Pinging stuff I care about.
Truth and Liberty : Transcript of Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) Delivered June 29th, 2006
It is wonderful to see Republicans break ranks with the White House, denounce the war, expose the lies, count the human cost, and express regret at having authorized the war.
Just got back from the town fireworks display with my wife & my 5 year old twins. It was wonderful. Made me feel like a kid again. Happy Independence Day, everybody.
The Depressive and the Psychopath – At last we know why the Columbine killers did it. By Dave Cullen
Pretty convincing case — Harris = psychopath, Klebold = depressive with a lot of anger. The world might be a better place if we understood better exactly what psychopathy/sociopathy/antisocial-personality-disorder *is* and how it *works*.
Don’t forget to click through to the seven myths about Columbine.
One of the interesting points is that by the perps’s own standards, Columbine was a failure. It was supposed to be a bombing, with the gunmen just picking off survivors. The bombs didn’t go off. Only a small fraction of the deaths that they planned on occurred.
I don’t know if they knew to draw this comparison or not, but what they were trying for was something more like the Bath, Michigan School Massacre of 1927 (NYT writeup).
Original link to Slate via Reddit.
June 30 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.The allegation is part of a court filing adding AT&T, the nation’s largest telephone company, as a defendant in a breach of privacy case filed earlier this month on behalf of Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. customers. The suit alleges that the three carriers, the NSA and President George W. Bush violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934 and the U.S. Constitution, and seeks money damages.
“The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11,” plaintiff’s lawyer Carl Mayer said in a telephone interview. “This undermines that assertion.”