I just put this together. . .

[xiphias]

From the Chicago Trib:

Karr has apparently been living abroad since being released from a California jail in 2001 after an arrest on child pornography charges. He is being brought to Colorado, where he will face charges of first-degree murder, kidnapping and child sexual assault, Ann Hurt, an official with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said in Thailand.

Like most sane people, my reaction was "WTF? Why the hell is the Department of Homeland Security involved in this, let alone in freakin' THAILAND?"

The 24-hour news channels are all abuzz with the potential confession of some random guy in Thailand who says that he killed Jon-Binet Ramsey, or however you spell it.

They're NOT all abuzz with the fact that President's warrantless wiretapping program has been found BOTH illegal AND unconstitutional.

Just sayin'.

Comments

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I had thought this as soon as I saw the two stories at the same time on Google News, but I hadn't seen the link between the two.

Now I feel like I'm not wearing a tinfoil beanie.

[holyhippie]

This is why I don't watch ANY TV news. It's mostly garbage, and a particularly smelly grade of garbage at that.

However, I do subscribe to the NPR Morning Edition/All Things Considered RSS feeds of their audio stories. A quick scan of ATC for this evening shows one story on wiretapping, none for Jon Benet. Scanning back a couple of days shows that the government's misbehavior has been getting about as much, if not more, attention from NPR.

I take this as just more proof that the 24 hour 'news' networks aren't in the news business. I won't ever claim NPR is the perfect news source, but I will claim that it is better than the average source in this country.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I don't have cable. But we watch the online clips of The Daily Show, which does things like report -- well, okay, make fun of -- what the cable news channels are doing.

[arib.livejournal.com]

Like most sane people, my reaction was "WTF? Why the hell is the Department of Homeland Security involved in this, let alone in freakin' THAILAND?"


Because deportations are handled by the state deptartment, but a lot of State Dept. stuff has been punted to DHS?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I can't see why extradition can be part of DHS's mandate. I mean, I can see INS stuff, but extradition is Justice department, I think.

[unquietsoul5.livejournal.com]

It's just the usual "Look! A Monkey!"

[mattblum.livejournal.com]

No, the Justice department only deals with extraditions from the United States, not to the United States. The State Department typically handles extraditions of U.S. citizens from foreign countries.

However, DHS has a much larger staff than State, so it's likely that DHS has gotten involved to facilitate things.

[mattblum.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, how could something be unconstitutional but not illegal?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

If the law is unconstitutional, then the thing is legal, but not constitutional, and the law is struck down. However, the person who did an action under the auspices of the unconstitutional law did not break the law -- he or she acted under an inappropriate law, but that's the fault of the people who enacted the law, not the fault of the person who did it.

In this case, the finding was that a) the action of wiretapping in the manner which it was done was illegal under the FISA act, and b) that if a law was passed to allow what transpired, that law would be unconstitutional on several grounds.

Thus, the action directly went againt the Constitution, but also went against a law enacted by Congress.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

But that's not in their mandate.

[mattblum.livejournal.com]

The definition of DHS's mandate is so broad it can be easily interpreted to include pretty much anything any part of the Executive Branch does.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

My general feeling is that if the Department of Homeland Security is using resources that don't have anything to do with security or the homeland, then we ought to look for reasons why they are using their resources that way.

In this case -- especially given that we're now finding out that the DA's office wasn't ready to move on this guy and didn't want this extradition to happen yet -- the idea that their motive here was to protect the Chief Executive starts to sound real plausible-like.

[mattblum.livejournal.com]

I think you may be overreacting just a tad. I'm as far from being a fan of the current administration as you can get, but I suspect the real explanation is much more benign. All you're going off of is this one article mentioning one quote in passing from a person who works at DHS.

We don't know any more about her than that (according to the article) she works at DHS. We don't know in what capacity, or even which subcomponent of the department she works for. My guess would be that she is the department's attache to the U.S. embassy in Thailand, handling immigration-related issues as is well within the purview of the department. She probably got involved because the State Department officials there simply asked her to.

It's also quite possible that the reporter accidentally assigned Ms. Hurt to the wrong department. It's happened before.

I'm not saying this is definitely the way it happened. You might be right. But you seem to me to be jumping to conclusions.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I can't prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, and I certainly can't prove it in the scientific or mathematical sense.

But my interpretation fits best with how this administration has worked in the past. Every time something seriously bad happens that implicates someone in this administration in wrongdoing, something under the control of the White House happens in the next two or three days that will have the effect of distracting people.

For a while, it was raising the Terror Alert Level. Until Tom Ridge finally got fed up, resigned, and told people that he was resigning because the Terror Alert Level was being manipulated for political purposes.

And, anyway, people started ignoring the Terror Alert Level, because they started to notice that it has nothing to do with anything.

Then we had arrests of terrorists! Look how good we're doing! Except that it's becoming more and more clear that the folks who were arrested, there's not enough evidence to secure convictions.

Either they're not actually guilty of what they were arrested for (which is possible, but unlikely), or someone pushed the authorities to make the arrests too early, to get the headlines -- and they didn't have enough of a chance to get the goods on them.

That's happened a couple times now -- and may be what happens with the "gatorade bombers", so now what? Ten year old sensationalist murder cases, that's what!

My predition: by next year, the Department of Homeland Security will be reporting alien abductions and Sasquatch/Elvis hybrid terrorist plots whenever an indictment against an administration official comes down.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

To summarize what I'm saying -- skepticism is a vital and important trait to have. Skepticism means that you try to listen to what you're hearing, and filter out your own personal prejudices, and try to figure out what is REAL.

There's a human tendency to find patterns, whether or not said patterns actually exist, and therefore, one should be skeptical of the existence of a purported pattern. And there is also a human tendency to assume conspiracy where, in reality, there is only coincidence.

So -- you've got all that on one side of the balance. A skeptic should be inclined to give a good deal of weight to the hypothesis that a supposed pattern in human affairs such as politics is actually just coincidence, or maybe coincidence plus incompetence. Most of the time, that's what it is.

You need to have a pretty good pile of incidents on the other side of the balance to start giving credence to any sort of "conspiracy" hypothesis. Which, frankly, is what my hypothesis is.

I think we're at the point where a skeptic has to start looking fairly seriously at THAT side of the balance. Skeptically, yes. But I think we're at the point that dismissing the hypothesis out of hand (which is USUALLY the appropriate response) is no longer the appropriate response.

[holyhippie]

Sadly, because I'm using an Intel Mac, those videos are extremly difficult for me to see. It's a shame, since I love the Daily show, and almost never catch it when it's on the air.

[cheshyre]

Two quotes for you: http://womzilla.livejournal.com/153412.html

[mattblum.livejournal.com]

While I concur that there probably are some conspiracies at work to distract the American people from what the administration is really doing, I really think that this particular instance is not part of it. My reasons for this belief:

1. I find it very hard to believe that the White House was involved at any serious level with Karr's capture.

2. I find it hard to believe that, even if they were, they would have used such a thing to distract the public, since there is obviously reason to suspect Karr of at least pedophilia, and he was apparently about to start work as a schoolteacher.

3. The verdict regarding the warrantless wiretapping program was not a huge surprise to anyone. That, and the fact that the verdict was a lock to be appealed regardless of which way it went, makes the verdict something that isn't likely to set the 24-hour news channels abuzz.

4. It's not as though this is the only distracting thing that's happened recently. I mean, the Israel-Lebanon conflict has recently overshadowed the situation in Iraq, even though that certainly hasn't gone any better. Yet I don't see you suggesting that the Bush administration asked Olmert to attack Lebanon to get the American public to look away from the debacle in Iraq for a while. Why is that?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

. . . sadly, there's starting to be a bit of evidence pointing towards your #4 hypothesis. . . it's just, well, Hezbolah did start it, and, while there exist channels in which Bush could ask Olmert to do stuff, I don't really think he's got any connections with Hezbolah. . .

[ckd]

There's an Intel-compatible Flip4Mac WMV plugin now, though I haven't tried it with the Comedy Central clips (the Intel machine is at work...).

[holyhippie]

I know about it, and I've tried it. It doesn't work for me.

There's a buffering issue, where the Flip4Mac software lets its buffer against network latency drain, so the audio and video start stuttering and skipping. This is worse than the Microsoft produced Windows Media Player 9 - that works just fine.

However, since that last was updated in 2003, it's a PPC only app (and plugin). The app and plugin run fine - in Rosetta. With the browser running native, the plugin doesn't work - and Comedy Central insists on running in a plugin, it won't allow you to launch the standalong player. With the browser running in Rosetta, the plugin does work - but wow, does the performance of Safari suck.

NPR produces most of its audio segments in Windows Media format, and the standalone, PPC binary Windows Media player 9 works just great. The Flip4Mac plugin into Quicktime - Universal binary - performs awful. Very sad.