links for 2009-05-16

The California Chamber of Commerce listed its 2009 "job killer" bills today, just in time for the end-of-May floor action in the Assembly and Senate.

Among the 27 bad-for-business measures the chamber is targeting is Assemblywoman Fiona Ma's Assembly Bill 1000, which would require employers to provide paid sick leave, and Sen. Tom Torlakson's ACA 22, which would increase tobacco taxes by $1.48 per pack of cigarettes.

The chamber has a strong record at killing the job killers, particularly in the governor's office.

Since Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was sworn into office, he has nixed 47 of the Chamber's 51 "job killer" bills. In 2008, he vetoed nine of 10.

For whatever reason, the number of registered voters in California has fallen from a record 17.3 million for last November's presidential election to 17.1 million heading into Tuesday's special election.

But the percentage of eligible people registered to vote — 73.4 percent — is higher than the 70.7 percent recorded in 2005, the last time California had a special election.

In the latest registration figures released by Secretary of State Debra Bowen, Democrats account for 44.5 percent of the electorate, Republicans for 31 percent, and decline-to-state voters for 20 percent.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts directed employees earlier this month not to log onto the Drudge Report website with government-issued computers due to potential viruses
on the site.

In an e-mail message sent May 4, Paul Harvey, an information-technology official for the Boston office, wrote that security specialists with the U.S. Attorney’s Office at the Department of Justice asked them “to reformat/reimage two computers because the user visited the drudgereport.com site.”

“Please avoid the Drudgereport website from the [United States Attorney’s Office] computers,” Harvey wrote.

Harvey said that if employees had a “work-related reason to visit the site,” access could be provided off the government network.

The first 100 days of the Palin presidency, according to a consensus of media commentators, have proven a near disaster. Perhaps it was Palin’s scant two years’ experience in a major government position that has eroded her gravitas, or maybe it was her flirty reliance on looks and informal chit-chat. In any case, the press has had a field day, and it is hard to see how President Palin can ever recover from the Quayle/potatoe syndrome. Here is a roundup of this week’s pundit mockery.

Graphic photographs of alleged prisoner abuse, thought to be among up to 2,000 images Barack Obama is trying to prevent from being released, have emerged.
Shocking images of inmates in Iraq are the kind of images whose release the president has now vowed to fight in court.

They risk provoking renewed hostility in the Middle East as Mr Obama attempts to build bridges with the Islamic world.
He is scheduled to make a major speech in Cairo on June 4 when he will launch his version of a plan to bring peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

One picture showed a prisoner hung up upside down while another showed a naked man smeared in excrement standing in a corridor with a guard standing menacingly in front of him. Another prisoner is handcuffed to the window frame of his cell with underpants pulled over his head.
Others yet to be released reportedly show military guards threatening to sexually assault a detainee with a broomstick and hooded prisoners on transport planes with

In a CNN interview this morning, former Vice President Gore got involved in the political feud over his successor Dick Cheney.

Gore said he wished Cheney would have given President Obama more time in office before criticizing national security policy. A stern critic of Bush policy over the years, Gore told CNN's John Roberts that "I waited for two years after I left office to make statements that were critical, and then of policy."

The reason Pelosi raised no objection to waterboarding at the time, the reason the American people (who by 2004 knew what was going on) strongly reelected the man who ordered these interrogations, is not because she and the rest of the American people suffered a years-long moral psychosis from which they have just now awoken. It is because at that time they were aware of the existing conditions — our blindness to al-Qaeda's plans, the urgency of the threat, the magnitude of the suffering that might be caused by a second 9/11, the likelihood that the interrogation would extract intelligence that President Obama's own director of national intelligence now tells us was indeed "high-value information" — and concluded that on balance it was a reasonable response to a terrible threat.

CIA Director Leon Panetta challenged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s accusations that the agency lied to her, writing a memo to his agents saying she received nothing but the truth.
Panetta said that "ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened."
Pelosi (D-Calif.) infuriated Republicans this week when she said in a news conference that she was "misled" by CIA officials during a briefing in 2002 about whether the U.S. was waterboarding alleged terrorist detainees.

Panetta, President Obama's pick to run the clandestine agency and President Clinton's former chief of staff, wrote in a memo to CIA employees Friday that "CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing 'the enhanced techniques that had been employed,'" according to CIA records.

"We are an agency of high integrity, professionalism and dedication," Panetta said in the memo. "Our task is to tell it like it is