Spencer Black is once again going to be the chair of the state Natural Resources committee .  Years of Republican control of politics in this state and in the nation have almost made me forget what it is like to put people in charge of the environment who actually know and care about it. 

I could get used to this.  I hope to have  a chance to do so.

Stephen Biskupic, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin (2002 - present) has announced that he is resigning in January before the new administration takes office.

Good riddance, though Biskupic allowed that he has amassed a good "track record."

Many Wisconsin Democrats and allies would agree with that positive performance assessment.

But I doubt that Biskupic is sending a Christmas card to the proven-innocent Georgia Thompson this year [see also Biskupic tried to 'squeeze' Georgia Thompson, and Investigate Biskupic].

We gathered yesterday, Gentle Reader, for a discussion of the constitutionality of highway sobriety checkpoints.

In yesterday’s episode we learned that the Fourth Amendment, according to the Supreme Court, can be ignored if the challenges of enforcing the law seem too burdensome for the Government...and we learned that despite a history stretching all the way back to the 1700s and the British case Entick v. Carrington, the Court was, for the first time, willing to allow general search warrants on American soil.

Today we take the history a bit further...and then we talk about what happens when freedom is given away...and sadly, we need look no further than a few miles from the Capitol Building, in Washington DC itself, to see exactly what happens when freedom is suddenly gone and a community is placed under siege by the police—all, we suppose, for the community’s own good.

We have a lot of ground to cover, so we best get out on the proverbial road—and let’s see if we can avoid our own roadblocks along the way.

In yesterday’s conversation we described how the Supreme Court, in United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, 428 U.S.

Milwaukee County Exec Scott Walker is gearing up to run for governor again, and Republican radio talker Mark Belling really likes Walker's chances. Says Belling:

Walker’s fiscal responsibility message will be especially powerful in 2010 if, as expected, the Democrats deal with a massive state budget deficit by passing monster tax hikes. He is a political nightmare for the Democrats.

That insight sounded somewhat familiar, so I did a little digging in the old Xoff Files and found Belling in 2005 saying:

Today's Science Times has a piece by Kenneth Chang summing up advancements by geologists suggesting that the earth some four billion years ago was a relatively calm place, and not hellishly hot as previously thought.

"Geologists now almost universally agree that by 4.2 billion years ago, the Earth was a pretty placid place, with both land and oceans," writes Chang of the ancient Hadean period [bottom of chart below].

A small band of lawyers remain diligently at work fighting for a Supreme Court win in Al-Marri v. Pucciarelli that would answer a huge question for our democracy: Whether we are a tyranny or a country where the rule of law, due process, and habeas corpus reign supreme.

Typical of today's Republican Party, the GOP has come down on the anti-liberty side of the argument.

From the Brennan Center:

Question Presented – Does the Executive have legal authority to detain a legal resident arrested in the United States without charge by declaring him an 'enemy combatant'? This case challenges the President’s assertion of unchecked executive detention power over all individuals in the United States.

For more information see:

NYT: Supreme Court should rule that presidents cannot seize and detain indefinitely individuals in US without charges

The new foreign policy team - Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state; Gen. James L. Jones as national security adviser, and Robert M. Gates who will stay on as secretary of defense - are named.

And so do the networks use the occasion to comment on the lies of the Iraq War, the sham of the War on Terror, the obscene amount of money used on armaments? The deaths of 100,000s? Perhaps speculating on whether this will change?

No, the talk of the day is will Hillary get along with Robert and will Hillary get along with Barack? Will the U.S. be okay and recover from its mistakes?

If anyone doubts that Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky are spot-on in their institutional analysis of the corporate mass media in their Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon, 1988), I recommend reading the book or the transcript of Chomsky's talk delivered at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, March 15, 1989.

This isn't political (well, maybe it is) but I watched The Simpsons last night, much of which revolved around Mapple Computers, Mypods, and the president of the company, Steve Mobs.  There was a trip to the Mapple store, a very funny reference to the initial Mac commercials - and this, a visit to Mapple headquarters.  The Mapple Cult was exposed. I recognized a lot of these people along the way:

The holidays are in full swing…or at least they are in the US…which means your days—and nights—are full of running around like crazy. There’s a million things to do, a thousand errands to run, and…are you kidding me?!
A police sobriety roadblock?
Now?
That’s right: there’s a crowd of officers all around you, there’s no way to avoid it…and even though you’ve committed no crime whatsoever, you get to talk to the police…and if they decide it’s acceptable, you may continue on your way.
How can this be legal in America?
Does it actually serve any purpose?
And what happens when the police decide to blockade your neighborhood--for your own good?
Believe it or not, it’s my job today and tomorrow to answer those questions…and beyond that, to defend the simple right of Americans to go somewhere if we feel like it, without having to explain it to the police…and in today’s discussion, I intend to set the stage through an examination of history.

Sobriety checkpoints are an effective law enforcement tool involving the stopping of vehicles or a specific sequence of vehicles, at a predetermined fixed location, to accomplish two goals: raise the public’s perception of being arrested for driving while impaired (DWI ), and detection of drivers impaired by alcohol and/or other drugs.
--National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “Low-Staffing Sobriety Checkpoints”

Update: National Bureau of Economic Research says the U.S. economy fell into a recession last year.
Among the pathological programs pursued by the Bush administration is its enterprise to turn the national debt from prospects made in 2001 of the debt being completely paid off in 10 years to upping the debt to $10 trillion.

'Deficits don't matter,' infamously mumbled Dick Cheney at a high-level meeting that was recalled by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil.

Worse is the wish list that the rightwingers wanted from the future administrations dealing with the massive debt: Eliminating those awful programs like Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare which would become unsustainable because of the debt purposefully piled up by Bush and Cheney.

Nobel Prize-winning Paul Krugman warns today that president-elect Obama should not clean up the fiscal mess immediately in the face of a dangerous recession, and views government spending as a economic imperative to ending the recession:

(C)ircumstances right now are anything but normal. ...