Saturday Stew: Delicious Bloggy Morsels

We're beginning a weekly round-up of blog posts that struck us as especially trenchant, articulate, passionate, or just plain good. We're going to miss a lot of the best ones, so we're counting on TNH readers to fill in the rest. Please add your favorite posts from around the web this week in comments, or talk about the ones below.

At "Huffington Post," Paul Rieckhoff, who started the veterans organization for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, begins a series of "think out of the box" solutions to Iraq.

Revere at "Effect Measure" looks into "local testing" of Indonesian bird flu cases and finds they are done in local labs, with little funding, and often without positive or negative control samples. Not surprisingly, some results were found by the WHO to be unreproducible. Indonesia has not recognized there is a problem.

Revere again, on human-to-human avian flu transmission: "If the Ministry of Health official walks like a duck, talks like a duck and looks like a duck, it doesn't mean the seven family members in the Sumatran cluster got it from a duck. It means the official is a quack."

Kevin Beck at "Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge" delivers a five-part series about American obesity. Part 1 covers the sometimes-misguided sometimes-valuable campaign by the National Association To Advance Fat Acceptance to reframe obesity not as a bad habit or disease but as just another personal trait. (Read on to Parts 2 | 3 | 4)

Eternal Hope catalogs, one by one, how each Amendment in the Bill of Rights has been broken by recent Republican administrations -- mostly by the current one.

Tara Smith at "Aetiology" explains how microevolution of one type of pathogen takes place within single patients (take that, ID'ers!) and presents the surprising conclusion that the mutations that help a bug to maintain chronic infection can be different -- even opposite to -- the mutations that help it mount an acute infection, something to think about for any disease.

And if you didn't already read it, don't miss eRiposte at "Left Coaster" who lays out the evidence of the second forged Niger document -- the one nobody's seen -- as emptywheel linked yesterday with some additional background.

What have you been reading this week?

Comments

[njr]

have been reading the names
it's not just a number
they were not just a number
reading the names puts me in awe, wondering what will happen when others say the names on Fathers' Day

[Arck]

Repeating the error. It seems that all America does; repeat Plame's errors. She was really 'super pro america and reported all the bad stuff.' I need a break from this garbage, and , yes the NSA stuff was the last straw after all the memos and leaks.

Squirm,
No one is buying the stovepipe because the purpose of the documents was to use them. The US bought the foreign intelligence operation(documents) from the Nigerians with the intent of using that against the US. This is the point and why Plame and her husband are having espionage problems.

Yes, it's a stove pipe and something is 'cooked' there.

[JohnLopresti]

TypePad is asking to re-post:
Check out comments about Libby's replacement in Cheney's office emerging from a 3-week quiet to author yet another gray eminence cancellation of a congress vote in the 730th presidential signing memo issued by the Bush presidency, a ploy which in 6 short years has cancelled more congressional votes than all previous presidents' signing memos combined. This is the Addington heritage to our constitutional form of government.
Commenters' articles are at:
Dan Froomkin, Washington Post; scroll down about 25 lines to "Addington".
Christopher Kelley, visiting law professor at University of Miami-Ohio
Richard Epstein, University of Chicago Law professor; his other titles at UChiLaw are "Faculty Director for Curriculum, and Director, Law and Economics Program"
For background, check Portland State University professor of public policy Cooper's history of the presidential signing memo; Cooper homepage is there
One of the journalists who stirred the public awareness of the controversy is Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe. His announcement of the formation of an ABA panel for assessment of the Bush signing memo juggernaut is there

A lot of people are talking about this signing memo gambit as a way of rewriting the constitution exercised by a private group within the vice president's office. Not that a sleepy president Reagan was on top of the scriptwriters' launch of the strategy twenty years ago; Reagan was not into the legalistic ways his screenwriters were utilizing his presidency by resorting to signing memos to cancel congress laws and to keep the Supreme Court away from decisionmaking in the Reaganite social deconstruction program. As one of the linked articles observes, when Charlie Savage's first two articles appeared last month in the Globe, Addington became quiescent; but recently yet another signing memo has appeared belatedly in the Federal Register. Addington is back at his craft, his and Cheney's. These are more than the casual executive legerdemain to manage the government; these memos represent a wholesale quantum shift in the balance of power. As Epstein's article, and others, illustrate; unless examined and refined by joint input from all three branches of government, the new way of governing from the wings by signing memo is an invitation to altering the very foundations of our system of government.
Admittedly, much of this has been scintillating through the news over the past six months; and some of the historians' websites I linked above, show the research has been in existence longtime in academia and among presidency historians. I wonder what Bob Woodward thinks of all this.

[Apparatus]

Bob Woodward? He likes to visit Toronto before leaking.

The DNC came up with a better way. Change the electoral college laws in areas that favor Republicans and do this as the UN monitors are deferred to during elections; the authority for this in the electoral college changes.

Groups. A big one just had a meeting in Canada, just after the Yearly KOS get together. So, is KOS Investments LTD (parterneships) actually something to do with Daily KOS and is he independently wealthy using his new group to build wealth while showing the original group he has political power or is it all a coincidence and he is just a poor guy wanting to make some cash? Yes, Bush sold off the 250 or whatever that ran capitalism from a bunker, but they really were'nt like the REAL CONSPIRATORILISTS.............

[DemFromCT]

Apparatus, what bullshit. Kos is trying to make a living blogging, nothing more (and i know him a good deal better than you do, apprently).

See link. it apparently applies to you.

[DemFromCT]

oh, btw, Kos investments BoD is here. The overview is here.

The Company was founded in 1988 by Michael Jaharis, one of the major shareholders and the principal architect of the very unique and extraordinarily successful Key Pharmaceuticals, Inc. which merged with Schering-Plough in 1986. Mr. Jaharis was joined at the start of Kos by Daniel Bell, the former Chief Operating Officer of Key, and by David Bova, the former Director of Product Development at Key. Presently, Mr. Jaharis is the Chairman Emeritus of Kos and Mr. Bell is Chairman. In 2002, Adrian Adams, who has considerable International and National experience, succeeded Mr. Bell as President and CEO. Other members of management have considerable industry experience in the areas of solid dose and aerosol manufacturing, clinical pharmacology, regulatory affairs and marketing.

let's just say this is not markos' forte. the name is a coincidence.