No Woodinville market for me today

Ra is out in full glory, and the Woodinville market has no shade opportunities, so I'll not be at that market today - the instruments just won't stay in tune in that environment. Next week at Bothell (Friday) and Lake Forest Park (Sunday), tho' - they have shade.

The last dregs of FISA

Okay, so the ACLU is running a national ad against FISA: you can sign up to have your name on the list of protestors. Seriously.

Over at Salon, Glenn Greenwald describes how the latest revelations of the American torture regime are not somehow specific and separate from the creation of the lawless surveillance state; it's all part of the same agenda of the political class placing itself above the law - and also gives a variety of specific examples of the political press continuing to fulfill its role of covering for the entire process. At The Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum reports how the new FISA surveillance regime will hamstring reporters, destroying their ability to work with many categories of contacts. Wired's Threat Level has a column on Mark Klein, the whistleblower whose testimony blew open the deeply criminal - but now retroactively legalised! - domestic spying programme, calls this the creation of an infrastructure for a police state.

By the way, not that it's a sideshow - because it's not, in any way - the International Rescue Committee and Red Cross have both decided that the American torture programme is unambiguously, clearly, and specifically a torture programme in every sense of the word. Stealing from Glenn, quoting Jonathan Turley on MSNBC - he's a law professor:

[The IRC] is the world's preeminent institution on the conditions and treatment of prisoners and specifically what constitutes torture. And the important thing here is they're saying it's not a close question, that as many of us, and there are many, many of us who have argued for years that this is clearly, unmistakably a torture program; the Red Cross is saying the same.

The problem for the Bush administration is they perfected plausible deniability techniques. They bring out one or two people that are willing to debate on cable shows whether water-boarding is torture. And it leaves the impression that it's a close question. It's not. It's just like the domestic surveillance program that the a federal court just a week ago also said was not a close question. These are illegal acts. These are crimes. And there weren't questions before and there's not questions now as to the illegality...

I never thought I would say this, but I think it might, in fact, be time for the United States to be held internationally to a tribunal. I never thought, in my lifetime, that I would say that, that we have become like Serbia, where an international tribunal has to come to force us to apply the rule of law. I never imagined that a Congress, a Democratic-led Congress would refuse to take actions, even with the preeminent institution of the Red Cross saying, this is clearly torture and torture is a war crime. They are still refusing to take meaningful action.

And The New York Times has an editorial on routine government searching of laptop data at the borders, how nothing has been done about it, and something should. Somehow, I don't think the Congress that just passed the FISA abomination will act. Not that it would be paid attention if it did.

Oh, and they're also blowing off the Supreme Court ruling on greenhouse gasses and the EPA. Kind of like how they're ignoring the habeas corpus ruling, if the Guardian's report on the continuing use of navy vessels as secret prison ships is accurate.

I haven't seen a signing statement issued on FISA. I'd think you'd have seen one by now.