The terrorist watch list is such a fucking joke, except that no one who is on it is laughing about it. It’s not a bad idea in principle, but the fact that you aren’t allowed to know if you’re on the list (at least until you get yanked aside at an airport) and you have no means of challenging your inclusion on the list renders it ineffective and unnecessarily troublesome. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect of Soviet-era Russia and not the United States of America. All it seems to have accomplished so far is ruining the lives of innocent people.

Take, for example, this news item about an Gulf War veteran and professional pilot who’s about to lose his job because he’s on the list:

“We don’t know why they’re on the list. They don’t know why they’re on the list. The government won’t tell us why they’re on the list,” said Amy Foerster, an attorney with Saul Ewing, who is providing pro bono counsel and working with the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and the Schuylkill County couple on the case, which was filed in U.S. district court.

The suit filed against the U.S. departments of Homeland Security and Justice and the FBI, among others, is “unique” because Erich Scherfen, a New Jersey native who converted to Islam in the mid-1990s, is a commercial airline pilot whose flight privileges were revoked in April, said Witold Walczak, the legal director of the state ACLU chapter. On Sept. 1, Scherfen will be terminated by his employer, Colgan Air, despite the airline’s cooperation.

“My livelihood depends on getting off this list,” Scherfen said. What list he is on and which government entity maintains it is unclear, Walczak said. The federal government has declined to acknowledge flight restrictions placed on the pilot.

Yes, the pilot is Muslim and his wife is Pakistani and the natural assumption would be those are the only reasons why they’d be included on the list. It’s entirely possible the government feels it has a valid reason other than his religion and his wife’s country of origin, but they won’t say what their reasoning is. The whole terrorist watch list needs to be seriously overhauled and that’s not going to happen if John McCain gets into office.

After reading this I stumbled across a similar story on CNN.com:

SAN FRANCISCO, California (CNN)—James Robinson is a retired Air National Guard brigadier general and a commercial pilot for a major airline who flies passenger planes around the country.

He has even been certified by the Transportation Security Administration to carry a weapon into the cockpit as part of the government’s defense program should a terrorist try to commandeer a plane.

But there’s one problem: James Robinson, the pilot, has difficulty even getting to his plane because his name is on the government’s terrorist “watch list.”

That means he can’t use an airport kiosk to check in; he can’t do it online; he can’t do it curbside. Instead, like thousands of Americans whose names match a name or alias used by a suspected terrorist on the list, he must go to the ticket counter and have an agent verify that he is James Robinson, the pilot, and not James Robinson, the terrorist.

“Shocking’s a good word; frustrating,” Robinson—the pilot—said. “I’m carrying a weapon, flying a multimillion-dollar jet with passengers, but I’m still screened as, you know, on the terrorist watch list.”

He’s one of three people with that name that get screened all the time at airports:

[T]here’s the James Robinson who served as U.S. attorney in Detroit, Michigan, and as an assistant attorney general in the Clinton administration; and James Robinson of California, who loves tennis, swimming and flying to the East Coast to see his grandmother.

He’s 8.

The third-grader has been on the watch list since he was 5 years old. Asked whether he is a terrorist, he said, “I don’t know.”

Thank goodness the government is keeping us safe from all those terrorist five-year-olds! I feel SO much safer now. Meanwhile I’ve vowed not to fly in this country until they get this shit straightened out.

The sad part is that all three of these people have found a way around the problem. Just change their name slightly:

although the list is clearly bloated with misidentifications by every official’s account, CNN has learned that it may also be ineffective. Numerous people, including all three Robinsons, have figured out that there are ways not to get flagged by the watch list.

Denise Robinson says she tells the skycaps her son is on the list, tips heavily and is given boarding passes. And booking her son as “J. Pierce Robinson” also has let the family bypass the watch list hassle.

Capt. James Robinson said he has learned that “Jim Robinson” and “J.K. Robinson” are not on the list.

And Griffin has tested its effectiveness. When he runs his first and middle name together when making a reservation online, he has no problem checking in at the airport.

So not only is the watch list making life difficult for non-terrorists, but it’s also easily bypassed by a slight change of your name. What do you think the chances are of a terrorist using his real name to get on a plane these days anyway? In the meantime the airlines and the TSA are busy blaming each other and nothing gets fixed.

Thanks President Bush! Your legacy will live on for decades I’m sure. Shame it’s not something positive.

I literally laughed out loud when I read this ArsTechnica.com article:

Most browser implementors are quick to adopt emerging Internet technologies, but Microsoft can’t or won’t make Internet Explorer a modern web browser. Despite some positive steps in the right direction, Internet Explorer still lacks many important features. Its mediocrity has arguably hampered the evolution of the web and forced many site designers to depend on suboptimal proprietary solutions.

IE’s shortcomings won’t hold back the Internet for much longer, however, because Mozilla plans to drag IE into the next generation of open web technologies without Microsoft’s help. One of the first steps towards achieving this goal is a new experimental plugin that adapts Mozilla’s implementation of the HTML5 Canvas element so that it can be used in Internet Explorer.

That’s certainly one way to bring standards to IE, but it’s not perfect by a long stretch as Microsoft seems determined to make it as hard as possible:

Vukićević is confident that a lot of the holes can be filled without substantial effort, but his primary concern is with the challenges posed by deployment. The plugin is designed to snap into IE as a binary rendering behavior, but the browser’s defensive security mechanisms insist on prompting the user before every time it is used. This detracts from the seamlessness of the plugin and makes it difficult to use for conventional web applications.

“Currently, the experience is pretty crappy: you have to click through an infobar to allow installation of this component, then you have to click ‘Yes’ to say that you really want to run the native content, and then you have to click ‘Yes’ again to allow the component to interact with content on the page,” he wrote in a blog entry. “In theory, with the right signatures, the right security class implementations, some eye of newt, and a pinch of garlic, it’s possible to get things down to a one-time install which would make the component available everywhere.”

Let’s hope the Mozilla folks are composed of some skilled witches then. Having a few plugins to help make IE standards compliant would be a welcome development for anyone who codes in HTML.

This just in: 1 in 2 Americans is a total idiot:

More than half of randomly surveyed adults — 57 percent — said God’s intervention could save a family member even if physicians declared treatment would be futile. And nearly three-quarters said patients have a right to demand such treatment.

When asked to imagine their own relatives being gravely ill or injured, nearly 20 percent of doctors and other medical workers said God could reverse a hopeless outcome.

“Sensitivity to this belief will promote development of a trusting relationship” with patients and their families, according to researchers. That trust, they said, is needed to help doctors explain objective, overwhelming scientific evidence showing that continued treatment would be worthless.

So they’re saying you have to kowtow to their beliefs in order to be able to tell them that continued treatment is pointless? How? By telling them “Folks, it’s time to start praying cause there’s fuck-all left that I can do”?

What’s really odd is the next few paragraphs talk about a Michigan woman by the name of Pat Loder who lost her two kids in a car accident who says that you need that belief at the time in spite of the fact that her kids still died and now she doesn’t buy into the idea as much as she did. Wait… what?

She said her beliefs about divine intervention have changed.

“I have become more of a realist,” she said. “I know that none of us are immune from anything.”

Loder was not involved in the survey, which appears in Monday’s Archives of Surgery.

She’s not involved with the survey, her views on divine intervention have changed, why the hell are they talking to her again?

Anyway, one doctor in the article basically seems to be saying that with today’s medical technology it’s possible to keep a body “alive” with no chance of recovery and that a lot of people think God will provide them a miracle. So they key, he says, is to not dismiss that belief, but show the family members that said miracle is unlikely given the condition of the patient:

Jacobs said he frequently meets people who think God will save their dying loved one and who want medical procedures to continue.

“You can’t say, ‘That’s nonsense.’ You have to respect that” and try to show them X-rays, CAT scans and other medical evidence indicating death is imminent, he said.

Relatives need to know that “it’s not that you don’t want a miracle to happen, it’s just that is not going to happen today with this patient,” he said.

Which is an odd argument to make because they very definition of a miracle is the impossible becoming possible so you’d expect that someone who was truly hoping for a miracle wouldn’t be dissuaded by a bunch of scientific evidence. Some aren’t, but they seem to be the exception to the rule.

Yet another doctor goes on to suggest that miracles aren’t all they’re cracked up to be:

Dr. Michael Sise, trauma medical director at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego, called the study “a great contribution” to one of the most intense issues doctors face.

Sise, a Catholic doctor working in a Catholic hospital, said miracles don’t happen when medical evidence shows death is near.

“That’s just not a realistic situation,” he said.

Apparently miracles are susceptible to reality.

The whole article is kind of strange in that the doctors being quoted are basically saying that they need to be sensitive to the fact that people are idiots who put a lot of stock in wishful thinking and so long as they pay lip service to that wishful thinking they can usually convince said idiots that further treatment is pointless. So, really, all the article says is half of Americans are idiots.

Sometimes in the mad and heady rush of marketing the shit out of a popular bit of intellectual property the folks at Disney tend to overlook how something might come across as, shall we say, a tad inappropriate. Disney has a big hit with the High School Musical movies and they’re marketing the hell out of them wherever they can. One item they should’ve thought twice about was panties for ‘tween girls that were themed after a scene in High School Musical 2 where the two main characters sing about how they love each other while dancing in and around a swimming pool. The panties, in keeping with the theme, had the words “Dive In” printed on them.

Needless to say, this hasn’t sat well with some parents:

“My daughter and I thought it was rather inappropriate for a 7 year old to be wearing them. ‘Dive In’ was written across them,” Ralf said. “Well, without being rude, we thought it was rather suggestive.”

“I think it is inappropriate because you just never know who could be out and about and see that and just think it was a bit too enticing for a young child to be wearing,” she said. “I would like to see all the products removed from the shelves.”

Well you’ve gotten your wish. Disney has announced they’re yanking down their panties:

“Unfortunately, an oversight was made and the text on the underwear was used out context,” Disney said in a statement. “This product will not be part of any forthcoming collections and the remaining product has been removed from shelves.”

You can see the panties in the pic to the left (click to embiggen) and, honestly, it’s not as bad as it sounds in the news stories. I expected the words to be printed in ALL CAPS using big block letters and bright primary colors, but it’s actually something you’d have to be looking at closely to really notice. Still there’s no point in tempting fate I suppose, though if Disney ever wants to start marketing to a more mature crowd I think they’d have another hit on their hands in the novelty underwear department.

Can’t seem to find anything I feel like blogging about today, but I did come across this cool Doctor Who tribute over on Respectful Insolence that I thought was worth sharing:

You won’t get many plot points from watching this, but it gives an idea of the breadth of this show over the years and if you’re a long-time fan there’s several moments that quicken your heart to see again.

Some twelve or so SEB members got spammed through our mail system today by someone going by the name of “lucie” and I would like to apologize for the inconvenience. Your emails haven’t been revealed as it was done through EE’s built in mail system which doesn’t reveal it to the sender. The person who did the spamming had to send each message individually so it took some time. They started around 7:14AM and sent the last message at 10:44AM. The spam itself was a variant of the classic Nigerian scam and the account has been banned.

Again, my apologies. On the bright side this method of spamming is slow and bothersome enough (thanks to captchas among other things) that the number of people affected remains low. 

A lot of folks are saying that 2008 is the year of the Playstation 3 and it’s increasingly looking like that may be true. It’s taken awhile to get here, but the PS3 has picked up some serious momentum. While it’s no where near close to the Nintendo Wii in terms of hardware sales, it has been outselling the Xbox 360 for the past several months and has doubled its sales from this time last year:

Following the latest NPD video game sales data for July, which showed the PS3 outselling the Xbox 360 by about 20,000 units, Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) has issued its own reaction to the sales, noting that PS3 hardware was once again boosted by the Metal Gear Solid 4 bundle. With the inclusion of the July data, the PS3 has now sold 1.8 million units in the U.S. in 2008, which represents 99 percent growth over last year.

Furthermore, PS3 software sales have grown 206 percent year-to-date. And Sony said there are now more than 10 million registered PSN accounts worldwide and approximately 200 million pieces of content have been downloaded across the globe. Overall, year to date (Jan-July), the PlayStation brand has generated nearly $3.3 billion in revenue, which is an increase of more than 22 percent.

The Xbox 360 still has a larger installed base, but that’s to be expected given it had a whole year to itself and the slow start the PS3 suffered due to its high price tag and lack of software. There’s quite a few major titles being released this year that are good candidates for selling hardware with the most anticipated being Little Big Planet. Of course it doesn’t hurt that the PS3 is the most future-proof Blu-ray player available.

With the Nintendo Wii shitting out money at a record pace for Nintendo it’s doubtful that Sony will recapture the number one console position this generation, but they can’t be too upset at the likelihood of being number two. As of November the PS3 will be two years into a 10 year life cycle so there’s still plenty of time left for improvement.

So browsing through the referrer logs today I come across a link to this entry on Republican Faith Chat titled “Hellbound: People Who are Probably Going To Hell”. When you combine that with the RFC’s tagline of “Conservative Christians ONLY. Liberals, Atheists Not Welcomed.” you just know it’s going to be a fun site.

As it turns out it’s a listing of various websites and blogs that the Republican Faith Chat folks feel are the worst of the worst on the Internet. You have to wonder why they’d be visiting any of the sites in question and they’ve helpfully provided the following explanation:

Regardless of how reluctant we are sometimes, it is our duty as Christians (Baptists) to pray for those we deem already damned to Hell. As easy as it is to dismiss these people as lost forever to eternal damnation, we must remember that in Christ, anything is possible no matter how remote the chance.

Given the enormity of sinners that we come across on a daily basis we simply cannot list them all. We will, however, try and update this list as frequently as necessary.

I guess that means they are hoping that people will pray for our corrupted souls in hopes of us seeing the light. On the off chance that the upright visitors reading the list feel the need to see just how vile and evil any of the sites on it really are they encourage them to recite the following prayer of protection first:

WARNING: Before visiting any of the following links you are cautioned to say the following prayer.

IN JESUS NAME, I BIND UP EVERY DEMON COMING ACROSS THE COMPUTER LINES, AND I RETURN THEM AND ANY CURSES.IN JESUS NAME, I COVER MYSELF IN THE BLOOD OF JESUS. I COVER THIS COMPUTER AND THE INTERNET ROAD I TRAVEL IN THE BLOOD OF JESUS. I TAKE AUTHORITY AND DOMINION OVER ALL WEB SITES, WEB MASTERS, WEB DOMAINS, AND DEMONS OF THE INTERNET SUPER HIGHWAY SO THEY DO NOT CROSS MY PATH. I DISPATCH ANGELS AHEAD OF ME TO PROTECT ME.

IN JESUS NAME, I CUT ALL UNGODLY SILVER CORDS AND LAY LINES.

AS YOUR WAR CLUB AND WEAPONS OF WAR I BREAK DOWN, UNDAM, AND BLOW UP ALL WALLS OF PROTECTION AROUND ALL HOMOSEXUALS, WITCHES, WARLOCKS, WIZARDS, SATANISTS, ATHEISTS, LIBERALS, DEMOCRATS, SORCERERS, AND THE LIKE, AND I BREAK THE POWER OF ALL CURSES, HEXES, VEXES, SPELLS, CHARMS, FETISHES, PSYCHIC PRAYERS, PSYCHIC THOUGHTS, ALL WITCHCRAFT, SORCERY, SATIRE, PARODY, MAGIC, VOODOO, ALL MIND CONTROL, JINXES, POTIONS, BEWITCHMENTS, DEATH, DESTRUCTION, SICKNESS, PAIN, TORMENT, PSYCHIC POWER, PSYCHIC WARFARE, PRAYER CHAINS, INCENSE AND CANDLE BURNING, INCANTATIONS, CHANTING, UNGODLY BLESSINGS AND HOODOO, CRYSTALS, AND EVERYTHING ELSE BEING SENT MY WAY, OR MY FAMILY MEMBER’S WAY, OR ANY CHRISTIAN MINISTRIES WAY, AND I RETURN IT, AND THE DEMONS TO THE SENDER, TEN FOLD.

AMEN.

Yeah, that’ll do it. No doubt. I have no idea why the words WARLOCKS and WARFARE are bold faced, but they are. I found it fascinating to see “satire” and “parody” listed among hexes, vexes, spells, and charms as things to be protected against thus proving that Republicans have no sense of humor. Or at least not the ones on “Republican Faith Chat.”

And they really mean it when they say you should recite that prayer first:

At the time of our encounter with these infidels there was no links to pornography, Satan Worship, or extreme foul language. Given the nature of the sinner and their willingness to sin we cannot gurantee that things will not be added at a later time. That is why it is crucial that you say the above prayer before visiting any of the listed web sites. If you have come across someone who is need of deliverance from their sickness you may email  Mrs. T.D. Gaines-Crockett, and she will forward the site to the Monie Willis Imprecatory Prayer Committee for submission to this page.

Due to the recent onset of foul language by certain unsaved visitors, comments will not be permitted for this page.

Warning: Proceed at your own Risk

Then we get to the list proper and it starts in June of last year with a link to Mark Fiore’s political cartoons website. Yeah, I can see how they’d have a hard time with him. They describe his site as follows: “Foul LIEberal, Mark Fiore, creates disgusting, anti-Family Values, un-American, un-Conservative, pro-Demoncrat, animated political cartoons from an undisclosed location somewhere in San Francisco. Imppressionable children under 21 should not be allowed to view this site.” And that gives you an idea of what the rest of the list is like.

Moving down the list there’s links to Hillary Clinton’s website, Barack Obama Hussein Bin Laden’s (their name for it, not mine) website, surprisingly enough a link to Fred Thompson’s website (described as “Supporters of a garden variety RINO and dirty old man running for President.”), (un)AmericaBlog, (don’t)Think Progress, Fark.com, Brent Rasmussen’s blog (“Bearded God-mocker who probably sprouts horns and a tail before sneaking into dreams and stealing souls. Extreme wickedness ahead. NSFC”), PZ Myer’s blog (“P.Z. Myers is not only a Atheist of the worst sort, he is a scientist who promotes the lies of man kind evolving from primate love.  NSFA.”), Richard Dawkins, Andrew Sullivan, Fundies Say the Darndest Things!, and, eventually, little old me:

Stupid Evil Bastard: Les Jenkins a Liberal Independent, Atheist spreads his message of hatred for Christ and Family values on a blog venue. Also reviews video games filled with sex, bood, gore, and guts.  Owner of the Fundies Say Darndest Things site above. VERY VILE. NSFW, NSFC<21, NSFC.

I like how the mouse tooltip for my link is “Truthful in it’s [sic] description”. They’re wrong in thinking that I own Fundies Say the Darndest Things - I wish I’d have thought of a site that cool - but I can see how they’d make that mistake as SEB is listed as a friend of FSTDT on their main page.

I skipped over a lot of the other sites listed, but suffice it to say that I’m honored to be included in such fine company.  SEB was added back in February of this year so it took them awhile to find us, but I’m proud just the same. The site overall is just a treasure trove of lunacy. I especially love their Legal Statement:

By visiting this entertaining Godly site OR by sending an e-mail submission to Mrs. T.D. Gaines-Crockett©, Republican Faith© OR posting to this site, YOU ARE CERTIFYING THAT YOU ARE 18 YEARS OR OLDER AND you are granting a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display your submission (in whole or part) and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed. The original posts, prayers, all materials and even the pasquinading by our mockers and antagonists found on this site and all materials within are Copyright© protected through 2008 by site manager and/or the contributors. Many antogonists on the political Left would like to call it political satire so perhaps everything posted here should be understood in that context. Whatever it takes to keep their tiny brains from overloading. Please keep in mind that Posting of personal phone numbers or information that may lead to personal injury or harassment is deemed illegal on this forum under congressional legislation, state law and various personal protection acts. Please refrain from divulging information of this kind in such a public forum for obvious security purposes. God Bless America.

I do have to give them credit for using a big word like “pasquinading” though. That’s an unusually large word for people with such tiny intellects, but perhaps they had a thesaurus handy. I may have to spend some time perusing the site a bit more. It’s looks like a lot of fun.

So says this rather brief article at Wired.com:

It’s a strange finding nestled inside a weird phenomenon:  children are 50 percent more likely than adults to respond favorably to placebos.

So concludes a Public Library of Science Medicine review by French pediatricians of anti-epilepsy drug studies. If replicated in other drugs, researchers may need to adjust their analyses of clinical drug studies involving kids.

What could account for the tendency of kids to feel better after taking a drug designed to do nothing? The reasons, write the researchers, “remain largely unknown and mostly speculative.”

This seems pretty simple to me. The placebo effect is at least partly based in belief and children will believe almost anything someone they trust tells them in sincerity. Kinda makes sense that they’d work better in kids. That’s probably oversimplifying things a bit, but I’d be surprised if that wasn’t true.

But I thought it was damned funny. Look! Someone has thrown away a perfectly good white boy!

Click to embiggen!

Found in this FARK thread. Bonus points to anyone who can identify the movie quote.

In the dream I’m in bed and I wake up. While sitting up and stretching I happen to look down at the night stand (that I don’t have) next to the bed and see a fairly large sized package sitting next to it as though someone had delivered it to my bedside during the night. For some reason this doesn’t strike me as being in any way odd and I just assume that I must have picked it up the day before and put it there before going to bed. Looking at the label it seems that it has something to do with the death of my biological father. The impression (because so much in dreams tend to be impressions) is that it’s his death report, but the box is way too big for just a bunch of papers.

I slide down onto the floor dressed only in my boxers and proceed to open the package and it does contain some paperwork about my father’s death, but it also includes a large container filled with preservation liquid of some sort and what appears to be the partially dissected head and shoulders of my dead father. Part of one side of his skull has been removed revealing the right hemisphere of his brain and a strip of flesh from the left side of his face has been cut away revealing musculature and the bottom of his left eye socket. Additionally the entire corpse has been carefully cut straight down the middle so it can be folded open to reveal a cross section of everything down to just before his lungs would start. Considering the man has been dead for over 36 years the corpse is in surprisingly good shape and while I’m a bit surprised at finding it in the package I’m more fascinated at seeing a man who’s face I can barely remember and being able to peer inside his head. I do think it odd that I received his head and shoulders when he died of cancer of the colon, but I’m also relieved that I didn’t get the part of his anatomy that killed him.

For reasons that only make sense in a dream, I proceed to open the container and lift up the corpse so I can fold it open to get a better look at the internals because I’m strangely fascinated by them and can’t resist my curiosity. It’s at this point that my wife stirs in the bed next to me and I suddenly realize that I’m examining the corpse of my dead father on the bedroom floor in my boxers and the utter absurdity of it all hits home. In a panic I try, and fail, to put the corpse back in the container without splashing preservation fluid all over the carpet and as I do so the corpse starts to fall apart in my hands. The left side of its brain falls out in the container splashing fluid all over the place, then the right eye falls into my hand, and the tongue is getting in the way of folding the body closed again. Plus it all won’t fit back into the container properly because there was barely enough room in it to hold the body in the first place and with all the random parts falling out and taking up room the bulk of it doesn’t want to go back in, but my wife is waking up and I desperately want to close the thing up and get it out of her sight so as not to upset her. I end up smooshing everything back into the container and getting it closed with quite a bit of fluid spillage and the body looking even more grotesque than it did when I first opened the package. It’s about that time that Anne wakes up, rolls over to the edge of the bed and asks me what I’m doing. She’s just starting to register on her face what’s on the floor in front of me when I literally wake up.

What the fuck was that all about?

More satire from Edward Current:

The sad part is I’ve actually had some True Believers™ use that argument on me.

This is annoying to say the least:

Most companies in US avoid federal income taxes - News from The Associated Press

More than 38,000 foreign corporations had no tax liability in 2005 and 1.2 million U.S. companies, or 66.7 percent of them, paid no income tax, the GAO said. Combined, the companies had $2.5 trillion in sales. About 25 percent of large U.S. corporations - those with at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in receipts - did not pay corporate taxes.

The GAO said it analyzed data from the Internal Revenue Service, examining samples of corporate returns for the years 1998 through 2005. For 2005, for example, it reviewed 110,003 tax returns from among more than 1.2 million corporations doing business in the U.S.

Of course this has been the case for awhile and being reminded of it now probably won’t change anything, but there’s always the hope that it’ll annoy enough people to maybe get a few laws changed. Imagine how well the economy would be doing if the tax burden wasn’t solely carried by citizens.

For almost 41 years now I’ve been operating under the apparently mistaken assumption that if you break a law you’ve committed a crime, but according to the U.S. Attorney General, speaking recently on the abuses in the Department of Justice in hiring and firing decisions, I am apparently wrong in my assumption:

In a speech Tuesday morning to the American Bar Association in Manhattan, Mr. Mukasey condemned the political abuses in his most forceful language to date, saying “the system failed.” He also acknowledged that some critics and commentators had called on the Justice Department to take what he called “more drastic steps,” including prosecuting those at fault and firing those hired through flawed procedures. But he rejected both those approaches.

“Where there is enough evidence to charge someone with a crime, we vigorously prosecute,” he said. “But not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime.”

This is going to make things a lot more confusing. If it’s true that not every violation of the law is a crime, something I thought was more or less inherent in the definition of the word crime, then how are we to know when breaking any particular law is in fact criminal? Is there a list I can get hold of that will tell me which violations of the law aren’t a crime? Wouldn’t it make more sense to remove any laws that aren’t crimes from the books so as to avoid confusion? What’s the point in having laws that aren’t crimes to violate?

As last month’s report from the inspector general acknowledged, the hiring abuses by former Justice Department officials represented a violation of federal Civil Service law, but not of criminal law, he said.

You mean it isn’t a crime to violate Federal Civil Service laws? Then why have them at all?

Don’t worry, though, Mukasey assures us the folks who broke the law, but didn’t commit any crimes in doing so, aren’t getting off easy:

“That does not mean, as some people have suggested, that those officials who were found by the joint reports to have committed misconduct have suffered no consequences,” Mr. Mukasey said. “Far from it. The officials most directly implicated in the misconduct left the department to the accompaniment of substantial negative publicity.”

“Their misconduct has now been laid bare by the Justice Department for all to see,” he said, adding that “I doubt that anyone in this room would want to trade places with any of those people.”

Oh yeah, I’m sure they all had trouble finding replacement jobs for a whole day or two after they stepped down what with all that negative publicity. They’re probably laying in a gutter somewhere with a half-full bottle of Mad Dog wine covered in their own vomit as a result of their disgraceful fall from power. Good thing we’ve got such an upstanding Attorney General making sure people are held accountable for their actions!