But prosecutor Timothy Stone, in an attempt to draw a link between Hamdan and the al Qaeda leadership in the first Guantanamo war crimes trial, told the six-member jury of U.S. military officers who will decide Hamdan’s guilt or innocence that Hamdan had inside knowledge of the 2001 attacks on the United States because he overheard a conversation between bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

“If they hadn’t shot down the fourth plane it would’ve hit the dome,” Stone, a Navy officer, said in his opening remarks.

The tribunal’s chief prosecutor, Col. Lawrence Morris, later explained that Stone was quoting Hamdan in evidence that will be presented at trial. Morris declined to say if the “dome” was a reference to the U.S. Capitol.

“Virtually no one knew the intended target, but the accused knew,” Stone said.

United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania. U.S. officials have never stated it was shot down although rumours saying that abound to this day.

And since on-line articles are often scrubbed thrown in the memory hole edited for clarity, here’s the screenshot (click the thumbnail for the big version, silly).

…adding from comments left at All Spin Zone on the same topic, I like how the other prosecutor “later explained that Stone was quoting Hamdan in evidence that will be presented at trial”.

Which brings to mind the tiger sketch in Monty Python’s “Meaning of Life”:

Ainsworth: Shut up. Now look, have you or have you not got his leg?

Rear end: Yes.

Front end: No. No no no.

Both: No no no no no no. Nope. No.

Ainsworth: Why did you say ‘yes’?

Front end: I didn’t.

Ainsworth: I’m not talking to you…

Rear end: Er… er…

Ainsworth: Right! Search the thicket.

Front end: Oh come on, I mean do we look like the sort of chaps
who’d creep into a camp at… night, steal into someone’s
tent, anaesthetise them, tissue-type them, amputate a leg and
run away with it?

Ainsworth: Search the thicket!

Front end: Oh *leg*! You’re looking for a *leg*. Actually I think
there is one in there somewhere. Somebody must have abandoned
it here, knowing you were coming after it, and we stumbled
across it actually and wondered what it was… They’ll be
miles away by now and I expect we’ll have to take all the
blame.

Another person who has contributed outside advice is former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, whom Mr. Obama has been wooing. Mr. Powell, a Republican, has a friendship of decades with Mr. McCain, but friends say he has felt excluded from Mr. McCain’s foreign policy operation and was impressed when Mr. Obama called on him in June. Mr. Powell also met around the same time with Mr. McCain.

yes, that’s just what Mr. Obama needs: foreign policy advice from Colin Powell, the guy who held up a test-tube of jism at the UN and insisted it was biological warfare agents from Saddam Hussein. Then, he went on at length about all sorts of things he knew weren’t true, like “mobile weapons labs”, and unmanned drones, and dogs with bees in their mouth and when they bark they shoot bees at you. (Ok, that last one was Homer Simpson.)

And Powell knew he was lying. Instead of working to STOP a war he knew was based on lies, Powell helped make it possible. For all his bullshit about honor, loyalty, and his efforts to rehabilitate his reputation (hard to do when people come home looking like this, this, this, this, this, and of course this thanks to you Colin), Powell is still known as a liar and sycophant of the highest order.

Obama would be better off hiring Jeffrey Dahmer as his personal chef (warning, NOT SAFE FOR WORK AT ALL IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM YUCK YUCK BLECCCCCH).

At the moment my upper body is still in some pretty grievous pain, so I will be trying to give myself a break and laying off the blog for a bit, or at the very least laying off the extended diatribes and rants compelling personal essays.

In the process of evaluating Mayor Street’s NTI legacy, the Nutter administration uncovered causes for concern.

In late May Nutter froze acquisition of new property through NTI. The city now holds large tracts of vacant land in many neighborhoods. Nobody’s quite sure of the land’s value, and it’s suspected there’s a $30 to $40 million shortfall in the funds needed for acquisitions already on the books.

Though deputy chief of staff Wendell Pritchett is adamant that no wrongdoing on the part of the Street administration is in any way suspected or implied, NTI acquisitions must now undergo an audit.

Andrew Altman, for one, is concerned about what to do with all the land the city now owns. “It’s one thing to acquire land and it’s another thing to look at how you’re going to dispose of it, what’s going to be built.”

Altman laments the difficulty of attracting investment in a down market with scarce government incentive.

—Michael Fichman, “Community Development: Slowing Initiative, Philadelphia Weekly 7/16/08

For those readers who don’t live here, Philadelphia has more unused land than it knows what do with, from abandoned factory sites to slums that have been raised by the aforementioned NTI (Neighborhood Transformation Initiative). And as Mr. Altman points out, with a crappy real estate market, a credit crunch, decreasing wages and a higher cost of living some of this land may be vacant for a LONG time. new home construction is down, for example, and many of these vacant tracts are in neighborhoods where people with the money to afford a new house simply don’t want to live. The slummy, ramshackle houses may have been torn down, but if neglected, these newly green lots will go back to blight, strewn with trash and bringing neighborhood property values even further down.

I propose that these lots be leased, sold, or donated to CDCs that promote community agriculture, and what’s more that the lots be planted with crops that can benefit our local economy. Specifically, take a few empty city blocks, test and improve the soil, and plant hops. And if the CDCs don’t want the land, see if our local brewers do.

As has been widely reported, the price of beer is going up steeply because of a global hops shortage: there have been droughts in Europe and New Zealand, while in the US an enormous warehous fire destroyed most of our stock. Worse, because of gluts in the 1990s, many farmers have stopped planting this vital ingredient for beer because the price dropped so much. Now, many of those same farms are growing corn for ethanol. Meanwhile, the skyrocketing cost of fuel makes shipping hops all the more expensive.

Philadelphia has two production breweries in city limits, the Philadelphia Brewing Company and Yards brewing. Yuengling is nearby, in Pottstown, as is Victory Brewing Company in Downingtown. We have several microbreweries and brewpubs including Nodding Head, Dock Street, and the Manayunk Brewery. All of them would stand to reduce their costs if hops were widely available in Philadelphia. In fact, the Philly Brewing Company is already growing hops in their courtyard, but the space isn’t enough to produce what they need all year.

Hops are easy to grow, and once established, the plant is a hardy perennial. Mine are in their first year, and one is already taller than the trellis I’ve put up. They need a lot of water and sun, something Philadelphia has in abundance, and don’t need a lot of space. A bine (relatred to a vine), hops grow nearly vertical. This bine is nearly as tall as a telephone pole.

You can plant them along side buildings, or train them up a line:

Another effective method involves hanging lines from a central pole, creating a teepee of hops. In short, Philadelphia is nearly a perfect urban milieu for hops cultivation. In addition, the plant attracts honeybees, a species that needs all the love it can get at this point.

By planting hops in our vacant lots, Philadelphia can support and build its local economy, support sustainable agriculture, strengthen communities, help our struggling small businesses save money, and bring jobs, volunteers, and beautification to blighted neighborhoods (someone’s gotta water, deal with pests, and harvest the buds).

It takes 3 years to get a full bumper crop from a hops plant, so the results won’t be immediate. However, once established and with enough lots, Philadelphia’s breweries could probably declare independence from hops grown on the other side of the world and become completely self-sufficient in that area of the brewing process.

…and Waxman’s job, and Conyers’ job, and Hoyer’s job, and…

President Bush has been a “total failure” in everything from the economy to the war to energy policy, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday. In an interview on CNN, the California Democrat was asked to respond to video of the president criticizing the Democratic-led Congress for heading into the final 26 days of the legislative session without having passed a single government spending bill.

Pelosi shot back in unusually personal terms.

“You know, God bless him, bless his heart, president of the United States, a total failure, losing all credibility with the American people on the economy, on the war, on energy, you name the subject,” Pelosi replied. She then tsk-tsked Bush for “challenging Congress when we are trying to sweep up after his mess over and over and over again.”

Nancy Pelosi is so full of shit, her hair and her eyes should be brown. Oh wait…

The fact is that President Bush has been highly successful in getting what he wants. It is unfortunate, dreadfully so, that everything he has wanted has been so incredibly damaging to our country. Let’s look at the record.

On FISA, warrantless wiretapping, and the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment, it’s not Bush that failed: it’s Congress. In fact, they failed on purpose: the bill was dead in February, and Steny Hoyer brought it back to life.

On war funding with no strings attached, Bush is no failure: Congress failed. Repeatedly.

Ignoring subpoenas and diminishing Congress to the point of meaninglessness? I think we can agree that Bush succeeded at that, unless “sternly worded letters with no consequence” count as oversight.

Legalized torture? Score another one for Bush, who got that out of congress too.

S-CHIP? Another Bush win, because the Democrat-led Congress couldn’t manage to override his veto.

They won on overriding Medicare cuts, and even then just barely.

Am I missing anything?

“A failure”. Please. I’d laugh in your face Nancy, but you’d probably have me tortured.

…adding, if Bush is such a failure, why is it the House Judiciary Committee needs to be nagged [fruitlessly, as always] to actually do its job and hold the man in contempt for ignoring subpoenas?

…also adding that John Cole’s head is about to explode, as is mine:

mpeachment is on the table.

But Congress is not allowed to bite.

The House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on one of Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders in the chamber have signaled that they do not want the committee—let alone the full House—to take a vote on impeachment….But, when all is said and done, the committee is only supposed to “accumulate” the evidence of imperial over-reach, not to act upon it.

If you needed any more evidence that the United States has now reached the point that we are completely unable to govern ourselves, and are, in essence, lurching forward like a drunk with a dysfunctional sense of balance and order, this should be the final clue. This is either an election year stunt and the Bush administration is owed a number of apologies, or the Democratic leadership themselves are complicit, or both. There is no other reasoning for this nonsense. Governments and political parties that engage in this sort of charade do not take themselves seriously, and they most certainly do not take the public seriously.

And why should they? Where is the outrage? Where is Pat Buchanan’s pitchfork brigade? Where is the outcry on the blogs? How can the leadership of an elected party say, with a straight face, that they intend to hold hearings into alleged malfeasance and criminal behavior, but don’t worry, they won’t do anything about it? It is a joke. It is worse than a joke. It is fraud.

And Pelosi calls Bush “a failure”?

President Bush has the legal power to order the indefinite military detentions of civilians captured in the United States, the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled on Tuesday in a fractured 5-to-4 decision.

Greenwald and Steven D. have more. LOTS more.

Steven:

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals (one level below the Supreme Court) has just ruled that Bush was granted the unlimited power by Congress to detain indefinitely anyone in the United States (you, me, your teenage son or daughter, anyone at all) merely be declaring them an enemy combatant. In a split 5-4 decision the Fourth Circuit also held that said enemy combatant was permitted to “challenge” that detention, but failed to elaborate on what form that challenge should take…
[snip]
So, in effect, we are at the mercy of Justice Kennedy, the one conservative member of the Supreme Court who has shown himself willing to vote with the more liberal justices on issues involving the rights of individuals detained by the Bush administration as enemy combatants. Kennedy was the justice who wrote the most recent majority opinion which held that detainees at Guantanamo Bay had the right to invoke the writ of habeas corpus to challenge their detentions. If and when this case reaches the Supreme Court he will be the one who decides what rights, if any, persons detained by Bush will have.

We already know how the other eight justices will vote.
[snip]
Until that happens, be very careful what you say and to whom. For who knows what constitutes evidence of terrorist allegiance in the minds of our national security professionals. Mr. al-Marri still doesn’t know what precise information landed him in prison as a suspected Al Qaeda sleeper agent. All he knows is that someone at the CIA signed an affidavit claiming that he was a terrorist. Because that is all it takes, my friends, to put you in prison and deprive you of your liberty. The opinion of one man. And until Congress or the Supreme Court holds otherwise you live in a police state, different from that of the former Soviet Union or Argentina under the rule of the Generals only by the degree to which that authority has been exercised — so far.

Greenwald:

Thus, the President can order anyone in the U.S. imprisoned in a military brig as an “enemy combatant” — even if they have never fought on a battlefield or with a foreign power against the U.S. Rather, mere accusations by the President of “terrorism” are sufficient to justify the indefinite incarceration of such an individual as an “enemy combatant,” who is then denied basic Constitutional guarantees.

To say that such individuals can be held “for the duration of relevant hostilities” means, of course, that such individuals can be imprisoned by the President in a military brig not just for years but for decades…
[snip]
Most critically of all — as two of the opinions separately recognized, including the one from the swing Judge (Traxler) whose opinion was the only one to attract five votes and is therefore the court’s opinion — this decision applies every bit as much, and to exactly the same extent, to U.S. citizens on U.S. soil as it does to non-citizens (such as al-Marri) who are in the U.S. legally

We are looking at frightfully ugly times coming up. Worse, there is no one, literally no one, to defend our rights. The Democrats in Congress? Don’t make me laugh. President Obama? I told you not to make me laugh.

“We were betrayed,” said Mr. Liszewski, who was still not sure he could believe the news that the company had agreed to be sold. “The good Lord was sold out for 30 pieces of silver. We were sold out for $70 a share.”

August A. Busch IV, the scion who runs the family brewery that makes Budweiser and Michelob and dates to before the Civil War, had vowed that there would be no sale on his watch. But in the end, sentiment and tradition were no match for a $52 billion offer from the Belgian beer giant InBev.

All around this old Midwestern city famous for its brew, heads have been shaking in disbelief. Budweiser, the king of American beers, will belong to Europe.

–Anger and Dismay at the Sale of a City Treasure”, NYT

Although the purchaser has promised not to close any of the company’s 12 breweries, there is a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over the sale of Anheuser-Busch to the Belgian InBev company, which owns (among other brands) Bass, Stella Artois, Hoegarden, and Beck’s.

I don’t see what the big deal is. Number one, if they hold true to their promise not to close the breweries, I don’t see why anyone necessarily has to worry about their jobs.

But number, two, it’s freakin’ BUDWEISER, the beer thats like having sex in a canoe because it’s fucking close to water. It’s a beer that (like the other big names in US brewing) uses way too much corn for a lighter flavor and cheap source of sugars. Sure, it’s OK ice cold after mowing the lawn, but hefeweizens and pilsners like Hacker-Schorr or Pilsner Urquel are much more refreshing.

In short, Budweiser is piss. It tastes horrible. It’s beer for people that don’t like beer. I drank the stuff in high school, back when I thought Michelob was “high class” (and in a related note, Michelob is now advertised as an all-malt, meaning 100% barley, brew, which should tell you something about the brewery’s flagship brand).

So maybe St. Louis’s civic pride is a little battered, but as long as no one’s losing jobs, who cares who owns the blandest beer in America?

Human beings have a similar tendency, and you can see it at work in Maryland, where the crabbing industry may be dead for good:

Crabs have thrived in the bottom muck of the Chesapeake and its tributaries even as centuries of overfishing harmed oysters, fish and other species in the nation’s largest estuary. Now blue crabs are in trouble, too, and when they go, a way of life is sure to go with them.
[snip]
The bay’s blue crab stock is down 70 percent since 1990 due to overfishing and water pollution, according to Virginia and Maryland fisheries managers. The states have imposed steep cuts on this year’s female crab harvest, aiming to reduce the number of crabs taken by more than a third.

The pollution in Chesapeake Bay is pretty awful:

The main culprit is water pollution and soil runoff from development throughout a watershed that is home to 10 million people. Excess nutrients wash into the Chesapeake, causing algae blooms and choking the native plant life that crabs rely on for food and habitat. In the summer, large swaths of the Chesapeake contain so little oxygen that scientists call them “dead zones,” because few critters can live there.

Watermen call it “bad water,” and they track it all summer, following crabs as they skitter to shallower water that contains more oxygen. Even when watermen luck out and pull up a pot full of crabs, long-timers say the crabs are nothing like they used to be.

“Sometimes in the summer, you pull the pots up, they’ve got algae and mud all over them. The bad water comes in and coats everything and the crabs can’t stand it,” Kellam explains.

We’re slightly different from yeast of course: instead of drowning in our own filth, we drown other species instead.

This is the entirely predictable result of too much development and bad land use policies. And while I’d like to have some sympathy for Marylanders over this disaster, they did this to themselves.

Tip o’ the hat to Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake.