Eric Muller starts hypothesizing about MemoGate:

This is the sort of thing one might expect to see a young lawyer do in a “brainstorming” sort of memo—and that one would expect to see a more senior lawyer react to by saying, “Very creative. I like how you’re thinking outside the box. But none of this is going to fly in the real world. Please go back and rewrite this into something we can actually use.”

The memo is marked “draft”—so maybe all of this too-clever manipulation of hornbook law ended up in the back of a filing cabinet of non-starter ideas. Somehow I don’t think it would have been leaked if that were true, though. [emphasis mine]

Alternative hypothesis: today is June 11, 2004, a mere 144 days before a presidential election. This memo is highly embarrassing to the Bush administration (at least in the opinion of those who already don’t much care for said administration; the jury’s still out on whether rank-and-file swing voter cares about Jose Padilla and Iraqi detainees). Lower-level functionaries in major government departments are known to be core Democratic voters. Ergo, any embarrassing material—even if it was never used to justify administration policy—is worth leaking, especially considering that Abu Gharib was finally moving off the front pages in light of progress in the political situation in Iraq.

Counter-hypothesis: today is June 11, 2004, the week of Ronald Reagan’s death. The memo is highly embarrassing to the Bush administration, but about the most damning piece of the paper trail that ties administration actors to extra-legal torture by CIA and military intelligence operatives. Leak it now, and the news will be buried along with Reagan, as the only media outlets who will still care in a week will be ones with known partisan taint like The New Yorker, and thus, any such accounts will be immediately discounted by otherwise-swayable Republican elites.

Will Collier notes that the ILECs won a Pyrrhic victory at the Supreme Court that will let them raise the fees they charge wireline competitors… not that it will help them in the long run.

I have BellSouth at present, like Will did; I’m trying to figure out a way to ditch wireline service when I move to Jackson next month. BellSouth’s nominal $16.55 local unlimited calling service actually is around $30, once all the bogus fees and taxes are piled on—including the absurd $1.87 a month fee I’m charged so they won’t give out my phone number in the directory. Vonage is looking awfully appealing, although I’m still not sure if my TiVos will play nicely with it or not.

I’ve been generally happy with BellSouth’s DSL, even though their occasional hardware screw-ups are annoying, but Earthlink has a great deal on cable Internet in Jackson which I can’t pass up ($29.95 per month the first six months, then $41.95 per month, with no equipment to buy). Now just to figure out how I can get my DirecTV hooked up with all the trees around and it being a rental property. Hopefully the DirecTV movers’ deal will cover that.

Needless to say, Mr. Neimeyer’s Wednesday column, which referred to the recently deceased Ronald Reagan as “the anti-Christ,” attracted a rather colorful exchange on the Letters page of the Daily Mississippian.

Thursday:

• Sgt. Chris Hankins.
• Prof. William F. Shugart II (yes, that William F. Shugart II).

Friday:

• Monty Horne.
• Steve Phillips.
• Kenneth Jones (who somehow manages to work in a reference to Matthew Shepard, thereby invoking what has to be the 21st century corollary to Godwin’s Law).
• Prof. David Sansing.

For what it’s worth, I was never a huge Reagan fan—I was more of a Thatcherite in my youth, albeit perhaps a bit more of a “wet” Tory than she was. But in a world with Kim Jong-Il, Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe, and the entire leadership of the Chinese Communist Party still around, I think one can find much better candidates for the title “anti-Christ.”

I also think Dr. Shugart might have more properly addressed his remarks to Mr. Neimeyer for having written such ignorant drivel, rather than complaining that the paper failed to exercise proper editorial judgment—although the idea expressed by Mr. Jones that Dr. Shugart’s rather brief letter constitutes a “chill” on free speech only serves to highlight the widespread misconception among undergraduates that the right to hold an opinion somehow includes the non-existent “right” to have that opinion go unchallenged if articulated in public, no matter how ill-informed or poorly-argued it is.

The always-engaging Geitner Simmons has an interesting post on the links between South Carolina’s backward alcohol laws and über-segregationist Ben Tillman, who was pretty much the intellectual forebear to folks like Strom Thurmond and Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo in the 20th century.

The machine Signifying Nothing is hosted on had some serious surgery last night (a complete Debian sid reinstall onto some xfs partitions, a large memory boost, a case transplant, a “new” Maxtor IDE controller and new boot disk, and about a hundred other changes), since there was some mysterious flakiness I suspect had something to do with bad RAM and I had lots of decent parts sitting around that would be of better use on gateway (named for its role, not the company) than gathering dust. Oddly enough, everything still seems to be working after less than an hour of tweaks.

The only downside: if you commented or trackbacked (or posted, for that matter) after about 4 pm yesterday, your comment/trackback didn’t make it into the backup, so it’s lost. Well, not lost, but I’m not going to bother trying to get it out of the old PostgreSQL installation on the old boot disk.