The New York Times Magazine has an 7 page article on Afghanistan and the opium crop, with a headline asking if the country is a "narco state."

The author's suggestions for fixing the problem include these steps:

1. Inform President Karzai that he must stop protecting drug lords and narco-farmers or he will lose U.S. support. Karzai should issue a new decree of zero tolerance for poppy cultivation during the coming growing season. He should order farmers to plant wheat, and guarantee today’s high wheat prices. Karzai must simultaneously authorize aggressive force-protected manual and aerial eradication of poppies in Helmand and Kandahar Provinces for those farmers who do not plant legal crops.

2. Order the Pentagon to support this strategy. Position allied and Afghan troops in places that create security pockets so that Afghan counternarcotics police can arrest powerful drug lords. Enable force-protected eradication with the Afghan-set goal of eradicating 50,000 hectares as the benchmark.

More...

It's fun to look for your house, or maybe your car, or maybe you, on Google Street View. It's not so fun if the Google camera caught you walking out of a strip club, but still, streets are public property, and that's the chance you take when you exit onto a public sidewalk.

Google crossed the privacy line, though, when it trespassed on private property in rural Sonoma County.

Up a single-lane road outside Freestone, Google went past a gate with a "no trespassing" sign and captured images on private property. Several residences can be seen on the property, including an up-close shot of someone's living room window.

This isn't the first time Google has treated private property as if it were a public street. Google was sued for taking pictures along a private road in Pittsburgh. What's next? Pictures of nude sunbathers on private beaches? [more ...]

The victim of Bob Novak's hit-and-run, Don Clifford Liljenquist, has this charitable reaction:

"Bob Novak is the one that hit me? Well, everybody knows who Bob Novak is! He's a famous journalist! . . . I was struck by Bob Novak? . . . Well, I think that makes it a great story!"

Yes it does. More about Liljenquist:

[T]he victim of syndicated columnist Robert Novak's hit-and-run pedestrian scuffle is not, as earlier reported by us and everyone else, 66 years old -- he's 86 years old. And homeless. And forgiving. And kind of tickled at all the attention.

Liljenquist thinks it's possible that Novak didn't see him, given that Novak wasn't paying attention. It would be difficult to charge Novak with hit-and-run if that's the testimony Liljenquist would give. Novak caught a break by colliding with a nice guy. He's likely to skate with only the "failure to yield" ticket he was given at the scene.

Your turn to ponder the fact that the Yankees lead the Red Sox 7-3 in the bottom of the 6th inning at Fenway, threatening to move one game back of the Sox for the wild card (the Rays lead the division by 1 over the Sox and 3 over the Yanks.) If the Yanks hold on, it will be their 8th straight win.

Oh by the way, just 35 days until the Rainbows of Hawaii visit the Florida Gators to kick off (well, it kicks it off for me) the 2008 college football season. Go Gators!!

This is an Open thread.

A proposed law would empower the federal government to seize your computer if you use it to violate a copyright law by downloading a song or movie for which you didn't pay. Doesn't that penalty seem a bit excessive?

The bill would also empower the federal government to bring civil suits for copyright infringement -- doing what the RIAA now does in its abusive lawsuits against (mostly) college students who download copyrighted music. This seems like the kind of "big government" that conservatives should deplore. If copyright holders feel infringed, they should bring their own lawsuits rather than counting on the government to do it for them. Surely our scarce federal resources are better spent elsewhere -- repairing bridges, building levees, strengthening port security, and doing the countless other things that benefit society as a whole rather than businesses that should spend their own money to protect their own intellectual property.

The bill enjoys the misguided sponsorship of Democratic Senators Patrick Leahy and Evan Bayh. Can't they find something more productive to do with their time?

Julia Sudbury envisions a utopian world in which imprisonment is not only unnecessary, but evokes the same revulsion as slavery. Until we find a more humane way to protect society from those cannot restrain their violent impulses, however, prisons will remain a necessary evil.

That reality does not diminish Sudbury's larger point: prisons are unnecessarily inhumane, and ever-growing prison populations are not the most effective response to crime. Rather than devoting a larger share of our shrinking resources to incarceration, society's dollars would be better spent on crime prevention. Reducing poverty and providing meaningful opportunities for a sound education, affordable housing, and well-paying jobs would help combat the despair and hopelessness that breeds crime. Helping parents learn to raise children in homes that are free from violence would also have a beneficial impact on crime rates. These are not easy or inexpensive solutions to implement, but they are more worthy of investment than supermax prisons.

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Readers who have computer security expertise might be able to shed some light on whether it was smart of the San Francisco District Attorney's office to make public "150 usernames and passwords used by various departments to connect to the city's virtual private network" (VPN).

The passwords were filed this week as Exhibit A in a court document arguing against a reduction in $5 million bail in the case of Terry Childs, who is accused of holding the city's network hostage by refusing to give up administrative networking passwords. Childs was arrested July 12 on charges of computer tampering and is being held in the county jail.

While "city prosecutors do seem to think that they are sensitive," the disclosure seems difficult to reconcile with claims that the City is making against Childs. [more ...]

(Parts 1 and 2.)

What does Obama legal advisor Cass Sunstein think about this idea

The proposal for a Church Committee-style investigation emerged from talks between civil liberties advocates and aides to Democratic leaders in Congress, according to sources involved. . . . Looking forward to 2009, when both Congress and the White House may well be controlled by Democrats, the idea is to have Congress appoint an investigative body to discover the full extent of what the Bush White House did in the war on terror to undermine the Constitution and U.S. and international laws. The goal would be to implement government reforms aimed at preventing future abuses -- and perhaps to bring accountability for wrongdoing by Bush officials.

Given that he endorsed the Bush Administration's lawlessness, I feel confident that he will oppose this idea. It is another reason why Cass Sunstein should have no place in an Obama Administration and should never be referred to as a progressive legal scholar. He has a long history of endorsing the extreme right wing legal views of the Bush Administration on executive power.

Speaking for me only

Fred Hiatt is a shameless man. Today he publishes an editorial in the Washington Post chiding John McCain for his McCarthyite smear of Barack Obama:

Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, had one of those unfortunate moments the other day, when he charged that his Democratic opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, "would rather lose the war to win a political campaign." . . . It's one thing to say Mr. Obama is wrong. It's another to accuse him of putting political self-interest over country. This is not the "politics of civility" that Mr. McCain was promising as recently as last month.

A rather tepid critique from Hiatt's WaPo. But there is a reason for that -- Fred Hiatt has his own history of McCarthyite smears of Democrats:

The Tour de France reaches its decisive stage this morning with the Maillot Jeune likely to be decided in today's time trial. Spaniard Carlos Sastre holds a 1:34 lead over the superior time trialer Australian Cadel Evans. By the numbers, Evans should make up the time and win the Tour. But there are no guarantees.

In other news, the Yoo-Bybee II torture memo has been released, sort of (most of it has been redacted), but one chilling bit of "legal analysis" is disclosed:

"To validate the statute, an individual must have the specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering," it reads at one point. "Because specific intent is an element of the offense, the absence of specific intent negates the charge of torture."

More . .

If things are going as swimmingly in Iraq as John McCain would like us to believe, why is the military so desperate to control the visual message?

The case of a freelance photographer in Iraq who was barred from covering the Marines after he posted photos on the Internet of several of them dead has underscored what some journalists say is a growing effort by the American military to control graphic images from the war. ...

[O]pponents of the war, civil liberties advocates and journalists argue that the public portrayal of the war is being sanitized and that Americans who choose to do so have the right to see — in whatever medium — the human cost of a war that polls consistently show is unpopular with Americans.

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Caption, anyone?

Story here.

Update: From Denver columnist Penny Parker:

EAVESDROPPING at Sen. John McCain's Denver appearance Friday. The press corps joked that given the speculation about McCain's running mate, perhaps he was going to announce the Dalai Lama as his veep during their meeting later in Aspen.

Said one out-of-town television reporter: "Obama can't do it because then it would be Obama-Lama."