I don’t really have any objection to Bush announcing that his lawyers believe he has the authority to attack Iraq without a Congressional vote. I don’t know about the de jure, but I’d bet he has authority de facto. The legal argument rests primarily on this Congressional resolution, passed last year, which authorizes the use of armed forces against those responsible for 9/11. They’re also citing H.J. Res. 77, a Congressional resolution passed in January 1991 which authorized the invasion of Iraq. ...

I know I sound just as goofy when I’m talking about wrestling, but how can I resist linking to a review with a line like “this new series works hard to give Mekaneck the purpose he never really attained in the original; the fact that his neck can bend and twist will aid that goal a lot.” Yes. Twisty necks, the key to all character development.

Someone’s doing a limited run of activist gas pump stickers (original). Good design, good wording, and high quality stickers. Not quite as subtle as my favorite anti-SUV sticker campaign. More political than the baby smashing bunch (original). It’s nice that the guy made sure he included real safety notices on the sticker. Hey, remember what I said a while back about identity and the ability to mold the reality outside the monitor? Yeah.

Bowing to popular demand, I’ve whacked up a barebones index page for Popone. No barebones archive or comments pages yet; if it’s very important to you, let me know and I will whip one up. I’ve also switched over to using Blogrolling.com to maintain my blog list. This sacrifices the purity of keeping that list to just the important few blogs, but there are more than a few I want to keep track of, so what’s a boy to do?

After about a month, there’s a new post over on True Porn Clerk Stories. Apparently some people bring video store clerks food. I never would have thought of that.

Unbillable Hours is another one of those lawyer-written weblogs, which I find eternally interesting. They set up some kind of cognitive dissonance within my head (“how come busy lawyers have time to weblog?”) and I always like that. The author, whose name I can’t find on the page, wrote a nice bite about RICO and the Catholic Church, which prompted this posting. I also really liked his discussion of sex and law.

Belated, but this is the sort of story I can’t resist. Namely, the “screw the popular wisdom, let’s be contrary” kind of a thing. I know that the Olypmic skating controversy (original) is dead and gone, but I’m linking Joe Bob Briggs’ story on it anyway. It’s a real story, actually, not written like the movie reviews. Wish I’d read it back then. I’d like to look at replays with his thoughts in mind. Mind you, the ISU did nail two French skating officials, so perhaps there’s not really so much of a case to be made after all. ...

Ashcroft’s getting itchy again. This time he argues (original) that the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (original) misruled recently when rejecting Ashcroft’s wiretap guidelines (original). Spiffy! I can’t actually object to Ashcroft’s objection; he has the right to appeal, after all. I’m just surprised that the USFISC (which hasn’t rejected a wiretap request in years) held up their hands and said “No.”

The Internet Archive Movie Collection contains a few thousand digitized films from the Prelinger Archives; the latter is a vast collection of ephemeral films. Newsreels, “Our Friend the Bowling Alley,” instructional films, and the like. Check out A is for Atom today.

I will be flying out of the Bay Area, my stuff on a truck somewhere below me, on September 7th.