Holder Contempt Charge: Now It's Official

Sharyl Attkisson reports that the draft of a contempt citation naming Eric Holder is being circulated to members of the House Oversight Committee today. The citation addresses the Attorney General's lack of cooperation in the investigation of Fast & Furious.

Resolved, That Eric H. Holder, Jr., Attorney General of the United States, shall be found to be in contempt of Congress for failure to comply with a congressional subpoena.

Resolved, That pursuant to 2 U.S.C. §§ 192 and 194, the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall certify the report of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, detailing the refusal of Eric H. Holder, Jr., Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice, to produce documents to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform as directed by subpoena, to the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, to the end that Mr. Holder be proceeded against in the manner and form provided by law.

Resolved, That the Speaker of the House shall otherwise take all appropriate action to enforce the subpoena.

I've got the actual text here [pdf], and it's a bit of a read. I'm not sure it'll lead to anything in terms of the investigation, but the timing suggests that it's more about election politics. We've got a Presidential candidate who's (belatedly) cozying up to the NRA, and something like this will come in handy in the upcoming debates.

What bothers me is that it isn't justice.

Anenon: The Inner Hue

Sometimes music doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there. This record is a good example.

It's not that nothing happens, but this album is more a collection of still pictures than a film in motion: in this case, a blurred sequence of sepia tones and sunbleached photographs frayed and wrinkled at the edges. Brian Simon utilizes a narrow pallette of saxophone, Rhodes piano, and a Roland 909 (ah, respecting the classics!). Sometimes limitations are the best creative spur, and that's well apparent here.

Possible points of triangulation might be Helios and the MFA but more than anything, the record feels like the first time I heard My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. It's gauzy and disorienting, but with a sense of rhythm that keeps things grounded to some extent. Simon's saxophone is rarely distinguishable, being relegated to providing texture more than melody. Though half the tracks lack percussion, the pulse is always just there under the surface.

It appears that there are no plans for a CD pressing, but the record is available in digital form from Boomkat.

How Erik Got His Gnome Back

I recently purchased one of the Acer Aspire notebooks. It's small enough that I don't feel like Sisyphus dragging a rock up the mountain, but large enough to actually be useful. I got it home, wiped Windows, and set about installing Ubuntu 10.04 on it.

I like 10.04. It's still got the Gnome 2 environment, which I find to be a great balance between usability and attractiveness, and I've absolutely no need to upgrade. However, the Aspire uses a newer Atheros AR9485 wireless card, and it's not supported under the 2.6.32 kernel.

Crap. That means upgrading to 3.0. That means upgrading to Ubuntu 11 and losing Gnome 2 for the mess that is Unity. Do let's start gnashing teeth and listening to Elliot Smith records now.

I did scads of research, and there is simply no way to get Gnome 2 working under Ubuntu 11. There's a fallback configuration for Gnome 3 that looks a bit similar, but it's not the same. The panel is stubbornly resistant to customization, and GTK2 themes don't work. That's irksome, because the Clearlooks engine was one of the cleanest and most attractive interface setups since Motif.

Then I came across references to Mint Linux. Mint is a fork of Ubuntu, but the developers appear to hate the whole Gnome 3 atrocity as much as I do. The difference is that they actually went and did something about it.

Revisionism

It's already begun. Mitt Romney showed up at the NRA convention Friday and gave a keynote address that boiled down to "Obama's going to take your guns, but I'm the guy who's going to fight for you right to keep them!"

Nice try, Mitt, but some of us have long memories. We remember who supported the original Assault Weapons Ban in 1993, and we haven't forgotten who signed off on a permanent extension of Massachusetts' state-level equivalent in 2004. Signing up for an NRA life membership two years later doesn't erase that.

Frankly, I don't expect the guy to push for the 2nd Amendment if he gets elected. I don't think we can even expect a wizened little shove. The best we'll get is that he stays out of the way of the progress we're making.

Is the situation ideal? Nope. But politics isn't about the ideal; it's about what's practical and achievable. This is something you just can't beat into the Ron Paul zealots. We take the best candidate who has a chance of winning, and this time around, it's Mitt Romney.

If he doesn't screw up too badly, we've got another few years with a sympathetic legislature and Supreme Court, and that's where the gains are to be made.

In happier news, check this out:



9mm Hornady Critical Defense loadings against pork ribs. Tell me it's no good now, Captain Tactical! While not the least bit scientific, I'm going to claim that this completely contradicts those silly Swiss goat shooting tests and declare that the .45 is just for old coots with compensation issues.

Like That When I Got Here

A guy came into work the other day and regaled me with his elaborate plans to build a flamethrower that shoots ball bearings. This is dedicated to him.

Like That When I Got Here  (01:19)

Decision in Woollard v. Sheridan

The Maryland District Court has just handed down a decision [pdf] in the Woollard case granting the plaintiff summary judgement. You can catch up on the background here. The meat of the decision is that Maryland's standard for issuance of carry permits is too strict and arbitrary to pass constitutional muster.

From the opinion:

The Court finds that Maryland’s requirement of a “good and substantial reason” for issuance of a handgun permit is insufficiently tailored to the State’s interest in public safety and crime prevention. The law impermissibly infringes the right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

Judge Legg maintains that the right to carry outside the home is only covered by intermediate scrutiny, but this is a step forward.

At bottom, this case rests on a simple proposition: If the Government wishes to burden a right guaranteed by the Constitution, it may do so provided that it can show a satisfactory justification and a sufficiently adapted method. The showing, however, is always the Government‘s to make. A citizen may not be required to offer a "good and substantial reason"why he should be permitted to exercise his rights. The right‘s existence is all the reason he needs. [p. 20]

This is the first opinion to phrase the idea in such clear and forceful language.

Think Blue, Count Two

Space sometimes commands strange tools to its uses.

Think Blue, Count Two (01:34)

False Flags and Cheap Shots

I was having a good day. I was rocking out to Hilary Hahn's phenomenal recording of Ives' violin sonatas, until I got word that a profile had been established for me at this site.

That's odd. I've never heard of that site, and I found that "claiming" my profile would require a paid membership. Well, that's pretty dishonest and underhanded.

So, who are these people? They don't seem too keen on making friends. In fact, they spend a great sum of pixels lambasting other established gun bloggers, and they've trolled more than a few gun forums. A whois query shows that the ownership and hosting details are obfuscated, and the only contact information is a phone number out of Denmark. I can tell from the grammar on the site that there are no Danes running it.

Then someone found a bit of a serendipitous wrinkle in their WordPress code.  Type in some garbage after the URL, and Smoke and Mirrors directs to the website of the Violence Policy Center.

We call those oopsies.

I was wondering where Josh Sugarmann was spending all that money he gets from the Joyce Foundation, since it's not as if his little group is very active in politics these days. I guess he's got to do something to keep busy, but this is just pathetic.

And frankly, it's encouraging to see that the opposition has to stoop to things like this.

Persistent Ringdown

Low-rent phase music made affordable.

Persistent Ringdown  (01:49)

New President for the Brady Campaign

Since Paul Helmke stepped down last year, Dennis Henigan has been serving as active president. Today, the Brady Campaign announced that Daniel Gross would be taking the reins.

Gross was formerly the director of the Center to Prevent Youth Violence. I can't find much about their funding. They were previously known as PAX, who received a $200,000 grant from the Joyce Foundation in 2004, but the trail appears to stop there.

Given that the Brady Campaign's budget has fallen into the four-digit range, I'm curious as to whether this guy is bringing in further funding, as they can't be paying him much.

Or, it might just be a part-time gig for him to build his resume.

Fast and Furious: Another Round

Attorney General Eric Holder testified before the House Oversight Committee again today. As with his previous appearances, we were treated to a litany of evasions and excuses. Long story short:  he doesn't know what's going on in his department, and he claims to have had no knowledge of any gunwalking operations prior to the death of Brian Terry.

It's been over a year since he promised an internal investigation, and he has yet to provide any explanation or any proof of action. Representative Labrador pointed out that Holder continues to show up for Congressional hearings unprepared, and that he seems oblivious to happenings at Justice. Representative Farenthold took it a step further, asking Holder, "knowing what you know, do you think you're qualified to lead the Department of Justice?"

Holder's response? "If you're going to ask me to resign (...) you've asked the wrong question."

I don't think we are.

Fast and Furious: Cummings Pushes Back

Attorney General Holder gets another chance to testify to the House Oversight Committee Thursday morning.  Just in time, Representative Elijah Cummings has released a report [pdf] in which he claims to clear the White House and Department of Justice of any complicity in this matter.  Of course, if they were already clear, then why is this unsolicited "report" even necessary?

He doesn't go so far as to claim ignorance, only that,

[t]he Committee has obtained no evidence that Operation Fast and Furious was a politically-motivated operation conceived and directed by high-level Obama Administration political appointees at the Department of Justice.

Instead, Cummings settles for declaring that the administration did not conceive or direct Fast and Furious.  He seems to think that justification hinges on such semantic differences.

Entitled "Fatally Flawed: Five Years of Gun-walking in Arizona," the report tries to lump Fast and Furious in with prior such schemes as Wide Receiver ("see?  George Bush did it, too!"), and it attempts to portray the entire situation as something isolated to rogue elements in the Phoenix field division.

Of course, this flies in the face of facts.  US Attorney Dennis Burke has resigned after being caught providing false claims to his superiors, and newly available documentation [pdf] from NPR shows that Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer and ATF Acting Director Kenneth Melson still approved of the operation's details as of February of 2011.