Blue Crab Boulevard

Bush just overturned Kelo by executive order. His order, of course, only applies to the Federal Government.

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to strengthen the rights of the American people against the taking of their private property, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. Policy. It is the policy of the United States to protect the rights of Americans to their private property, including by limiting the taking of private property by the Federal Government to situations in which the taking is for public use, with just compensation, and for the purpose of benefiting the general public and not merely for the purpose of advancing the economic interest of private parties to be given ownership or use of the property taken.

As I have said - repeatedly - I am not a lawyer, but that seems to be a complete prohibition against taking private property to give to another private individual for economic gain. The order still allows the traditional taking of land for genuine public purposes.

UPDATE: I had noticed that several other people in the blogosphere have said the order does not exactly say what it appears to. A commenter pointed to this post over at Volokh.

Appoint a special prosecutor immediately. Make the reporters reveal sources or throw them in jail until they decide to cooperate. Patterico has a really thorough and very balanced view of whether the reporters and editors themselves can be prosecuted. It's worth the read if you'd like a legal view of the situation.

As to the separate question of whether these folks can and/or should be criminally prosecuted, I haven’t made up my mind. I lean toward the conclusion that prosecutions are possible and wise. But it’s not as obvious as you might think. In the context of the current situation, the answer may seem obvious. But it is easy to imagine other situations where it is not.

Let’s hypothesize that, in the future, President Hillary Clinton suspends an important operation against a terrorist organization because of concerns that the operation relies too heavily on racial profiling. A concerned career Justice Department official writes a memo to President Clinton disputing the allegations of racial profiling, and warning of dire consequences if the program is suspended. The memo is classified. Later, a terrorist cell that could have been stopped by the program sets off a dirty bomb in downtown Chicago. Thousands are killed. And someone leaks the classified memo to the New York Times, which publishes it.

Should the reporter be prosecuted? I think it’s obvious he should not be.

Patterico makes a good point and a good distinction. This program was not classified because it was embarrassing. The NYT and LAT both confirmed that the case for keeping the program silent was quite strong. They both admit that major, major bad people were captured because of this program. But they went ahead and published.

And I suspect that they reason they did was not because the program was embarrassing to the administration, but because the papers hoped that they could damage the administration. Regardless of what damage it does to the US in the future. Regardless of how many people die as a direct result of the paper's actions.

Now, here's a question. Could a private US citizen bring a legal action against the two papers for the disclosures? Could the RICO statute be used? Just wondering.

I expect immediate and thorough denunciations from the left for the promoters of this unilateral action. This cowboy activity some are calling for. This act of war performed without approval of the UN Security Council. This call to immediately launch preemptive strikes on North Korea.

The people advocating this are two former Clinton administration officials and now Walter Mondale.

It's only fair. Otherwise all the left's posturing about Bush is exactly that. Posturing.

(By the way, some lefties did denounce the earlier call. But the ones I saw attributed the piece to the Washington Post. They neglected to mention it was an op-ed by two former Clinton officials writing in the WaPo and was not the WaPo editorial position.)

John Hawkins at Right Wing News has a post up that will blow your mind. He put on his hip waders and explored the fever swamp at Daily Kos to extract a "recommended diary" that discloses the Koz Kidz views of why the arrests were made in Miami. The conclusion? The arrests were made solely to distract people's attention from John Kerry's attempt to pass his bravely run away™ amendment. Here's the Kozzies:

In the same week that two Democratic resolutions forced the Bush and the GOP into the defensive by focusing attention on their incompetent management of the Iraq war, can we at least not be skeptical that this isn't an attempt by the Bush Administration to to change the focus away from Iraq?

Alberto Gonzales will be having a press conference. He'll say how grave a threat it was and will say once again we should give Bush everything he wants to pursue the "War on Terror" - NSA domestic spying, Iraq, and OUR OBEDIENCE.

Don't fall for it.

…Timeline of a Political Setup

Ok, now I'm going to get serious because this is the part that's truly dangerous.

Don't get me wrong, those kids - use your common sense - could've hurt somebody and needed attention, BUT they didn't need the damn FBI.

Put them in juvenile detention & de-program them. Or hell, send them to Chicago's Southside. Trust me - the locals would've straightened these "terrorists" real quick.

No, these seven were just fleas.

As John puts it:

To begin with, arresting terrorists has now been reduced to some sort of political trick? Why? Because the threat wasn't "imminent." Does that mean that the FBI should have waited until they were driving a truck bomb towards the Sears Tower and screaming, "Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!," out the windows to react? In the minds of Kossacks, I guess so.

And the point of this "distraction" is supposed to be to keep people from noticing that John Kerry is self-immolating in the Senate by offering a politically motivated proposal to cut and run from Iraq?

Just to display how in touch with reality the author of this piece of illumination is, the suspects who were arrested ranged in age from 22 to 32 years old. Just kids to be put in juvenile detention.

I think the Koz Krazy just showed who the juvenile is.

Go read what John has to say, he rants real good.

Today, my mission to visit one member of the fighting 101st each day took me over to my friend Rick's place, The Real Ugly American. Rick has been kind enough to link to me any number of times since I started up the Crabitat. He's always got a lot of good posts, today is no exception.

So this guy climbs a fig tree and is sitting up there minding his own business, apparently enjoying a spirited conversation with himself. He's up there for hours, then some busybody calls the cops. The cops try to talk him into leaving his perch, but he seems to want to stay. Close to nature, so to speak. The cops have a different idea and want him down. So the cop, finally runs out of patience with the guy - who by now has become somewhat belligerent. (Hey, wouldn't you get belligerent if some guys kept interrupting your conversation?) So the cop reaches for his Taser.

And accidentally draws his .40 caliber handgun instead and shoots the guy.

The deputy, a five-year veteran of the force whose name was not released, was placed on leave while Thursday's shooting is investigated.

Deputies carry both a Taser and a gun on their utility belts. The Taser, or stun gun, is similar in shape to the compact .40-caliber gun the deputy carried, sheriff's spokesman Scott Wilson said.

The victim was listed in satisfactory condition.

The man had been climbed a fig tree and stayed there for hours, talking to himself. Deputies were unsure whether he was intoxicated or psychotic, and they wanted to get him down before he hurt himself or others, Wilson said.

Oops. The man climbed down by himself after being shot. He is reported to have said, "Ow, that hurt. I'm coming down, I'm coming down."

The moral to this story: Joan Baez should consider staying out of fig trees in Bremerton, Washington.

Harriet, a Galapagos tortoise believed to have been brought from the archipelago by Charles Darwin, has died in an Australian zoo. The tortoise was listed in the Guinness Book as the oldest living tortoise. She'd been called "Harry" for the first 100 years of here captivity. In addition to an odd taste in souvenirs, apparently Chuck couldn't quite figure out that he was a she.

The extremely elderly tortoise, Harriet, was hatched on the Galapagos Islands in 1830 but lived out her final years at Australia Zoo in southeast Queensland where she was the star attraction.

Senior veterinarian John Hangar said the 150-kilogram (330-pound) reptile died on Thursday night after a short illness.

"She had been sick yesterday with, in effect, heart failure," Hangar told ABC radio.

"She had a fairly acute heart attack and thankfully passed away quietly overnight."

And in a completely unrelated story out of Queensland, Crocodile Jack's Authentic Outback Pub is pleased to announce that turtle soup is back on the menu.

Another handy-dandy label to hang on people you disagree with, courtesy of Andrew Sullivan, apparently. "Christianist" is the new word Sullivan has coined. Patrick Hynes over at Ankle Biting Pundits has a post up describing his reaction to the title.

And in the next chapter, titled “Onward, Secular Soldiers,” I point out how every major battle in our culture wars has been launched by secular liberals, not by religious conservatives seeking to “impose their values on everyone else.” In a paragraph I’m rather proud of, I write:

“These liberals seem to think that before, say, 1960, American was some sort of sexually licentious, a moral, nonjudgmental, libertine dystopia in which all “values” were considered equal. But then radical Christians rose up, snuffed out the cigarettes, poured the whiskey down the drain, clamped on the chastity belts and spoiled the party. …”

It's a good post.

It seems some anti-nuclear protesters chose a particularly appropriate selection of apparel during their stunt. They broke into a Minuteman III missile launch complex and attacked the silo lid with hammers.

Dressed as clowns.

The activists used bolt-cutters to get into the E-9 Minuteman II facility, located just northwest of the White Shield, North Dakota. "Using a sledgehammer and household hammers, they disabled the lock on the personnel entry hatch that provides access to the warhead and they hammered on the silo lid that covers the 300 kiloton nuclear warhead," the group said in a statement. "The activists painted 'It's a sin to build a nuclear weapon' on the face of the 110-ton hardened silo cover and the peace activists poured their blood on the missile lid."

This was all done while wearing face paint, dunce caps, misfitting overalls, and bright yellow wigs.

Defense Tech reports the protesters "ate a lot of gravel" when guards arrived. Since it is the group's stated position that it is immoral to build a nuclear weapon, I suggest they immediately carry their protests to Iran and storm one of the Iranian facilities.

Their diet would change though. It would contain a much higher percentage of lead.

"I just wanted to personally thank my good pal, Bill Keller the editor of the New York Times, for helping us figure out how all those great plans kept unraveling on us. Without outstanding people of his caliber, our efforts would never bear fruit. His hard work to uncover plots against us has been the number one reason for our continued success. Thanks, Bill."

Update: Others as frustrated and angry about this as I am. Or even more so. Patterico, Bull Moose, Michelle Malkin, Hot Air, Prairie Pundit, Pundit Guy, Confederate Yankee, Strata-Sphere, Liberty and Justice, The Emperor, Outside The Beltway, Anchoress, Orin Kerr, Influence Peddler, The American Thinker, Squiggler, Mac's Mind, Hyscience, Reverse Vampyre, Riehl World View, All Things Beautiful, Tinkerty Tonk, Dadmanly, A Blog For All,