I've been watching the Abrams Report. I generally like Dan Abrams but on many issues he just gives a liberal kneejerk reaction. I really, really like Jeralyn Merritt when she appears on the Abrams Report. The preceding link will take you to a post about the California Penal System and the mess it is in.
The last couple of days I've been hauling firewood from the back yard to the woodpile and today I spent a couple of hours chopping wood and hauling wood. There's enough wood to chop to keep me busy for many days. My back and neck are killing me. I've had a bad back ever since I had a motorcycle accident while I was in the Navy. All the skin on my back was scraped off and I was in a cast from my hip to my foot for about three months. Man, did that suck.
That was the worst motorcycle accident of the three or four I've had. The others happened out in the desert around Tucson when I was young and the worst part of those accidents was slamming into cactus.
I had just spent some days getting all the leaves out of the swimming pool and today we had a windstorm and now there's a bunch of leaves in the pool. Damn!
I downloaded the latest version of Mozilla and it seems to be working pretty well.
I like Firefox but it still needs some work.
Check out Iraq's Chemical Weapons Programs: History from the Federation of American Scientists.
From the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the Highway Loss Data Institute come the FATALITY FACTS: STATE BY STATE 2002 report. According to the report there were 42,815 motor vehicle deaths in 2002. Damn!! There's got to be a way to cut down on this slaughter on our highways and byways.
The following excerpt is from an article by By Stephen Schwartz.
By Stephen Schwartz
Tech Central Station | April 27, 2004With the bombing of a Saudi police facility in Riyadh on April 21, certain people of influence -- American journalists and officials, as well as leaders of the desert kingdom -- are finally admitting the contradictions of the Wahhabi dominion. And because it has taken so long for so many of them to wake up to this reality, I am going to break two journalistic rules: I am going to write about my own feelings, and about a colleague.
I'll begin with the latter -- Neil MacFarquhar of The New York Times, for whom I have nothing but respect. On Friday, April 23, under the headline "Saudis Support a Jihad in Iraq, Not Back Home", Mr. MacFarquhar confirmed a number of charges that I have made continuously, in print and on TV and radio, over the past year. They include:
· that the Islamist clerical establishment in the kingdom, adhering to the ultra-extreme cult known as Wahhabism, have actively preached for jihad against the Coalition in Iraq -- as I repeatedly charged and documented;
· that the long Saudi border with Iraq is a serious problem, which Saudi officials now claim they are attempting to fix, by allegedly sealing it against the frequent movement of jihadist volunteers northward -- a measure I consistently demanded, to virtual silence;
· that the Saudi rulers have permitted ongoing incitement, inside the kingdom, to the murder of Coalition soldiers in Iraq, as a means of "trying to let off steam" -- which has been the centerpiece of my critique of the Saudi order;
· that when Saudis are killed fighting the Coalition in Iraq their families make their "martyrdom" known to everybody in the kingdom -- which I also documented at length.
With no offense meant, since I am sincere in my admiration of Mr. McFarquhar, his reportage on April 23 read as if it was recycled from any of a number of my articles.
However, there is a difference. Mr. McFarquhar echoes the arguments of Saudi officialdom and the extremists among the Saudi public who see a contradiction between jihad against the Coalition in Iraq and terrorism against the Saudi regime. The former is applauded by the Wahhabis; the latter elicits screams of rage.
But this duality embodies nothing more than the 250-year old hypocrisy pursued by the Wahhabi-Saudi ruling elites, who have always depended on the Christian powers to defend them -- first the British, then us, and the French -- while preaching the most exclusionary, violent, and intolerant form of Islam known in the religion's history.
The outrage of Saudi-Wahhabis when the fire and steel they have rained on New York, Madrid, Bali, Casablanca, Istanbul, and Tashkent suddenly explodes on their own territory is certainly understandable. They have gotten away with mass murder for so long, and have enjoyed such exorbitant wealth at the same time, that it is naturally dismaying for them to be told that their long and successful exercise in fooling the West has ended.
The article is a great article and you should read the rest of it.
CHERRY HILL, NJ, August 29, 2003 - Former United States District Judge Stephen M. Orlofsky has rejoined Blank Rome LLP as a Partner in the Commercial Litigation Group.
The above paragraph is not meant to be an advertisement for Blank Rome, but it offers a little background for the rest of this post.
The following is what this post is about.
Mr.Orlofsky’s involvement with the restoration of the legal system in Iraq is spotlighted in the article, “Rebuilding a Shattered System” The Pennsylvania Lawyer, Sept./Oct. 2003, by JAG officer Cptn. Frank McGovern.
You'll need the Acrobat Reader in order to view "Rebuilding a Shattered System" and you can download Acrobat Reader here.
I think the most difficult tasks in rebuilding Iraq will be providing security for Iraquis, rebuilding infrastructure and actually instituting a legal system that might work.
I figure if we could rebuild Europe and Japan after World War II, we ought to be able to rebuild Iraq. Then again, I'm an optimist.