• No wonder the Iraq adventure has gone so smoothly: Rumsfeld & co. planned the war with PowerPoint.

• Chrome warriors: Here’s a Flash cartoon that had me grinning ear to ear at its sheer cleverness. “An animator faces his own animation in deadly combat. The battlefield? The Flash interface itself.” If you love Chuck Jones cartoon classics like “Duck Amuck,” get thee hence. [via Metafilter]

• I did not know that the historian David Kaiser, who taught at Harvard when I was a student, has a blog, and a good one, indeed. Most recently he puts Judge Anita Taylor’s recent decision against Bush’s domestic wiretapping program (full text of the ruling) in context:
  

  I was inspired by her opinion and am distressed that a variety of legal scholars, including some opposing the program, have claimed that it lacked legal sophistication. Certainly it did not focus primarily on recent precedents, although it cited some of them, nor did it, in accepted legal fashion, attempt to decide the question on the narrowest possible grounds. Instead, Judge Taylor reached back to the origin of the Republic and to the text and essential philosophy of the Constitution to point out that a President, once again, was taking advantage of an emergency to disregard both…. to those legal professionals who found fault with Judge Taylor’s opinion, I can only reply that it is clear enough to be understood by any intelligent high school student, much less a grown citizen — and that, like the finest opinions of Justice Black, it relies above all on the simple tactic of arguing that the Constitution means what it says.

  [via Brad DeLong]

[tags]flash, powerpoint, rumsfeld, wiretapping[/tags]

Tonight President Bush will announce his plans to deploy National Guard troops on the Mexican border to rein in illegal immigration. In times of political difficulty and sinking polls, Bush has always found troop deployments a tonic.

But I’m thinking he’s not going nearly far enough. Consider all the creative ways the Bush administration could pursue its goals with a little help from the uniformed services:

• For seniors who have been tardy about signing up for a Medicare drug plan, what could be more effective than a GI at the door? It may be that, as Bush has put it, “Deadlines help people understand there’s finality” — but gun barrels are even more persuasive.
• Schoolkids across the U.S. know that their future depends on how they perform on a growing array of tests that are the Bush-era education system’s hallmark. But if you really want kids to understand a test’s gravity, there’s nothing like the impassive stare of a sergeant at the front of the room.
• Under the Bush administration the I.R.S.’s army of auditors has focused its efforts on making sure that low-income filers claiming the earned income tax credit aren’t cheating. Surely this enforcement effort would prove even more effective with a little military muscle behind it. Suspect taxpayers could have their returns reviewed in the belly of an Abrams tank. If that’s not sufficient, Vice President Cheney could approve a Geneva Conventions waiver.
• The Bush team has faced what it views as outrageous delays in obtaining Senate approval for its most conservative judicial nominees. Well, why wait for senators to achieve consensus or compromise? Why not just deploy a Marine battalion to Capitol Hill?
• Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald may or may not be on the verge of indicting Karl Rove. But isn’t this endless Plamegate investigation distracting the government from its important national security mission? To end this threat, all it would take is a 3 a.m. visit from a Special Forces team.

Really, once you get going down the road of martial law, the possibilities are endless.

BONUS LINK: Tom Lehrer’s Send the Marines