Bye bye Gitmo

Color me surprised, because I truly didn’t think he’d keep this promise.  President Obama has signed an Executive Order ordering that Gitmo be closed as practicable as possible, and in any event, no later than one year from now.  He has also signed an Executive Order creating a Special Interagency Task Force to study what to do with the individuals housed at Gitmo (and elsewhere), and while he was at it, he revoked Executive Order 13440, and issued yet another Executive Order ensuring lawful interrogations.  Impressive.

According to the Voice of America, the world welcomes these changes.  That’s not surprising, as the world’s been pretty pissed at the US for quite some time for how we’ve gone about our bidness.

That’s a Lot of People!

CNET has some great pics of the inauguration taken from space.  Pretty amazing.

COPA Dies

Well, it’s been a while since I last posted.  Not like there hasn’t been wonderful things that have happened since December. A movie about a mall cop, for example, is numero uno at the box office.  And the weather has been very nice lately, which is always nice.  Oh, and something about an inauguration, that happened too.

In any event, a very controversial law is no more. COPA (or the Child Online Protection Act) was passed in 1998, and it imposed criminal penalties against those who posted “any material” that was “harmful” to minors.  (This was not one of the great things to come out of the Clinton era.)  The case bumped along for a decade, as detailed in this CNET article, until the Third Court of Appeals in Philly ruled that there were less-restrictive ways to keep minors from seeing “harmful” material.  The government petitioned for a writ of certiorari, but the SCOTUS has declined to hear the case.

So COPA is dead.