Just dropped in to see what condition jurisdiction is in

"White House asks Justice Department to look for other places to hold 9/11 terror trial"

The options seem pretty limited there -- the cities where the hijacked aircraft departed from, maybe, or the places where they crashed. But isn't it the role of the judge, not some Washington bureaucrat, to consider changes of venue? And the jury would still have to come from wherever the prosecution alleges the crime occurred:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law ... US Constitution, Amendment VI

The US District Court for the Southern District of New York may not be the only reasonable place to try the case, but it seems like the most reasonable place to try the case. It's where the most damage was done and where the largest number of victims died.

The usual suspects are still quacking for "trial by military tribunal," of course. Their case is weak. Military tribunals are a wartime instrument. The US declared war on Japan the day after the Pearl Harbor attack. It's now been more than eight years since 9/11 with no such declaration.

Typos and Search Engine Optimization

I hate typos. They drive me insane. A good part of my "day job" work involves hunting them down and killing them. Like many editors and proofreaders, though, I have a weakness: I'm often blind to typos in my own work. Why?

I blame Plato. My opinion, or at least working assumption, is that when I write something it resides in perfect, unblemished form in my brain -- and when I'm reading the typed, file-resident version of it, my eyes insist on seeing the ideal form rather than the mistakes that may have wormed their way into that latter version.

Anyway, yes, I make typographical errors, like the one in the title of a recent post on the US Senate election in Massachusetts.

What's interesting and cool is that that post shows up on the first page of Google results for the misspelling.

What's more interesting and cool is that I noticed the search result (and, for that matter, the typo itself) because I'm getting traffic from it.

I don't obsess too much over search engine optimization. If I did, I think I'd intentionally include typos in my posts so as to gravy train on traffic from the sizable "can't spell to save their lives" demographic. Just sayin'.

If Obama's not serious about freezing or cutting "defense" spending ...

... then he's not serious about freezing or cutting spending.

Glenn Greenwald elaborates on just how friggin' big and bloated the US "defense" budget is over at Salon. My shorter version:

The US spends almost as much as the rest of the world combined on "defense." It spends six times as much as the next-largest "defense" spender (China), and 29 times as much as the six top "rogue states" (Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) combined.

And let's be truthful here: US "defense" spending is mostly just a gigantic corporate welfare program -- a way of redistributing wealth from the taxpayer to the politicians' corporate cronies (and if a few hundred thousand people have to die every few years to keep the gravy train running, no problem as long as most of those people are evil, swarthy furriners). The actual national defense requirements of the US come to a small fraction of the amount spent under that label. Politicians and corporate welfare queens like the label because they can call anyone who objects to spending under it "unpatriotic."

If Obama was serious about a discretionary spending "freeze," he'd include the Department of Defense in that freeze. If he was serious about balancing the budget, he wouldn't stop there, either. He'd propose a 25% cut to DoD over the three-year "freeze" period, and ask for a much larger cut over a longer time period.

So, now we know Obama isn't serious.