† Why We Need Gitmo: The latest WikiLeaks dump includes Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs) written by military intelligence officials at Guantánamo between 2002 and 2008 marked “Secret/Noforn” - not to be shared with foreign governments - that identify intelligence sources and “tend to take a bleak view of the detainees, even those who have been ordered released by the federal courts because of a lack of evidence to justify their continued detention,” The Washington Post reports:

“The Guantanamo Review Task Force, established in January 2009, considered the DABs during its review of detainee information,” said Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell and Ambassador Daniel Fried, the Obama administration’s special envoy on detainee issues. “In some cases, the Task Force came to the same conclusions as the DABs. In other instances the Review Task Force came to different conclusions, based on updated or other available information. Any given DAB illegally obtained and released by Wikileaks may or may not represent the current view of a given detainee.”

The New York Times reports that the DABs describe most of the 172 detainees still incarcerated at Gitmo as posing a “high risk” threat to the United States and its allies “if released without adequate rehabilitation and supervision” and “an even larger number of the prisoners who have left Cuba - about a third of the 600 already transferred to other countries - were also designated “high risk” before they were freed or passed to the custody of other governments”:

The documents are largely silent about the use of the harsh interrogation tactics at Guantánamo - including sleep deprivation, shackling in stress positions and prolonged exposure to cold temperatures — that drew global condemnation. Several prisoners, though, are portrayed as making up false stories about being subjected to abuse.

The government’s basic allegations against many detainees have long been public, and have often been challenged by prisoners and their lawyers. But the dossiers, prepared under the Bush administration, provide a deeper look at the frightening, if flawed, intelligence that has persuaded the Obama administration, too, that the prison cannot readily be closed.

Prisoners who especially worried counterterrorism officials included some accused of being assassins for Al Qaeda, operatives for a canceled suicide mission and detainees who vowed to their interrogators that they would wreak revenge against America. …

While some detainees are described in the documents as “mostly compliant and rarely hostile to guard force and staff,” others spoke of violence. One detainee said “he would like to tell his friends in Iraq to find the interrogator, slice him up, and make a shwarma (a type of sandwich) out of him, with the interrogator’s head sticking out of the end of the shwarma.” Another “threatened to kill a U.S. service member by chopping off his head and hands when he gets out,” and informed a guard that “he will murder him and drink his blood for lunch. Detainee also stated he would fly planes into houses and prayed that President Bush would die.” …

The Guantánamo assessments seem unlikely to end the long-running debate about America’s most controversial prison. The documents can be mined for evidence supporting beliefs across the political spectrum about the relative perils posed by the detainees and whether the government’s system of holding most without trials is justified.

† First They Came For The Toilets …: And now, it's ice makers in the crosshairs of the environazis, reports The Washington Times:

Those looking for an easy way to cool down their drinks with ice cubes are guilty of increasing their refrigerator's energy consumption by about 12 to 20 percent. That's unacceptable to global-warming alarmists at the Department of Energy (DOE) who are hard at work finalizing regulatory standards for the fridge. The proposed changes will increase prices by an estimated $2 billion per year, but DOE justifies this added expense by claiming consumers would save $37 in electricity costs over the lifetime of a typical side-by-side. …

Dishonest bureaucrats impose their one-size-fits-all choice on Americans while simultaneously denying they regulate consumer behavior or ban items like light bulbs, showerheads and refrigerators. …

They do so by forcing appliance manufacturers to file statements confirming that their products meet every aspect of the regulations, that the products have been tested according to government rules and that the manufacturer "is aware of the penalties" involved. …Last year, DOE accused a company of producing a showerhead that worked a little bit too well. For this "crime," DOE demanded payment of $1.9 million and destruction of this highly effective product.

That's the left's idea of "choice." Uncle Sam is an unwelcome guest in the home. It's time for Congress to repeal the nanny-state efficiency standards and allow consumers to select the products that they want to use.

† Have You Seen The Price Of Arugula Lately?: Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners, tells CNBC.com that with the price of gasoline nearing $4 a gallon and rising food prices taking a bigger bite out of family budgets, the still-struggling economy may be headed towards another recession:

Of the six US recessions since 1970, all but the "9-11 year 2001 recession" have been linked to - of not triggered by - energy prices that crossed the 6 percent of personal consumption expenditures, he said. (During the shallow 2001 recession, energy prices had risen to about 5 percent of spending, which is higher than the long-term 4 percent share.)

What may make matters worse this time around, is there has been a steep increase in food prices that occurred as well. In other recent recessions food costs were benign, at between 7.5 percent and 7.8 percent of spending.

This year food prices have climbed 6.5 percent since the beginning of early January, according to Consumer Growth Partners.

"The combined increase in the necessities of food and energy creates a harsh double whammy for already stressed consumers," Johnson said. The last time this happened was in the recession that lasted from 1973 to 1975.

Johnson estimates that food and energy eat up about 15 percent of consumer spending at today's prices, compared with about 12.7 percent two years ago.

† Now Is Not The Time To Talk About Race: For generations of immigrants, the American Dream was to leave cramped, dreary, dilapidated ghetto housing behind and move to the suburbs (second item). It was a sign of success. But when blacks who move to the suburbs, something sinister is afoot, according to The Washington Post:

While the black population nationally ticked up 12 percent in the just-released Census numbers, eight of the top 10 majority-black districts across the country actually experienced population loss, losing an average of more than 10 percent of their black population, according to a review of Census data by The Fix. …

The population loss is really more of a migration. The black population is moving from the major metropolitan areas - where most of these districts are - and into the suburbs. In fact, of the 15 districts with the greatest black population growth over the last decade, all of them are in the suburbs of these metro areas.

So how can this be bad? It appears that the Voting Rights Act, which “require[s] black-majority districts not be diluted during the redistricting process,” was “[i]nitially …a boon to Democrats creating opportunities in places where the party struggled to win” but now, “could play right into the hands of a Republican Party” because “Republicans have made a habit of ‘packing’ as many reliably Democratic black voters into as few districts as possible, virtually guaranteeing black representation for those districts while also making nearby ones more winnable for the GOP.”

The WaPo seems to suggest that Repubs should not be allowed benefit politically from the Voting Rights Act the way the Dems did. With Repubs resurgent at all levels of state government, there are only two solutions to the problem The WaPo presents: Either the Voting Rights Act should be abolished or middle class blacks need to move back into inner cities. The first is not likely to happen, because having the Voting Rights Act on the books supports the lib narrative that institutional racism remains pervasive. The second is not likely to happen, because, having saved their kids from crime and failing schools, no parent is going to reverse migrate for the sake of ideology.

† All The News That’s Fart To Print: For some reason, Popular Science answers the question, “Is It Ever OK To Drink Your Own Urine?” – which “has been a faddish health drink for centuries”:

Urine is at least 95 percent water, but the remaining 5 percent is not very good for you - that’s why your body is getting rid of it. It carries excess electrolytes, such as chloride, sodium and potassium (urine also carries small traces of excess toxins in the form of acids from your kidney, but you’d need to drink a lot for that to do damage). Electrolytes enable some of our cells to conduct electricity, but too much sodium draws water out of our cells, dehydrating us, and too much potassium leads to a heart attack.

† Updates To Previous Posts (penultimate item, There’s Many A Slip ‘Twixt The Cup And Lip): VA Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli won’t get his wish for an expedited review of the constitutionality of ObamaCare by the Supreme Court, The Washington Post reports:

The decision to reject Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II’s request for expedited review, announced routinely without elaboration or noted dissent, is not surprising. The court rarely takes up issues that have not received a full review in the nation’s appeals courts. …

Depending on the speed of the appeals courts and the legal process, the issue could arrive back at the court by next year, in the thick of the next presidential election. …

Responding to the Supreme Court’s decision, Cuccinelli said in a statement that the action was “disappointing but not surprising,” given the rarity of such expedited cases. …

Monday’s action on the Virginia request did provide one clue about the court’s future deliberations on the health-care law: It appears that Justice Elena Kagan participated in the decision. Conservative critics of the law have suggested that Kagan might have to sit out review of the law because of her role as President Obama’s first solicitor general.

Kagan told the Senate during her confirmation hearings last summer that she took part in only the most minor of discussions about the health-care law.

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, Today’s Letter Is “I.” As In Ingrate.):  In expanding upon Colin Quinn's pithy observation that that people in other countries people thought more highly of American-style democracy when our culture was represented by the Beach Boys and The Mickey Mouse Club rather than Lil Wayne and Girls Gone Wild, The Wall Street Jourhnal's Peggy Noonan mentions a recent visit by "a tough American general" to her paper's office:

How is the war going? we asked. "Great," he said. "We just opened a new hospital!" This was perhaps different from what George Patton would have said. He was allowed to be a warrior in a warrior army. His answer would have been more like, "Great, we're putting more of them in the hospital!"

† Updates To Previous Posts (fifth item, How To Tell When A “Hate Crime” Has Been Committed): This video, taken by McDonald’s employee Vernon Hackett, appears to show a young white woman savagely attacked by two black women at the fast-food restaurant in the Rosedale section of Baltimore, while the staff makes a show of intervening: 
 

But wait – the victim isn’t what she seems to be. She’s just not a white girl who was punched, kicked, stomped on and dragged around by her hair until she suffered an epileptic seizure, she’s “a transgender woman,” The Daily Mail (London) reports, and so Scott Shellenberger, State's Attorney for Baltimore County, is considering hate crime charges: 

'If there is evidence that the crime was racially motivated, we will take a look at those charges and see if we meet those elements. We have the ability, if the facts are there, to upgrade the charges at a later date,' Shellenberger said. …

According to a police report, one of the suspects said that the fight was 'with a woman over using a bathroom'.

The victim, since identified as Chrissy Lee Polis, describes the attack:

[S]he was approached by a man who asked her how she was doing as she entered the fast food restaurant’s restroom. She responded “not now.” Upon exiting the restroom, she says, a girl spit in her face and pushed her, accusing her of having hit on her boyfriend. Another girl soon approached and the two began grabbing Polis’ hair, scratching, hitting, kicking her, and pulling the earrings out of her earlobes her as she attempted to fight back.

Polis recalls that McDonald’s employees watched the fight, but did not try to intervene. One employee even taped the attack on his cell phone camera, despite Polis demanding that he get the phone “out of my face.”

At one point, Polis attempted to call for help on her cell phone, but one of her attackers took it away. When Polis sat down and attempted to collect her things, her attacker kicked her back and stepped on her arm.

An older white woman tried to protect Polis from her attackers, and was threatened with assault as well.

† Updates To Previous Posts (Higher Taxes For Thee, But Not For Me): Twitter Inc. has signed a lease Shorenstein Properties to move its headquarters to the Market Square building on San Francisco’s Market Street three days after the city’s Board of Supervisors approved a six-year break on payroll taxes on new employees working for tech companies located in the Central Market and Tenderloin districts, San Francisco Chronicle reports.

† Updates To Previous Posts (penultimate item, WA Housewives Join Eco-Nazi Resistance: Whole Foods Markets plans to launch an Eco-Scale Rating System for household cleaners that will “make it easier for customers to understand which products are best for the environment, MarketingDaily reports:

The Austin, Tex.-based retailer, which says it is the first national retailer to launch such a ranking for cleaners, is assigning a color ranking of green, yellow, orange and red to products it evaluates. In order to be sold at Whole Foods, a product must at least rate an orange. Red-rated products will no longer be sold there. In addition to ranking its own private-label brands, it is also evaluating such brands as Method, Better for Life, Ecover, and Greenshield. So far, 34 products have been rated. …

The move comes in the midst of ever-growing consumer confusion about which products are better for the planet. One key issue that Whole Foods is requiring is that products list every ingredient they contain on their labels. …

"Shoppers have a right to know what's actually in the products they use to clean their homes," says the company in its press release describing the new system. "We've always carefully monitored ingredients. Now, with Eco-Scale, we're able to help shoppers buy eco-friendly products with confidence and provide safer alternatives for their households and for the planet as a whole."

Notice that how well the household cleaners actually, you know, clean is not a factor in the rankings.