Long weekend...

A hazel dormouse slumbers. Hazel dormouse numbers have fallen by almost two fifths in the past two decades – but the rate of decline is slowing down significantly [Picture: PA at the UK Telegraph]

I have had one of the more irritating 24 hours… and just want to crawl in to a ball… and sleep.  Well, sort of.

The modern era… somehow my normal monthly purchase from Safeway tripped a fraud signal to my bank… I use a debit card, buy every month in the third week, roughly, of the month from Safeway, roughly the same amt.  I made it thru the automated check, entering the debit card number, the SS last 4 digits, then verified the amounts that Safeway was trying to put on the card… was assured the card and the amount was released.. Safeway calls back.. I say re-enter… they do, several times.  Decline decline.  So I call a Fraud Specialist.  Ricardo.  By then there is no chance my order makes it on the delivery van for the afternoon.

Ricardo assures me the card is now released.. says the Safeway transaction tripped a wire as I had not used the card in weeks.  Right! not since I ordered from Safeway in the third week of April, for within 10.00 of my order today.  Like March and February.

Then I say, shall I advise you I am buying a digital TV, an antenna and maybe a couple of other related items, probably tonight – and definitely online?  Shall I pre-clear this, I ask? Shall I identify the supplier?  Would that help?  He asks the amount, I pick a number more than I think I will spend.. he says there should be no problem, esp as I have just been on the phone with Fraud.

Mother of God.  Let me out of here.

I was a wet noodle on the kitchen floor, when it was over.  The only good news is that it being Memorial Day Weekend… the Sat delivery times from Safeway still had openings.

In related news, I suddenly got offers for credit cards… Discover, with whom I never had a credit card.. and Capitol One, never one with them either… both offered 0% interest on balance transfers.  Something I had read the card companies were not going to do anymore.  I have no desire or need for either card… but seems it has been months without the usual credit card trash mail…

Whew.

***

INSTANT UPDATE, 2:29 pm on the Pacific Ocean

Secret!  It’s a Big Big Secret!  By now there are reports in Boston Globe, LA Times, NY Times… and Isikoff in TIME (or is it Newsweek, who knows who can tell the difference).

But humor Ob.  It’s a fucking secret meeting.

Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights on with Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Vince Warren joins us now. He’s in San Francisco, though he’s usually based in New York, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He met with President Obama earlier this week, the day before President Obama gave his speech at the National Archive yesterday.

Vince, welcome to Democracy Now! And start off—well, explain why this meeting that you, representing CCR, and other human rights groups had was supposedly originally a secret meeting. And then, what happened? And where did you meet? Tell us all the details.

VINCENT WARREN: Well, I’m not—still not allowed to talk about the substance of the meeting, but it was a meeting in which we met at the—in the Cabinet Room of the West Wing. And there were a number of high-level officials that were there at the meeting.  [I have read Rahm and Axelrod and iirc Ob's counsel, Craig attended -- Mcat]

And what was sort of shocking about it is we were told that we should not at all talk about the meeting, but right promptly afterwards, the press started calling us, because the White House Press Office told everybody about the meeting.

But it was—in my sense, it was something that President Obama wanted to do to be able to talk and to hear our views, the views of some of the human rights organizations like CCR, and to really embrace his critics, which I think is a wonderful hallmark of this administration.

The problem is that he goes out the next day, and he has a speech in which he not only embraces the opposition, meaning George Bush’s policies, but then he comes out with things that even George Bush didn’t come out with, like preventive detention.

Preamble.

VINCENT WARREN: [...]

What was very surprising was to hear President Obama talk about what he called prolonged detention, but what I think we can all safely say is preventive detention, moving forward, the idea of detaining people not because they’ve committed a crime, but because of their general dangerousness or that they may commit a crime in the future. That’s something that the documents that President Obama was standing in front of, particularly the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, simply doesn’t permit. And when I heard that in his speech, I was deeply, deeply shocked that he would go in that direction.

AMY GOODMAN: Had he told you that the day before?

VINCENT WARREN: No, he hadn’t—he didn’t talk about his speech at all. We really didn’t have a sense of what was going to come the next day. And we didn’t discuss preventive detention. And I think what’s interesting about it is, for most people in the room, I suspect that that wasn’t even something that anybody was contemplating or really could conceive of. We haven’t heard that discussion for, you know, eight or nine months. And so, this was really the first time that we were confronted with it.

Con law scholar remember.  Deliberative.  Listens.  Open wide for the pabulum.  It’s coming at you on an F-22.  Lobs of pabulum fired from warships.. to the right, to the left.  Drones overhead with pabulum bombs…

Farther on Warren makes an interesting point, calling these meetings “secret” (but of course the WH wants to also use them!, so they immediately release that the meeting occurred) may be an effort to silence critics.

Change.

It’s all old already.

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