Weekend and Monday Roundup Twofer: Afternoon Edition

We'll start the afternoon edition of the roundup with some good news coming out of the TYC debacle — or at least good compared to the situation previously, I suppose. TYC conservator Jay Kimbrough has announced that he expects to release about 400 youth from the program by the end of this week. Those 400 would be kids that have served their sentences, but whose sentences were extended for one reason or another by TYC staff. I'm sure everyone wants the staff that caused the TYC problems to be brought to justice as expediently as possible, but I don't think I mind at all that the first order of business seems to be trying to give some of these kids their life back.

I promised you guys some news on the British seamen being held by Iran, so here goes. The British seem to be backing off from the hard-line stance they had taken against Iran, and now say they are looking for a win-win resolution. But Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wasn't quite as willing to let bygones be bygones regarding whether the seamen were caught in Iraqi or Iranian waters. Perhaps that's because, as that New York Times article points out, there is no agreed-upon boundary between Iranian and Iraqi waters, and this whole thing has been a "mad propaganda exercise." And since the British military seems to actually be willing to acknowledge that "there are no [military] options at all" due to forces already being overextended, as the editor of Armed Forces of the United Kingdom points out in this Chron article, it's a good thing that both sides finally seem to be moving toward a diplomatic resolution to the problem. Does that sort of tactic work? I thought in times like that, you were supposed to increase your military presence by deploying tired, unprepared, underfunded troops into the region in numbers far below what would be necessary for a proper military campaign. Boy, I bet British troops feel pretty undermined by that diplomatic stuff right now.

So I bet you guys were feeling a little wistful at the knowledge that finance reports would be out today. (In case you're wondering, GOP reports are out now as well, with Romney leading the pack with a whopping "no, it's not April Fool's any more" $23 million, Giuliani at $15 million, and ex-frontrunner McCain hurting at $12.5 million.) After all, it's inevitable that after the first round of campaign reports, the pack of candidates ends up thinning, and we can no longer entertain ourselves with amusing conjectures of what it would be like to have this or that D-list candidate as President. Well, worry not, at least on the Republican side — the "R" candidate pool is getting reinforcements, in the form of Tommy Thompson and Tom "I Don't Like Brown People" Tancredo. Thompson is running on the "I'm the real conservative in the race" platform. Someone should have informed him that the position was taken — by half the candidates in the race, no less. With this many "real conservatives" around, you'd think one of them could actually garner some support. Tancredo, of course, doesn't need to fight for his platform. He bragged that he wasn't worried about out-fundraising the other candidates in the race, either, saying, ""We have something they don't have — a group of people out there who are there because of an issue... And they're never going to have that. They can use their 100 million to try and buy constituency. I have it. It's natural. It's there." Makes me wonder — maybe he's got a point. How reliable is turnout within the bigot population?

Speculation continues on when the Bush administration would pull a Rumsfeld on Alberto Gonzales and ditch him like a handsy prom date. But Slate did us the favor last Friday of pointing out the beginning of the end for our friend Gonzo. He seems to want to testify as soon as possible, but Congressional Democrats seem intent on taking the time to prepare for a very thorough interrogation. Larry Beinhart at HuffPo breaks down how this just makes impeachment that much easier. And an Okie from Muskogee points out that Sunday's talk show circuit showed Congressional Republicans in full eat their young mode with regards to all this attorney business.

The court system got to rack one up in the "W" column this weekend. David Hicks, the "Australian Taliban" held in Guantanamo facing a potential life term for terrorist involvement, pleaded guilty and was given a seven-year sentence by the panel, which he plea-bargained down to — wait for it — nine months. What did he have to agree to to get such a big break in his sentence? Surely he's rolling over on fellow terrorists, right? Helping make America a safer place? Well, perhaps for the Bush administration — he will serve nine months in exchange for a gag order on his treatment in Gitmo. He had to agree to a statement that he had never been "illegally treated," despite his previous claims of being beaten; he can't speak to the media for a year, and can't sue over the treatment he received while held. Not that we have any reason to suspect that he'd have bad things to say about his treatment. After all, the military assures us that all his treatment was "legal." Then again, they also mentioned something about Eurasia having always been at war with Eastasia. Not sure what all that was about. Ignorance is Strength!

Finally today, some good news to close the roundup as well — not all our rights are being methodically denied us. Copyright laws and fair use provisions finally took a step in consumers' direction, as EMI announced that their digital catalog would be sold through Apple's iTunes service without copyright restrictions. Why this sudden gesture goodwill to consumers? "[EMI's chief executive] said early market tests showed EMI that consumers widely preferred to buy songs without copy protection, even at a higher cost. Unrestricted tracks outsold the others at a rate of 10 to one, he said." Consumers preferred not being treated like criminals and being able to use what they purchased as they chose? I'm surprised that didn't make its own headline. At least now we can hope that other recording companies similarly drop all this silly digital rights management nonsense and learn to adapt to the modern marketplace.