Dozens of Constitutional Law professors’ heads just exploded. (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.)

UPDATE: Here’s the exact quote: “The [House] Oversight Committee has learned that over the objections of the National Archives, you exempted the Office of the Vice President from the presidential executive order that establishes a uniform, government-wide system for safeguarding classified national security information. … The National Archives has informed the Committee that your office intervened to block the inspection. According to a letter that the National Archives sent to your staff in June 2006, you asserted that the Office of the Vice President is not an ‘entity within the executive branch’ and hence is not subject to presidential executive orders.”

(Hat tip: Think Progress, via Ana Marie Cox’s Swampland, via Technorati.)

UPDATE 2: Here’s the letter from the National Archives to Cheney’s office, which the Oversight Committee (specifically, chairman Henry Waxman) is quoting from. Assuming the director of the National Archives, J. William Leonard, is accurately characterizing the position of Cheney and his aides, it appears their theory is based on the fact that the Office of the Vice President “has both legislative and executive functions.” That’s true, in that the VP is also the President of the Senate, but I think it’s fairly obvious that he’s an executive-branch official with certain legislative functions, not the other way around (which would be unconstitutional anyway), and certainly not neither; he can’t be neither. He’s not his own branch of government, for heaven’s sake.

UPDATE 3: The Democrats respond.

A new, experimental long-range forecast from the UK Met Office (the British equivalent of the National Weather Service) says we can expect a slightly below average hurricane season. Whereas previous forecasts have called for as many as 15 named storms in 2007, UK Met is predicting just 10, including the two that have already formed (Andrea and Barry). That would be the same number as last year, and two below the average of 12. If the forecast is borne out, 2006-07 would be the first two-year period with 20 storms or less since 1993-94 (when there was a total of just 15 storms).

This news comes on the heels of the latest La Niña developments, reported a few days ago by Margie Kieper:

After months and months (since…February?) of the weekly, “Subsurface conditions and recent CFS forecasts indicate a possible transition to La Niña conditions within the next 3 months,” today [NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center] has finally replaced it with:

Recent trends in surface and subsurface ocean temperatures indicates that ENSO-neutral conditions are likely to continue during the next 3 months.

If a La Niña does develop, it won’t be in time to affect the [Northern Atlantic] hurricane season. The bad news: don’t discount ENSO-neutral conditions. [”ENSO” means “El Niño/Southern Oscillation.” -ed.] In terms of ramping up / dampening hurricane seasons, only strong El Niño events have a significant effect on dampening the hurricane season — busy years can occur in both La Niña and ENSO-neutral conditions (for example, 2005).

Really, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. This long-range hurricane prediction stuff is an inexact science, and anyone who pretends otherwise is kidding themselves. So many factors, like the amount of Saharan dust, can have such a huge influence — or none at all. It’s not like anybody predicted in advance that there would be 28 named storms in 2005… or 10 in 2006.

Something else to keep in mind: it doesn’t necessarily take an active season to cause a lot of death and destruction. The costliest pre-Katrina hurricane in U.S. history, Hurricane Andrew, occurred in a season, 1992, with just seven named storms. But nobody remembers that. They remember this.

With one week until the iPhone debuts, The Onion gives us a sneak peek at some of its key features. Heh. (Hat tip: Briandot.)

(Note the guest-blog.)

According to The Greek Mythology Personality Test, I’m Prometheus:

“You are most like Prometheus, and you probably knew that before you even took this test. You probably aren’t deliberately altruistic, but you still tend to do things that benefit everyone, even at great expense to your health and personal relationships. You aren’t ruled by your emotions, but you still have a strong sense of justice. You make good descisions, but they can sometimes backfire (and this isn’t due to a flaw in your reasoning, but due to faulty premises instead).

You are very reasonable, you understand systems, you can quickly pinpoint flaws and you know how to correct them. You pride understanding and knowledge above everything else, and your greatest fear is to appear to be incompetent. You tend to be contemptuous of authority, but you don’t accept leadership roles yourself until everyone else has demonstrated their own incompetence.

You’ve built a very specific skill set. You know exactly where your strengths and weaknesses are, and you pride yourself on this kind of self-knowledge. You distrust tradition, which you see as arbitrary, and you rely instead on your own judgements. You also pride yourself on your pragmatism. You’re also a very private person.

Most of all, people think you’re arrogant, but screw them! They’re the ones who benefit from your ideas and discoveries, and if they took the time to understand why it is that you say and think the things you do, they’d realize that you only appear arrogant because you are exactingly precise when it comes to your area of specification, and most of all because, when you don’t know something, you don’t have an opinion about it (unlike most of the loudmouths that you have to deal with on a day-to-day basis).

Relationships are your kryptonite. It isn’t that you don’t want them — in fact, you would very much like a very close relationship with someone who understands you. They’re just the one thing in the world that you’re naturally bad at.

Famous people like you: Niels Bohr, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Werner Heisenberg, Issac Newton, John Maynard Keynes, Erwin Schrodinger
Stay Clear of: Apollo, Icarus, Hermes, Aphrodite
Seek out: Atlas, The Oracle, Daedalus”

Drudge just put up a siren for this AP article:

The Bush administration is nearing a decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and move the terror suspects there to military prisons elsewhere, The Associated Press has learned.

President Bush’s national security and legal advisers are expected to discuss the move at the White House on Friday and, for the first time, it appears a consensus is developing, senior administration officials said Thursday.

For those of you who are into college sports recruiting, you’ve probably checked out a player or two on Tennessee based Rivals.com. With a new CEO in place, Yahoo! just inked a deal to purchase the site. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

This acquisition could be an indicator that Yahoo! is taking a step toward further expansion, driving in an additional 2 Million+ users of Rivals.com into Yahoo!land. The biggest of the potentially huge deals, could find Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp trading MySpace.com for a 25% stake in Yahoo!, which would be a huge boon to Yahoo! as it tries to truly make itself a “one-stop shopping” destination for online users.

U.S. military reports the deaths of 14 troops in Iraq in the last 48 hours, including 5 in a Baghdad roadside bombing Thursday.

Visit CNN for the latest.

By popular demand, here is the much-discussed Hillary Clinton campaign ad spoofing the Sopranos finale. (If you have the Sopranos finale TiVoed but haven’t watched it yet, and have somehow managed to avoid hearing anything about it, you may not want to view this clip.)

Heh.

What do you think? Funny? Stupid? Weird? All of the above?

As happy as I am to have my computer back in good working order (knock on wood), I still wish I understood what exactly happened to it last Wednesday, and how the heck it magically fixed itself en route to the Apple repair center in Houston.

The loud popping noise that precipitated last Wednesday’s apparently catastrophic system failure — which turned out, mysteriously, to be temporary and self-repairing — sure sounded like a short-circuit or something similar, and the computer’s subsequent refusal to power up (regardless of the power adapter being used) was consistent with that diagnosis. But fried motherboards don’t just un-fry themselves, now do they?

Anyway, the lack of answers makes me nervous that the same thing might happen again, so I’m looking for any clues I can find as to what exactly occurred. Apropos of which, there were a couple of weird anomalies that occurred last Wednesday, prior to the “pop” and shutdown. They don’t seem relevant to what ultimately occurred — they seem software-ish, rather than hardware-ish — but who knows? Maybe our resident techno-geeks can construct a theory. Details after the jump.

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This article is a few days old, but Google News Alerts just recently delivered it to my mailbox. Anyway, the New Britain Herald’s Ryan Pipke says the Newington baseball team’s run to the state finals helped NHS end a rough year on a high note:

It’s been a rocky year for the students at Newington High as well as the residents of the town, as several incidents at the school and after-school events drew a heap of negative publicity across the state. [See, e.g., here, here and here. -ed.]

With each story in the news, those around the school had to face questions and endure a growing reputation around town and in the region, an unfair situation for the majority of students just trying to get an education and lead a normal life.

With the baseball team’s success, suddenly the talk around Newington was positive again, according to manager Eric Frank. “I think the town really needed something like this and the community really came together,” Frank said.

It’s always nice when sports can have a positive impact like that.

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