In his brief remarks after Libby's indictment, Bush said: "In our system, each individual is presumed innocent and entitled to due process and a fair trial."

Unless Bush decides otherwise, of course. According to this administration, the president or his agents can declare an individual -- including an American citizen -- to be an enemy combatant and throw him in jail indefinitely, without charging him or giving him genuine access to the legal system.

The Register: Second-class Intel to trail AMD for years. Intel has two problems. On one hand, its chips will continue to suffer from performance issues as a result of the front side bus dependency and lack of integrated memory controllers. (Intel has some kind of workaround for this in Tigerton, but not a real competitor to AMD.) In addition, Itanium customers - the chosen few - won't benefit from the cost savings that a shared Itanic/Xeon server infrastructure promised to deliver.

The logical backflips in this Wall Street Journal editorial, in which the writers attack the Libby indictments and all but endorse perjury if it's done in the right cause, would be hilarious if they didn't point up the newspaper's utterly poisonous hypocrisy. The Journal's upset about "criminalizing politics," a process it helped perfect in the 1990s.

Well, they're clever writers, anyway.

The National Security Agency's Operating Systems Guides page offers "configuration guidance" on securing computers. Very interesting, and useful.

(Via Slashdot)

SF Chronicle: Wal-Mart hit twice: critical film, activism / 6,800 sites to host DVD premiere by 'Outfoxed' director. "Wal-Mart" DVDs will screen at more than 6,800 locales, including house parties, churches and labor halls. There will be plenty of opportunities to see the film in politically blue parts of the country such as New York and San Francisco, a city with no Wal-Marts but 11 scheduled screenings. However, there will also be a dozen showings in both deep-red Kansas and Georgia, and others in rural areas where Wal-Marts dominate the landscape.

Mark Shields (Washington Post; reg req): Hypocrisy and The Miers Case. Miers does not need to apologize to anyone. She told no lies. The big losers are those on the political right -- both her supporters and her opponents -- whose contradictions and moral relativism were enough to give hypocrisy a bad name.

Boston Globe: Creating buzz, one peer at a time. But the use of campus ambassadors differs, specialists say, in that it is not cold-call salesmanship, used by street groups, and it is more forthcoming than buzz marketing. Campus ambassadors generally are not required to state their corporate affiliation, but most companies instruct them not to try to obscure it.

More forthcoming? When they're not required to say who's paying them?

Bull. It's dishonest at the core. But I suppose it's one way marketers will work in the future as "regular" advertising loses its allure. Microsoft is at the heart of this story, but it's far from alone in the semi-sleazy practice.

The worst part of this story is the statement, at the very end, by a student who said she listened to her huckster "because he's a friend." Sad.

In my world, real friends don't get paid to pitch products to each other.

Mercury News: Grove gives back to school that launched him. When Russian troops invaded Hungary in 1956 to quell a democratic revolution, some 200,000 Hungarians -- including a young man named Andras Grof -- spilled across the borders to escape. Humanitarian groups helped whisk him away to relatives in New York City. Within a matter of six weeks or so of crossing the muddy border in secrecy, he was attending classes in chemical engineering at City College of New York. He changed his name to Andrew Grove, graduated at the top of his class, and went on to become the chief executive of the world's biggest chip maker, Intel. The 69-year-old retired Grove, now Intel's senior adviser, has decided to pay back City College of New York with a $26 million donation.

Washington Post: Oil Industry Seeks to Cast Huge Profits as No Big Deal. By most familiar comparisons, the $9.92 billion profit earned by Exxon Mobil Corp. in just three months is almost unimaginable. It would cover all Social Security benefit payments for three months. It would pay for an Ivy League education for about 60,000 kids. It would pay the average list price for more than 160 Boeing 737s. It would fund the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than two months. Yet oil industry representatives and Exxon Mobil yesterday made a game effort to cast the record profit, earned during a quarter in which the Gulf Coast was shattered by hurricanes and gas prices rose well above $3 a gallon, as middling at best.

It is remarkable how an industry that has less competition than ever before can profit so handsomely on everyone else's troubles, more so how it can pretend that it's not gouging. But gouging is another word for capitalism as practiced today, so we'll probably have to live with it unless -- and this does deserve some investigation -- there's outright collusion in the mix.

But the best response to these pirates is to conserve. If we had elected officials who weren't so totally in the pockets of industry, we'd have long since embarked on a Manhattan Project for energy conservation and, ultimately, independence from non-renewable resources.

Someday, a politician will run for president on such a platform. He or she will win a lot of votes from people who are willing to sacrifice in the short term in order to help save this nation in the long run. Still waiting...

AP: Cheney Adviser Indicted in CIA Leak Case. Vice presidential adviser I. Lewis "Scooter' Libby Jr. was indicted Friday on charges of obstruction of justice, making a false statement and perjury in the CIA leak case. Karl Rove, President Bush's closest adviser, escaped indictment Friday but remained under investigation, his legal status a looming political problem for the White House.

They're not guilty until proved otherwise. They are, however, undoubtedly some of the least principled if not sleaziest people ever to inhabit the halls of power.

I don't know who broke laws. I do know that the sleaze goes all the way to the top.