Monday Bloggy Goodness

Here's a round-up of some interesting news from the past couple of days.

This got my blood boiling:
In the adding insult to injury category, the city officials that triumphed over a group of Connecticut homeowners in a landmark Supreme Court property-rights case are expecting those residents to pay the local government rent dating back to the year 2000. ...
"It's a new definition of chutzpah: Confiscate land and charge back rent for the years the owners fought confiscation," wrote Jonathan O'Connell in the Fairfield County Weekly.
Read the whole filthy story.

On a different not, during an interview on Hardball with MSNBC's Nora O'Donnell, former CIA analyst and bin Ladin expert Michael Scheuer revealed how much of a distraction government attorneys can be in the War on Terror:

O‘DONNELL: Let me ask you what you know about what we‘ve read recently about a secret military operation known as Able Danger. There are people involved in that that say that the United States knew about Mohammed Atta a year before the 9/11 attacks. Is that true? And was there a massive failure by our government?

SCHEUER: I don‘t know firsthand information about Able Danger, ma‘am, but from what I‘ve read in the media, that the lawyers prevented them from passing the information to the FBI, that certainly rings true. The U.S. intelligence community is palsied by lawyers. When we were going to capture Osama bin Laden, for example, the lawyers were more concerned with bin Laden‘s safety and his comfort than they were with the officers charged with capturing him. We had to build an ergonomically designed chair to put him in, special comfort in terms of how he was shackled into the chair. They even worried about what kind of tape to gag him with so it wouldn‘t irritate his beard. The lawyers are the bane of the intelligence community.