For the past two days when I've gone to the New York Times website, www.nytimes.com, I've been getting these pop-ups that say "Your computer may be infected with a virus, download a free scan now" or some such message. If you hit the "No thanks" button, it begins to run a fake scan on your system anyway! If this happens, close your browser immediately, and by no means should you run this bogus scan, because what it is really doing is inserting a trojan into your PC (don't know if Macs are similarly affected).

I wasn't really sure what the deal was until I read this just now:

Here's a front page story the New York Times (NYT) would rather not be running: The paper is warning readers to be aware of  bogus ads running on its Web site.

The paper says "some readers" have seen unauthorized pop-up ads promoting antivirus software on NYTimes.com, and warns visitors who see the ad not to click on it but to restart their browsers instead. While the Times doesn't spell this out, it has likely had its site hijacked by a "malware" scammer who is trying to trick visitors into installing pernicious software onto their hard drives.

The complete article can be read here:

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090913/home-delivery-the-new-york-times-serves-up-some-malware/

It appears that the TImes had been made aware of this and is now warning readers about it on their front page.

In other news...hello to everyone from the chatroom the other night during Obama's health care speech (big fun!). It's been awhile since I've had time to blog, so it was nice to be in touch with all of you.

Cheers,

astral66

Oscar Meyer Wienermobile Crashes Into House

Well, the garage to be specific. Naughty Wienermobile!

Greetings to all my friends here at TPM.

Regards,

astral66

From yesterday's UK Independent:

The Israeli government of Benjmain Netanyahu is seeking to deflect Washington's demand for a total settlement freeze by complaining that it ignores secret agreements between his predecessors and the Bush administration that construction in existing Jewish settlements could continue.

The rift between Mr Netanyahu's government and the US appeared to deepen yesterday, with a clear declaration by President Barack Obama that a freeze - including on "natural growth" of West Bank settlements - was among Israeli "obligations".

But Mr Netanyahu's government - which has made it clear it will not accept a total freeze - is pushing to restore at least part of the private "understandings" which it is emerging were struck between Israel and the previous US administration despite the Bush team's repeatedly stated opposition to settlement construction.

George W. Bush, the gift that keeps on giving. Secret deal? Anyone else heard anything about this? I'll admit, I stay away from the Israel/Palestine argument in most of my posts, but I haven't seen any mention of this story in the US media. Anyone care to fill in the blanks here? 

As George Costanza said about squirrels and pigeons in the road, "We had a deal!"

Little mention has been made of this article by Nancy A. Youssef that was up on McClatchy yesterday, aside from a link here on the TPM Newswire and for a short time at Huffington Post:

Why'd Obama switch on detainee photos? Maliki went ballistic

I realize that it's an easy thing for those of you sitting in the comfort of your living rooms and coffee shops to be absolutley certain that the release of the torture/abuse photos will have no ill effect in other parts of the world, but those who are confronted with the dangers of being in war zone, and who are responsible for thousands of lives every day, appear to have a different opinion.

Some choice quotes from the article:

When U.S. officials told (Iraqi Prime Minister) Maliki, "he went pale in the face," said a U.S. military official, who along with others requested anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity.

The official said Maliki warned that releasing the photos would lead to more violence that could delay the scheduled U.S. withdrawal from cities by June 30 and that Iraqis wouldn't make a distinction between old and new photos. The public outrage and increase in violence could lead Iraqis to demand a referendum on the security agreement and refuse to permit U.S. forces to stay until the end of 2011.

Maliki said, "Baghdad will burn" if the photos are released, said a second U.S. military official.

TPM reader Billyshake has a great post currently up called "The Torture Photos: The Ultimate Mixed Emotion" that explores the dilemma we all face in this issue: balancing the desire to see war criminals like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld held accountable for torture, with the real need to keep at the forefront the safety of our men and women serving overseas.

The heated debates we have had here certainly attest to the mixed emotions that prevail, and this article does a good job in presenting some of the background information that influenced Obama's decision to hold back on releasing the photos at this tenuous time:

Some of the photos were of detainees being held in prisons, while others were taken at the time a detainee was captured.

"It was not so much the photos themselves, but that the perception that they would be Abu Ghraib-type photos," added the senior defense official, who said U.S. officials were worried "about the potential street consequences" of making the photos public.

Iraq is scheduled to hold a referendum by July 30 on the accord, which calls for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops by the end of 2011. If the accord were rejected, the U.S. would have to withdraw from Iraq within a year of the vote or by the summer of 2010. Some U.S. officials fear that would be before Iraq's security forces are ready to protect their country on their own.

The status of forces agreement calls for the U.S. to train Iraqi forces in specialized areas such as aviation and intelligence gathering and to step to the side as Iraqi forces take control of their communities.

A lot of people calling for the heads of Cheney, Rumsfeld and crew (and I count myself among those with this desire for justice), seem to forget that Iraq, and particularly in places like Baghdad, could erupt into violence at any moment, and that any small, random incident could spark a massive uprising:

With tensions rising again in major Iraqi cities such as Baghdad and Mosul, Maliki feared that "if you add this (the photos) to that mix, it could very easily provide an incentive to the extremists" to use more violence, a State Department official said.

That, in turn, might cause U.S. and Iraqi commanders to reconsider the troop withdrawal from urban areas, which would be a major setback to Maliki's government and to the Obama administration, which is determined to withdraw troops from Iraq as it escalates the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.

The administration, which as late as April had agreed to release as many as 2,100 photos, said in the two weeks before the deadline approached that the release could trigger a backlash against American troops.

After U.S. officials notified Maliki, the prime minister put "heavy pressure" on Hill and Army Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, to stop the release, the senior U.S. defense official said.

Interesting info. Real reasons for concern about real consequences, and just some of the concerns presented to Obama that he had to weigh in making his decision. One last point to ponder:

Denis McDonough, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, said that Obama "has been clear that releasing the photos would have no benefit except to potentially increase the risk to our troops. He's also made clear that the existence of these photos was only known because the acts were investigated and those who undertook them were sanctioned."

So while it would be nice to think that these photos could be released, and that this single gesture would automatically lead to the conviction of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their underlings for war crimes and violations of the US Constitution, is this longshot currently worth the risk of igniting violence in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, of preventing the withdrawal of our forces from Iraq's cities by the end of this month, and leading to further delays in getting the hell out of Iraq entirely? I'm sure Obama was asking himself these same questions.

Read the entire article here. 

I guess it shouldn't be surprising that Dr. George Tiller was the topic of discussion on 29 episodes of O'Reilly's show since 2005, or that O'Reilly usually referred to him as "Tiller the Baby Killer", or that he compared him to the Nazis, pedophiles, and al Qaeda, or that eventually some right-wing nutcase finally listened to his master's words and decided to take the matter into his own hands. Not much seems to be shocking or surprising these days, just sad and tragic. It's hard for some to imagine how an individual is inspireded to commit such a crime, but pieces like this article now up on Salon.com do provide some insight into the underlying motivations that feed unstable minds:   

O'Reilly's campaign against murdered doctor

O'Reilly's language describing Tiller, and accusing the state and its elites of complicity in his actions, could become extremely vivid. On June 12, 2007, he said, "Yes, I think we all know what this is. And if the state of Kansas doesn't stop this man, then anybody who prevents that from happening has blood on their hands as the governor does right now, Governor Sebelius."

Three days later, he added, "No question Dr. Tiller has blood on his hands. But now so does Governor Sebelius. She is not fit to serve. Nor is any Kansas politician who supports Tiller's business of destruction. I wouldn't want to be these people if there is a Judgment Day. I just -- you know ... Kansas is a great state, but this is a disgrace upon everyone who lives in Kansas. Is it not?"

I'm sure that by Monday afternoon we'll be treated to all kinds of clips of O'Reilly and the rest of the right-wing MSM hate machine backtracking from their dogwhistle incitements to violence. Is it too late to put the genie back in the bottle?

A few days ago, TheraP had a great post up about a bird's nest she had been watching. I guess it's that time of year, because I was about to post a similar story. For the past few years, a purple finch has built a nest in one of the hanging planters on our front porch. The first year we noticed her, we watched as the finch built her nest, laid her eggs, and then sat on them until they hatched a couple of weeks later. For a short time there was a lot of chirping from the baby birds as the mother returned again and again to feed them. And then suddenly they were gone, having grown large enough to fly away.

Last year we watched the same cycle unfold, and this year, as soon as the weather warmed up, we bought some new flowers for the hanging basket and hung it from its hook. Within days, the finch was back, or was it one of the offspring? We don't really know that much about birds. Every few days I would check on the nest construction, and eventually, the eggs appeared.

But this year was different. Along with the usual blue eggs (there were three of them), there was also a speckled egg. This seemed a little odd, as I didn't recall hearing of birds laying different colored eggs, but I did remember hearing about certain "parasitic" birds that lay their eggs in other birds' nests. A little bit of the Google and I found the photo posted above.

It turns out that there is a species of bird known as the "cowbird":

It is time to write about cowbirds. No nice way exists to say this: they are parasites. They once multiplied at a prodigious rate in North America and may be endangering many other bird species. They are a menace. No one knows for sure how many reside in North America but the number exceeds 40,000,000 and may be as high as 80,000,000. Mostly they are Brown-headed Cowbirds although Bronze-headed Cowbirds live in the southwest United States.

Cowbirds don't believe in nest building. It is so much easier just to use someone else's nest. Cowbirds also don't believe in child rearing. It is so much easier to let someone else do it. But they do believe in fornication. The females are egg machines and the males love to fertilize all those eggs. Because they waste no time building nests or feeding their young, they have time on their hands and they use it for lust. In low density populations they appear to be monogamous but when population densities climb, the birds are promiscuous, polygynous, or polyandrous as the mood hits them. There is some evidence that monogamous populations flock together and that promiscuous populations flock together, leading one to the unforgivable comment, that birds of a feather flock together and we ask your forgiveness for making that unforgivable comment.

Female cowbirds are devious little birds. In order to find a nest to lay her eggs, a female will sit quietly and watch for other birds building nests; or she will walk around on the ground searching for nests in use; or she may flap her wings excitedly, perhaps trying to flush birds from their nests. When she finds a nest she lays her egg in it as soon as the nest-owner is gone.

When the nest owner returns there is one more egg to brood, unless the cowbird has eaten one eggs already there. Often the cowbird egg hatches a day before the legal residents', giving the cowbird a head start on its nest mates. The baby cowbird is a little bigger and a little noisier and ends up with more food.

So now we were faced with a moral dilemma. Should we let nature take its course, at the risk of the three legitimate nestlings? Or remove the parasitic egg and give the other three a fighting chance? Maybe it seems like a strange dilemma, having a dozen eggs in a carton in the fridge, but it was a tough choice to grab a spoon and carefully remove the speckled egg from the three blue ones. It was put in the freezer so as to euthanize it in the most humane way possible (it just didn't seem right to toss this living thing in the trash).

It's been about a week now since our efforts in bird nest management. Just yesterday I checked the nest and two of the three eggs have hatched. They must have just broken free, because all that could be seen were two little pink blobs barely moving around, hardly showing any feathers at all. I haven't checked the nest yet today, as it disturbs the mother bird everytime the front door gets opened, but I hope these little nestlings are doing well, and that our interference has given them a fighting chance. We're looking forward to the chorus of chirping once the mother starts bringing food to the nest for their feeding time. 

It is good to see that there is some external pressure being applied: 

GENEVA -- An independent U.N. human rights investigator said Thursday that the United States is failing to properly investigate alleged war crimes committed by its soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Although some cases are investigated and lead to prosecutions, others aren't or result in lenient sentences, said Philip Alston, the U.N. Human Rights Council's special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings.

"There have been chronic and deplorable accountability failures with respect to policies, practices and conduct that resulted in alleged unlawful killings _ including possible war crimes _ in the United States' international operations," Alston said in a report dated May 26 and published on a U.N. Web site.

A spokesman for the U.S. mission in Geneva, Dick Wilbur, said Alston's conclusions and recommendations would be reviewed closely.

Read the entire article here.

If you want to read the entire 47 page report in PDF form it can be found here.

The UK Telegraph reports that more information has emerged in regards to the detainee abuse photos that President Obama has prevented from being released to the public:

Photographs of alleged prisoner abuse which Barack Obama is attempting to censor include images of apparent rape and sexual abuse, it has emerged. At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee. Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube. Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts. Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq. Allegations of rape and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He has now confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.

*****

Maj Gen Taguba, who retired in January 2007, said he supported the President's decision, adding: "These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.

"I am not sure what purpose their release would serve other than a legal one and the consequence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy, when we most need them, and British troops who are trying to build security in Afghanistan.

"The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it."

I'm willing to take his word for it. There is no reason why images of rape and sexual abuse should be made available to the general public. These images have already been used as evidence in over 60 investigations into the individuals responsible for the abuse of detainees, so it's not like they haven't been made available to the proper authorities. Let them be viewed in a court of law, but keep them out of the hands of the torture-porn voyeurs and the websites that cater to them.

.

How is it with all of the incidents involving employees of Xe/Blackwater shooting civilians, that this company still receives its millions of dollars and is allowed to continue causing more harm than good? Last I heard, Iraq expelled the company from its borders (anyone know if that's correct?), so why are we still allowing these thugs to represent US interests at all?

Here's the latest from the Independent:

Four US contractors for the company formerly known as Blackwater were not authorised to carry weapons when they were involved in a deadly shooting in Afghanistan this month, the US military said today.

The men - accused of opening fire on a vehicle in the capital (Kabul) on 5 May - have charged that their employer, now called Xe, issued them guns in breach of the company's contract with the military. One Afghan was killed in the shooting, and two others wounded.

Xe has said its employees are not generally banned from carrying weapons in Afghanistan, though the authorization depends on the duties of the contractors. Anne Tyrrell, a spokeswoman for Moycock, N.C.-based Xe, declined to comment on the terms of this specific contract or say if the company issued guns to the men.

But the military told The Associated Press that the contract did not allow the men to keep guns on them.

The four American contractors claim they are being scapegoated by Xe, claiming that Xe issued them the guns. It surely wouldn't be surprising to anyone to find out that this was true, but still, opening fire on unarmed citizens after being involved in an accident is a hard one to explain away.

"While stopped for the vehicle accident, the contractors were approached by a vehicle in a manner the contractors felt threatening" and opened fire, the statement said.

Callahan -- the attorney who also represented the families of four Blackwater employees killed in Iraq in 2004 who sued the security company -- said the contractors were traveling in two vehicles when a car hit the first one. They had gotten out to give first aid when another car made a U-turn and drove toward them, he said.

"These four men drew their guns and shot," Callahan said.

The brother of one of the wounded Afghans has said the car was full of shopkeepers heading home from work who misinterpreted one of the Americans hitting the car as an order to move. Bullets started hitting the back of the Toyota Corolla as it drove off. A passenger was hit in the stomach and died two days later, said Shah Agha, whose brother Farid was driving the car. Farid was shot in the hand and another person was injured outside the vehicle, Agha said.

One would have a hard time arguing that Xe/Blackwater was responsible for these men using unauthorized weapons to kill a civilian. But the overall picture is still the same, employees of Xe/Blackwater have again found themselves in another incident of needless killing. Is it lack of training? Lack of accountability? Lack of any real oversight?

Isn't it time that we stopped this practice of hiring private contractors to do the jobs that our military has traditionally done? Wasn't the whole argument put forward by Donald Rumsfeld that private contractors were more efficient and cost-effective? Where is the evidence of this? 

This amazingly well-researched diary by "occams hatchet" at Daily Kos is one of the best presentations I've seen in regards to how a war crimes trial was, and should be, conducted. I've included just the opening paragraphs and a little of the discussion of the use of the film here, and highly recommend taking a minute to read the entire post.  

- and then they showed that awful film, and it just spoiled everything.

                                  - Hermann Goering
                                    at Nuremberg

So, Dick Cheney doesn't want the latest batch of detainee-abuse photos released.

Huh - I wonder why?

Nuremberg, Germany, November 1945: The Nuremberg trials were underway. In a legal proceeding unprecedented in human history, the victorious Allied powers were prosecuting 21 Nazi defendants for their respective parts in the horrors inflicted on the world by Adolf Hitler's Germany over the previous 12 years. Fittingly, given the unprecedented scope of the atrocities, the prosecution was seeking to prove the Nazis guilty of a new crime in international law: the waging of aggressive war,  a war perpetrated against people and nations that posed no threat to Germany. Never before in history had such an ambitious prosecution been attempted, nor had such a daunting task been faced by those seeking justice.

Realizing the unique nature of the challenge facing it, the prosecution team elected to take advantage of the Nazis' own meticulous record-keeping to make their case for them.  Headed by former U.S. Attorney General and then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the Allies intended to bury the Nazis under a mountain of their own documentation. The sheer literal weight of the evidence amassed against the defendants - including 250 tons of paper in all - insured that the tribunal, rather than looking like an episode of "Perry Mason," with a dramatic denouement presented to a gasping gallery of awestruck observers, more likely would be about as exciting as a reading of the New York City phone book.

*****

The film, "Nazi Concentration Camps," was a distillation of footage shot by Allied cameramen as their armies had liberated the death camps one by one in the final months of the war. The documentary was directed by Lt. Col. George C. Stevens, a noted Hollywood director in his own right (before enlisting, Stevens directed Woman of the Year; after the war, some of his most notable films included Shane, The Diary of Anne Frank, Giant and A Place in the Sun, the last two of which earned him Best Director Oscars).

The scenes, many of them familiar to us now, were absolutely shocking in their day: Bulldozers shoving tumbling corpses into open pits.  Bodies stacked like cordwood. Walking skeletons looking dazedly into the camera, uncomprehending. And then, just when the viewer's mind started to go numb, the camera would focus in on a single dead face among a literal pile of dead faces, eyes staring vacantly, glazed over, transforming the millions of deaths which (to paraphrase Stalin) up to that point were just a statistic, into the unspeakable tragedy of single death upon single death upon single death, repeated to horror.

The film lasted just under an hour. The effect on the mood in the courtroom can hardly be overstated.

Read the entire post here:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/5/18/727464/-Cheney,-Nuremberg-and-aggressive-war:-the-day-the-smirking-stopped

Here's a must-read article now up at Salon.com:

May 18, 2009 | On April 16, the Obama administration released four memos that were used to authorize torture in interrogations during the Bush administration. When President Obama released the memos, he said, "It is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution."

Yet 13 key people in the Bush administration cannot claim they relied on the memos from the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel. Some of the 13 manipulated the federal bureaucracy and the legal process to "preauthorize" torture in the days after 9/11. Others helped implement torture, and still others helped write the memos that provided the Bush administration with a legal fig leaf after torture had already begun.

The Torture 13 exploited the federal bureaucracy to establish a torture regime in two ways. First, they based the enhanced interrogation techniques on techniques used in the U.S. military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program. The program -- which subjects volunteers from the armed services to simulated hostile capture situations -- trains servicemen and -women to withstand coercion well enough to avoid making false confessions if captured. Two retired SERE psychologists contracted with the government to "reverse-engineer" these techniques to use in detainee interrogations.

These are just the first three paragraphs of the article, which also includes a list of what they are calling "The Torture 13", each of whose role is described in detail:

1. Dick Cheney

2. David Addington

3. Alberto Gonzales

4. James Mitchell

5. George Tenet

6. Condoleeza Rice

7. John Yoo

8. Jay Bybee

9. William "Jim" Haynes

10. Donald Rumsfeld

11. John Rizzo

12. Steven Bradbury

13. George W. Bush

The MoDo plagiarism scandal has hit the international news circuit today. The UK Guardian has a great little piece up on it, include some great props for our dear old TPM:

It is an axiom of the new digital media age that high-profile political columnists should generally avoid copying other people's words without attribution. Nobody wants to have the p-word hung around their necks.

It is a further axiom of the age that if a columnist is to borrow a paragraph unattributed, then at least they should ensure it doesn't belong to Josh Marshall. The man behind Talking Points Memo is one of the sharpest, most deadly bloggers around.

*****

Marshall has an enviable track record of investigative reporting.

Through the New York-based Talking Points Memo, or TPM to its many fans, he broke the story of the Bush administration's politicised sacking of federal lawyers in 2007; his Muckraker blog is a scourge of corrupt politicians.

Unfortunately, the Guardian gives no credit to the person who actually broke the story, TPM reader "thejoshuablog". Still, it's great to see TPM getting some good publicity in the international press.

Oh brother, the right-wing birther nutcases are going to have a field day with this. MSNBC  and the AP are reporting:

CAIRO - When President Barack Obama addresses the Muslim world from Cairo next month, Egyptian officials hope he will choose 1,000-year-old Al-Azhar mosque, the heart of a revered institution for Islamic study, as his backdrop to convey U.S. respect for Islam.

The American Embassy in Cairo said no decision has been made yet on a venue for Obama's June 4 speech on U.S. relations with the Muslim world. But two Egyptian security officials said Thursday that an American advance team scouted five potential sites this week and narrowed it down to a short list of three -- the Al-Azhar mosque and two other locations connected to it.

Al-Azhar is one of the oldest, most prestigious and most influential institutions of higher learning for Sunni Islam.

Persoanlly, I love the symbolism. But as an art historian and architectural preservationist, I guess I have my own agenda for calling attention to historic architecture. Oh yeah, and I love anything that makes the wingnuts scream. Here's a view of the Al-Azhar mosque: 

GQ has the exclusive story on how Donald Rumsfeld incorporated crusade-themed biblical verses in the cover sheets of his daily top-secret intelligence briefings to President Bush:

These cover sheets were the brainchild of Major General Glen Shaffer, a director for intelligence serving both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense. In the days before the Iraq war, Shaffer's staff had created humorous covers in an attempt to alleviate the stress of preparing for battle. Then, as the body counting began, Shaffer, a Christian, deemed the biblical passages more suitable. Several others in the Pentagon disagreed. At least one Muslim analyst in the building had been greatly offended; others privately worried that if these covers were leaked during a war conducted in an Islamic nation, the fallout--as one Pentagon staffer would later say--"would be as bad as Abu Ghraib."

But the Pentagon's top officials were apparently unconcerned about the effect such a disclosure might have on the conduct of the war or on Bush's public standing. When colleagues complained to Shaffer that including a religious message with an intelligence briefing seemed inappropriate, Shaffer politely informed them that the practice would continue, because "my seniors"--JCS chairman Richard Myers, Rumsfeld, and the commander in chief himself--appreciated the cover pages.

But one government official was disturbed enough by these biblically seasoned sheets to hold on to copies, which I obtained recently while debriefing the past eight years with those who lived them inside the West Wing and the Pentagon. Over the past several months, the battle to define the Bush years has begun taking shape: As President Obama has rolled back his predecessor's foreign and economic policies, Dick Cheney, Ari Fleischer, and former speechwriters Michael Gerson and Marc Thiessen have all taken to the airwaves or op-ed pages to cast the Bush years in a softer light. My conversations with more than a dozen Bush loyalists, including several former cabinet-level officials and senior military commanders, have revealed another element of this legacy-building moment: intense feelings of ill will toward Donald Rumsfeld. Though few of these individuals would speak for the record (knowing that their former boss, George W. Bush, would not approve of it), they believe that Rumsfeld's actions epitomized the very traits--arrogance, stubbornness, obliviousness, ineptitude--that critics say drove the Bush presidency off the rails.

The images are copy-protected, so I can't post them here, but you can see the GQ slideshow at:

http://men.style.com/gq/features/topsecret

For anyone who believes in the separation of church and state, this is about as disgusting as it gets.

One other thing, there seems to be a sudden surge (ha!) of anti-Rumsfeld sentiment this week. Any clues as to what is behind this current trend?

ps - It wasn't there when I started to put this together, but I see Josh has this up on the front page now. He must read Huffington Post over his Sunday morning coffee, too. Anyway, take a look, and come back to comment! 

More housecleaning ahead! From the Brad Blog, via Politico.com:

President Barack Obama plans to replace a "batch" of U.S. Attorneys in the next few weeks and more prosecutors thereafter, according to Attorney General Eric Holder.

"I expect that we'll have an announcement in the next couple of weeks with regard to our first batch of U.S attorneys," Holder said Thursday during a House Judiciary Committee hearing which stretched out over most of the day due to breaks for members' votes. "One of the things that we didn't want to do was to disrupt the continuity of the offices and pull people out of positions where we thought there might be a danger that that might have on the continuity--the effectiveness of the offices. But...elections matter--it is our intention to have the U.S. Attorneys that are selected by President Obama in place as quickly as they can."
...
Holder's comments Thursday came in response to a question from Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) "Many jurisdictions are waiting desperately to see what is going to be done. As we understand it, the protocol has been that U.S. Attorneys would hand in their resignations and would give the new administration an opportunity to make new appointments, we don't see that happening quite fast enough," she said, pointing to complaints about prosecutors in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama.