Here’s a brief update on a court order I wrote on earlier, in which the judge ordered a Mexican-American father to speak to his child in English or face visitation restrictions.
MSNBC:

[A]fter Amador [the father] spoke out about it during a Catholic Charities protest forum Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union in Nebraska threatened legal action, a state senator filed a complaint with a state judicial review committee and a columnist for the Omaha World-Herald opined the judge�s decision shows that �racism is alive and having its brutish way in Omaha.�
�This decision is really ripe for a challenge, because it goes against the law, in my opinion,� said Legal Aid Society attorney Christopher Ho. He cited a 1927 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down a Nebraska law that forbade teaching German in public schools.

Hopefully the judge’s discriminatory and unwarranted order will be invalidated soon, one way or another.

Is being (or playing) a dimwitted blonde a marketing boon? This USA Today article suggests that it is for Jessica Simpson:

Simpson is the latest in the “proud” dumb-blonde tradition: She joins such icons as Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, Suzanne Somers’ Chrissy on Three’s Company and Anna Nicole Smith. Carol Channing made a career out of playing a dumb blonde. “I didn’t have to be bright,” she said in an interview in Ladies Home Journal in 1955 “All I had to do was be blonde.”
It’s working for Simpson. Last week she met with execs from Chicken of the Sea, who are courting her as a new spokesblonde. The just-wrapped 10-week run of Newlyweds was such a reality-TV hit � the show follows Simpson, 23, and her husband, Nick Lachey, 29 � that a new season started taping Sunday.

The article notes that “men have long equated blondes and dimwittedness with sexiness.” True, though as a male I’ve never completely understood why. Sure the dumb blonde thing is cute and fun for a while, but it quickly gets old.
As I see things, brains enhance beauty. But maybe that’s just me.

According to the Financial Times, the outing of Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA operative was as more a shot across the bow of the intelligence community rather than an individualized retaliation at Joseph Wilson:

Vince Cannistraro, former CIA operations chief, charged yesterday: “She was outed as a vindictive act because the agency was not providing support for policy statements that Saddam Hussein was reviving his nuclear programme.”
The leak was a way to “demonstrate an underlying contempt for the intelligence community, the CIA in particular”.
He said that in the run-up to the Iraq war, the White House had exerted unprecedented pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to find evidence that Iraq had links to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and that Baghdad was trying to build a nuclear bomb.
While the intelligence agencies believe their mission is to provide accurate analysis to the president to aid policy decisions, in the case of Iraq “we had policies that were already adopted and they were looking for those selective pieces of intelligence that would support the policy”, Mr Cannistraro said.

Strong words from a man who served on the National Security Council during the Reagan administration.
Since the beginning, I’ve suspected this Plame episode was part of a larger intelligence battle. Had the White House merely wanted to retaliate Wilson for his role in the Yellowcake controversy, they could have done so directly. But they wanted to intimidate potential whistle blowers: stay in line with the government policy–or else. So that’s why they struck Plame–they wanted to highlight the vulnerability of intelligence agents.
This story hasn’t got much buzz recently, while the Department of Justice ramps up its leak investigation. But I suspect we’re going to hear more intelligence people talking to the media if we don’t get answers from the DOJ soon.

I’m wandering into dangerous technical territory. But from what I gather here and here, the White House website recently changed its robots.txt file to disallow external search engine robots, such as Google’s, from indexing files in its Iraq-related directories.
Users can still pull up these web pages using the internal White House site search, but this change makes it harder for web surfers to pull up past White House pronouncements on Iraq using the most popular search engines.
Why might the administration be doing this? Jesse Berney:

It’s easy enough to understand the reasoning if you look at past White House actions. Earlier this year, the White House revised pages on its website claiming that “combat” was over in Iraq, changing them to say “major combat.”
One of the reasons some alert readers noticed the change � and were able to prove it � was that Google had archived the pages before the change occurred. Now that all of the White House pages about Iraq are no longer archived by Google, such historical revisionism will be harder to catch.

That sounds like a reasonable explanation. After all, this White House hardly has a track record in openness, disclosure, and accountability.
Via Calpundit.

It’s not a good time for many people:

“California Fires Kill 13, Destroy Homes“

To add insult to injury, authorities suspect arsonists are responsible for this mess.
Long-time Resonance associate B, currently stationed in San Bernardino County, writes:

Waterman Canyon Fire is the one in the story that’s obliterated our visibility today. S and I are packing bags getting ready to evacuate if necessary. Hopefully not an issue since it’s over 10miles away, but very unnerving nonetheless to walk outside and have soot flying in our eyes. Trying to pack the important papers and a few important belongings away.
Pray for our communities,
B

Let’s hope the winds change and firefighters can get things under control soon.
UPDATE: Here’s a satellite image of the wildfire area.