Mid-Week Link Collection

I am reliably informed that on this day in history, December 18, 1865, Secretary of State William Seward certified that the requisite 3/4 of state legislatures had ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.

(Seward was portrayed by David Strathairn in Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln.)

From elsewhere around the web:

1. An American drone in Yemen missed its intended target and struck a wedding party instead, killing 15.

2. Reuters: “U.S. general who opened Guantanamo prison says shut it down.”

3. The US District Court for the District of Columbia has ruled that the NSA’s dragnet-style collection of telephone metadata is unconstitutional. Judge Leon’s opinion (pdf, 68 pages) enjoins the NSA from continuing the program, but the judge suspended the injunction pending appeals. The government will appeal, no doubt, and this case is likely headed to the Supreme Court. Burt Likko has a good overview of the decision, and at the Volokh Conspiracy, Orik Kerr has a number of posts looking at different aspects of Judge Leon’s opinion (see here, and here, and here, and here). Also, Ann Althouse points to an interview with Larry Klayman, the named plaintiff who is also the lead attorney for the plaintiff’s side in this case.

4. In an earlier post, I mentioned that Tennessee and North Carolina were paying to reopen the Great Smokey Mountains National Park during the federal government shutdown. Now, Tennessee Senator Alexander is pushing legislation that would reimburse the states for those payments.

5. John Sides: How the filibuster has helped create income inequality. Also at the Monkey Cage: Jonathan Krasno and Gregory Robinson, “If the filibuster does survive, here’s how to make it better.”

6. Wired has a collection of bizarre war monuments from the former Yugoslavia.

(I was going to embed and link to a Flickr photo of one of the monuments, but Flickr has decided to change up their website, and the changes make it harder to share photos and also generally make the website suck. This is similar to how The Atlantic and Foreign Policy decided to change up their websites, also for the worse. Why does everything keep changing, and why do all the changes suck?)

7. Via Steve Saideman, I learned that Dan Drezner is moving away from daily blogging to write a weekly column. (One of my first posts on this blog was linking to one of Drezner’s posts.)

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Also, apparently I missed that yesterday was the first day of Saturnalia! Have a good one.

Update (Thurs., Dec. 19, 2013, 11:40 AM): Part of me wants to join the chorus of people piling on David Brooks (see, e.g., here, and here, and here), but I have no stomach for kicking a man when he’s down.