2008 archive
Brendan Writes a Letter 0
Someone must have taken the telephone away.
I Heard about This Last Night at Drinking Liberally (Updated) 3
No, racism has nothing to do with it.
Really.
Nothing at all.
You can buy these from (guess who?) the Texas Republican Convention.
(Aside: No, I won’t link to them. If you want one of these, you gotta go find it yourself.)
Via Sadly, No!
Addendum, 06/19/2008:
Steve over at ASZ has more. Follow the link for the full rumination (emphasis added):
(snip)
I suppose this is good news, that some semblance of control is being exercised over Republicans who can often be quite ugly. But I’m guessing they can’t control of all the Republican entrepreneurs out their (sic) who want to show their ugliness on their lapel buttons. I would argue Republicans created this ugliness with their concentration of wedge issues and their embrace of such talk stars as Limbaugh and Coulter. So let them live with it. I’d say most of America is tired of this sort of ugliness, and tired of the divisiveness that seems the only way the Republicans can work.
Moral Low Ground 0
From Phillipe Sands in The Guardian:
On the basis of these conversations I believe that the administration has spun a false narrative. It claims that the impetus for the new interrogation techniques came from the bottom-up. That is not true: the abuse was a result of pressures driven from the highest levels of government. It claims the so-called Torture Memo of August 1, 2002 had no connection with policies adopted by the administration: that too is false, as the memo provided cover for Mr Haynes. It claims that in its actions it simply followed the law. To the contrary, the administration consciously sought legal advice to set aside international constraints on detainee interrogations, without apparently turning its mind to the consequences of its actions. In this regard, the position adopted by the Pentagon’s head of policy at the time, [Douglas] Feith, appears most striking.
As result, Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions was violated, along with provisions of the 1984 Convention prohibiting torture. The spectre of war crimes was raised by US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, in the 2006 judgment in Hamdan v Rumsfeld. That judgment corrected the illegality of President Bush’s determination that none of the detainees at Guantanamo had any rights under Geneva.
Torture was their pornography.
“I Am Aware of All Internet Traditions” 0
Thanks to John Cole.
PSA 0
Over here, at Brendan’s place (warning: language).
S(pl)urge ™ 0
Oh, it’s so much better over there:
The blast struck a crowded bus terminal near a market in Huriya, a northwest Baghdad district that once had a large population of Sunnis but after the American-led invasion saw horrific ethnic cleansing by Shiite militias and death squads, who killed or drove thousands of Sunnis out.
Truth in Labelling: Straight Talk Dept. 0
But now from Candidate McCain. Josh Marshall parses when social security privatization privatizes with without being privatization.
A Newt Is a Type of Salamander 0
Glenn Greenwald on Gingrich (follow the link for the full article):
From The New York Sun, November 29, 2006, here’s Gingrich arguing that we also need to give up First Amendment rights:
A former House speaker, Newt Gingrich, is causing a stir by proposing that free speech may have to be curtailed in order to fight terrorism. . . .
“We need to get ahead of the curve rather than wait until we actually literally lose a city, which I think could literally happen in the next decade if we’re unfortunate,” Mr. Gingrich said Monday night during a speech in New Hampshire. . . . “Either before we lose a city or, if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people.”
By the time the Republicans Fear Mongers finish destroying American liberty, there will be nothing left of America worth fighting for.
Support the Troops, Bushie Style 4
(Aside: By the way, my father was a POW in WWII. No one called him a hero and he was ashamed of having been captured until the last couple of decades of his life, even though his unit had been completely overrun in the dead of night, despite reports from Military Intelligence that there were no enemy troops in the area. He was captured by the Germans and was not mistreated–he told me that, even when he wasn’t getting much food at the end of the war, the American POWs were no more deprived than their German guards. Shame that the persons we the Bushies have captured can’t make similar statements.)
From Michael D. at Balloon Juice; I think his comments are unduly harsh, but not out of the ball park–my thoughts below:
(Michael D. quotes the news):
McCain has repeatedly voted against amendments in the Senate that would have…covered such important services as improving care at veterans’ hospitals, providing mental health services to soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder and substance abuse problems. [2006 Senate Vote #7, 2/2/2006]
In 2006, McCain voted against the Kerry amendment that would eliminate increased fees and co-payments for veterans in the TRICARE health care program by raising the discretionary spending limit by approximately $10 billion. The provisions would have been fully offset by eliminating creating corporate tax breaks. [2006 Senate Vote #67, 3/16/2006]
McCain was one of only 13 Republicans to vote against an amendment that added over $400 million for inpatient and outpatient care for veterans. [2006 Senate Vote #98, 4/26/2006]
(Michael D. comments) . . . Even though I am now becoming more left leaning than I have ever been, I still had the impression that the media supports Democrats (or gives them a fairer hearing anyway). More and more, I am seeing that this is nowhere near the case. McCain gets a pass because is supposedly “a hero.†I’ve never been sure why he is a hero. He graduated 4th or 5th from the bottom of his class. He wrecked three of his own aircraft (if I remember correctly) and he was captured in Viet Nam. Unless I missed the part where he jumped on a grenade to save the lives of his fellow servicemen, I don’t know where the hero part comes in. But I digress.
Candidate McCain has done no more than hundreds of thousands of others.
Surviving does not make one a hero (though Candidate McCain’s refusal to take the easy way out warrants respect; this would appear to be the only hook on which to hang “hero”), except perhaps in some metaphysical sense that makes all of us who get on with life “heroes.”
And now his idea of supporting the troops is to deny them medical and educational benefits.
Drinking Liberally 0
Tomorrow, Tangier Restaurant, 18th and Lombard, Philadelphia, 6 p.
No one in this house is in the hospital or on restricted duty this week, so I might actually make it.
Brendan Makes a Phone Call 0
It’s positively stenning stunning.
How Well Do You Know Fox “News”? 0
Take the quiz.
“The Worst of the Not-So-Bad” 0
The McClatchy report lives up to its billing.
The cynical among us might argue that one of the reasons the Current Federal Administration has been so adamant about denying any rights to the folks at Gitmo is that doing so would provide even more confirmation of its failure to get anything right.
Harry Shearer today observed that he thought that, in the United States, persons had rights which the government had to observe; that rights were not something granted on a whim by the king (whoops, my word, not his government.
From McClatchy:
McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.
This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.
The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.
Prisoner mistreatment became a regular feature in cellblocks and interrogation rooms at Bagram and Kandahar air bases, the two main way stations in Afghanistan en route to Guantanamo.