Fables of the reconstruction

Republican landslide expected in 2008!

Is it just me, or has the Washington Post Outlook section gone completely Fox News on me? A couple weeks ago, there was a long article about why a bunch of other people should be "prosecuted" in the Libby debacle, including Fitzgerald and the press. Today, there’s a pair of op-eds under the heading "It’s Uphill for the Democrats."  Oh, that liberal mainstream media, constantly spinning.... The lede on the continuation of this article on page B4 was "Winning in '06 Doesn't Guarantee Deocrats the White House . . . Unless They Play it Smart."  Put that way, it's not so unreasonable an article, but when you lead off with "The Democrats' road to the White House in 2008 runs through Congress, and it is uphill all the way," and a warning about pandering and pork, it's "uphill all the way" for your credibility. 

So, the thesis is: "The last time either party captured the White House two years after wresting control of both House and Senate in midterm elections was in 1920."  Slightly less dramatically, the last four times the country's been in this situation, the White House did not come under control of the party controlling the Congress.  So it can't happen now! Because politics works just like economics.  It’s mathy.  Never mind that 3 out of 4 of those contests involved incumbents running for re-election, and the fourth one involved Michael Dukakis. And, at an equivalent point in time, March in the year before the election, those incumbents had approval ratings of 44% (Clinton), 60% (Truman) and 70% (Eisenhower). Bush is at 30%.

And the thing is, there's a reason Bush is at 30 percent.  Or, more accurately, a dozen reasons why Bush is at 30%.  But the article cites to 1987, when the "Republicans’ prospects looked even bleaker than they do today," citing the deficit and the Iran-contra scandal (emphasis mine). So that one scandal, which at least half the country did not care about at all, made things "even bleaker" for the Republicans in the 1988 election than, lessee, there’s Libby/Plame, widespread Republican corruption, firing US Attorneys for prosecuting widespread Republican corruption, New Orleans, Walter Reed, and that little thing that led to Walter Reed – lying about WMDs in order to get over 3,000 troops killed and hundreds of thousands of troops maimed in Iraq. Yeah, I can see how Iran contra is about the same as that.  Oh, wait, my bad.  Iran contra was even bleaker!  It's kind of ironic, I always thought people did not pay enough attention to Iran Contra, they just admired Ollie North's haircut and square jaw, and decided contras couldn't be so bad if they had a dance named after them. 

Then there’s this mobius strip of an argument where pointing out the Republican administration’s failings will make people distrustful of the government and therefore they won’t vote Democrat.  Wait, what? Pointing out the failings of the Republican government will make people vote Republican?  Okay, I agree that the Democrats in Congress should actually do something in the next two years, like maybe raise the minimum wage. But the authors argue that Dems can't just point out "second-rate appointments," they have to do something. Dems have to fix FEMA. Last I checked, appointments were a presidential function and FEMA was part of the executive branch. Democrats sure will do a better job at executive appointments and managing the executive branch, once they’re actually IN the executive branch. In 2008.

Michael Moore is Still Fat! Ha ha!

I love the fact that this post is currently google's number 1 result for "sarcastic apology."

Fox Propaganda Channel

My favorite of this set:

Moussaoui looks so jaunty. Hello, crazy convicted failed terrorist man! And hello, Zacarias!

(Via Duncan.)

Update: Larry Johnson, in comments, responding to the inanity that Democrats should be "brave" by not boycotting Fox News Channel entirely:

I would also remind everyone that I went on the Joe Scarborough show more than one year ago. They turned off my mike when I tried to defend an attack on Valerie Wilson. After that experience I told Joe's producer to go fuck himself and refused to appear again. I won't enable these assholes.

Change Your Clocks

Daylight saving hit at 2 a.m. Move your clocks forward one hour.

QOTD

HTML Mencken at Sadly, No!:

Moral of the story: these Christians and Jews believe bigotry is an indivisible part of their religion, which says a lot not only about what they think of those against whom they discriminate, but about what they think of religion.

"It's Time These Idiot Liberals Understood That!"

Washingtonpost.com:

"We're trying to use the supplemental to end the war," said [Rep. David R.] Obey [D-Wisconsin], chairman of the Appropriations Committee and sponsor of the legislation that would end any combat role for U.S. troops by Aug. 31, 2008. "You can't end the war if you're going against the supplemental. It's time these idiot liberals understood that!"

As another protester joined Richards, Obey continued: "That bill ends the war! If that isn't good enough for you, you're smoking something illegal. You've got your facts screwed up. We can't get the votes! Do you see a magic wand in my pocket? We don't have the votes for it. We do have the votes if you guys quit screwing it up. We do have the votes to end the legal authority for the war, that's the same as de-funding it."

I am thinking of printing this on little cards and handing them out whenever I hear someone whine about how the Democrats are do-nothing slackers because they haven't ended the war now.

For First Time, Federal Appeals Court Rules Individuals Have Right to Own Guns

NYTimes.com:

In a 2-to-1 decision, a panel of the court, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, ruled [D.C.'s 30-year-old handgun ban] unconstitutional.

The Second Amendment says, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The basic question in the case was whether the first clause limits the second one.

Most federal appeals courts have said that the amendment, read as a whole, protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias — in modern terms, the National Guard. But in yesterday’s decision, the majority focused on the second clause, saying that the amendment broadly protects the rights of individuals to own guns — an approach that has been embraced by the Justice Department and by some constitutional scholars.

I haven't read the opinion, so I don't know what the court based its decision on, but just as a guess I would say they probably were persuaded by recent scholarship around whether the adopters and ratifiers of the Second Amendment meant to create an individual right. This does create a real conflict among the Circuits with far-reaching consequences, so my guess also would be the Supreme Court takes the appeal.

In the short run, how does it affect things politically? There are a lot of happy NRA members tonight. They're potent in the GOP, but it's unclear to me whether it affects the national races. State Republican campaigns will latch onto it and beat the drum for a gun in every pocket.

From a policy standpoint, whew boy. Let's say it gets to the Supreme Court and is upheld. Ta da! New individual right for defense lawyers to litigate. It'll take years, maybe decades, to flesh out the contours of where the right to own a gun begins and ends. Does violence increase? Sure. Some ownership restrictions will undoubtedly be overturned, and there's a direct relationship between the number of guns people own and how many people get killed. How many? No clue. The important thing is, a lot of lawyers will get paid.

If the Supreme Court overrules it or refuses to hear the appeal, we're back to square one, with the exception of D.C. in the latter case.  Can D.C. get more violent? Stay tuned.

Long term, the politics seem more interesting if the Court upholds the decision. First of all, having the only right they care about validated might take some of the steam out of the NRA. On the other hand, all those cases to litigate - it could be they get new life out of them. The difficulty there is the NRA may find itself on the same side as the ACLU a little too much.  The gun-rights cases being litigated would occur in the criminal context, with all the gruesome, propaganda-ready details that involves. Say, a guy with a history of domestic violence gets a gun because the requirement of having a clean record is held unconstitutional. Then he goes and kills his ex and her new boyfriend and kids. Then there is the question of why the Constitution stops at the courthouse door - why can't people bring guns to court? Onto trains and planes? And there is the question of what we mean by a gun - fully automatic weapons? They're too good at defending yourself with? Constitutionally, you can no more ban a machine gun under the Second Amendment than you could ban a really fast printing press under the First Amendment, they'll say. And so on. This may make it a tough sell.

Personally, I think the NRA are a bunch of stupid, extremist wackos who need to get a life. Anyone who thinks seriously that the Second Amendment serves as any kind of guarantee the government will not behave in a liberty-destroying manner is fucking crazy.  The gun owners I know are either genial hunting sorts who have been sadly hypnotized by all the propaganda, or they're assholes with handguns. People who carry a handgun concealed are usually just looking for an excuse to use it. They like to tell stories of brandishing it, usually in traffic, to demonstrate their toughness.

What to do about the NRA nutbars and gun violence generally? Fuck if I know. Americans like violence and they like having the means to kill each other at their disposal. Our culture glorifies gun violence (in the most unrealistic manner possible) and people love it. Sure, they make sympathetic noises when some kid gets killed accidentally, but basically the cult of the gun comprises part of the general societal attitude that life is tough, so you better be tougher. Underlying all of it is racism, as suburban whites load up to defend themselves from people of various shades of brown, and those same suburbanites can't get too worked up if a sea of guns sloshing around inner cities leads to a few less scary dark people.

So, bottom line, however this case ends up, I can't see how it will make things better, but it has the potential to make things worse.

Yippee for nihilism!

Update: The  revised article has more detail on the reasoning. Turns out it wasn't historical evidence at all, just good old fashioned conservative judicial activism:

The majority in yesterday’s decision pointed to a 1998 dissent in which “at least three current members (and one former member) of the Supreme Court have read ‘bear arms’ in the Second Amendment to have meaning beyond mere soldiering.” They were former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who died in 2005, and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia and David H. Souter.

Here's a really interesting passage:

In a 1996 dissent while serving on the federal appeals court in Philadelphia, Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., now a justice of the Supreme Court, wrote that he would have struck down a federal law regulating the possession of machine guns under the commerce clause of the Constitution.

Alito would bar the feds from using the commerce clause to regulate machine guns, which means the feds would lack almost all power to regulate them. Awesome. I am investing in body armor stocks if the Court grants cert.

But wait, there's more!

“It seems passing strange,” Judge Laurence H. Silberman wrote for the majority, “that the able lawyers and statesmen in the First Congress (including James Madison) would have expressed a sole concern for state militias with the language of the Second Amendment. Surely there was a more direct locution, such as ‘Congress shall make no law disarming the state militias’ or ‘states have a right to a well-regulated militia.’"

Well, your Honor, you convinced me. If there is one argument that cannot be beat, it's that the judge thinks a constitutional provision should have been written differently if it were to be interpreted any way other than what the judge prefers. Tell me, Judge Silberman, what does the Ninth Amendment mean? Hint: Start with what you want it to mean, then work backwards. This technique works great for much of the Constitution, since the language is as opaque as any results-oriented jurist could desire.

But wait! Judge Silberman doesn't want you to think it's the Wild West. He'll cabin this new right that he's created, by pulling a few limits out of the same orifice he drew his holding from:

Judge Silberman, writing for the majority yesterday, said the decision’s reasoning still allowed “reasonable restrictions” on the ownership and use of guns, and he gave some examples. It is “presumably reasonable,” he wrote, to prohibit drunks from carrying weapons and to ban guns in churches and polling places. Judge Thomas B. Griffith joined the majority decision.

Judge Silberman concluded that the Second Amendment protects an individual right just as the First Amendment protects free speech and the Fourth Amendment bars unreasonable searches.

So the right to carry a gun is like the right to free speech, but if you're a drunk you can't carry a gun, says Judge Silberman. As far as I know, drunks still have the right to free speech, slurred though it may be.  The right to possess a firearm is like the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, but if you go into a polling place you can't carry a gun, says Judge Silberman. Why? You can't be searched for no reason if you go into a polling place. It is true that speech near polling places can be regulated, because it has a detrimental effect on the integrity of elections to have people yelling in your ear as you're trying to close the curtain on the voting booth. In what scenario is a concealed handgun intimidating? It's concealed!

Fortunately, this is what's called dicta, which is latin for bullshit. Dicta is not the law, it's the soft, brown padding the law comes packaged in. Judge Silberman throws out this dicta because he's very impressed with his own powers of cogitating, he's just invented a new right and he's on a roll. If his holding prevails, it will be left to others to figure out the actual limits. Silberman's an artist, man, don't hold him back.

Fox News Lashes Out at MoveOn.org as Nevada Debate Cancelled

Great news:

After much pressure from the liberal blogosphere as well as comments made by Roger Ailes, chairman of Fox News, about Senator Barack Obama, the two ranking Democrats from Nevada — Tom Collins, head of the state party, and Senate majority leader Harry Reid — decided tonight to cancel an Aug. 14 debate with Fox. ...

At a dinner sponsored by the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation, Mr. Ailes [told this joke:]

“And it is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don’t know if it’s true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, ‘Why can’t we catch this guy?’

How did Fox News Channel respond to the cancellation? Like professionals? Like hell. They reacted like spoiled little children. Spoiled little fascist children:

Fox News released a statement from its vice president, David Rhodes:

News organizations will want to think twice before getting involved in the Nevada Democratic Caucus which appears to be controlled by radical fringe out-of-state interest groups, not the Nevada Democratic Party. In the past, MoveOn.org has said they ‘own’ the Democratic Party - while most Democrats don’t agree with that, it’s clearly the case in Nevada.

Dear Mr. Rhodes: Fuck you, ass clown.

So who carried the ball and made this great thing happen?

MoveOn as well as Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos, Matt Stoller at MyDD, and others pushed hard on this front ever since it was announced, collecting signatures, and urging online activists to keep up the pressure against the state’s Democratic leaders until Fox was dropped. ...

In a release before tonight’s official announcement, Eli Pariser, executive director of MoveOn.org Civic Action, said: “We hope this sets a precedent for all Democrats - that Fox should be treated as a right-wing misinformation network, not legitimized as a neutral source of news. John Edwards, Harry Reid, the Nevada Democratic Party, and grassroots progressives across the nation deserve credit for standing up to Fox’s right-wing agenda.”

Thank you, MoveOn. Thank you, kos. Thank you, Matt.

Next. Can we go further please? Why do Democrats ever talk to Fox News Channel? (I am not referring to local Fox broadcast affiliates, which are a separate thing, just the cable news channel.) Let's go for it. Democratic politicians should cut all ties. Boycott them. No interviews, no talk shows, no debate coverage, nothing. Treat it as a pariah. Make appearing on it, watching it or advertising on it an explicitly conservative political statement. It may weaken Fox, and at the very least it's right to call Ailes out.

R2-D2 Mailboxes

At least you know when you put a message inside, it will get delivered:

The U.S. Postal Service is marking the 30th anniversary of the release of Star Wars by, among other things, rolling out R2D2-wrapped mailboxes. When I first saw this, I figured it for a hoax. But it turns out uspsjedimaster.com is registered to the postal service.

Think of the remix possibilities. Adding blast damage. Intrepid pranksters attaching motion-activated sound-effects boxes.  A little holographic Leia sticker on the inside when you open it.

As a further geeky sidenote to a fairly geeky post, it's often bothered me that the same word - mailbox - is used to refer to what you put mail into to send it, and what the postal carrier puts mail into to deliver it. And I don't even smoke pot!

(Via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.)

Joe Lieberman Endorses Anti-Muslim Racist Mark Steyn's Book

Of course:

In another conversation, [Lieberman] told me that he was reading “America Alone,” a book by the conservative commentator Mark Steyn, which argues that Europe is succumbing, demographically and culturally, to an onslaught by Islam, leaving America friendless in its confrontation with Islamic extremism.

“The thing I quote most from it is the power of demographics, in Europe particularly,” Lieberman said. “That’s what struck me the most. But the other part is a kind of confirmation of what I know and what I’ve read elsewhere, which is that Islamist extremism has an ideology, and it’s expansionist, it’s an aggressive ideology. And the title I took to mean that we Americans will have ultimate responsibility for stopping this expansionism.”

Lieberman likes expressions of American power. A few years ago, I was in a movie theatre in Washington when I noticed Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, a few seats down. The film was “Behind Enemy Lines,” in which Owen Wilson plays a U.S. pilot shot down in Bosnia. Whenever the American military scored an onscreen hit, Lieberman pumped his fist and said, “Yeah!” and “All right!”

On "America Alone", Johann Hari delivers a categorical smackdown:

But number-crunching and mockery are not a sufficient response; it is hard to comment on Steyn's work without noting its raw racism. Throughout his work he uses openly racialized language, albeit with a post-ironic smirk. He talks about "the Yellow Peril" and "gooks". He notes nostalgically that "in the old days, the white man settled the Indian [sic] territory" whereas now the savages are settling us. He describes as "correct" a friend who talks about "beturbanned prophet-monkeys." Of course, Steyn denies this is connected to race, writing, "To agitate about what proportion of the population is "white" is grotesque and inappropriate. But it's not about race; it's about culture."

Yet it quickly becomes clear that for him, culture is merely a thinly veiled homologue for race - and then the mask slips entirely. He writes: "Those who pooh-pooh the the United States' comparatively robust demographics say they reflect nothing more than the fecundity of Hispanic immigration... In fact, white women in America still breed at a greater rate - 1.85 or so - than white women in Europe or Canda." So after saying it is "grotesque" to count out "white" babies, he does just that.

This is the argument about the "power of demographics" that Senator Joseph Lieberman finds so compelling. Could someone please ask the Senator if this idea would be valid if someone, say, applied it to Israeli Jews living in the occupied territories?

Hari:

The problem is that Steyn is himself a religious follower, so he cannot see a basic atheist truth: in reality, superstition is elastic. There is no divine essence underpinning it all and providing thematic coherence. There are indeed parts of the Koran that mandate savage imperialism, just as there are parts of the Torah and Bible where 'God' commits and demands genocide. Most Christians and Jews have managed to relativise away these passages, and in time most Muslims will too. But he has already declared Islam incompatible with democracy - so any moderate Muslim must be, by definition, a false Muslim. This argument is not just false. It is a weapon in the jihadists' hands.

Good stuff. Hari argues that jihadi Islam does exist and is a problem, but rather than stoking a clash of civilizations, the answer is to lead by example. Upholding freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and equality for women and sexual minorities, will "unpick Islamism."

No ideology built upon the savage oppression of half of 55 percent of its adherents (let's throw in the gays) can survive in a society where it can be debated and disputed without fear of violence. Islam in the open air will not be fundamentalist for long; indeed, European Islam can offer a starting-point for the Islamic Enlightenment.

Not only is this right, in a free, modern and democratic Europe, it's probably inevitable. The way to win is to treat people as individuals. What unites Steyn and Lieberman with the jihadis is their desire to deny that individuality as a means to gaining and using power. In twenty years, rather than Islamism taking over Europe, as Steyn predicts, he and other diehard neocons like Lieberman will be making common cause with the jihadis in a vain attempt to make their extremist bullshit relevant.

(Via HTML Mencken at Sadly, No!)

Newt Was Having an Affair While Impeaching Clinton for Having an Affair

Grand Old Hypocrites:

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich was having an extramarital affair even as he led the charge against President Bill Clinton over the Monica S. Lewinsky affair, he acknowledged in an interview with a conservative Christian group.

"The honest answer is 'Yes,' " Gingrich, a potential 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview with Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson to be aired today, according to a transcript. "There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There's certainly times when I've fallen short of God's standards."

Look! Al Gore has a big house!

FBI Violating USA PATRIOT Act With 20,000 Warrantless Searches Every Year

Under the USA PATRIOT Act, the FBI has expanded power to use what are called "national security letters" ("NSL"). The FBI, without ever appearing before a judge, serves these on businesses to compel them to produce records. There is no requirment that the records belong to a foreign intelligence agent or terrorist. 

Before 9/11 and the PATRIOT, NSLs were barely ever used. By contrast, in 2005, the FBI issued 19,000 NSLs, which contained 47,000 demands for records. Of those 19,000 letters, 3,501  were targeted at U.S. citizens or legal residents.

NSLs are rationalized as not violating the 4th Amendment as follows: The target of the investigation has given up his or her right of privacy by, say, entering into a cell phone contract, with respect to the cell phone company's records about him or her, because he or she knew a third party, the cell phone company, would have those records. (No, really, that's the argument.) With respect to the cell phone company, they have no privacy interest in the records because they're not the target. And this applies whether you and cell phone company agree otherwise. Catch-22.

Isn't law wonderful?

It gets creepier:

As it has since its creation in 1978, the NSL contains a clause which forbids the recipient from revealing the contents of the NSL, or even its receipt.

That's right. There is a global gag-order imposed on the recipient of a NSL. You can't even tell anyone but your lawyer that you received one.

So wait, you might be saying.  Twenty thousand of these things are being issued a year.  A judge doesn't see it beforehand. The receipients can't tell anyone - say, the media - about them. So, doesn't that present somewhat of a risk that the FBI will ... abuse their power?

Right:

A Justice Department investigation has found pervasive errors in the FBI's use of its power to secretly demand telephone, e-mail and financial records in national security cases, officials with access to the report said yesterday.

The inspector general's audit found 22 possible breaches of internal FBI and Justice Department regulations -- some of which were potential violations of law -- in a sampling of 293 "national security letters." The letters were used by the FBI to obtain the personal records of U.S. residents or visitors between 2003 and 2005. The FBI identified 26 potential violations in other cases.

If the ratio of 22 out of 293 is representative, that means 1,501 NSLs a year - about 8% of the total - are issued improperly. 

FBI agents used national security letters without citing an authorized investigation, claimed "exigent" circumstances that did not exist in demanding information and did not have adequate documentation to justify the issuance of letters.In at least two cases, ... the FBI obtained full credit reports using a national security letter that could lawfully be employed to obtain only summary information. In an unknown number of other cases, third parties such as telephone companies, banks and Internet providers responded to national security letters with detailed personal information about customers that the letters do not permit to be released.

So there's no oversight, no checks and balances, and the FBI can just sweep up information about U.S. citizens with nothing to stop them except this kind of limited audit. Maybe:

[The] audit, which was limited to 77 case files in four FBI field offices, found that those offices did not even generate accurate counts of the national security letters they issued, omitting about one in five letters from the reports they sent to headquarters in Washington. Those inaccurate numbers, in turn, were used as the basis for required reports to Congress.

That's right. The FBI doesn't always feel like telling their bosses or Congress 20% of the time when they used an NSL.

The report, mandated by Congress over the Bush administration's objections, is to be presented to several House and Senate committees today. But senior officials, speaking with permission on the condition that they not be identified, said the Bush administration has already responded vigorously to the audit's findings.

Get that? Bush didn't want the report in the first place. And that it's out he says it's already taken care of.

Excuse me if I am skeptical.

The NSL has to be reigned in. Just off the top of my head, adding a judicial authorization requirement might solve a hell of a lot of problems.

And conservatives? If you don't think this is a problem because it's not you who is being spied on, I have three words for you: President Hillary Clinton.

First Openly Atheist Member of Congress

Oh boy:

On Monday, March 12, the Secular Coalition for America will make history by announcing the name of the first openly nontheistic member of Congress.

Elected officials who do not hold a god-belief are a rarity and only a few nontheist politicians have been open about their beliefs. ...

As put forward in law by the U.S. Constitution, "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." However, in practice politicians are compelled to expound on their religiosity, forcing nontheists to keep quiet about their beliefs or opt out of pursuing public office.

With next Monday's historic announcement, the Secular Coalition for America hopes additional elected officials will self-identify as nontheists and establish that a god-belief is not a necessary prerequisite for public service.

First atheist member of Congress assassinated, too. The freaks are going to go nuts over this.

(Via PSoTD at Suburban Guerilla.)

Update 3/10/07: Commenter R.J. Lehmann presents evidence to think it will be Rep. Abercrombie of Hawaii.

Update 3/12/07: It's veteran Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA.)

Smarter, Please!

Batshit loco neocon and Iraq war shyster Michael Ledeen:

[H]ow come the Left doesn’t support the Iranians’ desire to be free? I think the answer is pretty obvious: because the Left has made the United States, Israel, and George Bush their prime enemies, and they defend all the tyrants who threaten these enemies.

To put it differently:  they never forgave us for bringing down the Soviet Empire.  We destroyed their utopian dreams.

That's right, Michael. On my shelf, I have a piece of the Berlin Wall because I miss it so. I walked out into a muddy no-man's land and knocked it off myself with an steel pipe one rainy winter day, with tears streaming down my face because I was just so sad.

For the record, I am all in favor of the Iranian desire to be free. It's just that I am not so fucking stupid as to confuse us aiding that desire with us bombing the ever-living shit out of them.  I think I am on firm ground with this. Ask a random assortment of Iranians you come across, Michael: "Do you desire the United States of American to bomb the shit out of your country? Do you want us to set you free like we did the Iraqis?"

I am fairly confident what the answer would be. I am only uncertain how long you would be in the hospital.

Also, Michael, "they never forgave us"?  Unless you have Mikhael Gorbechev in your pocket, shut the fuck up.

(Via Mona at High Clearing.)

Update 3/9/07: Fixed typo.

Obama Didn't Pay Parking Tickets! For Over 15 Years!

Ah, the silly season:

Barack Obama   is no longer a scofflaw, at least in Cambridge and Somerville.

(Emphasis added.) He probably is a scofflaw elsewhere!

I won't make you read it. The man got a total of 17 parking tickets during law school, from 1988-1991, most of them during his first year.

I hardly remember my first year of law school. I think that year I got engaged to a woman who later tried to kill me. Pretty sure 17 parking tickets would have shown better judgment.

Anyway, Obama left law school with outstanding fines of $375. Someone dug it up.  Obama, who had forgotten all about it, promptly paid. Clearly, the man lacks the character to be president.

What I Was Wrong About in March 2003

There's this challenge going around:

If you are a blogger who was active in March 2003, link to that month's archive and write an entry called "What I was wrong about in March 2003."

Sadly, I didn't put fingers to keyboard until August, 2003. But I'll tell you what I would have said, had I been blogging then: First, that I was totally astonished that Bush seriously was going to war in Iraq, and that I had no clear picture of what would happen, but that it probably would be bad. Second, that blogging was a stupid fad and would probably be gone in a year.

Michael Moore is Fat! Fat, I Say!

Shorter Roy Edroso:

Liberals think "The 1/2 Hour News Hour" sucks because it's not funny. Conservatives think it sucks because it doesn't make people hate liberals.

Happily, both sides are right!

But like the Iraq War, the problem isn't ineptitude, it's ideology. For example, we still have no good answer to the age-old (or at least year and a half old) question, "Where are all the funny conservative bloggers?" Oh, perhaps on rare occasion can you find a funny conservative, like P.J. O'Rourke, but he mined his humor from the common prejudices of the college-educated about materialism and their own special Americanness. It makes it harder to be funny if you lack a larger, adult perspective on life. You just run out of material. O'Rourke's shtick, like that of his halfwit sibling Dennis Miller, got old very quickly.

Women and the idiots who analyze them

As I was reading this Slate article about the lessons Hillary Clinton can learn from Katie Couric, with its really startling insights like don't allow yourself to have a personal style of dressing off the job or it may make you look like you're indecisive, I thought back to my post yesterday about the law school women who had been bullied on the internet.  In a sense, it is all just variations on a theme -- why women can't.  Women can't be lawyers/TV anchors/president because they're sluts/frigid/too feminine/too masculine.  The Slate piece states "the two women come at these jobs with very different liabilities: Katie seems too soft, Hillary too brittle" with no sense of apparent irony at all.  Of course, one's too soft and one's too brittle, all women are too soft or too brittle.  I challenge you to find me a professional woman who has not at some point in her career been labeled one or the other (or both).  Trying to get it "right" is aiming for a spot that doesn't exist.  Too girlish to be president, still too girlish, nope, still too girlish, oops, too mannish, sorry!  Incidentally, I have a boychild at home and I believe this kind of sexism hurts him (and guys in general), too, because they can't do anything that smacks of femininity (although I see some hope with his generation).  It's the same standard that gets John Edwards called a faggot or effeminate.  The only difference is that it's possible for men to get it "right" and be president, if women get it "right," then they're excellent first ladies and not much more.

Speaking of hate speech...

This WaPo article and this Feministe post about the same conduct are absolutely horrifying. It is about a law-school-oriented message board on which guys discuss female law school students by name in vile terms, threaten them with physical and sexual violence, and post photos of them in hotness contests without their consent. Meanwhile, the guys remain anonymous. One of the targeted women in the WaPo article, was concerned that the postings about her may have contributed to her failure to get any offers for summer internships despite some pretty good credentials. I think back to when I was a 24 year old law student and if this kind of stuff was posted about me, I would have been absolutely sick. Juvenile rumors about my sexual orientation I could deal with, but public threats of rape? Law school is stressful enough without having to deal with that. Hey, girls, you can draw attention to yourselves by being outspoken in class or getting good grades or getting on law review, but proceed at your own risk. Success is just an invitation for men to publicly malign you. Really, you have no one to blame but yourselves.

Ann Althouse doesn’t see how talking sexual smack about women could possibly hurt their career options. Seriously. Never mind that women have subject to actual and threatened sexual violence and sexual slander as a way of keeping them second-class citizens in all areas of life for millennia. Malicious gossip about women’s sexuality and vulgar and even just plain belittling talk among the guys have been used to define the men as dominant and the women as lesser since women entered the workplace. I believe Mithras can attest to that better than me, because as a guy, he’s heard it. The women only hear it indirectly. If these guys did the same thing within an existing workplace, it would be sexual harassment of a particularly ugly kind. Now please excuse me while I go medieval on Ann Althouse. I am more interested in issues than the people who spout off about them, but Ann Althouse is so self-absorbed, it annihilates her analytical abilities. For example, the really amazing thing about her post is that she goes into how the really bad kind of internet abuse is the kind that she was on the receiving end of. That abuse consisted of, and I kid you not, people on Sadly, No! posting clearly, obviously satiric posts under Ann’s name. And this is what is truly vile, not innocent women (and their prospective employers) having to read graphic posts about how they should be raped and stalked at the gym. In fact, the first category that Ann gave her post? Anti-Althousiana.

Wednesday Night Quickie

Two things that rock:

Vermont.  I love Vermont.  Independent Senator.  Town meetings where there are grass roots movements to impeach Bush and Cheney.   Just for the pure innocent joy of it.  It's almost like we have a real democracy.

And this video by The Nation.  Max Blumenthal would make a heck of a campaign manager. 

Florida Legislators Want Doctors to Report Underage Pregnant Girls to Police

Culture of life? More like culture of life in prison:

Health care professionals would be required to call police if they know or suspect a patient 15 or younger is pregnant, under a bill filed recently in the House and Senate.

In addition, doctors who perform abortions on such girls would be required to collect a DNA sample from the fetus and send it to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. ...

Doctors and nurses at abortion clinics, hospitals or even counseling agencies would have to report underage pregnancies within 24 hours of knowing about such a pregnancy or risk losing their state license.

The report would trigger a criminal investigation examining whether the girl was a victim of a crime, such as statutory rape, which can include sex between two minors who are under 16.

Republicans: All punitive, all the time. What could possibly be the problem with that?

Critics said the bill would dissuade pregnant minors from seeking medical care or counseling.

"If a 15-year-old is having consensual sex with her 15-year-old boyfriend and gets pregnant and she knows if she goes to a health care provider that the possible consequence is that her 15-year-old boyfriend could be thrown in jail, what's the likelihood she'll seek any care?" asked Lillian Tamayo of the Florida Association of Planned Parenthood.

She won't seek medical care. To which the Culture of Life responds, "Good! They're sluts anyway."

[Rep. Dennis] Baxley [(R-Ocala)] added, "It doesn't make me unhappy that a few more children may live."

They'll live, by God, even if it means they all need to be locked up until their 18th birthdays.

(Via American Constitution Society.)

 

Iraqi Named Maliki Attempts to Board LAX Flight With Magnet in His Ass

Al Reuters:

An Iraqi national wearing wires and concealing a magnet inside his rectum triggered a security scare at Los Angeles International Airport on Tuesday but officials said he posed no apparent threat.

The man, identified by law enforcement officials as Fadhel al-Maliki, 35, set off an alarm during passenger screening at the airport early on Tuesday morning.

A police bomb squad was called to examine what was deemed a suspicious item found during a body cavity search of the man. ...

"He was secreting these items in a body cavity and that was a great concern because there were also some electric wires associated with that body cavity," Larry Fetters, security director for the Transportation Security Administration at the airport, told reporters.

Okay, so an Iraqi named Maliki - not clear whether he's any relation to the Prime Minister - tries to get on a plane while he has a magnet with wires attached to it stored in his asshole. To which I can only say, "Bwah?"

Where was this very strange stranger going all gussied up?

Maliki, 35, who lives in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was preparing to board a US Airways flight from Los Angeles to Philadelphia.

Of. Course.

The Bush CIA Virus in the Department of Justice

Aquagirl's right about the Bush crew behaving like the mafia, but they put me in mind of a somewhat different outfit. Consider the email from one of the fired U.S. attorneys to five others, saying that someone from the Deputy Attorney General's office called him, saying in essence: Shut up or we'll come after you, and if you squeal to Congress, we'll really come after you.

This reminded me of a passage from one of John Le Carre's best books, The Night Manager. In this scene, a U.S. law enforcement officer named Joe Strelski confronts a Deputy Assistant Attorney General, named Ed Prescott. Prescott - of the Bush Prescotts - part of a corrupt cabal of American and British government officials, has blown Strelski's covert operation to snare a drug-running arms merchant and thereby caused Strelski's agent to be captured and tortured:

"The other thing you want to tell me, Ed, is I can kiss but I can't tell," Strelski resumed. "Because if I tell, somebody will have my ass and take away my pension. Or if I really tell, somebody may feel obliged reluctantly to shoot my fucking head off. I understand those things, Ed. I have learned the rules. Ed, will you do me a favor?"

Prescott was not accustomed to listening without interrupting, and he never did anyone a favor unless he could count on one in return. But he knew anger when he saw it, and he knew that anger given time subsides, whether in people or in animinals, so he regarded his role as essentially a waiting one and kept his smile going and answered rationally, as he would if he were in the presence of a raving lunatic. He knew also that it was essential not to show alarm. There was always the red button on the inside of the desk.

"If I can, Joe, for you, anything," he replied handsomely.

"Don't change, Ed. America needs you as you are. Don't give up any of your friends in high places or your connections with the Agency or your wife's arm's-length lucrative directorships of certain companies. Keep fixing things for us. The decent citizen knows too much already, Ed. Any more knowledge could seriously endanger his health. Think television. Five seconds of any subject is enough for anybody. People have to be normalized, Ed, not destabilized. And you're the man to do it for us."

This, from 1993, is one of the most angry moments in all of Le Carre's books, and in my opinion, completed his transition from spy novelist who offered occasional caustic flashes to a critic of secret government that began with The Secret Pilgrim The Russia House in 1989. It's also eerie in the parallels to today's Bush regime in its willingness to sell out covert agents for personal gain. And it reminds me that of course the Bush family is heavily connected to spies and espionage, given the elder Bush's directorship of the CIA. So, with that upbringing, it makes perfect sense that the junior Bush would think nothing of burning a source, and then concocting a cover story and disinformation campaign, complete with Libby as the cutout, and all the while using tame Department of Justice lawyers like Yoo and Ashcroft and Gonzales to retrospectively bless all of it.

It also makes perfect sense that the language of covert operations would inflitrate the Department of Justice. Consider the closing to the email:

Of course, I would appreciate maximum opsec regarding this email and ask that you not forward it or let others read it.

Opsec, of course, means "operations security", a term originating in counter-intelligence.

So while the Bush people remind me of the mafia, what they remind me of more strongly is a mutant mini-CIA, who are brutal enough to intimidate a group of independent-minded U.S. Attorneys so much that it takes subpoenas to make them testify, because they fear what they will get if they "really tell."

Don't Nobody Cross Georgie Junior, Nobody

So Libby’s been convicted. Score one for the rule of law. And yet, I’m not doing the happy dance. Because the conviction does nothing for the innocent people who got stomped by our government, Valerie Plame and the contacts who were endangered by her outing. And it sure doesn’t undo the administration’s message that if you cross Bush, you’ll pay. Hell, they’re probably happy for the publicity, it’s a full-page ad for their retaliation policy. It’s like convicting a mafia guy for killing a witness.

We’ve got an administration that is willing to ruin a person’s career in order to discredit a critic who has done nothing more than speak truth to power. That’s downright scary. But, hell, screwing with people’s careers seems to be Bush’s tool of choice in retaliating against people with actual integrity, the ones who refuse to ethically compromise themselves for his political gain. Just ask any US Attorney who has prosecuted Bush’s Republican allies or refused to investigate Democratic enemies, or not investigated them fast enough – not only are you out, you’re going to get slandered as a "poor performer," too. There will always be people brave enough to tell the truth, personal consequences be damned. But we’ll never know if Wilson might not have written that editorial if he had known it would permanently cost his wife her covert status and endanger her contacts. And we don’t know who else might be out there keeping quiet to keep themselves from getting whacked.

In which our heroine introduces herself

Hi, I’m Aquagirl. Mithras tells many stories about me, most of which are of questionable taste and veracity, but he knows he can get away with it because I can’t remember anything that happened more than 5 minutes ago. I think the Falwell one is actually true, though. As the man said, we’ve been friends since the internet was just a gleam in Al Gore’s eye. Excuse me a sec, I have to stop and sigh at the mention of Al Gore. In some alternate universe, things are going much much better. My stats: I’ve been a lawyer for longer than seems possible. I live in the DC area, and it sucks. I feel somewhat cheated because I’m an atheist and so according to the Christian right, I should be orgying stoned right now, but am I? Noooo. Instead, I’m the world’s only atheist Sunday School teacher (yes, literally). I’ve been reading more and more blogs recently and just when I got to the point where I thought I really needed to stop, Mithras asked me to post here. So, of course, in the time-honored tradition of liberals making bad decisions, I said yes. Up next: government Sopranos style.

Guest Blogger Aquagirl

For the month of March, my friend Aquagirl will join me as a co-blogger.  We met sometime about 50 to 75 years ago, when dinosaurs and Ronald Reagan roamed freely, devastating the countryside. One of the sweetest anecdotes about her that I can tell without fearing for my life is seeing her and her friend the Air Force ROTC officer (who - no shit - Clint Eastwood nicknamed "Lieutenant Debbie") lunging viciously at the television to stab their upraised middle fingers at the image of Jerry Falwell. Good times.

We've stayed close lo these many decades, for which I am grateful, because she is simply one of the smartest people I have ever met. She has been a frequent commenter at the Ministry of Offensive Humor, so some time ago I started to encourage her to blog. But unlike rabid obsessives like me, she has a life, so instead I suggested she might enjoy guest blogging, while readers of this site might like a break from the endless stream of profanity and half-baked political criticism. She graciously accepted. Thanks, honey.

Bobo's World: Teen Sex Edition

Two kids in shop class in an Indiana school district had sex while their classmates watched, and the teacher was distracted.

I got laid in stairwells and empty classrooms, but don't have that much of an exhibitionist streak in me. There was this one girl .... Wait, what were we talking about?

(Via PZ Myers at Pharyngula.)

The Issue is Plame, Not Libby

Another reason I can't get too happy about the Libby conviction, besides the fact he'll be pardoned, is that he truly is the fall guy for Cheney, who skates.

My retrospective, with selected excerpts:

2/9/2006:       Cheney Ordered Libby to Blow Plame's Cover:

Betraying the country for political gain is like mass murder for a pack of smokes. Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby and their co-conspirators should be occupying cells near Aldrich Ames'.

Still think so. This isn't like locking up Al Capone for tax evasion as much as like locking up Aldrich Ames for taking bribes.

6/30/2005:    Time Magazine Caves

7/23/2004:    Frogmarch!

10/11/2003:    CIA Leak Scandal Recap:

Bush and his cronies will do anything, including harming the security of the United States, if they thought it would advance their agenda.

10/3/03:       Geniuses from Alternate Universes:

She thinks the crime is using Plame's name in public. Is there anyone in the world who blogs about American politics who thinks the crime is using her name? Quite possibly, there are large numbers of stupid, simpleminded people who don't realize that the crime is identifying her as an undercover CIA agent.

No wonder these people vote Republican.

10/2/03:        Slander and Stonewall:

Ogged at Unfogged thinks the leaker is "Scooter" Libby and once he's gone, it's over.

Yes and perhaps.

9/30/2003: Glenn Reynolds: Objectively Pro-Treason

Criminal, Wrong and Counterproductive

Wriggly fishes from his table, so juicy sweet!

Step Back, and Keep Your Hands Where I Can See Them

What Will We Find at the End of This Road?

Popcorn:

I put $5 each on Rove and Ari taking the fall, and then $5 on Nobody, just to make sure I covered the bases.

Whoops.
 

9/28/03:        Rationalizing as Fast as They Can:

What would motivate a high-ranking official to commit a felony to discredit Wilson and the CIA?  The White House believed that Wilson was close to finding information that could bring down the Administration.

I was wrong here, too. I overestimated the moral seriousness of the Bushies. I couldn't believe anyone would commit treason for the trivial reason of silencing a critic.

Laws, Not Men

More Informed Speculation

A Third-Rate Burglary:

Given that John Ashcroft is Attorney General and Congress is controlled by people so feckless and partisan that they couldn't tell you the time of day if it might help the other side, it's not a straight shot from this to resignations or indictments.

I Must Not Say That Naughty Word or A Gentleman Never Gives Offense Unintentionally

I largely agree with Roy about this:

My only answer is this: language is my metier, and I try to use it to my best advantage. One of the best tools toward that end is the unexpected choice. Sometimes I put academic, literary, or other elevated types of language into situations that do not seem to call for them. (George Plimpton was a pro at this schtick. I remember him writing about Amateur Night at the Apollo Theatre, and saying of an act that was about to emphatically get the hook, "The crowd desired that he would be silent.")

Sometimes I go another way and use crude language as a crotch-kick against pretension -- as when I called this thick-necked Men's Rights blowhard a pussy. As for "cunt," well, it's just a fun word.

This response also plays to Ilyka's wider theme: the myth of Political Correctness. No normal person gives a rat's ass what any professor, committee, or City Council thinks of the use of any given signifier. At the same time, normal people know what offends and doesn't offend them -- and in many cases, it is not the specific words so much that make the difference as the way they are used.  Consequently, most ordinary folks of all races would be able to understand and accept Lenny Bruce's "I want to introduce you to the niggers in my cabinet" routine, or Blazing Saddles ("Don't move or the nigger gets it!"), but would consider this white jackass, who thinks it's cool to say "I hate niggers" because Chris Rock said it, to be, well, a white jackass.

In general, it goes a long way toward overcoming any language sensitivity issues people might have if you endeavor to talk to them instead to trying to put something over on them. As long as I stick to that program, though I do consider all criticisms seriously, I feel I cannot go too far wrong.

Right. I get offended by the expression of repulsive thoughts, not the words used to express them. Decency, civility and politeness are all different things. You can politely express intolerant, sadistic ideas, or you can rudely express decent, humane ideas. We do the latter all the time here in Left Blogistan because we've been struggling with years of the straight-faced assertion of the truth and goodness of truly barbaric or moronic notions. In fact, it would be indecent to treat contemptible ideas with politeness, because politeness conveys respect. Similarly, I will not shake hands, share alcohol, or have a meal with some people, such as racists, even though these things are polite. If they find it rude, I'm glad.

Politeness is an ideology. It drains language of emotional content. It's that emotion that can be used to break through complacency and indifference. That's why the rightwingers are so focused on the use of naughty words by liberals - if they can get us not to express outrage, they're one more step down the road to winning. But it's not just conservatives who use this tool. People on the left confuse words with meaning, and so create categories of words which may not be used. For example, when people attacked me for writing "If she didn't have tits, [Michelle Malkin would] be stuck writing at Townhall.com", they focused on the use of the word "tits".  If I had said "If she were a white male, she'd be stuck writing at Townhall.com" (because conservatives use her sex and ethnicity as a shield), no one would have blinked, even though it means exactly the same thing. And, unfortunately, there are liberals who latch onto this tool simply to attack others for their language when they can't win a substantive argument.

This is not to say that offensive language can't be used to express hateful ideas. But let's be clear about which is the problem. Being offended by language per se is a lazy, sloppy substitute for parsing meaning.

Libby Guilty

Scooter found guilty:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was convicted Tuesday of obstruction, perjury and lying to the FBI in an investigation into the leak of a CIA operative's identity.

Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was accused of lying and obstructing the investigation into the 2003 leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to reporters.

He was acquitted of one count of lying to the FBI.

As I said, though this case has political impact, the conviction is a particular legal judgment by the jury. They are not "sending a message" about how they feel about the Bush administration. I was prepared to write this if they had acquitted, too, because it's true either way. The administration is completely corrupt, but whether any given prosecution is successful has nothing to do with it. That's why it was stupid for rightwingers to claim Fitzgerald would be discredited if Libby were acquitted. That being said, let me add: Frogmarch!

And just incidentally, I was correct that the judge's response to the jury's question on Friday would quickly lead to a verdict.

Also, I think Libby's counsel used poor judgment in not asking for the jury to restart deliberations with an alternate when one of the jurors was dismissed. To the best of my knowledge, the judge wouldn't have told the jury it was the defense asking for them to do that, so it's not like they would necessarily would have blamed one side over the other. The defense should have known they were looking defeat in the face, and used any excuse to get there more slowly.

Dobson: Evangelicals Demoralized by Call to Stop Global Warming

Washingtonpost.com:

Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson and other conservative Christian leaders are calling for the National Association of Evangelicals to silence or fire an official who has urged evangelicals to take global warming seriously.

In a letter this week to the board of the NAE, which claims 30 million members, Dobson and his two dozen co-signers said the Rev. Richard Cizik, the NAE's vice president for government relations, has waged a "relentless campaign" that is "dividing and demoralizing" evangelicals.

Just as the "conservative movement" is made up of people who are rightwing radicals, not conservatives, Christian leaders like Dobson are not Christians, they're gang members allied with the GOP, and they use the bible as a weapon to promote themselves.

After Judge Refuses to Answer Question, Libby Jury Back to Work

I meant to mention this possibility the other day, but it's not surprising to me that the judge in the Libby trial refused to answer the question the jury posed on Friday about what "reasonable doubt" means. It's not surprising because jury instructions are crafted as the direct result of precedent, and trying to elucidate terms in a novel way is a good way to get reversed. Defining terms like "reasonable doubt" gets very tricky:

Several Federal appellate circuits have dealt with the problem of defining reasonable doubt by instructing trial judges not to provide any definition at all....

That is to say, juries are given the phrase and told to figure it out. That's one of the many reasons being a juror in a felony case is hellish.

When Did Broadcast TV Start Sucking This Much?

I'm sick and stuck in the wilds of Lansdowne, PA, housesitting for friends with only a dog, two cats, and a TV for company. My friends, being dirty suburban hippies, don't have cable, so I only have about 15 crap stations rather than 99.  Oy. Deal or No Deal? Dude creeped me when he had hair. Cold Case? It's Philly (hey. that's my street!), but oh no, it's not.  Those detectives are so not Philly, too healthy. Without a Trace? I would watch it if they killed off the main character, or at least killed his tough-guy machine gun speaking style. Ick.

And take that one Honda commercial where the 20-something guy drives his new Civic past plaster statues of people and things that might slow him down. A few of the statues are hard to decipher, but the last set is of a woman in a wedding dress with a couple of children. Marriage and family are supposed to represent the ultimate restriction on freedom, which creeped me out.  Not that I am a big proponent of either, but it looked more like he was abandoning them as he zoomed out onto the highway in his Honda.

Ginmar blames movies for a specific type of TV dreck:

You cannot magically outrun a explosion. It just shows how far from reality Hollywood is---yeah, I know, I know, but that diet of unreality has given us TV shows where torture works and persistance always pays. Sometimes it just tears you apart. And torture simply doesn't work. There's no ticking time bomb, no last-minute plot that can be averted by one dedicated agent intent on breaking the bad guy. There is, in short, no world in which rules do not apply and where the laws of physics and nature are suspended.

If we had movies and TV Shows where the bombs actually did damage to everybody, and including the hero, we'd have a harder time escaping the reality of what our politicians do. If we had TV shows where torture destroys both the victim and the offender both, we'd have to ask why the other route---prevention, rather than after-action revenge----is the preferred method. We seek to escape the very things we should confront and assess.

Yes, and if we had cop, lawyer and medical shows that weren't melodramatic fantasies heavy on special effects, maybe people wouldn't get wildly unrealistic ideas about law and health care.

Speaking of health care, back to bed for me.

Libby Jury Queries Judge on Reasonable Doubt Standard

Washingtonpost.com:

At the end of its eighth day of deliberations, the foreman of the 11-member jury sent U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton a two-sentence note. "We would like clarification of the term 'reasonable doubt,' " the note said. "Specifically, is it necessary for the government to present evidence that it is not humanly possible for someone not to recall an event in order to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt?"

The question asks whether the government must prove a negative, which answers itself: No.

Gazing into my crystal ball, I would say this question means there is at least one holdout for acquittal on the jury, with a majority trying to address the holdout's or holdouts' issues.  After eight days of deliberation, there is no way  things haven't jelled into camps, so questions are probably going to be aimed at resolving a disagreement.  The weird framing of the question makes it read to me this way, "Will you please tell our stubborn colleague(s) that we're permitted to use common sense? Because otherwise, we'll never leave."

Based on that, after the judge answers the question on Monday, we're less than a deliberation day away from either a verdict or the first note declaring the jury can't reach a verdict. That's because the holdout(s) will either capitulate or really dig in their heels depending on what the judge says and the emotional dynamics in the jury room.

Watch This Space

There are some very exciting changes coming in the near future to Fables. Very exciting. Changes. They're coming. Real soon. Just you wait. Very exciting.

What? No, I am not going to finally clean up the dead links, they've been dead forever.  That would be like desecration. Are you some kind of ghoul? Do you dig up grandpa and move him every few years, just to keep it interesting? Don't think of them as outdated URLs, think of them as a makeshift memorial to sites no one cares about anymore.

No, I am not going to go back to posting more porn. Shut up.

No more guessing. It'll be exciting. Soon. You'll see.

Walter Reed General Relieved of Command

ABC News:

Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, who was commanding general of the North Atlantic Regional Medical Command as well as Walter Reed hospital, was relieved of command by Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey.

 

In a brief announcement, the Army said service leaders had "lost trust and confidence" in Weightman's leadership abilities "to address needed solutions for soldier outpatient care" at Walter Reed.

Good, but just a start.

In Which I Fear Amp Will Have a Seizure, and Not Blogroll Roy

Edroso:

To this douchebag I say: what the fucking hell is wrong with you? If some stupid cunt says we're "not anti-war, just on the other side," why the fuck shouldn't we call the motherfucker out? Ditto stanky-ass cum-buckets who parlay their libels into rightwing sinecures. Fuck those twats and fuck you, too. Tony fucking Hendra built the fucking Lampoon, you twinky-ass bitch. You couldn't raise a piss-on at the Playboy Mansion. Ann Coulter couldn't find her own aching asshole with a digital shit-detector and the Ole Perfesser couldn't find his dick with Michelle Malkin's cunt. If brains were dynamite none of you fucks could blow a fart.

So go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut, asshole. Go take a flying fuck at the moon.

The chair! Hit him with the chair!

The Middle Ground is an Outcome, Not a Position

From washingtonpost.com:

When we combined voters' answers to the 14 issue questions to form a liberal-conservative scale (answers were divided into five equivalent categories based on overall liberalism vs. conservatism), 86 percent of Democratic voters were on the liberal side of the scale while 80 percent of Republican voters were on the conservative side. Only 10 percent of all voters were in the center. The visual representation of the nation's voters isn't a nicely shaped bell, with most voters in the moderate middle. It's a sharp V.

This is not surprising. Washington pundits push "moderation" as a virtue to aspire to, when what they really mean is, "Liberals, don't want what you want all the time, want what I want instead half the time, so I don't have to feel so icky about having given Dick Cheney head for the past six years."

In fact, the nation is politically divided. We have different values, we want different things, and we reason differently.  The main impetus for this is that the right has lost its collective mind since 9/11. They're both stupid and crazy, which became crystal clear to liberals the moment we realized Bush seriously intended to invade Iraq and the wingnuts supported it.

Still, it is possible to compromise with stupid, crazy people. You start with what smart, sane people want, and always keeping in mind that some things are never acceptable, try to mold a solution that meets enough of the stupid, crazy people's concerns that a positive outcome occurs.  But whatever results from this process, please do not call it a principled moderate position that people should aspire to. That ten percent of all people the story identified who were neither liberal nor conservative are either too lazy or too busy to actually decide things for themselves. They are not to be emulated.

Also, never think the business of compromising with the stupid, crazy people will be fun or easy.  They will bash us every chance they get, because they think as little of us as we think of them. (I am glad, since conservatives as a whole right now are not people I would enjoy having the respect of.) And all we can do is bash their stupidity and craziness, and try to split off as many of the salvagable ones as possible. Rub their faces in the consequences of the years of their misrule. Humiliate them so completely that the ones who still have a brain cell think, "Hey, why am I still voting for these losers?"

Now is not the time to make nice-nice with the conservative firebreathers. Now is the time to kick them in the balls.

On Getting Our Way and the Libby Jury as Political Theater

Booman discusses how frustrating it is for liberals to finally seize control of Congress yet not have the power to instantly reshape things to our liking - which I sympathize with - by giving a litany of discouraging events, which includes this:

We've got a jury of eleven down in Washington DC that needs over a week to decide whether or not Scooter Libby committed perjury. A rented mule could determine that he committed perjury in fifteen minutes. This is discouraging.

 Having been on them twice, I can say juries take their job seriously, which is to follow the law and weigh all the evidence.  On the "follow the law" part, the jury in question has received instructions which are at least 74 pages long, which I know only from yesterday's report that when they asked a clarifying question of the judge, they referred to that page. The entire set of instructions might be quite longer, who knows. On the "weigh all the evidence" part, there were weeks of testimony, and the jurors are strictly forbidden from discussing any of it until after it's all over.

So having come to the issue with an open mind, they are working their way through it conscientiously.

We should be glad about that. Whichever way they come out, they are doing as thorough and fair a job as they can. As a lawyer, as a liberal, and as an American, that's exactly what I want them to do when someone's liberty is at stake.

Deciding to put someone in prison for a long time requires more consideration than that of your average rented mule. While I agree that Libby is most probably guilty, that is not my decision to make, which I am glad about, because being on a jury is torturous.

Me and eleven others once had to decide whether a guy should be put to death. The judge had very clear ideas that he should, and was very surprised that we took so long, too. Then he was shocked when we disagreed with him. But then again, he didn't have to make the call, we did. He thought the acquittal sent the wrong message. But it's not about messages. It's not about scoring political points. It's about whether the evidence taken as a whole proves beyond a reasonable doubt that a particular defendant is guilty of a particular crime.

Whichever way this jury comes out, they will have to live with their decision for the rest of their lives. So kindly fucking lay off.