sfarber

Or some other fractured version of Shakespeare, that post-title seems to make about as much sense as the USA Patriot Act provision that removes the power to effectively determine the pace of state executions from federal courts, and hands it to… you got it… Attorney General Alberto “Fuck You, Congress” Gonzales. Defense attorneys are outraged. Like we care what they have to say! It is widely believed anathema to execute an innocent person. Except in the United States, where, let’s face it: if they were innocent, they would have been able to afford a decent defense attorney, now, wouldn’t they?...

The other possible headline is “Bush to rule of law: drop dead.” Either applies to the politically craven but desired by the Beltway Courtier class (and GOP-lock Fred Thompson)result… to wit, Bush commuted Scooter Libby’s 30-month sentence to zero— no time– thereby undoing years of work by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, and telling a jury and a federal judge (and indeed, a federal court of appeals) to go screw themselves. Well, why not? Poppy Bush pardoned a number of players implicated in Iran-Contra. Ford pardoned Nixon. Clinton pardoned Mark Rich (who was then represented by none other than Scooter Libby)....

Despite the ongoing threat of a veto from the President, the House passed its war-funding measure by a 218-208 margin, and that war-funding measure includes time-tables for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. As noted in the linked WaPo piece, it is remarkably rare for Congress to engage in this level of management of an ongoing war. Of course, it was remarkably just as rare for the Congress to have utterly abandoned its oversight responsibilities of the Executive branch for the last six years, including the handing to the President of a blank check authority to carry out the...

Various Congressional committees unleashed a hail of subpoenas and other “invitations” on current and former members of the Bush Administration, including a subpoena to Secretary of State Incompetetentalleezza Rice concerning pre-Iraq war intelligence indicating Saddam Hussein’s purported attempts to acquire “yellowcake uranium” (the subject of my interview with Knut Royce), another committee sought the testimony of Karl Rove’s deputy Sara Taylor, and yet another granted immunity to our old friend, Alberto Gonzales’s assistant, Monica Goodling. Rice’s testimony comes at a very interesting time; it could be designed to take on a President trying to go schoolyard on war funding; perhaps...

Our comrades at Pravda give us this chronology of the career of Boris Yeltsin, and the Grey Lady gives us this far longer narrative, in light of Yeltsin’s death, at 76. Hard to sum up Mr. Yeltsin (other than to note an uncanny resemblance to pro wresting’s Bobby “the Brain” Heenan). Had Yeltsin and Gorbachev been different men, the transition from Soviet Union to successor states could have been far more chaotic and troubling than it was, particularly given all of those nuclear weapons. Perhaps (like its last mayor believed to be the case with New York City), Russia is...

It seems that the White House official who quipped that the Bush Administration made up its own reality wasn’t kidding, as the White House reaction to a performance by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that was so God-awful that Republican Senators are calling for his resignation is, of course, an expression of renewed confidence in Gonzales by the White House. Was anyone expecting anything any different? And does anyone doubt for longer than a micro-second that if Gonzales is, indeed, forced out, he won’t be replaced with yet another crony potentially even more loathsome and incompetent than Gonzales himself? And even...

Call me gob-smacked to find that Sun-Kyung Cho, the sister of the Virginia Tech mass-murderer, is employed by the Bush Administration in an Iraq reconstruction function. At the moment, she appears to work for a contractor called McNeil Technologies, but the Princeton grad seems to have worked for the State Department in the successor to the Coalition Provisional Authority, either directly or indirectly in at least three stints. Given the Coalition Provisional Authority’s sordid history of hiring only inexperienced but connected Republican operatives for its crucial budgetary functions, we can more than reasonably conclude that in order to get her...

Those of us who were kind of troubled by the inability to mount a successful fillibuster of Scam Alito’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court get to shake our heads and say “surprise, surprise”… the High Court voted to dispense with a number of earlier precedents and outright find a so-called partial birth abortion ban constitutional (5-4… of course.) I’ll defer to Scott Lemieux’s observations on this; I think the short answer is “it’s about the patriarchy, stupid.” You little ladies don’t really know what to do with your bodies so we’ll tell you for your own good. Note that...

Frankly, there is no particular reason to talk about the issue of gun control, one way or another… let the Virginia Tech shooting sink in a bit, give it the distance of at least a few weeks. That’s not how politics works, of course. So naturally, it’s nice to see the Democrats in majority, led by Harry Reid. conceding the issue before it even starts. As always, Democrats are keen to believe Republican talking points, such as that it was the assault weapons ban back in 1994 (and that law alone) that led to the 1994 “Republican Revolution.” We won’t...

Words fail me in talking about the worst-ever-gun-rampage-in-American-history that left 32 people dead after a shooting spree at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, VA yesterday. Perhaps there is something frightening about April in this country… (T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land called April the cruelest month)… we had the Oklahoma City bombing 12 years ago this week, the Columbine shootings 8 years ago this week… and now this. I don’t know. What events like this show is that neither I, nor anyone else I know, seem to know anything about what makes the universe– or especially the human soul– tick. An...