sfarber

If you try to color by number, then the G.O.P.’s numbers would, at the moment, be a dismal shade of grey, according to this compendium of today’s poll results by Billmon. The polling consensus puts the G.O.P. behind Democrats generically (though, not of course, in a seat by gerrymandered seat match-up) by a jaw-dropping twenty-three percentage points. As Billmon’s piece notes, that does not augur well when compared to prior cycles, such as 1994, where the Democrats weren’t nearly that far behind in polling despite getting clobbered in the mid-terms. While, thanks to yon gerrymandering, the system is rigged to...

Sadly, I can’t come up with a clever post title for this event, but it seems to be generally confirmed that North Korea has detonated a .5 to 1.5 kiloton nuclear device, for which it is receiving universal condemnation. Bruce the Veep suggests laying this one at the feet of our previous President (that would be Bill Clinton) for agreeing to permit North Korea to proceed with “peaceful” nuclear research (the kind that Iran says it wants to pursue now) back in the 1990’s, rather than take on North Korea then and there (a North Korea that then did not...

That would be Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Swift, military attorney for Salim Hamdan, who prevailed in the Supreme Court in a challenge to the military commission process dreamed up by the President to try so-called “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay. Lt. Cmdr. Swift has been advised that he has been denied a promotion to full commander, and as such, must retire from the Navy. Coincidence, I’m sure. (You can read my interview with Swift’s civilian co-counsel Neal Katyal, here.) Since the Hamdan case… let’s see. Congress passes a law intended to strip federal courts of habeas corpus jurisidiction altogether, to permit...

Revisiting what was once a regular TD Saturday feature, we’ll drop by our comrades at Pravda (not Neo-Pravda a/k/a the Grey Lady… but Paleo-Pravda, the one based in Moskva ba-Russya), for this discussion of the results of the recent National Geographic Society quiz given to American youth. (In other Russia-related news at Pravda, an award winning journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, who was critical of the war with Chechnya, was murdered in an elevator in Moscow; while American journalists fear not getting invited to the better cocktail parties, or (heavens) being shut out of access to key Administration propaganda-feeders… journalists in places...

Something else we’re all not paying attention to while we continue to be distracted by a man no longer in Congress not having sex with a no longer 16 year old congressional page: Condi is running around the Middle East like the proverbial chicken without a head; she took an evidently unscheduled detour to Iraq to talk to al-Maliki about, you know, the escalating (from “very high”) level of violence in Iraq, which is on track to make this the worst week followed by the worst month for American casualties (not to mention for Iraqi casualties). In short, while the...

The sentiments I’ve been thinking about the Foley scandal have been eloquently voiced here by Barbara of Mahablog. As I said, the most critical issue of the day, in my view, is that our Senate Majority leader has just told us that he wants to invite the people who harbored those who attacked us into the Afghan government, followed closely if not a toss-up with the revelation that Incompetetentalleezza Rice seemed to be warned about an imminent A.Q. attack on the United States two months before it happened (in addition to the August warning we already knew about). (I consider...

It may seem a bit odd that the approaching Apocalypse would be greeted as good news… but this is so only if you’re a Republican, of course. In this case, that would be North Korea’s announcement that it intends to test detonate a nuclear bomb. While it is widely believed that North Korea has around 11 nuclear bombs, no one knows for sure that any of them work. Given the failure of its mid to long range Taepodong missile earlier in the year, it is always possible that its nuclear ambitions and capabilities are greatly overstated. A successful test of...

I frankly still find it hard to believe, but Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-HCA) has called for the Afghan government to invite the Taliban into the rulling coalition. You all remember the Taliban, I suppose. These are those extremely devout (in their peculiar parochial version of Islam anyway) Moslems who like to stone women for the hell of it, blow up world treasures like the giant stone Buddhas at Bamiyan, make women wear head to toe burqas and not go to school and make men wear beards… and, of course, they famously harbored OBL and al Qaeda and provided...

In this case, the office wife would be Secretary of State Incompetentalleezza Rice, in her former incarnation as the President’s National Security Advisor, who, we learn after the publication of Bob Woodward’s recent antidote to his earlier Bush hagiography, Dr. Rice seems to have… forgotten… critical details… like all of them… associated with a meeting in July, 2001 with CIA Director George Tenet urgently warning her of an impending Al Qaeda strike and begging her to alert the President (something else she seems to have forgotten to do.) In fairness to Secretary Rice, we tend to have what I’ll call...

The New York Times gives us this fascinating op-ed likening the recent outbreak of politically convenient cowardice in our own senate to that of the Roman senate circa 68 B.C. around the time of the great fire at Ostia. That fire included the burning of a Roman fleet and kidnapping of two senators by “pirates”. While I tend to view 9-11 as more reminiscent of the Reichstadt fire, apparently, this sort of “throw out all semblance of checks and balances, due process and, quite frankly, sanity, because civil rights don’t mean anything when we’re dead” (to paraphrase a recent screaming...