sfarber

The old Vaudeville bit about a man hearing a trigger word and slowly going into a pre-programmed tirade seems to be the best shorthand I can think of (other than perhaps “6-minute abs” from There’s Something About Mary) to describe what is probably happening at the White House now after the Senate voted 50-48 to leave in language calling for a troop pullout from Iraq— starting in just four months– as a condition of approving ongoing war funding. Wildman Chuck Hagel of Nebraska joined RINO Gordon Smith of Oregon to cross party lines (Pryor of Arkansas was the lone Dem...

Let me cut right to the chase with the fiasco of Attorney General’s office spokesperson Monica Goodling’s purported invocation of the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination: if she is not fired by the end of the week, then Alberto Gonzales should be fired (or if necessary impeached) for not firing her. Reading her tactic (which I presume was orchestrated by Karl Rove, because everything else seems to be) in its best light, she has supposedly tried to avoid “a partisan perjury trap”, to wit, the same horseshit Bill Clinton was arguably exposed to– questions with no underlying purpose other than...

In an extraordinarily bizarre day at the extraordinarily bizarre court set up at the extraordinarily bizarre detention facility set up at a location literally intended to be beyond the rule of law, after five years of open-ended detention with no apparent hope of release, Australian national David Hicks pleaded guilty to heretofore nonexistent charges of providing material support to terrorism in general (rather than face a potentially never ending show trial). Earlier in the proceedings, the military commissions decided to arbitrarily (as in “for no reason whatsoever”) disqualify two of Hicks’ three lawyers (including Josh Dratel, who yesterday, as in...

In the latest round of Gitmo show trials that never quite seem to get going, it looks like “Australian Taliban” David Hicks (whose “crime”, you’ll recall, was being a White Christian Anglo from a cool first world country who dared convert to Islam), will face arraignment today at GTMO on a charge of “providing material support to al Qaeda”, a charge which not only has the virtue of not being true, but that charge did not even exist until 2006. In other words, we are inventing conduct that we can charge Mr. Hicks with over five years after he has...

The House of Representatives has (almost unbelievably) acceded to the will of the people with respect to the Iraq War, and has imposed conditions that the Iraq war be ended attached to war spending, discussed in my American Street post “The Power of the [Fashionable] Purse“. It now appears that Attorney General Alberto “Spanky” Gonzales’s nose has grown a few inches: contrary to his public protestations that he was not involved in the decision to politicize the nation’s administration of justice by being part of the plan to sack loyal Republican United States Attorneys for not being partisan enough and...

It seems that upon the arrival of the Carlyle Group’s turnaround specialist Robert Gates to head up the Pentagon, the Grey Lady reports that one of his first activities was to try to close down Guantanamo Bay’s detention facility. He did, at least, manage to greatly reduce the scope and scale of the expanded prison and adjudication facility there, permitting Halliburton to collect a measly $10 million instead of the $100 million it was hoping for, on the basis that the massive $100,000,000 project created the unwanted image of permanence… though let’s face it, its residents have already been there...

The Governator, in response to Rush Limbaugh’s decrying him for being all liberal and s***, responds by calling the Right Wing’s greatest mouthpiece “irrelevant”. I have said before that the Democrats can consider themselves fortunate indeed that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, that man of initiatives on universal health care, global warming, and other things that the Democrats in Congress should be leading the way on… is ineligible to run for President. It would seem that now the (other) Republicans can consider themselves fortunate in that as well. It would seem that we have another Republican California Governor of true national...

And so the big newspapers, such as in this Grey Lady article, breathlessly anticipate a “Constutional showdown”, or perhaps “constitutional crisis”, to cover the latest inter-branch dance, in this case, the question of whether Senate Democrats are going to go forward and issue subpoenas to members of the Bush Administration (answer: yes), in particular, Karl “Bush’s Brain” Rove (answer: maybe, but that’s not how you bet). Subject: the ongoing U.S. Attorney firing fiasco. (The Senate, btw, voted 94-2 to repeal that portion of the USA Patriot Act giving the Attorney General the power to replace fired U.S. Attorneys without Senate...

This Washington Post story tells us that evidently, our allies in Riyadh seem to be objectively pro-terrorist, at least insofar as insisting on promptly releasing, usually within weeks, those people that we have deemed worthy of release from Guantanamo Bay’s open-ended (and once open-air) detention center. Indeed, according to a report by two Washington, D.C. lawyers Anant Raut and Jill M. Friedman, who represent detainees and did an analysis of 24 of the Saudi detainees so far released (about whom data is available), most of those we release are promptly released by their home countries. This is quite consistent with...

And onward goes the U.S. Attorney firing story, with this WaPo piece now observing shifting versions of the story coming from the White House, the Justice Department and recently resigned Alberto Gonzales aide-de-camp Kyle Sampson. Well, well. What gives? In some sense, the last thing the White House propaganda operation wants people to think about is how integrally tied it was to maintaining its Congressional majorities, to the point of stage-managing prosecutions of Democrats and suppressing prosecutions of Republicans timed to the election cycle… which seems blatantly troubling and should be iillegal if it already isn’t… We tend to pretend...