sfarber

I understand that today’s holiday is designed to honor the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a hero of the Civil Rights movement. However, I think its been just too long since we honored our own king… the one we elected twice now, thereby giving him “political capital” which he could spend. On that note, I give you this lengthy report (warning: PDF) on government secrecy in the Bush Administration prepared by the Government Accountability Office (GAO, one of my former employers). And here is a fascinating set of essays called “Patriot Debates” discussing various aspects of governmental surveillance associated...

From our comrades at Beijing’s People’s Daily we give you this succinct, to-the-point, completely lacking in irony discussion of the competing values of security against terrorism and protection of civil liberties that the American Congress is now confronted with. China, of course, need not tell us that it is, to put it politely, an “authoritarian” country that doesn’t trouble itself with these things, but China’s house organ gently reminds us that civil liberties were the founding principle of our republic… so perhaps this sort of debate will be more agonizing (or God damned well should be) than, well, than the...

From our comrades at Pravda, we’ll start with this view of George W. Bush’s favorite sleepaway camp from our old pal Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey that likens Guantanamo Bay to Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen and that sort of thing. That’s not exactly fair: our Cuba based camp hasn’t actually killed anyone (that we know of) and its scale is much smaller. Otherwise, of course, the whole problem with Bancroft-Hinchey’s comparison is that it’s not all that preposterous: we will not look back at what we’ve done at Gitmo (or Abu Ghraib or elsewhere) as our finest hour… This Pravda piece on the “imminent default...

One wonders just how important it is to the Bushmen that Sam Alito be confirmed… it must be damned important, because the Bush Administration has done something it refused to do even to the run-up to the all-important 2002 mid-terms or 2004 presidential election: violate Pakistani airspace to attack a purported Al Qaeda target there, in order to generate a diversion ahead of the senate deliberations (and possible delay by senate Democrats) of the Alito confirmation vote. Given the Bush Administration’s general competence at everything else, it should come as no surprise that the intended target, Al Qaeda “Number Two”...

On this Friday 13th, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel met with the President in Washington, and the two joined in… tough talk to Iran. At least from the Times report just cited, little mention was made of much vaunted German opposition to the continued operation of the detentions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, nor any mention at all of German resident and Gitmo prisoner Murat Kurnaz, with whom you are all familiar by now. It’s unclear what’s going to happen with respect to Iran. Unlike Iraq’s Osirak facility which Israel attacked and destroyed some 25 years ago, Iran’s nuclear development facilities...

The title duly stolen from this by digby refers,of course, to an interesting break in the abuse trial of two dog handlers associated with good old Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. It seems that the former commanding officer responsible for the area including Abu Ghraib, and earlier, of the good old Guantanamo Bay detention and interrogation operation, General Geoffrey “Jack D. Ripper” Miller took the fifth (actually invoking article 31 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice) to decline to incriminate himself; this took place conveniently after Colonel Thomas Pappas of former-commander-of-Abu-Ghraib fame accepted a plea deal with military prosecutors....

You could read this long description of today’s testimony in the Washington Post, or you can have this Shorter Sam Alito: “You all can kiss my ass before I tell you anything that might be construed as remotely committal on how I’ll rule on an abortion case (like you don’t know how I’ll rule already), and I see that none of you dipshits (especially you Biden) seem the least bit interested in the fact that I never met a government abuse I didn’t like.” Or you could read this from the Rude Pundit (please don’t read the second paragraph while...

This kind of self-writing headline is the recurring (and unique) problem with having elected the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI, particularly when he gives off-the-cuff speeches denouncing a vaguely described “culture of death” (which his predecessor usually equated with abortion and birth control, and of course, used the power of his office to, inter alia, rail against the distribution of condoms to AIDS ravaged Africa). Whatever. As a non-Catholic, my standing to criticize the Church is limited (though the choice of someone who served in Die Hitlerjugend will not be something I’ll likely fail to mention when...

This joke is almost as good as the talking dog joke. (Via Anacronyms.) The infinite variety of “how do you keep an idiot in suspense?” jokes never cease to amuse me…

Sayeth Beijing’s CPC House Organ: Bush says America is a secure, prosperous beacon of democracy and hope, but in reality America is rapidly becoming an economic failure and a police state that is hemorrhaging capital and exporting chaos.