sfarber

It’s official: my fair state’s Junior Senator (with whom I share a birthday… us and Leon Trotsky, btw) Hillary Clinton has announced that she is forming an exploratory committee to run for President of the United States. Obviously, she would be the first woman and first former First Lady to be elected to the Presidency, should she prevail. And right now, she immediately steps in as the prohibitive favorite to win her own party’s nomination, and given the likely train-wreck the current President Bush will leave where the Republican Party once stood, whomever the Democrat is will be in a...

The Pentagon has released its long awaited manual on implementing the Military Commissions Act, which will permit evidence against those detained in the war on terror obtained by hearsay (i.e. the confronting evidence comes from a witness not in court and available to be cross-examined), and more troubling still, evidence (i.e. confessions or finger-pointing) obtained under torture coercive circumstances. Does this comply with our treaty obligations to ostensibly try those captured in a military conflict in the same manner as we would try our own people? Um… no. Nor, of course, does permitting evidence obtained while a detainee was being...

The President (according to what he said on 60 Minutes) says it’s full steam ahead with The Surge TM, no matter what those stupid Democrats in Congress or the vast majority of the American people think. Here’s the thing: this happens to be one of the few areas where the commander in chief power means what he thinks he does (as opposed to permitting a martial law declaration, or acting as if he had). This is a straight troop deployment. This is not a draft: these are troops already mobilized, many of them are already deployed somewhere… many of them...

Such seems to be the prevailing attitude of the CIA and Pentagon with respect to their use of “voluntary” letter requests for sensitive financial and credit information from financial institutions; American military and intelligence services have evidently sought and obtained such records by the hundreds in a number of cases of suspected terrorism. Given a government that can’t be bothered complying with FISA or the Fourth (Sixth… Eighth… First… or any other of those stinking amendments)… The paradigm was the use of this method to spy on former Gitmo Army Moslem Chaplain Captain James Yee in the hope that his...

In this case, it will be the encouragement by the Brazilian government of uncontrolled logging in the all-important Amazon rain forest, in this case, the very heretofore unexplored center regions, through auctioning off logging rights. Unfortunately for everyone else (and every living thing on the planet) the Amazon just happens to be our most important land-based ecosystem, for one thing, in terms of generating oxygen, as well as regulating those greenhouse gases (especially CO2), as well as the home to innumerable species found nowhere else… and, you get the idea. What we have is that most dangerous of all animals,...

Charles D. “Cully” Stimson of the Pentagon’s Detainee Affairs office (he’s actually DOD Assistant Deputy Secretary for that function) has called for a boycott of lawyers who have the audacity to represent Guantanamo detainees by corporate America. (Hat tip to Julia.) Even A.G. Alberto Gonzales and the White House and the Pentagon itself had to rhetorically distance themselves from these remarks, pointing out that yada yada yada we believe in fair trials. Of course, they don’t mean it: this statement was the newest trial balloon in their effort to see how the latest form of neo-crypto-racism (going back to generalized...

And now… News from the Escalation It seems that the Pentagon has overruled the Army on its longstanding policy of not recalling National Guard units that had served in Iraq until they were stateside at least five years… Sorry, guys and gals of the National Guard and Reserves… We know you might prefer to stay here with your families, your homes and your regular jobs… but you’all know that the President’s ego and refusal to admit that he has created a hash (and his, or his Saudi clients’ insistence on squeezing out the last possible ounce of your blood in...

There’s not much to add to the post title when talking about the President’s speech this evening. Good blood and treasure after bad, and trusting that nice PM Maliki after his professional handling of the Saddam execution (and cover-up). This is simply a game to run out the clock. Any possible legitimacy in his pitch (and indeed, any reason not to introduce articles of impeachment) was undermined by his insistence on mentioning September 11th, and fairly early. The “mission” is about Bush himself, whether that means trying to diss Daddy and Daddy’s emissary Jim Baker for trying adult supervision, or...

We’ll let the Dead Kennedy tune referred to in the post heading be our segue to Kennedy in-law and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s announcement that California will, on its own, reduce greenhouse gases emitted from vehicles in the state, by law. While the United States as a whole, the world’s largest economy and by far largest emitter of greenhouse gases leading to catastrophic climate change (the three c’s, or some variation, will have to become the term of art, as “global warming” has an unfortunate positive connotation that does not befit drought, ecosystem collapse, devastating summer heat, crop failure, increased...

Some time ago, I received an e-mail (or was it so long ago that it was a fax?) suggesting that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” Such, of course, is precisely what one gleans from the saga of the President’s “big new speech” slated for tomorrow where we will hear his “new and improved Iraq policy“. While specifics are undermined by deliberate disinformation from some of the Republican senators that emerged from the White House (“we’re not talking about a surge of just 20,000 troops”)… that’s more or...