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.

While we were wacthing sundry things like the domestic horror of the loss of a dozen miners in West Virginia, the ongoing horrors in Iraq and a possible death-vigil for Israeli PM Sharon… Russia and Ukraine were having a conflict over the provision by Russia of natural gas to Ukraine (Russia supplies around a third of natural gas used by the former Soviet Republic). At one point, the Russians dramatically televised the act of their gas monopoly (“Gazprom”) turning off the valves sending gas into Ukraine. Well, it appears, via our comrades at Pravda, that a compromise has been reached....

One gets cases such as the “up or down vote on whether we are a dictatorship” a/k/a Padilla v. Hanft, or whether an American citizen picked up in the United States can be held at the sole whim of the President. The Supreme Court granted the government’s request to move Mr. Padilla from military to civilian custody, hinting as this LaLa Times piece suggests, that the Government’s cynical move of indicting Padilla after refusing to do so for years somehow “moots” the case. We’ll see…

Not good news out of the Middle East: Israeli PM Ariel Sharon has suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and is fighting for his life at an Israeli hospital. Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has assumed the duties of acting Prime Minister. It doesn’t look good. Certainly, Sharon’s political life is probably over. Hopefully, he’ll recover from this, though the condition he is in sounds grave. The Unseen Editor forwards these items that some in Gaza fired shots in the air in celebration or are otherwise gleeful… perhaps these are “isolated extremists…” and then again, maybe Hamas isn’t the frontrunner in upcoming...

Suggested in comments to the last post, Gary Farber has been on a tear on the issue of the recent revelations concerning the machinations of Our Government ‘s efforts to protect us from swarthy jihadist bogeymen (largely of its creation) with respect to its evidently iimproved technical abilities to monitor virtually every communication that can be monitored… this is just his latest installment. Scary s*&^. And given the lethal combination of (1) a corrupt to the core ruling party in control of all branches of government; (2) a complicit press, (3) a moribund opposition party, (4) gerrymandered districts, (5) less...