Lindsay, writing at In These Times, asks the musical question:

President Pervez, a/k/a our man in Islamabad, while jailing lawyers and students and dissidents (oh my)… has begun releasing captured Taliban, including the highest ranking Taliban in Pakistani custody. Not much we can do: the DeciderTM says Pervez is our man, and nothing– NOTHING– he does will change that (until, say, 21 January 2009, anyway).

His unreconstructed racism, his cocksure arrogance, his personal nastiness, his incompetent governance (which, quite frankly, must be recognized to include failing, despite clear warning, to provide adequate emergency communications equipment to firefighters and to locate the emergency response center in the likeliest target), and his clear likelihood of following in Dubya’s footsteps as a xenophobic institutional torturer (Abner Louima anyone?)… all seem to be features, rather than bugs, as St. Rudy Giuliani marches toward the Republican nomination (NOT: his front-runner-ness is actually by and large a media creation, insofar as the actually moderate and not bat-shit-insane-like-Rudy Mitt Romney is way...

As the “emergency” rolls on, former PM Benazir “Pinky” Bhutto has planned a massive (though banned) political rally for Rawalpindi, near the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. Pres./Gen. Musharraf has already said he would have “an election” by mid-February, though he will doubtless win that “election”, as everyone has figured out by this point. Revelations have come out recently that billions went to Pakistan in the form of a blank U.S. check to “fight terrorism”… “terrorism”, evidently defined as “India”. And of course, there is Pakistani nuclear proliferation… like nuclear powers America and Russia, Musharraf has a fellow follow him around...

A vote for Mitt Romney is a vote for Satan. Dershowitz says Democrats will lose the White House unless they embrace torture (like he has). The Clintons killed Kathleen Willey’s husband Ed (just ask her). Just more grist for the mill of the nation where 25% of us believe the rapture will occur this year. This has been… “It’s on the web so it must be true.”

Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow, nor earthquakes, nor support of nuclear proliferation or Islamist extremists nor imposition of martial law will interfere with American aid from making its rounds into Pakistan. The bet was “all in” on Pervez Musharraf, and so, boys and girls, that’s that. [Perhaps, like another double-dealing politician from the Islamic world always willing to tell us what we wanted to hear, we might call him… Mush-arraf-at– say it three times fast… naaaaaa…] There’s nothing Pres. Gen. Musharraf can do that will piss off the United States enough to, well, do anything about it, whether that...

After last month’s horrors involving the death of a marathoner and hospitalization of hundreds of runners at the unseasonably warm Chicago Marathon, and the death of yet another runner at D.C.’s Army Ten-Miler, I was hoping that we had come to the end of tragedies in the sport, at least for a while (my sport… I’ll be taking my chances– and apparently I do mean chances– in my seventh consecutive ING New York City Marathon tomorrow)… the running world (and the world) is shocked by the collapse and death during the U.S. Men’s Olympic Trials in New York’s Central Park...

Care of our friends at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, we give you this thoughtful suggestion on what the Senate could do now that two key “Democratic” members of the Judiciary Committee (Chuck “The Whore” Schumer from my own state and Diane “Sellout/Neocon Enabler” Feinstein from California) will back Judge Michael Mukasey to be our next attorney general, no matter what. (My own thoughts on Mukasey may be found here.) BTW, I still like Mukasey even as it appears his son works for Rudy! That said, John Dean’s suggestion, that Mukasey be appointed with a quid pro quo, i.e., he...

Perhaps another sign of the Apocalpyse… who knows? But John Cole, who, back in those halcyon pre-Iraq war days when I was doing the Dog Run as the Encyclopedia Blogospherica, was solidly in my right wing grouping (though he considered himself more moderate than the views on his site… and he has always proven to be a thoughtful and independent thinker). Today, John Cole tells us he has joined the Democratic Party, and so registered. Look: anyone who believes in the rule of law, fiscal sanity, caution before engaging in foreign adventures… hell, in any principle at all besides blind...

Not sure what to make of this WaPo account of Democrats’ bizarre and sudden emergence of a backbone with respect to an otherwise pretty good nominee, Michael Mukasey, the President’s choice for the next attorney general. When he was on the bench here in New York, Mukasey was regarded as a very good judge, who by and large, kept his politics to himself; even in Padilla, he figured out a way to repudiate the Bush Administration’s position finding that Jose Padilla had a right to counsel and a right to some kind of hearing, even if he didn’t quite find...