Enemy Combatant
Sunday, June 29, 2003
from Jeff Hauser's blog:
EASY POLITICAL PICKINGS, ONE HOPES
A) ALTERMAN: "House Democrats were voted down last week on a party-line vote in their effort to restore huge cuts to military family housing, paid for by a slight reduction in scheduled tax cuts for millionaires. Hereís what Army Times had to say: ìTaken piecemeal, all these [GOP] corner-cutting moves might be viewed as mere flesh wounds. But even flesh wounds are fatal if you suffer enough of them. It adds up to a troubling pattern that eventually will hurt morale ó especially if the current breakneck operations tempo also rolls on unchecked and the tense situations in Iraq and Afghanistan do not ease.î http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=0-ARMYPAPER-1954515.php†; more at http://www.msnbc.com/news/752664.asp#030627†, but the best account is by Daily Kos, who is himself a veteran: http://www.dailykos.com/archives/003195.html#003195
Remember, many swing state swing voters know people in the military.† A very, very good issue here, if properly played up in a niche way, or used as a broader symbol.† It's clear that the Dem nominee will need to offer a VERY detailed alternative budget/tax plan.
Dem candidates need to ignore Adrenal Boy in the faux Jodhpurs and Epaulettes, screaming in their faces, and talk DIRECTLY to America's military, and their families: Bush has a real barnburner of a defense plan, but ever see what's left AFTER the barn burns? Yeah, well . . . you can bet Bush never has.
We can't go on like this, folks. We've got each foot in a separate new Vietnam, and we keep on whacking more hornet's nests, everywhere we find them. This is no way to run a foreign policy.
Saturday, June 28, 2003
Let's not overlook this tidbit in Lawrence v. Texas:
FROM THE DISSENT By Justice Thomas
I write separately to note that the law before the Court today "is . . . uncommonly silly." If I were a member of the Texas Legislature, I would vote to repeal it. Punishing someone for expressing his sexual preference through noncommercial consensual conduct with another adult does not appear to be a worthy way to expend valuable law enforcement resources. . . .
OK, now, a show of hands: How many of you believe, if Clarence Thomas really were "a member of the Texas legislature," he'd risk his position by defying the knuckledraggers who voted him into office, and vote to end the continued criminalization of homosexual sodomy in Texas?
Anyone? Anyone?
Didn't think so.
[Psst: Clarence. The interview's over; you already GOT the job.
You can stop the LYING now!]
Thursday, June 26, 2003
"Texas is one of the few remaining States that criminalize private, consensual homosexual acts. But persuading one's fellow citizens is one thing, and imposing one's views in absence of democratic majority will is something else."
What, SCALIA -- the driving force behind the Supreme Court's triple-play interference with Election 2000 --- actually wrote those words, and wasn't immediately struck down by lightning?
There is no God; I rest my case.
Tuesday, June 10, 2003
Clip and save the concatenation of lies, spin, blather and misleading obfuscations here.
Is there any question, if this were Our Last Elected President (Without Supreme Court Intervention), this clip-n-sav LieList would be Exhibit A at his impeachment?
Thursday, June 05, 2003
from the Village Voice:
Why the "Dirty Bomber" Case Threatens Everyone's Rights
A Lifetime in Limbo
by Chisun Lee
June 4 - 10, 2003
He disappeared down the rabbit hole.
A year ago this week Jose Padilla, nabbed while on a visit to Chicago, was taken into military custody and sealed off from the rest of the world. To date, the government continues to deny the Brooklyn native a right all Americans take for granted: to tell his side of the story.
The public was told back then that his banishment was their salvation. Attorney General John Ashcroft, the nation's top law enforcer, revealed in a dramatic announcement via satellite from Moscow, "We have disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive dirty bomb." The day before, June 9, 2002, President George W. Bush had deemed Padilla so grave a threat to national security that he ordered him held incommunicado until the war on terrorism was over.
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0323/lee.php
I'll tell you, as a practicing lawyer who's always thought the Constitution would just plod along, with more-or-less minor veers to the right and left, I find the very concept of an American gulag, beyond the reach of the American justice system entirely, equal parts mind-boggling and revolting. It scares the hell out of me, frankly. MORE than terrorism.
Tuesday, June 03, 2003
Eat your heart out, Ari Fleischer: Rumor has it, Bush's NEXT press secretary will be a "rocket scientist":
One of the problems with explaining Quantum Iraqi Invasion Nano-Dynamics to the layman is that many of its most fundamental results can be so counter-intuitive. For example, consider the WMD wave function, which describes (or, more precisely, whose square describes) how the probability of finding WMD caches in Iraq changes over time and space. In a 24-dimensional manifold, this wave function conserves Einstein symmetries when rotated about any non-forbidden Higgs-Frum conjugate axis. What this implies is that any non-degenerate WMD particle is, when viewed from an eigenaxis, its own anti-particle, which means it instantly annihilates itself in inverse hyperbolic anti-time, causing the Big Bang to happen. Hence, in a seeming paradox, the absence of WMD in Iraq not only proves that they exist, but also explains how our universe came to be created from nothing. Seems strange, but physics tells us that this is not only logically consistent, but logically required. And, conversely, if we did find WMD, it could very easily set in motion a set of processes which would cause the universe to wink out of existence entirely, something which would no doubt please far Left moral relativists like Jim Jeffords and Brent Scowcroft. Or else they fell through a wormhole into Syria.
