Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

If you’re gonna whine, it’s time to resign!

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

The world has changed, and neither one recognizes it.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

Come on, man.

In my day, never was longer.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

The republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

She burned that motherfucker down, and I am so here for it. Thank you, Caroline Kennedy.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

“Just close your eyes and kiss the girl and go where the tilt-a-whirl takes you.” ~OzarkHillbilly

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

You are here: Home / 2006 / Archives for December 2006

Archives for December 2006

Hanging Saddam

by | 263 Comments

This post is in: ,

The NY Times:

The important question was never really about whether Saddam Hussein was guilty of crimes against humanity. The public record is bulging with the lengthy litany of his vile and unforgivable atrocities: genocidal assaults against the Kurds; aggressive wars against Iran and Kuwait; use of internationally banned weapons like nerve gas; systematic torture of countless thousands of political prisoners.

What really mattered was whether an Iraq freed from his death grip could hold him accountable in a way that nurtured hope for a better future. A carefully conducted, scrupulously fair trial could have helped undo some of the damage inflicted by his rule. It could have set a precedent for the rule of law in a country scarred by decades of arbitrary vindictiveness. It could have fostered a new national unity in an Iraq long manipulated through its religious and ethnic divisions.

It could have, but it didn’t. After a flawed, politicized and divisive trial, Mr. Hussein was handed his sentence: death by hanging. This week, in a cursory 15-minute proceeding, an appeals court upheld that sentence and ordered that it be carried out posthaste. Most Iraqis are now so preoccupied with shielding their families from looming civil war that they seem to have little emotion left to spend on Mr. Hussein or, more important, on their own fading dreams of a new and better Iraq.

What might have been a watershed now seems another lost opportunity. After nearly four years of war and thousands of American and Iraqi deaths, it is ever harder to be sure whether anything fundamental has changed for the better in Iraq.

I don’t know whether it will change anything, and I do not question Hussein’s guilt, regardless what kind of trial he may or may not have had. I think that is the only absolute truth that surrounds this whole mess in Iraq- any way you cut it, Hussein was a murderous thug. NBC is reporting that Hussein will be dead by Sunday, and I am under no illusion that his execution will solve any problems in Iraq, although it may ease the minds of his many victims. Perhaps a public or televised execution would serve that end.

Finally, even though I know he is guilty, and deserves to die, I still can not help but look at the pictures of the gallows and get a chill. There is something so final, so irreversible, so barbaric and primitive about capital punishment (in particular, hanging) that I still can not embrace it, even for scum like Hussein. Advocates of capital punishment will tell you that the finality and the barbaric aspect of the act are features, not bugs.

I am not so sure.

Hanging SaddamPost + Comments (263)

Don’t Worry About The Polar Bears

by | 95 Comments

This post is in: 

Hilzoy among many others has a touching piece on the recent decision to reclassify the polar bear Ursa maritimus as endangered. The reasons are fairly obvious. Polar bears have adapted to hunt marine mammals which depend on stable holes on the contiguous sheet of pack ice which once covered the Arctic Ocean in winter. In line with predictions for greenhouse warming the coldest parts of the Earth have warmed first, leaving polar bears with less and less pack ice on which to hunt every year. As the ice shrinks it pulls farther from shore and the patches pull back farther from each other, forcing polar bears to swim much farther than they ever have before. For that reason the bodies of exhausted, drowned polar bears have lately been spotted with alarming frequency. If things don’t turn around the species will die.

Hilzoy lists several things that we should do anyway, but don’t expect to save the polar bear. Global climate has a massive lag time between input and output. If we stopped producing any carbon today we would still have global levels far above anything seen since times when the Earth was much warmer. Bear in mind that global climate is really driven by the top few hundred meters of the sea, which has absorbed as much as half of all human-produced carbon and contains far more heat energy than the atmosphere. For climate to start changing back the ocean has to change back as well, and in the best of cases it will take years for the oceans to lose their thermal energy and breathe out the massive stores of carbon that they have already absorbed. Current trends such as carbon-driven acidification will need to turn around, and it won’t happen fast.

Let’s imagine that America manages to convince the global community to manage our carbon. That would take years and probably a new government on our part, but just put it out there. Even if the policies worked we would have some years to wait before anybody felt a difference. Take the polar bear’s desperate situation today, extrapolate ten years into the future and you have a dead species. I suppose that a sad subpopulation lingering in manmade zoos should count for something, but they will be permanent strangers from the world where they existed as a wild species.

Let me clear up one misunderstanding then: we won’t save the polar bears. The fate of Arctic sea ice was sealed some time during the Clinton era if not sooner. We should enact serious carbon mitigation policies not for the animals which are already at the brink, most of which will soon be gone, but for the endangered species we don’t know about yet. Odds are that some will prove more important to people than the distant polar bear.

***Update***

I should correct myself before anybody else does – the polar bear has been proposed to be threatened, not endangered. While I don’t doubt that the next step will come in its own time, we aren’t there yet.

Don’t Worry About The Polar BearsPost + Comments (95)

KMBA Watch

by | 22 Comments

This post is in: 

Congress edition.

Republicans see the ability to force tough votes — which they avoided in the majority by stifling Democratic alternatives — as having two potential benefits: It can put vulnerable Democrats on record with positions that might not be popular at home, or it can fracture the untested Democratic majority. Mr. Blunt noted that even senior Democrats who served in Congress when Democrats held control had no experience dealing with a relatively thin, 16-seat majority that will not allow many lawmakers to avoid tough votes.

Democratic leaders said that in the spirit of a new beginning, they have every intention of allowing Republicans the kind of legislative opportunities that Republicans regularly denied Democrats. “Democracy is a risk,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the incoming majority leader. “And democracy is about alternatives.”

This should hardly surprise anybody. The GOP behaved like children when in power and they show every sign of carrying right on with more of the same. If anything the Republicans’ minority position will inflame the victim complex which has fueled the worst aspects of rightwing behavior over the last umpteen years.

KMBA WatchPost + Comments (22)

I Read The Powerline So You Don’t Have To

by | 228 Comments

This post is in: 

Today they are in a tiff because Ford had opinions on the Iraq War:

Ford told Woodward not to publish his views until after his death, but apparently said once he died they could be published at any time. It’s easy to understand the first part of the decision — why would Ford, at his age, want to participate in a contentious policy debate? But Ford has been criticized for not telling Woodward to wait until, say, the end of the Bush administration to reveal his views. Either Ford felt strongly enough about the matter that he wanted his opinion in the mix sooner rather than later (but not so soon that he would become embroiled in the debate) or he didn’t think things through very carefully.

JOHN adds: I would group this together with the Jeffrey Hart story Scott discusses below, under the heading “elderly apostates.” I find it interesting that many on the left who viewed Professor Hart’s work over his entire adult life with contempt, now cite him as a sort of sage when he criticizes President Bush. Likewise with Gerald Ford. Out of public life for a quarter-century and aged ninety, his views on the Iraq war are not especially noteworthy, except insofar as they can be used to discredit the present administration. If Ford had endorsed Bush’s Iraq policy in his interview with Bob Woodward, would we ever have heard about it? I doubt it.

Shorter Powerline: Ford’s opinions should be ignored, because, if in some alternate universe, he had favored the war, the liberal media would not have reported it.

Bill Bennett is also in a huff because Ford voicing his opinions was indecent:

Since “decency” seems to be the watchword of the day and the consensus modifier for Jerry Ford (a view with which I generally concur), may I nevertheless be permitted to ask this: just how decent, how courageous, is what Jerry Ford did with Bob Woodward? He slams Bush & Cheney to Woodward in 2004, but asks Woodward not to print the interview until he’s dead. If he felt so strongly about his words having a derogatory affect, how about telling Woodward not to run the interview until after Bush & Cheney are out of office? The effect of what Ford did is to protect himself, ensuring he can’t be asked by others about his critiques, ensuring that there can be no dialogue. The way Ford does it with Woodward, he doesn’t have to defend himself…he simply drops it into Bob Woodward’s tape recorder and let’s the bomb go off when fully out of range, himself. This is not courage, this is not decent.

Bennett then goes on to offer up some more “manly” options (paging the General, himself an 11 on the scale of manly), all of which are absurd. At any rate, the reason Ford did not speak out is because all of the aforementioned blowhards would have savaged him for not keeping his opinions to himself, as former President’s are ‘supposed to do’. I think we can all agree that had Ford come out against the war, these same knuckleheads would have called him Jimmy Carter Ford or the like.

As every day passes, it becomes clearer and clearer that the GOP needs to be destroyed, purged, and rebuilt from the ground up. Praise the lord and pass the ammunition, I say.

I Read The Powerline So You Don’t Have ToPost + Comments (228)

Sick of the Mouthpieces

by | 111 Comments

This post is in: , ,

I really am sick of the noisemakers in the GOP. It is why, while my positions on most issues have not changed over the past few years, my allegiance to the Republican Party is all but over. Perfect example- this Power Line post mocking John Kerry:

On his visit to Iraq, Senator Kerry apparently got something like the silent treatment from the troops who are “stuck” there. WDAY’s Scott Hennen quotes a message from a friend serving in Iraq:

This is a true story….Check out this photo from our mess hall at the US Embassy yesterday morning. Sen. Kerry found himself all alone while he was over here. He cancelled his press conference because no one came, he worked out alone in the gym w/o any soldiers even going up to say hi or ask for an autograph (I was one of those who was in the gym at the same time), and he found himself eating breakfast with only a couple of folks who are obviously not troops.

What is amazing is Bill O’Reilly came to visit with us and the troops at the CSH the same day and the line for autographs extended through the palace and people waited for two hours to shake his hand. You decide who is more respected and loved by us servicemen and women!

I don’t even like Kerry, yet I am just sick of this carping nonsense. Add to it, Kerry didn’t even insult the troops- the spin machine and noice machine turned his flubbed line into an insult. Regardless, Kerry isn’t the reason we are in this mess, and Kerry, unlike the Powerline folks, is actually over there trying to do something about it.

But, with the current GOP and their noisemakers, that really doesn’t matter. What matters is they have a meme that works for their political advantage, and mocking a Senator who chose to spend his holidays with the troops is perferrable to actually discussing the sad realities on the ground, created in part by the pigheaded cheerleading and know-nothing pontificating of the Powerline and their ilk.

I don’t like John Kerry, but I will take him over over the Powerline. I guess that means the terrorists are winning here at Balloon Juice.

Sick of the MouthpiecesPost + Comments (111)

RIP, Gerald Ford

by | 49 Comments

This post is in: 

A good man, by all accounts:

Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr., 93, who became the 38th president of the United States as a result of some of the most extraordinary events in U.S. history and sought to restore the nation’s confidence in the basic institutions of government, has died. His wife, Betty, reported the death in a statement last night.

“My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather has passed away at 93 years of age,” Betty Ford said in a brief statement issued from her husband’s office in Rancho Mirage, Calif. “His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country.”

Ford died at 6:45 p.m. Tuesday (PST) at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., about 130 miles east of Los Angeles, the Associated Press reported. No cause of death was given.

Still not sure if I agree with his pardon of Nixon (maybe some swift justice for Nixon would have nipped the cronyism, corruption, and lawlessness that seems pervasive on Capitol Hill), but by all accounts, Ford was a good man who tried to do the right things. RIP.

RIP, Gerald FordPost + Comments (49)