I guess the only thing really going on tonight is the Academy Awards, so here is a thread to pick the winners.
Archives for 2009
CBS Sunday Morning
I’m picking out a thermos for you.
Speaking of morons, here is agood review of Eastbound and Down, which I saw last week completely by accident.
Saturday Night Open Thread
Watching Taking Chance on HBO and torturing the cat, myself.
No Such Thing As Partly Pregnant
Today, an all-time epic edition of it sucks being right. When last we checked in the Bush torture regime left Obama with a cute sophie’s choice between keeping even one guilty “war on terror” prisoner in custody and respecting the Constitution. Obama has an instinct for technically elegant middle ground solutions that often serves him well, but it will do nothing for him here. This is one of those cases where either you are pregnant or you are not. The way we treated virtually every muslim prisoner will annul any legitimate trial whether we hold it in the conventional courts or under the UCMJ.
In fact the truth is worse. While we tortured ordinary prisoners and denied them due process, the breathtaking abuse that we heaped on legitimate threats like Khaled Sheikh Mohammed makes them the most protected under American law. America put Japanese and Germans to death for significantly less than we did to any high value detainee in an orange jumpsuit. Clawing America back to Constitutional legitimacy will force the President to make decisions that will hurt a lot more than any part of fixing our truck-flattened economy.
Despite all that, and even granting that Obama hates to rock a boat, the President has a halfway decent staff, especially at DoJ, and he makes more tough decisions than most leaders. The optimist in me guessed that the Constitution has a fifty-fifty chance; the realist figured that at least I don’t have to listen to Sarah Palin all the time.
But the new administration faced a February 20 deadline to tell U.S. District Court Judge John Bates whether it would “refine” the Bush administration’s position on four men being held at Bagram who have filed suit against their detention.
In a brief filing with the court on Friday, the Justice Department said it would stick to the previous government’s position, which argued the four men — who have been detained at Bagram for over six years — had no right to challenge their detention in a U.S. court.
Hey, look at Sarah Palin being stupid. Ha ha. Sigh.
Innocent bystanders
No one could have anticipated that becoming the main spokesman for the McCain campaign would bring Joe the Plumber a lot of media attention. And it’s fair to compare him to people who ask questions during town hall meetings.
As the latest victim, Hughes joined a growing collateral damage club that includes Anita Esterday, the Iowa waitress tossed into the presidential campaign meat grinder after Hillary Clinton allegedly failed to tip her; Trina Bachtel, an Ohio woman whose death was campaign fodder for weeks after Clinton referred to her plight; Barack Obama’s aunt, Zeituni Onyango, outed for living in Boston after her worker’s visa expired the weekend before Election Day; and Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as “Joe the Plumber.”
Wurzelbacher, some would argue, had it coming. He was only too glad to embrace the spotlight after a brief campaign trail encounter with Obama where he asked the future president a loaded question on taxes.
He was working an angle, to be sure, but Wurzelbacher couldn’t have anticipated the firestorm he would soon get caught up in.
Healthy Duckies
I was going to make fun of this Michael Gerson column, but Digby beat me to it.
I’m now to the point that I no longer consider the Washington Post one of the country’s premier newspapers. The editorial pages are as bad or worse than the WSJ.
But The Powerline’s Sand Table Exercises Said It Was Impossible For a Bradley To Run Over a Dog
A court martial for Sgt. Michael Leahy:
A US soldier has been convicted of murder for his involvement in the killing of four Iraqis who were shot and dumped in a Baghdad canal in 2007.
Sgt Michael Leahy Jr had confessed to investigators that he shot an Iraqi in the back of the head from close range.
His lawyers argued that the stress of being in a conflict zone for so long meant he was unable to reason properly.
Who is Sgt. Michael Leahy? One of four men from Scott Beauchamp’s unit who is charged with the murders, including Beauchamp’s old first sergeant, who wrote the following completely and totally unprofessional letter at the height of the affair, publicly scolding Beauchamp:
I’m not in the habit of answering these email’s. It would be far too many. I appreciate all the support from home and I can assure you that not a single word of this was true. We’ve been fighting this fight for quite some time. Numerous soldiers within my unit have served on several deployments and this is my third year as a First Sergeant in this unit. My soldiers conduct is consistently honorable. This soldier has other underlining issues which I’m sure will come out in the course of the investigation. No one at any of the post we live at or frequent, remotely fit the descriptions of any of the persons depicted in this young man’s fairy tale.
This was widely and gleefully spread around by the usual suspects, most of whom never spent one day in uniform and whose entire military experience consists of masturbating while reading Michael Yon and a semi-weekly viewing of Red Dawn. Clearly there needs to be a truth commission set up to free Leahy, as we were assured by Michael Goldfarb and the rest of the wankers that no one would even make fun of a woman in a cafeteria, let alone execute someone in cold blood.
For those of you who don’t understand the title of this post, go here. And for the record, Scott Beauchamp is still, to this day, serving his country honorably in uniform, and Michael Goldfarb is still an asshole.