Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

You cannot shame the shameless.

Let me file that under fuck it.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

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

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

Humiliatingly small and eclipsed by the derision of millions.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

T R E 4 5 O N

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

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Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Happy Stories, Already!

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Sometimes all you can do is try to make a positive difference in a world of criminal awfulness. Maybe it’s not enough, but it’s better than nothing. From Slate:

When a grand jury decided not to charge police officer Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown just over two weeks ago, the aftershocks of the decision wreaked havoc on the Ferguson community. Pubic schools closed and stores shuttered their windows as protesters took to the streets in the tumultuous aftermath. Throughout it all, however, the Ferguson public library remained open as scheduled.

In the two weeks since the grand jury decision, individuals from around the country looking to help in some way began donating money and books to the Ferguson Municipal Public Library. Social media helped spread the word, and on Monday Ferguson library director Scott Bonner announced the library had received more than $350,000 in contributions. The two-week total nearly matched the library’s annual budget…

On a different hot news topic, Brendan Nyhan, at the NYTimes Upshot blog:

… Most accounts of sexual assault never reach this level of awareness, however. Few are even reported. One reason is that reporting systems on college campuses and in the criminal justice system are widely regarded as unfriendly to victims. In particular, even though research suggests that many rapists engage in repeated attacks, survivors of sexual assault are rarely aware of other victims or able to come forward together.

Callisto, an online sexual assault reporting system under development by a nonprofit called Sexual Health Innovations, aims to change this and provide better options for victims of sexual assault on college campuses…

Ms. Ladd describes Callisto as meeting the need for reporting systems that “keep the survivor in control of their own data and their own choices.” According to the organization, it will allow users to create time-stamped reports that are saved in the system, which is not accessible to administrators or law enforcement. Users may choose to submit a report to campus authorities immediately or store the information and return to it later once they have made a choice about whether to report. Most notably, users are provided with the option to automatically submit their report if another student reports being attacked by the same person, creating shared awareness of a possible serial perpetrator who might otherwise not be identified to campus authorities…

And touching a third horrible topic, Kevin Cullen in the Boston Globe:

Last Thursday, not long after the funeral for his wife’s grandmother, a Boston lawyer named Michael Mone stepped outside a restaurant in Amsterdam, N.Y., to talk on his cellphone with his client, Ali Hussain Shaabaan.

Thirteen years ago, when Shaabaan was 19, he was detained as he tried to cross from Afghanistan into Pakistan. The border guards handed him over to the US military and collected a very nice bounty. He got shipped to the prison in Guantanamo, where some guy he doesn’t know claimed all sorts of things about Shaabaan: that he was a terrorist from Syria, that he came to Afghanistan to wage jihad, that he fought with Osama bin Laden in the mountains at Tora Bora, that he trained to be a suicide bomber. It was a great story, except there wasn’t a shred of evidence, just the word of some shady guy who claims to have the dirt on about half the guys ever held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

“You’re getting out,” Mike Mone told Ali Hussain Shaabaan. “Sunday.”

Shaabaan probably didn’t believe him, but he signed off, saying goodbye the way Mone always ended their meetings: “I’ll see you on the other side.” The other side was the airport at Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, where Mike Mone was waiting when Ali Shaabaan walked off a plane, a free man…

Mone has argued for years that the case against Shaabaan was the fantasy of a guy who would tell his captors anything they wanted to hear and then some. Shaabaan was cleared for release five years ago, but he lingered in Guantanamo because he’s from Syria, and if he went back to Syria he’d probably be killed. He has no intention of going back, Mone says. He’s learning Spanish.

“There’s no evidence he did anything wrong,” said Mone. “In fact, I just saw a letter the US government gave the Uruguayans, admitting they had no evidence that he did anything wrong, that he was involved in any terrorist activities.”

Jerry Cohen, another Boston lawyer, and Buz Eisenberg, a lawyer in Greenfield, say the same thing about their client, a Palestinian named Mohammed Abdullah Taha Mattan. Mattan, 35, and Shaabaan were among six longtime Guantanamo detainees who were resettled in Uruguay on Sunday…

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Apart from looking on the bright side, what’s on the agenda for the day?

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Late Night Open Thread: What Just Floated to the Top of the Media Septic Tank

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There is an argument to be made against giving malevolent crazy people the attention they crave. And, yes, I’ve made that argument myself. But I can’t resist mocking the media jeenyuses at Tucker Carlson’s Vanity Project. Let us join Gawker‘s J.K. Trotter in mid-spate…

The Daily Caller Can’t Quit Chuck Johnson
You may be aware that Charles C. Johnson of GotNews.com had a role in several notorious (and false) stories published by Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller. Yes, this includes the infamous debunked article—to which Johnson “contributed reporting”—about New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez supposedly soliciting prostitutes in the Dominican Republic.

But today the conservative news site is trying to distance itself from its most famous former contributor. Why? Because the Washington Post decided to highlight Johnson’s tenure at the online rag…

The Daily Caller gave Johnson one of the largest platforms in conservative media, in part because Johnson wouldn’t hesitate to publish absolutely anything. The same pattern holds today. So it’s long past due for the website to acknowledge, and understand, its role in creating Charles C. Johnson. The world will be a slightly better place.

Further details, as always, at the link. Also, for once, it’s worth reading the comments on all three linked stories, for gems like “cat’s asshole of a mouth”, “Glen Beck and Ann Coulter’s test tube bastard“, and “He’s like if Newt Gingrich and George F. Will had a giant baby.”

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Torture and the Vicious Circle

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… While the CIA has said publicly that it held about 100 detainees, the committee found that at least 119 people were in the agency’s custody.

“The fact is they lost track and they didn’t really know who they were holding,” the Senate aide said, noting that investigators found emails in which CIA personnel were “surprised” to find some people in their custody. The CIA also determined that at least 26 of its detainees were wrongfully held. Due to the agency’s poor record-keeping, it may never be known precisely how many detainees were held, and how they were treated in custody, the committee found….

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Open Thread

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I am about halfway through the report, and I simply can not believe what I am reading. There is honestly nothing that Hayden has not lied about. Nothing. I know we are never going to force that man to see the inside of a jail cell, but he ought to at least have his pension removed. Scumbag.

Speaking of scumbags, check out this guy named Ben Edelman, a professor at Harvard, who is raising sheer hell against a family run Chinese take-out business because their online menu was not the same as the in-store menu, so he was overcharged by… $4 dollars. He is, of course, a lawyer, and surprisingly not an MBA as well.

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Thermite At A Funeral

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Ta-Nehisi Coates comes not to praise The New Republic, but to bury it under big neon signs pointing to evidence that it was a festering canker of “liberal” racist drivel.  He gives the publication and its more famous staff no less than they deserve.

That explains why the family rows at TNR’s virtual funeral look like the “Whites Only” section of a Jim Crow-era movie-house. For most its modern history, TNR has been an entirely white publication, which published stories confirming white people’s worst instincts. During the culture wars of the ’80s and ’90s, TNR regarded black people with an attitude ranging from removed disregard to blatant bigotry. When people discuss TNR’s racism, Andrew Sullivan’s publication of excerpts from Charles Murray’s book The Bell Curve (and a series of dissents) gets the most attention. But this fuels the lie that one infamous issue stands apart. In fact, the Bell Curve episode is remarkable for how well it fits with the rest of TNR’s history.

The personal attitude of TNR’s longtime owner, the bigoted Martin Peretz, should be mentioned here. Peretz’s dossier of racist hits (mostly at the expense of blacks and Arabs) is shameful, and one does not have to look hard to find evidence of it in Peretz’s writing or in the sensibility of the magazine during his ownership. In 1984, long before Sullivan was tapped to helm TNR, Charles Murray was dubbing affirmative action a form of “new racism” that targeted white people.

Two years later, Washington Post writer Richard Cohen was roundly rebuked for advocating that D.C. jewelry stores discriminate against young black men—but not by TNR. The magazine took the opportunity to convene a panel to “reflect briefly” on whether it was moral for merchants to bar black men from their stores. (“Expecting a jewelry store owner to risk his life in the service of color-blind justice is expecting too much,” the magazine concluded.)

TNR made a habit of “reflecting briefly” on matters that were life and death to black people but were mostly abstract thought experiments to the magazine’s editors. Before, during, and after Sullivan’s tenure, the magazine seemed to believe that the kind of racism that mattered most was best evidenced in the evils of Afrocentrism, the excesses of multiculturalism, and the machinations of Jesse Jackson. It’s true that TNR’s staff roundly objected to excerpting The Bell Curve, but I was never quite sure why. Sullivan was simply exposing the dark premise that lay beneath much of the magazine’s coverage of America’s ancient dilemma.

And Coates continues with his vicious slashing, like a literary velociraptor let loose in a sheep pasture, the whole article is breathtaking. Was everybody at the magazine complicit in this?  No, but that’s irrelevant, frankly. As far as I’m concerned, Chris Hughes’s massive techbro hubris actually did the world a favor for once, and mortally wounded something that should have been taken out back and shot years ago. And Sully, Marty Peretz, Charles Murray, Stephen Glass, all those guys can go straight to the septic tank of history as far as I’m concerned along with their damn “liberal” New Republic.

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Still Reading

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Still reading the report. It’s as bad as we knew and worse. Fuckers.

I’m recommending not watching cable news because the apologists will drive you insane. I’ve got season 1 of Vikings going on in the background. I might watch Chris Hayes at 8, but I don’t think I want to deal with this report and all the bobbleheads at the same time.

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Open thread

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I tried saying some things about the report, but in the end it looked like a better idea if I did not. I think I need a little time before I can be as coherent as I’d like to be.

All the same, oy.

In 2009, the Pew Research Center found that 49 percent of the public said that “the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information” can “often” or “sometimes” be justified. This belief was held by 64 percent of Republicans, 54 percent of Independents and 36 percent of Democrats.

Including the number who say that torture can rarely be justified, 71 percent of Americans accept torture under some circumstances.

Maybe Mitch McConnell’s idiot parade is exactly the leadership we deserve.

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