First, a video:
What better place to post the President meeting the SuperBowl Champions Steelers than a thread for the soon to be Stanley Cup Champion Pittsburgh Penguins!
by John Cole| 46 Comments
This post is in: Sports
First, a video:
What better place to post the President meeting the SuperBowl Champions Steelers than a thread for the soon to be Stanley Cup Champion Pittsburgh Penguins!
This post is in: Cat Blogging, Dog Blogging, Open Threads
Some more of your pets going Galt:
Claim your pets!
*** Update ***
By popular request, a freshly furminated Tunch playing with his favorite toy while lying on his favorite blanket, still warm from air drying in the afternoon sun. It is good to be king.
More after the fold.
I can’t believe I spend this much time and money on an animal who holds me in such utter contempt. I can’t wait to get another.
This post is in: War on Terror aka GSAVE®
What on earth does this mean:
President Obama told human rights advocates at the White House on Wednesday that he was mulling the need for a “preventive detention” system that would establish a legal basis for the United States to incarcerate terrorism suspects who are deemed a threat to national security but cannot be tried, two participants in the private session said.
The discussion, in a 90-minute meeting in the Cabinet Room that included Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and other top administration officials, came on the eve of a much-anticipated speech Mr. Obama is to give Thursday on a a number of thorny national security matters, including his promise to close the detention center at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Can anyone explain what exactly preventive detention means other than holding people indefinitely without evidence or charges? Reading through the speech he gave this morning, this is the relevant portion:
Now, finally, there remains the question of detainees at Guantanamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people. And I have to be honest here — this is the toughest single issue that we will face. We’re going to exhaust every avenue that we have to prosecute those at Guantanamo who pose a danger to our country. But even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States. Examples of that threat include people who’ve received extensive explosives training at al Qaeda training camps, or commanded Taliban troops in battle, or expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans. These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.
Let me repeat: I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture — like other prisoners of war — must be prevented from attacking us again. Having said that, we must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded. They can’t be based simply on what I or the executive branch decide alone. That’s why my administration has begun to reshape the standards that apply to ensure that they are in line with the rule of law. We must have clear, defensible, and lawful standards for those who fall into this category. We must have fair procedures so that we don’t make mistakes. We must have a thorough process of periodic review, so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified.
This is the conundrum Tim F. has talked about before, and I honestly have no idea what to do with them, as there really appears to be no good option. Having said that, if your ears don’t perk up when you hear Orwellian nonsense like “preventive detention,” you just haven’t been paying attention the last eight years. All the rest of Obama’s speech seems to me to be reasonable, rational, and legal (at least to me). The decision here is really the whole ball of wax.
This post is in: War on Terror aka GSAVE®
CNN just had James Inhofe on talking about how we could not bring the Gitmo folks to the states because they are too dangerous, and it reminded me of something that has been bothering me the last few days. There seems to be an effort to pretend that we chose to put these people in Gitmo for security reasons.
That is simply nonsense on stilts. It was little more than barbed-wire and plywood when we started detaining them there, and we had to build the damned place. We didn’t put the detainees there because it was super secure. We put them there so there would be no controlling legal authority and we could do whatever the hell we wanted with them.
I’m really tired of people making things up.
This post is in: Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.
Haven’t read the President’s speech yet, but I do find it kind of amazing that Cheney is offering up a national security speech. It is just weird to have a former VP out there openly sabotaging a new administration, and make no mistake about it, that is what Cheney is doing. He is openly attempting to damage or deny this current administration’s ability to craft national security policy. Republicans have a funny way of showing patriotism, I guess.
But what is really weird is that they seem to have just given up any pretense that Bush was anything other than an empty suit. Between Dick’s multiple pronouncements, his really odd response on MTP in which he said “I guess the President had been briefed,” and stunts like this speech today, Cheney is basically telling you who the HMFIC for the last eight years was, and he wasn’t a legacy frat boy from Connecticut.
Not that anyone ever suspected any less.
by John Cole| 46 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity
Same great taste but less filling:
The Republican National Committee backed away Wednesday from a resolution that officially called Democrats the “Democrat Socialist Party,” but instead voted to condemn Democrats for what it called a “march toward socialism.”
The voice-vote came after an unusual special meeting of the party that underlined fractures among Republicans on how to deal with President Obama and the Democratic Party. The original resolution was backed by some of the party’s more conservative members but was opposed by the party chairman, Michael Steele, as well as other Republican leaders. The opponents said the proposal to impose a new name on the Democrats made the Republican party appear trite and overly partisan, and would prove politically embarrassing.
“Calling people names isn’t useful,” said Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi and a former chairman of the party.
Exactly right, Haley. Idiot.
by DougJ| 104 Comments
This post is in: Clown Shoes
Like father, like son, I guess:
The son of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to make a federal case against Duke University for kicking him off the golf team. But a federal magistrate says Andrew Giuliani’s case belongs in the drink.
Wallace Dixon, of North Carolina’s Middle District, offered his opinion on the case this week, in a document peppered with references to golf and the movie “Caddyshack.”
[….]Duke contends that Giuliani squandered his opportunity to be on the team after flipping a putter, breaking a driver, gunning his car engine in a golf course parking lot and throwing an apple in the face of a teammate. The misconduct got Giuliani bumped off the team last year.
(h/t reader RC)