Rafe Colburn says it best: Tobacco companies more evil than you thought:

Tobacco companies found themselves facing the need to argue that some of the scientific evidence used to support laws banning smoking in public places is “junk science“, but quickly realized that a campaign focused on tobacco-related research would be dismissed as transparently self-serving. So they instead spent their money to a create propaganda campaign that attacked scientific research on many fronts, including research that supported smoking bans. The end result? The execrable Web site JunkScience.com. I’m sure John Stossel fits in here somewhere as well.

The WaPo notes the racist attacks Obama campaign workers have encountered among the absurdly stupid, inbred, goatfucking, useless tools who inhabit far too much of our national corpus.

We just got a push-poll call from Health & Human Services clearly intended to scare us into supporting abstinence-based sex education. “We want to know what you think about teens having SEX!”

Apparently, old Abu Gonzales is having trouble finding a law firm that will have him.

The Daily Show’s John Oliver has an excellent, excellent takedown of Fox News. Watch both parts:

• Part 1 (about 6 minutes)
• Part 2 (just under 4 minutes)

US research into foot-and-mouth disease, once a serious scourge of American agriculture, has heretofore been done on a remote island. This makes sense, as a biohazard mishap there probably can’t screw up our food supply.

In a move worthy of some sort of bizarre satirical skit, the Bush Administration wants to move this research to Kansas. WTF?

Harper’s has a longish and well-documented piece on how the GOP reworked the Justice Department to pursue political gain, not, well, “justice.” It’s something the GOP has long accused other parties of, naturally, but the only group that reliably attempts to or does turn the DoJ into a political hit squad is the Republican Party. It is the GOP that repurposed the Civil Rights division into something cleverly designed to suppress voter turnout. It is the GOP that began purging USAs for not initiating political investigations into enough Democrats. It’s the GOP that’s got a hard-on for the Voter ID act, which will certainly further suppress minority and lower-income voting — and, in so doing, increases their share of the vote, since those folks don’t usually vote Republican.

And, let us not forget, it is the Bush DoJ that has pursued political cases with partisan rigor:

In 2007, Donald Shields and John Cragan, two retired professors, released the preliminary results of a long-term study of the Bush Justice Department’s investigations of public officials. They found that between 2001 and 2006 the Justice Department had initiated 375 investigations of public officials. They also found that 298 of those investigations targeted Democrats and 67 of them targeted Republicans. Shields and Cragan concluded that the odds of this imbalance occurring randomly were one in ten thousand.

One of those 298 Democratic targets was former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. Arguably the most successful Democrat-ic politician in recent Alabama history, Siegelman had occupied almost every statewide elective office, frequently winning by large margins. He was elected governor in 1998 with a 57 percent majority. In 2002, however, Siegelman faced a strong challenge from Republican Bob Riley. The election was the closest in the state’s history, and was ultimately called for Riley following a late-night “computer glitch” that moved votes on just one line–that of the gubernatorial contest–enough to reverse the outcome of the race. A study the following year by Auburn University’s James Gundlach strongly suggested “systematic electronic manipulation.” But this electoral oddity remains unexamined by the Justice Department.

Later that year, however, as the Mobile Press-Register was publishing a poll that showed Siegelman trouncing Riley in a rematch, the Department of Justice finally took action. It launched an investigation of Siegelman. The case was based on allegations that Siegelman had appointed Richard Scrushy, the CEO of the Birmingham-based health-care firm HealthSouth, to an uncompensated hospital-oversight board as a quid pro quo for Scrushy’s having arranged a $500,000 contribution to a 1999 initiative to promote a state lottery bill favored by Siegelman. There were several problems with the case. First, the contribution itself was legal. There was no payment to Siegelman, or even to his campaign. Also, Scrushy didn’t support Siegelman in the election. He was a Republican and had backed Riley. In addition, Scrushy had been appointed to the same board by three prior governors. And finally, according to his own uncontradicted testimony, Scrushy didn’t even want the appointment.

It was a clear case of selective prosecution–and if the theory applied to the Siegelman prosecution were to be applied uniformly, many in the Bush Administration would now be in prison. George W. Bush singled out 146 individuals who gave or gathered $100,000 (to his actual political campaign) for appointment to far more desirable postings as ambassadors, cabinet officers, or members of his transition team. Not a single one of these appointments triggered a Justice Department investigation.

The piece concludes by noting the very real damage Bush has done here, and how it may become permanent:

It is improbable that any contender who prevails in the 2008 presidential election will renounce the Bush model of a redefined presidency. A newcomer will likely differentiate his (or her) policies on a number of points, pulling back somewhat from positions (such as the presidential right to torture or wage preemptive war) that have drawn sharp criticism. But these changes will be introduced as a matter of presidential policy, not because the president is bowing to law defined by Congress or to constitutional constraints.

Our Constitution provides a mechanism for countering transformational excess, but the people’s representatives thus far appear to have decided that the impolite process of impeachment is only for presidents who have affairs. Given this failure of will, we must be prepared to accept a changed system in which the will of the people is subsumed by good manners and fearful politics. As long as this new democracy prevails, little will matter beyond the will of the president.

Food for thought.

Doonesbury examines the myth of GOP fiscal responsibility. Hint: it’s a lie.

• Over half the national debt was incurred under a Bush presidency
• The proportion grows to 70% if you include Reagan
• Out of 19 budgets submitted by Bush I, II, and RWR, only 2 were balanced

The much-ballyhooed John Yoo torture memo has been declassified. Madcap hilarity does not ensue. Among the spectacular legal assertions Yoo manufactured: the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply to terror cases, even on domestic soil — in other words, warrantless wiretapping is A-OK! (N.B. that the notion of whether or not the Bill of Rights and the Constitution apply to foreigners in the U.S. is well settled law; they do, so it doesn’t matter if the person being investigated is a citizen, alien, illegal alien, or whatever.)

Further, Yoo’s imperial doctrine asserts that the President has the authority to simply abrogate laws that are in his way, such as those prohibiting harsh treatment of detainees i.e. torture. In this way, Yoo is directly responsible for at least some portion of the abuses found at Gitmo, in Iraq, and at undisclosed black sites maintained by the CIA around the world. N.B. what Wikipedia has to say about Authoritarianism:

Rule of law is frequently opposed by authoritarian and totalitarian states. The explicit policy of such governments . . . is that the government possesses the inherent authority to act purely on its own volition and without being subject to any checks or limitations.

John Yoo is, therefore, a WAR CRIMINAL, and ought to be in jail. Instead, he’s on the faculty at Berkeley Law.

Gore Vidal wins.

That speech? Obama wrote it alone.

Their reaction to Obama’s speech is fucking priceless. (I’ve tinyurl’d the link because their URL contains much of the joke.)

He may be a raving nutbird fundie, but he’s a decent human being who actually listened to Obama’s speech, which seems to have annoyed Scarborough yesterday (quoted at Kos):

HUCKABEE: [Obama] made the point, and I think it’s a valid one, that you can’t hold the candidate responsible for everything that people around him may say or do. You just can’t. Whether it’s me, whether it’s Obama…anybody else. But he did distance himself from the very vitriolic statements.

Now, the second story. It’s interesting to me that there are some people on the left who are having to be very uncomfortable with what Louis Wright said, when they all were all over a Jerry Falwell, or anyone on the right who said things that they found very awkward and uncomfortable years ago. Many times those were statements lifted out of the context of a larger sermon. Sermons, after all, are rarely written word for word by pastors like Reverend Wright, who are delivering them extemporaneously, and caught up in the emotion of the moment. There are things that sometimes get said, that if you put them on paper and looked at them in print, you’d say “Well, I didn’t mean to say it quite like that.”

And later:

HUCKABEE: I don’t think we know. If this were October, I think it would have a dramatic impact. But it’s not October. It’s March. And I don’t believe that by the time we get to October, this is gonna be the defining issue of the campaign, and the reason that people vote.

And one other thing I think we’ve gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say “That’s a terrible statement!”…I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told “you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus…” And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

Go and at least read Obama’s speech, even if you don’t watch the video. It is a profound document, perhaps the most significant such text since the civil rights movement. Senator Obama speaks to not just the red herring of his pastor’s most obnoxious remarks, but the anger and resentment that continue to characterize far too much of the racial dialog in this country — a country, he also notes, that is the only place a story like his could even begin to happen.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina – or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

Later, he finished with the story of Ashley, a woman who organized for his campaign in South Carolina. As a child, Ashley’s mother’s illness plunged her family into poverty, and Ashley wanted to work to avoid that fate for other families:

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”

“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

Yes. We. Can.

Andy Sullivan had this to say about it:

I do want to say that this searing, nuanced, gut-wrenching, loyal, and deeply, deeply Christian speech is the most honest speech on race in America in my adult lifetime. It is a speech we have all been waiting for for a generation. Its ability to embrace both the legitimate fears and resentments of whites and the understandable anger and dashed hopes of many blacks was, in my view, unique in recent American history.

And it was a reflection of faith – deep, hopeful, transcending faith in the promises of the Gospels. And it was about America – its unique promise, its historic purpose, and our duty to take up the burden to perfect this union – today, in our time, in our way.

I have never felt more convinced that this man’s candidacy – not this man, his candidacy – and what he can bring us to achieve – is an historic opportunity. This was a testing; and he did not merely pass it by uttering safe bromides. He addressed the intimate, painful love he has for an imperfect and sometimes embittered man. And how that love enables him to see that man’s faults and pain as well as his promise. This is what my faith is about. It is what the Gospels are about. This is a candidate who does not merely speak as a Christian. He acts like a Christian.

As Rob notes, however, it should surprise no one that Fox is boiling the speech down to Obama still considering Wright “like family.” They don’t like it when people insist on talking about issues and matters of substance over there.

Via Rob, we find this fine quote: “Saying that Hillary has Executive Branch experience is like saying Yoko Ono was a Beatle.”

From Kos.

This video is a pretty excellent discussion of Adam Smith and economic theory. It’s between P. J. O’Rourke and Jon Stewart on **Comedy Central*.

Check out this discussion of the FISA debate, which ends with:

…[T]he senators engaged in a debate over surveillance laws are legally barred from explaining how the nation’s surveillance laws work, because part of the law is public, but another part that supersedes the published part remains secret. (Emphasis added.)

On the other hand, McConnell and the vice president and president are equipped with declassification powers and thus are free to say whatever they like about the rulings — including inducing journalists to mislead people and describing the dire consequences of the rulings.

Such is the state of debate in a country with secret laws.

I’m not sure how we got here, nor am I sure exactly how to fix it, but I do not believe there is any reason sufficient in our republic to justify the creation of any law that every citizen may not inspect for themselves. Period. Democracies require transparency. Period.

Via Atrios, from The Nation:

When asked if he thought the men at Guantánamo could receive a fair trial, Davis provided the following account of an August 2005 meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes–the man who now oversees the tribunal process for the Defense Department. “[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time,” recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.‘”

Chet Endorses Obama.

Bush continues to enjoy an Imperial presidency, untroubled by the rule of law:

*No, the Justice Department will not be investigating whether the now-admitted-to waterboarding of US prisoners was against the law.

*And, no, the DoJ will not be investigating whether the Bush Administration’s warrantless surveillance was illegal. Nor will the AG appoint a special prosecutor to investigate.

• And, no, the Department of Justice will not enforce any contempt citations that Congress might bring against administration officials that have failed to honor subpoenas for testimony.

What AG Mukasey is claiming–and what he is establishing unless Congress does something quickly to contradict him–is that there is effectively only one branch of government, and that is the Executive Branch. The AG’s statements do not allow for congressional oversight, and they do not allow for judicial oversight. It does not even allow for the rule of law, since the law is whatever the President instructs his Office of Legal Counsel and Attorney General to say it is. How can we know what he instructed? We can’t–that’s a state secret or subject to executive privilege. What if a member of Congress, or a judge, or any US citizen has a problem with that? Tough luck–you have no effective recourse beyond the whims or benevolence of the President/Emperor.

This doesn’t just trample on the United States Constitution–it abrogates the Magna Carta.

More at TPM.

Bush: Peace and prosperity at risk in this election.

Previously.

Actually, it’s not just Kansas. We can see this cartoon applying pretty much anywhere there are raving nutbird fundies.

Obama entered the South Proper, and routed Clinton tonight, 55% to 27%. Native son Edwards pulled in third. Iowa was not a fluke. According to CNN, Sen. Obama pulled more than 290,000 votes — nearly as much as all votes cast in the 2004 primary. He’s now got 63 delegates, vs. Sen. Clinton’s 48 and Sen. Edwards’ 26.

Remember that Federal case about California attempting to demand higher emissions standards from cars and trucks, and the EPA trying to stop them? Yeah, well, in the resulting lawsuit, the EPA is asserting Executive Privilege to avoid turning over unredacted materials, which basically makes the discovery process useless. Bush-Cheney’s 7 year Imperial Presidency is a cancer on our republic, and it’s clearly still metastasizing. It’s going to be a long year.

“When Governments Put Together Big Databases On People, They Get Abused.” Word. It’s really just a corollary to the fact that any power given to government will get abused. Behave accordingly.

It’s all over the net, of course, but the transcript is pretty simple:

“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,” Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. “But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.”

In truth, I suspect Mormon Mitt is no better.

Much has been made of the 1992 Iowa caucus, when Governor Clinton ended up with less than 3% and still went on to win the nomination, but few stories are painting the whole picture. Here it is:

1992

It only warrants mention since some news outlets and back-of-the-pack campaigns have been misleadingly calling attention to it, touting the fact that Bill Clinton received less than three percent that year, and yet still won the nomination with ease. What they don’t mention is that, for all intents and purposes, the caucuses didn’t take place in 1992, thanks to the entrance of favorite son Senator Tom Harkin. No candidate, besides Harkin, actively campaigned in the state, almost no one showed up on caucus night, and the final result–Harkin received nearly 80 percent, with “uncommitted” finishing second at 12 percent–was given about two inches of space in most newspapers the next day.

Iowa gives us hope, which something we haven’t felt in quite a while: hope for America’s political future.

Our pick won, handily, as an underdog — with record-setting turnout, and in a state whose demographics (older, very white) do not favor his natural constituency (younger, more diverse).

The GOP, on the other hand, picked a raving nutbird fundamentalist who is unabashedly anti-gay, anti-evolution, and anti-choice, and frankly we couldn’t be happier about that, either. By pushing the party to the right and picking those hotbutton issues, they’ll drive more centrist nominal Republicans to cross the aisle in November.

And just maybe, wouldn’t it be nice to have a president who can speak again, who can actually lead without smirking, and who embodies not a life borne of generation upon generation of inherited privilege, but one of uniquely American opportunity? From Obama’s victory speech:

Hope! Hope is what led me here today, with a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written FOR us, but BY us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be. That is what we started here in Iowa, and that is the message we can now carry to New Hampshire and beyond.

But go listen (YouTube link in the “won” link above); this starts at about 12:20 into the video. And then consider donating to the cause; I believe 2008 will be the most important election for some time to come, and that Obama represents the best choice of the available candidates. No Republican need apply at all (unless you like the idea of anti-evolution, anti-gay and anti-choice positions; the status-quo in Iraq; the escalation of the “wars” on drugs and obscenity, more regressive taxation, no health care solution, and immigration policies that make Bush look smart), and the only viable Democrats are Obama, Clinton, and Edwards. I do not believe Clinton can win in November, and I am not comfortable with her lapdog behavior during her Senate career anyway. Edwards feels thin to me, but he’d do in a pinch. Obama, however, feels like the real deal, and he needs support to power past Clinton and the rest in the remaining primary states.

So give. It needn’t be much, since it DOES add up quickly. But do it. We did, and for the first time ever. Go here. Forgo a night’s bar tab, or a good dinner out, or a bottle of fine wine. You won’t notice, but the campaign will, and it just might help the right guy get to 1600 Pennsylvania.

Someone’s laid out the GOP primary candidates as Buffy villains. Excellent.

Go read this editorial in the NYT.

There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.

[…]

Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.

We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.

[…]

These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.

We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.

We’re particularly excited that January 2008 means we’re only a year away from January 2009, which is when our above-the-law president finally leaves office.

Just so you’re caught up, here’s a fine collection of the Administration’s 10 most absurd legal arguments of 2007, including whoppers like “waterboarding isn’t legally torture” and “the Vice President’s office isn’t part of the Executive Branch.”

According to declassified documents, J. Edgar Hoover tried to convince President Truman to suspend habeas and preemptively arrest some 12,000 Americans in the early days of the Korean war, in order to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.”

Or, at least, game enough to beat this SI writer in one of the more interesting candidate personality pieces I’ve seen. (Thanks, Rob.)

This kind of thing really has to stop:

LIMA — Two robbers who broke into Luther Ricks Sr.’s house this summer may have not gotten his life savings he had in a safe, but after the FBI confiscated it he may not get it back.

Ricks has tried to get an attorney to fight for the $402,767 but he has no money. Lima Police Department officers originally took the money from his house but the FBI stepped in and took it from the Police Department. Ricks has not been charged with a crime and was cleared in a fatal shooting of one of the robbers but still the FBI has refused to return the money, he said.

“They are saying I have to prove I made it,” he said.

Because Ricks had some pot in the house, the government’s position is that they can take the money under civil forfeiture rules — even though Ricks has not been charged with or convicted of any crime. The burden of proof is on Ricks; he must prove the money is legally his, and that he is innocent of wrongdoing. The FBI, the story notes, will likely want receipts; since Ricks and his wife accumulated their nest egg over a working life — he’s 61 — it’s a pretty good bet they don’t have every single pay stub.

Due process? Justice? Neither apply in forfeiture cases. Does this bother you? It should.

The Republican Party would have you believe they’re all about state’s rights and minimal Federal intervention, but this is really only true when it suits them. Case in point: Bush’s EPA has just quashed 17 states’ attempts to reduce further automotive greenhouse gas emissions.

More here.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California said the states would go to federal court to reverse the E.P.A. decision.

“It is disappointing that the federal government is standing in our way and ignoring the will of tens of millions of people across the nation,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said. “We will continue to fight this battle.”

He added, “California sued to compel the agency to act on our waiver, and now we will sue to overturn today’s decision and allow Californians to protect our environment.”

Twelve other states — New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington — had proposed standards like California’s, and the governors of Arizona, Colorado, Florida and Utah said they would do the same.

If the waiver had been granted and the 16 other states had adopted the California standard, it would have covered at least half of all vehicles sold in the United States.

Thank God for Chris Dodd. Reid’s pulled the bill.

Fortunately, Chris Dodd has balls, and is filibustering the immunity bill.

This’ll just be a roundup, since I don’t have time to do the entry I’d meant to do on this.

Romney attempted to answer the broad questions about his faith and how he’d handle it in office recently, and made more than casual attempts to paint himself as a sort of JFK figure in the process. Kennedy, as you may recall, gave a similar speech to the Greater Houston MInisterial Association in 1960 (right here in Houston) wherein he attempted to put to rest worries that a Catholic president would be little more than the Vatican’s proxy.

The primary problem with Mitt as Jack in this situation, though, is the message of either speech. As Maureen Dowd put it:

The problem with Mitt is not his religion; it is his overeager policy shape-shifting. He did not give a brave speech, but a pandering one. Disguised as a courageous, Kennedyesque statement of principle, the talk was really just an attempt to compete with the evolution-disdaining, religion-baiting Huckabee and get Baptists to concede that Mormons are Christians.

“J.F.K.’s speech was to reassure Americans that he wasn’t a religious fanatic,” Mr. [Jon] Krakauer [author of Under the Banner of Heaven, a history of Mormanism] agreed. “Mitt’s was to tell evangelical Christians, ‘I’m a religious fanatic just like you.'”

Fred Clark has more, mostly analyzing Romney’s charming but hopeless and frighteningly wrong cuplet “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.”

That’s a nice bit of parallelism. It pleases the ear even as it disturbs the brain. In a formal sense, the statement is valid. The first part is not true “just as” the second part is not true.

Romney repeatedly says in his speech that his topic is religious liberty and his own faith. Given that, it’s not surprising that he would argue that “freedom” and “religion” are compatible or complementary. But he goes beyond that, arguing that each requires the other — that religion is necessary for freedom and that freedom is necessary for religion.

Let’s deal with the latter assertion first: “religion requires freedom.” There are far too many counter-examples for this to be true. Think of China, where the government denies religious freedom to millions of Christians and Falun Gong adherents and Tibetan Buddhists. Yet despite this lack of freedom, despite this active oppression — and, in a way, in response to this oppression — these faiths are all thriving. This is what the early Christian theologian Tertullian was getting at when he said, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” Religion can survive, and thrive, in the absence of freedom.

and more:

But as potentially troubling and unfactual as the latter part of Romney’s assertion is, the first part of it is worse.

“Freedom requires religion,” Romney said. Had he said, “Freedom requires religious freedom,” then I would agree, absolutely. […]

But Romney did not say that freedom requires religious freedom. He said, “Freedom requires religion.” And that’s a contradictory statement — a very different, and very frightening, thing.

If freedom requires religion, then the a-religious and irreligious, the non-religious and un-religious are the enemies of freedom. Romney believes, in other words, that atheism is incompatible with freedom. Whatever it is he means by “religious liberty,” he does not believe it can safely be applied to atheists.

Keep in mind that this is Mitt “double Guantanamo” Romney talking — he’s made it clear what he wants to do to those he regards as the enemies of freedom.

The Agitator has much to say as we near the 6th anniversary of Cory Maye‘s “crime,” which amounts to defending himself and his child against unknown assailants breaking down the door to enter his home in the dead of night. On the day after Christmas, 2001, Maye was asleep in his home when a drug task force broke into his home with a no-knock warrant. First through the door was Ron Jones, who did not identify himself as a policeman.

Maye shot him dead before the cops managed to make clear who they were, and was quickly railroaded to Mississippi’s Death Row before his sentence was reduced last year on appeal. If nothing changes, Maye will spend the rest of his life in prison for defending his family against a home invader he had no way of knowing wasn’t his drug-addled neighbor.

White House press secretary Dana Perino has no idea what the Cuban Missile Crisis was.

The copyright cartel has managed to get a bill introduced that would create a whole new Federal copyright protection department as well as provide for drastically higher fines and — get this — civil forfiture of computer equipment involved in infringement even if the owner is not convicted. This is a scary mirror of a questionable practice from the ill-considered drug war; under no circumstances should assets be seizable without a finding of guilt.

So much for the Shining City on the Hill, human rights, respect for law, or any of the other qualities we insist make the US different: Evidence of Innocence Rejected at Guantanamo:

U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green, who was privy to the classified record of the tribunal’s decision-making about [German citizen] Kurnaz in 2004, concluded in January 2005 that his treatment provided powerful evidence of bias against prisoners, and she deemed the proceedings illegal under U.S. and international law. But her ruling, which depicted the allegations against Kurnaz as unsubstantiated and as an inappropriate basis for keeping him locked up, was mostly classified at the time.

In newly released passages, however, Green’s ruling reveals that the tribunal members relied heavily on a memo written by a U.S. brigadier general who noted that Kurnaz had prayed while the U.S. national anthem was sung in the prison and that he expressed an unusual interest in detainee transfers and the guard schedule. Other documents make clear that U.S. intelligence officials had earlier concluded that Kurnaz, who went to Pakistan shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to visit religious sites, had simply chosen a bad time to travel.

The process is “fundamentally corrupted,” said Baher Azmy, a professor at Seton Hall Law School who represents Kurnaz. “All of this just reveals that they had the wrong person and they knew it.”

Kurnaz was eventually released, in August of 2006, but only after German Chancellor Angela Merkel made him a priority. There is no reason to believe his five-year plight was unique, and newly declassified documents surrounding his case make it clear that innocents at Gitmo will have a hard time indeed getting released, since the process to “try” them is so heavily biased against them. Detainees are still unable to see all the evidence against them, and in some cases are denied the right to even now who said they were terrorists. It’s Kafkaesque, and is representative of the worst impulses of a power-mad administration.

If by “works” you mean “produces the first uptick in teen births in 15 years,” I mean.

Despite the National Intelligence Estimate stating pretty clearly that Iran doesn’t have a nuke program, Bush pretty much still wants to invade. What IS it about these creeps and invasions?

Our government is busily asserting in British court that they have the right to kidnap British citizens in the U.K. if they are suspected of crimes in the U.S. Extradition is unnecessary.

Presumably, the British authorities will take a dim view of this, and remind the Americans that kidnapping is crime in Britain.

I continue to be shocked at the absurd statements this Administration seems wholly willing to promulgate. We as a nation would obviously not accept this line from someone else; it’s utterly contrary to the rule of law, and our support of such might-makes-right positions make it harder for us to “spread democracy” elsewhere. There’s just no way this is a good idea.

Ashcroft: “I’m willing to be waterboarded.”

Mississippi governor Haley Barbour reacted predictably to Trent Lott’s intended retirement, which is to say he said he’d ignore the law and have a special election next November to replace him, which would be great for the GOP and bad for the Dems.

However, state law actually says — and the Secretary of State agrees — that if Lott resigns in 2007, they have to have that special election within 90 days. It’s only if Lott resigns in 2008 that they get to wait until next November — and here’s the rub: if Lott waits until January 1, the lobbying rules he’s trying to avoid kick in, and he can’t lobby for 2 years. Of course, the Mississippi GOP wants it both ways, but that’s not how the law reads.

More at TPM.

Dennis got it goin’ on.