We wouldn’t cross the street to piss on this motherfucker if he were on fire. This goatfucker just gets more and more repugnant. William Marsh Rice would spin in his goddamn grave.

Anant Raut, an attorney with the white-shoe (and known Aussie-employing) firm of Weil, Gotshal, and Manges, responds to the DoD’s sniveling goatfucker Charles Stimson in Why I Defend ‘Terrorists’, an open letter running in Salon. A bit:

Mr. Stimson, I don’t defend “terrorists.” I’m representing five guys who were held or are being held in Guantánamo without ever being charged with a crime, some of them for nearly five years. Two have been quietly sent home to Saudi Arabia without an explanation or an admission of error. The only justification the U.S. government has provided for keeping the other three is the moniker “enemy combatant,” a term that has been made up solely for the purpose of denying them prisoner-of-war protection and civilian protection under the Geneva Conventions. It’s a term that was attached to them in a tribunal proceeding so inherently bogus that even the tribunal president is compelled to state on the record, in hundreds of these proceedings, that a combatant status review tribunal “is NOT a court of law, but a non-judicial administrative hearing.”

[…]

[…] the question I get asked more than any other is, “How can a place like Guantánamo continue to exist?” I think it is because we as a nation are afraid to admit we’ve done something wrong.

There is a widespread belief, as well as a need to believe, that the men we’re holding in Guantánamo must be bad people. They must have done something to end up there. They couldn’t just be, in large part, victims of circumstance, or of the fact the U.S. government was paying large bounties in poor countries for the identification and capture of people with alleged ties to terror. If the bulk of the detainees are guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time, if there’s no evidence that some of them did the things of which the government has accused them, then it would mean that we locked innocent people in a hole for five years. It would mean not only that our government wrongfully imprisoned these men but that the rest of us stood idly by as they did it. (Emph. added.) It would mean that we have learned nothing from Korematsu v. United States, that we have learned nothing from the McCarthy-era witch hunts, and that when we wake up from this national nightmare, once again we will marvel at the extremism we tolerated in defense of liberty. It would mean that even as we extol the virtues of fairness and due process abroad, we take away those very rights from people on our own soil.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” It is my belief that the true test of a nation’s commitment to liberty occurs not when it is most readily given, but rather when it is most easily taken away.

Mr. Stimson, that is why I do what I do.

Nice job.

This dude is fucking worthless.

The Bush Administration is purging US Attorneys who are involved in GOP corruption cases.

The “liberal media” is, of course, nowhere on this story.

The good news: the Pentagon is explicitly disavowing the statements made by Charles Stimson.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Brian Maka, said Stimson was not speaking for the Bush administration.

Stimson’s comments “do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the thinking of its leadership,” Maka told The Associated Press on Saturday.

Stimson’s “shameful and irresponsible” remarks deserve condemnation, said Neal Sonnett, a Miami lawyer and president of the American Judicature Society, a nonpartisan group of judges, lawyers and others.

Sonnett said in a statement that Stimson had made a “blatant attempt to intimidate lawyers and their firms who are rendering important public service in upholding the rule of law and our democratic ideals.”

Stimson on Thursday told Federal News Radio, a local commercial station that covers the government, that he found it “shocking” that lawyers at many of the nation’s top law firms represent detainees.

Stimson listed the names of more than a dozen major firms he suggested should be boycotted.

“And I think, quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms,” Stimson said.

Asked who might be paying the law firms to represent Guantanamo detainees, Stimson hinted at wrongdoing.

“It’s not clear, is it? Some will maintain that they’re doing it out of the goodness of their heart — that they’re doing it pro bono, and I suspect they are,” he said. “Others are receiving monies from who knows where and I’d be curious to have them explain that.”

What a reprehensible jackass. But he gets worse:

Stimson also described Guantanamo as “certainly, probably the most transparent and open location in the world” because of visits from more than 2,000 journalists since it opened five years ago. However, journalists are not allowed to talk to detainees on those visits, their photos are censored and their access to the base has at times been shut off entirely.

He discounted international outrage over the detention center as “small little protests around the world” that were “drummed up by Amnesty International” and inflated in importance by liberal news media outlets.

Uh, right. Our own court system disagrees, bub:

FBI agents have documented more than two dozen incidents of possible mistreatment at Guantanamo. In one, a detainee’s head was wrapped in duct tape because he chanted the Quran; in a second, a detainee pulled out his hair after hours in a sweltering room.

In a December court ruling, a federal judge in Washington decried the plight of “some of the unfortunate petitioners who have been detained for many years in the terrible conditions at Guantanamo Bay.”

The judge criticized a system in which dozens have been held without charges and cut off from the world for lack of English or knowledge about the law, leaving them no choice but to turn to a fellow prisoner with outside connections for legal help.

Since the detention center opened, the U.S. military has transferred or released about 380 detainees. Some 395 remain in the prison.

The newly Democratically-controlled House righted a serious wrong in the much ballyhooed Medicare drug plan this week by reversing a clause explicitly preventing Medicare from negotiated with drug companies for the best price.

Yes, that’s right: the GOP bill forbid negotiation. Gee, corporate handouts, anyone?

It gets better. Under the new bill, Medicare will be required to negotiated for the best price. And, of course, Bush has threatened to veto it if it makes it to his desk. Nice one, George.

The Democratic majority may not, in and of itself, be big enough to override a veto, but it’ll only take a few defections to create such a supermajority. And even if that isn’t possible, Bush will make it abundantly clear where he and his party stand on these matters, in front of God and everybody.

So, the Administration keeps losing in the courts when it comes to its treatment of detainees and such, right?

Well, now they’ve turned their guns on the law firms doing the pro bono work for the detainees in an attempt to drive corporate clients away and punish them for daring to provide counsel.

That’s just plain evil. Which is, of course, pretty much par for the course with this bunch.

Wil Wheaton points out what John Rogers figured out:

They search for the best way to describe a President who engages in military policy opposed by his Joint Chiefs and contradicted by his own brand-new counterinsurgency policy, who doesn’t seem to understand the difference between goals and strategy, recycles last year’s “Plan for Victory” with more troops, and is apparently hell-bent on starting a war with Iran … a man incapable of calculating risk versus reward, or even understanding that hope is not a plan …

The geeks have it cold. The rest of you just won’t get it, but —

George Bush is Leeroy Jenkins, baby.

According to Condi Rice, planning ahead is a bad idea. When asked what the Administration would do if its plans failed (AGAIN):

“It’s bad policy to speculate on what you’ll do if a plan fails when you’re trying to make a plan work,” Rice replied.

Jesus wept.

(Found here.)

The new Democratic Congress seems poised to revise Federal stem cell research guidelines, but Bush has vowed to veto any such changes.

Current GOP-backed rules forbid Federal funding of research using embryonic stem cells even if the donor embryos were to be destroyed anyway, as is the case with many from fertility clinics.

“In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology.”

Yep; the National Park Service is still prohibited from stating the actual age of the Grand Canyon, as the fundies are unhappy with anything older than 6,000 years; the park shop still sells a book that describes the Canyon in fundamentalist (i.e., unscientific and flat-out wrong) terms, a move that one park geologist described as the “equivalent of Yellowstone National Park selling a book entitled Geysers of Old Faithful: Nostrils of Satan.”

This is what voting for Republicans gets you.

Rep. Virgil — Virgil! — Goode, R-VA, has a problem with all Muslims, which we’re guessing plays pretty well to his base. This is the dufus who’s been on the warpath about the new Muslim member of Congress taking his oath on a Koran rather than a Bible.

I do not subscribe to using the Koran in any way. The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.

Check out the cover of Scientific Republican this month.

The Times piece is called Theater of the Absurd at the T.S.A., so you can imagine the content. We’re sure some at DHS and TSA will whine about the piece, but it’s hard to fault its conclusions. We’re doing the wrong things for airport security, and for poor reasons, and nobody in power seems to have the balls to admit it even though everyone outside the system seems to know that it’s all bullshit.

The root problem, as some experts see it, is the T.S.A.’s reliance on IDs that are so easily obtained under false pretenses. “It would be wonderful if Osama bin Laden carried a photo ID that listed his occupation of ‘Evildoer,'” permitting the authorities to pluck him from a line, [Security expert] Mr. Schneier said. “The problem is, we try to pretend that identity maps to intentionality. But it doesn’t.”

What’s worse, the TSA is actively hostile to attempts at improvement:

Ostensibly interested in what security specialists and legal authorities on privacy issues thought of its Secure Flight plans, the agency convened an advisory group in January 2005. (Mr. Schneier was a member.) Nine months later, when the advisers turned in their final report, it showed that the T.S.A.’s planners had given little or no thought to basic security issues, such as the problem of stolen identities.

Expressing frustration, the T.S.A.’s advisers said in their report that the T.S.A. had been so tight-lipped when talking to them that they never received the information they needed to make a single substantive recommendation.

Professor Blaze [CS at the University of Pennsylvania] has a great deal of experience publicly discussing the most sensitive of security vulnerabilities. He acknowledged that disclosure of a security weakness prompts “a natural and human response: ‘Why should we help the bad guys?'” The answer, he said, is that the bad guys aren’t helped — because they almost certainly already know a system’s weak points — and that disclosing the weaknesses brings pressure on government agencies and their suppliers to improve security for the good guys.

Emph. added. This isn’t news; anyone worth a damn in cryptography knows that knowledge of an encryption algorithm shouldn’t give you an advantage in trying to crack it — or, at least, it won’t if the algorithm is sound. Secret encryption methods are assumed to be insecure.

The article concludes:

The issues raised by the discovery of security vulnerabilities are not new. A. C. Hobbs, a locksmith who in 1853 wrote the book on locks and safes (the title: “Locks and Safes”) knew that “many well-meaning persons” assume that public exposure of a lock’s insecure design will end up helping criminals.

His response to this concern is no less apt today than it was then:

“Rogues are very keen in their profession, and know already much more than we can teach them.”

It’s not any different now, but apparently the TSA thinks it is. It’s horrifying how wrong they are.

The Bush administration wants to review and approve all USGS scientific findings prior to publication, from articles to presentations. This review may take from a couple weeks to six months.

Yeah, that seems like a GREAT idea.

Or, specifically, he hates blogs, and has introduced legislation designed to neuter the blogosphere.

Despite what the media say, McCain is not a good guy. He’s a party hack and a craven power-monger. Fuck him and his horse, and don’t be fooled into thinking he’s some kind of outsider candidate.

And, oddly, sometimes they don’t quite get it when we say, truthfully, “because they’re like the bastard child of right-wing loonies and the Weekly World News.”

I mean, how else can you explain them running a story on how soy milk makes kids gay? The headline is, we shit you not, “A Devil Food Is Turning Our Kids Into Homosexuals.” Where do they FIND these nutbirds?

New York State Troopers made a game of DUI arrests so much that they openly arrested people they knew weren’t drunk. The goal was “the 100 club,” meaning 100 arrests in a year.

According to the report, it took serious misconduct for the troopers to log that many DUI arrests. The report said troopers were discouraging people from taking breath tests.

The troopers told people that if they took the breath tests they would have to stay in police custody longer before they could post bond and be released, the report states.

Subsequent laboratory tests showed that many of the people arrested did not have drugs or alcohol in their systems, or had amounts well below the legal limit.

People with authority and power must be watched even more closely than normal citizens. They should get no pass at all an the abuse of this power, because if they do, they’ll just become bigger bullies. We have to have police, but we don’t have to tolerate this kind of bullshit.

The drug warriors think they know better than doctors how to manage pain, and have been locking up pain management specialists for prescribing painkillers in volumes the DEA (not the AMA) thinks of as excessive.

Great. Consider for a bit whether or not it’s a good idea for thugs as the DEA to have veto power over medical decisions made by highly trained physicians.

Via Wired News:

The first public meeting of a Bush administration “civil liberties protection panel” had a surreal quality to it, as the five-member board refused to answer any questions from the press, and stonewalled privacy advocates and academics on key questions about domestic spying.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which met Tuesday, was created by Congress in 2004 on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, but is part of the White House, which handpicked all the members. Though mandated by law in late 2004, the board was not sworn in until March 2006, due to inaction on the part of the White House and Congress.

The three-hour meeting, held at Georgetown University, quickly established that the panel would be something less than a fierce watchdog of civil liberties. Instead, members all but said they view their job as helping Americans learn to relax and love warrantless surveillance.

More at Wired’s 27B Stroke 6 blog.

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour is basically responsible for the evisceration of the state’s highly successful anti-smoking campaign — which was funded not by taxpayer dollars, but by the tobacco settlement.

Mississippi’s program was funded by a settlement with tobacco companies, and was noted as one of the best in steering kids clear of a lifetime of tobacco use. So how did Barbour manage to destroy an effective program that wasn’t costing taxpayers a dime?

Barbour complained that the program received its funding directly from the courts and that it needed legislative approval, according to Myers. When the legislature passed a bill to continue the funding, Barbour vetoed it and went back to the courts to withdraw all remaining monies from the program.

That’s slight of hand you won’t see on a stage in Las Vegas.

Way to go.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is recommending that touchscreen voting machines be decertified for 2007:

One conclusion drawn by NIST is that the lack of an independent audit capability in DRE voting systems is one of the main reasons behind continued questions about voting system security and diminished public confidence in elections. NIST does not know how to write testable requirements to make DREs secure, and NIST’s recommendation to the STS is that the DRE in practical terms cannot be made secure.

The same article notes that Cuyahoga County, Ohio, is considering scrapping their machines outright. Excellent news for Ohio voters.

The Washington Post makes the case that Bush is the Worst. President. EVAR.

A bit:

Despite some notable accomplishments in domestic and foreign policy, Nixon is mostly associated today with disdain for the Constitution and abuse of presidential power. Obsessed with secrecy and media leaks, he viewed every critic as a threat to national security and illegally spied on U.S. citizens. Nixon considered himself above the law.

Bush has taken this disdain for law even further. He has sought to strip people accused of crimes of rights that date as far back as the Magna Carta in Anglo-American jurisprudence: trial by impartial jury, access to lawyers and knowledge of evidence against them. In dozens of statements when signing legislation, he has asserted the right to ignore the parts of laws with which he disagrees. His administration has adopted policies regarding the treatment of prisoners of war that have disgraced the nation and alienated virtually the entire world. Usually, during wartime, the Supreme Court has refrained from passing judgment on presidential actions related to national defense. The court’s unprecedented rebukes of Bush’s policies on detainees indicate how far the administration has strayed from the rule of law.

Enjoy that place in history, bub.

Mark Morford over at SFGate.com weighs in on the “no sex ’til you’re 30” propaganda paid for by your tax dollars:

I think I get it now.

The latest pitiable GOP plan, from what I can tell, goes something like this: To make it all so absurd, to make the remaining Bush administration proposals and doctrines and cultural stratagems so outlandish and silly and degrading and insulting to your mind and your heart and your very own beleaguered genitalia that you cannot help but take note of their existence and laugh and cringe and sit back and go, Oh my God these people have got to be kidding.

At which point (they hope) you will turn to your spouse or your significant other or your dog and say, Hey honey, check this out, did you see the latest moronic and horrible dictum from the Bush administration? We should totally try it, just for kicks!

Then the GOP will gloat and say: See? The world still loves the GOP! Yay us! And then they shall proceed to smack themselves in the face with a brick.

It is the only viable explanation. It is the only way to account for something like, say, the latest twist in the Abstinence Education Program from Bush’s increasingly laughable Department of Health and Human Services, a $50 million slice of embarrassing government detritus that is now actually encouraging all states to tell their single, youngish residents that they should — how to put this so you don’t shoot coffee through your nose? — that everyone should avoid sex entirely, until they turn 30.

Read the whole thing.

Greenwald:

There is no greater betrayal of the core principles of American political life than to have the federal government sweep people off the streets, throw them into a black hole with no contact with the outside world and no charges asserted of any kind, and simply keep them there for as long as the President desires — in al-Marri’s case, with respect to detention, now five years and counting.

As always, the most extraordinary and jarring aspect of cases like this one is that these principles — which were once the undebatable, immovable bedrock of our political system — are now openly debated and actively disputed by our own government. By itself it is astonishing — and highly revealing about where we are as a country — that such precepts even need to be defended at all. (Emph. added)

The new Democratic majority needs to fix this habeas problem NOW. We still can’t believe we’ve actually come to a place where it’s debated at all.

This is the first time in TEN YEARS we’ve been happy about an election.

Fucking EAT IT.

(For context, see BoingBoing.)

This morning, we got news of the GOP’s loss in the House and in governorships, and the likely split or loss of power in the Senate as well, and we smiled a little. Not a lot, mind you; if the American people had the brains God gave a dog, they’d have kicked Bush and his cronies to the curb in 2004 — or better yet, not elected this sorry bunch in the first place back in 2000. But we’ll take what we can get, and so we smiled a little.

Now CNN is reporting that Rummy is resigning (this after all the military papers called for his ouster last week), and our smile gets just a touch wider.

Heh heh heh heh heh:

We were THIS CLOSE to Jesus coming back. And you Republicans who turned your back on the President are going to wander in the desert for the next two years. Literally. Someone’s gonna have to replace those troops in Iraq.

And don’t think you’re off the hook, voters. You’re the ones who made this bed. Now you’re the ones who are gonna have to move over so a gay couple can sleep in it.

Tomorrow you’re all gonna wake up in a Brave New World. A world where the Constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones created in a stem cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags. Where tax and spend Democrats take all your hard earned money and use it to buy electric cars for National Public Radio and teach evolution to illegal Immigrants. Oh! And everybody’s high! Wooooo!

Remember that “Mission Accomplished” video? Yeah, the White House would rather you didn’t.

More specifically, VOTE AGAINST REPUBLICANS.

Jim Macdonald over at Electrolite sums it up:

A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote for torture.

A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote for corruption.

A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote for cronyism.

A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote against habeas corpus.

A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote against our troops.

A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote against liberty.

A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote against the Constitution.

A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote against being secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects.

A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote against Social Security.

A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote for “preemptive” war.

A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote for incompetence.

A vote for a Republican, any Republican, is a vote for Bush.

Go out today. Vote Democratic.

Today is the first day of the struggle to take our country back.

The Rude Pundit puts it as, well, he tends to:

Why vote against Republicans? Because Fuck Them.

Word.

In several states, the GOP has been caught making illegal robo-calls to voters designed to appear to be in support of Democratic candidates — and to redial over and over. The idea is to make the Dems look like assholes.

As it turns out, this is a very big deal, and the GOP could be looking at enormous fines over this.

Let’s hope they can’t escape the rule of law on this one, too.

ABC News:

A suspected terrorist who spent years in a secret CIA prison should not be allowed to speak to a civilian attorney, the Bush administration argues, because he could reveal the agency’s closely guarded interrogation techniques.

The DHS wants us all to have to obtain clearance to travel out of the country:

Forget no-fly lists. If Uncle Sam gets its way, beginning on Jan. 14, 2007, we’ll all be on no-fly lists, unless the government gives us permission to leave-or re-enter-the United States.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (HSA) has proposed that all airlines, cruise lines-even fishing boats-be required to obtain clearance for each passenger they propose taking into or out of the United States.

It doesn’t matter if you have a U.S. Passport – a “travel document” that now, absent a court order to the contrary, gives you a virtually unqualified right to enter or leave the United States, any time you want. When the DHS system comes into effect next January, if the agency says “no” to a clearance request, or doesn’t answer the request at all, you won’t be permitted to enter-or leave-the United States.

Editorial in American Conservative magazine: GOP Must Go.

So, last week a guy named Christopher Soghoian created a fake boarding pass generator website. Big deal; that the whole boarding pass system is absurdly insecure is not news, right? Well, maybe and maybe not, since Chris got two visits from the Feds, and lost all his computer gear in the second such visit (which is hard to see as anything but an extralegal punitive measure).

Security expert Bruce Schneier has a bit to say about the whole affair. A bit:

Soghoian claims that he wanted to demonstrate the vulnerability. You could argue that he went about it in a stupid way, but I don’t think what he did is substantively worse than what I wrote in 2003. Or what Schumer described in 2005. Why is it that the person who demonstrates the vulnerability is vilified while the person who describes it is ignored? Or, even worse, the organization that causes it is ignored? Why are we shooting the messenger instead of discussing the problem?

As I wrote in 2005: “The vulnerability is obvious, but the general concepts are subtle. There are three things to authenticate: the identity of the traveler, the boarding pass and the computer record. Think of them as three points on the triangle. Under the current system, the boarding pass is compared to the traveler’s identity document, and then the boarding pass is compared with the computer record. But because the identity document is never compared with the computer record — the third leg of the triangle — it’s possible to create two different boarding passes and have no one notice. That’s why the attack works.”

The way to fix it is equally obvious: Verify the accuracy of the boarding passes at the security checkpoints. If passengers had to scan their boarding passes as they went through screening, the computer could verify that the boarding pass already matched to the photo ID also matched the data in the computer. Close the authentication triangle and the vulnerability disappears.

But before we start spending time and money and Transportation Security Administration agents, let’s be honest with ourselves: The photo ID requirement is no more than security theater. Its only security purpose is to check names against the no-fly list, which would still be a joke even if it weren’t so easy to circumvent. Identification is not a useful security measure here.

Interestingly enough, while the photo ID requirement is presented as an antiterrorism security measure, it is really an airline-business security measure. It was first implemented after the explosion of TWA Flight 800 over the Atlantic in 1996. The government originally thought a terrorist bomb was responsible, but the explosion was later shown to be an accident.

Unlike every other airplane security measure — including reinforcing cockpit doors, which could have prevented 9/11 — the airlines didn’t resist this one, because it solved a business problem: the resale of non-refundable tickets. Before the photo ID requirement, these tickets were regularly advertised in classified pages: “Round trip, New York to Los Angeles, 11/21-30, male, $100.” Since the airlines never checked IDs, anyone of the correct gender could use the ticket. Airlines hated that, and tried repeatedly to shut that market down. In 1996, the airlines were finally able to solve that problem and blame it on the FAA and terrorism.

David Gagne explains his latest run-in with False Authority Syndrome.

Why do we let these TSA idiots behave this way? Send ’em all back to McDonald’s where they belong.

The Bush Administration, not content to fail with Abstinence-only sex ed with kids, is pushing onward with a campaign designed to keep single twentysomethings from fucking with a similar curriculum — i.e., one light on information about contraception and heavy on theology.

Er, right. That’s our GOP, kids: creating exciting new frontiers in failure and fantasy.

On October 17, Bush quietly signed a law making it easier for him to declare martial law.

How far will people let this goon go? Remember what the GOP stands for next week. A vote for them is an endorsement of these policies.

The General Accounting Office has issued a legal opinion affirming that sex ed materials must include accurate information about both sexually transmitted diseases and condom use. Heretofore, HHS has insisted that materials coming from abstinence-only sources didn’t have to include such pesky facts because of some loophole; thankfully, the GAO is calling bullshit. Sex education, like all education, is worthless unless it’s fact-based, and the AO crowd just can’t stand to tell the truth.

So, my friend Lowell Ray Barron’s father (also named Lowell) is a longtime democratic state senator in Alabama. For reasons that probably need no explanation, the state GOP is attempting to get Sen. Barron’s name dropped from the ballot, and the local radio news station has an online poll that is currently trending toward Evil.

I therefore ask all of you to take my word for it and head on over to WAFF.com to express your studied opinion that Sen. Barron’s name should NOT in fact be removed from the ballot. Vote early, vote often.

Thanks!

Rush Limbaugh, idiot buffoon of the Right, thinks Michael J. Fox was acting in the pro-Dem spot we mentioned a couple days ago.

What a jackass.

Michael J. Fox has done a commerical for Democratic senate hopeful Claire McCaskill in Missouri, who’s running against an anti-stem-cell incumbent (Republican Jim Talent).

Pat Tillman’s brother, who enlisted with him after 9/11, has written a piece on the mess we’re in, and what you can do about it. Read it. Now. A bit to get you started:

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we get out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

[…]

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

(Hat tip to Rob.)

Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA) (no, not the famous one) has been under investigation as part of the Duke Cunningham affair for quite some time; the powerful Appropriations Committee chair has spent nearly a million bucks on legal fees already.

No surprise, right? In bed with Duke, odds are you got a bit dirty in the process.

Well, Ol’ Jerry apparently got tired of defending himself, so he’s decided to shut down the investigation. On Monday, he fired 60 contract investigators working for his committee and charged with rooting out fraud, corruption, etc., and then yesterday tried to claim said dismissal was a bipartisan move, contrary to confirmable facts.

Can you say “culture of corruption?”

WaPo via Atrios:

Moving quickly to implement the bill signed by President Bush this week that authorizes military trials of enemy combatants, the administration has formally notified the U.S. District Court here that it no longer has jurisdiction to consider hundreds of habeas corpus petitions filed by inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

In a notice dated Wednesday, the Justice Department listed 196 pending habeas cases, some of which cover groups of detainees. The new Military Commissions Act (MCA), it said, provides that “no court, justice, or judge” can consider those petitions or other actions related to treatment or imprisonment filed by anyone designated as an enemy combatant, now or in the future.

As always, Keith speaks the truth:

…on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:

A government more dangerous to our liberty than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.

We have been here before — and we have been here before led here — by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.

He closes address the President:

Did it ever occur to you once, that in just 27 months and two days from now when you leave office, some irresponsible future President and a “competent tribunal” of lackeys would be entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of “Unlawful Enemy Combatant” for, and convene a Military Commission to try, not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?

We have limitations on governmental (and especially executive) power for very good reasons. An excellent rule of thumb when contemplating expansion of those powers it so imagine how someone completely at odds with one’s own political values might utilize such an expansion. The GOP in general and this Administration in particular have completely missed this lesson, and we pray that a wiser Congress may see this folly, and correct this travesty sooner rather than later.

At least when Santorum tries to use Lord of the Rings references to explain the Iraq war:

Former Rep. Gerry Studds married his partner, Dean Hara in Massachusetts, but the Feds don’t recognize that — so Mr Hara is therefore ineligible for any portion of Studds’ Congressional pension.

Opposing gay marriage means this theme will be repeated over and over again. Inheritance and survivor’s benefits happen automatically for married heterosexuals, and are capriciously denied to homosexuals seeking the same union. It’s petty and sad, and speaks to a profound moral blindness from our supposed “Christian” Right.