We are absolutely SHOCKED by this, but it’s awesome:

Today, the Lone Star State’s Governor Rick Perry signed an executive order to require all girls entering sixth grade to be vaccinated against HPV, according to the Associated Press. Perry, a conservative republican opposed to abortion and stem cell research, avoided the battle such an aim would incite in the Legislature by issuing the order himself. Despite the fact that we can now successfully vaccinate against HPV — the most common cause of cervical cancer, which kills 4,000 women yearly — many conservatives are up in arms over the implications of inoculating young girls against a sexually transmitted disease. To do so would undercut messages about safe sex; possibly encouraging sexual activity, they argue.

This line of reasoning is so loony, so unabashedly callous, it’s amazing to hear it so widely parroted. It essentially deems naughty girls who do not heed parental warnings about the dangers of unsafe sex as expendable — either to a HPV, a disease we can prevent, or, in the worst cases, cervical cancer. “The HPV vaccine provides us with an incredible opportunity to effectively target and prevent cervical cancer,” Perry said. “If there are diseases in our society that are going to cost us large amounts of money, it just makes good economic sense, not to mention the health and well-being of these individuals to have those vaccines available.”

More at the local fishwrapper.

Charles Timson, the Defense Department jackass who tried to organize a boycott of the law firms providing pro bono representation to the Gitmo detainees has resigned.

Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out, asshole.

Many have said this of presidents in the past, but in the US today, it’s a matter of public record:

LAST August, a federal judge found that the president of the United States broke the law, committed a serious felony and violated the Constitution. Had the president been an ordinary citizen — someone charged with bank robbery or income tax evasion — the wheels of justice would have immediately begun to turn. The F.B.I. would have conducted an investigation, a United States attorney’s office would have impaneled a grand jury and charges would have been brought.

But under the Bush Justice Department, no F.B.I. agents were ever dispatched to padlock White House files or knock on doors and no federal prosecutors ever opened a case.

The ruling was the result of a suit, in which [James Bamford, the author, is] one of the plaintiffs, brought against the National Security Agency by the American Civil Liberties Union. It was a response to revelations by this newspaper in December 2005 that the agency had been monitoring the phone calls and e-mail messages of Americans for more than four years without first obtaining warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Let’s compare:

• CLINTON lied about a blow job in an investigation of an ancient land deal in Arkansas on which he lost money: IMPEACHED

• BUSH admitted on national television that he was wantonly committing hundreds if not thousands of felonies by ignoring FISA, not to mention starting a trillion-dollar war with a country essentially unrelated to Islamic terrorism: UNIMPEACHED

Molly Ivins, 1944 – 2007. She was only 62.

Molly said this recently:

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush’s proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on Jan. 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, “Stop it, now!”

One of her editors said:

Goodbye, Molly I.

Molly Ivins is gone, and her words will never grace these pages again — for this, we will mourn. But Molly wasn’t the type of woman who would want us to grieve. More likely, she’d say something like, “Hang in there, keep fightin’ for freedom, raise more hell, and don’t forget to laugh, too.”

If there was one thing Molly wanted us to understand, it’s that the world of politics is absurd. Since we can’t cry, we might as well laugh. And in case we ever forgot, Molly would remind us, several times a week, in her own unique style.

Goddamn right.

We figure it’s got something to do with his ever-dwindling approval ratings and the fact that Congress is actually holding hearings, but it’s good that this is getting out. Politicians have no business influencing scientific findings.

He’s holding the administration’s feet to the fire for an explicit answer to the question “Do you think you can go to war with Iran without Congressional permission?” Rice, et. al., have tried hard to avoid answering this question, but he won’t let it drop.

God bless that man.

He’s increasing his direct control over regulatory agencies, basically hamstringing them in what Henry Waxman calls “great news for special interests.”

Seriously, how much more could this guy SUCK?

Canadian citizen Maher Arar — the poster boy, if you will, for extraordinary rendition — will be compensated by his government to the tune of $10.5 MM (CN) for its role in his year-long ordeal. Arar was arrested at JFK en route from Tunisia to his home in Canada in 2002; after 11 days, the US officials sent him to Syria, where he was frequently beaten and kept in solitary confinement for the better part of a year before being released.

This is better than nothing, but the real problem is that the true architects of his torture and imprisonment are the US, who still refuse to remove him from their watch lists despite his having been cleared by a 2-year inquiry, and despite the fact that the only reason he was on US watch lists in the first place is because of the original Canadian error.

Here he is insisting there’s no such thing as a Constitutional right to habeas corpus:

This is really beyond the pale. From the Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel:

“While Gonzales’s statement has a measure of quibbling precision to it, his logic is troubling because it would suggest that many other fundamental rights that Americans hold dear (such as free speech, freedom of religion, and the right to assemble peacefully) also don’t exist because the Constitution often spells out those rights in the negative. It boggles the mind the lengths this administration will go to to systematically erode the rights and privileges we have all counted on and held up as the granite pillars of our society since our nation was founded.”

(Quoted at Slashdot)

Honestly, this sort of absurd statement ought to be grounds for his removal and, frankly, disbarrment.

Via BoingBoing, this quote from Sir Ken Macdonald, British director of public prosecutions:

It is critical that we understand that this new form of terrorism carries another more subtle, perhaps equally pernicious, risk. Because it might encourage a fear-driven and inappropriate response. By that I mean it can tempt us to abandon our values.

London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war.

We wouldn’t get far in promoting a civilising culture of respect for rights amongst and between citizens if we set about undermining fair trials in the simple pursuit of greater numbers of inevitably less safe convictions. On the contrary, it is obvious that the process of winning convictions ought to be in keeping with a consensual rule of law and not detached from it. Otherwise we sacrifice fundamental values critical to the maintenance of the rule of law — upon which everything else depends.

They’re making shit up about Barack Obama. Fortunately, CNN remembered it used to be a NEWS organization and more or less obliterated the “story” promulgated by the Moonie Times (Washington Times and Insight Magazine) organization and Fox News. (The Moonie mag Insight is still insisting their unsourced story stands despite CNN’s actual investigative coverage, and they end up looking pretty stupid because of it.)

Even better: Obama himself isn’t taking this lying down.

In a post on coercion and hearsay, he concludes:

Either we are a global leader in fairness and human rights, or we’re not. Under our current administration, I fear that we are not.

And not in a good way: his approval rating stands at 28 percent.

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.