Jessica Simpson Gets a Massage

Did I say "Simpson"? Sorry. I meant Jessica Hippo.

Fringe Blogger Mows the Lawn

Fringe Liberal crazed rabid hippy blogger Bob Geiger responds to Fred Thompson.

We're Not Arming Sunnis.

We're arming Sunnis.

We're arming Sunnis.

We're arming Sunnis

We're arming Sunnis

We're arming Sunnis

We're not arming Sunnis! Who told you that?

Bush to Black Guests: Pick up the Trash

Good God, our president is embarrassing.

The Super-Executives

Background here. Even further back here, a pdf of a letter from the head of the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) to AG Alberto Gonzales in January of this year. It includes letters sent to the ISOO informing them of Cheney's violating the executive order and requests for them to do something about it.

A bunch of ISOO documents here.

And CREW takes a ride down Implication Highway.

The People in Guantanamo

How many mechcnics and bakers and taxi drivers have been in that hell for no good reason for years? Christ.

Easy MP3 Buying: PayPlay.FM

Just found out my music is for sale on PayPlay.FM.

Wo - I always wanted one of these. You can get one too and put it on your own blog or MySpace page or whatever:

Little Thom

Dang, doesn't fit. Oh well. Still works.

An Email to a Reporter

This story made the banner at Drudge with the headline: THE GREAT DIVIDE: REPORTERS GIVE DEMS MONEY OVER REPUBLICANS 9 TO 1!

The writer, Bill Dedman, provides a list of the 144 "journalists" found to have given to political candidates. The list includes copy editors, real estate reporters, and at least one graphic artist.

Way to go, Bill, that's hard-hitting journalism right there.

I sent Mr. Dedman an email:

Mr. Dedman

You wrote: "The following 144 journalists made campaign contributions from 2004 through the first quarter of 2007, according to Federal Election Commission records studied by MSNBC.com."

Is a copy editor a "journalist"? Because there are several in the list of 144 you provided. How about a real estate reporter? Or a sports copy editor? Or a fashion editor? Or a graphic artist? They're in there too.

Unbelievable. You and Drudge are a good match. Unfortunately you don't work for him; you work for a news organization that should not have allowed such distorted nonsense to be printed.

Sincerely...

I followed up with:

Mr. Dedman

I forgot to ask: Have you made contributions to
political candidates? If so, who were they?

Thanks for the time...

I'll let you know if he writes back. (He did: give me a bit.)

South Carolina

Protecting us from dangerous hippie t-shirt culture, thank GOD.

Iraq

One Iraqi teenager.

Brace yourself.

How Many Distortions Can You Find?

Check out this exchange between WaPo columnist Richard Cohen and readers. Background here.

What Would Jeff Dahmer Do?

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, with too little help from me, on torture.

June 16, 2007, OTTAWA -- Justice Antonin Scalia is one of the most powerful judges on the planet.

The job of the veteran U.S. Supreme Court judge is to ensure that the superpower lives up to its Constitution. But in his free time, he is obsessed with Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer, an American serial killer who raped, tortured, killed, committed necrophilia with, dismembered, and cannibalized several men and boys between 1978 and 1991. This much was made clear at a legal conference in Ottawa this week.

Senior judges from North America and Europe were in the midst of a panel discussion about torture and terrorism law, when a Canadian judge's passing remark - "Thankfully, security agencies in all our countries do not subscribe to the mantra 'What would Jeff Dahmer do?' " - got the legal bulldog in Judge Scalia barking.

The conservative jurist stuck up for Jeff Dahmer, arguing that hideous or not, federal agents require latitude in times of great crisis. "Jeff Dahmer - if those men and boys he raped, tortured, killed, committed necrophilia with, dismembered, and cannibalized, each had a nuclear device that could have destroyed Los Angeles, well, he saved Los Angeles. He saved hundreds of thousands of lives," Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling 1991, when Dahmer killed seven of his victims, and therefore, in Scalia's thinking, hypothetically saved Los Angeles seven times, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand.

"Are you going to convict Jeff Dahmer?" Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. "Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jeff Dahmer? I don't think so.

"So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes."

Are you going to convict Charles Manson?

Are you going to convict John Wayne Gacy?

Are you going to convict Son of Sam? He could have saved New York. That's even bigger than Los Angeles!

Who, I ask you, who on Earth - what sick, twisted, delusional, sadistic, murderous, psychopathic, torturing monster - would we not defend in the name of our fear? Huh? Who?

Conservative Blogs Take Baby Rebel Steps

The most hilarious thing about this WaPo story is how quickly these toddling keyboard revolutionaries will snap back to Bush's crotch. I give them a couple weeks.

Help Me Become O.J.'s Editor!

As you may have heard, a federal court today gave Fred Goldman, father of "alleged" O.J. Simpson victim Ron Goldman, permission to seek the rights to Simpson's warped book, If I Did It.

I want Mr. Goldman to hire me to edit it. He can't publish it as is - he needs to take O.J.'s words and twist them into shapes as hideous as the mind that birthed such a sick idea in the first place! I'm the man for the job!

I am uniquely suited for this:

• I'm from freaking Buffalo. O.J. was one of my childhood heroes. I had freaking full-page newspaper images of him on my wall for years when I was a kid.

• I can be as mean as a burnt snake, which is meaner than a cut snake by several factors, and which will be necessary - and gleefully employed - for the job.

• I'm a professional writer, both of fiction and non-fiction. (Credentials available upon request.)

• I already have a new title in mind, one I believe Mr. Goldman will appreciate: I'm an Idiot, which rhymes with If I Did It, but is way more honest.

Spread the word! Tell your friends! I want to edit O.J.'s warped book! Hell, I'll do it for free!

Human Corpses to be Made Into Oil

Yes!

Without oil we could no longer produce or transport food, and most of humanity would starve. That would be a tragedy, but at least all those bodies could be turned into fuel for the rest of us.

Bruce Schneier on Keystone Terrorists

There is a real threat of terrorism. And while I'm all in favor of the terrorists' continuing incompetence, I know that some will prove more capable. We need real security that doesn't require us to guess the tactic or the target: intelligence and investigation -- the very things that caught all these terrorist wannabes -- and emergency response. But the "war on terror" rhetoric is more politics than rationality. We shouldn't let the politics of fear make us less safe.

(Via)

John Howard Is a Hippie

Damn dirty Australian hippie.

Lou Dobbs Has Leprosy

If I say it, it's true.

No Amnesty - For Republicans!

Damn foreigners ruining our soup.

Foreclosure Rate at 50 Year High

Glad I'm not buying a house.

And the Canadian dollar is soaring.

Army Dumped Toxic Munitions at Sea

Welcome to the planet soon to be known as "Hell". (Via)

“The Army now admits that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste - either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels.”

Good God.

Here's their map, with the appropriate title, "WMDs Close to Home."

P. Bushie: Prez's Watch Stolen in Albania [UPDATE]

Holy crap this is hilarious. Watch about one minute in, as the gaga P. Bushie is double-handing the adoring crowd. You can see a hand going after the watch - then the watch is gone. Bush doesn't even seem to notice, so lost is he in the euphoria of being adored. This is how he pictured being president back in the good old days. "They like me! They really like me!"



The president of the United States lets someone take his watch off (the Secret Service is standing right there!) like he's freaking Ricky Martin at a teeny bopper's ball. Too much.

Albania, he's yours. Really. No, really.

UPDATE: the white House says Bush put the watch in his pocket. I guess it's possible.

Wait: Why would Snow say, "And I believe your network has actually looked through the tape carefully and has ascertained the same."? If Bush has the watch, why would he refer to the tape for proof? Dumbass.

Musharaff Out Soon?

Dicey, dicey, dicey days in Pakistan.

"They're Gonna Mock Us Out!"

Unbelievable. People are freaking out over the TUBES!

Then, alluding to the sometimes combative world of online media, they added there was “the real possibility that these letters, once released, would be published on the Internet and their authors discussed, even mocked, by bloggers.”

Why the worry about being published on "the internet"? They could be published in a newspaper, or a magazine, and be discussed, even mocked - but everything's different now, isn't it? People are discussing things, and we can see, watch, read them doing it in nearly real time. And a whole bunch of us can join in! And some people hate that.

It's fun to see.

Court Kills Major Terror Case

Via Think Progress and the NYTimes, and a fuller NYTimes version:

President George W. Bush cannot order the military to seize and indefinitely detain a Qatari national and suspected al Qaeda operative, the only person being held in the United States as an "enemy combatant," an appeals court ruled on Monday.

In the 2-1 decision, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel found that the federal Military Commissions Act doesn’t strip Ali al-Marri, a legal U.S. resident, of his constitutional rights to challenge his accusers in court.

It ruled the government must allow al-Marri to be released from military detention.

Al-Marri has been held in solitary confinement in the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., since June 2003. The Qatar native has been detained since his December 2001 arrest at his home in Peoria, Ill., where he moved with his wife and five children a day before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to study for a master’s degree.

“To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians, even if the President calls them ‘enemy combatants,’ would have disastrous consequences for the constitution — and the country,” the court panel said.

And, from the fuller NYT story:

“We refuse to recognize a claim to power,” Judge Motz added, “that would so alter the constitutional foundations of our Republic.”

A-Marri at Wikipedia.

A Too Kind Response to Joe Klein

Joe Klein, of TIME, at not his lowest, but very, very low.

My response, in which I was much to kind:

Mr. Klein, I'm really trying to understand this part:

"His "perjury"--not telling the truth about which reporters he talked to--would never be considered significant enough to reach trial, much less sentencing, much less time in stir if he weren't Dick Cheney's hatchet man."

He WAS Dick Cheney's hatchet man. Or, a better way to put it: he was the Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States. (Not to mention an assistant to the President.) And he was convicted of two counts of perjury and two counts of obstructing justice. Not enough to reach trial? A career federal prosecutor, a judge on the federal bench, a grand jury, and 12 jurors – well, they’d probably say your remarks don’t even merit a response, but I took the liberty of saying for them: “We disagree.”

And his perjury – and I know you know this, you're not an idiot by any stretch – was not “not telling the truth about which reporters he talked to.” It was lying to FBI investigators and to the grand jury about what he told and what he learned from reporters - and what he learned from the vice president. (Did you forget about Libby telling the FBI that Tim Russert told him Plame worked at the CIA? And that he forgot he learned it from Vice President Cheney? Ring any bells?)

This you turn into “not telling the truth about which reporters he talked to."

Mr. Klein, it is cringingly disappointing to know that someone capable of such a depth of obtuseness is seen as deserving of working at the top tier or our country's media.

A Soldier Responds to Fouad Ajami

Fouad Ajami wrote an op-ed in the WSJ making a case for the pardon of Scooter Libby.

He makes the case by calling Libby, in the title and in the piece, a "fallen soldier" in the war in Iraq.

An actual soldier in the war in Iraq responds.

Disappearing People

Human Rights Watch on the status of 39 people the U.S. government reportedly took prisoner, and will not disclose the location of.

This is after President Bush publicly stated in September, 2006, that, after 14 prisoners were transferred from secret prisons to Guantanamo, there were no prisoners left in CIA custody.

Aligning With Saddam Hussein

Via TPM, this is perhaps the most twisted twist in the twisted wreckage of American foreign policy under the Bush administration. American soldiers, who were sent to Iraq to save us from the Evil Sunni Saddam, are now helping Saddam's former Sunni fighters in their fight against the militias and terrorists this war created.

How's that for a super-sized pretzel from hell?

Ali Hatem Ali Suleiman, a leader of the Sunni Dulaimi tribe who works in Anbar and Baghdad, said many of the fighters in Amiriyah belong to the Islamic Army, which includes former officers from Saddam Hussein's military and is more secular than other insurgent groups. The fighters have been organized and encouraged by local imams.

"Let's be honest, the enemy now is not the Americans, for the time being," Suleiman said. "It's al-Qaida and the [Shiite] militias. Those are our enemies."

For the time being, American soldiers, many on the their third or fourth tour, are fighting alongside, and supplying weapons to, Sunnis militias in their fight against Shiites, Sunni soldiers who will, at some point (Who knows when?), everyone believes, turn those weapons on American soldiers.

Gosh darn it, I just love those yellow ribbons.

Thunderstorms

When I was a kid we'd be allowed to stay up past our bedtimes when a thunderstorm was coming to Western New York. We'd all gather at the picture window, which Dad, maybe Mom, smartly chose when they built the house in '61 to look out over our long back yard, which led out to nothing but forest and swamp for thousands of acres, and watch the show. It's a wonderful thing to remember, and brings the pain of my good momma's still so recent departure bubbling up. I love it, strangely enough.

Here's to you, Mom, and those lovely thunderstorm nights you gave us. (And here's to Buffalo. Hope you're alright, everybody.)

The Fairbanks Daily on Sen. Stevens, FBI

Hey Ted, the days of your reign of greed and lunacy are numbered. And you know what everybody already knows about you? That when the screw turns on you, you're such a weasel you'll sing like a lark to the FBI. Isn't that thought scary for your friends in D.C.?

Can't wait.

TPM's been on this from the beginning.

You Elected Interpreters

And those interpreters don't know how to speak the language of truth.

And Scott Horton on the same subject:

I was invited shortly after this Rice-Bellinger roadtrip to meet with the European parliamentary committee of inquiry and explain to them the curious aberrations of the Rice-Bellinger lexicon. For instance, when they say “America does not torture,” they mean this in the sense that John Yoo does. America can do whatever it likes, and if the president approves it, it is not torture.

Here's the report on extraordinary rendition published two days ago. It starts off:

1. What was previously just a set of allegations is now proven: large numbers of people have been abducted from various locations across the world and transferred to countries where they have been persecuted and where it is known that torture is common practice. Others have been held in arbitrary detention, without any precise charges levelled against them and without any judicial oversight – denied the possibility of defending themselves. Still others have simply disappeared for indefinite periods and have been held in secret prisons, including in member states of the Council of Europe, the existence and operations of which have been concealed ever since.

Hopefully this is a beginning of a necessary path to justice that Americans seem to always think is impossible or un-American or wrong for reasons of sovereignty. International justice can be very good for us. It can wake us up and help steer us at times when we've been steered wrong from inside. There is nothing wrong with that.

Digby dives in.

I Found the CIA Prisons

Too funny. I googled "CIA prisons" and went to hit news, but hit maps instead. My God - there's one in Portland!

Get Craig Donsanto Under Oath

Let's see what he has to say about this.

Tracheotomy and Squirt

And other songs, available for less than a cup of coffee each at iTunes.

For those of you who like hard copy, there's CDBaby.

Schlozman: Donsanto Did It

Schlozman claimed today that he had the okay from Craig Donsanto, head of the Election Crimes branch of the Justice Department, on the indictments mentioned in the post below. TPM Muckraker finds an email that speaks differently.

And another fired USAtty spoke similarly same about Donsanto too:

McKay also wanted to make it clear that he pressed ahead with a preliminary investigation, despite the hesitation of Craig Donsanto, the longtime chief of the Election Crimes branch of the Department of Justice, who ultimately concurred with McKay that no federal crimes had been committed in the election.

Schlozman: I Didn't Know They Were Democrats

Wow - that's a really big lie. And revealing.

Former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri Bradley Schlozman testified before the Senate today regarding his indictments of employees of a Democratic voter registration group, ACORN - five days before the election last November.

He said - under oath - that he didn't know if it was a Democratic organization.

Holy crap that's some lying.

Here's the indictment his office brought against ACORN. It reads:

e. ACORN is a not-for-profit organization, the mission of which is to improve minority and low-income communities.

f. Project Vote is a not-for-profit organization that works with ACORN to register voters for federal and local elections.

g. ACORN and Project Vote recruit and assign workers to visit low-income and minority neighborhoods in Kansas City,
Jackson County, Missouri, and elsewhere, to obtain voter registrations.

For him to say today - after all the news about this - that he doesn't even now know that they registered Dems is almost unbelievable. That is OBVIOUSLY a lie. And it reveals that he knew about ACORN then.

Really really dumb.