Category: Politics

Government Crisis Over Pakistani Judges Continues

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It appears that Nawaz Sharif’s party has quit the Pakistani government ruling coalition over the issue of reinstating judges.

It appears that at the center of this disupte is deposed Chief Justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, who has committed the sin of being a judge:

He held the ruling elite to account. He rattled the security establishment by pursuing the case of the “missing” – alleged terror suspects abducted and held incommunicado by Pakistan’s intelligence services.

And he took up legal challenges to President Musharraf’s re-election.

Additionally, there are indications that the Pakistani high court would likely rule that the state of emergency, and possibly Musharraf’s grant of amnesty to PPP head Asif Zardari who would otherwise be charged with corruption.

Guantanamo Court Bars Senior General from Participation

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General Thomas Hartmann, the senior officer in the Office of Military Commissions, has been barred from any participation in the Hamdan trial by senior judge Navy Captain Keith Allred.

The defense, bolstered by testimony from former chief prosecutor Morris Davis, claimed that Hartmann was exerting undue pressure on the prosecutors to rush the “sexy cases”, and hurry prosecutions for political gain, and use evidence obtain by torture.

We are seeing increasing push back, on many levels against the Bush Agenda, by judicial and bureaucratic forces, because there is an increasing realization that Bush and His Evil Minions™ have less than 9 months left on their term, and they are irrelevant.

The judge’s decision on the Yoo memos also reflects this.

Think Again: The Costs of Enforced Sexual Ignorance

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Eric Alterman has a column up, Think Again: The Costs of Enforced Sexual Ignorance, in which he rightly excoriates the people who propose abstinence only education.

However, he misses the bigger point:

These programs are chosen as if specifically designed not to work. One long-term evaluation of 10 state abstinence-only programs concluded, “Abstinence-only programs show little evidence of sustained (long-term) impact on attitudes and intentions. Worse, they show some negative impacts on youth’s willingness to use contraception, including condoms, to prevent negative sexual health outcomes related to sexual intercourse. Importantly, only in one state did any program demonstrate short-term success in delaying the initiation of sex; none of these programs demonstrates evidence of long-term success in delaying sexual initiation among youth exposed to the programs or any evidence of success in reducing other sexual risk-taking behaviors among participants.”

(emphasis mine)

He seems to think that these programs are wrong headed, and failures as a result.

They are not. They are failures by design.

The driving force for the people behind these programs is that they believe that sex is evil.

The scripture , “It is better to marry than to burn”, states that marriage is preferable to lechery, but inferior to celibacy, and people behind this are not interested in protecting children, they are interested in punishing them.

In fact, not only to they oppose premarital sex and abortion, they oppose birth control for married couples too. Their goal is not to overturn just Roe, but also Baird. They want women barefoot and pregnant.

Blog Post of the Year

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This is genius, c/o this modern world.

What an Amazing Accomplishment

It’s September 12, 2001. You’re sitting in front of a TV, watching footage of the World Trade Center collapse over and over and over again.

All of a sudden, someone from seven years in the future walks out of a tiny temporal vortex, and tells you: George W. Bush is going to fuck this up so badly that in 2008, the United States of America will likely elect as president a black man whose middle name is Hussein and whose father was Muslim. Oh, and he also admits he’s used cocaine.

I think it would have been easier to convince me of the reality of time travel. “No, no, I believe you really are from the future. But the other stuff, that’s CRAZY.”

Office of Special Counsel Raided by FBI

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Details here, here, here, here, and here.

It appears that Scott Bloch was the target of the raid, which appears to be about obstruction of justice, at least that was what was on the subpoena.

Note that Bloch had his disk wiped to NSA standards some time back, and claimed that it was virus removal:

Jeff Phelps, who runs Washington’s Geeks on Call franchise, declined to talk about specific clients, but said calls placed directly by government officials are unusual. He also said erasing a drive is an unusual virus treatment. “We don’t do a seven-level wipe for a virus,” he said.

He used the office for political advantage, and then covered it up.

Why he needed computer consultants to break the law is beyond me though.

In 1989, before it became horrific bloatware, Norton Utilities had this ability, and you could find a dozen or so similar utilities on the Google, but having a receipt like this pretty much slam

Newest Grant Theft Auto Slams Right Wing

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Well, now we know why younger Americans are trending against the Republicans.

Cases in point in GTA IV:

  • A hack news organization, Weasel News…Perhaps representing some other mammal named “fair and balanced” news channel?
  • Bridges closed to the city center (Manhattan) for “unspecified” security threats.
  • A Limbaugh clone who is poorly depicted, “You listeners make the show. All I do is make the money and spend it on face fulls of pharmaceuticals that make me go deaf.”

The vast left wing conspiracy seems to be doing its job.

Pumpkinhead is Very Petty

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And it appears that he has gotten Arianna Huffington blackballed from any interviews on her book tour on any NBC property.

She said not nice things about him in her book, Right is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe.

Note: I do not have one of those Amazon reference accounts. The link is a freebie, because Arianna is always entertaining, and Russert is a complete whore.

OK, this Is Corruption, and if it is Not Criminal, it Should Be

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Dean Baker notices the following bit of self-admitted corruption in a New York Times article on former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin:

Mr. Rubin encouraged Goldman to move into more treacherous markets like proprietary trading and commodities trading. Even so, he now says he was always concerned about the dangers posed by risky futures and derivatives trades, having seen how the pell-mell use of futures contracts exacerbated the 1987 stock market crash.

Shortly before leaving Goldman to head up President Clinton’s National Economic Council, Mr. Rubin says, he met with Richard B. Fisher, the chairman of Morgan Stanley, to discuss the idea of imposing stricter margin requirements on futures trading. Mr. Rubin says the idea died after the Chicago Board of Trade told him “we will make sure Goldman Sachs never trades another future on the C.B.O.T. if this went ahead.”

Bob Rubin just said that he changed his recommendations policy for the benefit of his company in has capacity as head of the National Economic Council. This is completely corrupt, and he is freely admitting it.

Where is one of Bush’s DoJ political vendettas when you need them?

Ranks of Southern Baptists Are Shrinking

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We now learn that both baptism and total membership in the Southern Baptists appear to be on the decline. It appears that not just Jimmy Carter is disenchanted with their increasingly strident stands of secular political issues.

While it is clear that the founding fathers demanded a separation of Church and State because they thought that organized religion was toxic to good governance*, there is also the issue of blowback when an a religion spot welds itself to a political party that is in the descendance.

In a very real way, they have been done in by the same thing that crippled them after the Civil War, when their origin as a sect was driven by their support of slavery.

It could be argued that the negative consequences of the circumstances of their founding led to the sect, and its worshipers, being held in some distrust until the 1960s or 1970s, with the best guess as to the definitive end of this status being Carter’s election as president in 1976.

The lesson to be learned is the lesson that Molière so eloquently demonstrated in 1664, that religion can often be a convenient refuge for scoundrels.

*Ask the brave anti-Mullah activists in Iran. They would agree too. Organized religionis completely toxic to good governance,

Obama Delegate Purge in California

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Well, we’ve had some shenanigans in delegate selection in California, where there are more candidates for Obama delegates than there were spaces.

Theoretically, the actual delegates are chosen at caucus, but the campaigns can, and do strike names from the list before the caucuses.

Originally, the Obama struck some 950 potential delegates off the list out about 1700 (about 55%), as opposed to about 40 out of about 1000 (4%) for the Clinton campaign, including Marcy Winograd, who sits on the Executive committee of the CA Dems, and contested the primary against hawk Jane Harman.

Apparently, their justification was that they were concerned about Clinton poaching their delegates (the Bitch made me do it defense), but of note is the fact that the people remaining were the bundlers and their girlfriends, so it was payback for the morally repugnant policy of bundling donations, one which the Obama campaign says that they do not need because of their massive small donor base.

It’s payback to the big donors.

Of note, once this all hit the fan, the Obama campaign backtracked, but it’s both stupid and sleazy.

Just another group of supporters to be thrown under the bus, as Obama is now signaling over “Don’t ask Don’t Tell”, where he’s nominally opposed, but won’t consider the position of candidates for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which means that we will see a military man lobbying against this, just like Colin Powell did, which sounds an awful lot like the dog whistle gay bashing that he did with Donnie McClurkin.

Oh, well, I guess that I’ll be holding my nose when I pull the lever (metaphorically speaking, it will be either Diebold or Optiscan in November) for him.

My expectations are now low enough that I don’t think that I will be disappointed.

FBI Goons Sent to Intimidate Wecht Jurors

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While it is normal for lawyers from both sides to talk with jurors following a mistrial, it is highly unusual, at least so far as I know, for the US Attorney to send FBI agents to interview the jurors.

Absent an allegation of something like juror tampering, it simply makes no sense. FBI agents are not trained as jury consultants or litigators, and as such are not the best choice for this task.

So now, at the end what was clearly a political show trial, one in which the prosecution could not meet the burden of proof, we are seeing a highly public harassment of those jurors at the direction of the US Attorney’s office.

When this is all over, U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan, and the rest of her bully boys, need to be fully investigated over their actions, which are a basic affront to the concepts of laws going back to perhaps the Magna Carta.

If wrongdoing is uncovered, they need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, with imprisonment and disbarment as the results.

The Bobblespeak Translations

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OMFG!!!! This is funny.

It’s a translation of the polite circuitous language of political discourse into more plebeian language.

One sample:

60 Minutes with Doug Feith – April 6, 2008
60 Minutes
April 6, 2008
Guest: Doug Feith
*******************************************
Kroft: why did we invade iraq?

Feith: Saddam had a very scary mustache

Kroft: but he wasn’t involved in 9/11

Feith: but he could have been

Kroft: but he wasn’t

Feith: but he could have

Kroft: but he wasn’t

Feith: we had to attack someone

Kroft: so why Saddam?

Feith: he once attacked Iran

Kroft: you’re f$#@ing kidding right

….

The translation of Krugman may cause physical injury from excessive laughter. (link)

My Son is Very Jewish

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So my son, Charlie, age 8, and I are watching Keith Olbermann, and we get to his favorite bit, Worst Persons in the World, and this time, it’s Joe Lieberman who wins the gold, for accusing the Ned Lamont campaign of hacking their website in 2006, when it was discovered well before election day that the problem was a poorly configured and overloaded web server, so it was Lieberman who hacked Lieberman’s web site.

My son knows that Lieberman is someone I detest, but there are a lot of those, so he asks, “Is he the one who hates blacks Jews and women?

Realizing just who he was thinking of I reply, no, the one who hates blacks, Jews, and women is Pat Buchanan.

He nods sagely, and says, “OK.”

And then I say, “Joe Lieberman is Jewish”.

And he smacks himself on his head, and says, “That is so embarrassing”.

I’m not sure that Non-Jews get the cultural overtone, but this is a perfectly Jewish moment.