Judge Roberts, the judicial activist

Guess it all depends on who he's acting for. In Roberts' case, when the wealthy and powerful are involved, suddenly judicial activism isn't all that bad. Read More......

Open thread

Man, I love this town. Read More......

Bush may be breaking law claims GOP member

Ok, for a Republican Member of Congress to realize that Bush is breaking the law, the Administration has to be doing something especially egregrious. Because, everyone knows the GOPers on the Hill are just Bush's lapdogs:

In a sharply worded letter to President Bush in May, an important Congressional ally charged that the administration might have violated the law by failing to inform Congress of some secret intelligence programs and risked losing Republican support on national security matters.

So, what the hell else has Bush been doing?:

"I have learned of some alleged intelligence community activities about which our committee has not been briefed," Mr. Hoesktra wrote. "If these allegations are true, they may represent a breach of responsibility by the administration, a violation of the law, and, just as importantly, a direct affront to me and the members of this committee who have so ardently supported efforts to collect information on our enemies."

He added: "The U.S. Congress simply should not have to play Twenty Questions to get the information that it deserves under our Constitution."

Even when Congress does play Twenty Questions, they don't get any answers. They're useless. Read More......

A word about that NY bomb plot

While I'm glad NYC is safe, I have to wonder about this "plot." From the stories I've read, this plot involved a bunch of guys who hadn't done anything to advance their plot other than talking about it in an Internet chat room and going online to find a publicly available map of New York. That's it. And just like the supposed plot to bomb the Sears Tower, there are no apparent Al Qaeda ties either (they aspired to be tied to Al Qaeda - uh huh).

And oh yeah, get this:

"We believe we have what I'll call eight principal players and that we have them largely identified," [Mark] Mershon [assistant director-in-charge of the FBI New York Field Office] said, adding that the suspects were on three continents. He declined to disclose the nationalities of the suspects.

"We don't have charges pending in the U.S. so there certainly will be no extradition," he said.

Really? The big bag terror cell is planning to flood lower Manhattan by blowing up the Holland Tunnel and killing God knows how many people, and the US is bringing no charges against those people. How interesting is that? Why, because thought crimes aren't yet against the law in America? I'm serious, I wonder if they could even get these guys on charges here in the US - what would the charge be? They hate our country and really would like us all to die, even though they've done nothing to actually further that goal?

I'm not saying these are "good people," but I'm having a very difficult time seeing a real terror plot here akin to what Osama did (speaking of which, where is Osama?). If it's a crime to be Muslim and chat online about how great it would be if Americans died, well, then we'd need some pretty big jails to fit a billion people. Read More......

Patriotism vs. Nationalism

An important, and scary, difference:

Too many people — in every country — think nationalism and patriotism are the same thing. They’re not; they’re completely different.

Orwell defined patriotism as “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people.” Can’t argue with that.

The subtitle of this article is “The greatness of the United States is unique—and not a model to be exported by narrow-minded nationalists.”

According to Orwell, nationalism is the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or an idea, and “placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” In other words nationalism doesn’t have to be based on a country. This same fanaticism can be applied to any “ism”: Communism, Neo-Conservatism, Fundamentalism (of any religion), you name it. Whether it’s based on a country or an “ism,” nationalism always has that combination of blind zeal and indifference to reality.

In nationalism, thoughts “always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. … Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.” And this self-deception leads to disastrous miscalculations based on wishful thinking rather than facts.

Read More......

Bush administration says detainee suicides in Gitmo are really part of an evil plot

Yeah, because there's no better way to escape than to kill yourself first.

Seriously, this is just weird - and at the same time extremely troubline. The Bush administraiton is trying to claim that the detainees are killing themselves in order to pass secret communications back and forth or something. This is my favorite paragraph:

Three suicides at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, may have been part of a broader plot by detainees who were using confidential lawyer-client papers and envelopes to pass handwritten notes their guards could not intercept, according to documents that government lawyers filed yesterday in federal court.

Detainees could apparently hide documents in their cells -- including instructions on how to tie knots and a classified U.S. military memo regarding cell locations of detainees and camp operational matters at Guantanamo -- by keeping the materials in envelopes labeled as lawyer-client communications.

Did you get that? A classified US military memo about Guantanamo itself. Let's just assume for a moment that these guys ARE Al Qaeda terrorists who are under top security at a US military prison. How did they get their hands on a classified US military memo detailing all sorts of useful information about Guantanamo Bay itself? They got it from their lawyers? Oh really, civilian lawyers now have access to classified military documents about our most secret and important anti-terrorist prison?

Sounds to me like, if this is true, the Bush administration just admitted to one of the biggest intelligence snafus and security breaches since they've come into office. Read More......

Open thread

Beautiful day Read More......

House GOP pushing "Terri Schiavo" agenda

Anyway they can find to intrude in to your life they will. That seems to be the motto for the Republican party these days. The ultra-right wingers in the House are going to push through their theocratic agenda this summer. That's freaking out some of the less right-wing GOPers:

Frustrated and angry, they say the leadership's new American Values Agenda, a list of initiatives heavy on ideological themes, seems short-sighted and ill-timed considering that few conservatives are at serious risk in November.

"It was stupid and gross," said Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut. "They have this obsession to satisfy conservative Republicans who will probably be re-elected no matter what happens. They get job satisfaction, but they are making it more difficult for me to win my race."

Tough luck for you, Chris Shays. You think you're one of them, but they really hate you. Let's hope that the new GOP strategy is, in fact, a winning strategy for the Democrats.

Rahm's got the talking point:

Democrats say the ideologically tinged votes could benefit their candidates in areas where they hope to defeat Republicans.

"It reminds people that the Republican Party is the party of Terri Schiavo," said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, referring to Republican intercession this year in the case of the Florida woman whose husband wanted her removed from a feeding tube.

Remind people every day that the Republican Party is the party of Terri Schiavo. Read More......

Three more soldiers dead in Iraq

But according to the AP article, that's not so bad:

Three American soldiers were killed Saturday in fighting in the western province of Anbar, the U.S. military said. They were the first U.S. fatalities reported in Iraq in four days and only the eighth so far this month.

"Only the eighth"? It's only the 8th day of the month. So one-death-a-day is apparently progress. Read More......

DeLay Not Done?

He's baaaaccckk....or he may be anyway. DeLay won't say it's over:

"For this guy to say he can't tell where I'm going to be on Election Day, and that I am forced to be on the ballot, well, they may get exactly what they want," DeLay told supporters to raucous applause. Sparks is a Democrat appointed by Republican former President George Bush.

Later, reporters asked Delay if he now planned to run. He didn't say no.

"We have to wait and see what the 5th Circuit does on appeal," he said.

DeLay can't give up the power. He's addicted to it.

(HT: Political Wire) Read More......

Saturday Morning Open Thread

Start. Read More......

Personal data found in the internet, again

Same story, over and over and over and over. It's pretty clear that the issue of personal data loss doesn't matter in political circles unless it's for a specific politician. All of us regular folks might as well talk to a wall because we'll get the same response anyway. It was only after the big loss of data that Bush proposed doing something and even then it was only for the military and the rest of the country who has been hit repeatedly has yet to hear so much as a whisper of similar help. Hillary made a minor splash with this subject a few weeks ago but that effort to attract campaign support has gone nowhere so I'm assuming it's MIA. Read More......