Does Karl Rove now remind us of Uncle Junior?

This is priceless.
The Federalist Society is a big-time conservative group of lawyers and scholars who claim to have actual principles, like respect for the spirit of the law and stuff like that.
So Karl Rove decides to piggyback on their reputation to try to polish some of the tarnish off his own image. And they let him. He was one of the keynote speakers at the 2005 National Lawyers Convention.
And as a result, the Society itself ends up talking like the Soprano's defense team -- turning its principles inside out and trashing all of its own dearly-held values just to defend the sleazy Rove.
Here's what one member actually said: "Everybody's presumed innocent until convicted and a mere investigation shouldn't hinder anyone's political activities". And here's the conference co-chair speaking: "He's come into the cross-hairs of criticism from the liberal establishment here in Washington [and when the establishment can't defeat the power of one's ideas] they crank up the engine of personal attack in order to distract the leaders."
So I imagine Jack Abramhoff and Tom Delay will be speaking at their next meeting? And then Bill Clinton? How about OJ next? And Blake? And maybe Saddam Hussein at the meeting after that?

Great line of the day

"We must not surrender flag and faith to those who would use both to support a war which honors neither."
This is from a very interesting essay "Confessions of a Repentant Republican" which I found originally on The Smirking Chimp. The whole essay is well written and presents a coherent framework for opposition to the war in Iraq -- a worthwhile read.

When the gales of November come early

I had forgotten that the wreck Of the Edmund Fitzgerald happened on 30 years ago, on November 10:
Music
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called 'Gitche Gumee'
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty.
That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early.

The ship was the pride of the American side
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin
As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most
With a crew and good captain well seasoned
Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
When they left fully loaded for Cleveland
And later that night when the ship's bell rang
Could it be the north wind they'd been feelin'?

The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
And a wave broke over the railing
And every man knew, as the captain did too,
T'was the witch of November come stealin'.
The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
When the Gales of November came slashin'.
When afternoon came it was freezin' rain
In the face of a hurricane west wind.

When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck sayin'.
Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya.
At seven P.M. a main hatchway caved in, he said
Fellas, it's been good t'know ya
The captain wired in he had water comin' in
And the good ship and crew was in peril.
And later that night when his lights went outta sight
Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Does any one know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The searches all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay
If they'd put fifteen more miles behind her.
They might have split up or they might have capsized;
May have broke deep and took water.
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters.

Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion.
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams;
The islands and bays are for sportsmen.
And farther below Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her,
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the Gales of November remembered.

In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed,
In the Maritime Sailors' Cathedral.
The church bell chimed till it rang twenty-nine times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call 'Gitche Gumee'.
Superior, they said, never gives up her dead
When the gales of November come early!

Friday Cat-and-Dog blogging

I love stories like this one:

"A schnauzer-Siberian husky mix named Ginny will be eulogized Nov. 19 at the Westchester Cat Show, where she was named Cat of the Year in 1998 for her uncanny skill and bravery in finding and rescuing endangered tabbies . . . Among the best-known rescues is the time Ginny threw herself against a vertical pipe at a construction site to topple it and reveal the kittens trapped inside. She once ignored the cuts on her paws as she dug through a box full of broken glass to find an injured cat inside." For more about this remarkable dog, see the Ginny Fan Club website.

Prime Minister Chalabi?

LiberalOasis notes that Chalabi is "being spun once again as a possible prime minister" for Iraq. Well, I suppose its a possible outcome, if he can figure out a way to steal the Dec. 15 election . . . Hey, do you think THAT'S why he's visiting in Washington this week? To get some election-stealing tips from the masters?

Wanker

What an asshole!: "Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito said Thursday he was 'unduly restrictive' in promising in 1990 to avoid appeals cases involving two investment firms and said he has not made any rulings in which he had a 'legal or ethical obligation' to step aside. "
Yeah, sure, Sam -- so what are you lying about NOW?

Paul Martin's mom didn't raise a stupid kid . . .

...though apparently Jack Layton thinks she did.
Here's Jack's plan -- first, in two weeks tell Martin that he has lost the confidence of the House and so he should set the election date a few days after the final Gomery report comes out, in mid-February, rather than waiting until March to call for an April vote. Second, in four weeks demonstrate your confidence in the Martin government by voting in favour of the Dec 8 spending estimates, so everyone gets their goodies.
Yeah, great plan guys -- Martin's sure to go for it. It will really put him on the spot, knowing how you support him or don't support him or either or neither or both.
Everyone just loves the idea of campaigning in January. And OF COURSE the Liberals would WELCOME the chance to have the vote happen just days after every newspaper in the land runs the expected centre-page spreads about Liberal corruption and millions missing and bag men and all that stuff likely to be in Gomery's final report.
So why would anyone expect the Liberals to take this seriously? Do the opposition parties think they can play some sort of 'principle' card here, pontificating that the Liberals would have "a hard time justifying remaining in power against the clear will of the House of Commons" when they themselves are too afraid of Canadian anger to bring the government down over its spending plans, which is how the Commons is supposed to actually demonstrate "clear will".
The opposition parties have to quit playing games here. They're not very good at it.
Jack, Stephen -- either vote Martin down before Christmas, or just shut up and wait until March.
Oh, and by the way, in the meantime you could be trying to come up with some ideas -- you know, some policies that might make Canadians think you actually have a clue about why we should vote for you . . . whaddaya think of that for a plan?

What part of 'no exceptional circumstances' does Cheney not understand?

Back in the good old days when that highly-moral Bill Clinton was in power, this is what the US told the UN about torture:

Torture is prohibited by law throughout the United States. It is categorically denounced as a matter of policy and as a tool of state authority. Every act constituting torture under the Convention constitutes a criminal offense under the law of the United States. No official of the government, federal, state or local, civilian or military, is authorized to commit or to instruct anyone else to commit torture. Nor may any official condone or tolerate torture in any form. No exceptional circumstances may be invoked as a justification of torture. U.S. law contains no provision permitting otherwise prohibited acts of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment to be employed on grounds of exigent circumstances (for example, during a 'state of public emergency') or on orders from a superior officer or public authority, and the protective mechanisms of an independent judiciary are not subject to suspension.

Emphasis mine. I don't care how many things "changed" after 911, this statement doesn't permit torture under any circumstances. And there is no allowance for Cheney to argue about a Presidential exemption.
Even the White House appears to be backing off Cheney's campaign, telling reporters that they have to "ask the Vice-President's Office" why he is continuing to lobby the Senate about this. But I'll bet Cheney just will not give it up, because he can't stand to lose.
Laura Rosen writes:

I was in a torture chamber once, in the basement of a police station in Kosovo days after it was abandoned by Serb forces defeated by Nato. It was hideous as you would imagine. The British soldiers who were with me were equally shocked. A lot of the instruments and interrogation drugs I saw there also suggest they were not designed to cause organ failure or death in their victims, just pain and terror . . . Having laid my eyes on what such a scene looks like, I just associate such activities with the forces of not only the pathological and depraved, but those who are headed for defeat. If you've seen it, you realize in a way that's hard to explain, it's the tactics of the losers. If Cheney and his office mates haven't had the experience, perhaps they should. And I really don't think it's inconceivable that the remote possibility of the Hague may lie in some of their futures. Things change fast when they do, as history shows, and they could find their current willing protectors eventually chucked from office, and a whole new climate at home and abroad.

Khadr is a prisoner of war

When considering the Khadr case, Ottawa and everyone else needs to remember this: when the US talks about enemy combatants and how the Geneva Conventions don't apply in Afghanistan, they're wrong. Omar Khadr is actually a prisoner of war. He was captured on the battlefield: "Khadr was just 15 when he allegedly threw a hand grenade that killed an American soldier and wounded another during a firefight with Taliban fighters in Afghanistan in July 2002. " I don't know enough about the Geneva Conventions to know whether or not POWs can be put on trial what they did during battle.

Great line of the day

From John at AMERICAblog, in regard to Kansas deciding to teach creationism as science: "But look on the bright side. We no longer have to worry about those pesky Kansas kids competing with our kids to get into Harvard."

Gentlemen, we must avoid a mine-shaft gap

Oh, come on -- lets not get hysterical here. In this Calgary Sun column, Roy Clancy quotes a counter-terrorism expert as saying that international terrorism 'is maybe the biggest threat ever posed to humanity' and going on to say how terrorism is even worse than the Cold War.
What garbage! I guess its not surprising that a counter-terrorism expert would think his own job is the most important job ever, but the media have to have some balance here -- terrorists are an intractable problem, but there is no way that the scale of the terrorist threat is comparable to the danger humanity faced for 50 years of blowing millions and millions of people off the face of the earth and causing an environmental catastrophe for hundreds of years to come.
What worries me is where such ideas lead. If terrorism is "the greatest threat ever" than is it going to be suggested that they be stopped with the worst weapons ever, like small-scale tactical nukes? And suddenly then we find ourselves in Strangelove territory, where fear magnifies to the point of hysteria, and the unthinkable starts to appear logica and sane.

Vet to get pension after all

Here's some good news: Ombudsman says decorated air force vet deserves pension after 44 years: "A decorated air force vet who was unfairly denied a pension 44 years ago should get an apology and compensation, the military ombudsman said Tuesday. " Too many times, people who work in jobs where they hand out money start acting like they are on commission, and that they will get a nickel for every dollar they "save". Quit doing that!

Great line of the day

Today's great line is from Pat Buchanan, the poster boy for the Republicans delusionally in denial.
I read about this discussion on another blog earlier tonight, but I didn't believe it until I saw this transcript from the The McLaughlin Group on Sunday:

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Okay, the human toll: The U.S. military dead in Iraq, including suicides, 2,035; U.S. military amputeed, wounded, injured, mentally ill, 48,100; Iraqi civilians dead, 117,700. . . . Exit question: On an escape probability scale, zero to 10, zero meaning zero probability, 10 meaning metaphysical certitude, what's the probability of the Democrats escaping from their vote in favor of the Iraq war? Pat Buchanan.
MR. BUCHANAN: It is about zero. They were derelict in their duty to really force the president to make the case for war convincingly that it was necessary and had to be done now. They did a rotten job in the Congress of the United States, and they're not going to recover by attacking Bush.
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: The president lied to them about the causes for going to war.
MR. BUCHANAN: He did not lie to them. The president emphasized, cherry-picked, hyped the causes for going, and set the others aside. That's not lying . . .
MS. CLIFT: Hyped, cherry-picked, misled, whatever the words you used, to me are criminal offenses when you see the suffering that has gone into this war and the cost of this war. It was a war of choice that was sold to the American people on fear.
MR. BUCHANAN: But why didn't the Democrats stop it? Why didn't the Democrats stop it?

Emphasis mine.
Those damned Democrats -- damned traitors! How could they? How dare they believe President Bush and Vice-President Cheney and the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of State and the head of the CIA and the FBI and every single Republican member of the House and the Senate? Of course the Iraq War really is all their fault, I see it now . . .
And I guess the US will just have to elect a majority of Republicans at the congressional midterms next year to get them out of this mess. Oh, wait a minute . . .

Fruit of the poisonous tree

There is a legal principle called "fruit of the poisonous tree" by which evidence is inadmissable if it was generated from an unconstitutional or illegal act.
In discussions about the Iraq War, I think we need to talk more about its poisonous tree -- the first mistake which is the mother of all the other mistakes made in this awful war.
Josh Marshall describes what is happening now: "It seems the president's defenders have fallen back on what has always been their argument of last resort -- cherry-picked quotes from Clinton administration officials arranged to give the misleading impression that the Clintonites said and thought the same thing about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as the Bushies did."
Yes, this is exactly what the Bush apologists are doing.
But the right wing and the left wing are both making the same error -- neither is talking about the poisonous tree.
Folks, it doesn't matter WHAT Clinton thought. It doesn't matter what Sandy Berger thought, either. Or Al Gore. Or the whole Senate and House and Pentagon. Neither does it matter what Powell thought, or Rice, or Tenent, or Rumsfeld, or Cheney, or Bush himself.
The point is this -- regardless of what ANYBODY thought, they had no right to ACT -- not unless or until Saddam committed an overt act of aggression first.
Clinton, it should be noted, did NOT unilaterally start a war even if he thought Saddam's weapons bore watching.
But with George Bush, the US pomulgated the Bush Doctrine, giving itself the authority to strike preemptively, to start a war.
Now, this doctrine is illegal in terms of international law. Regardless of how powerful the US thinks it is, it cannot legally ignore the Security Council, and demand "regime change" in another country, regardless of what weapons Saddam had or how awful his government was.
The Bush Doctrine is the basic mistake here, the poisonous tree which has produced poisoned fruit. The inability of the US to establish a legitimate and respected government in Iraq flows from the basic illegality of the Bush Doctrine. As a result of this doctrine, the US and Britain started the Iraq War without international support or credibility, and hence their occupation of Iraq was not legitimate. From the very beginning, they lacked the moral authority to govern; no democratic government can ever be successful without such authority.
Now, what Juan Cole calls "the guerrilla war" in Iraq is killing hundreds of Iraqis every week, including a dozen or more American soldiers. The insurgency is so widespread and so powerful that there are more than 100 attacks against American soldiers every day -- that's right, EVERY DAY. Now the news comes that the US was using white phosporous bombs in Fallujah last November
Juan Cole writes "The lessons of British Iraq were mostly unknown to the American politicians who planned out and executed the 2003 Iraq War. One of them is that the military occupation of a conquered population is a barbaric business and can easily draw the colonizer into the use of horrific means to control the rebellious occupied. The Americans' moral fibre is being destroyed from within by things like Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, and other atrocities. In the end, America may not any longer be America. The country that began by forbidding cruel and unusual punishment is ending by formally authorizing torture on a grand scale, and by burning small town Iraqis down to the bone with white phosphorus."
Poison. Pure poison.

Great line of the day

d r i f t g l a s s writes:

". . . .the GOP hasn’t just hit a bad patch: they’ve “lost the room." . . . And in ways that are virtually identical to Republican Herbert Hoover’s response to the Great Depression, the GOP’s response to the calamity their own policies have created is to freeze up, do nothing, and hope it’ll all just blows over, even though that path leads to ruin. Why? Because they are ideologically bound on all sides. Because like the Christopaths that ate their Party, Republicans are congenitally unable to admit error. . . . the GOP will spend millions on scapegoats, but not one cent on solutions. Hoover's failure to deal decisively with the Great Depression effectively killed the Republican Party for a generation. Eisenhower brought it back, but with a humane and moderate touch that this generation of anti-American Gingrich and Falwell Republicans have completely repudiated, and now the brighter among them are beginning to dimly perceive the size and shape of the pit into which Bush has led them.
Because they can't get rid of him. If instead of yapping about it, the GOP really ran the government (which they now completely control) like a business, George W. Bush would have been out on his ass in April. He has bankrupted the United States in every way conceivable, blow his performance evaluation worse than any other man in modern history for four quarters in a row, and has presented no turnaround plan to the Board beyond three more years of the same corruption, deception and bumblefuckery that got us here in the first place. And there is no way to get him the hell off the stage. Their Chickenhawk-in-Chief has become a 500-pound albatross hanging around the neck of the Republicans Party.

Emphasis mine. I know, a little long, but I thought it was all pretty good.
The advantage of a parliamentary system is that a government will fall if too many people lose confidence in the leadership.