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I was struck by the laws Blair was suggesting, which is why I linked to the “FRINGE” post by Publius at Legal Fiction and commented on Kevin’s post, HATE SPEECH vs. DEATH SPEECH, which is based on Mark A.R. Kleiman’s post, They Hate Us For Our Freedom.

So, I’m driving around and Tony Blair is discussing this on the hourly newsbreak on NPR, and in response to how you determine what is political speech and what is incitement, Blair invokes “common sense”.

If you are not a fan of Rumpole of the Bailey that may not mean much to you, but if you have watched as many episodes as I have, hearing a British authority figure invoke “common sense” as a means of discerning the niceties of a legal definition required a quick stop until I stopped laughing.

I had this picture of Blair with a Bolton mustache, a “dead lamb” on his head, wearing a black bathrobe pronouncing the value of “good old British common sense”. Judge Bullingham has moved to Downing Street.

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Len at Dark Bilious Vapors has a common sense article on troop withdrawal from Iraq written by Lieutenant General William E. Odom US Army [retired] who was DirNSA [Director of the National Security Agency] during the Reagan administration.

NSA is a joint services Defense agency, and I was part of it. We gathered and analyzed intelligence, which is very definitely a “really-based” business.

As General Odom points out the situation in Iraq with us there is already as bad as it would have gotten if we had left after deposing Saddam, so there’s really no point in being targets. More men and materiel are not going to make a difference at this point; we should cut our losses and leave.

We lost the peace when the decision was made to replace Jay Garner with Paul Bremer. Bremer exercised no oversight over anything and the situation spiraled out of control.

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The long time anchor of the ABC Evening News, Peter Jennings, died at home of lung cancer at 67. A Canadian who became a naturalized American, he was the last of the second generation of network television newscasters.

The ABC announcement.

[Update: The Associate Press on the CBS site has a more complete obituary.]

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I came across this post by Jane Hamsher of Fire Dog Lake: Just Another Leisurely Day at Crawford.

It would appear that the normally docile New York Post thinks that the Shrubbery should visit Brook Park, Ohio, the home of the Marine Reserve unit that has taken so many casualties lately in Iraq, and doesn’t understand why he is going to West Texas to cut brush rather than visiting the families of the Marines.

Contrast:

The June 1998 issue of the Air Force Association has a lengthy article on the Khobar Tower bombing. On the 25^th of June, 1996 a truck bomb with the explosive power of 10 tons of TNT went off near a building housing US military personnel causing 19 deaths.

Although the local commander was cleared of any negligence, the Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, felt that someone had to be held accountable and blocked the pending promotion of the officer. The Wing Commander resigned, as did the Air Force Chief of Staff. They were responsible because they were in command and it happened on their watch, not because they had done anything wrong.

Twelve local airmen died. They were members of the 58^th Fighter Squadron of the 33^rd Fighter Wing of Eglin Air Force Base.

Most of America isn’t aware of it, but at the memorial service for those who died was their Commander in Chief, William Jefferson Clinton. If you aren’t from this area you aren’t aware of this because he didn’t bring any reporters with him and didn’t answer questions from the local press. He was paying his respects to the friends and families of those who had died.

It was 1996 and he was running for re-election, but he didn’t use a memorial as a photo opportunity.

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