Posts from — November 2005

Fortunately she hasn’t been able to get out and about since leaving the hospital or she would be thoroughly annoyed by locations that had Christmas merchandise on the shelves before Halloween.

One of those she would be “expelling from the temple” would be a certain terrorist sympathizer who already has Christmas decorations up and Christmas “gifts” available in a most commercial manner, while claiming to be a defender of the holiday.

Commercial exploitation does not a Christian make.

After he outlines the tortured labyrinthine logic by which Graham attempts to flush a millennia of legal precedent down the odious latrine of Guantánamo, he declares by quote the effort to be “Kafkaesque”.

To those unfamiliar with his writings, I have often described Franz Kafka as Joseph Heller without the humor.

After the Shrubbery, the world will be ready for a Kafka revival. Even in translation from his native German, his descriptions of bureaucracies based on a short term of employment in an insurance company have never been surpassed.

It would be a publishing triumph: The Shrubbery by Franz Kafka, illustrations by Hieronymus Bosch.

Dot, Sox, Ringo and I join with Bobby, Michael, and others in offering our condolences.

Friends are a gift of great worth and are sorely missed.

Well, he met with Senator Feinstein today and indicated that those were just things he said to get a job, and he didn’t really mean them.

Soooooo, you lied to get that job, Sam, and we should believe what you are saying to get this one?

This morning Bobby and Robert spotted the news of tropical depression 27 in the Caribbean Sea.

While it is currently being suppressed by wind shear, it is expected to become Tropical Storm Г [Gamma] by the end of the week and hit Central America, which is still recovering from Hurricane Beta.

Exculpatory evidence covers facts that tend to show that the defendant did not commit the crime, and conflict with the case the prosecutor presented to the jury. If the omission is egregious, the prosecutor could be in trouble for prosecutorial misconduct.

In Kevin Drum’s article Manipulating Intelligence you will see a simple exposition of the “exculpatory evidence” that the Shrubbery hid from the world, when he decided to “prosecute” Saddam Hussein.

The only information that was declassified and presented to the public was information that supported the case for war. The “exculpatory evidence” was redacted and remained classified. Those who knew of its existence could not speak out without violating the law.

Those who criticized the intelligence that was used to support the war didn’t know about all of the doubts the intelligence agencies had about that intelligence.

They lied by omission, and they continue to lie.

Sorry, but “we” know no such thing, we have been told that this is true by the same group that told us that Saddam had tons of WMDs and the ability to attack the United States with them.

If the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal is this gullible after all of the evidence of the past several years, one can understand why they missed all the accounting scandals and the less than stellar performance of their parent company’s “Industrial Average” since they decided that George W. Bush was the man to lead the country to a stronger economy.

This is what happens when you put sandstone in a suit.

Maintenance on Monday, November 14

We are planning a two hour outage this evening from 9p to 11p (PST). This is to complete the network maintenance we’ve been performing over the last several weeks.
– Jason G. [11/14/2005 10:27:00 AM]

In line with that, Kevin Drum notes the reluctance of our political leaders to act in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution and obtain declarations of war when it is necessary to use the military for extended periods. The Congress did not actually authorize the Iraq War if you read the bill that was passed, but it refused to hold the President to the limitations contained in the bill.

This leads back to my discussion on habeas corpus: if no war has been declared, where is the basis for suspending the writ?

Djhlights at Exit Stage Left talks about the example of Lincoln suspending the writ during the Civil War, which was the basis for ex parte Milligan. Even though Lincoln was dealing with a rebellion as required by the Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled that he overstepped the bounds in the case of Milligan.

How difficult is “innocent until proven guilty”? It makes no difference what you call the individual in detention, they have a right to due process, so long as it is available.

The only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn is that those in current control of the government of the United States do not believe in the rule of law.

I suspected that George would join the “terrorist sympathizer” bandwagon as he was the originator of the infamous Miserable Failure effort.

Unfortunately Maru and Upyernoz feel that terrorist sympathizer is a justified label and come down with skippy.

More distressingly, Phinky at Ignorant Hussy not only supports the terrorist sympathizer meme, but thinks that a certain odious media conglomerate headed by a noisome Australian cane toad should be identified as an evil empire. While I don’t disagree that many of its subsidiaries do seem to lack any commitment to reality or the concept of the truth, referring to this global spider’s web of disinformation as an evil empire is not very polite. Consider for a moment, these people may not be evil, they could just be incredibly ignorant or, possibly, confused by physician prescribed medication.

If we continue with things like the terrorist sympathizer and evil empire campaigns, people will think that we are totally fed up with being abused by group of ignorant, disingenuous twits and fighting back. This might cause Senator “Blanche” Frist to have another attack of the vapors and feel really poorly, although, probably not a poorly as the young lady he jilted two weeks before a planned wedding.

Via Jillian, the doyenne of dough, at skippy the bush kangaroo, if we thought it was such a terrible speech, why didn’t we complain about it when he gave it at the National Endowment for Democracy on October 6^th, 2005.

Well, now we know that he needs more than a month to learn a new speech. It’s possible that he wore the same suit to both events and it’s the speech that was in the pocket.

That struck a cord because I had been in my local post office last week and noticed all of the trash cans were missing from the lobby.

So we are wondering if this is a local thing, or the Postal Service has removed the refuse containers to force you to take the bulk mail with you.

If you go the post office, leave a comment about your local area and the presence or absence of litter baskets.

Thanks.

[Even though he is a Bay Area blogger, Scaramouche would never descend to the level of the terrorist sympathizer ploy.]

Just because this total moron is unaware that members of the San Francisco Fire Department are currently deployed in war zones with their National Guard and Reserve units is no reason to include <a href=”http://www.billoreilly.com/”>terrorist sympathizer</a> in posts on your web site, or in comments on the sites of others.

No matter how much of a terrorist sympathizer you believe this individual to be because of his mindless spewing of hate directed towards American voters and members of the military currently at risk, this is not nice.