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Lisa at All Hat and No Cattle has the picture at the bottom of today’s edition.

It’s Ramadan, a month of fasting, and this evil person creates a mosque from more than 550 pounds of chocolate! People will be looking at it for weeks! That is totally inhumane!

I think Echidne should be sent to investigate.

I have seen a host of otherwise intelligent people, including some who have passed the bar, making a very basic error in the Foley case. They have talked about the age of the pages as being the determining factor as to whether the law was broken, and that is not true. The age of the pages determines what law was broken, because if the individual Foley had been sending those messages to had been 26 instead of 16, with all other factors being the same, it was still illegal.

Glenn Greenwald mentioned the age of consent in the District of Columbia is 16, and then opines that if Foley had had sex with the page it would have been legal, while sending the e-mails was illegal. If the page had given his consent to either the sex or the e-mails, it would have been legal and this wouldn’t be spread all over the media. The page didn’t consent. That is the heart of the issue, the lack of consent.

In the 1983 Page scandal, both pages consented and the Congressmen were reprimanded, but there were no criminal cases because of the consensual nature of the acts.

In this case the age of the victim determines the specific law broken, as occurs in other criminal acts, not whether the law was broken. The age of consent means exactly, and only that, the age at which meaningful consent can be given. The law generally says that no one under the age of 16 can give meaningful consent.

You have sex with a 16-year-old you are not going to be charged with statutory rape, but if they didn’t consent you are still going to be charged with rape.

As has become the custom in recent years we have the al Qaeda pre-election tape:

Calling President Bush “the murderer and spiller of Muslim blood,” al Qaeda’s top deputy released a videotape Friday accusing the U.S. president of being a “deceitful charlatan” who has lied to the American people.

Ayman al-Zawahiri also blasts the Bush administration for holding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an alleged 9/11 conspirator, in a secret prison and alleging that Mohammed gave interrogators “valuable information which has helped the crusaders to kill and arrest a number of al Qaeda.”

“I ask this lying failure, who are the leaders of al Qaeda whose killing or capture was facilitated by the information extracted from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?” al-Zawahiri asks. “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, may Allah free him, has hurt you thousands of times more than you have hurt him.”

I’m beginning to suspect that al Qaeda does this to help the Shrubbery with elections. They have been extremely consistent in issuing these tapes, and have to know that they generally benefit the Republicans.

No, I’m not suggesting there is a link between al Qaeda and Karl Rove. I’m merely commenting on this biennial custom.

CNN this morning:GOP leaders assail Foley amid Democratic criticism¹:

House Republican leaders mounted an effort to explain their own conduct after the resignation of Rep. Mark Foley, and they suggested there should be a criminal investigation of Foley’s contacts with congressional pages.

A strongly worded statement assailing Foley from the chamber’s top three Republicans came as they addressed questions about what they knew of the incidents and what action they took.

Calling Foley’s contacts “an obscene breach of trust,” the congressmen said in their statement that his “immediate resignation must now be followed by the full weight of the criminal justice system.”

“The improper communications between Congressman Mark Foley and former House congressional pages is unacceptable and abhorrent,” read the statement issued by Majority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois and Majority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri.

Foley, a Republican from Florida, resigned Friday after his alleged e-mail exchanges with a teenage male page were made public, and the House voted to launch an investigation. Foley apologized to his family and his constituents.

Note to CNN: it isn’t “alleged” when the bloody e-mails have been published all over the world.

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The now disgraced Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL-16) has been hoist by his own petard as he was a sponsor of the law that could result in up to 10 years in a Federal prison and inclusion on the sexual predators list. He will be forever [i.e. this election cycle] linked to the 2006 Congressional page sex scandal, so named to avoid confusion with the bipartisan 1983 Congressional page sex scandal [they had to go back to 1973 to make it bipartisan, but that’s Republicans].

I would note that the pages in the 1983 scandal were both 17 and neither complained, while one of the 16-year-olds in this scandal was clearly upset by Mr. Foley’s actions. It hasn’t been made very clear by the reporting, but there is more than one page involved if you can stand to read through the e-mails and IMs.

A common refrain heard is clearly stated in general terms by Christy Hardin Smith, and in more specific terms by Hastert constituents Karen and Michael: more concern was shown for the Republican Party than the high school students involved.

The Pensacola Beach Blog noted that buried in the messages is a references to a campaign event in Pensacola, which would mean that Foley continued long after he said he would stop.

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Lisa at All Hat and No Cattle has a great graphic in this weekend’s edition from the Democratic Underground site. It features the James Madison quote: “If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”

Earlier Jams at Poor Mouth wrote about the death of Iva Toguri, a Japanese American woman who was trapped in Japan at the start of World War II and worked on Japanese radio. Even though she was cleared of wrongdoing by the American occupation forces, when she returned to the US she was tried and convicted of helping the enemy by a corrupt legal process at the urging of Walter Winchell, the “Greatest Generation’s” version of Rush Limbaugh.

Everyone should be aware of the Japanese internment camps in World War II, so none of what is going on is new; every generation seems hell-bent on making the same stupid mistakes of earlier generations. We never seem to learn.

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I threw up a last minute post on testosterone poisoning which reminded Karen at Peripetia of an earlier post on the Shrubbery’s use of testosterone in his exercise regime which resulted in her new post: Brain Death Silence.

The process is similar to Alzheimer’s and produces mood swings. No doubt the apologists will use this to excuse his abuses. We have a complete copy of King George, including the madness.

Feminists have been saying it for years: Too much testosterone kills brain cells.

Dr. Cole of Informed Comment notes:

Bush told Wolf Blitzer he thought Iraq was a comma. But Iraq is very clearly an exclamation point. Now you know why the whole policy has been wrong. Bush has been trying to close off a dependent clause, not realizing he was forcefully making a declarative statement.

Watertiger of Dependable Renegade mentions George Allen’s new nickname: Sen. Macacawitz

The first incident is the Shrubbery using crypto-Christian in public. The sense of the “comma” is that we shouldn’t judge his Iraq policy at this point because we don’t know the outcome. The “comma” is from “don’t use a period where G-d put a comma”, but reality and long experience tells us that it is no longer a question of whether the Iraq situation will end well or badly, but of how badly it will end.

The second is an example of a different religious group, Jews. If you aren’t familiar with Jews you won’t understand the significance of the ending.

These were insiders talking among themselves not being understood by outsiders, but the next example is an outsider attempting a joke about Islam.

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Tristero at Hullabaloo makes the point that torture should be opposed because it is morally wrong. It doesn’t make any difference if it works or not, it is wrong.

I don’t disagree, but as a former military interrogator and law enforcement interviewer, I would like to go on record as stating: it doesn’t work.

A point most people miss in the classic “good cop/bad cop” routine, is that the “good cop” is the successful interviewer. The purpose of the “bad cop” is to speed up the connection between the suspect and the interviewer. You don’t need the “bad cop”, it just speeds things up with a certain type of person. There is a danger if the routine is tried with the wrong person it will blow up the process.

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Maru of WTF is it now? noted that our idiot Secretary of Defense is in talks with MONTENEGRO about sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan!?

At this point I could take a cheap shot and say: I met the army of Montenegro once – he was working as a bartender in Germany.

The newly independent Republika Crna Gora has the total population of the city of Baltimore. It does have a military, 6,500 people that is a remnant of the break up with Serbia, but the government wants to reduce that number to a 2,500 man all-volunteer force, and end conscription.

Who’s next on his list: Liechtenstein, San Marino, Andorra, Monaco?

Maybe he should try the Duchy of Grand Fenwick or the Kingdom of Lancre? There was a lot of bother the last time the army of Grand Fenwick left home, and I’m not sure that Nanny Ogg would approve of Shawn going to foreign parts, but Rummy is apparently desperate enough to ask.

I guess he had to scratch the Swiss Guard off his list after the Pope’s speech. They certainly would have added some color to Afghanistan.

This is like the invasion of Grenada with all of the police forces from Caribbean nations taking part to lend the operation an international flavor.

Keith Olbermann has again committed journalism in the first degree: A textbook definition of cowardice. [transcript]

Via Watertiger at Dependable Renegade the video is up at Crooks and Liars.

Remind me again who was selected to sit in the chair of the news organization that Edward R. Murrow built?

Donald Rumsfeld doesn’t seem to be able to design a shift schedule that would work for a fast food restaurant:

The 1st Brigade of the 1st Armored Division was extended in order to allow its replacement unit, the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, a minimum 12 months between overseas tours, the official said. The 3rd Infantry has already served two tours in Iraq, including the initial invasion of the country in March 2003.

Nor can he create a working budget to cover the costs of the Pentagon, as reported in this NPR story, Pentagon Asks for $25 Billion for War Equipment.

Actually it is Army Chief of Staff, General Peter Schoomaker, a man called out of retirement to fill the job by Rumsfeld, who is asking for the money to repair and replace Army equipment that has been chewed by by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The General has five depots filled with broken equipment, but he doesn’t have the money to make the necessary repairs.

There are no unknowns, and no surprises in these problems. These are very basic elements in military planning and a lot of people have been doing this for decades, until Rumsfeld decided that he was the only person in the universe who knew how to run the Department of Defense.

Rumsfeld doesn’t know how to do his job; it’s that simple.

Recently it has been reported that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iraqi leader Muqtada al-Sadr are both members of the Twelver sect of Shi’ia. They are among the group with the most extreme view of the role of the Mahdi, also called the Twelfth Imam.

First of all the fact that Muqtada called his militia “the Mahdi Army”, should have been a clue to people who know anything about Islam, and, as Ahmadinejad is known to be an ultra conservative Shi’ia, it should have been assumed that he would belong to the “Twelvers”.

They are the Shi’ia equivalents of evangelical Christians who buy the “Left Behind” books, as they all believe that “judgment is nigh.”

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