Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s not even safe to go out and pick up 2 days worth of poop anymore.

Mission Accomplished!

I personally stopped the public option…

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

We survived Breitbartpocalypse!

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Everybody saw this coming.

Deploy the moving finger of emphasisity!

I’m only here for the duck photos.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Yes we did.

I swear, each month of 2020 will have its own history degree.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

We still have time to mess this up!

Not all heroes wear capes.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

We can agree to disagree, but i’m right.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn – Nancy Pelosi

Historically it is a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

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The Full Bernanke

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Helicopter Ben just pushed the Big Candy-like Red Button, kids.

The Federal Reserve launched another aggressive stimulus program on Thursday, saying it will buy $40 billion of mortgage debt per month and continue to purchase assets until the outlook for jobs improves substantially.

In a significant shift in the direction of U.S. monetary policy, the Fed has tied its unconventional bond buying directly to economic conditions, a move that is likely to be controversial among central bank critics.

“If the outlook for the labor market does not improve substantially, the committee will continue its purchase of agency mortgage-backed securities, undertake additional asset purchases, and employ its other policy tools as appropriate until such improvement is achieved in a context of price stability,” the Fed said in a statement.

In an additional step that reflects just how concerned Fed officials have become about the health of the economy, policymakers said they would not likely raise rates from current rock-bottom lows until at least mid-2015. Previously, it had set such guidance at late 2014.

Not only is it QE3, but it’s got no set expiration date, apparently.  You know, exactly the kind of sustained growth program that everyone’s been screaming for now for a couple of years.  That sound you hear is Austrian-school economists exploding like microwaved giant jawbreakers, not to mention the sound of Mitt Romney’s campaign guys going “Umm…we argued that something had to be done, but we refused to provide specifics…now what?”

I gotta fiver says House Republicans will try to impeach somebody before the week’s out.

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Amends For Past Transgressions

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The whole Secret Service South American Sexytime incident may have put a healthy (and deserved) dent in the reputation of the agency, but on the balance of the whole, I’m glad these guys are around in places like Louisiana.

Authorities in Houma said they found weapons, phony law enforcement badges and fake bombs at a residence where a 61-year-old man was arrested. Monday’s discovery at an apartment complex led to a six-hour evacuation of about 40 people from four buildings.

The Courier reports that the investigation was launched by the U.S. Secret Service after agents learned a man had bought counterfeit badges and credentials that represented him as a federal agent. The Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office said federal agents and deputies found several hundred counterfeit documents, badges and credentials.

Michael Hebert, a resident of the complex, was booked with multiple charges including 19 counts of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and 10 counts of unlawful possession of fraudulent documents. Hebert was being held in the Terrebonne jail, awaiting a bond hearing, the Sheriff’s Office said. It was unclear when he would enter a plea or whether he had an attorney who could comment for him.

Hebert had illegally acquired 19 firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition, which were confiscated along with the counterfeit documents, badges and credentials that falsely identified him as belonging to law-enforcement agencies, including the FBI, CIA and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Sheriff’s Office said.

Best part:  the guy managed to apparently obtain all this stuff while being a previously convicted felon, nobody bothered to flag the guy until the fake badges got introduced into the equation.  But we can’t have a national discussion on gun control and lax enforcement of existing laws on the books, we can’t have a discussion on the real sourced of domestic terrorism in this country, and we certainly can’t have a frank and open national discussion as to why the Secret Service would need to get involved in a case where a guy is hoarding fake explosives, fake federal agency badges, and a metric asston of firearms.

Gosh, I certainly can’t think of a reason.

[UPDATE] And details are still sketchy of today’s shooting incident of a security guard at the Family Research Council building in Washington, DC, but law enforcement officials apparently are and need to be treating it like a domestic terrorism attack.  Seems we’ve had a rash of those in the last few weeks and months.

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Q: Iz Tom Friedman Learning?

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A:  No.

When last we checked in on the moustache of wisdom, we learned the real reason we should start a war with Iraq.

One would have thought that would be the end of Tom Friedman as someone anyone could take seriously.  Hell, it should have been the start of the time people spat on the sidewalk as he passed them by.

But, of course, because we have been so well and benevolently led by our elites, Tom of the Married Fortune and Unmerited Influence continues to opine about the sacrifice and loss others should undertake in the service of his worldview.

Exhibit A:

And Iraq was such a bitter experience for America that we prefer never to speak of it again. But Iraq is relevant here. The only reason Iraq has any chance for a decent outcome today is because America was on the ground with tens of thousands of troops to act as that well-armed midwife, reasonably trusted and certainly feared by all sides, to manage Iraq’s transition to more consensual politics. My gut tells me that Syria will require the same to have the same chance.

 

A little fisking seems in order.

And Iraq was such a bitter experience for America that we prefer never to speak of it again.

You don’t.  We do.  Why? 

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Beyond Thunder DOMA

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And the inevitable Supreme Court case on the federal Defense Of Marriage Act got one step closer today as a three-judge panel on the First Circuit just declared the law unconstitutional.

A three judge panel of The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit just handed down a decision declaring the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional. Notably, the panel included Judges Juan Torruella and Michael Boudin, both of whom are Republican appointees. Judge Boudin, who authored the opinion, is one of the most highly regarded judges in the country; he frequently sends his former law clerks to clerk for Supreme Court justices.

Here’s the money quote from the ruling linked above (PDF, emphasis mine):

For 150 years, this desire to maintain tradition would alone have been justification enough for almost any statute. This judicial deference has a distinguished lineage, including suchfigures as Justice Holmes, the second Justice Harlan, and Judges Learned Hand and Henry Friendly. But Supreme Court decisions in the last fifty years call for closer scrutiny of government action touching upon minority group interests and of federal action in areas of traditional state concern.

To conclude, many Americans believe that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, and most Americans live in states where that is the law today. One virtue of federalism is that it permits this diversity of governance based on local choice, but this applies as well to the states that have chosen to legalize same-sex marriage. Under current Supreme Court authority, Congress’ denial of federal benefits to same-sex couples lawfully married in Massachusetts has not been adequately supported by any permissible federal interest.

Both the “closer scrutiny” Fifth Amendment and the “permissible federal interest” Tenth Amendment arguments are key to taking down DOMA.  The basic argument is that the federal government has a duty to protect minority groups under the Equal Protection clause, and that same-sex couples meet the standard of a minority group that needs equal protection, and as such the denial of federal marriage benefits specifically to same-sex couples violates that equal protection when the state, in this case Massachusetts, makes those benefits at the state level legal.  It’s the scope of how far that applies (if it’s just to states where same-sex marriage is legal or all 50 states) that seems to be the question the panel is leaving up to SCOTUS to chew over, but they definitely accept the argument as valid.

The ruling also spells out pretty plainly that in the end, only SCOTUS can decide this one.  But seeing the lower court ruling affirmed here is a definite point for the good guys.

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Federal Judge Katherine Forrest to Milt Shook- You’re Clueless

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Those evil lefties and their whining about about the indefinite detention aspect of the NDAA (and the ridiculous, Jonah Goldberg level stupid arguments made by Shook). Wait? What? You mean they were right:

A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction late Wednesday to block provisions of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that would allow the military to indefinitely detain anyone it accuses of knowingly or unknowingly supporting terrorism.

Signed by President Barack Obama on New Year’s Eve, the 565-page NDAA contains a short paragraph, in statute 1021, letting the military detain anyone it suspects “substantially supported” al-Qaida, the Taliban or “associated forces.” The indefinite detention would supposedly last until “the end of hostilities.”

In a 68-page ruling blocking this statute, U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest agreed that the statute failed to “pass constitutional muster” because its broad language could be used to quash political dissent.

“There is a strong public interest in protecting rights guaranteed by the First Amendment,” Forrest wrote. “There is also a strong public interest in ensuring that due process rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment are protected by ensuring that ordinary citizens are able to understand the scope of conduct that could subject them to indefinite military detention.”

***

Guardian journalist Naomi Wolf read testimony from Jonsditir, who prepared a statement saying that she would not visit the U.S. for fear of detention.

Forrest alluded to this testimony in her decision.

“Hedges, Wargalla, and Jonsdottir have changed certain associational conduct, and O’Brien and Jonsdittir have avoided certain expressive conduct, because of their concerns about § 1021. Moreover, since plaintiffs continue to have their associational and expressive conduct chilled, there is both actual and continued threatened irreparable harm,” she wrote.

“In addition, it is certainly the case that if plaintiffs were detained as a result of their conduct, they could be detained until the cessation of hostilities – i.e., an indeterminate period of time,” Forrest continued. “Being subjected to the risk of such detention, particularly in light of the Government’s inability to represent that plaintiffs’ conduct does not fall with § 1021, must constitute a threat of irreparable harm. The question then is: Is that harm immediate? Since the Government will not say that the conduct does not fall outside of §1021, one cannot predict immediacy one way or the other. The penalty we know would be severe.”

The judge added that she did not make the decision lightly.

“This court is acutely aware that preliminarily enjoining an act of Congress must be done with great caution,” she wrote. “However, it is the responsibility of our judicial system to protect the public from acts of Congress which infringe upon constitutional rights. As set forth above, this court has found that plaintiffs have shown a likelihood of success on the merits regarding their constitutional claim and it therefore has a responsibility to insure that the public’s constitutional rights are protected.”

Although I caution you all to keep an open mind, because none of this changes the fact that Glenn Greenwald is longwinded and *GASP* lives in Brazil. Also too, JANE HAMSHER!

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A Little Wager

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I thought about this guy the other day when I attended a college fair in Rochester and saw that UC Davis had a booth. They were the most distant school by at least a thousand miles, and there’s no need to wonder why: parents don’t want to send their precious snowflakes someplace where this could happen.

The independent report on the pepper spray incident came out last week, (via) and it’s a scathing tale of incompetence pointing directly at Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi. Even so, I’ll bet that she isn’t going anywhere. Freddie’s a lot closer to the issues with universities than I am, so perhaps there’s something more subtle than my simple view that Katehi is a typical administrator and therefore a survivor. In other words, she’s an ambitious, smart academic who got bored with her chosen discipline and instead decided that she wanted to make a big salary and taste a little bit of power. So, she learned to mouth the appropriate platitudes about “the sense of community” and “consensus” while at the same time sending the right signals to the cash cows on campus that she wouldn’t get in the way of the ethically dubious tactics they use to entice government and industry to funnel money into their programs.

Until those patrons tire of her, Katehi will hold on to power, and this report will have accomplished her aim, which was to delay the day of judgment until a time long after everyone had forgotten her role in one of nastier incidents in the whole Occupy saga.

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It Was All a Lie

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And I fell for it:

A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.

“Curveball”, the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi’s lies used to justify the Iraq war.

He tries to defend his actions: “My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime’s oppression.”

The chemical engineer claimed to have overseen the building of a mobile biological laboratory when he sought political asylum in Germany in 1999. His lies were presented as “facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence” by Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003.

But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true. When it is put to him “we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie”, he simply replies: “Yes.”

US officials “sexed up” Mr Janabi’s drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable, admits Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell’s former chief of staff. “I brought the White House team in to do the graphics,” he says, adding how “intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy”.

Although simply saying “I fell for it” isn’t exactly right, and lets me off the hook. I was caught up in the pathology of the time, and wanted to believe it. There was lots of evidence this was nonsense, and I just ignored it. And the sad thing is that if a Republican wins the Presidency, there’ll be another Curveball out there leading the charge for us to invade Iran.

I guess this is as good a time as any to re-post what I think is the greatest blog post in the history of blogging, RonK’s Operation Desert Snipe from 2003.

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