I, a frequent commentator on this moron blog and sometime blogger on my own pathetic site, who prefers to be nameless for this post, due to as yet to be concluded legal procedings recently started dating a real live female thanks in part to the moron in chief, the CPAC blogger of the year, Web Blog Finalist for "2006" , Ace. You know you really should start looking at this place once every year or two big guy, it could use some updating.

[ring, ring, ring]

just a second...

Really? Completely frozen over? The hell you say, ha, ha, ha. Yea, that was kind of funny. No, I do not ski. No, do not snowboard either. You know what is causing this don't you.. GLOBAL WARMING. Yea well I am sure you can ask Al Gore about that bullshit yourself in another 20 or 30 years. OK, got to go, say hello to Adolph and Saddam.

[click]

Sorry about that.

The details after the jump
more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 08:00 AM | Comments (55)
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How fucking predictable.

Doesn't matter. They finally clarified the meaning of the expression "we support the troops" for the rest of us. We now understand this means "we support those innocents right up until the time they actually enlist. After that, they're baby killers".

Thanks Berkeley!

UPDATE: Kinda late with this (sorry ghengis), some zombietime pics of the protest and counterprotest, some moderately NSFW (they change though, so, whatever)

Posted by: Dave In Texas at 01:13 AM | Comments (16)
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Yesterday I wrote about arguments being made by Clinton supporters that the Michigan and Florida Democratic delegates should be seated according to the results in those states' primaries. One of the arguments I described was that of NAACP National Chairman Julian Bond. I wrote:

Seat the delegates because to do otherwise is racially discriminatory.
A variation on the above spin, this one points out that black and Hispanic people voted in the Michigan and Florida primaries. Argued most recently by the NAACP, the spin is that keeping these delegates from counting at the convention brings to mind the "sordid history of racially discriminatory primaries."

Unfortunately, it now appears that I was led astray by press accounts of Bond's letter, which incorrectly assumed that Bond was calling for the delegates to be seated according to the results of last month's flawed primaries. Al Sharpton appears to have fallen victim to the same reports. Closer examination of Bond's letter, a copy of which can be seen here (JPEG), and calls to NAACP headquarters reveal that such is not the case.

Bond's letter calls for "some solution" to the problem so that the delegates may be seated, but does not make the pro-Clinton "seat them as they are" argument. His interest seems to be in preventing disenfranchisement of Florida and Michigan voters rather than supporting a candidate and he would be equally happy to see new primaries in each state. According to Kevin Myles, Wichita NAACP Chapter President, Bond is also concerned about trouble with the national party:

Actually about an hour ago, Julian issued a clarifying statement to all of the National Staff and Board members. It basically confirms all that I'd heard. It was not his point or intent to try and seat the delegations as prescribed by the previous primaries. But rather, he hoped to urge the DNC to resolve this issue now, recognizing that if the DNC does nothing and just waits for the convention, we could all be faced with some very complex problems and have no additional time to solve them.

I also asked Kevin what he thought about the latest round of press coverage pitting Sharpton against Bond. I thought there was a little too much glee about two black leaders having a public disagreement. Here is what he said:

The Sharpton vs Bond thing is a train wreck; but the media loves a good train wreck. I think the earlier reports of Bond's comments 'suggested' that Bond wanted to seat the primary delegates and Sharpton reacted to that without first picking up the phone and calling Julian. But now, even as additional context and information becomes available, I expect that the media will keep hyping the "fight".

Boy, was Kevin ever right. If this next link is to be believed, we have the origin of the Sharpton vs. Bond disagreement right here at the Roland Report:

While Sen. Barack Obama was racking up three huge wins last night in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia, word broke that NAACP Chairman Julian Bond had sent a letter to the head of the Democratic National Committee asking that the delegates from Michigan and Florida be seated.

Talk about stepping into a messy situation!

[...]

When I got the tip regarding the letter, I called the Rev. Al Sharpton to hear if he had heard about the letter, and he was stunned when apprised of it.

He said that he was sending his own letter to Dean today, stating that if the DNC tries to seat the Michigan and Florida delegates, he would lead a protest in front of the group's national headquarters.

My NAACP sources also say that Bond was out of bounds for sending the letter - one called it "disgusting" - because he didn't apprise the board of it, nor the group's executive committee.

To the extent I assigned Bond to the pro-Clinton position, the whole thing was a mis-fire from the beginning. Let this stand as my correction to yesterday's post. My thanks to Kevin for calling it to my attention.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 12:45 AM | Comments (8)
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For just shy of a year Congressional Democrats have been demanding that Bush Administration officials appear under oath to testify about the U.S. Attorney firings. First, they tried to get officials, most notably Alberto Gonzales, Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, and Josh Bolten to appear voluntarily. Initially all four refused, but the White House offered to let them testify in private hearings not under oath. That option was rejected by Congress out of hand. Gonzales eventually ended up testifying anyway.

That's when Congress started rumbling about subpoenas and contempt citations. The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Miers and Bolten; the Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Rove and Bolten. The White House responded by claiming to extend executive privilege, and each official refused to appear. Executive privilege is the doctrine that coequal branches of government must afford respect for the inherent sensitivity of communications between the president and his advisers. The House Judiciary Committee rejected the assertion of privilege and issued a citation of statutory contempt for Miers and Bolten in July of last year. In December, the Senate Judiciary Committee issued contempt citations for Rove and Bolten.

That's how things stood until Monday, when Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced that he's ready to refer the contempt citations to the full House. That's the final step in the process of statutory contempt before a referral to a U.S. Attorney for presentation to a grand jury. Unfortunately for Conyers, it has long been the position of the Office of Legal Counsel that the President can direct the Department of Justice to refuse to act on the certified contempt citations. In other words, the Attorney General can order the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia to sit on the contempt citation, rather than seek an indictment. That was the conclusion of lawyers for Presidents Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43. Resolving the question will almost certainly result in appeals for a judicial resolution.

There are several reasons to expect that a court case will not resolve the situation in favor of Congress. First, contempt of congress is a seriously underdeveloped area of law and these questions are intimately involved with the another underdeveloped area: executive privilege. Second, courts are loath to be dragged into fights between Congress and the Executive Branch. Justice Scalia, in particular, argued when he was Assistant Attorney General that the courts should refuse to intervene in dueling claims of contempt and executive privilege. Since that time, the courts have largely agreed. Third, this is about scoring political points. The longer this drags on, the less it will matter to Congressional Democrats because it won't matter to the public. Alberto Gonzales is already gone; so is Karl Rove. President Bush will be gone in a year and the issue is already fading from the minds of voters. At some point, the political return will be worth less than the investment of time and money and the very real possibility of an embarrassing loss at the Supreme Court.

Because these are confusing areas of law about which I've already seen misrepresentations and outright errors in the press and on blogs, I've put together a primer on contempt of Congress. Another more interesting post on executive privilege, which is an even more complicated mess of law, will go up tomorrow.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 12:04 AM | Comments (16)
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On Wednesday, the Senate Ethics Committee sent Senator Larry Craig a Letter of Admonishment for the foot-tapping incident. Or, more properly, for his actions after he was caught. They don't actually seem to care about the conduct that led up to the arrest.

Instead, Craig is admonished for flashing his business card in an attempt to receive special treatment and for trying to withdraw his guilty plea:

"It appears you are attempting to withdraw your plea in significant part because your initial calculation that you could avoid public disclosure of, and adverse public reaction to, this matter by pleading guilty proved wrong. . . . We consider your attempt to withdraw your guilty plea to be an attempt to evade the legal consequences of an action freely undertaken by you -- that is, pleading guilty.

Craig's other significant mis-step (y'see what I did there?) was to use $213,000 in campaign funds to pay for legal expenses and public relations related to the incident.

This is the lightest form of punishment available to the committee. The case is deemed to be closed. If you're interested, MSNBC has the letter itself here (PDF).

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 12:03 AM | Comments (8)
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I have argued a few times in the comments that the Bush Administration has had little trouble convincing judges of the importance of preventing civil and criminal cases from threatening national security. The invocation of state secrets privilege has been upheld in the vast majority of cases in which it has been raised. In fact, it has been overruled in only four cases out of 54 since it was first recognized in 1953. My point is that judges should not be automatically viewed as "the enemy" when it comes to constitutional claims against the Bush Administration or the War on Terror.

For example, the ACLU's lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc, a subsidiary of Boeing, for allegedly participating in the CIA's supposed extraordinary rendition of five terror suspects was dismissed yesterday pursuant to state secrets privilege.

"In sum, at the core of plaintiffs' case against Defendant Jeppesen are 'allegations' of covert U.S. military or CIA operations in foreign countries against foreign nationals - clearly a subject matter which is a state secret," Judge James Ware wrote in a ruling issued on Wednesday evening.

[...]

"The Court's review of General Hayden's public and classified declarations confirm that proceeding with this case would jeopardize national security and foreign relations and that no protective procedure can salvage this case," Ware wrote.

The unusual efficacy of the privilege is one of the reasons I was so angered in December by the discovery that CIA officials chose to lie (or omit) to Judge Brinkema in the Moussaoui trial rather than claim state secrets privilege. In fact, the privilege has been so good at keeping the courts from interfering with the prosecution of the War on Terror that Senators Arlen Specter and Ted Kennedy have collaborated to create S. 2533, the misleadingly named State Secrets Protection Act. Their goal is to emasculate the common law privilege by replacing it with this watered-down statute.

h/t gengis.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 11:50 PM | Comments (2)
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Pretty disgusting they're pushing this filth on kids if you ask me.

Thanks to pookie.

Posted by: Ace at 09:16 PM | Comments (12)
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Damn it all. Unless Hillary can win by margins of 25-30 points -- which she can't, of course; she's lucky to squeak if she wins at all -- she can no longer amass enough delegates to catch Obama, because the Democratic proportional-allotment system will give her only paltry gains where (if) she wins.

This is the true stake in the heart for me. Every candidate I supported loss. But losing Hillary -- once, Hilllary! -- is almost too much to bear.

Thanks to tmi3rd.

Posted by: Ace at 09:06 PM | Comments (57)
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Two Tunisians and a Dane of Moroccan origin apparently had a serious plan to murder Kurt Westergaard of Islamic cartoon fame.

Intelligence agents said two Tunisians and a Dane of Moroccan origin had been arrested in Aarhus at 0330 GMT "to prevent a murder linked to terrorism".

The editor of the newspaper that first published the caricatures said he had been deeply shaken by news of the plot...

Oh...and Cindy Sheehan is in Egypt pimping for some Muslim Brotherhood goons the government has on trial.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 06:57 PM | Comments (22)
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That's right.

Scotland's beloved Nessie is believed by one cryptozoologist to have died.

Apparently, Nessie succumbed to the only mythical force greater than she: ManBearPig Global Warming.

LEGENDARY Nessie hunter Robert Rines is giving up his search for the monster after 37 years.
The 85-year-old American will make one last trip in a bid to find the elusive beast.
After almost four decades of fruitless expeditions, he admitted: "Unfortunately, I'm running out of age."
World War II veteran Robert has devoted almost half his life to scouring Loch Ness.
He started in 1971. The following year, he watched a 25ft-long hump with the texture of elephant skin gliding through the water.

FOX News ALERT: That hump you saw wasn't Nessie. It was LauraW swimming laps in the Scottish Highlands. She migrates there annually to dine on Haggis and Scottish children.

Since then, he has been obsessed with tracking down the creature with a staggering array of hi-tech equipment. It was this gear that took the famous "flipper" picture that year which created a stir around the world.
Despite having hundreds of sonar contacts over the years, the trail has since gone cold and Rines believes that Nessie may be dead, a victim of global warming.
He still wants to check almost 100 contacts on the floor of the loch, believing one may be the monster's remains.

Global Warming: It's in yur atmosfear killin' yur monstas since 2008.

Posted by: Jack M. at 04:36 PM | Comments (61)
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