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From the 'it took you 4 1/2 years to think of that?' department, we've now decided we should supervise the armies we hire.

Will he say 'yes'?

About whether waterboarding is torture? The esteemed Pat Buchanan thinks that Congress needs to specifically define it as torture in a new law. I would be pretty curious to see the signing statement on that one. This comes as good news to me however, since I don't think Congress has ever defined my favorite game, 'potato sack dodgeball', as torture. It's where I play dodgeball with someone whos'e feet have to stay inside the sack. If they drop the potato sack then they have to go to inside the 'naked in the freezer with loud fingernails on the chalkboard looping while chained in unnatural positions' box for 5 minutes to 5 days, depending on how flagrant the violation of the bag-rule was. Sadly, I don't think Ed Grimly is as lucky with his 'black and blue with frozen bluegill' game.

One Word

Free Booze

Abbreviated for brevity

I could probably go on for a few pages on these, but in the interest of keeping things short I won't.

Update on Waxman's Blackwater investigating

Laws schmaws, we've got a fence to build!

To get your law degree you have to take the bar exam, which I've hard is tough. To become attorney general, I guess all you have to do is agree that torture is illegal.

More acid please, carbonic.

A classic

From the newly posted daily show archive:

The end is nigh

Ok, maybe in reality it isn't, but that really only makes a difference to those of us in the reality based community. In George Bush's mind, it is indeed nigh. To the average onlooker, his policies and the things he does may seem foolish. If we were in the last days, it makes all to much sense. War, pestilence, World War III, the tribulation, are all imminent, as well as his ascension to Sunday school in the sky, no longer having to deal with it all. Why worry about the deficit, the biggest ever, and the costs of the Iraq war aren't even included in the budget, when soon you will be lifted up to heaven with all your christian brethren? It's not as if we will have to pay it back after the rapture? Even if we did, everyone that mattered will have ascended already, so the heathen fools left behind (now with Kirk Cameron) will have to figure out their own way to pay. Why worry about loss of habitat, deforestation, climate change, or depleteion of natural resources when you'll be up in heaven for the rest of eternity in a few years? With the tribulation imminent, perhaps already underway, there's no need to worry about how people will generate energy 100 years from now, or even 50 years from now, since only unbelievers will be left to survive with no more oil in the ground and an infrastructure and landscape dependent on the availability of cheap and abundant energy. It's inconceivable to consider any medium or long term effects of significantly changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere by pumping eons of stored carbon gas back into it. We came, we saw, we cashed in, now lets blow this joint.

If someone is waterboarded in the forest, is it torture?

After a rather uneventful first day of hearings for the Attorney General Nominee, Michael B. Mukasey (who I might start referring to as shifty bastard), the second day turned out to be a bit different. Day 1 was filled with lots of feel good folksy talk, but details were sparse. He said the first day that the president could not order torture;

“Torture is unlawful under the laws of this country,” Mr. Mukasey said. “It is not what this country is all about. It is not what this country stands for. It’s antithetical to everything this country stands for."

Bush says that the US doesn't torture. But as long as they dont die or have organ failure, it isn't torture. And those couple that did die were just accidents, and then a few suicides too. Oh yea and it's not torture if we send them to another country that will do it for us (now a major motion picture movie), kind of in the same way as it doesn't make you gay as long as your not the one doing the blowing.

So when he was asked to be more specific:

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: “Is waterboarding constitutional?”

Mukasey: “I don’t know what is involved in the technique,” Mr. Mukasey replied. “If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional.”

Whitehouse: “is the practice of putting somebody in a reclining position, strapping them down, putting cloth over their faces and pouring water over the cloth to simulate the feeling of drowning. Is that constitutional?”

Mukasey: “If it amounts to torture, it is not constitutional.”

Seems like the trend is to avoid direct talk, and invent a new word for what we do like 'terrorist surveillance program' or 'enhanced interrogation'

Extra: a short history on waterboarding from Dick Durbin:

The United States has long taken the position that this is a war crime. In 1901, the U.S. Army Major Edwin Glenn sentenced to 10 years hard labor for water-boarding a captured insurgent in the Philippines.

U.S. military commissions after World War II prosecuted Japanese troops for engaging in water-boarding. The torture statute makes it a crime to threaten someone with imminent death. Water- boarding is a threat of imminent death.

I'm hoping that you can at least look at this one technique and say that clearly constitutes torture, it should not be the policy of the United States to engage in water-boarding, whether the detainee is military or otherwise.

MUKASEY: It is not constitutional for the United States to engage in torture in any form, be it water-boarding or anything else.

Victory in Iraq

The mysterious pocket dimension

If your in the mood for a long anti-Clinton rant take a look here. It mentions Dennis Kucinich at the end, who you can see here.

Cowboy Country

Amateurish raids by immigration, complete with cowboy hats. Shoot-em up mercenaries paid billions in Iraq. Drunken shootings by same mercenaries. Legalised torture secretly justified in secret memos. The list can go on, but I should stop here before I induce vomiting.
The first 'CEO administration' seems to be keeping with that label. Their meetings are punctual, he is 'the decider'; and instant results, lackadaiscal planning and oversight, and profit above all else rule the day. With the largest military budget in the world, we don't have an army large enough to keep the peace in Iraq without heavy reliance on mercenaries like Blackwater. Mercenaries who have conviniently been exempted from US, US military, and Iraqi law by our occupation authority in Iraq, until now. The staggering costs of our occupation are floodling into the pockets of Bush's friends and donors, who our own audits show are overcharging, and not completing work they were paid for.
Have you ever wondered what would happen if a spoiled rich kid from New England who likes to pretend he's a Texas cowboy, who failed in every business venture his daddy paid for him to try, who liked to think he was an airplane fighter but got a stateside post during Vietnam from his papa that he didn't bother showing up for, became president of the US?