This is a breaking news bulletin. Excerpt, read the whole thing.
In a slight shift from his campaign trail promise, President Obama announced Monday that his administration’s message of “Change” has been modified to the somewhat more restrained slogan “Relatively Minor Readjustments in Certain Favorable Policy Areas.”
Peggy Noonan’s column today in the WSJ encourages Republicans to “act like grown-ups” over the Sotomayor nomination. And she is right. Hyped-up attacks on the nomination and, for that matter, on virtually every Obama administration initiative will not help either their party or the country.
Some, and they are idiots, look at Judge Sotomayor and say: attack, attack, kill. A conservative activist told the New York Times, “We need to brand her.” Another told me a fight is needed to excite the base.
Excite the base? How about excite a moderate, or interest an independent? How about gain the attention of people who aren’t already on your side?
The base is plenty excited already, as you know if you’ve ever read a comment thread on a conservative blog. Comment-thread conservatives, like their mirror-image warriors on the left (“Worst person in the woooorrrlllddd!”) are perpetually agitated, permanently enraged. They don’t need to be revved, they’re already revved. Newt Gingrich twitters that Judge Sotomayor is a racist. Does anyone believe that? He should rest his dancing thumbs, stop trying to position himself as the choice and voice of the base in 2012, and think.
Video from the WSJ All Things Digital D7 conference:
My prediction: the Pre will, after an initial flurry of interest, be a failure along the lines of the Blackberry Storm.
So this is change?
The U.S. is embarking on a $1 billion crash program to expand its diplomatic presence in Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan, another sign that the Obama administration is making a costly, long-term commitment to war-torn South Asia, U.S. officials said Wednesday.
Sounds like a continuation of policies previously deployed in Iraq, simply relocated to a new venue.
And here is a good example of why.
Check out this clip of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor in action last December 9, in oral arguments in Arar v. Ashcroft. The case was filed by Arar claiming that he was arrested at JFK and shipped by the US to Syria to be tortured. This is a clip from an en banc rehearing by all twelve judges on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The excerpt from the hearing starts at 17 minutes into the clip. Listen to her in her own words. More info at Swampland.
Via Newshoggers:
Major Matthew Alexander says that torture doesn’t work, that it creates terrorists and that Dick Cheney doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Major Alexander is a credible witness – he was a U.S. military interrogator for 14 years and recieved a Bronze Star for leading the team that got the information that led to the capture of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi without using torture.
He supports closing Gitmo and ending torture:
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General David Petraeus said this past weekend that President Obama’s decision to close down Gitmo and end harsh interrogation techniques would benefit the United States in the broader war on terror.
He supports closing Gitmo and ending torture:
General David Petraeus said this past weekend that President Obama’s decision to close down Gitmo and end harsh interrogation techniques would benefit the United States in the broader war on terror.
A federal lawsuit has been filed challenging the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8.
Theodore B. Olson and David Boies have filed a U.S. District Court lawsuit on behalf of two gay men and two gay women, arguing that the California constitutional amendment eliminating the right of gay couples to marry violates the U.S. constitutional guarantee of equal protection and due process.
Update: Remember that Ted Olson was George Bush’s first Solicitor General. Now he states the following:
“It is our position in this case that Proposition 8, as upheld by the California Supreme Court, denies federal constitutional rights under the equal protection and due process clauses of the constitution,” Olson said. “The constitution protects individuals’ basic rights that cannot be taken away by a vote. If the people of California had voted to ban interracial marriage, it would have been the responsibility of the courts to say that they cannot do that under the constitution. We believe that denying individuals in this category the right to lasting, loving relationships through marriage is a denial to them, on an impermissible basis, of the rights that the rest of us enjoy…I also personally believe that it is wrong for us to continue to deny rights to individuals on the basis of their sexual orientation.”
So here we have criticism of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the US Supreme Court. You can ignore this comment:
Obama had some truly outstanding legal intellectuals and judges to choose from—Cass Sunstein, Elena Kagan, and Diane Wood come immediately to mind. The White House chose a judge distinguished from the other members of that list only by her race. Obama may say he wants to put someone on the Court with a rags-to-riches background, but locking in the political support of Hispanics must sit higher in his priorities.
Why ignore it? Because of the author of the remark. John Yoo.
More here.
Their next single, to be released in June, is Did You See Me Coming? Click the HD Button for the best view.
The two speeches are those last week by President Obama and former Vice-President Cheney. Toobin is Jeffrey Toobin, writing for The New Yorker. He notes the relative differences in credibility between the two men and warns of Cheney’s ability to cause problems. The full article is here. Read it.
At a minimum, Obama seemed alive to the moral and legal ambiguities implied by the issue. Not so the former Vice-President, who chose to speak in a chilling code, in which methods of torture such as waterboarding became “enhanced interrogation,” in the way that death might be called “enhanced sleep.” Cheney delivered his indictment of the current Administration in the same tone of certainty that he once used to inform the nation of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; of the connections between the government of Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers; and of the prospects for quick victory in Iraq. In light of this, it’s hard to take seriously the claims that Cheney asked us to accept: to name just two, that the information obtained by torture saved lives; and that the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was solely the work of “a few sadistic prison guards,” and not the result of interrogation practices approved by Cheney himself.
Even worse than Cheney’s distortions was the political agenda behind them. The speech was, as politicians say, a marker—a warning to the new Administration. “Just remember: it is a serious step to begin unravelling some of the very policies that have kept our people safe since 9/11,” Cheney said. “Seven and a half years without a repeat is not a record to be rebuked and scorned, much less criminalized. It is a record to be continued until the danger has passed.” Cheney’s all but explicit message was that the blame for any new attack against American people or interests would be laid not on the terrorists, or on the worldwide climate of anti-Americanism created by the Bush-Cheney Administration, but on Barack Obama. For many months after the 9/11 attacks, Democrats refrained from engaging in the blame game with the Bush Administration. Cheney’s speech makes it clear that, should terrorists strike again, Republicans may not respond in kind.
Another amazing pet video. (via William Gibson who also recommends this.)
Neil Tennant recording radio show
On BBC2 Radio, the Pet Shop Boys today presented two hours of their picks of the best recent electro-pop songs. This is one of my favorite genres, and my favorite group as well. They recently won an award for Outstanding Contribution to Music at the Brit Awards. You can listen to the radio show here.
One of their picks is Walking on a Dream by Australia’s Empire of the Sun. I just bought their album yesterday and it very good with a strong 80′s feeling and a hint of Fleetwood Mac. Here is that cut: