June 2006

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Chicken Little and Hamdan

June 30, 2006 in Political Animals | No comments

Justin at RightontheRight.com isn’t thinking straight — again. He’s crying that the sky is falling in the wake of yesterday’s decision by the US Supreme Court in the Hamdan case. Apparently he is laboring under the delusion that the only options left are to release all suspected terrorists, or try them in civilian courts:

Do we release dangerous terrorists back into the world, or do we spend years upon years trying every single one of them in a civilian court… Congress is going to have to do something, as we simply can’t begin trying hundreds of foreign enemies in our domestic courts. I wonder if our soldiers in Iraq may now have to shoot instead of detain terrorists, just so they don’t have to make countless court appearances. Can you believe this idiocy?

Caveat: I have yet to read all 185 pages of the Hamdan decision [PDF], but I would certainly be surprised to find that the Supreme Court mandated the use of civilian courts in trying terror suspects. Read the rest of this entry »

Misha is full of shit

June 29, 2006 in Political Animals | 40 comments

Yes, that Misha. The potty-mouthed, reality-challenged blowhard who goes by the name of “Emperor Darth Misha I” (no megalomania there, eh?) is completely full of shit.

So is most of the rest of the rightwing blogosphere. The hysteria du jour they’re hyping is that the New York Times revealed “covert measures” when it published a story detailing the Bush administration’s use of bank records to track terrorists. Unfortunately, Misha and his fellow dimwits have succeeded only in exposing their own ignorance. There was nothing secret about the “Terrorist Finance Tracking Program”, save for the fact that it was carried out without judicial oversight. Read the rest of this entry »

Wondering about Kit’s honesty

June 29, 2006 in Political Animals | 7 comments

Kit Jarrell demonstrates her tenuous grasp of the facts again.

Quoting a CNN report, she claims that witnesses to the killing of an Iraqi civilian are "lying". What does the CNN report actually say?

An autopsy report on the Iraqi civilian a squad of Marines are accused of murdering in April indicates the man may not have been disabled as his family reported, defense sources said Wednesday.

A preliminary, partial report released to defense lawyers does not mention any deformity or other injury consistent with a permanent disability, a source familiar with the evidence told CNN.

Seven Marines and a Navy medical corpsman have been charged with killing Hasham Ibrahim Awad in the town of Hamdaniya, west of Baghdad, on April 26. Prosecutors began handing over computer discs that contain the evidence against the men to their lawyers last week.

Awad’s body had been exhumed as part of the investigation. The remains were severely decomposed by the time the autopsy was performed, sources told CNN.

Let’s see… this CNN report is based on a “preliminary, partial report” of an autopsy on a body that was “severely decomposed by the time the autopsy was performed”. The report is one that Kit herself has not seen. Yet she knows for a fact that the witnesses were lying.

I wonder what else Kit knows without having any evidence to support her accusations.

(Aside: I can find no indication that the new Euphoric Reality site accepts trackbacks. Gotta wonder if Kit and Heidi are trying hard to insulate themselves from any criticism…)

Wednesday Hodgepodge

June 28, 2006 in Life, the Universe, and Everything | No comments


Iraq WMD red flags ignored, ex-CIA aide tells paper

A former CIA officer says he made repeated efforts to alert top agency officials to problems with an Iraqi defector’s claims about the country’s mobile biological weapons labs but he was ignored, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.

CIA officer Tyler Drumheller said he personally crossed out a reference to the labs from a classified draft of a U.N. speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell because he recognized the source as a defector, code-named Curveball, who was suspected to be mentally unstable and a liar.

Drumheller told the Post he was surprised when a few days later, on February 5, 2003, Powell told the U.N. Security Council that “we have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and rails.”

  • Larry Johnson points out that the Bush administration’s whining about recent revelations in the New York Times ebar the unmistakable stench of hypocrisy:

Bullshit alert! After watching George Bush and Dick Cheney weep and wail over the “damage” done by the New York Times for reporting that financial data is being dumped into the CIA as part of an effort to find terrorist networks, I kept waiting for Darryl Hannah to pop up and say, “Live, from New York, it’s Saturday Night”. Does George have Alzheimer’s Disease? Has he forgotten that he used to love the New York Times?…

[W]ho can forget that Vice President Cheney instructed his Chief of Staff, the intrepid Scooter Libby, to leak misleading portions of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to the New York Times’ Judith Miller. NPR’s David Greene reported that:

Former vice presidential aide Lewis Libby, indicted for leaking a CIA agent’s identity, has testified that any classified information he may have leaked to a reporter was authorized by President Bush through the vice president. The claim is included in court documents released Thursday.

Libby told a grand jury that classified information he may have leaked to a New York Times reporter was authorized for use by President Bush, acting through Vice President Dick Cheney. Lewis is awaiting trial on charges that he lied to the grand jury, which was investigating the leak of the agent’s identity to the media.

We should also remember that the New York Times was not the only friendly outlet for planting “news”. White House officials turned to Time Magazine and the Chicago Sun Times in shopping information about Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA officer. For this White House, leaking classified information that damages national security is okay as long as it can be used to save the President’s political reputation.

Woody’s hot air

June 28, 2006 in Political Animals | 2 comments

If the facts don’t support your preconceived notions, argue personalities. That would seem to be Woody’s motto as he stumbles through another post about Al Gore’s movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.

Woody opens with one of his typically empty claims:

When I read the Associated Press article titled "Scientists OK Gore’s Movie for Accuracy", I went to see the substance of that claim and realized that it was more leftist fluff than fact.
What exactly in the article was non-factual? Woody can’t say. We are apparently supposed to accept his assessment of the article without one single shred of upporting evidence. This is Woody’s famous because-I-say-so! tactic, and it’s just as feeble here as it’s always been.

Next, the expected ad hominem attack:

The AP article quotes Robert Correll, the chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment group. It appears from the article that Correll has a personal relationship with Gore, having viewed the film at a private screening at the invitation of the former Vice President. Maybe he got free popcorn along with some grants, too.
What did Correll say that was wrong or untrue? Woody cannot say. What evidence is there that Correll’s opinion is affected by the alleged “personal relationship with Gore”? Woody cannot say.

If Woody doesn’t have the facts, he’ll smear. Every single time.

Still no answer from Cao

June 27, 2006 in Political Animals | 2 comments

In her latest attempt to avoid answering a very simple question, Cao provides both some unintended entertainment and further confirmation that one of the most common traits — perhaps even a prerequisite — of being an ultra-rightwing blogger is the inability to draw rational conclusions from the data at hand.

Her post "Miami 7, Islam and media lies" has a number of obvious flaws. The first appears in the very first sentence:

Apparently some people simply don’t know about the Nation of Islam and its ideological connecton with Al Qaeda and terrorism (which was apparent in the comments section of this post).

Now, why does Cao need to establish this ‘ideological connecton’ (sic)? Simple… to date, there has been reported no tangible evidence linking the seven suspects to anyone in the Nation of Islam. So, lacking a substantive connection, Cao is forced to reach back into the history of the Nation of Islam and invent the vaporous ‘ideological connection’ as a justification for tying the NOI to the alleged terrorists. Read her claims carefully — the ideological connection is the only connection she even tries to make between the seven terror suspects and the Nation of Islam. Read the rest of this entry »

Saturday Hodgepodge

June 24, 2006 in Life, the Universe, and Everything | No comments

  • Ed Brayton provides an overview of the royal fisking that Ann Coulter is being subjected to regarding her latest attempt to sell books by pandering to the ‘intelligent design’ crowd:
    The Panda’s Thumb crew decided to take her 4 chapters on evolution and dissect them, picking out some of the more absurd claims and showing, in great detail, why she’s wrong about them. Suffice to say that there are enough claims that are not just weak but stunningly dishonest and wide of the mark that this could take weeks to complete…

    On the first claim, that there is no evidence for evolution, Myers correctly points to the scientific literature that contains hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of articles about various aspects of evolution. That represents the life’s work of tens of thousands of scientists, difficult and painstaking work that slowly and steadily adds to our understanding of evolution. Of course, Ann has it backwards. The issue is not whether there is evidence that supports evolution, but whether there is evidence that is explained by evolution. Theories, after all, are explanations for data…

    The Coulter chapters get much, much worse. As Ian Musgrave notes, she repeats practically every old creationist canard in existence, including the claim that there are no transitional fossils. Again, why would an ID advocate deny the existence of transitional fossils if ID is genuinely consistent with guided common descent? One would expect there to be transitional fossils if that is true, just as we would expect them to be there is unguided common descent is true. The answer seems obvious to me: because they really don’t mean it when they say that ID is okay with common descent, despite the monumental evidence for it.
  • Greg Sargent points out that the right only cares about the victims of terrorism when said victims are politically useful:
    I’ve asked this before, but what is it about the relatives of people killed by terrorists that these wingnuts hate so much? Recall that Ann Coulter smeared the widows of 9/11 victims and that many righty bloggers smeared the father of Nick Berg, who was beheaded in Iraq. Their sin, of course, was that they criticized America and George Bush.

    Let me put this as clearly as I can: To the likes of Hinderaker, the pain of those who lost loved ones to this war only matters to the extent that the bereaved allow their grief to be used to prop up the war effort and Bush himself. If the bereaved relatives don’t allow their grief to be used in this fashion, their sacrifice and loss no longer matter a whit—they’re not to be pitied or empathized with, but scorned and humiliated as brutally as possible. Despicable.
  • And, just because we all need a laugh now and again, I present Victor Navone’s classic animation, "Alien Song":

Cao’s favorite tactic: cut and run

June 24, 2006 in Political Animals | 15 comments

From all indications, it doesn’t take much talent at all to be a rabidly right-wing blogger. You need a lot of rage, the willingness to make accusations and draw conclusions based on little or no evidence, and the conviction that anyone who holds a view that deviates even slightly from your own is a moron, a traitor, or both.

Oh, and you must be utterly unwilling to answer simple questions. Even better, you have to be ready to run away from those questions like a scared little bunny. Cao has just provided us with an excellent example of this trait, in the comments section for her post " Seven swore allegiance to Al Qaeda in Miami". Read the rest of this entry »

Jay the ignorant

June 17, 2006 in Political Animals | 5 comments

Jay Stephenson, who has already proven himself to be a liar, makes some snarky comments about recently released reports detailing abuse of prisoners by the US military. Let’s examine just how ignorant Jay proves himself to be.

To start with, Jay gets the most basic details of the reports wrong. He claims (with evident sarcasm) that the documents reveal the “horrible terror techniques of our ‘evil’ military at Gitmo”, when in fact the reports do not examine allegations of detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay at all. The AP story that Jay links to makes this crystal clear

[The documents] included two major reports – one by Army Brig. Gen. Richard Formica on specials operations forces in Iraq and one by Brig. Gen. Charles Jacoby on Afghanistan detainees.

Note that Jay must have read this story, because he quotes the sentence immediately preceding. Gawd DAMN, Jay, how willfully blind ignorant can one man be? Read the rest of this entry »

Gribbit’s documented lies

June 15, 2006 in Political Animals | 18 comments

Andrew “Gribbit” Richardson apparently does not like having his words subjected to serious scrutiny. He finds being fact-checked extremely distressing… as well he should. His command of the facts is feeble, at best.

Most amazing is his claim to total honesty:

I DO NOT LIE.

One tiny problem: Gribbit does indeed lie, and that can be proven. Read the rest of this entry »

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