June 2009

CNN: Court declares Franken the winner of Minnesota Senate race

Minnesota’s Supreme Court has dismissed former Sen. Norm Coleman’s challenge to the state’s November election results and declared Democratic challenger Al Franken the winner.

The unanimous opinion ruled that Franken “received the highest number of votes legally cast” and is entitled “to receive the certificate of election as United States senator from the state of Minnesota.”

The former “Saturday Night Live” writer and performer had declared victory in the disputed race after a recount ended in January, but Coleman, a Republican who had been seeking a second six-year term, went to court to challenge those results.

Coleman still could attempt to take the challenge to federal courts, but Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican, told CNN on Sunday that he would sign Franken’s election certificate if the Supreme Court ordered it.

Let’s see if Governor Pawlenty can be trusted to keep his word, shall we?

UPDATE 06/30/09 5:34 PM EDT: Norm Coleman has conceded the race.

Glenn Greenwald lays out in plain language the awful truth:

The interrogation and detention regime implemented by the U.S. resulted in the deaths of over 100 detainees in U.S. custody — at least.  While some of those [deaths] were the result of ”rogue” interrogators and agents, many were caused by the methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush White House, including extreme stress positions, hypothermia, sleep deprivation and others.  That’s why we’ve always considered those tactics to be “torture” when used by others — because they inflict serious harm, and can even kill people.  Those arguing against investigations and prosecutions — that we Look to the Future, not the Past — are thus literally advocating that numerous people get away with murder.

The record could not be clearer regarding the fact that we caused numerous detainee deaths, many of which have gone completely uninvestigated, let alone unpunished.  Instead, the media and political class have misleadingly caused the debate to consist of the myth that these tactics were limited and confined.

…

It’s not uncommon, of course, for our political debates to be distorted.  But discussions over torture and accountability have descended to a new level.  The picture that is most commonly conveyed — that torture was confined to a small handful of cases, was highly regulated, and resulted in no long-lasting harm — is pure propaganda, completely false.  The reality — that our “interrogation tactics” killed numerous detainees, who, by definition, are people help helplessly in our custody, virtually none of whom has been convicted of anything, and at least some of whom are completely innocent — is virtually never heard during these debates.  It’s vital that this changes.

The United States cannot regain its moral standing in the world until the facts regarding its use of torture are made public and dealt with in an honest and forthright manner. The Obama administration’s tactic of simply ignoring these crimes will not suffice.

The petulant man-child that calls itself “Stogie” has again proven just how infantile he really is. Two days ago he decided that the best way to express his disagreement with another blogger was to ridicule her for her weight:

This is a screenshot from my Google Reader account. In a rare moment of self-examination, Stogie realized that maybe this post would make him look like a vindictive little asshole, and deleted the post. Too bad for him that the Internet never forgets anything.

Oh, and repeating the lie that Biegel is the “official blogger for the Democratic Party of Alaska” doesn’t help his credibility one little bit either. But then, if Stogie is determined to paint himself as a vindictive little asshole, I suppose he isn’t going to be too terribly concerned about shredding his credibility, either.

UPDATE 06/30/09 9:30 PM EDT: Stogie sure is a class act. He was just too, too embarrassed to leave his ‘beached whale’ post up, but has no compunctions about photoshopping Biegel into ‘Jabba the Slut’. Talk about your content-free blog posts…

Allan Uthman points out that by limiting the torture debate to waterboarding, all participants in the torture debate are effect colluding to erase from the national consciousness much more horrifying crimes committed in our name:

I don’t want to come off as minimizing the horror of controlled drowning. It’s just that there’s something about forcible anal rape that brings the torture issue into sharp focus. Just once, I’d like to hear one of these American Enterprise Institute psychos, the ones that always trot out to defend the Neocons’ freakish obsessions, have to defend shoving a flashlight up a guy’s ass. I want to hear Frank Gaffney or Jonah Goldberg tell me why I shouldn’t be fucking mortified that raping prisoners was considered within tolerable interrogation practices by my country. I want Glenn Beck to justify butt-raping a suspect…

The upshot is this: America is the country that rapes its prisoners. We’re sex criminals. That’s our thing now. And Obama’s refusal to “look back,” i.e. prosecute these incredibly serious crimes, ensures that it’s our permanent legacy. No national reputation can survive this simply by shrugging it off. We used to be seen as a bastion of freedom and decency around the world. That shit is over, folks. We’re like the Soviet Union with better movies now. When we talk about human rights, we are an international joke.

And when we talk about torture, we stick to waterboarding, because nobody, not even the “liberals,” are willing to face what we’ve done.

Here’s a simple fact for torture advocates like Derek Foley to consider: Not only is torture morally abhorrent, but it’s counterproductive. Once a suspect is tortured, it may prove difficult or impossible to prosecute him:

The United States is relying on evidence obtained by torture to prove that it can continue to imprison indefinitely a young man arrested as an adolescent in Afghanistan six and a half years ago, according to documents filed with a federal district court.

Mohammed Jawad may have been as young as 12 years old when he was seized by Afghan police and turned over to U.S. authorities in December 2002, according to a recent letter from the Afghan attorney general, who is requesting his return. Jawad is accused of throwing a hand grenade into a U.S. military vehicle and injuring two servicemen and their translator. But the primary evidence against him — his own confessions — were obtained by torture. Although the U.S. military commission created by President George W. Bush eventually charged him with war crimes for the attack in October 2007 — almost six years after the crime — a judge ruled in October 2008 that because they were tortured, his confessions were unreliable and inadmissible.

I’ve been having a running debate discussion exchange with Derek Foley of My Uncommon Sense over the past few weeks. You may recall that Derek deleted all of my comments at his blog for the simple reason that said comments contained far too many inconvenient facts — inconvenient in that they blew away most of the idiotic reasons Derek gave for favoring the use of torture in the War On Terruh®.

The exchange has been taking place in email because Derek Foley simply doesn’t have the courage to conduct a debate discussion exchange of this sort in public. His latest missive in the series is especially educational, as it is a textbook example of a favorite meme amongst the wingnuts: I’m A Christian, And Therefore Everything I Say Must Be True. Have a look at this huge malodorous pile of donkey droppings:

From: Derek Foley <foley.193@osu.edu>
To: “meatbrain@thinkingmeat.net” <meatbrain@thinkingmeat.net>
Date: Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 7:46 PM
Subject: Re: Yes, Derek Foley is a lying coward

Note how I promised that if you swore again on my site, that I would delete ALL of your comments, not just the ones that contained derogatory language. If you really think that your comments weren’t obscene or derogatory, just take a look at your emails; they are filled with foul language and hate. I really wonder what happened to you as a child to hate so many people simply because they have an understanding of logic and truth. Wait! Can I predict how Terry would respond to my past statement? “I hate you because you are a liar!!!!1!!!!!111!”

Okay, here’s the first lie. Derek has actually made two claims:

1) He deleted all my posts because I used ‘foul language’ (side note: Examples have been found of Derek using the same words he claims are ‘foul language’ in his own posts and comments).

2) He deleted only those posts that he found contained ‘foul language’.

Both claims cannot be true. Derek is clearly lying here.

One does not have to read the wingnut blogs for long before one understand just how morally bereft they are, both as a group and individually. Most wingnuts will happily demonstrate, on a daily basis, that they are lying, racist, hatemongering bigots.

Then you have the really amazing cases, the ones who not only have no moral compass whatsoever, but who will proudly flaunt the fact that they are moral imbeciles at every opportunity. Robert aka ‘Bushwack’ of American and Proud is an example of the kind of subhuman that makes up a significant fraction of the wingnut population. This dimwitted maggot has chosen to advertise its moral vacuity by cheering on a criminal act:

Perez Hilton assaulted.

Got his ass kicked the other day by a member of the “Black Eyed Peas” music group. I must say I AM NOW A FAN OF WILL I AM (The lead singer)

Poor Perez Hilton, got BITCH SLAPPED.. He’s (She’s) crying like a little punk faggot and frankly that does my heart good!

I’ll never be a rap fan, but since one of them punched this asshole in the head I’ll toast to them all… WELL DONE! oh and Fergie is absolutely HOT! LOL

This insect that pretends to be a man is celebrating an assault on a human being. If one needed hard evidence that wingnuttery degrades the moral sense until nothing is left, one would need to look no further than this worm that calls itself ‘Robert’.

UPDATE 06/23/09 1:52 PM EDT: It comes as no surprise, of course, to find that murder advocate ‘Big Dog’ is also celebrating the commission of a crime. There must be some sort of competition in Greater Wingnuttia to see who can prove themselves the most egregious bigot.

If the wingnuts want to make a real difference in Iran, they might drop the silly posturing about President Obama’s visit to an ice cream parlor and turn their attention to the Iranian regime’s corporate enablers:

A Nokia-Seimens joint venture supplied the key surveillance tech to the Iranian government that is being used to spot and bust protestors, subjecting them to massive human rights violations and endangering their lives. Seimens says it’s all Nokia’s fault, and a spokesman says they did nothing wrong because spying on and torturing dissidents is legal in Iran.

Meanwhile, Cisco and every other “western” network tech company is busily selling spyware, censorware, and other surveillance crap to every repressive government in the world, and also raking in big bucks selling unconstitutional wiretap tools to the US government for use on domestic populations…

The right to make money hand over fist is, of course, paramount in the Republican mythos. Can the right wing screech monkeys take their eyes off the almighty dollar long enough to question whether it is morally acceptable to profit from a dictatorial regime’s need to spy on its people?

UPDATE 06/22/096:00 PM EDT: The Wall Street Journal has more on the Nokia-Siemens joint venture.

Sara Robinson does an absolutely superb job of debunking the conservative myths surrounding the recent spate of right-wing domestic terrorist attacks. Recommended reading.

The dipshit wingnuts are at it again. Drooling imbeciles like Porter Good and some asswipe calling himself ‘Wordsmith’ over at the cesspool known as Flopping Aces are having hissy fits because President Obama did what fathers do, and took his girls for ice cream. Apparently he’s not supposed to do anything of the sort while there are riots in Tehran.

I have a little trip down memory lane for these jackasses:

As usual, IOKIYAR.