RING A BELL?

This cracked me up. Watch out Repubs!!

Hundreds of Turkish sheep follow leader off cliff:

"ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Hundreds of sheep followed their leader off a
cliff in eastern Turkey, plunging to their deaths this week while shepherds
looked on in dismay.

Four hundred sheep fell 15 meters (yards) to their
deaths in a ravine in Van province near Iran but broke the fall of another 1,100
animals who survived,
newspaper reports said on Friday.
Shepherds from
Ikizler village neglected the flock while eating breakfast, leaving the sheep to
roam free, the Radikal daily said.

The loss to local farmers was estimated at 100,000 new lira
($74,000).
($1=1.3440 new lira) "

So far the loss from our sheep is far greater: 87 billion and growing, 1700+ lives. Untold damage to the economy, civil rights, and the environment.

*sigh*

A NEW JUSTICE

Debate has begun in earnest about who will replace the woman who was arguably the most powerful person in the world. Think that's exaggerating? Think about it -she was the "swing-vote" on the highest court of the most powerful nation in the world. Her one vote could decide whether a case was won or lost or whether a piece of legislation or a lower court holding would stand as constitutional or fail as not. Scared yet?

Personally, I have two requirements for a Supreme Court Justice:

1. That they rule in accordance with stare decisis (settled law)
2. Unless they are breaking from precedent to protect the individual rights granted in the Bill of Rights, or to overturn existing law in order to grant greater individual rights under the Bill of Rights.

Pretty simple, eh?

Using that test none of the ten controversial judges who were catalysts for talk about the "Nuclear Option" would stand a chance as they all had records of ruling contrary to binding precedent and not to prop-up or expand individual rights, but to favor corporate or governmental rights. See my post "THE FILIBUSTERED TEN" for details.

Does Alberto Gonzalez withstand the test? Honestly, I'm not familiar enough with his record as a Texas Judge to know. I am however predictably suspicious that he fails, because his recent exploits as a Bush toadie, weaseling past and disparaging the Geneva Convention rules, do not give one reason for optimism. I'm sure that we'll find out in the days ahead.

Start the pop-corn popping -this should be fun.

POLITICIZING THE BRITISH BOMBINGS

Sympathies and condolences to the families of the dead and wounded from the bombings in London.

The messages from the right are typically appalling: a panel of dopes on Fox "News" gleefully recounted how the bombings bitchslapped the leaders at the G8 summit into dropping the AIDS, poverty in Africa, and Global Warming issues and bringing terrorism back to the fore. Others are using it to whip up more frenzied fear in the American electorate as a means of distracting from both the titanic failures and outright criminal and ethical violations of the Bush Administration and their supporters in the GOP.

Yes sh*theads -we know terrorism is still a threat. Duh.

If the British want to follow our playbook they should deploy to Northern Pakistan but leave before they get Bin Laden and withdraw to attack and (re)occupy India.

If anything this attack should prove just how little anything we've done has curbed that threat. By the way what have "we" done to "curb the threat"?

1. Hunted down those who orchestrated the attack on us on 9/11 and then abandoned the hunt before they were captured.
2. Waged an illegal war of agression with an enemy who had nothing to do with the attack on us and began an occupation of that nation for the forseeable future.
3. Employed a vast army of "civilian" contractors who are subject to no laws on the planet to "support" that war effort.
4. Created yet another bloated government bureaucracy -the DHS.
5. Authored a statutory scheme that supresses the rights guaranteed to us in the Bill of Rights.
6. Detained hundreds of people with no charges against them, and no access to courts of justice to determine their fate.
7. Begun a policy of torture for those we've detained.
8. There's more but do you really need it?

Has any of it made it one iota less likely that we'll have another terrorist attack?

Here's a scary anecdote: my neighborhood was lit up like the Tet Offensive with illegal fireworks this 4th of July. Illegal fireworks. That means that they had to come over the border from Mexico because those fireworks aren't made here. The LAFD complained that the amount of illegal fireworks this year was greater than at any year in the past.

What that means is that large numbers of illegal explosives are coming into the country over the border undetected, by customs, border patrol or stupid f*cking "Minute Men". The fact that they're for recreational or pyrotechnic use is irrelevant -they're expolsives, they're illegal and they're coming across undetected.

Feel safer?

SO ROVE'S THE RAT?

Apparently Bush puppetmaster Karl Rove has been fingered as the source of the leak in the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame.

If this is true Rove could be indicted and tried under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. Without going into too much depth (you can follow the link and read it for yourself) the act makes it a crime punishable by anywhere from 3 to 10 years in prison or up to $50,000 dollars or both to disclose the identity of a covert intelligence operative when:

1. the person has or had authorized access to classified information
2. the person, through or because of that access learned the identity of said operative, AND (and this is a big and)
3. the person intentionally disclosed the identity to someone else not authorized to know that the identified was a covert operative.

It's a pretty narrow test and difficult to prove the intent prong (as this article in Slate details in regard to Robert Novak -the original publisher of Plame's name. )

It's tempting to envision Rove doing the "perp-walk" in orange jumpsuit for the cameras but it's unlikely even if he's indicted.

Hope he gets the Susan McDougal treatment. I was watching "The Hunting of the President" last week, and the most poignant moment of the film was when Susan McDougal (who was dragged through the mud and worse in the right-wing hit campaign dubbed "Whitewater") recounted her treatment in prison after she was sent there because she refused to lie about the Clintons.

She was dressed in red prison scrubs and housed in the wing reserved for women who have killed their children. She said that every time she went past other parts of the prison the other prisoners threatened derided and threw things at her because they thought that she was a child killer because of the color of her scrubs. She was given death threats and needed additional security while she was there. Moreover, every time she appeared in court she was forbidden from wearing civilian clothes and was led in manacles back and forth from court.

If Rove is convicted (and I say "if" because I'm a liberal and so I still believe in the principle of innocent until proven guilty, even for those I detest like Rove) I have a twisted fantasy of him being housed in the pedophile wing and dressed accordingly. (*sigh*)

Not that I'm vindictive or anything. ;-)

Actually my favorite part of the DVD was the "special feature" of Clinton's videotaped speech after the Sundance premiere of the film. Damn I miss him! He's just so exponentially more intelligent than anyone in the Bush cabal.

Anyway, he made what I think is a crucial point: we (democrats) cannot fight back by becoming them( the GOP) -i.e. by using their tactics. We have to 1. not back down (listen up Harry Reid) 2. continue to point out why their wrong using the truth and facts, and 3. (and this IMHO is the BIG POINT) say how we'd do it differently.

It was nice to have some validation for what your own OP has been saying for sometime now. And from none other than the man himself.