Funny like three caskets

This report is contested, and I am told (by zarq in comments) that the Yahoo! editorial (and several other sources I saw with the same information) are all incorrect - the joke was not told this year, but 22 years ago in a Senatorial campaign.

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Sadly all too revealing...

Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, 'Where is that marvelous ape?'

&mdash Senator John McCain, on the campaign trail, last week

(Spotted via emrecom.)

post-mortem coming, I want to post this already.

I'm writing a short FISA post-mortem - and that was the post of opening this window to write a post, even - but I'm not getting to it quickly enough, so here, have this for the moment instead:

Glenn Greenwald analysies a new decision on indefinite detentions from the 4^th circuit appellate court, ruling that "the President can order anyone in the U.S. imprisoned in a military brig as an 'enemy combatant' — even if they have never fought on a battlefield or with a foreign power against the U.S. Rather, mere accusations by the President of 'terrorism' are sufficient to justify the indefinite incarceration of such an individual as an 'enemy combatant,' who is then denied basic Constitutional guarantees." The decision states that such detentions can be indefinite in length (including, specifically, decades). It also states that US citizens are not exempt from this in any way:

...it is likely that the constitutional rights our court determines exist, or do not exist, for al-Marri [the defendant] will apply equally to our own citizens under like circumstances... the protections we declare to be unavailable under the Constitution to al-Marri might likewise be unavailable to American citizens...

He also comments on the politisation of the Justice Department into a personal enforcement and protection arm of the Chief Executive here.

brazilrascal has posted a longish article ("Event Horizon") you should read here, about the near-ritual reversing of roles now underway in the 2008 campaign:

It’s already started. Conservative blogs like Ace of Spades and Michelle Malkin are testing the waters, warning of the impending Obama Socialist-Islamo Negrocracy and its rampant abuse of executive power. Such an unprepared, unstable president might even ingulge in massive wiretap programs free of oversight, or add little notes to laws basically stating that "this holds as the law of the land, unless I disagree at some point in the future" ...

I don’t think it’ll get to a full reversal, however, because liberals and conservatives currently have very different views of what it means to be an opposition party. In fact, it can be safely asserted that the only thing that is more conservative-friendly than a democrat minority is, oddly enough, a democrat majority in legislative affairs. On the other hand, the GOP perfected brinkmanship to a T, blowing up even minor issues to levels of conflict and media attention that put the Cuban Missile Crisis to shame.

And everyone, I think, has already heard about the Bush administration's torture regime was taken directly from 1950s Chinese Communist torture systems designed to elicit confessions, true and false. So yeah, it was on purpose.

I'm going to be walking away somewhat from most of this for the rest of the year. Everything remaining is going to be election noise, and I frankly can't stand it. I'm not going away; I'll still post if there's some particular new horror, and there certainly will be. I do think that the only election that matters very much at this point is the Chief Executive race, because if you're going to have a king, you're better off having the least bad one, and Senator McCain seems to be doing his best to prepare to be as bad a one as possible. Congress has written itself out of the government, so I don't exactly expect any resistance to any of a Chief Executive McCain's court nominees no matter who is in charge, and that's most of what's left to fight for in the wreckage. I'll have more on this, I suspect but do not promise, in my FISA wrapup post later.


Pledge Now

Off to give the Country Village/Bothell market another try

Off to give the Country Village/Bothell Market another try. Wish me luck. ^_^

Hellboy 2: The Suckening

Hellboy 2 (which I ended up going to against my better judgement) would have been a lot better if 1) the wrong people hadn't won (as so far as I know only nihilistic_kid has pointed out in review form) and 2) it wasn't a sanctimonious, depressing, hypocritical, desperately derivative pile.

Looked pretty good, though. I liked the bits with the gears. But even with that I spent about 2/3rds of the movie thinking, "I hate this movie and I want to go home now," over and over and over again.