solarbird | Posting this now before I repost it later

I'll probably repost this later, after the "holidays," so that people actually see it.

Immigration locks up a legal immigrant for five and a half years without charges, eventually dumping him out on the street. Unlike most detainees, he had phone calls out. Clearly Islandic tourist Eva Ósk Arnardóttir got off light with just being "handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep, been without food and drink and been confined to a place without anyone knowing [her] whereabouts" for only 24 hours. One member of the GOP base is quite happy about her treatment.

Early in the Korean War, J. Edgar Hoover, the archetypal weirdo transvestite, planned the arrests and indefinite detentions without charge of 12,000 Americans. Over at Powerline, John condemns the scope, but not the substance, noting that "Hoover was too quick to judge people disloyal--it would be interesting to get a look at the list of 12,000" but adds that "some may feel nostalgic for a time when disloyalty was at least acknowledged to be a bad thing."

CATO discovers that leading GOP candidate Mike Huckabee has been working with not just fundamentalists, not just theocrats, but outright Christian Reconstructionists as recently as this month, raising money. Christian Reconstructionists, as longer-time readers know, want to impose Old Testament law as civil law, including the death penalty for queers, uppity women, and well, you know. But that's yet another thing people don't want to talk about.

Most of the other leading GOP contenders, unfortunately, are fascists. So there's really not any winning there. I mean, Sullivan pointed to The American Conservative's denunciation of the Rudy Giuliani campaign and its plans for endless war as fascist this week; that's good. Check out that cover, and worse, check out that platform.

But wait, there's more! Another leading candidate, Mitt Romney, believes that the President is bound by no law or treaty, Constitutional or otherwise. He's onboard with the idea that the President can void law via signing statements, unilaterally start wars, ignore already-passed laws without reservation, and, of course, endorses all the Bush administration's obscene power grabs. The man is running for absolute dictator. Unlike the other fascist candidates, he at least answered the Q&A. Most of the GOP didn't. (Glenn Greenwald has a longer discussion of this here). The sane amoungst you might find Rep. Paul's and Senator McCain's answers much less distressing. You might even find Rep. Paul's quite pleasant and worthy of support.

By the way, according to that useless rag known as Newsweek, Rep. Paul is no longer ruling out a third-party run. Given that his current party is dominated by fundamentalists and absolutists of all stripes - and his own polling at 6% in Iowa (and about the same in the GOP nationally), I can see that.

Here is a first-hand account, in detail, of the reality of the torture technique called waterboarding, a technique that the AP still refuses to call "torture" despite being defined as such for centuries, and, in fact, invented as such. The account is fairly short and educational and includes the key point: Torture is not about truth. Torture has never been about truth. Torture is about getting someone to say whatever you want them to say, true or not. Torture is the opposite of truth.

Speaking of which, it looks like there were hundreds of hours of torture-interrogation video destroyed by the CIA, and that they were withheld, intentionally, in 2003 and 2004 from the 9/11 study panel.

And meanwhile, in Nigeria, Evangelical pastors are helping to create a terrible new campaign of violence against young Nigerians. Children and babies branded as evil are being abused, abandoned and even murdered while the preachers make money out of the fear of their parents and their communities. Basically they label random children "witches" and demand money to clense them. What happens most of the time is the children get tortured or killed. Ah, evangelicals. Gotta love 'em.

ETA: Glenn Greenwald, again, has good coverage of the contempt the DC Establishment has for anyone who fights what it has decided it wants. It's worth reading. They really don't like you. Read that as a reminder.