Germany Tries Rumsfeld

Glenn Greenwald had a post up a couple weeks ago decrying Germany for bringing charges against Donald Rumsfeld for war crimes. I think some points are required: If the German government wants to implicate itself in the prosecution of alleged war criminals, they are certainly able to do so. The fact that the crime did […]

Whee

A few months ago, I was supposed to get some help on my job. Specifically, someone to work on the .NET side of things, which would free me up to do the job I was actually hired to do: PHP development. He wasn’t my first choice, but he was second, in large part because of […]

Dangerous Territory

via Rad Geek: Inskeep If you’re an enemy combatant, who decides if you ever get a full-blown trial—a military commission trial as it’s been called? Fmr. Bush Counsel Yoo That’s ultimately up to the President. I think it’s still up to the President and the Secretary of Defense who’s going to be tried by a […]

Dying Democracy and Dehumanization

Last Wednesday night, I was calling friends to try and do a little street theater downtown Chicago, in the hopes of providing a particularly gritty infomercial and generating pressure on the Senate to not pass S.3930 (aka the “Just Confess to Something Act of 2006″). It appears I wasn’t the only one with the same […]

Threat Levels

From Wired, via Boing-Boing: Look closely at the “Green” threat level. Yes, you are reading that correctly. As a resident of America, you are more likely to be shot by a police officer than killed in any type of terrorist attack. Now factor in the well-documented racial bias in law enforcement strategies and arrest rates, […]

No Santa

I started writing this post to point out that the coordinated demands by virtually every major nutcase over the New York Times’ revealing the data-mining of banking records via SWIFT—the calls for execution, harassment, lynching, etc.—was a clear indication that Karl Rove is no longer a target of Fitzgerald’s investigation. The much-vaunted “Fitzmas” is over, […]

Missing the Point

Sigh. After only a few short months of paying attention to them, I have already tired of the Democrats and their assorted minions. If nothing else, the idea that it’s somehow in the Bush Administration’s best interest to claim the NSA spying program was some advanced data mining procedure—and thus be able to wave the […]

GULAG

Now that it is widely known that the CIA is torturing people in a string of secret prisons around the world, is there going to be a retraction from those who criticized Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) for his use of the term GULAG to describe the U.S. government’s interrogation centers and prisons? Somehow, I doubt […]