Psychopolitik 2.0

Found this on Cognitive Apostate, thought it mildly amusing: What (american) accent do you have?

Here’s the result I got:

No surprise there. Awkwardly though, the locals here sometimes think I’m from NY for some reason.

Another sign that everything is politics:

Frustrated by Bush administration inaction on global warming, states and environmentalists urged the Supreme Court Wednesday to declare greenhouse gases to be air pollutants that the U.S. government must regulate.

The court’s first case on the politically charged topic showed an apparent split between its liberal and conservative justices, with Anthony Kennedy potentially the decisive vote in determining whether the administration must abandon its refusal to treat carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as air pollutants that imperil public health.

The friggin US Supreme Court is now being asked what they think of global warming…WTF, people?!?

Regardless of what one thinks of the issue (I personally think it’s a FACT that humans affect the environment, the only question is how much), this is so obviously beyond the point of the Supreme Court as to be comical.  Go look at the Constitution for once, 10th Amendment says anything not explicitly listed as a federal power is none of their business, the EPA wasn’t even created until 1970 and there was no constitutional amendment passed for it, so this is a question that they shouldn’t even be asked.  The state and local level, if they so choose, can implement their own ideas — why they don’t, hell if I know…

Environmentalists (the true ones, not the political opportunist types) being shunned while energy company execs get to write their own legislation should be enough proof that the founders knew what they were doing when the feds were so restricted at first.  You hand off power thinking that some central authority is going to work for you, and they end up working against you, I’d say you asked for it basically.

If this doesn’t give you a screwface trying to comprehend it, check your pulse…

The Optomist-in-Chief:

President Bush, rejecting what he called “pessimistic” assessments of his Middle East policy, pledged Tuesday to make necessary changes in Iraq but vowed never to pull out U.S. troops before completing the mission there.

Before flying to Latvia, Bush said in Estonia Tuesday morning that he would press Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for a plan to contain the country’s escalating sectarian violence, although he refused to characterize the situation in Iraq as a civil war. (emphasis mine)

If what’s going on in Iraq isn’t a civil war then that little skirmish that’s mentioned in american history books wasn’t a civil war.  The definition is when factions within a single nation-state fight each other, period.

Previewing the message he will carry with him Wednesday to Amman, Jordan, where he is scheduled to meet Maliki, Bush said he would ask the Iraqi leader, “What do we need to do to succeed? What is your strategy in dealing with the sectarian violence?”

The most likely strategy there, from what we hear about it, is actually quite simple:

1) U.S. Troops make an exit ASAP

2) One side or the other — more than likely the Shiites — wins, by whatever means they deem acceptable.

This is what’s going to happen, it’s only a matter of how soon we can get out of their way.  If they were ever interested in holding hands and singing kum-bay-ya they would’ve done so, anyone out there who for reason of mental defect cannot accept the moral arguement for withdrawal needs to at least understand the cold realist arguement: they’re going to do some increasingly nasty things to each other, would you rather they do it with us at home or with us standing around implicitly co-signing it?

Giving football a short break today to address somethin’…

Spotted the following comment from a statist-progressive on Kos:

[T]he human condition is an ongoing tension between the desires of the individual against the needs of society. And libertarianism in its purest form is so biased toward one side of this as to be igorant (yes, that’s the word I used) of the needs of society.

Whenever this rhetoric comes up, it begs a few questions:

• How do we define the needs of society?
• Who addresses the needs of society?
• Who decides who makes these decisions?
• How do we know that whoever makes these decisions genuinely cares about the needs of society?
• What do we do about it if they don’t?
• Even if whoever is in charge of making these decisions in the interest of society as a whole genuinely cares, suppose the solution they come up with for an issue is hugely unpopular?
• Suppose an issue w/ society comes up that simply cannot be addressed directly?

An answer is welcome from anyone willing to respond, but my point isn’t in the answers.  From my view, the questions are the answers, in that my response to appeals to society as being anything beyond a collection of individuals of equal standing is to ask how.

When you consider why I ask these questions, you’ll know why I reject the view that prompts them.

You know you ate a lot on thanksgiving when the next morning you’re still full…

Hell, most of that was stuff other people fixed, I haven’t even gotten to what we cooked yet.  Barring events that absolutely beg for my two cents, give it ’till monday.

-A cop points out how some of the details of these type of raids aren’t being mentioned.

-Shorter TalkLeft: “Gee, thanks Scalia!”

Also, some examples showing that radical times forge radical people…

As the story comes out, I have no reason to believe she thought she was doing anything but a “righteous shooting”. *I* certainly would have shot first, asked questions later if I were in her shoes. I guess it’s all the more reason to practice those headshots and crotch shots.
-Desert Cat

As for cops busting down your door in civilian clothes, Hell awaits them.
Should I start using a rifle for home defense? .308 Winchester will go through just about anything a person can wear.
-”LightningJoe”, poster on TheHighRoad.org

Look, if three burly dudes in street clothes start banging on my door one night and try and force their way into my home, I don’t care if they’re yelling “Police!” or “Singing Telegram!“, that’s why I keep a loaded M4 carbine in the house.
-Tamara, of Views From The Porch

Wait ’til a few more grandmas get ventilated. If someone started killing police officers right now, I could care less. Heat. Kitchen. They can can always get honest work instead.
-Tom Perkins, commenting on QandO

This is what the drug war & the militarization of domestic law enforcement is doing. For every Kathryn Johnston that is killed, for every Cory Maye who is branded a murderer for self-defense, a thought comes around to the rest of us that doesn’t bode well for either side of the equation: “Since the Constitution & legal vigilance aren’t restraining them, maybe force is all they understand”.

Overbearing authorities: you’ve been warned…

Yet more blood on the hands of Drug Warriors:

Three Atlanta narcotics officers were wounded in a Tuesday evening shootout with a 92-year-old woman in northwest Atlanta. She was shot and killed. This was supposed to be the routine serving of a search warrant, but things went very wrong, very fast.

Once the gunfire ended, three APD narcotics officers had been shot: one with a graze-wound to the face, and another hit dead-on, center of mass in the bulletproof vest. They were all transported to Grady Memorial Hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

A 92-year-old woman — Kathryn Johnston — lived in the home where the officers tried to execute the warrant. She was killed in the gun battle.

“The female victim shot and wounded all three of them (the officers),” said deputy police chief Allen Dreher. “The investigation is going to be ongoing — I’d say it would be all wrapped up in a period of time, but as we have it, she opened fire on the officers. The officers returned fire, struck and killed her.”

What they didn’t mention on the website that they DID mention on the local TV broadcast is that they busted down the womans door, and she had had bars on the windows. Sounds like she feared someone breaking in to me. Under those circumstances, no shit she fired first! She’s 92, living by herself, in a bad neighborhood, and someone smashes their way into her home, if I were her I’d start firing too. What’s she supposed to do, call out questions to whoever was there in the darkness, asking them to sit down in the living room and wait for her? “Would you young men like a cup of tea?”

For all she knew it was some gang punks willing to kill for valueables. Though, to be honest, what’s the difference? This was the biggest gang we know rearing its ugly head again, they were looking for something valueable (drugs), and they obviously were willing to kill otherwise this woman wouldn’t be dead.

Whether they had the wrong house, or someone used to live there that fled long before the cops caught up, the atrocity is obvious. End the Drug War, now.

***edit @ 1:11pm EST 112206***  Radley’s got more info.

Jim Henley has proof…

Me, back in January about Padilla:

A lot of people who feed off of the power of government ought to be praying that he’s convicted. Because if after all this “dirty bombs!” mess, & him, a U.S. citizen, being held in limbo for years at the behest of the president….mark my words, if the outcome of all this is that a jury finds him innocent, there will be havoc. This is simply too big to ignore, the implications from such would blow the doors open, watch.

Well we’re getting really close to that.  All emphasis mine:

A Republican-appointed federal judge in Miami has already dumped the most serious conspiracy count against Padilla, removing for now the possibility of a life sentence. The same judge has also disparaged the government’s case as “light on facts,” while defense lawyers have made detailed allegations that Padilla was illegally tortured, threatened and perhaps even drugged during his detention at a Navy brig in South Carolina.

The Justice Department denied the allegations of torture last week and is pursuing an appeal of the conspiracy ruling in hopes that the charge will be reinstated. Prosecutors on Thursday also took the unusual step of revealing that Abu Zubaida, an al-Qaeda lieutenant now imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a key source who led authorities to capture Padilla.

But some legal scholars and defense lawyers argue that the government’s case is so fundamentally weak, and its legal options so limited, that Padilla could draw a relatively minor prison term or even be acquitted. The trial has already been postponed once, until January, and is almost certain to be delayed again.

The difficulties have reignited a debate in legal circles over whether terrorism suspects such as Padilla can be effectively prosecuted in regular criminal courts, or whether the Bush administration blew its chances by relying on questionable interrogation methods that cannot be used to build a criminal case.

The Bush Administration assumed there wouldn’t have been so much as a peep about Padilla, despite him being a US citizen.  That apparently influenced their treatment of him, and now it’s possible whatever they did get on him is inadmissible in a real court.

We all know the standard: innocent until proven guilty.  If everything that would suggest guilt is tossed because the US government tortured him, a US citizen, then they have no choice but to acquit.  He’d serve as a living example of just what Bush thinks of the law.

Here’s what the gov’t has been reduced to as its defense:

Among other things, the defense alleges that Padilla was held for 1,307 days in a 9-by-7-foot cell, isolated for days or weeks at a time, physically assaulted and threatened with execution and other violence, kept awake with lights and noises, and forced to take mind-altering drugs, possibly PCP or LSD.

The government counters that Padilla offers no evidence to back up the allegations and that, besides, his treatment by the military is irrelevant to the criminal case against him.

“We didn’t do it, but even if we did who cares?”  Nice…

With the Democrats in control of congress, & some Republicans showing newfound skepticism, I don’t see how Bush escapes this without at least an attempt at impeachment.  The war was never a viable reason because many Democrats supported it, but far as I know this “enemy combatant” thing was all Bush.

Oh yeah, remember that loophole left open by the spinelessness of the Supreme Court?  The one where rather than rule on whether the Administration commited an offense in holding a US citizen without charges they called it “hypothetical”?

Robert M. Chesney, a specialist in national security law at Wake Forest University, said he thinks the government will be able to fend off many of the current challenges to its case, including Cooke’s decision to throw out the murder conspiracy charge.

But he and other legal scholars on both sides of the debate say that the government’s case could prove troublesome in front of a jury because of Padilla’s seemingly minor role in the alleged conspiracy. It also remains to be seen whether the administration might try to rename Padilla as an enemy combatant if its prosecution begins to fall apart.

They’re not going to get the chance.  If he walks from the court that citizens were supposed to have access to in the first place, no one in their right mind is going to go along with Bush if he tries to throw him back in the brig & play Calvinball with the Constitution.  If he’s seriously THAT nuts to attempt it, then you might as well prepare a rubber room for King George.