Sportsman’s Club Testicle Festival
ArchPundit
There are actually several testicle festivals including one in Nebraska, but the entire name sort of adds to the thought process in this case.
The drag queen contest adds another new dimension too.
June 2005
B-1 Bob is Considering a Comeback
In California he may run for Chris Cox’s seat. No word on where to send donations targeted for the let’s make blogging really easy fund to elect B-1 Bob.
Salvi Urged to Run to Bolster the Right Wing of the Republican Party
Interestingly, Akin himself is facing a primary challenge by an African-American Republican from St. Charles, Sherman Parker.
Spokesmen for Pence and Akin confirmed that their bosses had spoken with Salvi in the past few months but said those conversations did not amount to endorsements.
Pence spokesman Matt Lloyd indicated that Pence is trying to bolster his party?s right wing. ?I think certainly, as RSC chairman, Congressman Pence wants to see more conservative members in the Congress. So things like the House Conservatives Fund are set up to help move toward that end.?
The fund was formerly called the Conservative Action Team PAC, or CAT PAC, and was run by Rep. John Doolittle (R-Calif.), Lloyd said.
A Republican source close to the Republican Study Committee suggested the Salvi phone conversations with Pence, Akin and other members were organized by the RSC.
In recent months, the group of 100-plus conservatives ? which Pence has called ?the majority of the majority? ? has confronted House GOP leaders over the budget and sought to play a more prominent role in shaping the Republican agenda.
Apparently that whole 50% +1 vote stategery is all wrong for winning elections. heh.
Mike Madigan Was Arrogant. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you.
In the category of like he gives a rat’s ass:
This will be interesting only to IL pols:
IL Speaker of the House Michael Madigan was subpoenaed June 17 to give a deposition on what part he played, if any (ha), to stop the Illinois Choose Life license plate legislation last year.
(Side note: Workers at Madigan’s law office told the process server he wasn’t in. But she smelled a rat and barged into his inner sanctum where – voila! – she spotted him and served him. She said he was unpleasant. Actually, she said he was “arrogant.”)
Madigan’s daughter, AG Lisa, is fighting the subpoena.
Another legislator who shall remain nameless for the moment is presently dodging and weaving the server.
“arrogant”
Few things are more annoying than leaving it at this. My guess is the server got in the room, Madigan looked up annoyed (pretty much the same face he always uses with the press), was served, stared at the person and looked back down as the server tried to make uncomfortable discussion about being successful. But instead we don’t get the funny details. We get a cheerleading post about the most dreadfully irrelevant issue to ever hit Illinois politics since Chris Lauzen debated whether he really was a CPA or not.
Via Capitol Fax
Nukem Harvey
And the rest of the story…
Austin Mayor picked it up and Zorn gets the full text:
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill said that the American people?he said, the American people, he said, and this is a direct quote, ?We didn?t come this far because we are made of sugar candy.?
That was his response to the attack on Pearl Harbor. That we didn?t come this far because we are made of sugar candy.
And that reminder was taken seriously. And we proceeded to develop and deliver the bomb, even though roughly 150,000 men, women and children perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With a single blow, World War II was over.
Following New York, Sept. 11, Winston Churchill was not here to remind us that we didn?t come this far because we?re made of sugar candy.
So, following the New York disaster, we mustered our humanity.
We gave old pals a pass, even though men and money from Saudi Arabia were largely responsible for the devastation of New York and Pennsylvania and our Pentagon.
We called Saudi Arabians our partners against terrorism and we sent men with rifles into Afghanistan and Iraq, and we kept our best weapons in our silos.
Even now we?re standing there dying, daring to do nothing decisive, because we?ve declared ourselves to be better than our terrorist enemies — more moral, more civilized.
Our image is at stake, we insist.
But we didn?t come this far because we?re made of sugar candy.
Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and into this continent by giving small pox infected blankets to native Americans.
Yes, that was biological warfare!
And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on to grab this land from whomever. And we grew prosperous.And, yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves.
And so it goes with most nation states, which, feeling guilty about their savage pasts, eventually civilize themselves out of business and wind up invaded, and ultimately dominated by the lean, hungry and up and coming who are not made of sugar candy.
Biological weapons–the ROAD TO PROSPERITY!
And that, folks, should be the end of the rest of the story.
Down Sick, but back
Don’t ask–never should have left Colorado. I think my body was protecting me from the first Red Air Quality Day here in St. Louis by making my stomach revolt against food for 36 hours.
Today, it’s 98 degrees of soupy air that I would swim in, but there’s no where to get a breath.
On that note, the must read is Zorn’s column
“I’m surprised. Though Mayor Daley can’t even pronounce Guantanamo–he says it `Gwa-ta-mahn-o.’ And even though he blithely presided over the Cook County state’s attorney’s office during the biggest police-torture scandal in Chicago’s history. And even though he mistily invoked `what America’s all about’ at the news conference in which he announced a `presumed guilty’ program of posting photos on the Internet of people arrested but not yet convicted in prostitution stings.
Coming at this as someone who thinks the analogy was unproductive and wrong, but not in the hyper whining of screaming the TROOPS, this was the greatest irony to me–Daley, who was Cook County State’s Attorney during the Burge torture ring’s days of operations and had plenty of warnings about it, never did a thing and to this day is strangely silent about it. While Dick Devine might be called on it as well, Devine has a very delicate situation since he worked for the law firm defending Burge and has recused himself from the case. But Devine didn’t say that Durbin was out of line and essentially lay a line of defense for the White House from probing such claims with seriousness. Daley not only attacked Durbin for something Durbin didn’t say, he essentially said such questions about the treatment of prisoners was beyond the pale.
What makes that so disturbing is that Daley didn’t stop at criticizing Durbin–obviously I did that though mildly. What he did was say that we should never say that US Soldiers might do something horrific. While it is reasonable to say that our military is one of the better disciplined and humane militaries to probably ever fight, we know individuals within the military also have done horrible things.
Worse, Durbin didn’t implicate troops–he implicated the administration. Many have tried to spin that as being about troops, but while it might involve US active military personnel, it might just as well be private contractors, CIA, or military intelligence that isn’t a typical GI. We know from Abu Ghraib that much of the prison operations were outside of the control of the typical chain of command and shadowy people showed up for interrogations with the typical command structure both overstretched and out of the loop on key decisions.
We also know that we’ve outsourced torture through extraordinary rendition that takes individuals from our custody to the custody of nations that will torture individuals without any rules to worry about. My second criticism of Durbin is that by choosing a bad analogy he sidetracked the conversation.
A Quick Question
Why isn’t there a strategic plan and fundraising document at the Democratic Commitment Conference ?
The report Locked Out has some good points and such, but misses some critical points. And the above question points out the issue. When someone tells me they want money to win a bunch of Congressional seats, I want to know how else they are going to raise money and how they plan to spend it.
If you tell me that the 9 candidates didn’t fundraise well, and one of them wants to correct the problem by distributing cash to a wider array of candidates, from where is that cash coming?
Daley Wankery
On Tuesday, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley– a fellow Democrat– added his voice to the chorus of criticism, saying, “I think it’s a disgrace to say that any man or woman in the military would act like that.”
Yeah, like it was a disgrace when anyone said that about a certain Police Commander?
Of course, Durbin didn’t say it was the fault of the military, he said it was the fault of the administration. Then again, one might see why the Mayor wouldn’t like that reasoning either.
The Better Editorials
Most From TalkLeft:
Yet just as America does not benefit from the reduction of political debate to partisan name-calling, it also does not benefit from the stifling of debate. The real message of Durbin’s statement – that we must investigate and stop inhumane treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and other military prisons – is one we can’t afford to ignore.
Had Durbin not invoked the Nazis, Stalin and Pol Pot, it very well may have been.
The centerpiece of Durbin’s statement was criticism of President Bush and his top advisers for declaring that the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply to individuals taken into custody by the United States if American officials designate them as terrorists. The senator said the result has been mistreatment of prisoners, even torture, at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq
In fact, the government shipped these prisoners off to Guantanamo Bay believing that since the naval base is on Cuban soil, our government could claim that the laws of the United States do not apply.
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected that argument.
Compared to government prison camps in other countries and the brutality of terrorists themselves, some of the tactics applied at Guantanamo Bay may not seem extreme.
Nevertheless, I hope Americans are shocked.
Republican and Democratic senators have expressed revulsion and asked the Bush administration to close the camp.
This country must not wait for the day to come when the U.S. applies torture tactics that are truly worthy of comparisons to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
During World War II, when Japan murdered American POWs and the Germans mistreated prisoners, Americans continued to treat captured enemy soldiers with respect and dignity.
The United States proudly stood by the Geneva Convention, which our government now tries to ignore.
Near the end of his speech, Durbin quoted from a Supreme Court ruling that claimed President Lincoln did not have the right to suspend habeas corpus during the Civil War.
“The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances …”
If we fight terrorism by behaving like terrorists, we will lose this war … and risk our country’s soul.
Now, war is not pretty. Some of the above may be defensible. But it is debatable. Mistreating people, some possibly innocent, in a harsh prison forever is not an Illinois value.
Nor is it an Illinois value to take a person who might possess some intelligence of possible value, stake them out naked on the ground, turn up an air-conditioner until they?re shaking with cold, play ear-splitting music, and watch them defecate and urinate on themselves. That, in fact, was the conduct Mr. Durbin was protesting.
Andy McKenna, the chairman of the Illinois Republican Party, released a statement calling Mr. Durbin ?mean-spirited? and demanding that he ?defend those Illinoisans who are, or have, sacrificed in the nation?s service.?
He did, Andy. He did by arguing that America doesn?t torture people, whatever some leaders may want. And besides, with former Gov. George Ryan?s trial coming up, don?t you have better things to do than issuing misleading statements to please the White House?
What he did was read an FBI account about a Guantanamo Bay prisoner chained to the floor, in a fetal position, subjected to extreme heat and cold, and without food or water. Durbin said Americans who read that report would never think the reference was to an American-run prison, but that “this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime – Pol Pot or others – that had no concern for human beings.” The line came toward the end of a long speech which argued that whether the prison at the Cuban base should be kept open or closed is the wrong issue.
The treatment of prisoners is the right issue, and so is how long we will keep those we have taken in a war on terrorism that is unlikely to end in our lifetimes, if ever. Unfortunately, Durbin’s rhetorical gluttony has diminished our efforts to grapple with these issues in a way that will both protect the United States and honor a long history which holds Americans to a higher standard. At a minimum, the senator should have said that the vast majority of those Americans assigned to our prison camps treat their charges in a manner that honors our history.
One should invoke the names of Hitler and Pol Pot, or Stalin and Mao, sparingly, first because it diminishes the brutality of regimes that together are believed to have killed 100 million civilians. And secondly because it is harder to hear the rest of the message when one misuses the names of tyrants.
To the human being Durbin described laying on a Guantanamo prison concrete floor, chained in excrement, alternating between stifling heat or chilling cold, it’s torture plain and simple.
Extreme and sometimes cruel measures can be necessary to extract specific information from enemy combatants. What rightfully aggravates Durbin is that this torture of prisoners in U.S. custody doesn’t seem to meet any kind of end. The cruelty in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib seems a random result of a breakdown of discipline and procedure. It obviously isn’t leading to great gains in the war on terror.
You want reason for American outrage? How about this: The death rate of U.S. soldiers in Iraq is escalating. Six more soldiers died in Iraq Friday. And there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And Osama bin Laden remains at large.
Who Let the Tools Loose
Normally a fan of the Trib Editorial Page, this one got me
We know what Durbin thinks about the treatment of Guantanamo prisoners. So what’s the proper treatment of our coverage-hungry senior senator when he displaces the ever-present microphone long enough to insert his foot in his mouth? Ignore him. That would be torture.
Nice and pithy and utterly obnoxious given the subject. Saying he screwed up is fine, that is what editorial boards do. However, distracting from a serious issue in which Durbin simply made a bad analogy is far worse of a stunt than anything Durbin said. This isn’t a typical media hound just trying to get attention–it’s a serious story and one that the news hasn’t covered very well. To it’s credit the Trib did mention it in an editorial, brought about by another report that they crticized.
Perhaps if the Trib and other news organizations were doing a better job keeping the issue in front of the public, we wouldn’t have to wait for someone to say something over the top to get the subject attention.
Making matters worse, Americablog points out the Ed Board left out important details about the description of events.
Trib Board:
He read an account by an unnamed FBI agent of the alleged treatment of a prisoner who was “chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water.” The prisoner, the agent said, had been subject to extremely hot and cold temperatures, and loud rap music.
Full Text of the description by Durbin:
On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold….On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.
Of course, Kass makes even a pithier comment out of it, but Kass didn’t seem to read the actual speech either. On part stuck out to me:
Former Congressman Pete Peterson of Florida, a man I call a good friend and a man I served with in the House of Representatives, is a unique individual. He is one of the most cheerful people you would ever want to meet. You would never know, when you meet him, he was an Air Force pilot taken prisoner of war in Vietnam and spent 6 1/2 years in a Vietnamese prison. Here is what he said about this issue in a letter that he sent to me. Pete Peterson wrote:
From my 6 1/2 years of captivity in Vietnam, I know what life in a foreign prison is like. To a large degree, I credit the Geneva Conventions for my survival….This is one reason the United States has led the world in upholding treaties governing the status and care of enemy prisoners: because these standards also protect us….We need absolute clarity that America will continue to set the gold standard in the treatment of prisoners in wartime.
So a guy who went through it thinks differently.
Blogs are supposed to be the ones doing silly pithy posts about politicians, I’d hope the larger media would have the sense to know when it’s inappropriate.