I admit, I took the day off from work and completely tuned out everything to give my brain a rest. I also felt that common sense would prevail in the Senate. After all, they’re far less prone to radical election posturing. A bill authorizing the President to detain people without trial or even charges would fit the definition of radical. It wouldn’t pass in the Senate.

Obviously, I was wrong. The bill passed 65-34. Our horrible Senator, Joseph Lieberman voted for the bill (Dodd voted Nay), along with 11 other Democrats. Despite his moralistic bombast on other issues, Senator Lieberman is apparently pro-torture and against the Bill of Rights.

To put a clear frame on the electoral posturing here, only one Republican, moderate Lincoln Chafee (R-RI), voted against the bill. The remaining 33 votes were Dems and Jeffords (I-VT).

It’s 3AM, and I don’t have the energy to write something deep and meaningful here. So, I’ll direct you to some other people who have done the job for me:

• Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings reacts.
• The NY Times details why this bill is an affront to everything America stands for.

• Glenn Greenwald points out some truly remarkable statements about this bill:

  Jay Rockefeller (who voted for this bill) is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. When he was defending the amendment he introduced to compel the CIA to disclose to the Senate and House Intelligence Committees information about their interrogation activities, he complained that the White House has concealed all information about the interrogation program and that the Intelligence Committee members (including him) therefore know nothing about it. His amendment to compel reports to Congress was defeated with all Republicans (except Chafee) voting against it. He proceeded to vote for the underlying bill anyway, thereby legalizing a program he admits he knows nothing about (and will continue to know nothing about).

  oversight? We don’t need no stinkin’ oversight… Apparently, Congressional oversight emboldens terrorists.

It would not be an overstatement that I’d like to scream into my monitor right now. I would, and it wouldn’t be an overreaction, except that Heidi is sleeping and it is, after all, 3:43AM.

Our Congress, with the help of both parties (goddamn pansy Democrats that didn’t filibuster this to hell), just sold out the most basic of American values. They just enabled the President to define his own laws, to imprison people indefinitely simply by calling them a name, and then prevented any check on this power by either Congress or the judiciary. All in order to boost their own standings in the 2006 election.

Stupid Democrats, for not realizing that people would’ve seen through the bullshit had they stood up from the beginning. Consistency would outweigh demagoguery and the 32 that voted against this bill should’ve been screaming about this from the beginning.

Stupid Republicans for being the craven, corrupt, and cavalier representatives they are. They don’t care about our country, they just care about winning. Orwell had a point:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others ; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. … We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

If that doesn’t describe the modern Republican party, I’m not sure what does.

Stupid us, for falling for this type of garbage during each election. They use fear to manipulate us, they use a war of choice (”preemption”) to promote the jingoist, and they treat us like idiots. As long as we keep voting for this nonsense, or keep putting inconsequential issues like abortion or marriage amendments above the welfare of our nation, we will suffer the consequences.

America changed on Thursday. So, now the question is, what are you doing to change it back? All we need is one house taken by the Democrats and we can start working our way back to an America that we are proud of.

The next Bond flick, Casino Royale, comes out November 17th. It looks like this movie will be close to the book which happens to be the the first Bond book Ian Fleming ever wrote. We’ll see how close to the books this movie is. Already from the trailer, I see that they’ve changed the casino game from Baccarat to Texas Hold ‘Em, but I guess you roll with the times (and the marketing tie ins?).

You can watch Olbermann’s reaction to Clinton’s Fox News appearance. Not mincing words anymore, is he?

I’ll leave it to you to explain why.

The original is on Newseek’s site, and I found this via this blog thanks to Atrios.

You can watch the Clinton interview I mentioned earlier on Think Progress. They have a video capture of nearly the entire thing.

I think it’s telling that Wallace can’t even look President Clinton in the eye when asking his smear question. Clinton is upset, but under control. It is about time someone did this to Fox, on Fox.

Glenn Grenwald highlights these four paragraphs from a NYT article covering the release of the new National Intelligence Estimate:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

I agree with Greenwald: This should get turned into a commercial and should be the only commercial run nationally by the DSCC and DCCC.

Hopefully, we’ll see some ads from Ned Lamont about this since Joe Lieberman doesn’t have a problem with how the war is being conducted.

Update: In case you’re not familiar with what NIE’s represent, here is Wikipedia’s entry and an entry from SourceWatch.

You know when Fox News starts hammering on something, it’s part of the national Republican strategy (must be nice to have a party propaganda network). Unsurprisingly, the new strategy is “Blame Clinton” (they’re not too original, these national Republicans). Chris Wallace gets into the act by securing an interview with Clinton under the guise of talking about The Clinton Global Initiative, then asking nearly immediately “Why didn’t you do more to put bin Laden and al-Qaeda out of business…”

Clinton apparently smacked him down, as he ought to. Reading any of the sources, such as Richard Clarke’s excellent book or the more administration friendly Plan of Attack and you’ll learn the same thing: the Clinton administration made mistakes, but they took the threat of terrorism very seriously. Not one person denies Clarke’s assertion that the message from Sandy Berger and Clarke to the incoming Bush administration was that terrorism would consume more administration resources than anything else.

If that isn’t enough, the foreign policy goals as outlined by President Bush in 2001 speak volumes. The single most important piece of the Bush foreign policy plan in 2001 was the missile defense program. We bucked the ABM treaty, the first of several international agreements we’ve decided to renege on during the Bush administration.

The point here isn’t that Clinton was some sort of terrorist fighting super-President, but simply that this new attempt to shift all blame to Clinton is simply a political move designed to help the Republican’s flagging chances this fall. As Clinton himself says in this interview (airing tomorrow):

But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try, they did not try. I tried. So I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clark [sic], who got demoted.

Update: As expected, the blogosphere is doing their research. Think Progress has more of the transcript than the USA Today piece I linked to earlier, including a section where Clinton reads like he’s pissed off. I’m not really sure I blame him.

I’ve been reading more on the Maher Arar story and I’m now upset. I’m amazed that our rendition and torture policies are still a matter of debate. This is a perfect example of how these policies can’t work.

What’s worse, though, is where these policies have taken us. Maher Arar was taken to Syria. The same Syria we consider to be a terrorist supporting state. The same Syria that supplied the rockets Hezbollah fired into Israel. We are working with them to torture people. We share intelligence with them. I seriously doubt they’re helping us for free. Makes you proud to have Bush as our president. I mean, where would our foreign policy be without those geniuses at the helm.

I also saw excerpts of Hugo Chavez’s speech at the UN today, and I’m watching CNN and Fox reacting in disgust that people applauded him. Why are they surprised? Rendition, torture, and unilateral wars enables the likes of Hugo Chavez or Ahmadinejad. People who feel bullied or powerless look to those that stand up to power. They don’t necessarily care whether they’re extremist in some ways. Dictators have done this on a national scale so often it’s almost cliche. The worst moments in history have been created by those excused because they gave strength where people found none before.

If we really believe that the United States stands for something more than just might, we need to step back and take another look at these policies. If we believe that we represent more than economic muscle, we need to behave like that. We need to stop acting like a scared animal, lashing out blindly simply because we can. We need to start acting like people who believe in the rule of law, who believe that our actions speak louder than our words, and who live up to the ideals written in our constitution.

Those that support the President’s policies choose to be scared animals, flexing their muscles and lashing out at anything that they can imagine as a threat. At the end of that road lies the weakening of American power. It raises the profile of folks like Chavez and exposes the weaknesses that are appearing in American soft power. I don’t care whether we choose to be multilateralists or realist, I just want us to stop being stupid.

I found this via our ever-popular TV Commercial Music thread. It's a cool little video for the song "Remind Me" by Royksopp. Believe it or not, it makes me miss working in a city. Definitely very repetitive, but there was a rhythm that I haven't figured out in suburban life.

Enjoy!

101 cookbooks

If you haven’t read up on the story of Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen mistakenly incarcerated and tortured by American proxies around the world, you should read up on this story. It’s horrible that this country, our country not only has tortured innocents but has done so without remorse and with full knowledge that the people we capture are innocent. There are bills now in Congress that would legalize this preemption of the Bill of Rights (which I hope will get struck down by the courts if they pass).

The debate around these topics remain surreal as we slowly alter the very fundamental parts of our country that used to be a source of pride. We now torture, openly acknowledge a network of secret prisons where innocents get taken to secretly without representation and without recourse to prove their innocence. I feel so powerless to stop these changes that I’m not sure what to do. It’s hard not to feel despair.

Anger is the only other emotional response, especially when I see ads like the inaccurate scare ad from CT Rep Nancy Johnson. There is no other word to describe her ad aside from “lie.” Chris Murphy and other Democrats simply want the President to obey the law, in this case FISA, which allows federal agencies to eavesdrop on communications for up to 72 hours before filing for a warrant. The scenario described in her mendacious commercial doesn’t change when the President follows the law.

But wait, she’s a Republican. They don’t need to tell the truth, they just need to scare their votes out of all of us. Hopefully, we’re tired of being scared.

So, I’m sitting in the library, and across the table from me, three students are studying Chinese.  Being the friendly fellow I am, I asked what got them into Chinese, and without hesitating they all responded simply, “Firefly”.

Makes you wonder, if CSI got people into Forensics, is it possible that more people are studying Chinese because of Firefly?

Another bleg, if you won’t mind. Kareem reminded me about a post I wanted to do about Fan Nation, a small startup here in CT founded by a few former colleagues. I’m curious what the non-ESPN’ers think of Fan Nation. Leave comments below, and thanks!