Month: November 2010

Weigel's advice:

Just as we knew that Obama was going to win when the networks couldn't call Indiana — in an instant it was clear the "Bradley effect" was a myth — and just as we knew that the Democrats were winning the House when Democrat John Yarmuth started winning in Kentucky's 3rd district, we will know a lot after 7 this year. If Yarmuth is struggling, against a Tea Party candidate who beat the NRCC's choice, Democrats are basically doomed — they are losing in an urbanized district which has been steadily trending toward them.

Another gruesome day as alienated Sunni/al Qaeda terrorists (or mere nihilists) killed more than 70 people in 15 coordinated blasts, injuring up to 300. The attempt to reignite sectarian war is real:

Tonight’s bombs all detonated within 90 minutes of each other. Hospitals were appealing for blood donors, and the city’s main A&E centres were reporting large numbers of casualties amid chaotic scenes.

The bombs exploded in 12 areas of the city, including a police station in Sadr City and a coffee shop in New Baghdad. Restaurants appeared to be prominent targets in other attacks, along with main roads and, in one case, a funeral tent.

The scale of the attacks and the ease with which car bombs were, yet again, able to penetrate security cordons constitute a damaging blow for Iraq‘s security forces, which have remained without effective leadership for eight months owing to the crippling political crisis that has seen politicians unable to form a government.

The NYT says the targets were varied:

The bombings tore across lines of sect and class, striking poor Shiite neighborhoods, a Sunni mosque, a crowded restaurant in the north of the city and middle-class shopping areas. “I tried to escape, but there was chaos,” said Mustafa Mohammed Saleh, a dentist who was leaving his office in the Shiite enclave of Bayaa when he saw four explosions that scattered bodies into the street. “You see what happens: The most secure part of Baghdad, they hit.” “Tension,” he added, “is in the air.”

McSweeneys has the transcript. Money quote:

I do not understand this world as being capable of containing anything called Washington, DC. I believe Washington, DC to be one giant hologram. Washington, DC, like my gay son, is dead to me.

Radley Balko thinks so:

It's telling that the loudest voices opposing pot legalization are coming from the mainstream media, politicians, and law enforcement. The three have a lot in common.

Indeed, the Prop. 19 split illustrates how conservative critics of the mainstream media have it all wrong. The media—or at least the editorial boards at the country's major newspapers—don't suffer from liberal bias; they suffer from statism. While conservatives emphasize order and property, liberals emphasize equality, and libertarians emphasize individual rights, newspaper editorial boards are biased toward power and authority, automatically turning to politicians for solutions to every perceived problem.

 

Mark Blumenthal projects a 48 seat gain for Republicans in the House. On the Senate:

The 86% probability we are reporting (as of this hour) on the Election Dashboard of Democrats maintaining their majority [in the Senate] assumes that each state's result is statistically independent. However, if the polling has a national bias – a subject discussed here in more detail this morning — the chances of a single party sweep of the close races is likely much greater. So while Democrats are likely to retain control, the potential for a Republican Senate majority remains very real.

Ambers gets some cold water at the ready:

If anything the early boiler room data makes the Democrats quite nervous.

It's O'Donnell by a mile. Weigel sighs:

So of the top three most-covered candidates, two (O'Donnell, Paladino) never really were given a chance to win, and three (Whitman, Crist, Lincoln), are widely expected to lose today. The problem, perhaps, is focusing on elections like the way American Idol producers focus on which schmucks they'll use from the audition footage.

The jurors wanted a child soldier sentenced for forty years, despite a plea bargain for eight (my bet is he'll be out of Canadian jail in two). I find it hard to disagree with this assessment of a farce of a trial after a tragedy of an imprisonment:

The trial of Omar Khadr has been called a travesty of justice, a violation of the rule of law, a kangaroo court and lots of other things beside. But what it really was, was a show trial.

On the main charge, "murder in violation of the laws of war" (a crime that doesn't appear to even exist in international law, given that combatants who kill other soldiers in combat are not violating the laws of war), the chief evidence against the then-15-year-old child soldier was his own confession. And that confession, made years ago and long since recanted, was obtained under conditions that any normal human being would describe as torture…

And so the Bush administration project of ridding the world of terrorism by means of torture comes full circle. The U.S. military and CIA, ordered to use force to extract information from detainees, something that violated not just U.S. military tradition but U.S. military law, had to come up with new interrogation techniques, and quickly. They turned to history, including copying communist coercion-based interrogation models, such as those that captured American troops had been subjected to during the Korean War.

The original communist torture techniques, which for a time inspired the standard operating procedures at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo and the secret black sites, were not designed to elicit truth. They were designed to produce false confessions: That was the whole point. They were designed to force people to say what interrogators wanted to hear — yes, I am a capitalist stooge, yes I am a Trostkyite, yes I am a terrorist. And now Guantanamo's very first military tribunal has its first guilty verdict, thanks to those methods of coercion first perfected for the Soviet Bloc show trial.

My God, what have we done?

Justin Elliott isn't as forgiving as I was:

[W]hile [Bill Maher] likes to present himself as an equal opportunity religion-basher (see his movie "Religulous"), has long singled out Muslims (and, for that matter, Arabs).

If Maher looked at the full list of popular baby boy names in Britain for 2009, he'd find an overwhelmingly Judeo-Christian group:  Joshua, straight from the Hebrew Bible, is the 5th most popular. No. 6 is Thomas, after the apostle. The most popular after Mohammed is Jack, from John — again, one of the apostles. No. 9 is James, from Jacob. No. 10 is Daniel.

(For the record, Muslims currently make up just 4.6 percent of the population of the U.K.)