Month: February 2011

Peter Nelson goes through some old e-mails:

From 2001 to 2006, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote dozens of short memos to (and about) National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. They're succinct, and also, inordinately, hysterically disdainful. In fact, they might be the most important, passive-aggressive notes in recent American history, and now, they've gone public.

To celebrate the masterwork that is Rumsfeld's just-released memoir Known and Unknown we examine an overlooked corner of his tell-all treasure-trove of government: The man's profound gift for the passive-aggressive note aimed at Rice, his most common target of ire. We sorted through them, and pulled out the best. If you're going to be That Guy, the one who writes pathologically passive-aggressive notes, this is how you do it. And remember: These are all real. Or in Rummy's words: "Thanks."

Read them all here. Money quote:

"I think we better get some talking points on what Condi thinks she meant when she said we have made 'thousands of tactical errors.'"

The NYT eulogizes the end of an era:

Frank Buckles, who drove an Army ambulance in France in 1918 and came to symbolize a generation of embattled young Americans as the last of the World War I doughboys, died Sunday at his home in Charles Town, W. Va. He was 110.

(Photo by Alex Ogle/AFP/Getty Images)

The February employment report is due out this Friday. Calculated Risk has a primer. The big picture: 

• There are 7.7 million fewer payroll jobs now than before the recession started in December 2007.
• Almost 14 million Americans are unemployed.
• Of those unemployed, 6.2 million have been unemployed for six months or more.
• Another 8.4 million are working part time for economic reasons,
• About 4 million more have left the labor force since the start of the recession (we can see this in the dramatic drop in the labor force participation rate),
• of those who have left the labor force, about 1 million are available for work, but are discouraged and have given up. 

Babak Dehghanpisheh tours a Libyan prison that has since been torched by Libyan protesters:

Abdul Salam Barghati locks his wrists and ankles around an iron bar with his body dangling just a few inches off the ground. "This was called the ‘Hyundai,'" he says, describing a torture position that Libyan interior ministry forces used at a notorious prison in Benghazi. "They beat us with sticks while we were hanging for hours."

Chait doesn't think that the Koch brothers care about it too much:

[T]he Kochs will happily put their money behind candidates who agree with their economic agenda but disagree with their social agenda. They will never put their money behind candidates of whom the reverse is true.

Balko protests that the Kochs gave money to fight the Patriot Act. Serwer points to the Russ Feingold race as a good test of Chait's theory and concludes that Chait is mostly correct.

When canes just won't do:

(Hat tip: TDW Geek)

“If it’s a dope case, I won’t even read the petition. I ain’t giving no break to no dope dealer,” – Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

As long as they're posted by students exercising free speech:

The ACLU of Virginia has come to the defense of a group of Christian athletes in Floyd County. In an e-mail sent Friday afternoon, the civil liberties group said it had e-mailed the principal of Floyd Co. High School (FHS), and urged him to allow students to post their personal views, including copies of the Ten Commandments, on the lockers.

"Schools have the authority to ban all displays on school property," said ACLU of Virginia Executive Director Kent Willis, in a news release. "But if a school allows students to post some kinds of personal messages on their lockers, it must also allow other kinds of messages, including those that have religious content The removal of the Ten Commandments from student lockers at Floyd County High School appears to violate the First Amendment rights of students by discriminating against religious expression," added Willis in the release.

Yet another sign that the right's antipathy toward the organization is misplaced.

David Link understands Newt's game:

Gingrich is trying to morph Obama into San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom.  Newsom, in fact, is the lawless politician Gingrich wishes Obama were, who not only refused to enforce California’s anti-gay marriage prohibition, he ostentatiously allowed people in his city to openly violate it.  This was a politically savvy and profitable move for him (he is now California’s Lieutenant Governor) but it was an unapologetic violation of his legal duties, something the California Supreme Court made abundantly clear.

Obama is not Newsom.  Newsom took what he believed to be a moral position, akin to civil disobedience.  That is fine for individual citizens, but it is a bit more precarious for someone whose job is to administer the law.

Obama has either learned from Newsom’s escapade, or is relying on a different political instinct.

In a piece subtitled, "The Islamic agenda is not coexistence, but dominion," Andy McCarthy again raises the spectre of a global caliphate governed by sharia law, writes as if all Muslims are coherently lumped into a single caliphate-seeking entity, and does everything short of explicitly calling for a war on Islam to thwart them. Various commenters at NRO capably flagged the flaws in his piece. Hal Morris:

Mr. McCarthy's sweeping generalities apply to only some parts of the Muslim world, and the more we address the Muslim world as if they are all the enemy of the west, the more they will be driven to unite and really be at total war with the rest.

And here's Quayle:

One and a half billion Muslims in the world and Andrew McCarthy knows what every last one of them is thinking, and it ain’t good. So he indicts not just the bad actors merely claiming Muslim legitimacy, but he indicts the entire Muslim religion as well – the religion cherished by over a billion peaceful children of our mutual Father in Heaven. And this is pure hypocrisy from McCarthy, and regrettably mirrors the same hypocrisy on this point of much of western (predominantly, American) Christianity. We western Christians spent the better part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries killing each other by the millions in inter-Christian war after war. Yet we easily brush that aside as underived from and unrelated to our Christian religion because we claim such wars weren’t “religious wars.”

…we hypocritically don't allow modern Muslims that same privilege even when their bad actors have killed only in the thousands. We don’t allow Muslims to use the same argument that we use, which is that the violent among them are the heretics of the religion, and not exemplars of the religion. Rather, at the first sign of an advocate of violence we readily paint Muslims and their religion with one, huge, broad brush, during and after which we wax self-congratulatory about our noble Christian heritage, bloody though it clearly was.