Unlike those individuals who will be tried by military tribunals, Shahzad can make no credible claim to being a soldier. He is a traitor, an attempted murderer, and a hapless terrorist whose fragile ego is clinging to a warrior narrative because it's the only way he knows to hold on to the last shred of dignity he has. With the sharp knock of a judge's gavel, that meager comfort was denied. That's exactly how it should be.
The question now becomes, why are Republicans so eager to give every suspected terrorist that very comfort?
Rudy Alfaro, aka 'Smurf', a member of the 'Mara 18' gang, remains at a court room in Guatemala City on June 22, 2010. The gang are accused of violating several women in the prison where they are kept for other crimes. By Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty Images.
Kristol writes that McChrystal probably has to go. Kori Schake wants him to stay:
McChrystal's comments are not particularly wide of the norm — this is what war-fighters sound like when they're talking to each other. It's not polite, and it certainly isn't politically correct, but these are people doing deadly work. They develop cynical attitudes about civilians and our often impractical ideas. They do not feel understood, much less appreciated, by the political wheelers and dealers in Washington, and politically-motivated attacks on McChrystal will aggravate that. Let us not forget George Orwell's caution that "we sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm." This is what rough men sound like, and we shouldn't want to wring that toughness out of them. They will not long remain a war-winning army if we do.
None of [Gibbs's remarks] sounds like a White House that’s ready to scrap its counterinsurgency strategy in the year to go before it begins to shift to a heavier focus on training Afghan forces and withdrawing troops. But McChrystal will have to reiterate his commitment tomorrow to working with the team that, in many ways, signed onto a strategy he himself largely convinced the president to support. “This is bigger than anybody on the military or the civilian side,” Gibbs said. Translation: McChrystal can go or stay, but the strategy has been set. And that may be the greatest irony of the entire McChrystal imbroglio.
"If this case is decided on the strength of the arguments, our side wins, hands-down, all the way up to the US Supreme Court. However, we know that on our issues, a win can be tenuous and the legal process can take years," Marc Solomon, marriage director for Equality California, one of the state's most prominent membership groups for gay rights, wrote over e-mail. "So we are working extremely hard right now to change hearts and minds in the direction of fairness and equality to gain solid majority support for the freedom to marry in preparation for a 2012 ballot campaign."
As a movie critic, I end up seeing most new releases and two of the biggest grossing films of the year, "How to Train Your Dragon" and "Toy Story 3," were not only family films, but also two of the year's best. They exceeded in quality and sophistication most of the movies aimed at adult audiences. (I'm just talking multiplex here. The art house continues to offer challenging films for adults.) "How to Train Your Dragon" was genuinely thrilling and the 3D animation was gorgeous. "Toy Story 3" was, in the tradition of Pixar, superb and had children laughing, while the adults cried. (If you haven't seen "Up," Pixar's big release from last summer, do so soon. It's one of the best movies of this century. My kids love it for the talking dogs, but some of its story of loss is too painful for me to watch repeatedly.)
Animated films are currently some of the most intelligent films being made for the multiplex.
Pixar has proven that quality – with the help of the monstrous marketing arm of Disney studios – can be successful. The animated film, though inherently more artificial, is providing us with more humane, challenging stories than we are seeing in live action. I keep expecting Pixar to challenge audiences too much– the movies "Up" and "Wall-E" spend a good portion of their running times as essentially silent movies–with stories of cranky widowers and robots helping humans overcome a world ravaged by overconsumption. But Pixar makes these films with such care, that they have gained the complete trust of the audience.
I celebrate, crave, quality films wherever I can find them. And right now some of the best movies are being made for families. It's a golden age for animation.
… I don’t care about Toy Story. That being said, it is high time the children of America learned about the gray-area vagaries and heartbreaking social complexities of the modern day drug trade and the political and legislative efforts being used to combat it in a format that is both relatable and appealing to them. Also, the show would be called Hamsterdam and feature animated hamsters. Obviously.
It's trite to say it, but the news business is biased toward, well, news. There are plenty of outlets that tell you what happened yesterday, but virtually no organizations that simply tell you what's going on. Keeping up on the news is easy, but getting a handle on an ongoing situation that you've not really been following is hard…
If I edited a major publication — or even a medium-sized one — I would begin each major legislative battle by detailing a few of my smartest, clearest writers to create a hyperlinked, fairly comprehensive, summary of the basic legislation. That summary would be kept updated throughout the process, and it would be linked in every single story written on the topic. As reader questions came in, and points of confusion arose, it would be expanded, so by the end, you'd have a document that was current, comprehensive, navigable and responsive to the questions people actually had about the legislation. Telling people what just happened is undeniably important, but given that most people aren't following that closely, we in the media need to do a better job of telling people what's been happening.
Classical Indian dancer Ananda Shankar Jayant shares:
At the minute I was diagnosed with cancer, I decided not to focus on the whole thing. The only way I could escape focusing on the cancer was to focus on something that animated me and moved me and touched me. And, I found that in my dance. Dance is really who I am. Dance is really my life’s breath, in that sense of the word. I — consciously, with a whole lot of visual and mental cues — pulled myself out of the thought processes that send you into that emotional whirlpool that cancer can push you into. It does that. There were times that I shed tears and times that I was miserable. But, because I had something else to focus on and something else to shift my mind to, I found that I was able to cut this whole thing out of my mindset. Your mind is really your final frontier. I was able to take my thoughts and push them into my dance. I made it so that the cancer was not a big deal. I would go and get my chemo, take the three days rest that my body needed, and then I was back in the studio dancing, teaching class or doing choreography.
Prayer and writing gets me through my HIV as well. You have to own the illness and then own an identity that is so much more than the illness. And tomorrow will be the 17th anniversary of the day I found out. I was griping about getting old the other day, and then I remembered it used to be an ambition of mine.
Friedersdorf enjoyed Matthew Continetti's article on the tea parties and Glenn Beck. He adds:
Mr. Continetti focuses on the political cost associated with this kind of rhetoric. I submit that it also exacts a cost in the world of ideas. Insofar as the conservative rank-and-file confronts an imagined cabal of leftists intent on destroying America from within, it'll remain utterly unequipped to argue with, persuade, or even intelligently oppose the actual liberals and progressives who compose the other half of the political spectrum. It's heartening to see more conservatives calling out Glenn Beck. In pushing back against this poisonous pathology, however, there is much more work to be done.
The Dish 