Emily Dickinson presages Paris Hilton:
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there ’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
An animated stick figure fights with an animator trying to torture him. And he can use the brush tool and the eraser tool. Cool:
A reader writes:
Yes yes yes. I haven’t been to NYC for almost 20 years and would love to go again, but after our recent horrendous experiences flying via to Mexico via Houston my wife has vowed not to travel to or through the US until there are signs of things changing. That’s $600 at least of tourists’ money lost to the US economy for a start.
Another writes:
My partner and I got a taste of this flying back to the US from Johannesburg, South African to JFK. During the 1 hour refueling break in Dakar, everyone had to take all belongs out of the overheads and hold them in our lap while the plane was inspected ("In order to prepare to enter US Airspace").. as if passengers spent the last 8 hours of the trip assembling bombs and putting them in the overheads for safe keeping.
Then upon arrival, my partner and I went up to passport control (The US citizen line) and were yelled at as we were not family so we were not to come up together (not an issue in the 3 countries visited on our trip..nor any other country we have visited and we have traveled extensively around the world). I know this does not compare with non-residents but we both felt anything but a nice welcome back to our own country.
Gay couples can expect abuse from US immigration authorities if they start acting as if they are a family in any way. In the end this takes a toll.
Glenn Reynolds vs a real libertarian on torture.
"Apology: Augustus Caesar. In our review last week of Lucien Polastron’s book on libraries we said that Augustus had destroyed the Alexandrian library in 48BC. Since the lad, then called Octavian, was only 15 at the time, he obviously didn’t. And Julius Caesar, who did, hadn’t actually meant to. We apologise to Mr Polastron, the many well-educated readers who have complained, and to Augustus, now divine," – the Economist this week, print edition.
A reader writes:
One further point to your post on Mukasey: when we make laws against certain things – let’s take the example of murder – we recognize that there may be certain circumstances where murder may be justified. We handle this in 2 ways:
* We write special-case exceptions into the law, e.g. self defense.
* We conduct trials where the guilt and punishment are determined by a jury of peers, who can refuse to convict if their collective conscience tells them that the crime was justified.But more importantly, we create serious legal consequences for murder because we don’t want anyone to commit murder unless they’re willing to accept the consequences. This sets a ‘threshold of seriousness’ so that when a person considers murder, they must determine whether their justification is dire enough that they are willing to put their own liberty at stake. This sounds like a great standard for the president to have to meet when considering torture of an individual, doesn’t it?
Yes. And, moreover, to turn a one-in-a-million emergency exception into the rule, and to pretend that we need to know any more specific details to know that waterboarding is both torture and plainly illegal is to turn the rule of law on its head. The notion that you have to explicitly make waterboarding illegal – or even more absurdly that if the Congress hasn’t done so, it has essentially accepted the legality of waterboarding – is a little like saying that the law against murder doesn’t apply to someone who suffocated someone with a pillow, because that particular method hasn’t been specifically outlawed.
Murder is murder. Torture is torture. The latter is the application of any "severe mental or physical pain or suffering" to force an individual to say what he otherwise might not say in captivity. The point is the coercion – however it is applied. It is illegal and unconstitutional – and that applies not just to waterboarding but to any such tactic that has that effect. To give the president the power to order this against the law as a routine matter and to declare that s/he has that power permanently and with respect to anyone is tyranny.
The last time I checked, conservatism is not a defense of tyranny. It is a defense of the Anglo-American tradition of freedom that this president and the current GOP have been abusing for six years. Conservatism must now mean resisting this president’s abuse of power, not enabling it.
I’m just grateful the real Hillary Clinton is now up for discussion:
Dodd’s new ad is also pretty toxic to the Clinton machine.
It was something of a breakthrough for me to watch Jon Stewart last night pick up a dictionary and look up the definition of torture – both etymological, but more importantly legal. Pace the pro-torture Andy McCarthy, there is no "excruciating complexity" here. There is a broad and easily understandable legal ban on the infliction of
severe mental or physical pain or suffering
on any prisoner in wartime as a means to extract "information." Yes, to thrash a horse in advanced stages of rigor mortis, as a philosophical matter, this might, in a million-to-one scenario, still allow a president to authorize illegal torture if the entire republic was at stake or if a major city was about to go down in nuclear flames, and we knew we had an individual who knew how to stop it. But the president would still subsequently have to subject himself and all those who did such a thing to legal punishment. That is what the rule of law means, guys. It means there is no exception. We either live in a republic of laws or the imperium of one man. We cannot live simultaneously under both. The oath of the president is to enforce such laws, not to avoid them. And that is why it is insane to say we have no right to demand that the attorney-general nominee assure us in advance that he will uphold the rule of law in office. We do not merely have the right. We have a duty to ensure that an attorney general of the United States will uphold the law.
There is no question whatsoever that "simulated drowning," "water-boarding" or whatever name we give to a technique routinely deployed by the Khmer Rouge is illegal however it is done, whoever does it, and whomever is subjected to it. If the attorney general cannot say this in public without equivocation before he is nominated, then the Congress is indicating that it condones the Bush administration’s contempt for the rule of law and routine use of illegal torture. I cannot see how Republicans who impeached a president for perjury in a civil suit cannot see what the issue is here. It is the most bedrock principle of a free society. Do the laws apply to the highest executive authority? Do we live in a tyranny or a republic?
Alas, the president almost certainly will never be prosecuted for the war crimes he has committed. He has already seen to that and so, shamefully, has the Congress by passing a law that retroactively granted him immunity. Surely that is bad enough. To compound that by allowing an attorney general to take office by refusing to say whether he will uphold the law in the face of the Cheney-style Protector-Presidency is inexcusable. This is history in the making. Who will defend the rule of law?
A pitch-perfect take. This race is shifting a little, isn’t it?
Berkeley, California, 9 am.
