The Dish

"I don’t look at all the signs that come up that I get pictures taken with … so I don’t have anything particular to say about a sign someone else is holding. … Lighten up slightly. Lighten up… I’m not responsible for all the signs I’m handed," – Mitt Romney, who was photographed with a supporter holding a sign saying: "NO TO OSAMA OBAMA AND CHELSEA’S MOMA."

A reader writes:

William Kristol’s latest editorial was the last straw for me.  Until now I’ve been willing to sit on the sideline and listen to both sides of an argument that continues to snowball in the direction of people who agree that our Iraq policy has done more harm than good to the interests of the US and Iraq. I’m an ex-Marine  who initially supported our efforts to overthrow a dangerous, rogue regime that I believed, based on the cherry-picked intelligence presented, was a clear and present danger to the United States.  Regardless of the justification, I now believe that this administration’s arrogant, amateurish, ham-handed post-war occupation ruined our best chance for success (which was approximately five years ago) and that we are merely postponing the inevitable as we continue to make the United States a more desirable target for Islamic terrorists everywhere, not to mention the monstrous carnage we have and will continue to visit upon a majority of Iraqis.

With desperation on full display, Kristol’s latest and most pointed accusation that anyone with a reasoned objection to that policy is a cut and run coward who is backstabbing our troops finally sent me over the edge. I love my country and am under no illusion that the freedoms it provides me are cost-free but if either of my children told me they wanted to enter the military now I would literally beg them not to do it … that’s how little I trust this administration.   

I’d take this opportunity to point out the cowardice it takes for a serial supporter of this administration’s failed strategies to hide behind the sacrifices of our soldiers while using it as an argument for more of the same (let’s "surge" the troops while we piss on the findings of the Iraqi Study Group), and even though his latest rantings will probably do his cause more harm than good I still won’t stand by and allow myself to be insulted for expecting as much of my country’s leadership as they expect of those they lead.  I’m sure you hear this general sentiment, much more eloquently stated, a hundred times a day but I still want to add my voice to growing tide that will hopefully wash away the disgrace that this adminstration and its current batch of shameless supporters have brought on this country.

A US soldier secures the site where a car bomb exploded in central Baghdad’s Karrada neighborhood, 23 July 2007. An explosives-laden car, parked on a road in Karrada, exploded at around 11:00 am, security officials said. A few minutes later another car bomb went off in the same area targeting a passing police patrol, they said. At least seven people, including three policemen, were killed in both the attacks, security officials and a medic at the capital’s Ibn Nafis hospital said. By Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty.

An eye-popping chart.

The fact that there are indeed many vicious terrorists in Guantanamo Bay does not mean it is a fair, humane or effective instrument of a fair, humane or effective policy. About one fifth of the inmates were actually captured by US forces. The evidence for the rest is often extremely sketchy. It’s hard to convey this until you hear the specifics. Here are some:

In a hearing on Oct. 26, 2004, a transcript shows, one detainee was told that another had identified him as having attended a terrorism training camp.

The detainee asked that his accuser be brought to testify. “We don’t know his name,” the senior officer on the hearing panel said.

At another hearing, later reviewed by a federal judge, a Turkish detainee, Murat Kurnaz, was said to have been associated with an Islamic missionary group. He had also traveled with a man who had become a suicide bomber.

“It would appear,” Judge Joyce Hens Green wrote in 2005, “that the government is indefinitely holding the detainee — possibly for life — solely because of his contacts with individuals or organizations tied to terrorism and not because of any terrorist activities that the detainee aided, abetted or undertook himself.”

In a third hearing, an Afghan detainee said he had indeed been a jihadist — during the 1980s war against the Soviet Union, when a lot of Afghans were jihadists. Was that what the accusation against him meant, he asked, or was it referring to later, during the American war?

Again, a very traditional, conservative and careful patriot has risen to the occasion to illuminate these abuses and to try to correct them. And that man, reservist Colonel Stephen Abraham, had a role in getting the Supreme Court to review its own previous decision. America does indeed require the virtue of its most loyal citizens to survive as a constitutional republic. Thank God some still exist.

My column on Oprah and Obama is here.

"With the ongoing progress of the surge, and the obvious fact that the vast majority of the troops want to fight and win the war, the "support-the-troops-but-oppose-what-they’re-doing" position has become increasingly untenable. How can you say with a straight face that you support the troops while advancing legislation that would undercut their mission and strengthen their enemies? You can’t. […]

Having turned against a war that some of them supported, the left is now turning against the troops they claim still to support…. [The troops] are our best and bravest, fighting for all of us against a brutal enemy in a difficult and frustrating war. They are the 9/11 generation. The left slanders them. We support them," – Bill Kristol, classy as ever.

A paleocon manifesto.

Please don’t feed or hug the base.

This is something some of us have worried about for a couple of decades now:

Ron Garber knew his former wife was living with another woman — and had taken her last name — when he agreed to pay her $1,250 a month in alimony.

What he didn’t know was that the two women had registered with the state as domestic partners under a law that was supposed to mirror marriage law, Garber said.

State marriage laws say that alimony ends when the former spouse remarries, and Garber reasons he should be off the hook, given that domestic partnership is akin to marriage. But an Orange County judge has decided that registered partnership is cohabitation, not marriage, and that Garber must pay.

"This is not about gay or lesbian," Garber said. "This is about the law being fair."

The case, which Garber intends to appeal, highlights gaps between the legal status of domestic partners and of married couples, an issue the California Supreme Court is considering as it ponders whether to legalize same-sex marriage.

The answer is to grant us all the same rights and responsibilities of civil marriage: good for marriage, good for families, good for gays, good for straights, good for kids.