I Hate What You Just Said

Ah, who isn’t just a bit nostalgic about the great Gold Rush of 1849?  You remember the fun we used to have claim jumping, exploiting Chinese workers, and once we got warmed up, strip mining?

For my money, it doesn’t get any better than the old Amalgamated Copper Mining Company mine in Butte, Montana, now known as the Anaconda Mine with its main attraction, the Berkeley Pit.

Is there nothing better than seeing American ambition from outer space?  Yeah those were good times indeed, when men were men, the West was wild and digging massive holes in the earth’s crust was but a glint in the eye of Copper King William Andrews Clark.

So let us then hail the arrival of the next Gold Rush, renew our rugged individualism and place our claims once again:

Today, record gold prices, widespread economic turmoil, and the enduring optimism of America’s entrepreneurial classes have combined to entice fresh swarms of prospectors to head west in search of hidden riches beneath the picturesque hills and ravines of the Golden State.

The “new 49ers,” as today’s wave of fortune-seekers are known, are a breed apart from their historic predecessors, driving trucks and SUVs down the dusty tracks first created by trains of horse-drawn wagons nearly 160 years ago. But they share with them a timeless predisposition for what veterans call gold fever. “It’s like going to Vegas, except with this, we actually get to win something,” said Mike Dunn, clutching almost an ounce of nuggets unearthed from the south fork of the Feather river last Sunday. “We’ve just hit a halo of gold, and this lot alone must be worth between $500 (£250) and $1,500. I’ve just about paid for my trip already.”

The Independent

I just felt a tingle down my spine.

Dreams won’t be the only things broken. Last week, three men were killed trying to reopen a 19th-century mine in rural Madera County. Police said the men, all in their twenties, died from carbon monoxide poisoning while using a petrol-powered pump to drain the 20ft-deep shaft.

And no risk.

“There is so much of that stuff out here you wouldn’t believe,” said Ekhard Davisky, who pans for gold near Paradise in Butte County. “The trick is finding it. I think it was Mark Twain who said a gold mine is just a hole in the ground owned by a liar, and I think he just about got it in one there. But if you know what you are doing, and you are prepared to listen and learn about how to do it properly, there’s never been a better time to be looking for gold. Back in 1849, an ounce of gold was $18.80, which was about enough to buy a man a nice suit and a steak dinner. And when you think about it, that’s the price of it now. These are happy days.”

Damn right they are.  Meet me and Jedadiah at the Buttercup Pantry in Placerville and we’ll strike it rich.

This tells you all you need to know about the Military Commissions down in Guantanamo Bay:

The Bush administration wants to rewrite the official evidence against Guantanamo Bay detainees, allowing it to shore up its cases before they come under scrutiny by civilian judges for the first time.

The government has stood behind the evidence for years. Military review boards relied on it to justify holding hundreds of prisoners indefinitely without charge. Justice Department attorneys said it was thoroughly and fairly reviewed.

Now that federal judges are about to review the evidence, however, the government says it needs to make changes.

The decision follows last week’s Supreme Court ruling, which held that detainees have the right to challenge their detention in civilian court, not just before secret military panels. At a closed-door meeting with judges and defense attorneys this week, government lawyers said they needed time to add new evidence and make other changes to evidentiary documents known as “factual returns.”

Attorneys for the detainees criticized the idea, saying the government is basically asking for a last-minute do-over.

Robert Hurt is a Texas rancher and a father of 14 children. Ten years ago, he visited our nation’s capital for a Promise Keeper’s rally and was shocked at what he found:

Washington is a town filled with boobs.

They’re everywhere, from the bare-breasted ladies who decorate the fountain at Dupont Circle to the peekaboo statue in the Justice Department’s Great Hall to the countless nudes in our museums. But while those of us who live here hardly blink at the public nudity, it can shock some of our visitors. Such was the case for Robert Hurt, who last week tried to add the issue of artistic indecency in the nation’s capital to the platform of the Texas GOP.

When he saw “unclothed people” at the National Gallery and the bosomy figures of Valor and Sacrifice at the Arlington Memorial Bridge–well, Hurt had had enough:

“You don’t have nude art on your front porch,” the Dallas Morning News quoted the delegate as telling the platform committee at the state party convention. “So why is it important to have that in the common places of Washington, D.C.?” [. . .]

“I believe art affects a country indirectly. I have been studying the decline of morals in this country. It’s sending the wrong message to children that nudity is fine, that nakedness is fine. . . . There are degrees of vulgarity, and it opens up the door for the other stuff.”

We can’t have children thinking that their bodies aren’t shameful factories of sin! And Hurt is right: tits are the gateway to the other, hard-core forms of patriotic porn.

Take heart America, even though the boob-draping Attorney General John Ashcroft is gone, titular moral sheriff Hurt is on the case. He’s even promised to return to Washington, “possibly . . . to videotape the evidence.”

“I’m not going to stop until I succeed,” Hurt proclaimed,” I’m prepared for a long fight.”

From baking to the dap:

That’s what politics is all about, baby.  Build that bridge girls.

Cindy McCain cribbing cookie recipes?  Color me shocked.  Michelle Obama’s amaretto-laced shortbread bombs?  Raised my roof doggg!  So, now that Hilary is out of the race, the remaining women revert to a fucking bakeoff (not that there aren’t a number of kick ass feminist bakeries dotting our fair country)?!

If John McCain loses in November, his wife Cindy may catch some of the blame after apparently cheating in a high stakes presidential cookie bake-off.

Every four years, in the approach to the presidential election, kitchens across America are busy testing cookie recipes submitted by candidates’ spouses for the Family Circle magazine competition.

The stakes could hardly be higher. In the past four presidential elections the magazine’s readers have successfully predicted America’s next first lady. Hillary Clinton’s chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies beat Barbara Bush’s effort, and Laura Bush’s cowboy cookies triumphed over Tipper Gore’s ginger snaps. In 2004 Mrs Bush won again with oatmeal chocolate chunk cookies.

The Independent

Of course Hillary once disparaged baking (and, goddamnit, drinking tea, for which I have never forgiven her), but the recipes that she later released to quell the backlash of a horrified American public could never fully dispel the taint of “uppitiness” that so manifestly makes her unsuited for public office.

Update: This story has legs! Mary Todd may have been a Hellcat but her gingerbread is the shiznit.

Have no illusions, McClatchy plays for keeps:

The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn’t the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.

It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials.

The Supreme Court now has struck down many of their legal interpretations. It ruled last Thursday that preventing detainees from challenging their detention in federal courts was unconstitutional.

The quintet of lawyers, who called themselves the “War Council,” drafted legal opinions that circumvented the military’s code of justice, the federal court system and America’s international treaties in order to prevent anyone — from soldiers on the ground to the president — from being held accountable for activities that at other times have been considered war crimes.

And the document dump proves it.

On Fox News Sunday, our friend Bill Kristol made it clear that John McCain and Lindsey “Huckleberry” Graham will be offering new legislation to Congress this week that will seek to undermine the Supreme Court’s decision in Boumediene v. Bush.

It was this decision, of course, that struck a serious blow to the administration’s claim to virtually unlimited powers of arbitrary detention. Kristol remarked:

And I think you will see Senator Graham, accompanied by Senator McCain, come to the floor of the Senate very soon, like next week, and say, We cannot let chaos obtain here. We can’t let 200 different federal district judges on their own whim call this CIA agent here, say, ‘I don’t believe this soldier here who said this guy was doing this,’ you have to release someone,’ or, ‘Let’s build up — let’s compromise sources and methods with a bunch of trials. I mean, it’s ridiculous.

Those pesky judges, always dispensing their so-called “justice” whenever their America-hating whimsy kicks in. Just listen to Justice Kennedy, legislating from the bench:

Security depends upon a sophisticated intelligence apparatus and the ability of our Armed Forces to act and interdict. There are further considerations, however. Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom’s first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to separation of powers.

Unbelievable! We can’t let these evildoers get O.J. style trials here in the US!

I bet, if he had been alive in 1830, justice Kennedy would have ruled in favor of those savage Indians. Thank Christ we had a real, tough-as-hickory American patriot like president Andrew Jackson to give those meddling Supreme Court oligarchs one of those go-up-your-own-ass gestures.

Check out this 18th century hippie, going by the name of Alexander Hamilton:

the practice of arbitrary imprisonments, [has] been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.

If they had douchebags in the 18th century, this guy would’ve owned five.

Remember, it was this guy and a bunch of his fist-jabbing terrorist buddies that kept resisting God’s selected leader, King George, during the 18th century. One of the things they were pissed off about was that George kept throwing their fellow natural law extremists into jail without cause or trial. They even had the audacity to write him a strongly-worded letter telling him to stop!

Those assholes just didn’t understand freedom.

Rick Shenkman is out with a new book entitled Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter.

Courtesy of Boing Boing, it’s the Talking Jesus Doll. And don’t forget those traditional sandals!

You might be forgiven for not having registered the significance of the Irish public’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty, viewed by some as the failed 2005 “constitution” of the European Union in drag, last week. Perhaps you saw an article flit by the New York Times website over the weekend before the issue took a backseat to Kobe’s ongoing experiment in athletic eugenics at the NBA Finals or the latest journalist (yes I’m thinking about you Kristol) to elegize the passing of Tim Russert. And damn, wasn’t that a clutch put Tiger sunk to force a playoff?

Meanwhile, somewhere outside Donegal all hell broke loose in European politics. A relatively small European country, Ireland (the only country to put the ratification of the treaty to a referendum so far) is an exemplary case of what is at stake, as the treaty seeks to further centralize key policy positions–such as labor regulations and foreign policy–at the expense of member state autonomy:

The Lisbon treaty is complex. It offers sweeping changes to the way the union runs—creating a new full-time “president” to represent member states, and a foreign-policy chief to speak for Europe round the world. It also sweeps away national vetoes in some important areas of policy, such as cross-border policing and justice. Many Irish no voters voiced suspicions that the treaty would, in reality, rob their small state of clout at the EU’s top tables.

The Economist

“EU leaders were to be heard crowing last year that they had made it “unintelligible” in order to smuggle it past voters,” The Economist continues, rightly noting that this was a much easier task in most European countries, eighteen of which had already shoved it through their respective parliaments with little or no debate.

“So pay no attention to the wailing in Brussels,” writes Anne Appelbaum, “If the most enthusiastic Europeans in Europe didn’t care enough to read the treaty they’ve just rejected, then maybe it’s just as well it didn’t pass.” I guess Applebaum figues that libertarianism European-style means more centralized government and concentrated economic and military power. Apparently, European citizens lack the free-thinking gene possessed by all rational, Cato Institute supporting Americans that allow them to cut through hundreds of pages of bureaucratic doublespeak. But I digress.

Predictably, establishment politicians have been wringing their hands over the result, especially from the larger states, who stood to gain the most. Nicholas Sarkozy, the immigrant-bashing-top-model-marrying-archconservative president of France is especially pissed off. He’s threatening to travel to Ireland to learn firsthand why they had the temerity to say no to even more big business payola and the prospect of increased European military integration. Guess which countries would assume effective control of the latter? Now you’re getting the picture. Stay tuned, France assumes the rotating presidency of the European Union in July.

Just when it seemed that Gordon Brown’s troubles couldn’t get much worse, he received the ultimate kiss of death.

From the Guardian:

George Bush yesterday heaped praise on Gordon Brown as the prime minister announced that Britain would intensify sanctions against Iranian banks, dispatch 230 extra troops to southern Afghanistan and keep British troops in southern Iraq until the build-up of Iraqi security forces justified a withdrawal.

Big cuts in British troop levels in Iraq were not expected until next year, military sources said as the US president insisted there was no difference between British and American policy in Iraq.

Bush said he appreciated the prime minister being “tough on terror”, saying that Brown understood that the spread of freedom was transformative, and it was wrong to think that “only white guy Methodists” wanted self-government. He branded such thinking as the ultimate form of political elitism.

The last thing a guy with these poll numbers needs is an endorsement from, er, this guy.

The right wing freakout over the recent Supreme Court decision to permit habeas petitions for Gitmo detainees reached a skull-splitting crescendo today. Mike “gamecock” DeVine, so-called “Legal Editor” for the site Minority Report, posted the most laughably insane and transparently stupid argument ever crafted with a keyboard.

Today’s infamous 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court granting terrorists the right to an O.J. trial in U.S. civilian courts cries out for the present Chief Executive to so paraphrase Old Hickory’s similar defiance of John Marshall 176 years ago with respect to removal of the Cherokee from Georgia.

“John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

The nation survived President Andrew Jackson’s defense of his constitutional executive powers against the first Judicial Oligarch. Should President Bush succumb to Justice Kennedy’s attempted coup to assume the role of Commander in Chief, it will be much harder for our nation to survive, much less thrive, as it has since 1832.

Beyond the fascistic, mindlessly authoritarian vision DeVine articulates for our country, I can only hope that he failed history class. Otherwise, he’s seriously advocating the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears as positive models for presidential behavior. That story is one of the darkest stains on the fabric of American history.

I suppose it’s only fitting that someone use it to justify unlimited, unchecked, and arbitrary executive detention — probably the most un-American and un-democratic thing that I can imagine.