I Hate What You Just Said

It seems that George Bush has had a taste for torture for quite some time. In 1967, the New York Times reported the following story about the DKE fraternity at Yale:

NEW HAVEN, Nov. 7–A Yale fraternity accused by the student newspaper of burning its initiates with a brand will have its fate decided Friday by student fraternity leaders.

The fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, could face the temporary closure of its house and a $1,000 fine resulting from alleged violations of rules previously passed by the Inter-Fraternity Council, which consists of Yale’s five fraternity presidents.

The charges against Delta Kappa Epsilon were made last Friday in a Yale Daily News article that accused campus fraternities of carrying on “sadistic and obscene” initiation procedures.

The charge that has caused the most controversy on the Yale campus is that Delta Kappa Epsilon applied a “hot branding iron” to the small of the back of its 40 new members in ceremonies two weeks ago. A photograph showing a scab in the shape of the Greek letter Delta, approximately a half inch wide, appeared with the article.

A former president of Delta said that the branding is done with a hot coathanger. But the former president, George Bush, a Yale senior, said that the resulting wound is “only a cigarette burn.”

Only a few steps from here and you’re telling the American people that “we don’t torture” and that the grievous crimes of Gitmo are just “hazing pranks from some fraternity.”

Maybe someone should have gotten little George some help.

Robert Kennedy hit one out of the park today.

NY Times:

Citing their free speech rights, three tour guides in Philadelphia filed a lawsuit this week challenging an ordinance that will require them to pass a history test and get a license. Mayor Michael Nutter signed the measure into law in April amid concern that some guides were perpetuating gross inaccuracies, including the false claims that Benjamin Franklin had 69 illegitimate children and that Betsy Ross, a three-time widow, killed her husbands. But the three guides, Ann Boulais, Michael Tait and Josh Silver, backed by a public-interest law firm, argue that the city has gone too far. The tests will be required beginning in October.

Lee Greenwood is famous for his 4th of July masterpiece, “God Bless the U.S.A.” One thing has always bothered me about it. It’s this line:

And I’m proud to be an American where at least I know I’m free.

What the hell does this mean? Does Lee Greenwood actually live on another American citizen? Or has Lee so confused the land he loves with himself that they are cognitively inseparable for him?

If so, hats off, Lee Greenwood — your patriotism runneth over.

In a genius political move, John McCain is spending July 4th . . . in Mexico.

The Boston Globe reports that the first habeas petition that hit the federal appeals court system has gone against the government:

In the first Guantanamo Bay case to be reviewed, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in favor of Huzaifa Parhat, a Chinese Muslim known as a Uighur, undermining the basis for his more than six years in detention.

The appeals court directed the U.S. military to release Parhat, to transfer him or to hold a new proceeding promptly in light of the appeals court’s ruling.

Considering that this man has been held at Guantanamo Bay for six years, this seems like pretty poor evidence:

Parhat never fought against the United States and the government concedes there’s no evidence he ever intended to. He has been held for six years because he is linked to a Chinese separatist group that the military says has some ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network.

Government attorneys say he can be held under the law authorizing military force against anyone who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks” of 2001.

Seriously, that’s it? A guy whose enemy is Communist China just spent 6 years in a hole and the government admits that he never attempted, nor desired, to attack the US or our allies?

And before anyone in Congress starts wailing that a bunch of incense-burning, sitar-crazed, liberal judges were “legislating from the bench,” they should check out who the judges were:

Sentelle is an appointee of President Reagan, Garland was appointed by President Clinton and Griffith was appointed by President George W. Bush.

The current trajectory of wealth distribution in America must certainly be making this man proud. For the rest of us, The Nation has devoted its June 30 issue to the growing problem of profound inequality.

The handy “guide” to extreme inequality is filled with useful links.

And the piece titled “The Rich and the Rest of Us,” by John Cavanagh and Chuck Collins, is on the money (bad pun intended):

Over the past three decades, market-worshiping politicians and their corporate backers have engineered the most colossal redistribution of wealth in modern world history, a redistribution from the bottom up, from working people to a tiny global elite.

Indeed. And part of the problem is about changing the discourse:

To reverse this reckless course, we need to change our nation’s dominant political narrative and restore faith in the critical role that government must play to protect the common good. But we can’t stop there. We need to confront directly the threat posed by this inequality.

That won’t be easy. Too many Americans see the enormous concentration of our nation’s wealth as a symptom of a sick society, not a cause. Indeed, most of our politicians and pundits refuse to treat it as any sort of problem at all. They may sometimes bewail particularly unseemly CEO paychecks. They may twitter occasionally about the latest bilious billionaire extravagance. But that’s it. The Senate couldn’t even manage to eliminate a tax loophole for gazillionaire hedge-fund managers last year. And even progressive wish lists tend to call only for a return to pre-George W. Bush tax rates, a step that would undo a mere one-sixth of the rise in income inequality we have experienced since the late 1970s, according to the Brookings Institution.

(I seem to recall some other dude striking similar notes recently).

In any event, we best address our nation’s economic woes quickly. That way, we can get back to tackling the really serious issues, like the War. On Christmas.

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.

From baking to the dap:

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

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.

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

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.