Quick question: when the Feds took down the "mafia' through wire taps and listening devices did your first amendment feelers prick up so strongly as they do about Islamic terrorists? It seems to me most of what has been done pales in comparison to what was done to people based solely upon the fact that there were rumors they were mobbed up, oh, and they had Italian names.

None of you seemed bothered when that occurred, and they were all American citizens, so I'm just confused.

and by the way, your explanation will probably be that labeling them "mafia" was "accurate and sticky", but that only supports whatever Bush has authorized.

What makes you think that my name doesn't end in a vowel?

And, yes, if indeed the feds used warrantless wiretaps against the mob, that would bother me (assuming that one could say that the Mafia has been taken down).

Robber Barons?

There's a reason they call them classics.

Hank, the big distinction here, one which I am confident has not escaped you, notwithstanding your righteous indignation, is that those wiretaps were placed by leave of court. I don't think that anyone here would object to the feds using authorized wiretaps obtained under due process of law. It's the suspension of this process that I, along with many others, find objectionable.

fighting joe
 

Who's incensed? I just have to set my sights low with you.

I love you, man.

Because you're not NotBobby?

The Marlboro Marine
 

You may remember seeing a picture of this kid from the Battle of Fallujah.

http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2007-11/33718133.jpg

The photojournalist who took it works for the LA Times. For a long-form story of what happened to both the Marine and the photojournalist, go here.

Gattigap

The Marlboro Marine
 

It's touching, but the end is more about the photographer's own feelings than it is about the Marine.

Confessions of a California Dem
 

Four times, starting in 1992, I have stood in a voting booth* and conjured up the image of a certain President of the Board of Supervisors for the City and County of San Francisco announce in a halting voice that Supervisor Milk and Mayor Moscone were dead of gunshot wounds and that Dan White was the suspect. I have done so in order to suppress the tiny bit of vomit that reflexively rises every time I am called upon by the perpetual joint stupidity of the Democratic and Republican parties in California that results in me having no alternative than to vote for Dianne Feinstein, and thinking of her having her last unselfish and genuine human emotion is the only thing that can get me through that experience.

Thought you'd like to know.

*This is a lie. I voted absentee in 1992 and 1994 and could therefore have vomited with impunity on both those occasions.

fighting joe
 

I like it - it's handy. As soon as someone drops it you know to turn the conversation over to sports before you have to hear a recap of whatever it was Rush Limbaugh was talking about that morning.

It's like when Hank drops "Paki" and you know to stick to talking about steakhouses instead of recommending the Indian place. These little markers are what make civilized social intercourse possible.

The Marlboro Marine
 

Fair point. FWIW, here's Part 2 of 2.

Confessions of a California Dem
 

My landlord once ran against Feinstein. Talk about the lesser of two evils.

fighting joe
 

It's hard to find good "dogging" in the country club parking lot.

Confessions of a California Dem
 

This was incoherent. You need to lay off the Twinkies.

Confessions of a California Dem
 

It makes perfect sense. You should try living in California.

The Marlboro Marine
 

I rescind my complaint.

Confessions of a California Dem
 

If you have a Senator -- even one -- who has proven emself capable of unscripted outrage at any point in the last 30 years, then you wouldn't possibly understand.

Confessions of a California Dem
 

Sad, but 2

hoo-boy
 

“What we are going to have to put in place is a combination of the Manhattan Project, the Apollo project, and the Marshall Plan, and scale it globally,” Mr. Gore told Fortune. “It’d be promising too much to say we can do it on our own, but we intend to do our part.”

This guy has the ability, in one quick sound byte, to remind all of america why we are lucky the Supreme court protected our institutions and stopped the Forlida vote steal. Can anyone fathom the depths of this man's hubris?

Confessions of a California Dem
 

Like Santorum's screed about gays being a step away from dog-fuckers? Or announcing to the NYTimes magaizne that he and his wife slept with their stillborn baby for an evening?

Scripting's not so bad.

Millions for defense; not one penny for tribute!
 

http://content.cartoonbox.slate.com/...9d8c7550177fca

*Yes, I am aware that Hank may argue that Lt. Decatur didn't worry about treating the Musselmen well when he led his Marines into "the shores of Tripoli," or that William Henrry Harrison was a war criminal for what happened at Tippicanoe, but that's just because he wants to bad-mouth our national heroes.

Millions for defense; not one penny for tribute!
 

Do you think that Mr. Rall is aware that pirates are still a rather nasty problem in the world, or would that just get in the way of his, um, point?

http://africa.reuters.com/top/news/usnBAN236820.html

aV

fighting joe
 

You should tell the Pentagon that this is just hyper-partisan paranoia:

• The Pentagon is not preparing a pre-emptive attack on Iran in spite of an increase in bellicose rhetoric from Washington, according to senior officers.
  
  Admiral William Fallon, head of Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, told the Financial Times that while dealing with Iran was a “challenge”, a strike was not “in the offing”.
  
  “None of this is helped by the continuing stories that just keep going around and around and around that any day now there will be another war which is just not where we want to go,” he said.
  
  “Getting Iranian behaviour to change and finding ways to get them to come to their senses and do that is the real objective. Attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice in my book.”
  
  Adm Fallon did not rule out the possibility of a strike at some point. But his comments served as a shot across the bows of hawks who are arguing for imminent action. They also echoed the views of the senior brass that military action is currently unnecessary, and should only be considered as an absolute last resort.
  
  In recent months, President George W. Bush and his top officials have made a string of tough statements that have fuelled speculation that the US was preparing to strike Iran over its nuclear programme. Adm Fallon declined to comment specifically on whether the US rhetoric was feeding the speculation, but said that “generally, the bellicose comments are not particularly helpful”.

The Financial Times

Of course, the FT is known as a paranoid lefty rag, so YMMV.

eta: But wait, there's more:

• In Washington and in the world at large, fears are growing that the US may mount a pre-emptive military attack on Iran.
  
  President George W. Bush recently described the dispute over Iran’s nuclear programme in near-apocalyptic terms, warning America’s partners to prevent Tehran from obtaining the bomb if they were “interested in avoiding world war three”. Vice-president Dick Cheney declared, in an echo of his prewar rhetoric on Iraq: “We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”
  
  New US sanctions on Tehran, tensions between the two countries in Iraq and a New Yorker magazine article alleging that the White House has told the Pentagon to work on plans for an attack have all intensified the air of confrontation.

Millions for defense; not one penny for tribute!
 

He asked, so I told L'il Ty that there are still pirates around. Alas, he then had nightmares for a week.

He was a ninja for Halloween. I think these things are connected.

Millions for defense; not one penny for tribute!
 

I suspect that Mr. Rall wasn't thinking about modern piracy when he drew his Barbary Corsair. I know that I certainly wasn't when I saw the panel, and I just read a long-ass article about some troubling pirate confrontations with the US Navy within the last couple of weeks.

fighting joe
 

If Israel actually strikes Iran, will the "US is nothing more than an AIPAC Zionist puppet" set on the Left make a distinction?

Millions for defense; not one penny for tribute!
 

that's funny! did you watch The War?

It was funny too! We killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Italy alone. We shot prisioners dead. I had heard of the Germans doing it, but we did too. I don't know if the Captains that ordered realized they were ruining the long standing US rules, but they did it. Oh, and if we did happen to have a Japanese soldier surrender on Okinawa we torutured the shit out of him to hopefully learn where others were hiding.

You guys are historically goofy.

i think the point of the cited parts of the War was that any war is going to have those things. You should factor into the decision to have a war that bad shit will happen. of course I'm sure there are blogs-a-plenty that say what bush/Cheny has "allowed to happen" is only on par with the gulags.

Millions for defense; not one penny for tribute!
 

A friend of mine (who is a partner at a large firm, but that's another story)'s band played at a small venue here in Houston on Friday. They were offered the headliner, but they demurred claiming they didn't wanna stay up that late.

Anyhow, they were followed by a young, enthusiastic, not very musically good, but fun anyways two man punk band. Their final song told the tragic story of a relationship that failed because, as the lyrics said:

I am in to ninjas.
She was into piiiii-rates.

It was my favorite song of all time that four mintues.

Millions for defense; not one penny for tribute!
 

Hank, we have had this discussion before. There is a fundamental difference between recognizing that bad things happen in a war, and in enshrining those bad things as policy approved at the highest level.

I can virtually flat out guarrantee you that we didn't torture German prisoners in WWII away from the battlefield in order to learn how far along the Luftwaffe was with the heavy water project, or with where V-1s and V-2s were being aimed. And I strongly suspect (but am slightly less confident, if only because of the attitudes of the era) that the same is true about Japanese prisoners away from the battlefield.

This is not about Sergeant Rock in the hedgerows with Fritz trying to find out where the sniper that killed Gus is hiding. This is about what happens outside of the blood rage of immediate action, and is instead about policy decisions made in the light of cool reason. The fact that you continue to ignore this distinction puzzles me.

Millions for defense; not one penny for tribute!
 

Is your ivory tower ivory?

Abu gharib much?

This is the first war where papers and TV intrude in what's going on, and so it is upon the administartion to protect soldiers. We didn't need to protect Sgt. Rock because the NYT still saw one side as good.

Millions for defense; not one penny for tribute!
 

Not for nothing, but in the "good" WWII, firebombing major cities and slaughtering civilian populations was indeed enshrined as policy and approved at the highest level.

Who is your candidate?
 

http://glassbooth.org/

Ron Paul shares a 71% similarity with your beliefs

Ron Paul was born on August 29, 1936. He is a Republican from Texas. Paul has served 10 terms as a congressman from the 14th and 22nd districts of the U.S. House of Representatives. Prior to that he was a general physician in Lake Jackson, Texas. Paul placed third in the 1988 presidential election with a 0.5% of the vote, running as the Libertarian Party nominee--while remaining a registered Republican.

Trade and Economics very similar
Drugs very similar
Civil Liberties and Domestic Security very similar
Iraq and Foreign Policy very similar
Taxes and Budget similar
Crime and Punishment similar
Social Security very different
Abortion and Birth Control very different

Who is your candidate?
 

Lyndon Larouche is probably upset by this.

Millions for defense; not one penny for tribute!
 

Millions for defense; not one penny for tribute!
 

Uh, no. Remember Vietnam? My Lai? Lt. Calley? Sy Hersh? David Halberstam? Walter Cronkite getting blamed after Tet?

And Abu Gharib was NOT ON THE FRONT LINES. It was a prison, and those who worked there were not infrantrymen or in the combat arms.

Throw Haditha back at me instead, and I would still say that there is a fundamental difference between a company commander giving way to blood lust and lawyers in the Justice Department saying that so long as major organ damage doesn't occur that it ain't a violation of the law.

You're a lawyer, right? What's the difference between manslaughter and first degree murder in your state?

Millions for defense; not one penny for tribute!
 

my point was that some people in harm's way might try to get some of their comrades a benefit.

oh. WWII. you don't think we tortured. I mean sanctioned by the government torture.

what is your basis for the opinion?

as to crim law, I have made an effort not to know anything. when my lowlife cousins call I can tell them i don't know what the fuck.

Specialists. Trust them to do their speciality. 2007 some people still think torture makes sense. You, armed by blogs-a -plenty think not. Do you not ask yourself why people whose job it is to interrogate don't agree? I mean the spartans tortured and it wouldn't continue if it didn't help. do armies still pray to Bal?

Millions for defense; not one penny for tribute!
 

Fair point, though a different problem. We also had concentration camps for Japanese-Americans and a segregated Army and Navy.

That being said, as I've said here before, I'm only here because of Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb, so I have no problem with that -- and I think that, contra the revisionists occasionally cited here, the Emperor would never have cut a deal to surrender absent the loss of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And I have less of a problem with US bombing than with British and German bombing because we at least were being as accurate as technology permited in going for largely military targets (but see the non-nuclear firebombing of Tokyo, which probably killed more civilians that either of the nuclear bombings or of the Dresden bombing).

Interestingly, I don't recall the Luftwaffe being charged with war crimes for the terror bombings of England in 1940 or the V-1 or V-2 programs, but I could be wrong.

Millions for defense; not one penny for tribute!
 

I don't base my moral disgust with torture on what I read in blogs, Hank.

Millions for defense; not one penny for tribute!
 

i am also disgusted that it may be necessary. i only take issue when you imply Bush/Cheney invented it.