Edgewise

what would Mr. Rogers do?

can you say “habeas corpus”?

What if King Friday got taken away to a secret jail in the middle of the ocean by the Central Intelligence Agency? And the government said King Friday could not file a writ of habeas corpus because he had no rights. Because Congress just happened to sort of incidentally take them all away….

Justices Hint That They’ll Rule on Challenge Filed by Detainee - New York Times

red dwarf exits red america

Post.com Blogger Quits Amid Furor

“When I was 17, I was certainly sloppy,” said Domenech, who did not graduate from college. “If I had paid more attention, none of these problems would have happened.”

Is this statement:

False__

Plagiarized__

Really stupid__

(what score did WashPost’s Jim Brady get?)

Color Theory: "Red America" and "Red Dawn"

Edgewise readers are probably familiar with the story of the Washington Post Online’s new right-wing blog, “Red America,” written by a 24-year-old sometime Republican speechwriter named Ben Domenech, who also runs the RedState.org site. Various writers at Daily Kos & eslewhere have detailed the various aspects that make his hiring so egregious —- that a party functionary has been hired to “balance” a working reporter (Dan Froomkin), that he feels no need to support his assertions with links or other references, that he’s such a chickenhawk his website sells Cafe Press coffee mugs drooling about Marines killing Bad Guys (coffee mugs! you can’t make this stuff up), plagiarism, etc., so I won’t rehash all that here.

Instead, I’ll just note that his blog demonstrates how completely the political connotations of “red” have been reversed in the last 20 years or so. In his inaugural column (no link, as a matter of principle), Domenech cites the 1984 movie “Red Dawn” as some sort of cultural/political touchstone. I haven’t seen it, but it’s apparently a fantasy of gun-totin’ American resistance to a Soviet invasion. That is, “red” in the movie title refers to communism, and in the blog title it refers to Republican voters. A red dawn was a Bad Thing, back in the day, but a red America is now a Good Thing.

The similarities between the radical Republican impulse toward single-party rule and communist totalitarianism have also been discussed elsewhere, and IMO somewhat exaggerated. But it is fascinating how enthusiastically those who a generation ago said “better dead than Red” have embraced the new color symbolism. I suspect that when the TV networks first used red/blue color coding to denote which party had gotten a state’s electoral votes, they assigned blue to Democrats because assigning red would have looked like overt red-baiting. The symbolism works for Republicans in the same way that it worked for communism, by evoking a powerful emotional response. Red is the hot color, blue the cool color. Red is the color of blood, of life, of sex; blue is the color of dispassionate discourse. We can’t break that association, of course, but maybe by bringing it to light we can detach it from our political parties.

Does the Bush team need fresh blood? Part II

The Bush team has no difficulty infusing fresh blood; they generate it in vast quantities and on a global scale.

But the political problem remains: they flame out when exposed to daylight, and they can't see their own reflection in a mirror.

Dead giveaway.

Crybabies grow up to be conservatives

According to this study it’s the anxiety and paranoia that breeds a conservative.

Shake-up? Does the Bush team need fresh blood?

Cheney Dismisses Suggestions of Shake-Up Associated Press

"Senior Republicans and others have said the Bush team may need an infusion of fresh blood..."

DKo: Well, there's always corporate Middle Management. They haven't bled them completely dry just yet.

We would welcome Iranian financing to influence our politics.

Washington Post
"The Bush administration is asking Congress for $75 million...to promote democracy in Iran....The plan...includes fostering independent media inside Iran.

"The final $15 million would go toward nongovernmental organizations and civic education on the lines of what the federally chartered National Endowment for Democracy carries out in a wide variety of countries."

DKo:

This Endowment also provides campaign funding to political parties in elections in a number of countries.

Why is the Iranian government getting so upset about this? It's a two-way street. We would welcome Iranian government financing of independent media and civic organizations to influence politics in the US. We would welcome all foreign government financing in our elections

Wouldn't we?

The WP article http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/13/AR2006031301761_2.html?referrer=email&referrer=email

Let's take South Dakota

Let the Libertarians take over New Hampshire (quickly, though - it’s trending Blue).

Let the religious nuts have South Carolina (Nick, we’ll find another home for you).

Let’s take over South Dakota (apparently, it’s not that hard to do).

What About the Misidentified Victims?

A growing number of people, having been duly convicted of heinously violent crimes, are now being released and put back on the street, based on newly fashionable legal technicalities such as DNA mismatches. We hear the predictable chorus of soft-on-crime lobbies, running on ad nauseum about the precious civil rights of misidentified convicts--even when the crimes involve the most brutal murders, rapes, and physical mutilation.

Have these champions of the rights of misidentified convicts given even the slightest thought to the rights of the misidentified victims? Or the rights of the misidentified families of misidentified victims?

It is about time these convicts took full responsibility for every last one of their past mistakes.

Oops! The truth!

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican, said in a statement that Cunningham's sentence "should send a strong message that no one is above breaking our nation's laws, including the Members of Congress who make them."