|link| Posted 9:56 AM by Brian Linse

Russ Has A Pair...

...perhaps the only pair left amongst Democrats on The Hill. Do like ReddHedd sez. Call your senators.

|link| Posted 10:16 PM by Brian Linse

Guns Don't Kill People...

Follow all the Dead-Eye Dick mayhem over at firedoglake. (scroll up and down for all the good stuff)

I have two hopes in the wake of the Vice President's shotgun accident: First, that the elderly man who was shot will recover completely; second, that the press will look at how the White House has treated them on the story and finally realize how they've been getting played all these years.

David Gregory at NBC seems to already get it.

And one other note to the press: when you accidentally get a face full of buckshot from a shotgun you've been FUCKING SHOT; when your housekeeper accidentally squirts you with a bottle of Windex you've been SPRAYED.

|link| Posted 12:51 AM by Brian Linse

GWB/DOJ/NSA FOS on FISA

Definitively full of shit. Glenn Greenwald would, in any sane universe, be a guest on every news program in the country tomorrow.

Kevin Drum runs it down in case you still don't get it.

And some conservative internet rag is reporting that the White House is preparing for impeachment hearings.

I'd love to believe it, but God, that bitch, hates me too much for it to happen.

|link| Posted 9:12 PM by Brian Linse

Bloggasm Lefties

Simon Owens is running a series of interviews with Lefty Bloggers over at Bloggasm. You can find mine here. [link fixed]

|link| Posted 11:36 AM by Brian Linse

Alito Hearings

SCOTUSblog is liveblogging.

I'm listening to the hearings on streaming radio as I work. Based on the opening statements thus far I'd guess that this one is going to be tougher for the nominee than the Roberts hearing was.

Oh, and I'm betting that Lindsay Graham will offer to wax Judge Alito's car before the hearings are over.

Kevin Drum suggests we all get drunk.

|link| Posted 10:50 AM by Brian Linse

Feisty

Check out a feisty new dialogue at Blogging Heads.

In an Afterthought post, Bob Wright argues that the "democracy meme" will succeed in Iraq and elsewhere, but will do so because of information technology rather than war. This is an important aspect of the broader thesis in his amazing book, Nonzero.

|link| Posted 5:20 PM by Brian Linse

R.I.P. Eugene McCarthy & Richard Pryor

Two giants of American culture have left us today. Eugene McCarthy has died at the age of 89, and Richard Pryor at the age of 65 after a long battle with MS.

Digby, as he often does, has captured my thoughts exactly, this time with regard to Pryor:

He was right up front, saying it all clearly and without restraint. He wasn't being polite and pretending that race wasn't an issue. And it didn't matter. Nobody, not one person, in that audience was angry. In fact, not one person in that audience was anything but doubled over in paroxysms of hysterical laughter. He had our number, all of us, the whole flawed species.

See also Tony Pierce, Russell Shaw, RichardPryor.com, NPR.

There will no doubt be many thoughtful pieces on the life of Mr. McCarthy in the next few days, but unless you were alive and paying attention during his peak political years you won't really be able to appreciate the kind of hope that he engendered. He was the most un-politician-like politician that ever took to a campaign in this country, and his passing reminds us of how badly we need those kinds of candidates now.

|link| Posted 6:04 PM by Brian Linse

Paramount SKG

Late breaking news that Viacom will buy Dreamworks SKG live action division. My sources say the deal is done.

LAT & WSJ confirm the deal.

|link| Posted 8:09 AM by Brian Linse

Sami Al Arian Acquitted

I've waited a day after the announcement that Sami Al Arian had been acquitted of 17 charges relating to support for terrorism in order to take in some of the reaction and reporting on the case. I first wrote about Arian in 2002 in a post for Horowitzwatch. If you have a moment, give it a read.

If you haven't caught up on the news in the last 24 hours, check out the New York Times, The Miami Herald, or The Chicago Tribune. See also: a helpful Q&A;, a list of the charges and verdicts, a brief timeline of events in the case, and some reactions to the verdicts, all from the St. Petersburg Times. For some Sami-in-his own-words, check out this page from the conservative civil liberties group FIRE.

If you take the time to read even a couple of the links above you will, unfortunately, be better informed than many of the bloggers who have so far weighed in on the verdicts.

At the risk of repeating myself, let me just emphasize my earlier sentiments as expressed on Horowitzwatch: I don't like this Sami Al Arian guy - at all. He is an extremist Palestinian nationalist whose rhetoric has often been overtly racist, and he has associated with a great many people who are certainly terrorists. Whatever genuinely charitable and positive endeavors he may have engaged in over the years, they do not impress me as balance to his repugnant politics.

Al Arian was tried in a high profile case that was seen as a test for the new government powers granted by the Patriot Act, and the complete failure of the prosecution to get even a single guilty verdict out of a 51-count indictment can only be seen as a disaster for the government.

If only the prosecutors could have stacked the jury with bloggers. Many had already independently determined that Sami Al Arian was guilty.

Dan Darling of Winds of Change calls the verdicts "disgraceful", and in a later comment claims that there was so much evidence that he must have been guilty. What Dan doesn't seem to realize is that most of the evidence presented by the government occurred before the 1995 passage of the law that made support for Palestinian Islamic Jihad a crime. The prosecution presented a purely circumstantial case that relied heavily on pre-1995 evidence.

In other words, if Al Arian had done the things after 1995 that he had done before 1995 he would have broken the law. But Al Arian appears to have changed his activities after the '95 law was passed. Dan Darling didn't take the time to research the facts before he declared the man guilty of terrorism. I'd call that, well, "disgraceful".

This dipshit, at a blog called Sister Toldjah, cites video of Al Arian at a 1991 Cleveland event where Sami Al Arian can be seen and heard saying:

Despite all difficulties, the Palestinian people have decided to continue: to continue to confront, to continue to resist, to continue to endure, to set an example for all people and Muslims around them. Thus is the way of struggle. Thus is the way of giving. Thus is the way of sacrifice. Thus is the way of jihad. Thus is the way of martyrdom. Thus is the way of blood, because this is the path to heaven.

This quote is proof enough for Sister Toldjah that Al Arian is guilty of terrorism. By this standard our prisons would be filled with Neo-Nazis, redneck racists, and quite a few Fag-Hating/abortion-doctor-targeting Fundamentalist Christians in no time, and there would be no room left for Jee-Hadies.

My favorite, by far, is a real piece of work named Debbie Schlussel. Debbie appears to be another Ann Coulter wannabe, accompanying her wingnut rants with photos which she clearly thinks present her as a glamorous and sexy Conservo-Babe of some sort. This is a phenomenon that deserves its own post, but we'll not digress today.

Debbie seems to think that Al Arian was so damn guilty that the only explanations for his acquittal must be prosecutorial incompetence and the possible presence of an "O.J.-style" jury. Stupid people who have somehow managed to become federal prosecutors, and too many Brown People on the jury - that's her take on it.

Wow.

By the way, you can join Debbie's fan club! Here's my favorite part of her Yahoo! Club page:

To paraphrase "Wayne's World's" Wayne and Garth, if she were President, Debbie Schlussel would be Babe-raham Lincoln.

And what a talented writer Babe-Raham is! Check out this graph from her Al Arian post:

Krigsman and company threw in everything but the bathwater in this case, putting several jurors to sleep frequently during the case. She took five months to present her case, when it was strong and could have been presented in a much shorter time with less extraneous matter. The defense didn't even make a case. They didn't have to. Krigsman did it for them.

Threw in everything but the bathwater? WTF? And if this stuff just seems to get better to you all the time, check out Debbie's Homophobic Film Reviews!

David Horowitz's Frontpagemag.com has weighed in today, too. Resident nutbag Joe Kaufman attended the trial, and in spite of the jury's verdict believes that Al Arian should be locked up anyway.

But is deportation for this man justice? If that were the case, Sami al-Arian would have been deported long ago. No, al-Arian should remain behind bars. Regardless of what the outcome of the trial was, he was guilty of being a leader in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist entity he co-founded.

Atta boy, Joe! Let's show 'em all what Real Democracy looks like!

OK, no more picking on the Short Bus Kids.

Here's the bottom line: The federal government, with the power of the Patriot Act, tried to convict a legal permanent resident of the U.S. for crimes which a jury seems to have decided amounted to guilt by association and protected free speech. In fact, the defense seems to have made no effort to tone down the extreme nature of Al Arian's political views, as this page from their website recounting closing statements indicates. Al Arian's attorney didn't even feel the need to present a defense, so confident was he that the government had failed to prove their case.

Sami Al Arian remains in jail while the feds decide whether or not to re-try him on the counts that were deadlocked, and he still faces charges related to immigration violations. I won't miss him if it turns out that he fucked up enough on the immigration front that the government can rightfully deport him, but for today, I'm happy that a US jury found the wisdom to uphold freedom of speech and association for everyone. The fact that Sami Al Arian's speech and associations were both political and unpopular makes this case an even more important test of our system.

If not deported, Sami Al Arian should be released so he can, I hope, go fuck himself.

See also: Atrios & TalkLeft, and Huff Post on the MSM's silence in the wake of the verdict.

UPDATE: The LAT says the Patriot Act can't make up for a weak case, while the Miami Herald calls the verdict a victory for the rule of law in an editorial. Mike Deeson reports that insiders say the the trial cost taxpayers 30 million dollars. Bob Wright discusses the positive impact (comment at 16:24) of demonstrating that a Muslim can still get a fair trial in the US.

|link| Posted 5:14 PM by Brian Linse

The Kaus Paradox

Bob Wright finds the heart of the paradox that is Mickey Kaus in a segment of the latest dialogue at Bloggingheads. Later in the segment linked above, Kaus notes the unique ability of blogs to cooperate in a more effective way than an open source site like Wikipedia. His example cites the work of JustOneMinute and firedoglake on the Plame leak story.

On the subject of Kausian paradox, The Mickster doesn't let us down over at Kausfiles as he continues to push the truly irresponsible idea that the Plame outing may not have "caused any damage". There's a hint of the Washington insider mind set to Kaus's position here that is not often a feature of his work. Maybe a few more years in LA will cure him of that, but in the meantime it should be enough to point out that ideally, we will never know what, if any, damage was done, since to do so would further hinder national security. And regardless of how many of the Kool Kids in DC knew about Plame's status there is a simple principle at issue here: should the White House be allowed to play politics with national security? Hopefully, not even Mickey Kaus is cynical enough to think that there is any wiggle room on that.