Andrew Breitbart's Dangerous Dipshits

The single greatest disappointment I have about the political blogosphere is that it never lived up to its potential. When I started, I hoped that it could be a place to find unique and interesting perspectives on the day's events that you wouldn't find in the dreaded mainstream media. Unfortunately, what ended up happening is that too many bloggers decided that they wanted to be media stars and started emulating what they see and hear in the mainstream. Because of that, the blogosphere is even dumber than cable news ... it's talk radio stupid.

With some exceptions, the biggest political bloggers tend to be lying, crazy, stupid, or all three. Like talk radio hosts, you never see them argue against the passions and convictions of their audience, or challenge them in any way. They reinforce what their readers already believe and let the hits roll in. Some get their wish and actually wind up with book contracts or radio and TV gigs. I'm not going to say that it isn't incredible marketing, it's just deeply cynical.

Most cynical of all is Andrew Breitbart, a blogger who wound up being a big deal in the Tea Party movement, despite the fact that he doesn't appear to know or believe in much of anything. He pretends to be an outsider, but he's about inside the big media world as any blogger is likely going to get. And if you trust anything you see on his zillion blogs after the ACORN and Shirley Sherrod incidents, I don't know what to tell you other than I hope you enjoy your stay here, because you're likely to believe anything.

Anyhow, Breitbart's lunatic "foreign policy" blog, Big Peace, has a number of people posting there that have no idea what they're talking about. I find it funny, so I make it a daily stop. Foreign policy is a major interest of mine, and seeing people mangle it beyond recognition always makes me smile. There are any number of foreign policy journals that comprehensively address the subject in a serious way. Big Peace isn't one of them. But if you like your analysis childish and factually incorrect, I can't recommend Big Peace highly enough.

This morning, the Breitbart minions are prattling incomprehensibly on and on about WikiLeaks, which I wrote about on Friday. There are no fewer than three posts on the topic at Big Peace, and it's some of the craziest shit I've ever read. There's something about the combination of ignorance and insanity that always makes my day. You can read the posts here, here and here.

Peter Schweizer kicks things of by missing the point completely. I haven't personally gone through everything in the quarter of a million documents dumped yesterday, nor am I inclined to. But there are two stories here and not very many people are paying attention to either of them.

First, you'd think that the U.S government would know by now that nothing stays secret for very long. After all, the 1970s existed for no other reason than proving it. That being the case, you would expect the State Department to be more careful about what they do and say. They haven't.

Second, the government seems determined to see their dirty laundry become public, given the way they protect it. Between the Iraq and Afghanistan papers, combined with yesterday's State Department leak, the government has lost around a million documents in about a year. Who has access to that amount of sensitive stuff and why? This is about a lot more than inter-departmental information sharing, this is rank carelessness and amateurism. WikiLeaks might be exploiting that, but they certainly aren't the cause of it.

Mr. Schweizer, of course, wants WikiLeaks stopped, by means fair or foul - a common thread on Breitbart's and other Republican blogs when Julian Assange and company publish things that they don't like. He misses another point regarding diplomatic secrecy when he says "If we can’t keep these discussions secret, even our closest friends will no longer be candid with us."

That's not the problem as much as bad-mouthing America's friends and allies in diplomatic cables after these discussions is. Some of the characterizations of sitting foreign leaders in these papers are stunning and would themselves tend to minimize the trust of those leaders in America.

Brad Schaeffer, a derivatives broker, simply wants Assange killed. That's something else I see a lot of on "conservative" blogs and undercuts the conservatism of those bloggers dramatically. Expanding the interpretation of an already questionable legal theory regarding unlawful combatants to the outer realms of logic is a lot of things, but it tends to be more liberal than conservative. Having said that, these people believe that the U.S government can assassinate American citizens extra judicially, regardless of what the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution actually says.

Mr. Assange is an Australian citizen. If you're looking to shore up the trust of close American allies in the U.S government, may I suggest that not murdering their citizens is a great place to start? Murdering him on the streets of Europe, where he is known to live, might also prove to be diplomatically problematic.

Most importantly, when everyone is designated as an unlawful enemy combatant, the term loses all meaning quickly. It also sets a precedent for foreign governments to kill American citizens that they don't like absent the protections of due process. Another common Bretbart lie is that the United States can do whatever it wants without consequences. Life, as I'm sure you know, doesn't work like that. Given the number of foreign nationals and leaders that the Kennedy administration plotted to assassinate, I'm surprised that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't forced to wait in line to assassinate Kennedy. There is such a thing as blowback, you know?

More importantly, if leaks of this sort are major threats to the national security - a dubious proposition at best - why stop at killing Assange? By the looks of it, the American government is riddled with "traitors" who pass the material on to WikiLeaks. Why not kill them without trial and waterboard anyone that might have helped them? And why do the newspaper and TV news editors that disseminate the information get off so easily? Shouldn't they be targeted for death? If not, why not? The information either poses a national security threat or it doesn't.

James Carafano wants to try a whole bunch of folks for treason, thereby proving his unfamiliarity with the Constitution. There hasn't been a treason prosecution in the United States since World War II because Article III makes them impractical. Since treason is one of two crimes specifically mentioned in the Constitution (the other is bribery) and the only one to be legally defined by it, one can assume that the Founders took it pretty seriously. Article III, Section 3 reads as follows;

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

As you would imagine, most traitors don't perform their deeds before an audience that could later testify against them at a trial. Fewer still are prepared to confess in open court. Besides, the Espionage Act of 1917 became a catch-all for crimes that could otherwise be defined as treason. But it's amazing that Mr. Carafano is either utterly ignorant of his own national Constitution or so willing to ignore its binding requirements.

Carafano also wants American allies to attain U.S legal aims for them by prosecuting any of their citizens associated with WikiLeaks, which is almost too silly to bother commenting about. Under which laws? As a Canadian, I somehow doubt that if I were to be peddling American documents, I would be violating Canadian law. There are likely exceptions to that, but they would be almost exclusive to Canadian intelligence or military operations. Moreover, why would foreign countries go to the time and expense of launching prosecutions because the United States is singularly unable to keep its own secrets secret?

What Mr. Carafano seems to want is an end run around the Supreme Court's decision in New York Times Co v. United States. As a result of that ruling, WikiLeaks itself probably couldn't be prosecuted, just as no other media outlet that published the story could be. So he wants trials in jurisdictions where New York Times Co doesn't apply. However, I don't suppose that he would support the foreign prosecutions of American bloggers or journalists who write things that violate the laws of other countries.

Yesterday's Wikileaks dump hurts American national security only because the United States was so careless in what it said in diplomatic cables and because it was so lax about the physical security of those cables. For the most part, the material was classified because it was embarrassing. From what I've seen, none of the information poses a security threat by itself. Andrew Beitbart and his Big Minions just want to pretend it does.

I read Breitbart so you don't have to. Chances are that you might have actually learned something that way, which I can guarantee you wouldn't happen otherwise.


Update: This post hasn't even published yet, and another Breitbart dipshit put up something factually wrong. This one is named Diana West, and she's determined to prove that she doesn't know anything about Syria.

Here's what she has to say;

Another example: Leaked cables confirm that Syria supplies Hezbollah. This not only underscores (again) Syria’s status as a jihad-terror-supporting state, but deals yet another blow to the canard that Sunnis (Syria) don’t connive with Shiites (Hezbollah) against infidels (the rest of us). Then there’s Pakistan, which, we now learn, isn’t cooperating with our (formerly) secret plan to secure its nuke materials. (Which should make us wonder what $18 billion in “aid” to a sharia state really buys these days.)

While Syria is a predominantly Sunni country, the ruling Assad family and most of the upper echelons of the military and intelligence services and the Ba'ath Party are actually minority Alawites. The Alawites are actually an offshoot of mainstream Shia Islam.

Not only is that widely known, it's easy for anyone to check. If you're going to comment on the religious inclinations of a given government, it might be a good idea to know what they are. If the Breitbart crew are getting things like that wrong, what in the fuck are they getting right?

Let's Arrest Everybody! What Could Go Wrong?

I was just checking my archives, and Jesus, did I ever write a lot about the sad, strange saga of David Chen this fall. For some background to my newer readers, or if you just love me so much that you can't help but read my musings over and over again, go here, here, here, here and here.

If you're too lazy to read through all of that, I'll recap. Mr. Chen and others detained a career criminal roughly an hour after seventy-odd dollars worth of plants were shoplifted from Chen's store on Dundas Street here in Toronto. The thief, Anthony Bennett, was chased by Chen and his boxcutter-wielding employees, tied up and thrown into a van until police arrived.

The police charged the Lucky Moose employees because the arrest was illegal under Section 494 of the Criminal Code of Canada, which governs citizens arrests. Weapons Dangerous charges related to the boxcutters were dropped before trial. On October 29, Mr. Justice Ramez Khaw acquitted Mr. Chen, in my opinion, in open defiance of the facts of the case and the law and based his judgement on conclusions that would be inapplicable in any similar circumstance. The Chen case stirred populist outrage in the city, and federal Members of Parliament - including Prime Minister Harper - were not only openly commenting on an ongoing criminal case, but proposing changes to Section 494 that would make it easier to effect a citizen's arrest.

I oppose that. I don't believe that any good can come of granting broader powers of arrest and detention to citizens who aren't trained and are largely ignorant of the law. I'm of the strong opinion that this lead to increased personal injury (including possibly avoidable deaths), civil rights violations, and a completely preventable congestion of the civil courts. The bills proposed by Toronto MPs Olivia Chow and Joe Volpe and supported by Harper are chock full of bad ideas and unintended, but easily predicted, consequences.

As it happens, people who are trained in powers of arrest under the Criminal Code not infrequently make stupid mistakes. We learned this yesterday in the case of Gentles v. Intelligarde International Incorporated, 2010 ONCA 797.

I'm familiar with Intelligarde by reputation, having worked with a number of their former employees when I was in loss prevention. I know that, at least in 2003-05, all of their new hires went through extensive training that lasted between one and two weeks. I also know that that they licenced by the province to use handcuffs and, given their contracts, aren't afraid to use them.

The sections from the judgement posted at Morton's Musings aren't particularly clear about the complete background of the case, and I can't find the complete Gentiles ruling online. Therefore, you should be warned that I'll have to assume a couple of things here and there as I comment on the case.

59] The security guards took the initiative to approach the two appellants. As the trial judge states in para. 3, "The security guards were in the courtyard and spoke to the [appellants] as they passed." It is uncontested that Gentles and Francis were merely walking towards Gentles' apartment building, a building with a locked front door. As the trial judge puts it in the passage above, the appellants were "questioned". The jury's answer to question 2 indicates that Collins and Barnes asked Gentles and Francis if they "live here". Gentles and Francis' response to being questioned was, as the trial judge put it, "a vulgar and totally uninformative refusal to answer." Collins testified that Gentles responded by saying "FU, we do not have to tell you f'ing anything."

60] Vulgarity aside, the statement that Collins attributed to Gentles is an accurate statement of the law. Gentles and Francis were not required by the TPA or any other legal principle to respond to the question whether they lived there. The Intelligarde respondents' counsel concedes, as he must, that while security guards have the right to ask questions, tenants have the right to refuse to answer them. Since that is so, the refusal of an individual not recognized by security guards to identify himself as a resident provides no reason to think that he is on the premises in contravention of s. 2 of the TPA.

62] The next circumstance is that, rather than respecting the young men's right to refuse to answer their questions, the security guards, as the trial judge put it, "pressed" them to respond. The further response they received was more vulgarity and the adoption of an aggressive stance.

[63] It is difficult to appreciate the logic that there is reason to believe an individual is likely to be a trespasser because, after initially refusing to answer questions, he maintains that position when "pressed" to answer. The tacit assumption seems to be that residents who stand on their rights and refuse to answer will eventually relent when "pressed" to do so. Such an assumption is not grounded in reason. Additional rounds of questions and refusals add nothing to the legal principle that individuals can stand on their rights and refuse to answer the questions of security guards.

[64] Nor can the escalation of vulgarity and aggressiveness attributed to Gentles and Francis contribute to the required reasonable grounds. It seems to me that the one thing the security guards did have a reasonable basis to believe, having encountered vulgarity and belligerence upon first "questioning" the appellants, was that they would encounter more vulgarity and belligerence if they persisted in pressing for answers.

[65] Gentles and Francis may have been uncooperative, vulgar and belligerent. However, the security guards required some objective basis to believe that Gentles and Francis were uncooperative, vulgar and belligerent trespassers rather than uncooperative, vulgar and belligerent residents.

I'm assuming that Gentles v. Intelligarde is an appeal of a civil lawsuit resulting from a false arrest. Mr. Morton offers no background, nor can I find any online. From the Court's citations, I'm also assuming that Messers Gentles and Francis were detained or had their freedom of movement otherwise restricted.

In any event, these are highly trained people who are schooled in their powers of arrest and are designated "persons of authority" under Ontario law. And they made some pretty basic mistakes. Luckily from them, security guards have little in the way of assets, so they weren't sued personally, and Intelligarde carries liability insurance for exactly that purpose.

That being the case, what happens when you loosen the restrictions in Section 494? Does anyone have expanded powers of arrest for summary offenses - which shoplifting (technically Theft Under $5,000) almost always is - or does Ontario's "person of authority" designation still apply? Will the Section 494 distinction between indictable and summary offenses be repealed, as they almost certainly would have to be? How do you expect the average citizen or retail employee to know the difference? How would civil liability be determined if 494 is amended?

Gentles and Francis were well within their rights as Canadian citizens and were presumably arrested by private citizens (Remember, security guards are not police officers and have no legal authority that any other citizen doesn't.) Depending on the circumstances of the case, the Intelligarde employees could have criminally charged, just as Mr. Chen was this year.

There are any number of practical and legal considerations that should be addressed before 494 is amended. However, in the populist outrage arising from the Chen matter, they haven't been and likely won't be until something goes terribly wrong.


Note: Again, please remember that this post is written under a number of assumptions that I have made because I don't have the full record of Gentles v Intelligarde in front of me. If I'm mistaken on any of the material facts of the case, I'll be more than happy to correct them and so note the corrections. Also, if anyone can find the full judgement online, I'd appreciate reading it in full.

Special thanks to Morton's Musings: Canadian Law and Policy

Update: Thanks to your friend and mine, LJB, the appellate ruling can be read here.

Let's All Join Hands And Vote For Raymi Again!

You know what the single biggest problem with the blogosphere is, other than not everyone is me? The fact that there are innumerable beautiful women blogging and almost none of them get naked, which means I have to seduce them.

Oh, I've done it time and time again. But it's hard work, given that I'm ugly, broke and not that bright. I'm also getting old - old in body, spirit and mind. I'm just really lucky that I have a massive wang and can do push-ups with my tongue. Otherwise, I don't know what I'd do.

Well, the lovely and talented Raymi the Minx - perhaps the greatest and most famous of Toronto's bloggers - gets naked without even being asked (Link super-NSFW). It's a Christ-like sacrifice she makes every day to make our lives just a little bit better. I still can't believe that no one has founded a church devoted to her worship yet. I'd do it, but I'm crippled by laziness and compulsive masturbation.

When last I brought Raymi to your attention, I asked you all to vote for her in a local blogger poll. You did, and she left a comment telling me that I'm awesome, which is incredibly observant. Not only do I like that in a girl, it makes my testicles rattle like maracas, just like the ones Jerome Green played on those great old Bo Diddley records. And, as any girl will tell you, there's nothing sexier in a man that that.

Anyhow, Raymi's vying to win the People's Choice award in the Canadian Weblog Awards - the very people who named me only the second funniest Canadian blogger two years ago. Even though she's kicking ass mightily, she'd like you to vote for her and so would I.

The last time I helped out, she said I was awesome. But that was only a local poll, and this one's national. So I figure if I bring a lot of votes her way, she'll let me sew my face between her beautiful buttocks (also NSFW). After all, Christmas is coming and I've been nice this year.

Just don't tell my girlfriend, okay? She hits me sometimes.


Update: Welcome Raymi readers! There sure are a lot of you, aren't there? Hopefully you're all just as hot.

Doug Schoen's Fairy Tale Economics

Great. Another post about the American debt crisis. You folks have no idea how tired I'm getting of writing these. It's exhausting and it ultimately isn't going to make a difference.

One of the things that I've constantly reiterated over the last year or so is that even the most stalwart Tea Party members aren't really serious about even reducing the deficit in a serious way, let alone eliminating it and addressing America's truly awesome debt. I know this by looking over their (albeit limited) policy proposals and listening to their rhetoric.

If you ever want to have fun, suggest cutting just the rate of growth of Social Security or Medicare to your average Tea Party supporter, who tends to be fairly old. You'll see heads explode rather quickly, more so if you throw cuts to the Pentagon and tax increases into the mix. No, those folks really believe that you can maintain or expand those programs while further cutting taxes and still shrink the deficit. They actually think that banning about $50 billion in earmark spending is going to somehow shrink a $1.5 trillion deceit.

In fairness, the Teapublicans aren't alone. Last week, a Wall Street Journal - NBC News poll found that 70% of Americans don't want entitlements cut, even though that's where the unfunded liabilities that will bleed America dry actually are. You could eliminate the Department of Defense completely and you still won't save enough to pay for the unchecked growth of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Having said that, defense - entirely dependent as it is on U.S foreign policy - is the very definition of discretionary spending and a good place to start looking for cuts. But you ultimately have no other choice but to reduce and reform the outlays that come with entitlement programs. More importantly, you have to do it in a way that doesn't create a moral hazard bailout trap, like President Bush's "private" Social Security account proposal would have.

The odds of that happening before the international bond market forces Congress to do it are somewhere between slim and none. It's just as likely that Sarah Palin would not only become president, but actually be a great president. It's so statistically unlikely that I can't believe that I'm wasting my time even mentioning it.

Instead of being serious about their national future, most American political types are busying themselves selling the fantasy that they can grow their way out of debt to a public that has no interest whatsoever in the truth. This is mostly a Republican delusion, but it is gaining some currency among the more cowardly elements of the Democratic Party.

Although it seems like it was just yesterday that I pointed out that Democratic pollster Doug Schoen was born wrong, it was actually last Wednesday. On the Daily Beast this morning, Schoen full-throatedly endorsed the "grow your way out of debt" plan. More importantly, he didn't appear to be drunk or kidding.

The theory works like this: If you have a Social Security payroll tax holiday, extend the Bush tax cuts for a few years, and expand a bunch of small business oriented tax credits, you grow the economy to a point where the deficit disappears.

The only problem with that theory is that it's wrong. Mr. Schoen doesn't propose spending cuts, or even a freeze at the current astronomical levels. He just expands tax cuts and credits that further deprive the government of revenue, which is ultimately the cause of deficits in the first place. Just like private individuals, the government goes into debt when it spends more money than it takes in. That debt can only be addressed in one of two ways; by cutting spending or increasing revenue.

Schoen doesn't propose either, at least not in the short or medium term. He seems to believe that the tax cuts and credits with spur the economy enough to increase revenue through a larger tax base. When John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush tried that, it was called supply-side economics and it just created bigger deficits. As Alan Greenspan recently admitted, tax cuts never pay for themselves, let alone grow the economy enough to raise the revenue necessary to address existing deficits.

For Schoen's plan to even come close to being realistic, the American economy would have to grow at an annual rate that it hasn't seen since the mid-80s. And things have changed greatly since the Reagan administration. For example, the United States had a manufacturing base and trade surpluses then. It doesn't now. Since the Clinton administration, America has been a consumption economy. Unfortunately, the American consumer is even more underwater than his government is.

If history is any indication, American households are going to be conservative in ways that they haven't been since the Great Depression. Just as was the case seventy years ago, their main priority is likely to be discharging personal debt rather than buying new stuff. Given the collapse of the housing a credit markets over the last three years, they can't borrow more even if they wanted to. If the American people weren't mightily spooked by the Great Recession, they haven't been paying attention and there's probably no saving them.

It stands to reason that you're not going to have economic growth if consumers aren't consuming. You can have all of the business tax cuts you can imagine, but they'll be worse than worthless if those businesses don't have a customer base. That's why I'm beginning to think that this might be a structural recession, where unemployment doesn't come down significantly for several years, irrespective of what the federal government does.

Mr. Schoen, like virtually everyone else in America, thinks that the United States exists in a bubble. Every other country with a debt issue is engaging in austerity economics, regardless of their unemployment rates. Taxes are going up and spending is going down. They are doing this because they recognize the unavoidable laws of mathematics apply them.

That's not happening in the United States. From the right of the political spectrum to the left, they think that reality can be ignored and wishful thinking will fix what are now structural problems in the American economy.

And that's not going to end well.

On WikiLeaks

As a general rule, I oppose government secrecy. As a matter of fact, one of the central tenants of conservatism is the distrust of government. For that reason, principled conservatives should oppose the power of democratic governments to keep secrets from its citizens except in the most extraordinary circumstances.

While it's true that some secrecy is necessary in both diplomacy and war, government tends to expand that necessity to truly ridiculous degrees. In the 1990s, for example, the United States still had documents from the First World War highly classified. Was there a likely threat from a resurgent Kaiser? I, and most other rational people, would think not.

More often, secrets are kept from the people by their government because they might be embarrassing to that government. President Nixon's "secret bombing" of Cambodia certainly wasn't a secret from the people of Cambodia or the North Vietnamese military that it targeted. The Soviets and Chinese knew about it. But it was unknown to the American people for nearly two years.

The Nixon administration is a classic example of the consequences of government secrecy. In 1971, the Pentagon Papers, a classified study of the Vietnam War during the Kennedy-Johnson years, was leaked to the New York Times and Washington Post by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon and RAND corporation analyst.

When the Times started publishing the papers, Nixon was initially more than happy to allow it, given that they tended to embarrass the previous Democratic administrations. His mind was changed when National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger pointed out that the leak could jeopardize the then-secret negotiations with the hyper-secretive People's Republic of China. The "China Opening" was, in my opinion, a proper exercise of government secrecy as it likely would not have survived if it was negotiated openly.

Attempting to preserve the China intuitive, Nixon went to the Supreme Court to stop the publication of the Pentagon Papers. The government was rebuffed by a vote of 6-3 in New York Times Co. v United States. At that point, Nixon sought to discredit Ellsberg through extra-legal means and stop further leaks by creating the White House Plumbers Unit. As we now know, the Plumbers went far afield of their original mandate, setting in motion the events that became the Watergate scandal.

The Clinton administration, under pressure from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, established a process to declassify non-essential material. However, that was reversed by the second Bush administration, which gutted the congressionally-passed Presidential Records Act by executive order. Under Bush, the number of materials that were classified skyrocketed. More importantly, the Obama Justice Department has sought to defend the Bush legacy in the courts by invoking the doctrine of state secrecy repeatedly.

And that's where WikiLeaks enters the picture.

WikiLeaks was the darling of most conservatives in 2009, when it exposed the East Anglia global warming e-mails. They became less beloved when their focus turned to the American prosecution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As I mentioned earlier, there is necessary secrecy and unnecessary secrecy. In their Iraqi and Afghan document dumps, WikiLeaks managed to penetrate both. By naming American collaborators, Assange and company definitely endangered lives and, to some extent, discredited themselves. Having said that, leaks like the "Collateral Murder" video are a valuable public service. As the great Dan Carlin has mentioned repeatedly, a public cannot reasonably support or oppose a war unless and until they see it. Since Vietnam, the United States government has sanitized war journalism to the point that it's essentially meaningless.

Now WikiLeaks has gotten its hands on State Department cables, which even Foggy Bottom admits could be disastrous.

U.S. embassies around the world are warning allies that WikiLeaks might be poised to release classified cables that could negatively impact relations by revealing sensitive assessments and exposing U.S. sources, a State Department spokesman said Thursday.

The State Department has prepared for the possible release - which WikiLeaks has said would be seven times larger than the Iraq files released last month - by reviewing thousands of diplomatic cables and "assessing the potential consequences of the public release of these documents," spokesman P.J. Crowley said.

Crowley said State does not know "exactly what WikiLeaks has or what they plan to do," but the consequences to American interests could be severe. The cables, for instance, could reveal that senior government officials in other countries are the sources of embarrassing information about the inner workings of those governments, thus making it more difficult for the State Department to obtain such intelligence in the future.

Again, I hope that Assange is more careful in redacting potentially lethal information than he has been in the past. Any sources that are cooperating what are likely CIA operations (Most CIA stations are located in U.S embassies are necessarily committing espionage against their countries at best, and treason at worst. This is the kind of thing that could very well get people killed.

On the other hand, more information is always better than less. And a lot of the document dump has appears to deal with U.S machinations against its allies, which I find to be of particular interest.

The cables could also show that allies sometimes take private actions that directly contradict publicly declared policies. The London-based daily al-Hayat reported that WikiLeaks is planning to release files that show Turkey has helped al-Qaeda in Iraq - and that the United States has helped the PKK, a Kurdish rebel organization. The documents reportedly suggest that the U.S. has supported the PKK, which has been waging a separatist war against Turkey since 1984 and has been classified by the State Department as a terrorist organization since 1979.

If the United States has been aiding the PKK, that's important in that it undermines completely the logic behind the War on Terror and that it is in any way designed to protect U.S allies. There are few closer allies than the Turks and the U.S itself has classified the PKK as terrorists. It is also thought that the PKK was supported by Saddam Hussein, although they deny it. In any event, the Turks have the right to know if the CIA is supporting terrorists against them, and if they are, it could put the alleged Turkish aid to al-Qaeda in a new light.

Then there are relevant matters closer to home;

U.S. ambassador to Canada David Jacobson has already phoned Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon to inform him of the matter, the Foreign Affairs department told the Canadian Press. Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Melissa Lantsman said the Canadian Embassy in Washington is "currently engaging" with the U.S. State Department on the matter.

In Australia, the Department of Foreign Affairs and other agencies in Canberra, including the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, met to discuss the leaks, which a senior Australian government official said had prompted a "strong measure of concern," according to the Australian newspaper. "The whole thing is pretty big," the official said.

If there's something there that the State Department fears is going to "create tension" between the United States and Canada, Canadians have a right to know what it is. If nothing else, more conspiratorially-minded Canadians could make it out to be worse than it is, suggesting perhaps that there are CIA operations underway in Canada in violation to an understanding between our governments.


Ultimately, if there are American actions that would damage relations with their allies, the wiser course of action would have been not to engage in those actions in the first place. But if they're doing it, I can't really sympathize with them if they become public.

You would think that the U.S government would have learned its lesson after the exposure of the CIA's Family Jewels, the Church and Pike Committees and Iran-Contra. The lesson of course being that you had better be damn sure that the means by which you stop something isn't actually worse than that which you seek to stop. Because it's all going to be public eventually, and you have to explain it to the American people.

Blaming WikiLeaks is simplistic and ignores history. The fact of the matter is that there's always been a WikiLeaks in one form or another, and there always will be. Internet technology is just going to make them faster, more efficient, harder to censor and incredibly comprehensive. Instead of concentrating its energy on keeping secrets, something the United States government has never been especially good at, it should try to avoid doing things that it can't explain or justify to its own citizens.


For a more comprehensive discussion on WikiLeaks, download and listening to these episodes of Common Sense with Dan Carlin here and here. You can also subscribe to the show, which I would highly recommend, for free at the iTunes store.

Happy Thanksgiving, America!

Enjoy your turkey ...

"Do You Know Where You Are? You're in Litigation, Baby"

Axl Rose is a lot like Sarah Palin. Although both leave behind them a long trail of almost unspeakable fuck-ups, neither is especially good at taking responsibility for them. To understand Governor Palin, you need to read her first book, Going Rogue, to learn that everything was Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace's fault. In Axl's case, just follow the lawsuits.

Famous people spend a lot of time in court. Specious lawsuits come with the territory. I get that. But after spending 15 years in hiding, can The Artist Formerly Known as William Bailey still be considered famous. It takes him a decade and a half to finish a mediocre record and he's plays to crowds half the size that he used to, when he plays at all. If he wasn't fraudulently calling his solo career Guns N' Roses, I don't think that anyone would know anything about it. But he spends more time in litigation than your average celebrity.

Everybody has their favorite Axl lawsuit. Most people liked the one where his ex-wife, Erin Everly, and his ex-girlfriend, Stephanie Seymore, joined forces to sue him for beating the crap out of them. Until this morning, my favorite was the conflagration between Rose and his former manager Irving Azoff. I happen to believe that Azoff; the nexus between Frontline Management, Ticketmaster and Live Nation; is the living personification of everything that's wrong with the music business. On the other hand, Axl Rose is a fucking nutter. Litigation like that is endlessly entertaining and it's what keeps me alive.

But now there's a better one. Axl's suing the makers of Guitar Hero III. Why, you ask? Because he doesn't like Slash very much, that's why.

The Guns N' Roses frontman has just filed a $20 million lawsuit against "Guitar Hero" maker Activision claiming its use of the GNR song "Welcome to the Jungle" violated a deal not to include any imagery of ex-guitarist Saul Hudson (aka Slash) in the popular game.

In an amusing lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday, Rose and his Black Frog Music claim Activision Blizzard fraudulently induced Rose into authorizing "Jungle" for use in "Guitar Hero III" by telling him during negotiations that it wouldn't feature any reference to the former GNR member or his subsequent band Velvet Revolver.

" began spinning a web of lies and deception to conceal its true intentions to not only feature Slash and VR prominently in 'GH III,' but also promote the game by emphasizing and reinforcing an association between Slash and Guns N Roses and the band's song 'Welcome to the Jungle,'" the complaint states.

When Rose found out that a Slash-like character and Velvet Revolver songs would be included in "GHII," he said he immediately rescinded the authorization for "Jungle," but Activision allegedly lied and told him the inclusion was just for the purposes of a trade show.

Then "GHIII" came out and its box cover featured "an animated depiction of Slash, with his signature black top hat, long dark curly hair, dark sunglasses and nose-piercing," according to the complaint. In shot, the former GNR guitarist was all over "GH III," enraging Rose.

This is more complicated than it looks, because it focuses on how bands are actually incorporated businesses. Each member of a band is a partner in the business, unless that band is like the current Guns N' Roses, where everyone but Axl is an employee. As is true in most businesses, when a partner exits the venture, the remaining partners buy his stake in the partnership.

However, musical groups are more complicated than most businesses because of the importance of song publishing, which is traditionally where the money is. Publishing is yet another partnership, separate and apart from the band partnership. And no one in their right mind gives up their publishing rights. Let's say the Rolling Stones broke up tomorrow. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards would still have to deal with one another because they would remain equal partners in their publishing business. If you wanted to include, say, "Gimmie Shelter" on your video game or movie soundtrack, Mick and Keef would have to agree to licence it.

If you look at the songwriting credits for "Welcome to the Jungle", you find that they're equally divided between Axl and Slash. Most Gn'R songs are divided compositions between Rose and some variation of Slash, Duff McKagan and Izzy Stradlin'. Accordingly, they would, in theory, remain partners in the publishing end of Guns N' Roses.

However, there's some controversy surrounding the ownership of original band's publishing. Five years ago, Axl merged the publishing with Sanctuary Music (which at the time also served as his management) without telling Slash and Duff. He may or may not have also pocketed their royalties. Slash and Duff, not being as stupid as they look, filed suit federal court. So far as I'm aware, the matter has yet to be resolved.

So that's one question that would have to addressed: Does Axl have the legal right to be negotiating publishing matters by himself? Yes, he did create Black Frog Music, but does it legally claim sole ownership of the GN'R catalogue? If not, the Activision suit is baseless.

But the funniest part of the saga is further down in the Reuters story;

"This lawsuit is about protecting Guns N' Roses and 'Welcome to the Jungle,' and is about holding Activision accountable for its misuse of these incredibly valuable assets," says Rose lawyer Skip Miller, "The relief we are seeking is disgorgement of profits and compensatory and punitive damages."

Axl has an odd way of "protecting" Guns N' Roses. Everybody but him left the band, and he hired studio guys to spend 15 years making a record that was only as good as the worst parts of Use Your Illusion I and II. He's late for concerts when he bothers to show up at all, and the 2002 tour was killed by promoters after two no-shows on Axl's part that resulted in riots. And that's ust during the years of the most recent version of GN'R. He was doing violently crazy shit during the 80's and 90's, too. Axl might somehow own the legal rights to the name "Guns N' Roses", but he's done a shitty job of protecting it.

If anything, Axl should thank Activision for openly associating Slash's image with both the song and Guns N' Roses. Even though he hasn't done anything worthwhile in years, people at least still think of him fondly, which can't be said of Axl.

On the other hand, seeing how the publishing issues work out will be fascinating for geeks like me.

The Most Dangerous Game

One of my main objections to continuing military operations in Afghanistan is that there has been little, if any, planning on how to prevent the war from spilling into Pakistan. That the fragile Zadari government has been able to largely quell domestic dissent over U.S drone attacks is perhaps the most surprising development of the last two years.

Unfortunately, that isn't going to last forever. While the drone attacks have killed a good number of al-Qaeda and Taliban figures, they have done little to wind up the fighting in Afghanistan. Indeed, it seems as though the enemy's command and control has moved closer to Pakistan's major cities as the aerial bombardment of the tribal areas intensified.

If, in fact, the enemy is being controlled from Pakistan, and drone attacks aren't as effective as they should be, there is little option but to eventually move ground forces into that country. At that point, all bets are off. There is no way that the Islamabad government can be seen supporting that and the chances of major urban upheaval that could result in the overthrow of the Zadari regime are high. Worse, the odds of a replacement government that would continued to be allied with the United States and NATO are low.

More importantly, a NATO excursion into Pakistan would require the consent of the NATO membership, which is unlikely at best. In all likelihood, the pressure to obtain a UN Security Council resolution would be almost impossible to avoid, and China would almost certainly veto it.

So it appears that the Obama administration is doing the next worst thing.

The United States has renewed pressure on Pakistan to expand the areas where CIA drones can operate inside the country, reflecting concern that the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan is being undermined by insurgents' continued ability to take sanctuary across the border, U.S. and Pakistani officials said.

The U.S. appeal has focused on the area surrounding the Pakistani city of Quetta, where the Afghan Taliban leadership is thought to be based. But the request also seeks to expand the boundaries for drone strikes in the tribal areas, which have been targeted in 101 attacks this year, the officials said.

Pakistan has rejected the request, officials said. Instead, the country has agreed to more modest measures, including an expanded CIA presence in Quetta, where the agency and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate have established teams seeking to locate and capture senior members of the Taliban.

Quetta is a city of nearly a million people, and Islamabad is reacting to the request about as well as Washington would if a country asked if it could bomb the suburbs of, say, St. Louis. That would fly in the face of Pakistani public opinion and very probably expand the war in unpredictable ways.

The disagreement over the scope of the drone program underscores broader tensions between the United States and Pakistan, wary allies that are increasingly pointing fingers at one another over the rising levels of insurgent violence on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Senior Pakistani officials expressed resentment over what they described as misplaced U.S. pressure to do more, saying the United States has not controlled the Afghan side of the border, is preoccupied by arbitrary military deadlines and has little regard for Pakistan's internal security problems.

"You expect us to open the skies for anything that you can fly," said a high-ranking Pakistani intelligence official, who described the Quetta request as an affront to Pakistani sovereignty. "In which country can you do that?"

This is also true. Because of the impossibly low NATO troop levels in Afghanistan, there is almost no control over the insurgent elements, particularly in the border region. The drone attacks also tend to kill a dozen civilians for every enemy leader they take out. Expanding the attacks to more urban areas will drive up the ratio of civilian-enemy kills, creating an impossible political situation for Zadari. That's even more true when the violence on the Afghan side of the border continues unabated.

Pakistani history makes this worrisome. The country has had eight military coups in it's sixty years. Unlike India, which was built around the concept of political parties, Pakistan centers on a strong military that brings order when democracy goes off the rails. Those coups don't tend to be unwelcome by the people, although they have been known to overstay their welcome.

A coup by jihadi-sympathizing elements of the military or ISI would also heighten tensions with India, whom both the Bush and Obama administrations have been reaching out to. That outreach to New Delhi hasn't gone unnoticed by Pakistan's government or it's increasingly critical media. Part of the reason that the ISI supports the Taliban in the first place is because it fears growing Indian influence in Afghanistan and the potential for encirclement when the next war comes. In publicly tilting toward India, the United States is doing nothing to quell that impression in Pakistan.

In interviews in Islamabad, senior Pakistani officials voiced a mix of appreciation and apprehension over the U.S. role in the region.

The high-ranking Pakistani intelligence official said the CIA-ISI relationship is stronger than at any times since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and that the two spy services carry out joint operations "almost on a daily basis."

"I wish [our] countries understood each other the way the CIA and ISI understand each other," the official said. But he also traced Pakistan's most acute problems, including an epidemic of militant violence, to two decisions by the government to collaborate with the United States.

Using the ISI to funnel CIA money and arms to mujaheddin fighters in the 1980s helped oust the Soviets from Afghanistan, the official said, but also made Pakistan a breeding ground for militant groups.

Similarly, Pakistan's cooperation since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has been key to the capture of al-Qaeda operatives and the success of the drone campaign. But it has inflamed radical elements in the country and made Islamabad a target of terrorrist attacks.

"We'd not have been here if we had not supported the Afghan jihad, if we had not supported [the response to] 9/11," the official said, adding that it was "our fault. We should have stood up."

Remember, this isn't some "man on the street" interview, this is a senior intelligence official. Remember also that the Pakistani military and intelligence haven't been traditionally subservient to the civilian government. Rather, the civilian government has historically served at the pleasure of the military. That senior ISI people are speaking this openly to American reporters is a clear sign that Pakistan's cooperation might be coming to an end.

ISI has been playing both sides against the middle for years now. But it's becoming increasingly clear that they won't be able to do it much longer, not with the Americans wanting to bomb near major population centers.

There's a lot more at stake here than just the war in Afghanistan. A nuclear power in South Asia can go either way, which way it goes greatly impacts two other neighboring nuclear powers (China and India) and a potential third (Iran.) And Washington and NATO don't seem to have considered the many ways that things can go wrong, or planned for the possibility that they might.

For Jay

Jay Currie is one of Canada's greatest bloggers. He also seems like the kind of guy that appreciates female fitness. Also, he's been a pretty good friend to me and this blog over the last year.

As a reward to him, I offer ... Kristina Rose. How can any red-blooded man not adore a the 2010 XRCO Nominee for "Orgasmic Analist"? It just isn't possible, I tell you. It. Just. Can't. Happen.



As always, Rosario Dawson is just for me.

Anne Hathaway and the Death of Journalism

It isn't just cable news that's completely worthless, just mostly. Increasingly, news magazines are competing with cable to be a totally knowledge-free environment. The way things are progressing, I figure that it'll be nearly impossible to learn anything at all in about four months.

I've been telling you good folks for years that pretty girls with perfect jugs have an almost mystical power to make everyone around them drooling-on-themselves stupid. However, since I'm only a pretty girl on dress-up day, I can really prove that. But Anne Hathaway can, and does, turning Newsweek's Jennie Yabroff into a dribbling idiot. It's a pretty impressive thing to see, actually.

Ms. Yabroff was supposed to be reviewing Hathaway's new film, Love and Other Drugs, a romantic comedy co-starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Instead, she wound up reviewing Anne's titties. And shockingly, they didn't get two thumbs up.

If I read Yabroff's column right - and there's no way to know if I did because it's so mind-numbingly wrong - gratuitous nudity distracts from the films generally and Love and Other Drugs more specifically. The title of the review is actually "Who Wants to See Anne Hathaway's Breasts?" The url reads "Anne Hathaway's Breasts Are Way Distracting."

Who in the fuck thinks that way? Jennie overlooks the unarguable fact that most movies are unapologetic shit. The only thing that could ever hope to redeem them are a healthy set of nice knockers. I've never actually seen an Anne Hathaway film, but I'm pretty sure that I'd hate them. On the hand, if there was a better than even chance that I'd see a lot of pink, I'd make them profitable all by myself.

Ms. Yabroff, seemingly wanting us to know that she went to college, says that nudity is "a self-congratulatory indication of European-style seriousness, an interruption of the narrative to remind the audience we are watching A Work of Art." Of course, she couldn't be more wrong. Excessive nudity is also a way to prevent the audience from getting violent after they've realized that they've just spent $30 bucks to see a steaming heap of dung. Magnificent milkbags have a way of calming potentially explosive situations, but if Love and Other Drugs is half as bad as it think it is, I'd have to see Anne's asshole to prevent me from mowing down the concession stands and beaheading an usher. I'm just that serious a student of the arts.

Good Christ, is Newsweek in such sorry shape that they're publishing anything that gets turned in? Did all of their editors commit suicide or is Jennie Yabroff blackmailing someone at the Washington Post Company? It turns out that Meacham was right to flee when he did.


If your local school sucks, you can home-school your kids. But how exactly do you replace journalism now that self-important half-wits have taken over?

Catching Up With Pat Burns

So Pat Burns, coach of the New Jersey Devils and formerly of the Toronto Maple Leafs, finally got around to dying of lung cancer yesterday. He was 58 years old.

That might seem to you a harsh way of reporting Mr. Burns' passing, I know. But he was two months later in leaving his mortal coil than the Canadian news media would have preferred.

The coach had been ill for some time, so when rumours of his death began circulating in September, the Fourth Estate thought nothing of publishing them as fact, post-hate, without verification of any sort. It was hilarious unless you were actually Pat Burns. Then, not so much.

The story had its genesis in wire service reports describing Burns taking a turn for the worse in Quebec last Thursday. The next day, a shaken Toronto Maple Leafs executive Cliff Fletcher told several reporters that he'd heard Burns had passed away. It made sense in the context of the previous day's story about Burns's declining health. Without consulting Burns's family or double checking the story, Damien Cox of The Toronto Star reported Fletcher's story on his Twitter account. Within an hour the story was viral. (twitpic.com/2pbckt)

The FAN 590 broadcast a prepared obit during Andrew Krystal’s show. Wire services picked up the story. The Globe & Mail, Canadian Press and Rogers Sportsnet did not report the story, because they had not verified it with a second source. But with today’s “this-just-in” culture, a significant portion of mainstream media and blogosphere ran with the story-- till Burns himself phoned TSN’s Bob McKenzie a couple of hours later to say he was out shopping, not checking out.

Typical was Vancouver's all-sports station TEAM 1040, where former NHLer Ray Ferraro, now morning drive co-host, received an e-mail from a trusted source. He went with the incorrect report on-air. Ferraro's report was subsequently sourced by a number of people. “I should have called [TSN colleague] Bob McKenzie to verify it,” a contrite Ferraro told Usual Suspects Friday. “He's a friend of Pat's. I was wrong. I can tell you it will never happen again. Never. I just wish I could tell Pat and his family how embarrassed and sorry I am about this.”

Krystal echoed Ferraro, telling Usual Suspects that mistakes were made in verification. “It will not happen again on my show. I plan to apologize Monday to the Burns family.”

At least Ferraro and Krystal wore the blame. Cox offered no apology, explaining it away as “an honest mistake” on the part of a distraught Fletcher. No mention of having failed himself to get a primary source with the Burns family or a secondary source to verify the story – the basics of reporting. This was no honest mistake, just a breakdown in the reporting process to claim primacy on a hot-sounding story. Blaming Fletcher was self-serving.

The best part? This isn't the first time the Canadian media has done it this year. They managed to kill Gordon Lightfoot back in February.


What do both hoaxes have in common, you might ask? Twitter. In the Burns case, a Toronto Star writer posted it on Twitter without verifying the story, and in Lightfoot's case, a Twitter user in Ottawa just made it up. Both times, the national media fucking ran with it just as fast as they could.

Well, it occurred to me that I have a Twitter account that I barely use and a morbid desire to fuck with the press. I'm also a pretty creative cat when it comes to new and exciting ways to die. Also, a few media figures are following me.

So here's what I'm thinking. I invent truly odd deaths for prominent people on Twitter and see if the newspapers run with it. I'll bet you the do. How great would be if, say, the Montreal Gazette reported that, say, Stompin' Tom Connors was killed in an auto-erotic asphyxiation accident that I made out of whole cloth? I would say that it'd be pretty fucking great, indeed.

Let's see what happens ....

"Lament for His Cock, Sore and Crucified. It Begs Your Pardon"

Like any number of men my age, I went through a Jim Morrison phase. My excuse was that I was thirteen years old. I was already into blues musicians like Willie Dixon, so the Doors cover of "Back Door Man" was fascinating to me. The rest of the band's oeuvre would soon be added to my record collection.

No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman was the first and among the greatest of the "rock n' roll fuckup" genre of literature that I cherish so deeply. Between 1983 and 1988, I read it no fewer than seventeen times. In my mid-teens, I read loads of Kerouac and Nietzsche and actually thought that I was Morrison for a time, going so far as to even write extremely bad poetry. My speaking voice is sort of the same, and being drunk most of the time certainly didn't hurt my delusions.

But, y'know, you grow. By the time I was seventeen, I decided that I was Richard Nixon instead and started breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters and relentless wiretapped myself. Sadly, I never got bomb Cambodia, mostly because everything I know about that place scares the shit out of me. But, as Neil Young reminds us, "Even Richard Nixon has got soul."

If I were to retrospectively choose, I'd say that the Morrison phase was more fun, if only because the 37th president of the United States never appeared on a Miami stage drunk and inviting his audience to look at his cock. Presidential historians are unanimous in their opinion that Nixon wasn't very much fun at all.

Doors keyboardist Ray Manzerek is an even more pretentious dickhead than ol' Jim himself was, and he keeps endlessly prattling on about how Morrison was "possessed by spirits and dervishes" which is unrepentant horseshit. Jimbo was never possessed by anything more complicated by a few gallons of Wild Turkey, which is what him so much fun.

On the evening of March 1, 1969, Morrison was possessed by a few more gallons than was usual for him. Unfortunately, the Doors were scheduled to perform at the Dinner Key theatre in Miami that good eve. Jim showed up, late and dead drunk, to an auditorium that was dangerously oversold by the promoter. A drunk Morrison onstage was hardly unusual, but a Morrison this drunk was truly a sight to behold, particularly in a room this overcrowded on an especially humid Miami night.

It might be one of the few concerts in recorded human history where the band didn't get through a single song. Over and over again, Morrison would stop the show and launch into almost incomprehensible tirades. Then Morrison told his audience that they were "all a bunch of fucking assholes", whose "faces are being pressed into the shit of the world."

He went to challenge the crowd. You see, Doors concerts for the previous two years were essentially about two things: "Light My Fire" and spectacle. In New Haven in 1967, Morrison had become only the second performer to be arrested on stage in American history, after Lenny Bruce.

"You didn't come here for the music, did you?" Jim asked. "You came here to see something you've never seen before, didn't you?" He continued, " Do you want to see my cock?", he asked, as if this was the most reasonable request in the world. "Well, I'm gonna show it to you!" At that point, he pulled down the fly of his leather pants. The surviving members of the Doors and Morrison's defense layers contend that he pulled his shirt tail out of his zipper. The state of Florida asserted that it was indeed das Morrison schvantz.

Morrison wound up being indicted on five counts "a felony charge of lewd and lascivious behavior and five misdemeanors; two counts of indecent exposure, two of public profanity and one of public drunkenness."

At trial, Morrison was on the stand for about a day. When asked by the prosecution whether he had pulled his pecker out, he testified, "I don't know, I was too drunk."Amazingly, the jury acquitted on the public drunkenness charge. There were some 300 photographs of the Dinner Key performance taken that night, none of which displayed Morrison's cock, but he was convicted of indecent exposure and one count of public profanity.

The trial was a fucking mess in other ways, Judge Goodman disallowed the "contemporary community standards" defense (the musical Hair, which had public nudity played in Miami that year) in open defiance of the Supreme Court's ruling in Roth v. United States (1957). That was the reversible error by which Morrison's defense appealed the convictions. Not that it would have mattered. What people forget about Roth is that the High Court actually upheld his conviction back in the fifties. And by September, 1970, the attitudes in places like Florida had only hardened.

Anyhow, Jim Morrison died on July 3, 1971, making the entire matter moot. Until now.

If you've read Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, you pretty much already know that Florida's outgoing governor, Charlie Crist, is most duplicitous, dishonest motherfucker in all of Christendom. Crist is easily the worst person in a book filled with bad people. Even as you read accounts of shockingly scuzzy folks like John and Elizabeth Edwards, you remain thankful that they're at least not Crist.

Charlie ran for Florida's U.S Senate seat, only to get bounced out of the GOP in the primary and squashed like a goddamn bug in the general. It was a sad and horrifying thing to see, although it couldn't have happened to a worse person.

Since losing, the governor has tried to cement his reputation with the Boomer crowd, which is rapidly qualifying for Medicare. One of his plans for doing this is by advocating a pardon for one James Douglas Morrison, deceased.

Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, a Republican turned independent who lost a November bid for the United States Senate and whose term expires in January, seemed to align himself with this view in explaining why he will submit Morrison’s name to a state clemency board next month.

“The more that I’ve read about the case and the more I get briefed on it,” Mr. Crist said in an interview on Tuesday, “the more convinced I am that maybe an injustice has been done here.”

Well, not exactly. Under the laws in effect at the time, Morrison was clearly guilty of public profanity. There's a tape that was not only played in court, but was also released on a Doors box set that proves it. As much as I hate to say, given my love of public profanity, that conviction should stand. But Judge Goodman clearly fucked up on the Roth test, which means that the indecent exposure count qualifies for a pardon. More importantly, there isn't any evidence that any indecent exposure actually happened.

Was Jimbo fucked over? Sure he was. But there's another important fact to consider here. Specifically, Jim Morrison has been dead for 39 years. Is anyone really afraid that his conviction won't let him get a job at, say, Wal-Mart? His legal status in Florida likely is lower on his list of immediate concerns than being buried in Paris is.

And this isn't, like George Pataki's posthumous pardon of Lenny Bruce, a powerful statement on the importance of free speech. it's nothing more than a bid to secure the future vote of some delusional and drunken thirteen year old that has memorized An American Prayer at some unspecified future date.

Good work, Charlie!



And who can forget this popular, drunken and highly NSFW favorite ...



And then there's this classic ...



STRONGER THAN DIRT!

On Junk Touching and Hypocrisy

I have no plans to enter the United States in the foreseeable future, but I might change my mind if I can get a reasonable assurance that someone will touch my cock during the trip. I have a somewhat Pavlovian response to such things.

As I'm sure everyone's heard, the entire United States is flipping the fuck out this week over new airport screening measures instituted by the Transport Safety Administration. Essentially, if you're looking to go to, say, lovely Fresno, California, the federal government has thoughtfully included a thorough finger-rape with the price of the ticket. It's a pretty choice deal for everyone concerned.

Of course, with everyone flipping the fuck out, it tends to be forgotten that half of America is being more than a little hypocritical. It wasn't too long ago, after all, that we heard the constant refrain of "We're at war! The government needs to do everything in it's power to keep us safe!" As a matter of fact, it was only last Christmas that the federal government was being accused of not doing enough to secure airliners.

I encourage everyone to read through some Republican-leaning blogs this week. Note the outrage over the sexy scanners and feel-coppers at an American airport near you. Then go back through the archives to last Christmas, through the middle of January. And, just for giggles, skip back to late 2005, when the National Security Agency's "wireless wiretapping" program was exposed. You'll likely notice a ... change of tone over the last five days or so.

One thing that I've noticed this week is that Republicans are using the phrase "privacy rights" quite a bit these days. That's special insofar as these people have spent most of the last forty years denying that such a right even exists, except in the special circumstance of Rush Limbaugh pretending to be Keith Richards.

The 2001 Patriot Act provided law enforcement the authority to conduct "sneek and peak" searches without notifying a suspect, which is a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment. The American people were told that this would only occur in sensitive terror-related cases. Guess what? A Senate investigation revealed that of the 763 Patriot Act searches in 2008, only three had anything at all to do with terrorism.

More troubling is this;

Sen. Feingold (D-WI) said that 65 percent of the cases for which sneak-and-peek warrants were used were drug investigations. And Assistant Attorney General David Kris told Feingold that, in most terrorism cases, surveillance methods are “generally covert altogether,” and do not use sneak-and-peek warrants.

… “That’s not how this was sold to the American people,” Feingold responded. “It was sold — as stated on the DoJ’s Web site in 2005 — as being necessary ‘to conduct investigations without tipping off terrorists.’”

Heard any Republicans complain about this gross, unconstitutional (And remember, the Fourth Amendment actually is in the Constitution) invasion of privacy? I haven't.

The NSA program is even more insidious. If you've read James Bamford's The Shadow Factory, you know that the physical "taps" the NSA uses are placed at the fiber-optic trunk stations where the lines enter the country from under the sea, primary in New Jersey, Miami and the San Fransisco Bay Area. Those taps don't discriminate between "terrorist communications" and any other kind. Every electronic communication in America necessarily has to go through the NSA's super computers to ferret out the naughty ones.

Heard any Republicans complain about that? I haven't.

This brings us to the strange case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the amusingly named "underwear bomber." Since the U.S government has spent the last nine years determined to prevent yesterday's attacks, it stands to reason that it might want to peek in your unmentionables. Besides, this is what fuckheads like Liz Cheney and the entire GOP congressional caucus has been agitating for since last Christmas, isn't it? If you're worried about 'splodey drawers, it's self-evident that you have little other choice but to somehow check the drawers in question.

Except the Republicans don't want the government doing that. More precisely, they don't want this government doing that. If Dick Cheney was feeling up your wife and kids, that would be one thing. But having Barack Obama doing it comes uncomfortably close to a scene from Mandingo that was left on the cutting-room floor.

These protests from "conservatives" are nothing if not curious. The GOP spent years demanding and justifying incredibly intrusive and unconstitutional powers for themselves to fight the War on Terror. The American people were told that they were necessary and specific to the purpose of combating terrorism, which we now know to be untrue. But when specific measures are employed to detect and deter a specific threat ('splodey unmentionables), Republicans go batshit.

The Bush administration essentially stripped away Fourth Amendment guarantees from your home and communication, even though both are actually in it. But they really want to protect your crotch from an intrusive government. More exactly, they want to protect your crotch from a Democratic government.

That's what's happening here, teenagers. This is more partisan noise, nothing more and nothing less. It's exactly what I said would happen back in 2005-06. The GOP defended extra-constitutional powers when they had them, but excluded the possibility that they wouldn't be in power forever. Now they're putting on their "Defenders of Liberty" costumes, which is hilarious to anyone that has been paying attention.

I'm against all of these measures, if for no other reason than I'm adorably consistent. I think that the United States Constitution actually means something, and in all of my studies of the document, I have yet to see a "scary Muslim" exception. More importantly, Israel - which doesn't even have a written constitution - does a pretty good job of protecting her people's rights while preventing terrorism. Their airline security hasn't been breached in over eight years and they don't take naked pictures of you or even feel you up.

There are ways of addressing the problem that are more effective and constitutional than what's been employed since 9/11. Americans just don't want to explore them because they prefer having pointless stupid fights with one another. I hope that someone recognizes that before the next successful attack, but I'm kidding myself. Just like everyone else.


TSA logo cunningly hijacked from Girl on the Right, whose site appears to be down at the moment.

When Hacks Attack

You pretty much know that a political operative has outlived his or her usefulness when he or she starts appearing on television regularly. Just look at Karl Rove. He's on Fox News all the time, and virtually no one in the Republican party will talk to him anymore. Granted, Rove was largely responsible for the Marxist reign of George W. Bush, but that wasn't stopping anyone from being his buddy when he was winning elections. The only problem is that Rove stopped winning in 2006.

The sagas of Douglas E. Schoen and Patrick H. Caddell are even sadder. They're not even washed out strategists, they're tired pollsters.

Schoen worked with the two worst people in professional politics, Mark Penn and Dick Morris; managed to talk Bill Clinton into being more of a Republican than he already was, and incomprehensibly talked Hillary Clinton into continuing to be Hillary Clinton. Caddell somehow managed to work for both George McGovern and Jimmy Carter without getting kicked out of politics.

Both have a long history of going on Fox News and shit-talking Democrats that they don't personally work for. That being the case, I'm shocked that anyone has any interest in anything either has to say, but I'm constantly amazed by the craven ignorance of people generally and journalists in particular. I guess that it doesn't come that far out left field for the Washington Post to publish the "thoughts" of these two old hacks.

I am, however, shocked at just how much wrong they managed to stuff into a mere 1,287 words. Schoen and Caddell pile flawed premise atop flawed premise and somehow think that this makes a case for anything other than how friggin' dumb they are.

This is a critical moment for the country. From the faltering economy to the burdensome deficit to our foreign policy struggles, America is suffering a widespread sense of crisis and anxiety about the future. Under these circumstances, Obama has the opportunity to seize the high ground and the imagination of the nation once again, and to galvanize the public for the hard decisions that must be made. The only way he can do so, though, is by putting national interests ahead of personal or political ones.

To that end, we believe Obama should announce immediately that he will not be a candidate for reelection in 2012.

If the president goes down the reelection road, we are guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it. But by explicitly saying he will be a one-term president, Obama can deliver on his central campaign promise of 2008, draining the poison from our culture of polarization and ending the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity and common purpose.

We do not come to this conclusion lightly. But it is clear, we believe, that the president has largely lost the consent of the governed. The midterm elections were effectively a referendum on the Obama presidency. And even if it was not an endorsement of a Republican vision for America, the drubbing the Democrats took was certainly a vote of no confidence in Obama and his party. The president has almost no credibility left with Republicans and little with independents.

The best way for him to address both our national challenges and the serious threats to his credibility and stature is to make clear that, for the next two years, he will focus exclusively on the problems we face as Americans, rather than the politics of the moment - or of the 2012 campaign.

If, as Schoen and Caddell suggest, President Obama has "lost the consent of the governed" and that this month's elections were "certainly a vote of no confidence in Obama and his party", wouldn't the proper course for him be to resign instead of simply declaring that he's not running for reelection?

These idiots seem to think that this would end the gridlock that is almost certain to envelop Washington over the next two years, but they cite no evidence to support it. As a matter of fact, their entire article is just a long series of assertions without evidence, which is pretty much the nicest thing that I can say about it.

Far be it from me to defend Obama, but the entire premise of Schoen and Caddell's op-ed is wall-to-wall silly. Throughout their article, they ignore both political calender and good, old-fashioned common sense.

The GOP just won the House (and would have won the Senate, but for a slew of retarded Tea Party candidates who didn't even belong on the fucking school board) by trying to obstruct everything the White House and the Democrats proposed. It's been said that nothing succeeds quite like success, so why would the Republicans abandon that strategy once Obama announces his premature retirement?

I'm not sure how many of you know this, but the race for the Republican presidential nomination started two weeks ago. What do you think makes for a better primary strategy; cooperation with the departing administration, or running even harder against its "failed agenda"?

More importantly, if Obama withdraws from the 2012 campaign now, all he does is start the jockeying for position for the Democratic nomination as well. Do you think that potential Democratic nominees are going to run toward Obama or away from him? By taking itself out of the game, the Obama White House would make itself irrelevant and Congress would abandon government entirely in favor of a two-year long presidential campaign. And you'd wind up with exactly the same problem you have now, except maybe worse.

I also don't remember any political professionals going on the record to suggest retirement to either Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton, both of whom had lower approval ratings at this point in their terms than Obama does now. Both Reagan and Clinton won substantial reelection victories.
What Schoen and Caddell propose isn't even all that original. When Harry Truman lost both houses of Congress in 1946, several prominent Democrats suggested that he nominate Michigan Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg to the vice presidency and then resign, giving the GOP the White House. Truman, as the more historically-minded of you know, not only won reelection in '48, he took back Congress, too.

If Obama has any brains at all - which, I'll admit, is an open question - he'll sit back, let the GOP overplay its hand, and run against that. Essentially, that was the Clinton '96 - Truman '48 playbook and it worked like a charm. You never saw Bob Dole in Clinton's reelection ads. He was always paired with the unpopular Newt Gingrich. Truman almost never mentioned Thomas Dewey by name. He ran against the "do-nothing 80th Congress", instead. Let's just say that you'll be seeing a lot of John Boehner in the summer and fall of 2012.

The Republicans didn't win because of the Tea Party, they won in spite of it. They won because independents swung so heavily to them. But if the GOP just plays to the Tea Party base, they'll alienate independents just as surely as Obama, Pelosi and Reid did, and independents will swing back. What's going to happen over the next two years is the most predictable thing on earth.

Defeating an incumbent president is one of the hardest tricks to pull off in Big Time Politics, which is why it's done so rarely. In the last hundred years, only four (not counting Ford, who wasn't elected president or vice president) presidents - Taft, Hoover, Carter and Bush 41 - were defeated at the polls. Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and Clinton were all at low points after their first mid-terms, and all five won reelection by commanding margins.

Presidents historically have been at their least effective after their second set of mid-terms because of the "lame duck syndrome" that was created by the Twenty-Second Amendment. It is at that point that a president can no longer do anything of consequence for or to a given member of Congress, and he loses all of his influence. Instead of addressing the fact that Obama would become a lame duck the second that he announces that he isn't running for reelection, they simply try to dream it away.

They present absolutely no evidence that the atmosphere of partisan intransigence would melt away once Obama does, and they offer no plausible reason that it would because there isn't one.

Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell don't like Barack Obama, which is fine. Neither do I. The difference is that I'm not prognosticating from the pages of one of America's proudest newspapers with my head up my ass.