Blog Comments

ahahaha the department of irony

Has he seen Bill Nye's Dancing with the Stars moves? Bill is clearly on the right side of whatever he wants to be.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

The world is going to become a much better place as more old conservative nut jobs start to die off.

DID HE JUST TRY TO DOG MY MAN NYE? I'LL KICK HIS ASS.

That's pretty disgraceful behaviour. Too many loopholes allow people to put honest people on the back foot and make legitimate complaints impossible. If this is the sort of behaviour she conducts, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that her journalistic ethics are questionable too.

If she's yellow, she might want to get to a doctor...

This may just be my search results (though I was logged out at the time), but for me, this blog entry is showing up on the first page of a Google search for "Lori Kilchermann" (in quotes). That is both cool and disappointing -- the latter because there is disappointingly little ruckus about this case.

Excellent interview of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

But 40 years have passed, and after 9/11 in particular, all of those lessons have been lost. There’s been very great tolerance that if the magic words “national security,” or the new words “homeland security” are invoked, Congress has given the president virtually a free hand in deciding what information they will know as well as the public. I wouldn’t count on the current court with its current makeup making the same ruling with the Pentagon Papers as they did 40 years ago. I’m sure that President Obama would have sought a life sentence in my case.

Various things that were counted as unconstitutional then have been put in the president’s hands now. He’s become an elected monarch. Nixon’s slogan, “when the president does it, it’s not illegal,” is pretty much endorsed now. Meaning not only Obama but the people who come after him will have powers that no previous president had. Abilities on surveillance that no country in the history of the world has ever had.

Interestingly, after the AP revelations and the [revelations about] Fox News reporter [James Rosen], who was actually charged with aiding and abetting a conspiracy with a source, every journalist has suddenly woken up to the fact that they’re under the gun. That may actually have the effect of waking people up to the fact that, for example, Attorney General Holder has been violating the Constitution steadily, and that he should be fired. But fired for what? For doing what had the approval of the president.

Holder should be fired for a whole series of actions culminating in this subpoena for James Rosen’s cellphone records. I think that would be the first step of resistance in the right direction, of rolling back Obama’s campaign against journalism, freedom of the press in national security.

Haha, I could find plenty more Scalia opinions you agree with. He's pretty good on most free speech and Fourth Amendment issues, as well as being the biggest advocate on the Court for criminal defendants' confrontation rights. His opinion in Brown v. EMA is also worth a read, where the Court struck down a California law that prohibited the sale of violent video games to children (Breyer also dissented from that one, because he's a moron).

Additionally, Scalia was apparently so upset at this ruling that he read his dissent aloud, which is highly unusual (a summary of the majority opinion is generally read aloud, but that's it). Scalia added some more biting commentary during that oral statement:

It may be wise, as the court obviously believes, to make the Leviathan all-seeing, so that he may protect us all the better. But the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would not have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection. I dissent.

I dunno what's more disturbing: the opinion of the court in this case or the fact that I agree with Scalia about... anything.

The scary thing about Obama is that he's an intelligent guy you could have an decent conversation and probably agree on a lot of stuff. But at the end of the day, it just doesn't add up to what his administration is doing. At least least with Bush you could tell he was a cretin, someone to call the bad guy. Now it just seems everything is a lie. Even the republicans just seem to exist only to make Obama look better with all the insane trout they pull.

I just realized there were a bunch of potentially confusing typos in the post. I should really proofread my longer posts. *fixes*

Originally Posted by Boobies

I think people who are still happy with Obama are either stubborn or delusional.

Well that, or they have horrifying values.

Originally Posted by kotora

Thing about Obama is that he just looks and sounds so damn good on camera. He's one of the few US presidents that doesn't appear to be a total dumbass.

He's a very intelligent person and an expert on general constitutional law, which just makes it worse. He knows exactly what he's doing, and why it's wrong. He himself pointed out that this sort of bulltrout was wrong during Dubya's administration. He just freely flouts those principles when it personally benefits him and his administration. He may not be a dumbass, but he's a lying, self-absorbed charlatan -- which is worse.

Thing about Obama is that he just looks and sounds so damn good on camera. He's one of the few US presidents that doesn't appear to be a total dumbass.

I don't understand all of this.

I think people who are still happy with Obama are either stubborn or delusional.

Eye-witness identifications can mean something, but ryd is right that it is grossly overestimated in many circumstances. Eye-witness IDs of strangers have terrible accuracy, especially for cross-racial identifications. Police lineups and photo arrays are also generally terrible and suffer from a variety of flaws and biases.

You want to talk about eye witness testimony meaning something? In Afghanistan all we have to do is take a picture of someone restrained and with evidence scattered about them for the court to find them guilty.

No. It was a magnificent pun that went over your head. You need to listen to more Dr. Dre, man.

Raistlin is right on here, no one even talks about this stuff though- politicians can't because they can't seem to be anti-police or would never get elected.

I also find it amusing that people still think eye-witness testimony is worth something.