“Ensuring torture is totally banned under American law is a touchstone issue that defines our very civilization, to include its continued embrace of Englightenment values, a belief in progress in the face of adversity, and ensuring that our most odious enemies are not successful in having us sully our human rights leadership, one so hard earned through the Cold War.”
—Greg Djerejian, Neoconservative, “Has Waterboarding been banned?”
Category: religion and politics
Church and State should be separate in the body politic, but never in individuals.
Tony Blair exits
The New York Times had an interesting article on the Labour Party and Tony Blair.
Apparently as Tony Blair gets pushed out, Gordon Brown will be replacing him. The article then talks about the uneasy alliance between the two:
Patriotism is not blind devotion
“Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism.
A patriot does not tell people who are intensely concerned about their country to just sit down and be quiet; to refrain from speaking out in the name of politeness or for the sake of being a good host; to show slavish, blind obedience…”
—Rocky Anderson, Mayor of Salt Lake City
This is in response to Rumsfeld’s speech in that same city equating dissent with appeasing the Nazi’s. To understand the context, Salt Lake City is the capital and largest city in the state of Utah which is the most pro-Bush state in the union and one of the few places where he still enjoys a positive approval rating. This city and state is also the home town of my mother’s family.
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Hatin’ Katie
Am I the only person in the world who simply thinks that the Katie Couric thing was just a pretty good retouching job?
(Some people say that this isn’t retouched and then go into a spirited defense involving anamorphic film. Haha you guys are funny! I bet you believe that those girls on the magazine covers at the checkout stand really look like that.)
Sure, I think as much as the next guy that someone as vapid as Katie Couric being anchorwoman for CBS is a sign of the Apocalypse, but puh-leez…Continue reading
A strategy against terrah
“There are no quick fixes when you are fighting an ideology. Like communism before it, I suspect Islamic fundamentalism will only be defeated through a slow war of attrition. Ideologies must die out, they cannot be killed.”
—Anonymous Liberal, “Strange Burden Shifting”
A scathing indictment on a false choice that the only options on the War on Terror are military or nothing at all.
Koreans are Klingons
‘…it’s never a good idea to take military action, or the credible threat of it, off the table as you suggest. Our enemies understandably see that as a sign of weakness and act (or don’t act) accordingly.’
“Apparently, our enemies are the Klingons.”
—LITBMueller, in response to a threadjack on John Cole’s shadenfreude article
stem cell fun
“…just as I am in favor of mandatory abortions (and, of course, recreational abortions), I am in favor of mandatory embryo harvesting. Actually, that doesn’t go far enough I want to create embryos, develop them in a lab, wait until they become fully-formed 14-year-olds (which they absolutely, positively will do in the lab), then steal their organs to give to gay people as wedding presents.”
—SeesThroughIt, commenter on Balloon Juice
A series of tubes
Ted Stevens gives us his “wisdom” on the issue of network neutrality:
“They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck.
It’s a series of tubes.
And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material…
Ten movies streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet? I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
—Senator Ted Stevens (R. AK) describing the internet in support of ISP content segmentation
The middle
“When the President wants to dismantle our Constitutional system of checks and balances, what’s the moderate position? To dismantle HALF the system?”
—pericles, a comment on ”The Radical Middle”
…it is not that the “middle” has been forsaken. It is that the vast majority of the American public has been forsaken, left, right and middle…We are all held hostage to system institutionalized bribery of the worst sort…”
—MSheppard, a comment on ”The Radical Middle”
Criticism and debate
“The test of democracy is freedom of criticism.”
—David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Founder of Israel
From “A Beautiful Friendship?: In search of the turth about the Israel lobby’s influence on Washington, The Washington Post.
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