Category Politics

And This Is Why the First Amendment Is a Good Thing ™

One more thing to be grateful for
if you live in a country with freedom of speech:

CAIRO, Egypt (Reuters) — An Alexandria court convicted an Egyptian blogger on Thursday for insulting both Islam and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and sentenced him to four years in jail over his writings on the Internet.
…

One of Suleiman’s articles said that al-Azhar in Cairo, one of the most prominent seats of Sunni Muslim learning, was promoting extreme ideas. Another article, headlined “The Naked Truth of Islam as I Saw it”, accused Muslims of savagery during clashes between Muslims and Christians in Alexandria in 2005.

He has also described some of the companions of the Muslim prophet Mohammad as “terrorists”, and has likened Mubarak to dictatorial pharaohs who ruled ancient Egypt.

“I was hoping that he would get a harsher sentence because he presented to the world a bad image of Egypt. There are things that one should not talk about, like religion and politics. He should have got a 10-year sentence,” said lawyer Nizar Habib, who attended the trial as a member of the public.

Point duh-one: freedom of speech is not there to protect popular speech. It’s for unpopular speech.

Point duh-two: an idea that needs legislative protection from criticism is one that can’t stand on its own. I’m sorry Mr. Habib doesn’t like the fact that Suleiman aired Egypt’s dirty laundry in public (any more than I like it when an American makes the US look bad in the eyes of the world), but frankly, the way to deal with this is to fix the problem, not shoot the messenger.

And if there needs to be a law against criticism of Islam, doesn’t that pretty much mean that there’s no rational reason to believe in Islam? What kind of god needs to be protected, like an endangered species?

Porn in Afghanistan

According to
the Scotsman,
people in Afghanistan have developed quite a taste for teh pr0n:

The heaviest fighting in five years has slowed reconstruction to a crawl in the deserts and oases of Kandahar, where the strict Taleban movement began in 1994, but pornography, opium and illegal alcohol are flourishing, officials say.
…

“Pornography is a problem,” admits new provincial police chief General Asmatullah Alizai. “According to our Islamic rules and beliefs, people cannot accept this kind of thing. I don’t want people to see this kind of film.”

Can you say “forbidden fruit, boys and girls? I knew you could.

Also, from the comments:

If they are going to be issued with a bevy of virgins
in their next life, I see nothing wrong with them veiwing a few training manuals. You wouldn’t want to look stupid on the big night if it was you.

(HT Plan 8 from Doubter Space.)

Let’s Hire A Grizzly as a Babysitter, While We’re at It

Brad Blog reports that someone managed to make a key that opens Diebold voting machines… by copying it off of an image on Diebold’s web site.

Can you imagine what would happen if an individual, rather than a company, had screwed up this way? If you answered “that person would be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom”, pat yourself on the back. Unfortunately, we can’t give medals to corporations, but this comes close:

NORTH CANTON, Ohio– Diebold, Incorporated, one of the nation’s largest security integrators with expertise in the government, commercial, financial and retail markets, has solidified its homeland security presence. The company recently earned certification from the General Services Administration (GSA) to deliver security integration services that meet the requirements of the Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD-12).

I tried to come up with a better subject line. Really, I did. But all I could come up with was “It’s like letting Bush & Co. run the country” or “Like letting Halliburton handle the post-Katrina reconstruction”.

Gonzales to Judges: Don’t Worry Your Pretty Little Heads About the Law

From the Associated Press:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says federal judges are unqualified to make rulings affecting national security policy, ramping up his criticism of how they handle terrorism cases.

In remarks prepared for delivery Wednesday, Gonzales says judges generally should defer to the will of the president and Congress when deciding national security cases.

People have been saying for years that someone needs to give Bush a blow job so he can be impeached. I think we’ve just found the man to do it.

Bumper Sticker O’ the Day

Bush = Leeroy Jenkins

(Thanks to [info]mcoletti, who found the idea somewhere.)

im in ur mailbox

im in ur mailbox, readin ur mail



Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.

(Thanks to [info]doc-quixote for the idea.)

Well, Crap

The Baltimore Sun
reports
that after the vote-counting was completed, right-wing
homophobic
religious nutjob
assclown and
reanimated corpse
Don Dwyer
was reelected to the state legislature by 28 votes. I don’t live in Anne Arundel county, so I couldn’t make that 26.

(Update: Can someone explain why the first Google result for
“reanimated corpse” points to State Farm’s site?)

Those Who Do Not Remember the Dictionary Definition Are Condemned to Mangle It

I’ve started hearing the phrase “actionable
intelligence”
being used as a five-dollar synonym for “useful information”, particularly in the context of the debate on how to rebrand torture to make it seem acceptable.

Am I the only one to have noticed the irony here? In case everyone forgot, the first definition of
“actionable”
means “something you can get sued over”. This is not generally considered a Good Thing.

Maryland Politics

Headline O’ the Day, courtesy of the Gazette:

Victory will hinge on how many voters vote Tuesday

Let’s file that under D for Duh.

Secondly, if you live in Anne Arundel, please remember to vote against religious nutcase,
bigot, and all-around asshat
Don Dwyer tomorrow.

USA: Now, With Less Torture!*

* Some restrictions may apply. The definition of torture is subject to change without notice. Incarcerators’ decision may be final.

So anyway, we now have
a shiny new law that outlaws torture.

With a few caveats.

Like, the president gets to define what constitutes “torture”, so as long as he can rationalize that something is just high-spirited hijinks or “tough interrogation techniques” or approaches but does not exceed the pain of organ failure, or even if God just told him to do it, then hey, it’s not torture.

And what if you’ve been locked up when you haven’t done anything? Well, if the administration says you’re an unlawful combatant (at their discretion, natch), then you don’t even have the right to have a judge tell you WTF you’re locked up. In other words, if you think you’re being tortured illegally, who are you gonna complain to? And if you think you should have the right to habeas corpus because you’re not an unlawful combatant, well, the people who have you locked up say you are, so who are you gonna complain to?

Another sad and ironic part is that this certainly isn’t going to help our troops in the field. Not that this is news to anyone, except possibly the people at the head of this administration.

Back in the 4th century BC, Alexander the Great introduced a new wartime strategy. Unlike previous conquerors, when he captured a city, he didn’t slaughter the inhabitants and burn the city to the ground. Rather, he would execute the king and spare the population. This meant that the defenders were fighting to defend their king, their city, and their wealth, but not their lives, so they had less of an incentive to fight to the bitter end.

More recently, during WWII, Joseph Stalin decreed that any Soviet soldier taken prisoner by the Germans obviously hadn’t fought hard enough, and was therefore a traitor. Any POWs who were returned to the Soviet Union were executed for treason. Consequently, faced with a choice between possible death in combat, and surrender to the Germans, followed by months or years in a POW camp, followed by execution by firing squad, the Soviet army put up a hell of a fight.

Now we have become a nation that, shocked by the photos that came out of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, looked deep into its soul, and said, “I don’t think we should do anything like this… but why don’t you decide for us, Mr. President?”

In other words, we are a country that tortures.

And now, in Iraq and Afghanistan, any insurgent, terrorist, or poor schmuck caught at the wrong place at the wrong time and staring down the barrels of a dozen marines’ rifles is going to have to ask himself, “do I want to surrender, and probably be tortured, and spend the next forever chained naked to a cell door in a pool of my own shit, or do I want to risk fighting my way out, and maybe take a few of them with me?”

News flash: that’s not what we want them to think. What we want them to think is “Fuck this shit. This isn’t worth dying for. I’ll just surrender, and have some war stories to tell my kids.”

Is this really that hard to grasp?

(Crossposted to daily Kos.)