Anyone who cares knows: Blogger George Washington is taking a well-deserved break, for himself and his family.

Blessings to GW.  No, not that GW.  Rather, the GW who has brought such critical insight and aggregation and many, many great links, references, and all in a timely fashion, on so many issues, in a non-partisan fashion.  

I hope he comes back.

Hats off to George Washington!

Cass Sunstein has failed to notice that denizens of the tubes frequently quote others whom they despise in order to mock them.  It’s called balance.  Here, for example, is Cass Sunstein himself:

“Momma Cass ‘Dream a Little Dream for Me'” Sunstein thinks web sites like Docudharma should volunteer or be coerced into providing links and ideas to alternative opinions to the ones being expressed by single-minded dharmavillains.  

“The best would be for this to be done voluntarily,” said Sunstein, “But the word voluntary is a little complicated and people sometimes don’t do what’s best for our society,” he added.

“The idea would be to have a legal mandate as the last resort….an ultimate weapon designed to encourage people to do better,” Sunstein concluded.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates:

“The United States is unlikely to repeat a mission on the scale of those in Afghanistan and Iraq anytime soon – that is, forced regime change followed by nation building under fire,” he wrote

Anytime soon.  D’oh!   Weeza izn’t lernt gol’darn’t thingz.  No moneyz, no warzuv scalesez.  We bankruptz us-selves.

More likely, he said, are “scenarios requiring a familiar tool kit of capabilities, albeit on a smaller scale.”

Familiar tool-kit?  Prithee, lemme guess: More flying robotz assassinashunz.

The triple-thick milkshake of socialism.

What’s going on is really simple. We’re having a run on the Shadow Banking System and the only question is how intensely it will self-feed as its assets and liabilities are put back onto the balance sheet of the conventional banking system.

…bottom line, you had the Fed step up and provide its public good to the Shadow Banking System. You had the FDIC step up and do the same thing with its public good. And as Paul Volcker was noting this afternoon, you had the Treasury step up and provide a similar public good for the money market mutual funds, using the Foreign Exchange Stabilization Fund. It was a triple-thick milk shake of socialism. And it was good.

Glad you liked it.  Now, please suck on this.

One shouldn’t be surprised if the President were fed up with the problems of taking war prisoners, aka enemy combatants, because they cause a lot of administrative headaches.  The vast majority of prisoners at GITMO were innocent, but there were no acceptable ways of providing due process without the administration looking like tyrants or liars, so prisoners simply languished in prison year after year based on the administration’s word that these were the worst of the worst.  Then there were the unsightly torture photos from Abu Ghraib, and reports of homicides and abuse at Bagram and GITMO, and an entire global archipelago of black sites used to squeeze information and compliance from god-knows-who.  

According to Seymour Hersch, Team Obama is not going to make the same mistakes as Team Bush and just round-up people arbitarily:

And I’ll tell you right now, one of the great tragedies of my country is that Mr. Obama is looking the other way, because equally horrible things are happening to prisoners, to those we capture in Afghanistan. They’re being executed on the battlefield.  It’s unbelievable stuff going on there that doesn’t necessarily get reported. Things don’t change.

[…]

What they’ve done in the field now is, they tell the troops, you have to make a determination within a day or two or so whether or not the prisoners you have, the detainees, are Taliban. You must extract whatever tactical intelligence you can get, as opposed to strategic, long-range intelligence, immediately. And if you cannot conclude they’re Taliban, you must turn them free. What it means is, and I’ve been told this anecdotally by five or six different people, battlefield executions are taking place. Well, if they can’t prove they’re Taliban, bam. If we don’t do it ourselves, we turn them over to the nearby Afghan troops and by the time we walk three feet the bullets are flying. And that’s going on now.

Imagine that:  Killing them because you CAN’T identify them as an enemy.  It helps cut down on paperwork and political overhead.  Stay classy, Barack.

http://www.gijc2010.ch/en/home…

Ugh.

Elena Kagan, President Barack Obama’s latest nominee to the Supreme Court, helped protect the Saudi royal family from lawsuits that sought to hold al Qaeda financiers responsible in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

The suits were filed by thousands family members and others affected by the Sept. 11 attacks. In court papers, they provided evidence that members of the Saudi royal family had channeled millions to al Qaeda prior to the bombings, often in contravention of direct guidance from the United States.

But Kagan, acting as President Obama’s Solicitor General, argued that the case should not be heard even if evidence proved that the Saudis helped underwrite al Qaeda, because it would interfere with US foreign policy with the oil-rich nation. She posited “that the princes are immune from petitioners’ claims” because of “the potentially significant foreign relations consequences of subjecting another sovereign state to suit.”

Remember when you were either with us or against us?  Kagan has no scruples about acting at the behest of hypocrites and terrorists, as long as it advances her career.

Kagan also argued in a separate case that lawyers attempting to bring terrorist organizations under the rule of law by writing a legal brief, or even representing them to standards of reason in an op-ed article could be charged as terrorist sympathizers.

So, on one hand, actual terrorist outlaws should not be prosecuted, because they are powerful “allies,” whereas small-time lawyers who encourage or aid lawful behavior by less-preferred or less politically connected terrorists get no such protections, and should be prosecuted.  Rule or spirit of law: 0; Powerful elite: 2

It’s the typical hypocrisy and lack of intellectual honesty by the ruling elite, and Kagan has no scruples defending it, as long as it advances her career.

Some will say that it was her job to represent the administration.  However, if my job required me to tell people to take stress hormone supplements and eat high-fat diets, I’d resign, because it’s professionally irresponsible and flat-out wrong.   Letting your integrity hit rock bottom in order to advance your career is pretty stanky, and not a selling point for a lifetime seat on SCOTUS.  This does not pass the smell test.

Hellasious.

Federal lawyers backed the measures on grounds of self-defence …

Whoo!  That was a bit of the old galvanic skin response, wasn’t it?  Wall Street’s high frequency trading programs exhibited a bout of uninhibited sympathetic discharge, and lots of hearts initially stopped dead before drum-rolling seconds later, amid abrupt increases in blood pressure, pounding headaches of sudden onset, profuse sweating, piloerection, blurred vision, and micturition and voiding reflexes.  The Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P took a huge, 1,000-point swan dive, while the Volatility Index shot up Ben Bernanke’s butthole like a bolt of lightning.  Exciting stuff!

I’m just glad everything is back to normal.