Update: I’ve bolded key passages in the bill below the fold to whet your appetites.

My Fellow Prisoners, High-Value Detainees, and Unprivileged Enemy Belligerents,

I would like to introduce to you the legislation that gets our accelerator stuck on the floor mat on the road to full tilt boogie, banana republic-style dictatorship, Senators John McCain’s and Joe Lieberman’s Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010.  

This proposed legislation manages not just to “twist” the Constiution, but a does the physically impossible inward-rotating armstand flying forward back double reverse three-and-a-half somersault pike with a synchronized hand-in-butt-tuck.  The essence of the bill aims to completely destroy the concept and practice of due process, shoot America in the face, and throw it straight off the cliff.

I suspect that this bill was written with indefinitely, and illegally detained Guantanamo prisoners in mind, i.e., to keep them from being prosecuted in civilian criminal courts, but the scope of the language goes well beyond those poor suffering bastards and explicitly includes YOU, my fellow high-value detainees.   Someone needs to take a flamethrower to this odious piece of garbage.

Any person suspected of being an “enemy belligerent,” explicitly including U.S. citizens, can be detained without Miranda warnings, interrogated, and be imprisoned indefinitely at the whim of interrogation groups, the FBI, CIA, DNI, Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, “appropriate committees of Congress,” and the President, with the President making any final calls in cases of dispute.  Any alien determined to be a “high-value detainee,” the law would explicitly prohibit Article III jurisdiction, that is, it would prohibit the judicial branch from any consideration of due process requirements.  As a bonus, the bill would also essentially usurp any local, state, and federal law enforcement for military purposes.  Thus the President trumps the judicial branch on due process for non-citizens in all circumstances.  However, during a time of war, the President trumps justice on due process for citizens, as well:  

SEC. 5. DETENTION WITHOUT TRIAL OF UNPRIVILEGED ENEMY BELLIGERENTS. An individual, including a citizen of the United States, determined to be an unprivileged enemy belligerent under section 3(c)(2) in a manner which satisfies Article 5 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners in which the individual has engaged, or which the individual has purposely and materially supported, consistent with the law of war and any authorization for the use of military force provided by Congress pertaining to such hostilities.

The New Yorker and The Atlantic are running twin puff pieces on how – they hate to admit it but – Timmy G saved the economy.

The New Yawker sezzie poohs:

Economists are still debating what it was that ended the financial crisis and turned the economy around. It is inarguable, though, that Geithner’s stabilization plan has proved more effective than many observers expected, this one included.

Whereas the Atlantians suggest that our fabled civilization was not destroyed by the gods for excess greed and corruption, ’cause Timmeh held back the thunderbolts with hizown chest:

Yet when the history books are written, Geithner will be recognized as Barack Obama’s key lieutenant in the struggle to right the economy and fix the finance system. Economically, Geithner’s plan has worked better and more cheaply than anyone could have imagined a year ago.

The twin, virtually interchangeable pieces appearing at the same time and having extremely similar, if not identical overall angles is prolly just a coincidence, as opposed to a controlled marketing campaign, don’tcha think?

Anyway, just wanted to let everyone know they can relax.  Everything’s hunky dory now and Tim G is an elfin sizzle chest whose athleticism “inspires an adolescent awe in male colleagues.”

First, Krugman argues that debt isn’t a problem.

(adjusts eyeballs back into sockets…)

Second (and woe to us), Krugman argues that more important than fundamentals is “confidence” in the political system.

So what determines confidence? The actual level of debt has some influence – but it’s not as if there’s a red line, where you cross 90 or 100 percent of GDP and kablooie; see the chart above. Instead, it has a lot to do with the perceived responsibility of the political elite.

What this means is that if you’re worried about the US fiscal position, you should not be focused on this year’s deficit, let alone the 0.07% of GDP in unemployment benefits Bunning tried to stop. You should, instead, worry about when investors will lose confidence in a country where one party insists both that raising taxes is anathema and that trying to rein in Medicare spending means creating death panels.

The fundamentals blow donkey dick.  Now, the man is arguing for confidence in the political system?  

Let’s have a look at that 9 mm, thank you.  It fits in my mouth perfectly.  Sure, put it on my credit card!

Tonight, we specialize in demon-blasting.

Atheists are smarter?  I don’t think so.  Try bench-pressing your IQs with this:

Quite possibly!

A. It is a war crime to kill captive prisoners  

B. it is a war crime to kill children

C. shooting captive (handcuffed) schoolchildren dead may also be a war crime.

Of course, the media response to such barbarism would be massive and growing in amplitude and outrage, such that after more than two months of government inaction the political tremors would be shaking the ruling elite from their very thrones.

U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan has an excellent shot at being nominated for the Supreme Court when John Paul Stevens retires.  

The President will want a highly qualified nominee, obviously.  Beyond that, the calculation for the White House will be almost entirely political.  Rahm Emanuel will have overriding control – if not minute-by-minute involvement – just as he did with Justice Sotomayor.  And as with that previous confirmation, the calculus will be one of the political costs and benefits of the highly qualified candidates at the political moment in time.

Kagan is technically qualified, but unfit for the job on ideological grounds, imo.  I base that opinion on her arguments concerning the broad sweep of anti-terrorism laws recently made to the Supreme Court in the case (Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project) concerning Robert Fertig, a lawyer and president of the Humanitarian Law Project, who gave “expert advice or assistance” to the PKK in Turkey.

Listen to this  self-absorbed fucking ponce:

“To be honest with you, I really hope it blows up. I think the U.S. taxpayer deserves to lose a trillion dollars over this thing for the way they have behaved.”

This narcissistic douche goes on to berate politicians, as well:

“They only care about the next election, just like we only care about the next bonus. Well, none of them cares about the country, none of us cares about the institution.  They really don’t care, and I really don’t care. And frankly, if a trillion dollars gets lost, fine.”

Another self-pitying victim of his own vapid, mercenary belief system agrees:

“I think it violates everything I believe in, and it’s un-American.”

This prehensile wallet stands by his social contract: Hey, we had a fucking deal, man!

“You made a commitment to us, and we made a commitment to you. And for anybody to look beyond that, as the politics and the media are at the moment, is missing the point. You can’t expect us to just roll over and ignore that commitment because there is a bunch of immoral bigots that intend us to do something different. It’s not going to happen.”

Whereas another country club-circumscribed extortionist thinks your treatment of him has been horribly, horribly gauche!  And an anti-commie plot!

“I think it’s distasteful. It’s unfair. It’s unjust. I agree with you, it’s not American. It is McCarthy-ite. . . . It will be viewed as a horribly dark period.”

Finally, I really hope someone gives this oblivious wanker exactlywhat he demands:

“This country is supposed to stand on due process.”

Aw.  Poor things.  We’re abusing them.  Next thing you know, they’ll be calling it torture.

The war-mongering NY Times continues its 57-year long smear campaign against Iran. NYT reports the patently misleading headline, Inspectors say Iran worked on warhead, which might be true, if you were referring to 2003, but the Times’ weasel reporters, David Sanger and William Broad, like Judith Miller and Michael Gordon before them, continue twisting and tormenting the actual facts in order to stove-pipe false intelligence to the American people, because apparently, American needs another monstrous war crime on its bloody hands:

“The United Nations’ nuclear inspectors declared for the first time on Thursday that they had extensive evidence of ‘past or current undisclosed activities’ by Iran’s military to develop a nuclear warhead, an unusually strongly worded conclusion that seems certain to accelerate Iran’s confrontation with the United States and other Western countries.”

My hypothesis is that some men have no stigma attached to failure due to pure solid stupidity.  

If true, it follows that if hot plasma stupidity could be contained, cooled and compressed through the states of matter to form a perfectly arranged crystalline structure at absolute zero, solid diamond stupid should look like this:

America is the greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed, and it can’t be duplicated anytime soon, because it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with no stigma attached to trying and failing, a noncorrupt bureaucracy, and financial markets and a venture capital system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning them into global products.

 – Tom Friedman, The Secret From Our Sauce, March 7, 2004

How solid is that?

At least of couple bloggers I read fairly regularly have cited Kanazawa et al. Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent. Social Psychology Quarterly, 2010, based on press releases.  The actual article is DOI: 10.1177/0190272510361602, but unless you have a subscription, the journal is charging an outrageous $32.00 fee to download the article. (I’ll get back to that.)  

PZMeyers, an evolutionary biologist and blogger at Pharyngula, has already sounded the warning on the predictable self-congratulatory praise for the findings expected from liberals and atheists.

Meyers says:

Stop patting yourselves on the back over this study

Good grief. This ridiculous study is making the rounds of the atheist community, with its claim that liberals and atheists are smarter than conservatives and religious people. Look at the numbers!

Young adults who identify themselves as “not at all religious” have an average IQ of 103 during adolescence, while those who identify themselves as “very religious” have an average IQ of 97 during adolescence.

Seriously? Show me the error bars on those measurements. Show me the reliability of IQ as a measure of actual, you know, intelligence. Show me that a 6 point IQ difference matters at all in your interactions with other people, even if it were real. And then to claim that these differences are not only heritable, but evolutionarily significant…jebus, people, you can just glance at it and see that it is complete crap.