CONTEMPTIBLE. “I will give you a scaring sentence so that the public be protected from people like you, so that we are not tempted to emulate this horrendous example.” The horrendous example is you, Malawi.
Archive for 2010
May 20, 2010
DID OBAMA’S SPEECHWRITERS WRITE THE MEXICAN PRESIDENT’S SPEECH? It sure sounded like it to me… and to Rush Limbaugh. (If you want to talk about it, the comments are open chez Althouse.)
EVERYBODY 404 MOHAMMED DAY: Michael Totten noted at the start of the day that Pakistan placed itself under a firewall today, blocking access to Facebook and YouTube, in anticipation of “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.” Perhaps they needn’t have bothered, since, as a reader just emailed, Facebook appears to have pulled the page that was to disseminate the various Motoons. Here’s the Google cache of the page, the cached version of which is still online as of the time of this blog post:
Here’s where clicking on the URL in that cache takes you.
Meanwhile, at Reason, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe. C’est Muhammad.”
UPDATE: Much more from Allahpundit, appropriately enough.
UPDATE: Iowahawk, “one of Eastern Iowa’s top 500 political satire bloggers,” sits this one out:
As a responsible humorist I will not, indeed cannot, sanction this disgusting and nihilistic ‘Draw M*******’ (PBUH) sideshow. Yes, we still have Freedom of Speech in this country. But there comes a time when a man must look deep inside himself and muster the courage to exercise his Freedom of Not Speech. And if having that courage also means not having his house firebombed, hey, win-win!
To coin a couple of phrases, heh. But still, read the whole thing.™
HOW EUROPEAN HUMAN RIGHTS LAW protects foreign terrorists from deportation.
COUNTERING WUSSY PC EUPHEMISMS:
If you blinked, you might have missed it. The Obama administration has unofficially rebranded “war on terror” phrase that dominated public discourse throughout the Bush administration. The replacement phrase, carefully chosen, is “CVE” — Countering Violent Extremism.
Like Orwell’s ever-shrinking Newspeak Dictionary, Marc Ambinder counts the number of real-world words missing from this latest euphemism, a term that brings new meaning to the title of Austin Bay’s pocket dictionary of military jargon.
MARKDOWNS ON Leatherman multitools.
HEZBOLLAH IS INTERESTING IN THE WAY FREDDY KRUGER IS INTERESTING: Michael Ledeen has more on why searching for Hezbollah “moderates” is such a half-baked idea, and retired Lt. Col. Rick Francona wonders why John Brennan, who hatched this idea in the first place, still has a job.
DENNIS BLAIR TAKES THE FALL. The Director of National Intelligence resigns in the wake of the Fort Hood shooting and the Christmas Day and Times Square bombing attempts.
RESISTANCE IS FUTILE: The cyborg insects are coming.
More Rand flaps to come and not just in Kentucky.
MICHAEL RUBIN reviews Lebanese-American author Michael Young’s new book The Ghosts of Martyrs Square
THE TRUTH ABOUT SYRIA. Evelyn Gordon understands what the White House does not. “As long as Assad can get everything he wants from the West without a peace deal, Israeli-Syrian peace will be unattainable. Only when the West starts punishing ‘resistance’ rather than rewarding it will Assad’s strategic calculation change.”
UCSD STUDENTS SEEK OFFICIAL CONDEMNATION OF PRO-HOLOCAUST STATEMENT: A Muslim student’s ultimate Kinsley-esque gaffe — publicly announcing her support for a second Holocaust — “has prompted a petition drive to have the chancellor condemn the hate speech,” Aaron Elias, a student at University of California Irvine writes on the Pajamas homepage.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Don’t let Iran blackmail the world.
Remember Truman’s advice about getting a dog if you’re in Washington and you need a friend? Well, Jeannie DeAngelis at American Thinker says President Obama has put a whole new spin on what important people in the nation’s capital do with dogs. It’s a lot like kicking the can down the road, except the dog doesn’t get to chase the can because the dog is the can …. trust me, it’s worth a read.
MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD’S CHIEF OF STAFF says Iran can destroy Israel in a week.
SEARCHING FOR MODERATE TERRORISTS is a complete waste of time.
By the way, anyone who wants to email me can do so at meganmcardle -at- theatlantic.com
A tax hike even conservatives should love? I’m in favor, and I live in one of those high-tax jurisdictions. But then I love tax simplification so much that I’m in favor of doing it even without marginal rate tradeoffs–if you do the tax simplification, the marginal rate decreases will probably follow.
In the Floyd Landis case, the isotopes don’t lie.
WHY WOULD ANYONE NEED TO LIE ABOUT HAVING BEEN IN VIETNAM? That’s the question that the Washington Post’s Henry Allen asks of Richard Blumenthal (D-CT):
He didn’t have to claim he’d been in Vietnam. He already had the résumé to be a shoo-in candidate. Rich kid, Harvard (editor of the Crimson), reporter at The Washington Post, Yale Law School (editor of the law journal), almost two decades as attorney general, the perfect knowledge-class candidate of the kind favored by modern Democrats. (In looks, however, he does bear an unsettling resemblance to disgraced former New York governor Eliot Spitzer.)
Bill Clinton not only dodged the draft but lied to do it, and still we elected him president over a World War II combat flier — though Clinton never lied about having been in Vietnam. George W. Bush spent his war flying fighters over Texas and still defeated Al Gore, who had served in Vietnam. Then Bush beat John Kerry, a wounded and be-medaled Vietnam veteran. Dick Cheney’s military record — he got five academic deferments — didn’t seem to hurt his political career, and he was bold enough to say to a Washington Post reporter: “I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service.”
Of course none of them lied about having been in Vietnam — a catastrophically stupid thing to do, a fact that is easily checked. What would propel Blumenthal to do such a thing?
Naturally, Kerry’s Winter Soldier experiences after the war, or that Bush #43 apparently did volunteer to go to Vietnam at one point in his reserve career aren’t mentioned. Meawhile, at Hot Air, Ed Morrissey catches this:
The Stamford Advocate hit gold from a parade speech in November 2008:
“I wore the uniform in Vietnam and many came back to all kinds of disrespect. Whatever we think of war, we owe the men and women of the armed forces our unconditional support.”
The occasion was the Stamford Veterans Day parade Nov. 9, 2008.
The speaker was Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, as quoted by The Advocate.
A trove of potential bulletin board material was unearthed Tuesday by Hearst Connecticut Newspapers from its archives quoting the once seemingly unflappable U.S. Senate candidate on his military record, one that he has been accused of embellishing.
And more:
During a May 18, 2009, military board tribute to veterans in Shelton, Blumenthal was quoted by the Connecticut Post as saying, “When we returned from Vietnam, I remember the taunts, the verbal and even physical abuse we encountered.”
This is a classic case of badly-handled crisis management. It appears that a decision was made to rebut the accusations without consideration of how much material might be found to undermine their argument. A good staff would have at least gamed that out, done some Googling and review of past speeches, and determined that the risk of further exposure would prolong the story.
On the other hand, as Henry writes, Blumenthal “already had the résumé to be a shoo-in candidate” — and he could still squeak through, even with his known flaws. Just ask Tom Harkin.
‘CONSERVATIVE LIKE ME:’ John Nolte of Big Hollywood proffers the “Patrick Goldstein ‘Prove Big Hollywood Wrong’ Challenge.” Call it a deliberate case study in “Blacklisting Yourself,” to paraphrase a recent book title…
Update: Speaking of Roger L. Simon’s latest book, Roger emailed to note that Blacklisting Myself was the only one of Roger’s 11 books to have not been reviewed by the L.A. Times, despite a promise from Goldstein that the newspaper would cover it. Which just adds an extra layer of recursive meta to that book title…
“THE POSTRADICAL LEGAL GENERATION” and the argument that we’re not getting truly liberal Supreme Court nominees because there’s a short supply of truly liberal lawprofs. (More discussion and open comments at my home blog.)
Last week, an Illinois judge rejected Chicago artist Christopher Drew’s motion to dismiss the Class I felony charge against him. Drew is charged with violating the state’s eavesdropping statute when he recorded his encounter with a police officer last December on the streets of Chicago. A Class I felony in Illinois is punishable by 4 to 15 years in prison. It’s in the same class of crimes as sexual assault. Drew will be back in court in June to request a jury trial.
I’m currently working on a feature for Reason about man in a more rural part of the state charged with six violations of the same statute, all of them for making audio recordings of on-duty public officials. For several of the counts in that case, the police were actually on the man’s property. He started recording his conversations with police because he felt he was being unjustly harassed for violating a town ordinance he thought was unconstitutional.
Like our host, I’m of the opinion that it should always be legal to record on-duty police officers, both as a matter of policy and under the free speech, free press, and right to petition the government provisions in the First Amendment. We saw the power and potential of audio and video recording technology to expose government abuse in the Iranian protests last summer. But we also see it here in the U.S. with the thousands of police misconduct videos uploaded to YouTube in recent years.
Typically, police who want to arrest someone for recording them while on duty use a strained interpretation of state wiretapping laws or whatever state or local law addresses obstructing or interfering with law enforcement. These incidents are troubling enough, and I think state legislatures should consider passing laws explicitly making it legal to record on-duty law enforcement officials. Those laws should include remedies for people wrongly arrested, or who have had their cameras or cell phones illegally confiscated, damaged, or destroyed.
But in Illinois the situation is quite a bit worse. In Illinois it actually is illegal to make audio recordings of on-duty cops–or any other public official. Illinois is one of a handful of states that require all parties to consent before someone can record a conversation. But the other all-party-consent states also include a provision in their statutes stating that for there to be a violation of the law the nonconsenting party must have a reasonable expectation of privacy. On-duty police officers in public spaces have no such expectation.
Here’s where it gets even worse: Originally, the Illinois eavesdropping law did also include a similar expectation of privacy provision. But the legislature stripped that provision out in 1994, and they did so in response to an incident in which a citizen recorded his interaction with two on-duty police officers. In other words, the Illinois legislature specifically intended to make it a Class I felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, to make an audio recording of an on-duty police officer without his permission.
Given the spate of recent stories about cops in Chicago caught on video misbehaving (some of whom were subsequently held accountable only because of the video), the legislature’s already-awful-when-it-passed 1994 amendment hasn’t aged well.
I suspect most state officials know this law is unconstitutional. While several people have been charged under the statute for recording public officials, I’ve so far been unable to find anyone who was actually convicted, much less had a conviction upheld. (If you know of someone who has, please email me!) Prosecutors tend to either drop the charges or offer a plea bargain before the case gets to trial. It isn’t difficult to see why someone would take a misdemeanor plea and a clean record instead of challenging a bad law and risking up to 15 years in prison and a felony record if they lose.
Before Drew the closest anyone came to challenging the law came in 2004, when documentary filmmaker Patrick Thompson was arrested for recording police interactions with patrons outside of bars and restaurants in Champaign-Urbana. He was looking to document allegations that police were treating white patrons differently than black patrons. (See the ACLU’s brief on Thompson’s behalf here). But Thompson took a plea bargain before his case went to trial.
So the law remains on the books. Which Illinois police officers remain authorized by state law to detain, arrest, and jail people who record them while on-duty, and they can continue to confiscate the recordings.
(Cross-posted at Reason‘s Hit & Run.)
UPDATE/CORRECTION: Eugene Volokh emails to say that Massachusetts also doesn’t appear to recognize an expectation of privacy exception to its all-party-consent law, and has upheld a conviction for recording on-duty police officers.