Terrorists in Johnson County?

Pardon me if I'm skeptical. I thought the Liberals were the only thought police. Seems like some folks have been thinking about and trying to commit some "terrorist acts?". Like raising money for some terrorist organizations like the dudes in Charlotte a few years ago who gave money to Hamas.

Hello, just because we support a foreign position and give money to it would not seem to me in America to make it against the law to support an opposing foreign agency. Remember our support for Afghanistan rebels like bin Laden when they were fighting Russia? Remember our support for Saddam when he was fighting Iran? It seems we can't get it right. How do you believe we have it right even now? We support Israel over the arabs. Why? Why have we picked one aggrieved party over another aggrieved party? Are we that smart?

So the terrorists arrested recently once fought in Afghanistan for a group that we heartily supported at the time. Now, this fight is being used as evidence against them?

You know, we just seem to arbitrarily decide to call something terrorist. Dropping bombs on innocent people from an airplane is somehow not seen as behaving in a terroristic manner. Maybe that's because it's what WE do. So we OK our behavior and outlaw all other opposing forms of behavior.

Now, it is against the law to talk about jihad in another country. Has anyone been paying attention to what our leadership has been doing? Pardon me if I'm skeptical about this whole situation. This sounds a lot like the Lackawanna 6. I think they got a bad deal. The got punished for getting out of a community that misrepresented itself to them. They were smart enough to leave and get back to putting their lives together, but not smart enough to avoid having our government hold it against them for the crassest of political reasons.

Just pardon me if I'm skeptical. I think I have every right to be.

What does it mean to be an "activiist judge"?

From Glenn Greenwald's excellent blog today, he quotes an answer given by Sam Alito during his confirmation hearings for a position on the Supreme Court:

When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.

Two weeks ago, Alito cast the deciding vote in Ricci v. DeStefano, an intensely contested affirmative action case. He did so by ruling in favor of the Italian-American firefighters, finding that they were unlawfully discriminated against, even though the district court judge who heard all the evidence and the three-judge appellate panel ruled against them and dismissed their case. Notably, the majority Supreme Court opinion Alito joined (.pdf) began by highlighting not the relevant legal doctrine, but rather, the emotional factors that made the Italian-American-plaintiffs empathetic.

You know, Sotomayor has been villified for talking about the advantages of having a Latino judge with a background unfamiliar to the court today. She's talked about the fact that, in a sense, judges do make law since they ultimately interpret the law to determine if it passes constitutional muster.

Republicans claim to despise activist judges and, according to the tenets of the Federalist Society, want judges who interpret the law the way it would have been interpreted by the founders of the US of A. I suppose what they really mean is an activist judge is any judge who rules differently than the way they would like. To me, an activist judge is one who is reversing laws that have been passed by legislatures. That is the only way a judge could "make law".

That means that, if the legislature determines that a city could throw out a test when the results of those passing the test do not reflect in some basic way the population of the citizens there, you might determine that maybe the test is biased toward the group that managed to pass the test. That is the intent of the laws under which Sotomayor made her ruling (along with another in a 3 judge panel) on a lower court. She is now being villified for having that ruling reversed recently by the supreme court.

A fair interpretation of this affair would be to determine that the Supreme Court (5-4) has made an activist ruling. They, in effect, have changed the law and are now preventing New Haven from redoing the promotion test for firemen.

What is particularly stunning in this story is that Ricci, the white fireman for whom the case was named was hired in the first place under anti-discrimination laws. Ricci has dylexia and he was given special provisions in order to pass the exams to qualify as a fireman for New Haven.

I'm telling you, some folks can only see life through their own special prism. I suspect Sotomayor will have an interesting viewpoint and be asking some interesting questions as she serves on the Supreme Court. Whether guys like Alito, Thomas, Roberts, or our good buddy Scalia will be listening is of course another question. After all, it's hard to hear with your ears plugged.

How can there be uncertainty about what Nancy Pelosi was told???

The continuing controversy about CIA briefings attended by Nancy Pelosi and a limited set of congressmen during the Bush administration leaves one major point unaddressed. If the CIA summaries presented thus far are so full of obvious inaccuracies (wrong dates, wrong people on the list), why has not more attention been directed to this?

First of all, the claim is that congressmen could not take notes about what was told to them. Secondly, it is also apprarent that either no records were made during the briefings (as a secretary would do) or that records were made but are being withheld.

These briefings were top secret. The very idea that our government gave top secret briefings and then has no official record of what was said is just astounding to me. If one of those attendees were to have leaked top secret info, how could anyone ever prove what they were told? It would devolve to he said/she said as seems to be the case now.

Unless this approach has been official CIA policy all along, it smacks to me of the Bush approach of hiding, obscuring, and failing to reveal any information which would make them look bad or show them to be the liars they truly are.

Having no official record of Top Secret briefings seems to me to be a firing offense. If they can't handle something so obvious as this, what can they possibly handle with any degree of competence? Their record reveals the answer to that question.