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It seems that radical hard-line fundamentalist Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants liberal and secular teachers kicked out of schools.

"Today, students should shout at the president and ask why liberal and secular university lecturers are present in the universities."

Hmm..... Sounds like he's a Republican.

The Administration is comparing Iraq and Fascism. Images of World War Two are used, but not Vietnam. Communism is mentioned, but the fact that the world's most populous nation is also a Communist state, slips most people's minds. We are busy making sure we are in good standing with the biggest nation, let alone the biggest Communist nation, that we no longer say that "Communism doesn't work."

Why is this relevant? Well, the Administration is talking about how the United States fought Fascism and Communism. It declares victory.

We are told we have to fight the terrorists "over there," otherwise we'll have to fight them "over here." This used to be called the "Domino Theory" during Vietnam. If we let Vietnam fall, we'd be soon fighting Communists at home. Instead we're importing Communist goods and setting up factories in Communist China.

No longer do we hear slogans about how Communism doesn't work and that we're fighting Communism. The war against Communism is largely forgotten, except for Cuba and Korea.

More to the point, Rumsfeld and the rest of the Administration have it wrong about World War Two. Why doesn't the current Administration look at Lyndon Johnson's War in Vietnam? The comparisons are striking beyond the Domino Theory. In the 1960s, Americans were also told to "stay the course" insofar as Vietnam and that "victory is just around the corner," and "we're seeing light at the end of the tunnel."

Today's pundits blame Democrats for being "soft" on national security. Most are too young to recall the slogan, "The Democrats are the party of war and the Republicans the party of depression." Many people fail to remember that World War One and World War Two were fought during Democratic administrations. The standoff during the Cuban Missile Crisis was under a Democratic Administration. This is not to say Republicans are weak despite the stalemate in Korea and Nixon's pull out in Vietnam.

Author Tammy Bruce, a once progressive convert to Reagan, gives a lesson about how World War Two happened and she advises that "Mein Kampf" tells the story, but those who have actually read it find its is largely an anti-Semitic tract. Yet the United States declared war on Japan, not Germany, after Pearl Harbor. It was the Germans who declared war on the United States through a Japanese-German Treaty because America had declared war on Japan. America was not a member of the League of Nations and Americans did not broker much, if anything, in Europe during the Hitler's rise to power or the carving up of Europe.

It was Zbigniew Brzezinski who said,

I am also somewhat inclined to feel that their criticism of our hysterical approach towards Iraq, viewing Iraq as another Nazi Germany, Saddam Hussein as another Hitler is not without merit. I think we have lost our sense of proportion.

Surely we should stop terrorists, but miring America's Army in an overseas civil war is not going to stop, for example, British citizens from plotting to blow up planes. Using the name of Hitler and the Domino Theory has little to do with the real threats.

The best comparison to a war of the past is America's involvement in Vietnam ... a Civil War where the enemy blends into the populace, where raw military force cannot crush the opposition, where we are told to "stay the course" and told that if we don't, the Domino Theory will mean we end up fighting them here.

And yet, history has proven that staying the course did not win us anything and yesterday's enemies, Communist or not, are our big friends.

Remember Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose 3000 terrorism arrests resulted in not one conviction?

It seems it was an indication of a general trend: That the Bush Administration's Justice Department is declining to charge most of the terrorism suspects arrested.

Despite a sharp increase in the prosecution of terrorism cases just after Sept. 11, 2001, only 14 of the defendants have been sentenced to 20 years or more in prison, according to a study based on Justice Department data.

Of the 1,329 convicted defendants, only 625 received any prison sentence, said the study, released Sunday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data research group at Syracuse University. More than half of those convicted got no prison time or no more than they had already served awaiting their verdict.

The analysis of data from Justice's Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys also found that in the eight months ending last May, Justice attorneys declined to prosecute more than nine out of every 10 terrorism cases sent to them by the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies. Nearly 4 in 10 of the rejected cases were scrapped because prosecutors found weak or insufficient evidence, no evidence of criminal intent or no evident federal crime.

[emphasis added]

Just a friendly reminder, folks, why we have a justice system, the right to a fair trial and the fundamental tenet that people are innocent until proven guilty.

Suspicion is not enough. Presidential posing is not enough.

The small number of long prison sentences shouldn't be a surprise because "terrorism is actually very rare — far more people are killed in ordinary street crime," said James Dempsey, policy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Nevertheless, terrorism poses a risk of catastrophic loss of life, "so agencies must pursue a lot of leads that do not pan out," Dempsey added. "We can't blame the FBI for pursuing those leads, but we can blame them and the Justice Department for arresting people and making a big media splash when things don't pan out."

We can also take to heart just how wrong wrong wrong the Bush government and its dittohead apologists and fans are when it comes to civil rights.

This is a problem when it comes to the non-prisoners in Guantanamo.

At the penalty trial of al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, the government acknowledged that it has captured most of the Sept. 11 ringleaders including mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and operations coordinator Ramzi Binalshibh. Although prosecutors suggested they might be charged somewhere someday, the government has never disproved persistent allegations they were tortured during interrogations overseas and thus cannot be tried in U.S. courts.

If prosecutions "have been compromised by unlawful interrogation or surveillance, that would be worse than ironic," Aftergood said. "It would mean the government has performed in a self-defeating manner."

You think?

This is a land ruled by laws, not by men. But the men in charge have really messed up. Now what? That's the question of this upcoming election.

The fantasy comes in many forms. There's the notion that 9/11 was planned by Saddam Hussein, that popular non-fact suggested as true by the Bush Administration and held as gospel by many Americans even today.

There's the fantasy that terrorism is best fought by bombing civilian neighborhoods rather than international police work.

There's the fantasy that terrorist without industry, without nations, without centralized control are "fascists" while nations that suspend civil liberties and quash dissent and torture prisoners and kill civilians in bloody occupations somehow could never be "fascist."

There's the fantasy that patriotism can be measured by winning a political argument, like, say, sticking it out in Iraq, rather than winning this war on terror, whose goal is in conflict with the Iraq occupation.

There's the fantasy that the Geneva Conventions are "quaint" and don't apply to America.

There's the fantasy that being "strong" can make up for being stupid.

And there's even the fantasy that, while thousands are dying in a bloody, smoky, burning hell, nobody uses four-letter words.

"This is example No. 1," said Martin Franks, executive vice president of CBS Corp., of the decision by two dozen CBS affiliates to replace or delay "9/11" — which has already aired twice without controversy — over concerns about some of the language used by the firefighters in it.

"We don't think it's appropriate to sanitize the reality of the hell of Sept. 11th," Franks said. "It shows the incredible stress that these heroes were under. To sanitize it in some way robs it of the horror they faced."

The stations, including Fox Television Stations Inc. and Sinclair, cite the FCC's large and arbitrarily enforced censorship laws. However, the political views of Fox and Sinclair are not exactly secret.

Still it's hard to argue with a bunch of FCC boobs who got all upset over Janet Jackson's boob -- or the boobs in Congress who facilitated such overreaction.

Congress recently boosted the maximum fines the FCC can impose for indecency from $32,500 to $325,000.

So far, about a dozen CBS affiliates have indicated they won't show the documentary, another dozen say they will delay it until later at night and two dozen others are considering what to do.

So on this upcoming 5-year anniversary of 9/11, we can reflect on how tough the US government has gotten on the terror of four-letter words uttered by true American heroes.

If you missed This Week this week, you missed George Will making one of the strangest assertions I've heard (video):

That the fact that 25,000 people applied for 350 low-wage jobs at a new Wal-Mart is a sign of a strong economy.

Excuse me?

25 thousand people desperate to work at a job that will still leave their families below the poverty line. This is supposed to be a good thing?

24,650 people bummed because they can't work for minimum wage? This is supposed to be the sign of a healthy economy?

Of course, this is coming from the guy who sees contracted and earned corporate pensions as "entitlements" (and thus somehow undeserved). I suppose it's not news that George Will needs to come down from his ivory tower.

Life's a little harder if you're not pulling down six or seven figures from ABC News.

Our apologies to those who found the site unavailable the past several hours. I communicated with our sysadmin and now it seems all is well again.

...we share this recent classic.

The Reclusive Leftist points to yet another example of how sexist chauvinism is accepted in ways that would never be tolerated by decent folks when it comes to racism.

Imagine if the host of a popular TV show on dog training had made the following remarks:

“Black people are the only species that is wired different from the rest. They always apply affection before discipline. White people apply discipline then affection, so we’re more psychological than emotional. All animals follow dominant leaders; they don’t follow lovable leaders.”

Of course, if we were to ask sometimes-funny but always-self-important culture critic Bill Maher about this, Diane Dees points out that he'd dismiss us for not focusing on the important shit.

Tonight on Real Time, Maher said something about what the Bush administration had done to "the working man." Mary Frances Berry, one of the panelists, said "The working woman, too. You said just 'the working man.'"

Then he said it: "There are so many more important issues. Don't hang me up here."

No wonder we're seeing self-labeled "progressives" willing to advocate forced pregnancy pragmatism in pursuit of power. Self-autonomy and equal rights don't pass the hill-of-beans test.

Just shut up, girls, and go make us some sandwiches. You know we're on your side, right?

Uh huh.

Now isn't this fall's election just so full of promise?

Pam Spaulding finds a doosie coming from the poor, insecure conservative sex activists who still seem to be wrestling with their choice to be all-American heterosexuals -- being an orientation-optional bisexual heterosexual (dammit!) and socially conservative role model must be a terrible cross to bear for these folks -- because they're trying to project their own sexual orientation arbitrariness on the rest of the population, this time in an indictment against tolerance programs that undercut macho bullying.

Talk about ass-backwards thinking. Teaching tolerance, according to the doyenne of Columbus, Ohio-based Mission[ary Position] America, Linda Harvey, is turning male students into stone cold killers and stressed-out neurotics. She’s obsessed with Homosexual Agenda infiltrating the school system, and this freakout is par for the course.

Read on.

Enjoy....

The "I'm just a stupid jerk, so get off my case" excuse.

Bush: “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.”

Video-WMP Video-QT

Hell hath no fury as a wingnut scorned.

When Fox News journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig were being held by Gaza kidnappers, they were used as solemn symbols of our grand struggle against Islamic fascists. But ever since they were released, physically unharmed, they have become, as John Amato documented the other day, the targets of the same sort of hostility and bizarre resentment which was directed at Jill Carroll when she was released. It's almost as though the fact that they weren't killed -- and then refused to read some fictitious propaganda script about their captivity -- instantaneously transformed them from glorious martyrs in the War on Terror to impediments which needed to be neutralized through attacks on their mental health and character.

Yesterday, David Warren, a columnist for Real Clear Politics and The Ottawa Citizen, attacked Centanni and Wiig for being cowards and "men without chests" and said that they illustrate so much of what is wrong with the West and why we are losing to the Islamofascists:...

Who needs an election when you run the House?

San Diego Superior Court Judge Yuri Hofmann rendered his decision in the election challenge in California’s 50th Congressional District. He dismissed the request for a recount and for discovery of the facts of the Busby-Bilbray election stating specifically that "Once the House asserts exclusive jurisdiction and selects a candidate, the court no longer has jurisdiction" (emphasis added). The judge argued that the June 13 swearing in alone was sufficient to establish Bilbray’s "election." The event had the power to take away any and all citizen rights and immediately rescind authority over their own elections.

Requests for a recount resulting from major problems with the election were deemed insufficient and the rights of voters to due process were cast aside in deference to Speaker Hastert or any future Speaker. The induction of Republican Bilbray was just seven days after the election and a full 17 days before the election was officially certified by the San Diego Registrar.

The American visa card: Don't leave home.

According to the article, the two Americans have already submitted to an FBI interview, but one of them -- the American-born 18-year-old -- "had run afoul of the FBI when he declined to be interviewed again without a lawyer and refused to take a lie-detector test. " For those actions -- i.e., invoking his constitutional rights to counsel and against self-incrimination -- he is being refused entry back into his country. And the Bush administration is now conditioning his re-entry on his relinquishing the most basic constitutional protections guaranteed to him by the Bill of Rights.

Since neither of the two Americans are citizens of any other country, they are in a bizarre legal limbo where the only country they have the right to enter, the U.S., is refusing to allow them to return home.

Bush v. Gore Redux.

1) Bush v. Gore was a 5-4 opinion. (If I could put that in neon, I would.) Full stop. No qualifications. No dissenter joined any aspect of the opinion of the Court. Pace uberhack Stuart Taylor, there is no such thing as a "partial concurrence." You join an opinion, or some aspect of an opinion, or you do not. Souter and Breyer did not join any part of the per curiam, including its equal protection analysis. Anyone claiming that Bush v. Gore is a 7-2 opinion is lying, or lacks an even rudimentary understanding of constitutional law.

And via Bitch Ph.D., Adam Kotsko's deconstruction of wingnutty debate tactics (of which we've seen our share here).

5. Being "willing to be convinced" -- but only if the conservative's opponent can provide a thorough, definitive, and bulletproof argument on the spot. The existence of vast libraries of literature is most often disregarded (the only exception in the history of arguments being baa's decision to read The Second Sex in this thread) -- in any case, it's the duty of the conservative's interlocutor to supply the conservative with the perfect book, totally representative of all work on the topic, reasonably short, not overly academic, hopefully with pictures.... Most people seriously studying a topic read many books and articles, but the conservative reserves the right to make a definitive decision after reading a single book, preferably of fewer than 200 pages.

Don't forget to stand up-wind from the BBQ now.