Why is Romney the Almost-Human?

Posted: April 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , | 12 Comments

Everybody — well, me, and Charles Pierce, and bostonboomer, and well, everybody — sees him as a stiff awkward robot with less charm than a Roomba.
Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner with lights on. Photo: benfulton, cc on flickr

Yes, that’s at least partly because he’s a rich guy who has to mix with the rubes on nothing stronger than caffeine-free Coke. And it’s partly because he’s been lying for votes for so long, it takes more and more time to get the right lies out of storage. A Roomba doesn’t have to do either of those things.

But, really, are those issues unusual for a politician? They all have to campaign among the manyheaded and sanitize their hands every few minutes. They all lie like tombstones, and we know it. So what is it with Romney? Why are the other politicians just doing what politicians do, but Romney gets called a robot?

I’m beginning to think that maybe it’s because he’s so bad at lying. It’s written all over his face that he doesn’t believe any of the drivel himself, that he’s reading his speeches to the proletariat because that’s what you have to do, that he’s going through the motions.

He’s such a bad liar, we can see him doing it. But truth-telling is so far off the table it’s in the Marianas Trench somewhere. That means we have to examine the only alternative. Good liars.

In the RE (Rove Era), elections are about piling on the most stimulating lies. For three and a half years we’ve had someone doing pretty much the diametric opposite of everything he campaigned on, and when he goes out campaigning now … people still believe him when he says the next four years will be different. He’s one of the best liars in all history.

It’s like a choice between being swindled out of your money or your house. Both alternatives are repulsive, but with a bad liar, we might be on our guard and actually get ripped off less. With a sweet-talking bamboozler, in Vastleft’s inimitable words, half the country accepts it while the other half demands even worse.

Crossposted from Acid Test

George Zimmerman Goes Rogue

Posted: April 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Crime, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , | 18 Comments

UPDATE: Angela Corey has announced that she will hold a press conference in Jacksonville within the next 72 hours. She said she will give the press a 3 hour heads-up before she makes her announcement.

George Zimmerman’s attorneys Craig Sonner and Hal Uhrig, announced at a press conference this afternoon that they have withdrawn from the representing Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin homicide.

The attorneys decided to resign after they “lost contact” with Zimmerman–he has refused to return their calls since Sunday. They also learned over the weekend that Zimmerman had ignored their advice about a website they set up for him and had set up a Paypal account different than the one they had agreed on, which Zimmerman’s father would control.

The last straw was when Sonner and Uhrig learned that George Zimmerman had contacted special prosecutor Angela Corey’s office and asked to speak to her directly. She refused to speak to him without counsel. Zimmerman then called back and told Corey’s office that he had no attorneys, just “advisers.”

Zimmerman also contacted Sean Hannity, who took the call personally. Hannity confirmed that he did talk to Zimmerman off the record and that he would discuss it on his Fox News program tonight. Sonner and Uhrig have no idea what their former client said to Hannity.

Most troubling of all, Zimmerman has “left the state, but not the country.” So where is he? It’s not clear if even Zimmerman’s father knows where is now. Keep in mind that these two attorneys have never known where Zimmerman was hiding, and have never actually met him. They have only talked to him by telephone.

According to MSNBC, the attorneys said

“We have a pretty good idea where he (Zimmerman) is,” Uhrig said, but added that Zimmerman is not answering the phone. The attorneys said they thought Zimmerman was still in the United States, but not likely in Florida….

The attorneys also expressed concern about Zimmerman’s “emotional and physical safety” and said he may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. They also have reservations about a web site Zimmerman set up to solicit money for help in his defense.

“Him setting up his own website is fine,” Sonner said. “I wish he would have told me.” Sonner, the first attorney Zimmerman contacted, said he had been working on the case for free.

From Think Progress:

At various times during the press conference, both attorneys said they did not know where Zimmerman is currently.

Uhrig told the press that, if people are trying to find Zimmerman, they should “stop looking in Florida” and “look much farther way.” This directly contradicts what Craig Sonner said on March 23 when he assured a reporter from WFTV that “he’s absolutely in the state, he’s local.”

Benjamin Crump, one of the attorneys for Travon Martin’s parents, gave a statement to Time Magazine:

Benjamin Crump, attorney for Trayvon Martin’s family expressed surprise over the announcement and issued a statement to TIME.

Trayvon’s family was always concerned that Zimmerman doesn’t try to skirt his legal responsibilities and become a flight risk. We always wanted this before a judge and a jury. We hope that [authorities] will take this under consideration that this a flight risk. If they go to press charges, is he really going to face them?

Regarding the website, therealgeorgezimmerman.com, Crump says:

It’s America, and he has a right to do what he wants to do. The family was a little taken aback that George said he had this life-changing occurrence [and needs money]. Well Trayvon Martin had a life-ending occurrence; his family had to do all this stuff [to get someone] who killed their child to face a judge and a jury. The fact that he has this website and he’s out to do this website, when you see the balance, Trayvon is dead. If it were the reverse, Trayvon would have been arrested by day one.

Let’s hope that the special prosecutor’s office has caller ID or that the FBI has some way of finding out where Zimmerman has gone.

Tuesday Reads

Posted: April 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads, Team Obama, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, unemployment, War on Women, Women's Healthcare | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 49 Comments

Good Morning!

It is just me, or is racism coming to the surface with a vengeance after the Trayvon Martin shooting? Maybe it’s just that the media is covering it more. But when it comes to the right wingers, it seem to me that they’ve be somehow inspired by, rather than shocked by, George Zimmerman’s horrific act. I’ll give you some examples, but I don’t want to link to the winger sites. I’ll give you enough info so you can google them.

You’ve probably heard about the National Review’s firing of writer John Derbyshire after he wrote a blatantly racist piece in response to the Martin/Zimmerman case. Amy Davidson at the New Yorker:

Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, announced over the weekend that he was ending the magazine’s association with John Derbyshire because of a post he published in Taki’s Magazine….Lowry said that the column, “The Talk: Non-Black Version,” was “nasty and indefensible.” Given its conceit—Derbyshire explaining to his children that black people are generally dumber than they are and dangerous and should, on the whole, be avoided—it might also be described as racist. (Josh Barro, at Forbes.com, called it “kind of unbelievably racist.”) In firing “Derb,” Lowry directed readers to his “delightful first novel” but said, in effect, that “Derb” had become bad for the NR brand:

We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation.

Except as Davidson points out, barely disguised racism is hardly foreign to the National Review. Why should we believe Lowry is so shocked by it? More likely he acted because the column was getting so much negative attention.

And yesterday another right wing racist–some guy named Mark Judge–came out of the closet in a post at Tucker Carlson’s site The Daily Caller (google it to read the whole miserable thing) writes that he’s thrown off the chains of his “white guilt.” Why? Because his bike was stolen and he’s sure the thief must have been black–even though he has no idea who actually stole the bike.

First Judge establishes his “poor me-ness” by explaining that he really loved that bike, and his doctor recommended exercise to deal with the aftereffects of chemotherapy for non-Hodgkins lymphoma. AND he was at church on Good Friday when the must-have-been-black-guy stole his bike. AND he never went on disability during his chemo treatments. Break out the violins and handkerchiefs!

Next he claims

“a liberal friend gave me a lecture about profiling and told me to just forget about the bike. ‘That person needs our prayers and help,’ she said. ‘They haven’t had the advantages we have.’”

“They?” So this “liberal” also assumed the thief was black?

That’s when I lost it. I had been carefully educated by liberal parents that we are all, black and white, the same. My favorite movie growing up was “In the Heat of the Night.” Yet that often meant not treating everyone the same. It meant treating blacks with a mixture of patronizing condescension and obsequious genuflecting to their Absolute Moral Authority gained from centuries of suffering. It meant not treating everyone the same.

It meant leaving valuable things like a bike in a vulnerable position in a black part of town because you didn’t want to admit that the crime is worse in poor black neighborhoods.

And get this–Judge’s favorite movie used to be In the Heat of the Night. So he couldn’t possibly be a racist, right? Really, go read the post. The pretzel logic is beyond belief.

The news has been filled with reports of African Americans getting shot by white people. I don’t know if there’s been an uptick in race-related shootings or if they are just getting more coverage at the moment. This terrible case in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example. The two shooters have now confessed.

The explanation for a shooting rampage that terrorized Tulsa’s black neighborhood and left three people dead may lie in a killing that took place more than two years ago.

Carl England, whose son is accused in the weekend shooting spree, was fatally shot in 2010 by a man who had threatened his daughter and tried to kick in the door of her home.

The man was black, and police say England’s son may have been seeking vengeance when he and his roommate shot five black people last week.

Police documents filed Monday in court say the two suspects have both confessed. According to an affidavit, 19-year-old Jake England admitted shooting three people and 32-year-old Alvin Watts confessed to shooting two.

So what was Watts’ motive then? It’s very sad that England’s father was killed, and the case does sound troubling

Back in 2010, Carl England had responded to his daughter’s call for help and with her boyfriend tracked down the man who tried to break in. A fight broke out, and the man took out a gun and fired at England.

The man who pulled the trigger, Pernell Jefferson, was not charged with homicide because an investigation determined he acted in self-defense.

Nevertheless, deciding that other innocent black people have to die because of what Jefferson did is still racist.

And then there’s right wingers and their hatred of poor people. That’s not news, but when a preacher unashamedly advertises it on Easter Sunday… Good grief! Kevin Drum: Helping the Poor is Now Apparently Anti-Bible.

I see that fellow Orange Countian Rick Warren — he of Saddleback megachurch and Purpose Driven Life fame — is in the news again. He was on ABC’s This Week yesterday, and Jake Tapper asked him what he thought about President Obama’s suggestion that God tells us to care for those less fortunate than ourselves:

Well certainly the Bible says we are to care about the poor….But there’s a fundamental question on the meaning of “fairness.” Does fairness mean everybody makes the same amount of money? Or does fairness mean everybody gets the opportunity to make the same amount of money? I do not believe in wealth redistribution, I believe in wealth creation.

The only way to get people out of poverty is J-O-B-S. Create jobs. To create wealth, not to subsidize wealth. When you subsidize people, you create the dependency. You — you rob them of dignity.

These people have completely removed Jesus from “christianity.”

Via The Minority Report at The Washington Free Beacon, It looks like the Obama Campaign needs to work a lot hard on diversity in hiring.

On Monday, Buzzfeed posted some photos of Obama campaign staff, and if there are any black faces in them, I can’t see them. Take a look at that Minority Report piece if you can. Here’s part of it:

In August 2011, Obama signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to develop plans for improving workforce diversity.

The apparent lack of racial diversity at the Obama campaign headquarters comes at a time when the national black unemployment rate is nearly double the rate for whites.

According to the most recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 14 percent of blacks are currently unemployed, compared with 7.3 percent of whites….

In Illinois, the black unemployment rate—as high as 28 percent, according to the Illinois Department of Employment Security—far exceeds the national average.

What a hypocrite!

And check out this one on “Obama’s war on women” too.

Jeeze, where can we turn? Obviously, the Repubs are even worse. In case you missed it, Scott Walker recently surreptitiously signed anti-abortion and anti-birth control bills at the same time he repealed Wisconsin’s equal pay for women act.

I’ll end there, but in case you missed my evening post last night, please be sure to read Joseph Cannon’s important post on electronic spying by Progressive Insurance. Your car insurance company may be following suit soon.

What stories do you recommend this morning?

Monday Evening News Update

Posted: April 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Barack Obama, children, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 50 Comments

Good Evening!

I have some great Sky Dancing news! Minkoff Minx will be back posting again soon! She plans to do the Wednesday Morning Reads and will gradually work her way back to her previous schedule. I’m so happy you’re on the mend, Minx!

In addition, we have a new front pager, Ecocatwoman (AKA Connie from Orlando). If you haven’t read her first two posts yet, please check them out: Language Matters and Goodby Flipper?

It’s another slow news day in politics, but I’ve gathered a potpourri of links for you anyway.

First, I want to call your attention to an important post by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire: Why is Progressive Insurance LYING about their spy devices?

You know about Progressive Insurance. That’s the company whose TV ads feature a lovely lady wearing a white uniform and blindingly red lipstick. The folks at Progressive are pushing a device called Snapshot which plugs into your car’s steering column and sends the company information about your driving habits. If you practice good habits, you get a substantial discount.

The question is: How much info are you sending to them? Are they tracking your location via GPS? Are they keeping track of how fast you go?

Progressive insists that they don’t collect location and speed info. In the video embedded above, you’ll see a Progressive commercial in which the lady with the stoplight lips assures you that the company doesn’t want to know where you go or how fast you get there. All they want to know is the amount of driving you do, how hard you hit the brakes, and what time of day you travel.

Please go read the whole thing. We truly have no privacy left. Along similar lines, apparently we can look forward to being spied on through our televisions next, according to The Daily Mail: Is your TV watching you? Samsung’s latest sets with built-in cameras spark concerns

Samsung’s latest breed of plasmas and HDTVs may allow hackers, or even the company itself, to see and hear you and your family, and collect extremely personal data.

The new models, which are closer than ever to personal computers, offer high-tech features that have previously been unavailable, including a built-in HD camera, microphone set and face and speech recognition software.

This software allows Samsung to recognise who is viewing the TV and personalises each person’s experience accordingly. The TV also listens and responds to specific voice commands.

This is Twilight Zone stuff!

Gary Merson, who runs website HD guru, said that because there is no way of disconnecting the camera and microphone, users cannot be 100 per cent sure that Samsung is not collecting data and passing it on to third parties.

Merson said: ‘What concerns us is the integration of both an active camera and microphone. A Samsung representative tells us you can deactivate the voice feature; however this is done via software, not a hard switch like the one you use to turn a room light on or off.

‘And unlike other TVs, which have cameras and microphones as add-on accessories connected by a single, easily removable USB cable, you can’t just unplug these sensors.

I’m never buying another TV as long as I live! I barely watch the thing anyway.

This morning Angela Corey, the special prosecutor (who began investigating the Trayvon Martin shooting after the states attorney in charge of Sanford, FL, Norman Wolfinger, had to recuse himself) announced that she will not be using a Grand Jury to determine whether to indict George Zimmerman or let him go free. The decision, and the consequences will be strictly on Corey. She didn’t indicate how much longer her investigation will take, so the only thing we know for sure right now is that Zimmerman won’t be charged with a capital offense. In Florida, that would require a Grand Jury.

According to The Miami Herald:

Benjamin Crump, an attorney for Trayvon’s parents, issued a statement after Corey’s decision Monday.
“We are not surprised by this announcement and, in fact, are hopeful that a decision will be reached very soon to arrest George Zimmerman and give Trayvon Martin’s family the simple justice they have been seeking all along,” Crump said.
Trayvon, 17, was shot and killed by Zimmerman on Feb. 26 while walking through a Sanford neighborhood where he was visiting. Sanford police opted not to arrest Zimmerman, who claimed self-defense. After public outcry, Gov. Rick Scott assigned Corey, the state attorney for Duval, Nassau and Clay counties, to take over the case on March 22.

Assuming Corey decides to charge Zimmerman, it may not be as easy for him to get off with a “stand your ground” defense as some commentators have claimed, according to a legal analysis published by Reuters.

Interviews with nearly a dozen veteran defense lawyers who have experience litigating Stand Your Ground cases suggest winning immunity could be quite difficult.

“Judges do not readily grant these (immunity) motions because they know they can pass it on to the jury,” said Carey Haughwout, the public defender for Palm Beach County….

The first hurdle will be a special evidentiary hearing in front of a judge, where Zimmerman will have the opportunity to argue that he deserves immunity. But to convince the judge, Zimmerman will have to present a “preponderance of evidence” that he acted in self defense, which under the law means he has to show he had “reasonable belief” that such force was necessary. That is a high bar, and difficult to prove, criminal defense attorneys said.

In cases where the facts are in dispute — and even if they don’t seem to be — the judge is likely to deny the Stand Your Ground immunity motion, said Ralph Behr, a Florida criminal defense attorney who has filed eight motions for immunity, all of which have been denied. More typically, a judge will choose to have the case go to trial, where the defendant must take his or her chance with a jury, just like other criminal defendants, he said.

I think that is all Trayvon’s family and their supporters want–a chance to see Zimmerman arrested and tried before a jury. Of course they also have the option of a civil suit, and that could mean that the homeowners’ association that allowed Zimmerman to run their neighborhood watch without doing a background check or requiring that he get training could be on the hook for millions of dollars.

I certainly hope that Angela Corey will factor into her decision the troubling racist history of the city of Sanford as well as the history of the Sanford Police Department’s failure to carefully investigate crimes against young black men.

Here’s a little Sanford history from WXEL public television:

The year before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier by becoming the first African American to play major league baseball, he fled the racist threats of townspeople in Sanford, Florida, where Trayvon Martin was shot 66 years later.

It was 1946 and Robinson arrived in this picturesque town in central Florida for spring training with a Brooklyn Dodgers farm team. He didn’t stay long.

Robinson was forced to leave Sanford twice, according to Chris Lamb, a professor at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, who wrote a graphic account of Robinson’s brush with 100 angry locals in a 2004 book.

According to the article, there was still plenty of “racial tension” in Sanford even before the shooting of Trayvon Martin, and the failure of local police to arrest Zimmerman has brought the simmering resentment to the surface.

Last month, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) held two town hall meetings in Sanford where hundreds of black residents turned out to voice their concern over police conduct….

NAACP officials compiled details at those meetings of at least six incidents involving alleged police misconduct that they plan to turn over to the Justice Department for possible investigation, an NAACP spokesman said.

HuffPo has a very good article on the racist bumbling Sanford Police Department. Check out this one example from a lengthy piece:

On the night of June 15, 2010, Ikeem Ruffin, 17, was shot and killed by a masked man during a robbery in an apartment complex in north Sanford. Ruffin had just left work and died wearing his McDonald’s uniform.

Police found 18-year-old Tarance Terrell Moore standing by the victim and calling for an ambulance, but the teen was already dead. The gun used in the killing was never recovered.

The next day, police charged Moore with robbery and murder in Ruffin’s death. He was denied bail and locked in Seminole County Jail awaiting trial.

More than a year later, Seminole County prosecutors dropped the murder charge, which carried a maximum sentence of life in prison without parole, in exchange for a guilty plea to a charge of robbery with a firearm. Moore was sentenced to nine years in prison….

“He was there, but he wasn’t my son’s killer,” Ruffin said of Moore. “They just wanted to pin it on him and forget about the killer.”

So the kid shoots someone and then stands there calling for an ambulance? How much sense does that make. But police never investigated further after arresting Moore.

I just have a couple more items for you. Did you hear about Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley calling President Obama “stupid” on Twitter?

David Axelrod responded: “Heads up, Sen. Grassley. I think a 6-year-old hijacked your account and is sending out foolish Tweets just to embarrass you!” But I like Charlie Pierce’s response better:

This is…funny because, you see, if there’s one thing that Chuck Grassley is noted for, it is that he is the most spectacular box of rocks, the most bulging bag of hammers, in the history of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body. If brains were atom bombs, he couldn’t blow his nose. If his IQ was one point lower, they’d have to water him. As the great Dan Jenkins once put it in another context, if the man had a brain, he’d be out in the yard playing with it.

Don’t take it from me. Ask anyone. “Stupid” is not a word for this fella to be tossing around idly, even if he did spell it out fully.

Finally, a very scary situation for some British youngsters that turned out to have a happy ending: Toddler on Easter egg hunt stumbles on live GRENADE… which has to be blown up by bomb squad.

Police called in the bomb squad yesterday after a three-year-old boy was spotted standing on a live hand grenade during an Easter egg hunt.

The grenade, believed to be a relic from the Second World War, was found in a field next to a busy road.

Yikes!

The egg-shaped hand grenade was spotted by father-of-three Stuart Moffatt, 34, at the event organised by a pre-school group.

Mr Moffatt, an engineering consultant, was there with his wife Victoria, 35, and their children Nelly, five, Isla, two, and 11-month-old Freddie.

He said: ‘We were beginning to count up the eggs at the end of the hunt and I saw a boy of three standing on an object.

‘It was brown and about 4 inches high. It looked like an Easter egg, but it was a hand grenade.

‘I was shocked. The boy who was standing on it thought it was a rock.’

Thank goodness all the kids are okay!

Sooooo….what stories have you been following today?

Thursday Reads

Posted: April 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Civil Rights, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, morning reads, torture, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 21 Comments

Good Morning!!

I think I have a few interesting links for you this morning, so let’s get right to it.

Those New Orleans cops who killed two people on the Danzinger Bridge after Hurricane Katrina got real prison time yesterday.

Four New Orleans police officers were sentenced to 38 to 65 years in prison for convictions including violating the civil rights of two people killed a week after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2005.

U.S. District Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt in New Orleans sentenced a fifth officer today to six years in prison for covering up the crimes.

A federal jury in August convicted officers Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Robert Faulcon and Anthony Villavaso of opening fire on unarmed black civilians on the city’s Danziger Bridge and conspiring with others to cover up their actions. The fifth, homicide detective Arthur “Archie” Kaufman, was convicted of conspiring to make the shootings appear justified.

“We hope that today’s sentences give a measure of peace and closure to the victims of this terrible shooting, who have suffered unspeakable pain and who have waited so patiently for justice to be done,” Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said in an e-mailed statement. “The officers who shot innocent people on the bridge and then went to great lengths to cover up their own crimes have finally been held accountable for their actions.”

Finally, some justice at a time when we are becoming aware of so many cases of African Americans being killed without any repercussions for the killers.

Last night I wrote about the judges of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordering the Justice Department to attend a hearing and be lectured about the President of the United States daring to make a few comments about his belief that the Supreme Court would not overturn the ACA. The hearing turned out to be even more ludicrous than I could have imagined. Jeffrey Toobin called it a “judicial hissy fit.”

An appeals court judge who claimed President Barack Obama was challenging the authority of federal courts was just throwing a “judicial hissy-fit,” according to CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.

“Totally extraordinary and totally inappropriate,” Toobin said. “This was a judicial hissy-fit.”

U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jerry Smith on Tuesday demanded a “three page, single spaced” letter from the Justice Department regarding the authority of the federal courts to strike down laws passed by Congress. Obama said Monday that the “unelected” Supreme Court should not to take the “extraordinary” and “unprecedented” step of striking down the Affordable Care Act.

“What the President said was entirely appropriate, entirely within his rights as an American citizen to express his opinions about this law,” Toobin continued.

“He wasn’t intimidating the Supreme Court. He couldn’t intimidate the Supreme Court if he wanted to. He was simply saying that he believes this law is constitutional, and this judge, doing this ridiculous patronizing act to the Department of Justice has simply made himself look ridiculous.”

A three-page, single spaced letter? Good grief! Of course the right wing nuts are overjoyed and crowing over this. Remember when they were so much against “judicial activism?” Remember just recently when Newt Gingrich talked about the dictatorship of the judges (or similar words)?

Eric Holder also defended the President’s remarks:

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday that the Justice Department will respond “appropriately” to a federal appellate judge in Texas who demanded a letter recognizing federal courts’ authority to strike down laws passed by Congress.

Holder spoke a day after 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jerry Smith questioned President Barack Obama’s remarks this week about an “unelected” court possibly striking down the president’s health care overhaul. Smith, during oral arguments in a separate challenge to the health law, asked the Justice Department for a three-page, single-spaced letter affirming the federal court’s authority.

When asked during a Wednesday news conference in Chicago what an appropriate response to Smith would be, Holder said, “I think what the president said a couple of days ago was appropriate. He indicated that we obviously respect the decisions that courts make.”

“Under our system of government … courts have the final say on the constitutionality of statutes,” Holder said. “The courts are also fairly deferential when it comes to overturning statutes that the duly elected representatives of the people, Congress, pass.”

Spencer Ackerman at the Danger Room got hold of a memo written by Philip Zelikow, who was an adviser to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in which he said that the torture techniques that had been supported by the Bush Justice Department amounted to war crimes.

Zelikow argued that the Geneva conventions applied to al-Qaida — a position neither the Justice Department nor the White House shared at the time. That made waterboarding and the like a violation of the War Crimes statute and a “felony,” Zelikow tells Danger Room. Asked explicitly if he believed the use of those interrogation techniques were a war crime, Zelikow replied, “Yes.”

Zelikow first revealed the existence of his secret memo, dated Feb. 15, 2006, in an April 2009 blog post, shortly after the Obama administration disclosed many of its predecessor’s legal opinions blessing torture. He briefly described it (.pdf) in a contentious Senate hearing shortly thereafter, revealing then that “I later heard the memo was not considered appropriate for further discussion and that copies of my memo should be collected and destroyed.” [….]

Zelikow’s memo was an internal bureaucratic push against an attempt by the Justice Department to flout long-standing legal restrictions against torture. In 2005, he wrote, both the Justice and State Departments had decided that international prohibitions against “acts of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture” do not “apply to CIA interrogations in foreign countries.” Those techniques included contorting a detainee’s body in painful positions, slamming a detainee’s head against a wall, restricting a detainee’s caloric intake, and waterboarding.

Zelikow wrote that a law passed that year by Congress, restricting interrogation techniques, meant the “situation has now changed.” Both legally and as a matter of policy, he advised, administration officials were endangering both CIA interrogators and the reputation of the United States by engaging in extreme interrogations — even those that stop short of torture.

Of course Zelikow couldn’t know back then that the next President, supposedly a Democrat would defend the war criminals in court and refuse to release videos and photos that would reveal the horrors of what the CIA had done.

Former Senator and 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern, who is 89, has been hospitalized in Florida. His daughter Ann McGovern told the AP that her dad

was admitted to Flagler Hospital in St. Augustine, Fla., on Tuesday evening for tests to figure out why he occasionally passes out and loses his ability to speak, she said.

“He’s comfortable. The tests are continuing to see if they can determine what’s causing this,” Ann McGovern said.

Hospital officials said the elder McGovern is in stable condition. McGovern splits his time between Florida and South Dakota, where he was a South Dakota congressman from 1957 to 1961 and a U.S. senator from 1963 to 1981. He has been hospitalized several times in recent months, including for exhaustion.

South Dakota Democratic Party Chairman Ben Nesselhuf said McGovern looked great and was in good spirits when he attended the party’s annual fundraiser, named in his honor, last weekend in Sioux Falls. Nesselhuf said the former senator, who gave a 20-minute speech at the affair, resists efforts to schedule rest periods during such events because “he wants to do everything.”

Yesterday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough came out and said what most people who have been watching the Republican clown show are thinking: Mitt Romney has no chance to win the presidency in 2012. In fact, Republicans are already looking ahead to 2016.

Joe Scarborough: Nobody thinks Romney is going to win. Can we just say this for everybody at home? I have yet to meet a person in the Republican establishment that thinks Mitt Romney is going to win the general election this year. They won’t say it on TV because they’ve got to go on TV, and they don’t want people writing them nasty emails. I obviously don’t care. I have yet to meet anybody in the Republican establishment that worked for George W. Bush, that works in the Republican Congress, that worked for Ronald Reagan that thinks Mitt Romney is going to win the general election.

Duh! Who wants to vote for a man who has made himself into a laughing stock?

Have you heard about the giant feathered dinosaur fossils that have been found in China? They were as big as a bus and had fuzzy feathers all over them.

The discovery of a giant meat-eating dinosaur sporting a downy coat has some scientists reimagining the look of Tyrannosaurus rex.

With a killer jaw and sharp claws, T. rex has long been depicted in movies and popular culture as having scaly skin. But the discovery of an earlier relative suggests the king of dinosaurs may have had a softer side.

The evidence comes from the unearthing of a new tyrannosaur species in northeastern China that lived 60 million years before T. rex. The fossil record preserved remains of fluffy down, making it the largest feathered dinosaur ever found.

If a T. rex relative had feathers, why not T. rex? Scientists said the evidence is trending in that direction.

“People need to start changing their image of T. rex,” said Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who was not part of the discovery team.

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