Indefinite Detention? But I Have Soccer Practice at 4: U.S. Politics 2012

i had a bite and it was like where the fuck did my $5 go because it's not in here

see but Assad's personally murdering his citizens one by one with a rusty switchblade, whereas Obama's being a pussy with all this robodrone assassination from a million miles away crap

xp

my basic stance is that the executive has grown too powerful and unitary in a lot of ways, especially in foreign policy. (the same holds for 'executive' powers in lower levels of gov't = cops)

this has happened because congress have given the executive that power and most people are either happy with it or view the status quo as natural. this is an ancient problem tbh, older than this country even.

for elected bodies to assert their power over warmaking would require congress to be 'fixed' and that's a whole other set of problems.

in one sense there's nothing wrong with a low level drone war in yemen, but it's something that just kind of happened because of this or that other thing that was happening nearby, of which congress was informed.

never declared war on Vietnam etc

― the alternate vision continues his vision quest! (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, July 17, 2012 12:48 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

vietnam wasn't exactly a bright spot on our resume either. again my problem isn't with the drones themselves (although tbh this is a bit of a lie - there are legitimate moral issues [and questions of legality] wrt dudes sitting back playing halo like this) but rather with the fact that it makes more practical and less messy the types of actions i'd like our country to avoid in the first place.

i didn't know Assad was a US president, I am mortified

Oh so Obama is only bloodthirsty in comparison with other presidents? I didn't realize we were playing with such low stakes- generally Olympics get participants from throughout the world.

http://blog.purentonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/laduree-macarons-paris-pic2.jpg

Macaron

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_CmCvh8DaqIM/TAv3dGVrgQI/AAAAAAAAA0k/MkfHSVXd1ac/s1600/May+31+pic.jpg

Macaroon

Look, in both the Bush and Obama administrations the argument has been that we're going after bad guys. I neither dispute that generally nor think that fewer ppl would likely end up as that lovely euphemism, collateral damage, if we sent in a swat team, I just think that:

(a) Killing ppl in foreign countries w/o declaring war is bad consitutionally and bad foreign policy in the long run, and

(b) W/o 'due process' (currently defined as we didn't roll any dice, we picked some dudes off of an intel list that was supposedly vetted) there's no accountability for psychopaths, rogues and hotheads and our constitutional guarantees are either negated or severely cheapened. It's bad enough that our local police forces can waste ppl almost indiscriminately but when the military is doing it, it's not such a good look.

We can afford such a military but we can't set up a 24/7 court dedicated to oversight? I know the Constitution is supposedly not a suicide pact but c'mon...

Mordy, instead of an Olympics I should've said it's more like an All-American episode of Steve Allen's 1970s dress-up fictional talk show Meeting of Minds, only with mass murder.

^ may very well be the platonic morbius post

Would watch

my basic stance is that the executive has grown too powerful and unitary in a lot of ways, especially in foreign policy. (the same holds for 'executive' powers in lower levels of gov't = cops)

this has happened because congress have given the executive that power and most people are either happy with it or view the status quo as natural. this is an ancient problem tbh, older than this country even.

for elected bodies to assert their power over warmaking would require congress to be 'fixed' and that's a whole other set of problems.

in one sense there's nothing wrong with a low level drone war in yemen, but it's something that just kind of happened because of this or that other thing that was happening nearby, of which congress was informed.

otm

Harry Reid's promised filibuster reform: B- trollbait

what was his quote about whether or not obama would support filibuster reform? "you darn betcha"? surreal moment

sorry, "you damn betcha". forgot he threw the D-word in there

why would the President's support be required to modify Senate rules?

to make everyone feel good, like qualified support for gay marriage 2 years after Dick Cheney

"qualified"? I'm not sure what else you want O to do on gay marriage - he can't repeal DOMA by himself, or make Supreme Court rulings. He could have come out sooner and that would have been better, but it wouldn't have any real legislative impact.

and lol Cheney kept his mouth shut while in office or didn't you notice

I did. Am anticipating Obama becoming a liberal in retirement with moist brow.

kept his mouth shut

except for that little unpleasantness with Senator Patrick Leahy

He could have come out sooner

and hurt Michelle's feelings?

we'll be here all week, everybody

they stopped holding the Blood Olympics after the peace treaty iirc

ACLU-CCR suit vs Panetta, Petraeus et al over extrajudicial killings:

http://www.salon.com/2012/07/18/obamas_killings_challenged_again/

the ACLU is like the only political organization I give money to

optimistic to think this might be the beginning of a long, drawn out, but ultimately important court challenge?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303567704577519213906388708.html

re: filibuster reform, they can do that now right, they're just making sure they still have the majority?

when you don't have the house it doesn't really matter anyway

? what does the House have to do with internal Senate rules? it totally matters.

I guess it still matters w/ senate appointments, but in terms of major progressive legislation, not really abd atm

sorry to be really slow but such as it is

SHUT UP THIS IS THE MOST CIVILIZED WE'VE EVER BEEN is only a hair away from IF YOU'VE DONE NOTHING WRONG YOU HAVE NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT.

that hair, and its measurable breadth, remains extremely important to me, and to many, many other people who actually have to figure out how to straddle it on a daily basis. The danger is the window of what is normal - and having accepted that blatant espionage is normal, how far are we from having to accept that sabotage and assassination are also normal? I'd like to think the answer is that one only nominally deprives people of their livelihood, and the others deprive them indirectly or directly, respectively, of their actual lives.

Farley @ LGM made a good point about what we'll never know about the drone assassination program - that these things only occur because somebody made a deal that nobody can ever talk about - but at some point the cartel nature of international counterterrorism will undoubtedly become unacceptable to more than a few major demographics in the participating states.

One decade at a time, or even one generation at a time, we seem to manage to redefine what is acceptable re: "war" - we've gotten so far that it really is now being narrated as a death penalty without a trial. Press on. But understand your opposition in the debate.

Using drones is pretty brilliant cos the image of a soldier playing a videogame in Florida is one more nail in the coffin that is public awareness/scrutiny of the war(s).

Yeah, because public awareness and scrutiny of the war(s) has been a POWERFUL FORCE FOR GOOD in how we go to war.

Tombot this is related in terms of general ideology to what you're saying but if you haven't read the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy by Javier Marías you might enjoy it. There's a lot of (very interesting & awesome to read) stuff in it about acceptable behaviors within broader contexts of wars & preventing wars, etc

General McChrystal said last month at some Aspen "ideas" cheese party that he'd bring back the draft. Me too, cuz I can't think of a quicker way to foment domestic rebellion. "Who, ME?"

Agreed.

yep

I revived a "national service, c/d?" thread recently but it didn't catch.

civilians of a certain bent seem to like the draft but the military pretty much doesn't. one of the 'lessons' of vietnam was don't go to war for a long time with kids who don't want to be there.

ppl like mccrystal talk about it in terms of the distance 99.5% of people are from the suffering of war, and/or how easy it is for washington to send people off to kill.

a draft seems like a pretty expensive, clumsy way to fix those things, and it may not even fix them. conscription didn't prevent vietnam from happening, and the major effect of the 'domestic rebellion' that vietnam sparked was... the end of conscription. so the whole thing seems pretty circular to me.

also as we learned some time ago, gen mcchrystal is a fan of bud lite lime so

so, this huma abedin/bachmann story

http://audibleconnection.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/smiley-bangheadonwall-yellow.gifhttp://audibleconnection.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/smiley-bangheadonwall-yellow.gifhttp://audibleconnection.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/smiley-bangheadonwall-yellow.gif

man what the fuck

the fact that this shit is in letters rather than out of control vertigo medicine speech fragments is somehow the worst thing about it

The whole Sharia thing is farcical dogwhistling, though tbf, I preferred the McCarthyite commie enemy better.

Ugh and then I saw this:

Last week, she announced via Twitter that she had raised $1.7 million in three months against her ‘12 congressional opponent, Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidate Jim Graves. He has raised $400,000. Of that, $150,000 is his own money. Most of her contributions reportedly come from out-of-state.

And with the coffers filling, don’t expect Bachmann to quiet down any time soon.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/post/john-mccain-hasnt-slowed-michele-bachmann-who-stands-to-benefit-from-accusations/2012/07/19/gJQAsrbHwW_blog.html

i suppose the silver lining there is, let all the nutcases pay for a congressional seat somewhere. shame it has to be one ~20 miles from me.

Any chance she could lose?

i need to look into the redistricting etc but no probably not

Bachmann's career will end in scandal, like that idiot Bob Dornan.