BlackBerry blogging
WordPress has developed a neat little BlackBerry app, which I’m testing out right now while losing at Scrabble.
Also, the Senate voted 60-39 tonight to move the health care reform debate to the floor. During his comments, Sen. Chris Dodd asked, “Why are we here on a Saturday evening; and for that matter, what are you doing watching C-SPAN on a Saturday evening?”
I felt like he was talking to me.
EDIT: I actually won the Scrabble game, coming back from a 60-point deficit. The winning word was “EQUIP.”
The fear over the upcoming trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that five men held in the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, would be moved to the United States in preparation for upcoming criminal trials in New York City. Included in this group is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has claimed to be among the masterminds of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on Manhattan and Washington, D.C.
Predictably, this has led to roars of outrage from the political right (predictably, because the move was made by the Obama Justice Department, and anything done by the Obama Justice Department elicits roars of outrage from the right). Their criticism, when it is intelligible, falls into three categories. First, there is the concern that bringing a “known terrorist” to trial in New York City (or, presumably, anywhere on U.S. soil) will make that location a target for terrorist attack. Second, some conservatives are disgusted by the idea that a foreign national is being accorded the right to civilian trial, when he is actually an “enemy combatant.” Third – and I’ve sat up over beers at a bonfire recently discussing the finer points of this one – many are worried that the trial will be a “circus” that turns into an excoriation and “embarrassment” of the United States’ intelligence community, specifically, the CIA.
Sarah Palin is breaking the Internet and creeping me out
While flipping through satellite radio channels today, I became convinced that I had discovered proof of America’s growing stupidity. Every talk channel I flipped through – Sirus-XM’s “The Virus,” NPR, CNN, and others – were breathlessly covering one of three topics: the soon-to-open “Twilight” sequel, the confusion over when to start getting mammograms, and Sarah Palin’s recently-released memoir, “Going Rogue.”
The situation is the same all over the Internet, at least as far as Sarah From Alaska is concerned. Wonkette has basically just run with the “PalinBlog” (RogueBlog? SarahBlog?) theme already established over at NRO, Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish has officially been overwhelmed, and the whole spectrum of punditry has basically had nothing else on its collective mind for the past two weeks or so.
It’s not just the blogs, either – Newsweek ran a front-page story on her (complete with leggy cover shot) last week, National Review’s Rich Lowry continues to slavishly adore her in print and online, and she’s made a tour of all the major talk shows, including Barbara Walters and… (even!)… Oprah.
Why not? It’s a fun story with colorful characters and conflict (the story about Palin’s book, I mean; not Palin’s book itself). I’m tempted to pick it up, but have decided not to for at least two reasons: one, I don’t want to encourage this kind of behavior and two, I have no idea where I left my last box of crayons.
Time to stop calling Randall Terry “pro-life”
“Operation Rescue” founder Randall Terry seems to have gotten a pass for a release he issued a few days ago, which I noticed in my general news inbox when it came out:
WASHINGTON, July 17 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The following was released today by Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue.
Randall Terry, Founder of Operation Rescue, and other local pro-life advocates will hold a press conference at the National Press Club (529 14th Street NW, Washington, DC) on Tuesday, July 21, at 2:00 P.M. Mr. Randall Terry to discuss what he and other pro-life leaders will and will not do if healthcare passes and includes paying for child-killing, and what convulsions follow.
Health Care, Murder, and the Coming Convulsions
“Let all those in government be warned: They cannot order people to pay for the murder of babies, and betray God Himself, without horrific consequences.”
Randall Terry
Background: It is clear that many elements in the pro-abortion congress and White House want to force Americans to pay for the murder of the unborn in their “healthcare” program.
If that happens, it is tantamount to the government putting a gun to taxpayers’ heads to pay for the brutal murder of an innocent child. This is tyranny and evil of the highest order.
“Please understand: neither I, nor any thinking person wants the convulsions that would inevitably come from such a government policy — the decision to force Americans to pay for the murder of their neighbor.
“Nevertheless, the sheer horror and frustration of such an evil policy will lead some people to absolutely refuse to pay their taxes. And I believe — if my reading of history from America and around the world is correct — that there are others who will be tempted to acts of violence.
“If the government of this country tramples the faith and values of its citizens, history will hold those in power responsible for the violent convulsions that follow.”
While Terry includes some perfunctory throat-clearing about not wanting any “convulsions,” make no mistake: he is making a very clear threat, not just about refusing to pay taxes, but about the kind of violence that we’ve already seen at least one instance of this year. In that case, the murder of Wichita abortion doctor George Tiller, Terry pronounced that Tiller had brought his slaughter on himself.
Let’s run a little mind-experiment. Imagine that you are assigned the task of making a statement designed to show as much support for domestic terrorism as you possibly could, without crossing the line into explicitly calling for murder. What would that statement look like? Would it be very much different from Terry’s thinly-veiled “warning” about coming “convulsions”?
It is time to stop using the term “pro-life” to describe Mr. Terry. He can be accurately described as “anti-abortion,” but he is no advocate for human life.
Palin’s poorly-worded, poorly-delivered, poorly-timed resignation
I watched the video of Sarah Palin’s resignation speech yesterday with much discomfort — sort of the way I watch disgusting viral videos sent to me by old friends from college.
It wasn’t because I’m a Sarah Palin fan — I’m not. It was just the sheer awkwardness of the entire event: the timing, right before the July 4 weekend; the setting (in front of the lake near her Wasilla home); and, most of all, the speech itself — rambling, babbling, incoherent, full of forced, ham-handed metaphors, and topped off by the worst use of a (mis-) quote I’ve heard in recent memory.
(On that last note, others have already pointed out that the “We are advancing in a different direction” quote wasn’t Gen. MacArthur’s, it was Marine Gen. O.P. Smith’s, whose remarks came just before X Corps pulled back to Pusan during the Korean War — which remains the largest retreat in U.S. military history, whatever Gen. Smith may have wanted to call it).
Speculation abounds over the governor’s unexpected resignation. Perhaps, she’s opening up her schedule in order to gear up for a run for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012. Maybe she’s got some significant skeletons that are about to make an appearance from the closet. Or maybe she’s genuinely had it with politics and is calling it quits.
If the first of those theories is true, Friday’s resignation has scuttled her ship before it’s even had a chance to sail. She came under fire for being a political novice during the last campaign, and quitting her office before having completed even a single full term as governor is only going to add fuel to the fire. In the case of the second — some kind of upcoming political bombshell on the immediate horizon — then she’s preemptively battening down the hatches, which would suggest a problem bigger than South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s.
In the third case, she’s probably making the right move. She was very obviously out of her depth on the national politics stage — as Mark Purdom’s piece in this month’s Vanity Fair makes clear. The resignation speech itself, as Paul Begala points out, was inane and childish, even in the text version posted on Palin’s own web site.
I fear, however, that we have not heard the last of Sarah Palin. She has her political fundraising group (“SarahPAC”), a “book” on the horizon (heavily edited by publisher Harpur-Collins, if Friday’s speech is any indication of the governor’s own literary ability), and she remains one of the Republican Party’s most profitable audience-pleasers.
And this may indeed be a role the former beauty queen is more cut out for. She’s a spokeswoman, not a politician.
Check out Sullivan
I’ve added a link to Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog at The Atlantic. He and others there have been liveblogging the events unfolding in Iran. Very valuable source of information.
Iran inflamed
It seemed clear last week that sitting Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had a tenuous, at best, hold on popular opinion in the run-up to Iran’s presidential elections. Iran’s huge urban youth population overwhelmingly supported a moderate reformer, Mir Hossein Moussavi, who had promised more personal freedom for Iranians and more outreach to the rest of the world.
Riots have broken out in Iran to protest what is being called a rigged election. (Photo via Agence France Presse)
When the results came in Friday, they showed that Ahmadinejad had won handily — prompting immediate cries of fraud in Tehran and around the rest of the world. Iranians took to the streets in protest, despite a government ban. Rioters faced police squads equipped with tear gas and clubs; photos and YouTube videos linked to by Twitter users have shown people, including women, being savagely beaten by riot police.
They’re still out there now — in Tehran, perhaps more than a million have gathered in the city’s “Freedom Square,” and reports of at least one fatal shooting are emerging from the protest, now more than 72 hours since it began.
This is going on now, so details are difficult to sort out. Christopher Hitchens, who has spent some time writing about Iran and its leaders, cautions not to call what happened in Tehran an election in his Slate.com column.
Twitterers are providing live coverage (which they have harshly criticized American cable networks for failing to do) of the event, which you can follow using any of these:
#IranElection
Twitterers near Tehran
Real-time images posted via PicFog.
Update: Boston.com has a hi-res series of some of the most stirring images from the ongoing protest. Some are graphic.
George Tiller murdered in Wichita church
Kansas physician George Tiller, long renowned for being one of the nation’s handful of late-term (and partial-birth) abortion providers, was shot and killed in a Wichita church Sunday, when a lone gunman entered the building and fired a single bullet from a handgun at him.
Arrested for the crime was one Scott Roeder, who, as far as I am currently aware, is now in the Sedgewick County jail awaiting charges.
The killing has predictably become a lightning rod in the abortion debate in the U.S. Some pro-choice groups have condemned the act as terrorism, and several large pro-life representatives, such as Operation Rescue’s Randall Terry, have found it difficult to completely denounce the act. Dan Holman, of Missionaries to the Preborn Iowa, told CNN’s Drew Griffin “I don’t advocate Tiller’s murder, but I don’t condemn it.”
Leave aside for the moment the rather obvious problems tenant to simultaneously calling oneself “pro-life” and rejoicing (either publicly or privately) at the vigilante execution of a human being. The far-reaching result of Tiller’s killing (above and beyond the grief and loss his family is undegoing) will be to re-polarize the abortion debate, drastically narrowing the common ground spoken of by the president at his recent commencement address at Notre Dame University.
Absent in almost all rhetoric in the abortion debate is the recognition that people of good faith exist on both opposing sides. The inability to empathize with the other side is what leads to events like Sunday’s slaying of Tiller in his place of worship — the idea that the opposing side consists solely of evil-minded people who want to either murder babies or strip women of their reproductive rights. This works well for the purposes of preaching to the proverbial choir, and little else — unless, of course, you count inciting deranged psychopaths to take their twisted personal sense of justice into their own hands.
