...the next time he visits Israel:

http://www.visaliatimesdelta.com/article/20090528/NEWS01/905280317/1002/NEWS01

Halbardier is one of the survivors of the Israeli's "accidental" attack on the USS Liberty in 1967:

The attack occurred in international waters off the coast of Gaza during the Arab-Israeli Six Day War. The Liberty, a navy intelligence ship, was there to monitor the war.

Instead, the ship was attacked by waves of Israeli fighters firing rockets, machine guns and napalm bomblets that dispersed a fiery jelly on the deck, according to some reports of the attack.

[...]

Survivors of that fateful day and other supporters maintain the attack was carried out by orders with the Israeli military and that it was deliberate.

Israeli officials, on the other hand, said the attack was accidental and have since apologized to the U.S. government.

Halbardier said survivors were told by the government officials to keep the attack to themselves and not tell anyone not even their spouses and family members upon returning home.

"I was told to forget it ever happened," he said.

Crew members were threatened with court martial and prison if they broke the silence.

For some reason Minnesota is home to boatloads of the zanier wingnuts, and not all of them live in Michele Bachmann's congressional district.

Yet again, the wingnuts show that their prime motivation is deeply tied to, if not indistinguishable from, totally unreasoning race-based fear. The Uighurs were and are innocent, but that cuts no ice over at Captain's Quarters.

Right here: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/06/wheres-the-money-coming-from/

Oh, and why hasn't Mark Kirk been brought up on treason charges? http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/06/rep-mark-kirk-r-il-i-told-china-not-to-believe-us-budget-numbers.php

The same phenomenon was noted in autopsies of soldiers killed in the Korean War, nearly twenty years earlier. Prolonged, extreme stress, such as that faced by combat troops, causes arteries to harden and eventually damages the heart.

One needn't go to a chain restaurant to eat affordable restaurant food. Try broadening your food horizons a bit and you might be pleasantly surprised.

They whine and whine and whine about how nobody wuuuuvs them and everybody haaaaaates them -- and then run to their keyboards and talk about whiny liberals.

I'd call it "cognitive dissonance", but that would imply the presence of cognition.

They are the People of the Lie.

Witness AF's blood brother (and likely sockpuppet) "farragut" spewing the long-since-debunked Republican lie that Kennedy 'stole' the 1960 election. http://www.slate.com/id/91350/

...precisely BECAUSE you're an American woman. The main thrust of the book and the review is about Western men with Asian women in Asia, and both conditions need to apply to trigger the sort of fetishization Laura Miller talks about, and Brightstar et al exemplify.

Go back in this thread and read the letters being posted by Not-So-Brightstar, something stinks (because he's smelling himself), Great White Male (in his own mind), and others. Their preference for Asian women -- and in the context, it's clear that they mean Asian women reared in Asia, NOT in the West -- is predicated mostly on their ideas of what Asian culture is like, and the role of women within it.

And if that guy has had sex with a willing partner other than his right or left hand, I will be very surprised.

Please?

Jon Aravosis, who we last saw fomenting hatred against then-DNC Chair Howard Dean for getting rid of one gay DNC worker and replacing him with another (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/5/3/16228/75954/303/207183), has done it again. His framing of the DoJ’s brief against the Smelt DOMA challenge (a framing that even a critic of the brief finds questionable: http://www.bilerico.com/2009/06/thoughts_on_the_doj_doma_brief.php#comment-186752) ignores some basic facts, facts that you have to read Laurence Tribe to find out.

Here's Tribe on the DoJ's DOMA brief on the Smelt case that Aravosis touts (http://www.advocate.com/news_detail_ektid90000.asp):

As someone who wants to see DOMA dismantled and invalidated, I would love it if this ninth circuit case would evaporate into the ether.

Even though I personally believe that DOMA is unconstitutional, I think that this particular lawsuit is very vulnerable; it’s not anywhere near as strong as the one that was brought in the federal district court in Massachusetts [a suit filed by Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders].

In an environment where the Supreme Court is still quite conservative, what makes a suit a strong one is that it finds a point of entry in which it’s possible to invalidate a law in a number of its applications by using more of a scalpel that might appeal to five justices rather than a bludgeon that will almost certainly ask more of the court than it is willing to do.

What’s strong about the Massachusetts case is that these are concrete situations of people who are legally married under the laws of states like Massachusetts or Vermont, and who are being discriminated against by the federal government with respect to federal benefits simply because they are same-sex couples. There’s no other difference between them and other couples in that state, and the court could agree with that without accepting any of the broader theories advanced in the [Smelt] lawsuit in the central district of California, which is basically a bet-the-farm lawsuit that almost dares a conservative Supreme Court to slap it down.

[...]

There are ways for the president to get rid of DOMA. He can advocate for its repeal, he can eventually urge the solicitor general to join in a more surgical attack, but he certainly isn’t obliged to go along with every plaintiff who brings a lawsuit.

The important point here is that the solicitor general traditionally seeks to dismiss lawsuits against federal laws whenever there is a plausible basis to do it. A lot of the outcry about the administration’s position doesn’t take that institutional reality into account.