If you post somewhere, whatever your motives, and no one ever responds to you, you generally move on to some other forum where you find more engagement.

Not that I haven't succumbed to the urge to try to smack down some trolls--but I have been working to resist that urge, because nothing good ever comes of it.

I always think of this cartoon I saw once. There is a little stick figure hunched over a computer. In the open doorway in back of the figure a head pops in and says, "It's 3 in the morning. Are you coming to bed?" and the stick figure says, "I have to finish this. Someone is WRONG on the internet!"

My mother has worked there for years and she is a civilian. I believe the lab is associated with MIT and she is considered an employee of the school.

"it's twelve-dimensional chess... like, underwater"

HA HA! Loved the whole post. Thanks for the laugh.

You have cleverly divined the truth.

The reasons he writes this blog are:

1. He uses his critiques of the administration to push the courts toward upholding the law, because then, you see, the administration will realize just how inconvenient it is to have a nation of laws instead of men, and then it will take the necessary corrective steps toward creating a unitary executive.

2. He is forced to play this role of agent provocateur because his life has been threatened by the boogie man.

3. Glenn is actually a creepy quasi-religious worshipper of Obama, and his Secret Good Motive is to make sure that--through the most circuitous route possible, by doing what only seems to be the exact opposite of what he should be doing to gain his end--Obama can become more and more powerful and dump the twenty-second amendment, so that we can all adore our great POTUS forever more.

The one captioned

"...and then Toby heard the 'snap' of the rubber glove..."

cracks me up every time.

That's a tough one. I'll have to really think about that.

But meanwhile, I think Chris Rock got it pretty much right:

...nobody gives less of a fuck than George Bush. You think you don't give a fuck? George Bush don't give a fuck. Nobody gives less of a fuck than George Bush.

If you was hangin' from a cliff, gettin' ready to fall to your death--that's right--and Bush was at the top of the cliff, and all you needed was a fuck to save your life, and Bush had a pocket full of fucks...he wouldn't give you one.

"Hey, Bush, I need a fuck!"

"Ohhhh, you know I don't give a fuck."

Here are some of the comments he made, paraphrased:

The memos offer the very definition of tyranny--everything a petty despot would want. What is pathetic about the Bradbury memo is that it says “we don’t believe most of this stuff; it cannot be sustained,” but we got five years of this stuff, followed by a few days of contrition.

K: What will future documents reveal?

The memos were written in a vacuum, for small group of people. From their premises they created a torture program, and how much worse than that it got, we don’t know yet. But these documents provided a foundation for a much larger edifice.

K asked about Yoo.

I cannot believe Yoo would produce this kind of work—-it is really bad in terms of legal analysis, the kind of stuff you that you send back when you see it in student papers. This shows the tragedy of an individual working very hard to tell the president what he wanted to hear.

We have got to say, enough. There are lots of people, even friends of mine, trying to avoid what they know they are legally and morally obligated to do.

Can't sleep.

Scared shitless.

Thanks for the link, karr(sic). As I mentioned elsewhere, Jonathan Turley echoed the comments of the lawyers criticizing Yoo in that article when he said on Countdown: I cannot believe Yoo would produce this kind of work—-it is really bad in terms of legal analysis, the kind of stuff you that you send back when you see it in student papers.

Turley also pointed out that this Yoo’s was the tragedy of an individual working very hard to tell the president exactly what he wanted to hear.

But Yoo tries desperately to recast this as his own stalwart professionalism in the face of the vagaries of political life: “I think the job of a lawyer is to give a straight answer to a client. One thing I sometimes worry about is that lawyers in the future in the government are going to start worrying about, ‘What are people going to think of me?’ Your client the president, or your client the justice on the Supreme Court, or your client this senator, needs to know what’s legal and not legal. And sometimes, what’s legal and not legal is not the same thing as what you can do or what you should do.”

With the last sentence, Yoo seems to be trying to suggest that 1. he only offered theory without having the slightest idea of its praxis and 2. he is free from any responsibility because he did not determine what the administration ultimately did as a result.

And speaking of recasting, he chooses to see his reputation at Berkeley not as a consequence of his moral and legal failures, but rather as persecution by those partisan lefties: “Berkeley is sort of a magnet for hippies, protesters and left-wing activists. So I’m not surprised that being one of the few recognizable conservatives on campus that I would generate a lot of heat and friction.”

Maybe I am doing a bit of recasting myself, but I choose to see Yoo’s current situation as the wheels of justice turning ever so slightly toward the good.