I had actually never read Mcardle until today. I wrote earlier, that perhaps Glenn should have taken a more even tone. But I do sympathize after having taken a gander; how could you treat this person seriously. I have a pretty low opinion of the Atlantic to begin with, their coverage on Israel literally reads as if it was written on a mossad typewriter. But this, my god...

"As regards the war, I think his charge of American exceptionalism is actually pretty fair; I think the US has done a better job of occupying Iraq than, say, Iraq did of occupying Kuwait; and my belief in the basic goodness of America, a belief I still hold, made me think the war would be a way to get rid of a dictator and make the Iraqi people better off. My error was in not recognizing that our strength is not the strength of ten merely because our heart is pure. My conviction that we had the wisdom and power to take the fate of another country into our own hands was overweening arrogance, and it's too bad that other people, mostly Iraqi civilians, have paid the price. I think the war also hasn't been good for us, though I'm less concerned about that. The financial cost is not particularly important, but the cost in lives was large, and the cost to our national polity..." etc...

I don't see an apology in there anywhere. Yes, I was wrong, its a shame. If she had a soul, she would have spent the rest of her life washing out bedpans at a charity hospital as penance.

What I found most obscene was her comparison of the US occupation of Iraq to the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. This is wrong on so many levels that I can't imagine how this woman ever got a job in the private sector. Not only is it obviously, and objectively untrue--in the history of occupation, there has never been an occupation this bungled by any measure or standard. Even the Nazis had more foresight in occupying their invaded lands. But to bring up this point, as if it somehow mitigates the reality, is just bonkers.

I think your arguments are great, and would work even better combined in the following scenario:

There is a ticking time bomb (and its a DIRTY bomb, too) and the authorities have captured a likely suspect who won't talk. Luckily, the government has kept several interrogators locked up in a cage with no food for over a week, just in case of such an emergency. Taking advantage of the confluence of BOTH extenuating circumstances for breaking the laws you mentioned, the interrogator is allowed to eat the suspect, who confesses in hopes of being allowed to be uneaten. But the interrogator, after noting the location of the "ticking time bomb" eats him anyway. The interrogator gets to eat, the terrorist is done away with without even going through the messy habeus corpus stuff, and the ticking time bomb is caught just as it is to explode (and thrown into a convenient nearby river). No muss, no fuss. It will probably be this easy every time.

I aim to please.

It seems like Mukasey admitted that his remark was baseles...he admitted that it wasn't Afghanistan, he admitted that the upgraded FISA was not needed to intercept the call. He even seems to be admitting that the agencies involved are at fault for not having intercepted the communication. I'm at work, granted, and reading this stuff more quickly than I'd like to...but hasn't Mukasey effectively admitted that this was bs?

In regard to your interpretation of the transcript. Listening to the audio and watching Mukasey's mouth I would think he's saying, "...shouldn't need it", which makes sense given that he had just said, "no FISA application should have been neccessary".

As for the rest of Mukasey's cryptic commentary, I just don't understand what he's saying. Basically, he seems to be saying it was spot on, even though he seems to be admitting he got everything about it wrong. And that he was using it completely inappropriately and in the wrong context to get a bill passed. Unfortunately, Leahy had run out of time, and no one seems to have followed up on the question.

...far from it, so can anyone point out the mechanism by which proceedings would be started against Yoo. My understanding is that he is currently the target of a lawsuit, and of proceedings in a foreign court. But he hasn't been convicted of anything. Does Berkeley have the authority to initiate an investigation into crimes that should be adjucated in a court of law? And do the findings of that investigation bear any real weight? I'm not trying to start an argument; my dearth of knwowledge is making me skeptical, so anyone with specific info should pipe up.

I agree that many so called "progressive' congressional representatives in particular have misrepresented themselves during their campaigns, and that with voting machine irregularities, it really can't be said that anyone has been 'elected' with certainty. But I think we should be more sober in our assessment of the People. Certainly, there are more good than bad, but still, People do seem to have a long history of voting for reprehensible ideas, and did initially overwhelmingly support the war, the Patriot Act, etc. This may be out of ignorance, rather than malevolence, but in the end there's been little difference.

Waiting until the last minute to do your taxes doesn't necessarily count as tax resistance :)