She read it here, but she didn't really read it carefully enough. Even from the even handed tone of this article, it seems quite clear that--especially in the light of the DOJ appeal--the changes would mostly be cosmetic.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/world/asia/13detain.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=pentagon%20seeks%20to%20overhaul&st=cse

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration soon plans to issue new guidelines aimed at giving the hundreds of prisoners at an American detention center in Afghanistan significantly more ability to challenge their custody, Pentagon officials and detainee advocates say.

The new Pentagon guidelines would assign a United States military official to each of the roughly 600 detainees at the American-run prison at the Bagram Air Base north of Kabul. These officials would not be lawyers but could for the first time gather witnesses and evidence, including classified material, on behalf of the detainees to challenge their detention in proceedings before a military-appointed review board.

Some of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as six years. And unlike the prisoners at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba, these detainees have had no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as “enemy combatants,” military officials said.

The changes, which are expected to be announced as early as this week after an obligatory Congressional review, come as the Obama administration is picking through the detention policies and practices of the Bush administration, to determine what it will keep and what it will abandon in an effort to distance itself from some of the harsher approaches used under President George W. Bush.

The decision has an immediately pragmatic side, too, coming as the administration is preparing to appeal a federal judge’s ruling in April that some Bagram prisoners brought in from outside Afghanistan have a right to challenge their imprisonment.

Some of the changes in the American detention policies are already under way. The Pentagon is closing the decrepit Bagram prison and replacing it this fall with a new 40-acre complex that officials say will be more modern and humane. In a recent policy reversal,

“On paper, it appears they’re going to be changes that will allow detainees more opportunity to present their side of the story,” Ms. Foster said in a telephone interview. “But ,b>I think the procedures are just words on pieces of paper unless someone is there to ensure they’re being followed and the detainee has the ability to understand them and avail themselves of them.”

You're lucky you aren't white.

Though I don't think about things that way, your behavior has started to make me wonder if its true.

Re, Sotomayor. You're leaving off a crucial part of the analysis. Its quite possible that the battle over ethnicity did throw people off of the more important issues of Sotomayor's record [that is, except for people reading here, who I think got a lot of information from Glenn that they would not have ordinarily received]. But that leaves the question: how and why was her ethnicity made such an overshadowing element of the choice. If I recall it was a shitstorm of nutball conservatives who first raised the issue of her ethnicity as being relevant to her jurisprudential skills. If we are going to lament how ethnicity skewed the discourse, then we'll have to just settle for only nominating white people, or conservative people of color to such positions. Otherwise, think of the obfuscating controversy that would always explode over inconsequential race issues.

Yes, it was all theater; politics IS theater. If voting could really change things, it would be illegal.

Then why did you vote?

I said it before...despite your obssesive interest, I'm not going to sleep with you.

1. How does a posting about propaganda and demagoguism, hardly uncommon themes, merit a place in every poli-sci textbook:

because it captures the particular dynamic of this moment, with inferences which highlight the past of these tactics, and allows readers to posit a future. It is an example, and such are necessary in any textbook. Squee.

2. Once again, its not Marx's conception of "false conscioiusness" because any debate about where to take capitalism, while maintaining its legitimacy, would be part of that false consciousness. Glenn, from a Marxist perspective, would be an equal victim of false consciousness as Glenn Beck, discussing illusory ideals that have never actually existed and tropes that are inherently as exploitative. We are noting one area of false consciousness, but ignoring what Marx would think was the bulk of it.

Once again, I don't necessarily believe in that, though I often have to concede its truth in moments of weariness. From that same conception, one must also concede that life is meaningless, since everyone of every generation dies, and that even the maker of false consciousness, was living in his own false conciousness that anything he did actually made any difference to the infinite void just one mile above ground.

Bottom line, such is the stuff Adnotoed wankery; but observing it from time to time harms no one.

True. Our Democratic representatives made sure to make those bases a permanent fixture for the next administration to create policy around. Benefits are, of course, an excuse to give money to military contractors, a collective food trap of distraction for the public, and a seat at OPEC. Downside--nothing but the possible collapse of our country. Russian roulette, US foreign policy style.