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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Sorry for your loss,thank you for your service and your opinion.I can't help but wonder how many less victims of this mess there would be if we could have been less partisan and fully recognized the threat during the 1990's.That failure I feel, contributed to making Bush/Cheney ,9/11 and Iraq possible.Did you volunteer?
"Weren't you emigrating somewhere, JonathanInTelAviv?"
It wasn't "emigrating" he said he was going to do, it was "enemaring". He's trying to loose weight. Trouble is if the enemas work there wont be much left of him, he's so full of it - that's all there is.
"less partisan and fully recognized the threat during the 1990's"
What threat are you talking about?
in Liverpool, nort-west England, it's been shortened to "scally" and could be used of a cheeky child or some fairly harmless fellow with a habit of getting into trouble.
I seem to be the only person here, or at least the only one vocal about it, who thinks that would be an absolutely outrageous miscarriage of justice.
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I turned off "Law & Order" just around the time the series spawned a litter of spinoffs; it was also around that time that the scripts began to reflect the post-9/11 "No More Mister Nice Guy" meme. (The meme most purely reflected in the abominable "24".)
Despite the casting of hot hard-ass babe ADAs to drive home the point that women can grow and swing professional dicks just as well as men, an irritating hypocrisy put me off: generally, the "Law" component of the episodes unabashedly presumes that the DA and staff are the Good Guys 'n Gals, responsible for outsmarting the fancy-schmancy defense lawyers pulling all those legal tricks and technicalities in the form of blue folded papers from their briefcase.
"He's arguing that all the evidence be excluded because Briscoe forgot to say 'gesundheit' during the arrest after the suspect sneezed!"
But when the scripts drifted rightward, it became annoyingly obvious (to me, at least), that the prosecutors were every bit as conniving and "unprincipled" as the defense. The prosecutors (and often the audience) just knew the suspect was guilty, and a conviction had to be obtained by any means necessary.
Their professionalism and ethics were so eroded that one could only keep "rooting" for the star protagonists if one shared the presumption that the DA et al was in the mold of an Atticus Finch-- a wise, learned, insightful attorney with a modest ego subordinated to a deep understanding of the rule of law. Whereas, for all the characters' noble pretense and utter self-righteousness, they actually behaved like shameless, conniving shysters.
The legacy running sore of the issue of capital punishment has revealed endless sound bites of former prosecutors who still mumble and grumble and stand by convictions that are afterwards found to be unjust-- sometimes because of police or prosecutorial misconduct, but also because of after-discovered exculpatory evidence, e.g. DNA testing.
I realize it's a hard job, and that prosecutors need to adopt a mind-set in which they must feel absolutely confident of the defendant's guilt in order to make the best case they can for the People. But the point to all my rambling here about a mere teevee show is to posit that the prosecutorial mind-set indeed sees "justice" as the end, or outcome-- putting away the bad guy/gal-- and argues for the broadest means possible to accomplish this end.
IMO, it's too late to fret over egregious miscarriages of justice after poor pregnant Lady Justice has been kicked in the belly over and over, then thrown down the stairs.
What threat are you talking about?
Um, you *do* remember the two attacks on the World Trade Center, don't you?
You know, the one that happened while Clinton was president, and the one that was planned and prepared while Clinton was president. And that'd be the Clinton whose "soft-power, and some harmless missiles at abandoned terror bases" approach to terror?
Bin Laden declared war on us long ago,they bombed the WTC in 1994 and many small bombings against us throughout the world.We took no action other than to throw a few rockets and missles into the hills of Afghanastan.We looked the other way in Sudan and wouldn't touch the hot potato of Bin Laden when the Saudis offered him to us.They have plotted against and attacked us for decades. Jimmy Carter held out his hand and they took our embassy in Iran.They mistook our tolerance and lack of response as weakness.If there is a common ground I cannot find it.I only know they wish to continue.I feel the strongest weapon we could have is to develope open minds to hear all sides and stand together with partisanship taking a secondary role.There is enough responsibilty and guilt to go around for both sides it's time to move beyond that to find solutions.It's time to "Man"up.
prepared for the dinner-table. The English expression is "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander" but I'm sure you're Yiddish is much better than mine. The expression is an invitation to even-handedness but pardon me if I cannot see any even-handedness in the assault on the captives in the Gaza Ghetto by American-provided weaponry. Of course, you don't want to "talk turkey" and admit the truth about the number of Palestinians killed by an army which has been trained to kill and which has the very latest in death-weaponry. If I were you I wouldn't want to talk about it either.
Just get out of my way, you snake. You've got to hope that Uncle Sam will continue to be Israel's sugar-daddy. If that day ends, your Holocaust stories won't seem so poignant any more as the modern world can see, without film-makers and authors, how cruel you are when you think you've someone to kick around the place. Go for a swim in the Dead Sea; there should be enough salt in it for you to cook your goose very nicely.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
