by TChris

If George "the brat" Bush has to play by the rules, he doesn't want to play at all. On Friday, the president announced that his administration would stop interrogating terrorism suspects if interrogators must follow the Geneva Conventions, prompting this editorial response from the NY Times:

To some degree, he is following a script for the elections: terrify Americans into voting Republican. But behind that seems to be a deeply seated conviction that under his leadership, America is right and does not need the discipline of rules. He does not seem to understand that the rules are what makes this nation as good as it can be.

The president's threats failed to impress the three Republican senators (McCain, Graham, and Warner) who argue that tortured confessions and trials based on secret evidence do not serve American interests. Perhaps someone in the White House noticed that the weekend headlines were about Republicans fighting Republicans, not the kind of reading that encourages GOP prospects in the upcoming elections. Suddenly the White House is making noise about a possible compromise.

U.S. News & World Report notes that Charleton Heston may be replaced by Tom Selleck as head of the National Rifle Association.

Better Selleck than Ted Nugent, if you ask me. Of course, I have nothing against the NRA as I am a supporter of the belief that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to bear arms and I am an opponent of gun control. The way I see it, the Second Amendment is one away from the Fourth and I'm not yielding anything when it comes to constitutional rights. Give them an inch, and they'll take a mile.

(Guest Post by Big Tent Democrat)

Via Atrios referencing this comment , I notice this online chat with David Broder. The strange thinking exhibited by Mr. Broder certainly provides reason to doubt his judgment:

Washington, D.C.: Mr Broder, if you feel Karl Rove is owed an apology from the pundits and writers over Valerie Plame, did you also call for an apology to the Clintons after Ken Starr, the Whitewater investigation and the failed attempt to impeach President Clinton? If not, why not?

David S. Broder: As best, I can recall,I did not call for such an apology. My view, for whatever it is worth long after the dust has settled on Monica, was that when President Clinton admitted he had lied to his Cabinet and his closest assoc, to say nothing of the public, that the honorable thing was for him to have resigned and turned over the office to Vice President Gore. I think history would have been very different had he done that.

So it is the lying to the Cabinet? Clinton's closest associates? The public? Any lie? Or just lies about private sexual matters to questions that never should have been asked in the first place? Or is it lies that have been proven to be so by a 50 million dollar partisan witchhunt? And is it only lies by Presidents? Because, you see Mr. Broder, Mr. Rove lied to the FBI. Mr. Rove lied to the grand jury. You would say he made a mistake I suppose. But at the least, an apology to Mr. Rove seems to be an absurd response for his own mistakes no? On the flip we can discuss more of the Strange Mind of David Broder.

The Associated Press reports today the U.S. has held 14,000 detainees overseas in secret prisons "beyond the reach of established law."

The bitterest words come from inside the system, the size of several major U.S. penitentiaries.

"It was hard to believe I'd get out," Baghdad shopkeeper Amjad Qassim al-Aliyawi told The Associated Press after his release -- without charge -- last month. "I lived with the Americans for one year and eight months as if I was living in hell."

Captured on battlefields, pulled from beds at midnight, grabbed off streets as suspected insurgents, tens of thousands now have passed through U.S. detention, the vast majority in Iraq. Many say they were caught up in U.S. military sweeps, often interrogated around the clock, then released months or years later without apology, compensation or any word on why they were taken. Seventy to 90 percent of the Iraq detentions in 2003 were "mistakes," U.S. officers once told the international Red Cross.

(Guest Post by Big Tent Democrat)

Back to the stage returns the utterly discredited John Yoo as he pens one of the most audaciously mendacious columns seen on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times this side of David Brooks. The man is truly shameless:

Thus the administration has gone to war to pre-empt foreign threats. It has data-mined communications in the United States to root out terrorism. It has detained terrorists without formal charges, interrogating some harshly. And it has formed military tribunals modeled on those of past wars, as when we tried and executed a group of Nazi saboteurs found in the United States.

The Administration has gone to war? Not even the Administration claims this. They rely on the Authorization to Use Force enacted by the Congress in September 2001. Harsh interrogation? Say the word Yoo. Torture. John Yoo is simply incorrigible. In a just world, he would be hooted off the stage of public affairs. In today's BushWorld, he writes Op-Eds in the New York Times. The man is a sick joke. More on the flip.

Some things to read today if you're online:

• Matt Yglesias:

As the President readies himself to go to the map for his right to order torture in violation of America's laws and international commitments, it's worth putting this in some context.

• The Talking Dog interviews Dr. Steven Miles, medical professor at the U. of Minnesota, and author of "Oath Betrayed" discussing medical complicity in torture, prisoner abuse, et al, in the war on terror.

• Law Professor Jordan Paust's plea to Congress urging that minimum due process guarantees under customary international law must not be denied when Congress attempts to articulate forms of procedure for new US military commissions

• A report in the San Francisco Chronicle about the interesting make-up of the California lethal injection team members.

• Warren Strobel and John Walcott on how Bush is gearing up for an attack on Iran -- based once again on faulty intelligence:

Duane Chapman, aka Dog the Bounty Hunter, made bail in Hawaii yesterday.

Dog has to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet, but otherwise can go about his life as he awaits extradition hearings.

Background here.

Lawyer and pundit Victoria Toensing has gone on the attack, accusing journalist David Corn of being the first to out Valerie Plame Wilson as a covert employee of the CIA. Corn denies it.

Here is Corn's original article from July 16, 2003.

The President of Iraq , Jalal Talabani, arrived in Aspen yesterday, a guest of the Forstmann Little conference. Today he spoke with PBS moderator Charlie Rose at the Maroon Creek Club.

Talabani spoke hopefully about the prospect for peace in Iraq and estimated that the U.S. military would be needed for approximately one more year before violence abates to a level that Iraqi forces can handle it on their own, according to an attendee who requested anonymity because all discussions at the Forstmann Little conference are meant to be confidential.

What kind of security was required for Talabani?

We haven't had one of these for a while in the blogosphere, but our bloggers' lunch with Bill Clinton seems to have brought out the worst in a lot of people.

Tonight, it's Ann Althouse and her second attack on Jessica of Feministing. Jessica responds here. Read all the comments, too. And this post at Salon. I'm firmly with Jessica on this one.

Jessica's sin, according to Althouse: She is posing in the picture, you can see she has breasts, and she resembles a rather famous intern who became rather famously involved with Bill Clinton.

I was there. I think Jessica turned sideways because we were packed in like sardines. At one point I was right on top of Chris Bowers -- he had to ask me to move forward -- when I did, I probably bumped into Jessica. But even if Jessica did turn to show a flattering pose, so what? Why is Ann being so catty about it? I sat across from Jessica at the roundtable. She did absolutely nothing to call attention to herself. She was sitting directly opposite President Clinton. She did nothing flirtatious, nothing to try and grab his attention, she was just like all of us, engrossed in the conversation.

Now, on to the next blogfight which is taking place in the comments at Steve Gilliards' NewsBlog, to his post asking why there weren't any minority bloggers at the lunch. In his post, Steve, a journalist, says he wouldn't have gone even if he had been invited. Reporters don't do these kind of events. Fair enough, I'm not an impartial journalist and don't have that training, so I'll take him at his word. Liza at Culture Kitchen (whom I really like and have sincere respect for, we spent an evening together at a club in Amsterdam) is even more upset about the lack of minority bloggers. She wrote Peter Daou about it and received this response. I'll agree. There should have been a greater attempt made to include minority bloggers. But I think it was unintentional. I will bet that when there's another such event, and there will be, whether it's by President Clinton or another Democrat, there will be a greater effort to include a more diverse group of bloggers.

(Guest Post by Big Tent Democrat)

How ironic. One of the main forces of Left blog detraction of the past few years, The New Republic, has joined the shrill partisan forces:

This November, control of Congress hinges upon the reelection of Republican moderates--especially those in the Northeast, such as Chafee and Connecticut Representative Christopher Shays. Inevitably, these dwindling, endangered few present their survival as an essential cause for all those who care about decency and goodwill. "I feel a moral obligation to make sure I do everything I can to make sure moderates have a place in this party," pleads Shays.

We don't want moderate Republicans to disappear, right? Surely we don't want Congress to descend irrevocably into bitter partisanship, do we? Actually, yes, we do. This November, it's time for voters to wipe out the remnants of the GOP's moderate wing--and without regrets.

Hello? Rather shrill of them no? More on the other side.

Robert Parry at Consortium News writes that Karl Rove and Richard Armitage have a long standing friendship. They worked together to secure the nomination of Colin Powell as Secretary of State. Parry writes:

The significance of this detail is that it undermines the current "conventional wisdom" among Washington pundits that Armitage acted alone - and innocently - in July 2003 when he disclosed Plame's covert identity to right-wing columnist Robert Novak, who then got Rove to serve as a secondary source confirming the information from Armitage.

This new revelation that Armitage and Rove worked together behind the scenes also lends credence to Novak's version of his contacts with Armitage and other administration officials, both as Novak sketched out those meetings in 2003 and then filled in the details in a column on Sept. 14, 2006.

Consider this in the context of the disparate versions provided by Robert Novak and Richard Armitage of Armitage's role in the leaks investigation. It also relates to the timing of Armitage's leak to Novak -- Novak said he first got a call from Armitage in June, 2003, before Joseph Wilson's July 6 op-ed: