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Open Thread: Thursday Night

By Jeralyn, Section Blog Related
Posted on Thu Feb 10, 2005 at 04:36:18 PM EST
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I missed an entire day's news finishing my brief. It got filed at 4:53 pm. I logged on to find Lynne Stewart had been convicted. Awful. (see post below where I added my thoughts.) Thanks to TChris for this and other news today. I'm going to re-group, go out to dinner and watch the last half of the Apprentice. Here's a space for you to chat about whatever else happened today or is on your mind.

< Saddam Hussein Trials to Begin This Spring | National Lawyer Guild Condemns Lynne Stewart Verdict >

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    Open Thread: Thursday Night | 32 comments (32 topical)
    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#1)
    by Kitt on Thu Feb 10, 2005 at 04:53:48 PM EST
    Someone mentioned seeing Ward Churchill on CSPAN. Here ya go. Russell Means is up first - fiery!

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#2)
    by soccerdad on Thu Feb 10, 2005 at 05:14:50 PM EST
    Dr Ace - we finally agree on something - big loss

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#3)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Feb 10, 2005 at 05:26:11 PM EST
    The U.S. is one up in the war on terror they finally locked up Michael Moore's Mother. Lynne Stewart

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#4)
    by Richard Aubrey on Thu Feb 10, 2005 at 06:18:18 PM EST
    So what, exactly, is awful about Lynnes Stewart's conviction?

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#5)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Feb 10, 2005 at 06:23:57 PM EST
    What is awful about Lynne Stewart's conviction? The alarming use of imflamatory evidence for starters. There are many who may not like her politics or her tactics but this was a horribly overblown case. If this conviction stands then we are really in trouble.

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#6)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Feb 10, 2005 at 06:26:10 PM EST
    What is awful? The investigation and prosecution breached the privilege between client and attorney, one of the most important privacy privileges Americans have. The prosecution and conviction will create a tremendous disincentive for any attorney to mount an aggressive defense of an unpopular defendant. Our entire justice system just took a hit. It's awful.

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#7)
    by Richard Aubrey on Thu Feb 10, 2005 at 06:35:47 PM EST
    Hey. Guys. This is not a kindergarten you're talking to. The accusation was facilitating communication from the accused terrorist to terrorist groups. This is against the law, provides no help to a zealous defense, and she'd agreed not to do it. You know the truth. I know the truth. Don't waste your time trying to misrepresent the truth. In other words, be better than Stewart. If you still can. You can cry all you want about chilling defense lawyers, and if you're talking about enabling terror by illegal communications, I say, good. If you're talking about legitimate defense (which of course you're not), this has no connection. Point is, all your howling and crocodile tears will not suffice to cover up the truth of the crime she committed. It was not zealous defense of an unpopular figure. After all, she didn't go to jail for defending Sammy The Bull or the Weather Undergrounders. So you can quit peddling taurine scat. NOBODY is dumb enough to buy your act.

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#8)
    by Richard Aubrey on Thu Feb 10, 2005 at 07:13:17 PM EST
    Really, Doc? I mean, these are supposedly, some of them, lawyers. As far as I know, that means they can read. That means they can read the facts of the indictment and the conviction. Are you saying they've forgotten the whole thing in just a few hours and reverted to the BS the ginned up for the great unwashed? They believe their own stuff? Man. If you're right, they are really dumb.

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#9)
    by jimcee on Thu Feb 10, 2005 at 08:16:38 PM EST
    Doc and Richard, No, most corresponents to this site can't imagine that Ms Stewart is guilty as charged. That doesn't mean the she isn't guilty, just that some refuse to believe it and that is at their peril. This woman has been a radical all of her adult life and she will always be that and that is fine by me. For the most part I can forgive her for that but I can't forgive her passing on messages to terrorists no matter how naive or ignorant she says she was. That she didn't know what was going on is a stretch. If she is such a smart lady then she knew exactly what she was doing, if not then she should not have ever been admited to the NYS Bar. So to her defenders: Is she a good lawyer? Or is she a bad lawyer that was so naive that she didn't see she was being used by Islamo-facsist to communicate to terrorist groups outside of the US? Or is she a smart gal that got caught fomenting a misguided '60's mentality that led the Left astray? Just asking for a clarification.

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#10)
    by Richard Aubrey on Thu Feb 10, 2005 at 08:21:23 PM EST
    Jimcee. Given the nature of this site, it might be worth asking the following question: If she's guilty as charged, do you think it was a good thing that she did? Other than getting caught at it, I mean. [This commenter previously has been limited to four comments a day. All execess comments have been deleted.]

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#11)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Feb 10, 2005 at 09:00:51 PM EST
    The cat's out of the bag on the Jeff Gannon affair. John Aravosis graced CNN's airwaves and did, I think, a wonderful job of framing the issue.

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#12)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Feb 10, 2005 at 09:29:46 PM EST
    so how about the good old North Korea nuke? and who is for freedom? if any of you missed it the Army just said it needs 750,000 new troops, oh boy here it comes! nuke anyone?

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#13)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Feb 10, 2005 at 10:24:12 PM EST
    On the same day that the North Korean announcement of its nuclear weaponry put the Bush administration on the defensive, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice got a double-dose of blowback from her 9/11 dissembling. First, the release of a previously classified report by the National Archives shows that the FAA had been warned repeatedly of the threat of terrorist hijackings between April and September, 2001. Even a slew of redactions, the Auugust 2004 report (which the administration held up) details 52 intelligence warnings to FAA. Some airport and airline officials were even briefed on the threat. These warnings included five that mentioned hijackings and two that mentioned suicide operations, according to the New York Times. Perhaps even more explosive, the famous January 25, 2001 Richard Clarke memo stating "we urgently need" a meeting of the Bush administration principals was released. (Clarke's Clinton era strategy document, distributed with the 1/25/01 memo, was also released.) The contradictions are clear and glaring. In 2004, then NSA director Rice tried to torpedo Clarke's testimony stating in a March 22, 2004 Washington Post op-ed that "No al-Qaeda threat was turned over to the new administration." Compounding Rice's woes is her earlier statement during a May 15, 2002 press briefing:
    "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile. All of this reporting about hijacking was about traditional hijacking."
    Clearly, Senators Boxer and Dayton were right about the new Secretary of State. Apparently, Dayton was "lied to repeatedly" and Boxer was correct to state that Rice's loyalty to the President "overwhelmed your respect for the truth." In any event, for the next several days at least, North Korean nukes will be the least of Condi's problems. For more, see: "Fried Rice: Condi's Coming 9/11 Firestorm"

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#14)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Thu Feb 10, 2005 at 10:46:21 PM EST
    Jon- The FAA and nearly every other gov't agency gets a slew of terror warnings on a regular basis. After a while you get a bit numb to them. The 9/11 commision covered all this already. I actually read a warning that specifically targeted the Nairobi station (but with no particulars beyond bomb) about 4 months before it was hit. If the mere discovery or report of a terrorist threat was just cause to go to lockdown, we might as well close the Embassy in Cairo- They recieved over thirty reports of a possible terrorist attack and increased chatter relating to it in less than a week during the mid nineties. The good news is 99.999% of these type of reports turn out to be false alarms- The bad news is so many of them are false it is hard to take them too seriously.

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#15)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Fri Feb 11, 2005 at 05:20:05 AM EST
    So North Korea now admits to having nukes. Does this mean that Jimmy Carter will be asked to return his Nobel Prize? The work for which he won it was, after all, a complete and total failure.

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#16)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Fri Feb 11, 2005 at 05:27:35 AM EST
    I don't think you could get the Nobel away from Jimmy with a crowbar and a blowtorch- that said, good intentions will get you recognition but little else.

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#17)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Fri Feb 11, 2005 at 06:13:46 AM EST
    Should there be a difference between the advocate and the accomplice? If so where should the line be drawn? Did Stewart cross the line?

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#18)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Fri Feb 11, 2005 at 12:13:12 PM EST
    jon - Your total comment is just a copy of that the website says. So why tell people to link to it? Trying to get some hits, eh? Now read this. "O'REILLY: All right. But that was quite different from what Clarke said in August of 2002 when he put forth that once President Bush took office in January, 2001, he stepped up the war against al Qaeda. audio clip CLARKE: In the first week in February, decided on principle, in the spring to add to the existing Clinton strategy, and to increase CIA resources, for example for covert action, five-fold, to go after al Qaeda. And then (Bush) changed the strategy from one of rollback with al Qaeda over the course of five years, which it had been, to a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of al Qaeda." END AUDIO CLIP) O'REILLY: Rollback under Clinton. Rapid elimination under Bush. So will the real Richard Clarke please stand up. We've got two sound bites. You just heard them. OK? Something going on here." And then we have this. "CLARKE: I think if there was a general animus that clouded their vision, they might not have kept the same guy dealing with terrorism issue. This is the one issue where the National Security Council leadership decided continuity was important and kept the same guy around, the same team in place. That doesn't sound like animus against uh the previous team to me. JIM ANGLE: You're saying that the Bush administration did not stop anything that the Clinton administration was doing while it was making these decisions, and by the end of the summer had increased money for covert action five-fold. Is that correct? CLARKE: All of that's correct. ANGLE: OK." Then we have the fact that in mid summer, all agencies were put on the highest alert. And if you want to know what really kept all of these warnings from being looked at properly: "After 9/11, it's been obvious that the intel community was emasculated by laws dating back to the 1970s that made cooperation between the FBI, CIA, NSA and DIA impossible. And the Clintons made it worse. Ms. Gorelick, as Deputy AG, wrote a memo in 1995 that added several layers of bricks to the top of the wall separating the FBI's criminal investigators and intelligence gatherers. It says, in part, "…we believe that it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations. These procedures, which do beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation." Appearances mattered more than allowing the investigators to put the pieces together before 9/11." jon, this is all old news. You're going to have to do something better.

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#19)
    by jondee on Fri Feb 11, 2005 at 01:59:12 PM EST
    I love Bush's not even intelligent hypocrisy in telling the North Koreans to give up the pursuance of armaments and concentrate on the welfare of its people. Meanwhile this shameless creep spends a billion a week on Iraq while millions of kids are malnourished in the U.S and millions of WORKING adults subsist at the poverty level.

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#20)
    by glanton on Fri Feb 11, 2005 at 02:05:43 PM EST
    Better not to speak of such things, jondee. Someone might leak word of our huge suffering underclass to the Press!

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#21)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Fri Feb 11, 2005 at 02:06:34 PM EST
    Just in case you didn't catch the website on the photo of the banner in the original post: Check out this short animation, with sound effects of machine guns even, advertizing the "Men's Night Out" where that insane pictoral account of military recruitment in a Kentucky church that I caught on Fark.com via locomono (see screenshots if you missed it).

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#22)
    by jondee on Fri Feb 11, 2005 at 02:14:23 PM EST
    PPJ - Yes its all the fault of the left and Frank Church. Btw Anybody know what happened to all those colored coded monthly terror alerts??

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#23)
    by glanton on Fri Feb 11, 2005 at 02:31:34 PM EST
    Hopefully they went up Tom Ridge's rectum where they belong.

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#24)
    by glanton on Fri Feb 11, 2005 at 02:47:33 PM EST
    Though I hope Tom saved some for Karl and Ashcroft and especially the MSM.

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#25)
    by jondee on Fri Feb 11, 2005 at 02:50:18 PM EST
    Phoney election year terror alerts and Reichstag fires arnt as far apart as some may like to think.

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#26)
    by pigwiggle on Fri Feb 11, 2005 at 04:10:12 PM EST
    “while millions of kids are malnourished in the U.S and millions of WORKING adults subsist at the poverty level.” I looked and looked for rates of malnourishment in the US. It was very difficult because most searches for malnourishment and United States resulted in hits for aid programs from the US to other countries; I eventually gave up. However, it was trivial to find links covering malnourishment in the DPRK, as it was one of two countries to have increases in malnourishment among the general population during the UN’s last survey. It seems in the US malnourishment has been replaced by ‘food insecurity’. I would be interested in seeing any information that corroborates your claim of MILLIONS of malnourished children. It does seem like a fair comment from the president as the DPRK (read Kim Jong Il) spends more than half of its GDP on a standing army. Further, comparing poverty in the US and poverty in the DPRK is straight up stupid, no two ways. I wonder if you could find a single obese person in the DPRK that they would consider poor.

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#28)
    by glanton on Fri Feb 11, 2005 at 06:01:18 PM EST
    Look, I'm sure both of you have had it as rough as you say, and I further concede that 'poverty' as we usually think of it here in America is luxury when compared globally. But it's just a lie to say "there's no economic poverty in America." There are millions of homeless people in this country, for example, who would disagree with you pretty strongly on that account. Homeless. Not living in a dangerous neighborhood, not having two crappy cars.

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#29)
    by sarcastic unnamed one on Sat Feb 12, 2005 at 09:32:35 AM EST
    My mom is periodically homeless. Which is typical. Few are permanently homeless. Millions of homeless? Try 600,000. Homeless Statistics A lot, for sure. But let's be honest in our discourse.

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#30)
    by glanton on Sat Feb 12, 2005 at 09:43:36 AM EST
    sarcastic unnamed: I'm sorry, I just don't believe the Department of Health and Human Servuces nails this one on the head. I feel certain it's a lot, lot more than 600,000. For the purposes of this discussion, though, we can leave it at a conservative--perdiodical--600,000, which obliterates any claim that there's "no economic poverty in the US."

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#31)
    by sarcastic unnamed one on Sat Feb 12, 2005 at 09:47:11 AM EST
    Oh yeah, as in my case, US poverty is usually temporary. I'm certainly not in any way claiming that poverty is not a problem, but inflamatory rhetoric is not helpful.

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#32)
    by Richard Aubrey on Sat Feb 12, 2005 at 10:01:01 AM EST
    Being homed in the United States is apparently pretty easy. The percentage--even if we take the nineties BS number of 4 million--is pretty low. That was just over one percent. What percent of people can't finish high school? Pass a driver's test? Fill out a job application? There was a guy named Mitch something or other who was pushing homelessness as a cause. He later committed suicide. He started the Center for Creative Non-Violence, as I recall the name. Somebody called to ask how many homeless there actually were. As he related later, he looked at his colleague with the realization they had no idea, so he said, "Two million". On the theory that, if some is good, more is better, the libs punched it up to three and on some occasions four million. You will recall that that they all got housed when Reagan's second term was over. Anyway, almost all the homeless have mental, drug, alcohol, or criminal problems, or a combination. That means, especially the criminal part, that they don't have much social credit among their kin. Some neighbors of ours took in a couple of kids from a home. They toughloved one of them, did everything they could think of, and, then when he was too much for the rest of the family, pitched him out at the age of eighteen. My wife found him and I took him to a shelter (I'm still on their mailing list). He was homeless by most definitions. Since then, he has damaged an infant by shaking, and otherwise been a criminal pest to the law-abiding. He's now in jail. Fewer would be homeless if involuntary committment were more common, but, lacking stout locks, they will wander. Anyway, it's far from a matter of economic injustice. Battered women escaping their miserable significant others aren't victims of General Motors' stinginess. Now. This isn't to tell you something you don't know. Just to let you know that when you try to peddle the usual stuff, everybody knows better.

    Re: Open Thread: Thursday Night (none / 0) (#33)
    by jondee on Sun Feb 13, 2005 at 12:13:40 PM EST
    pig - I see you gave the long answer this time; the short one,"what does it have to do with ME?" We know already. I,me,mine - the shellfishnes of selfishness.

    Open Thread: Thursday Night | 32 comments (32 topical)