stcynic
Posts by this author
The Bush defenders would have a much better case to make about media bias being the point of this controversy if it weren't for all that pesky evidence that keeps showing up. The latest? Turns out that those barrells that the news crew videotaped in the still-sealed bunkers on April 18th are, in…
Take a look at this article by Peter Galbraith, a former ambassador who reported to Paul Wolfowitz. He reports on more post-war looting and how dangerous it was to our troops:
IN 2003 I went to tell Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz what I had seen in Baghdad in the days following Saddam…
Yesterday, President Bush addressed the growing controversy over the missing explosives at a campaign stop and he predictably pulled out the ultimate appeal to uber-patriot morons, the claim that if you attack the administration's policies, you attack the troops themselves. And the audience,…
And while I'm arguing with Sandefur on the explosives story, I still think you should go to his blog and read his post on substantive due process and the post from Jon Rowe to which it responds. You can learn a hell of a lot about constitutional law by following their exchanges on that subject and…
Here we go again....
What a surprise, it turns out that Ed Brayton et al. may have jumped the gun on the missing-explosives story. Astonishing!
The link here is to a story in the Washington Times that claims that the Russian government sent transportation units into Iraq to help them move the WMD…
The administration's faithful defenders at Fox News are trying mightily to make the case that the explosives were gone before troops arrived, but they're doing so with misleading headlines. Look at this article on their website headlined "Search Showed No Explosives at Iraqi Base Before War's End…
Bill Ware, a longtime reader and sometime commenter here, has started his own blog. He doesn't post as often as I do, but what he does post is really substantive and worth reading. Go forth and contemplate.
Jason Kuznicki has jumped into the Sandefur/Brayton tete-a-tete with this post, at least in a manner of speaking. I agree with his assessment of Bush, obviously, but I still can't bring myself to vote for Kerry.
From the AFP:
"It is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime's fall," said Mohammed al-Sharaa, who heads the science ministry's site monitoring department and previously worked with UN weapons inspectors under Saddam.
"The officials that were inside…
The first defense story, which White House aides started frantically emailing reporters, was that NBC News had been with our troops when they first got there and confirmed that they were already gone. That was quickly shown to be false by the NBC reporter who was there, who said that in fact there…
Sandefur writes:
Yes, I know Brayton claims not to be a Kerry supporter, but so did Andrew Sullivan.
There is a real difference between the two. Sullivan was a Bush supporter who slowly swung over to being a Kerry supporter (rather reluctantly), and for many of the same reasons I've criticized the…
Quote:
The commander of the first unit into the area told CBS he did not search it for explosives or secure it from looters. "We were still in a fight," he said. "our focus was killing bad guys." He added he would have needed four times more troops to search and secure all the ammo dumps he came…
Ding, ding:
Look, I don't know what happened to these explosives, and I'm pretty sure Ed Brayton doesn't either. But my point was not about what happened to them. My point was about whether it is fair to declare this as an example of alleged incompetence in the White House. Once again, without…
Eugene Volokh discusses Bush's statement that he's okay with civil unions and has a different version of the FMA than I had. The original Musgrave amendment that was rolled out with a good bit of fanfare said:
Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman.…
Sandefur says I "fell" for a false story about the disappeared explosives:
Explosives disappear in April of 2003 or so, before American troops arrive. The probable explanation is that Iraqi troops moved the material out of the bunker and camouflaged it prior to American bombing, and that it was…
In an interview with Good Morning America taped Sunday, President Bush said:
"I don't think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that's what a state chooses to do so."
Now let's compare that to the Federal Marriage Amendment that he has been promoting:
Marriage…
Last night, the people in my fantasy football league had a little get together because one of our group, a reservist, is leaving for an 18 month tour of duty in Iraq in a couple of days. His unit will be stationed around Fallujah, one of the most dangerous areas of the country. He is leaving behind…
Several months ago there was a story on NBC that claimed that the Bush administration knew about Al Zarqawi's terrorist training camp in the Northern no-fly zone in Iraq long before the war started and that they and that they had decided not to take the camp out because it was more convenient to…
The new FBI Uniform Crime Report is out and it shows that 755,000 people were arrested last year on Marijuana charges, with 9 out of 10 of them being arrested solely for possession (over the past decade, the total is 6.5 million arrests). And here's a stat that no one ever talks about. The United…
From the "could this administration possibly be any more incompetent" file comes this report:
The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads…
Our old pal, Rev. Andrew Sandlin, is participating in a debate with David VanDrunen on "the role of God's law in society". His opening statement can be found here, and it sums up perfectly how he and his fellow Christian Reconstructionists think. Some people find it incredible that there are people…
Timothy Sandefur has been writing furiously since his return from Memphis on Friday (a trip that made me quite jealous. Memphis is known for two things, blues and BBQ - if there's a heaven, it must look a lot like Beale Street). If you're at all interested in constitutional law, his latest essay,…
Fascinating post by Jon Rowe about Catholics and natural law, based on a conference he attended recently. He points out the odd fact that Catholic thinkers tend to be more in line with the natural law philosophy of the founders because they have embraced philosophy and reason far more than their…
I finally managed to get all of my old blog entries moved over here, along with all of the old comments as well. The internal links are not correct, of course, and I'm not gonna go through 500 entries to fix them all. The search function should work for that if someone really wants to find an old…
At a time when we are dealing with a growing threat from North Korea, it's probably a good idea to take another look at the relationship between Reverend Moon and the maniacal dictator Kim Jung Il. The investigative reporter Robert Parry has long been following Moon's activities and in October of…
This is just disturbing. Three teachers go to a campaign speech by President Bush. They have tickets for the event that they got from the Republican party headquarters; they give the tickets at the front gate and are let in; then they are approached by event security and told that they have to…
The Church of Critical Thinking has a pretty good couple of posts up fisking my old pal Kent Hovind and his followers. Hovind is a marvel to behold, a one stop shop of stupidity. Naturally, he has thousands of followers.
Kevin Keith has written an absolutely devestating fisking of Phillip Johnson's latest bit of nonsense. In addition to being the Grand Poobah of the Intelligent Design movement, Johnson is also on the lunatic fringes of the AIDS issue (though as a law professor, he is profoundly ignorant of both…
One of the most irritating things to me about the shallow patriotism that is so pervasive in America, especially these days, is the notion that refusing a military draft is intrinsically a bad thing. We hear it all the time in regard to those who refused to go to Vietnam, despite the fact that most…
Happy Birthday, Earth!
Yes, folks, today is the Earth's 6000th birthday, according to the famous Bishop Ussher. In 1650, he famously calculated the age of the Earth using the biblical timeline based upon the ages at which various people were begat and came up with October 22nd, 4004 BC. At around 6…