Tuesday, December 23, 2003

COMIC BOOK BARBARIANS. Now this is a charming development: Kansas City, Mo. -- A member of a panel interviewing applicants for a judgeship in eastern Kansas asked candidates if they believe in the Ten Commandments, surprising several lawyers who applied for the job. "I was a little taken aback," lawyer Darrell Smith said. "It's my understanding that the Bill of Rights prohibits a religious test for an office of public trust." Panel member Robert Harrington asked about the Ten... [The Light of Reason] Tests like this are a standard trick of politicians from both branches of the Boot on Your Neck Party. Since the Republican branch is in the White House at the moment we tend to hear more about tests by the Democratic branch, but it's wise to remember that the Republicans are just as guilty. 9:08:35 PM    comment () Salam Pax has some comments on the US government's latest war on capitalism. 1:48:32 PM    comment () For Vietnam Vet Anthony Zinni, Another War on Shaky Territory. Over the past year, the retired Marine Corps general has become one of the most prominent opponents of Bush administration policy on Iraq, which he now fears is drifting toward disaster. It is one of the more unusual political journeys to come out of the American experience with Iraq. Zinni still talks like an old-school Marine -- a big-shouldered, weight-lifting, working-class Philadelphian whose father emigrated from Italy's Abruzzi region, and who is fond of quoting the wisdom of his fictitious "Uncle Guido, the plumber." Yet he finds himself in the unaccustomed role of rallying the antiwar camp, attacking the policies of the president and commander in chief whom he had endorsed in the 2000 election. "Iraq is in serious danger of coming apart because of lack of planning, underestimating the task and buying into a flawed strategy," he says. "The longer we stubbornly resist admitting the mistakes and not altering our approach, the harder it will be to pull this chestnut out of the fire." [...] The more he listened to Wolfowitz and other administration officials talk about Iraq, the more Zinni became convinced that interventionist "neoconservative" ideologues were plunging the nation into a war in a part of the world they didn't understand. "The more I saw, the more I thought that this was the product of the neocons who didn't understand the region and were going to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks who never had an idea that worked on the ground." [The Washington Post] 12:45:12 PM    comment () A couple of days ago, Yahoo! linked to a newstory on its frontpage with this intro: Saddam enters global web of U.S. prisons What other government maintains a network of prisons not only within its actual territory but inside other... [LewRockwell.com Blog] The only one at present is the People's Republic of China. The two other governments that have done so in the recent past were the Soviet Union and the Third Reich. Such interesting company the Feds keep. 12:35:19 PM    comment () Experimental nBlog Post This post was made using "nBlog", a Newton package for posting to a Blogger weblog--or in this case, to a Radio weblog via the Blogger API. While it's an interesting experiment, posting to Radio this way isn't terribly practical. The mail-to-weblog method is much simpler. It does have one advantage over email posting--with nBlog you can edit a post. That's not possible via email. The second paragraph of this post was added that way. 1:59:31 AM    comment ()

© Copyright 2006 Ken Hagler. Last update: 2/15/2006; 1:58:38 PM.