Admiral Fallon Resigns | The Agonist.
I'm not saying it's going to happen, but with Fallon there the odds were very high that an attack on Iran wasn't going to happen. Now the odds are not as high.
Update: Good comments (and great pun) at Fallon on His Sword. And see Adm. Fallon resigns as CENTCOM Commander.
Update2: Does anyone know how many carrier groups we currently have in the Persian Gulf?
Here are two well-written blog postings that argue Spitzer need not resign:
I'm not persuaded. I don't think Spitzer should be treated worse then the next John, which means he maybe shouldn't be prosecuted and certainly shouldn't go to jail. But that doesn't mean he belongs in the Governor's mansion.
If the facts as we currently know them are true, NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer must resign.
As a general rule, I think that office-holders who commit crimes while in office should not continue to hold that office. (I do take shockingly bold positions, don't I?) This case seems to fall into that general rule. I admit that I have exceptions to my rule. For example, I can imagine excusing some — but only some — crimes involving entrapment, or highly technical and basically harmless violations of complex rules in the context of a good-faith effort to comply, or reliance on reasonable advice of counsel. But this case — from what we know so far — isn't even close to one of those exceptions.
The problem is not infidelity. It's not even the overweening stupidity (“worse than a crime: a blunder”). Nor even the incredible assumption that so many politicians and CEOs seem to have that the rules that apply elsewhere don't apply to them — although that gets close. The problem is that this is criminal behavior. And we really can't define our minimum requirements for public life that low and still hope to get this country out of the ditch.
The charge of “structuring” cash withdrawals seems to me the sort of technical issue I would be inclined to forgive; the suggestions of a Mann Act claim are silly on these facts; but the basic fact remains that hiring prostitutes is a crime. Maybe — maybe — it should be legal. (I don't feel well enough informed as to how 'victimless' a crime this is to have strong views; the expensive market may differ from the street, further complicating matters.) But it's not legal. And I think we must expect basic legality from public officials (and if they don't like the rules, let them lead the charge for better ones). That this particular crime is rarely prosecuted, and even more rarely prosecuted by the feds doesn't change a thing. That Spitzer once trumpeted his office's prosecution of a prostitution ring just adds hypocrisy to the mix.
Even if it this case were shown to be highly selective prosecution of a Democratic Governor by a partisan Justice Department — and we don't at present have nearly enough facts to allow us to reach any conclusions on this question — my conclusion remains firm: if indeed the facts are as we currently know them, then Spitzer must go.
(And so too should Senator David Vitter. And no doubt many others.)
Democrats won big in a special election in Illinois on Saturday, winning the congressional seat formerly held by GOP House Speaker Dennis Hastert. This suggests a large national swing to Democrats at the congressional level. Especially around here. The Fix agrees,
Putting The Hastert Seat Loss in Context – The Fix: Those statistics got us to thinking about just how wide the Democratic target list could grow if the special election in Illinois was taken as a test case for the fall.
Looking for a way to compare apples to apples when it comes to congressional districts, we turned to our old friends at the Cook Political Report and their Partisan Voting Index (PVI). The PVI was developed by the folks at Cook in the summer of 1997 as a way of looking at measuring every district in the country against the nation as a whole. Each district was given a score — R+6, D+19 — that indicated how it performed on the presidential level when compared to the country. A score of R+6 means that the district performed six points more Republican than the country as a whole; conversely, a score of D+19 means the seat performed 19 points more Democratic than the nation. (A further explanation of PVI is behind the Cook Report's subscription wall so get one today!)
Illinois' 14th district has a PVI score of R+5. …
…
Florida boasts nine districts currently held by GOPers with PVI ratings between R 1 and R 5. Those nine districts are a mix of the once competitive (Florida's 8th and 12th), the occasionally competitive (Florida's 13th and 24th) and the never competitive (Florida's 5th, 7th, 15th, 18th and 25th.) Democrats have spent considerable time recruiting in Florida and are expected to put a number of these seats — including the 24th and 25th — in play this November.
But there's a fly in the ointment: Important local Democrats are too invested in being clubby with the GOP power structure — or with local sugar interests? — to give their all. Even local stars Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Kendrick Meeks are taking a pass on fighting for their party — and for Florida.
Not surprisingly, local activists and party workers are very unhappy.
I'm particularly disappointed in Wasserman Schultz on this one.
The Washington Monthly has a special issue NO MORE: No Torture. No Exceptions..
In most issues of the Washington Monthly, we favor articles that we hope will launch a debate. In this issue we seek to end one. The unifying message of the articles that follow is, simply, Stop. In the wake of September 11, the United States became a nation that practiced torture. Astonishingly—despite the repudiation of torture by experts and the revelations of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib—we remain one. As we go to press, President George W. Bush stands poised to veto a measure that would end all use of torture by the United States. His move, we suspect, will provoke only limited outcry. What once was shocking is now ordinary.
On paper, the list of practices declared legal by the Department of Justice for use on detainees in Guantanamo Bay and other locations has a somewhat bloodless quality—sleep deprivation, stress positions, forced standing, sensory deprivation, nudity, extremes of heat or cold. But such bland terms mask great suffering. Sleep deprivation eventually leads to hallucinations and psychosis. (Menachem Begin, former prime minister of Israel, experienced sleep deprivation at the hands of the KGB and would later assert that “anyone who has experienced this desire [to sleep] knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it.”) Stress positions entail ordeals such as being shackled by the wrists, suspended from the ceiling, with arms spread out and feet barely touching the ground. Forced standing, a technique often used in North Korean prisons, involves remaining erect and completely still, producing an excruciating combination of physical and psychological pain, as ankles swell, blisters erupt on the skin, and, in time, kidneys break down. Sensory deprivation—being deprived of sight, sound, and touch—can produce psychotic symptoms in as little as twenty-four hours. The agony of severe and prolonged exposure to temperature extremes and the humiliation of forced nudity speak for themselves.
Then there is waterboarding, a form of mock execution by drowning, a technique that has been used in so-called “black sites.” In addition to the physical pain and terror it induces, long-term psychological effects also haunt patients—panic attacks, depression, and symptoms of post-traumatic-stress disorder. It has long been prosecuted as a crime of war. In our view, it still should be.
Ideally, the election in November would put an end to this debate, but we fear it won't. John McCain, who for so long was one of the leading Republican opponents of the White House's policy on torture, voted in February against making the CIA subject to the ban on “enhanced interrogation.” As for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, while both have come out strongly against torture, they seldom discuss the subject on the campaign trail. We fear that even a Democratic president might, under pressure from elements of the national security bureaucracy, carve out loopholes, possibly in secret, condoning some forms of torture.
Over the past decade, voters have had many legitimate worries: stagnant wages, corruption in Washington, terrorism, and a botched war in Iraq. But we believe that when Americans look back years from now, what will shame us most is that our country abandoned a bedrock principle of civilized nations: that torture is without exception wrong.
It is in the hopes of keeping the attention of the public, and that of our elected officials, on this subject that the writers of this collection of essays have put pen to paper. They include a former president, the speaker of the House, two former White House chiefs of staff, current and former senators, generals, admirals, intelligence officials, interrogators, and religious leaders. Some are Republicans, others are Democrats, and still others are neither. What they all agree on, however, is this: It was a profound moral and strategic mistake for the United States to abandon long-standing policies of humane treatment of enemy captives. We should return to the rule of law and cease all forms of torture, with no exceptions for any agency. And we should expect our presidential nominees to commit to this idea. —The Editors
There are articles by the following luminaries:
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