Public Offenders Office is open

Item of note on FoxNews.com:

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An Idaho public defender became a very public offender after she delivered a crude note to county commissioners. Kootenai County defense attorney Linda Payne, angry that her raise was $5,000 less than she’d been told, walked into the commissioners’ offices last Thursday and dropped off a tube of lipstick, a tub of Vaseline and a greeting card. “The next time you choose to give us something please lubricate and/or kiss first,” Payne wrote in the card, according to the Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash. “Vaseline and red lipstick are enclosed. (Please excuse the small amounts. I don’t make that much to give you how much you need or deserve.)”

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Well, what to say about that? How about we start with BWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH!!!!!!!!!!!!! Seems the public defenders there were told about their raises – amounts and timing, etc. – and then a day later were told they weren’t getting that much after all. Even though the reason for it was a “miscalculation” when the raises were being tallied, I might be a little ticked off about that as well. To be honest, I think the response this woman gave was funny. Witty. Appropos, even. She got suspended for a week without pay.

Gotta love that. A woman gets suspended for a week for making a very veiled reference to her perception of her own situation. Dick Durban calls the people at Gitmo Nazis, gulag guards, and worse and he’s being supported. Definitely not right.

Dick Durban’s hateful bile getting called for what it is

If you’ve not seen the comments by now, then you aren’t hitting the blogs of the titans of the ‘sphere. Check Michelle Malkin (who’s all over this story), Hugh Hewitt, Captain Ed Morrissey, Power Line, Confederate Yankee and many, many more are talking about the after-hours slanderous, treasonous – and yes, I mean that word precisely – comments on the Senate Floor by Dick Durban. With thanks to milblogger Froggy Ruminations, I give you the Senator’s comments:

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‘On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.’ If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime–Pol Pot or others–that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

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The Senator has refused to apologize for the remarks and has engaged in the usual spin by saying 1) that he never intended to compare the US Military to those regimes he mentioned and 2) that the “right-wing noise machine” is attacking him unfairly. Senator, when you tell me that I would not be able to tell the difference between actions taken by our troops and officials at Gitmo and the actions taken by Nazis in concentration camps, by Soviet guards in the gulag, or by the murderous, nearly inhuman monsters of the Khmer Rouge, then you are most certainly comparing them to our troops and you’re claiming our troops are of the same breed. After all, if they’re not, then I’d be able to tell the difference, now wouldn’t I? Your spin is sickening and your comments – loudly broadcast by Al Jazeera, as you know – are giving aid and comfort to the people who want to see as many Americans dead by violence as they can arrange. Those people are the enemy, sir, whether you care to see that or not. Aid and comfort to the enemy has a name, sir.

Treason.

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Article III. Section. 3. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

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Even the basis for the Senator’s remarks are sheer lunacy, as has been the whole “torture” claims all along. Rusty Shackleford has a fine post (Warning: Graphic Imagery) detailing in language even the most dense of the moonbat-left should be able to process what torture really looks like. Durbin’s commentary makes anything Tom DeLay’s done sound like a quiet whisper beside a glass-shattering belch and the Democrats, who have resolutely demanded DeLay’s resignation, have said nothing. No admonishment, no denunciation. Not. A. Peep. While some of the MSM have remained steadfastly quiet (Washington Post, New York Times), some have had the balls to say what needs saying. I give you John Podhoretz of the New York Post.

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There was general outrage when Amnesty International made the disgusting comparison of Gitmo to Stalin’s gulag. A million of the approximately 26 million incarcerated in the Gulag actually died from it — which makes analogizing it to a prison facility holding, at most, 750 people an act of intellectual barbarity. But being merely intellectually barbarous was evidently small beer for Dick Durbin, whose comfort in using genocides as cheap rhetorical devices earns him the rare position of being intellectually genocidal. No, Stalin wasn’t enough for our Dickie. He had to add on the Nazis (concentration camp death toll: 7 million) and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (total death toll: 2 million). Their victims were innocents. Those incarcerated at Gitmo, it must be said again and again and again, were taken on the battlefield in Afghanistan or in proximity to it. And who gets the blame from Durbin? “This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners,” said Durbin. Yes, it was. Those Americans happen to be enlistees in the U.S. military. They are, in other words, soldiers or sailors or airmen or Marines, under the command of other military officials. Now, at this point in a column on this subject, it’s usually the time for the standard disclaimer that goes something like this: Yes, there can be bad apples in the American military. Yes, our techniques have been controversial and deserve serious debate. Yes, torture is bad. Yes, yes, yes. No, no, no. Not this time. Dick Durbin has slandered the American military. He has slandered his country. He has defiled truth and he has spat on reason. He has given aid and comfort to all those who seek to use America’s tough stance in the War on Terror as a recruiting tool for anti-Americanism. He is the Senate’s Democratic whip: a leader of his party by any stretch of the imagination. If he remains a leader of his party, his party deserves to be judged by his words — by his anti-military, anti-American words. Judged, and held to account.

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Held to account, indeed. Any of the Democrats who hold their silence at this don’t deserve to be in office. I agree with the idea about taking off the gloves. Enough worrying about not insulting left. Lord knows they don’t give a crap about insulting anyone else, including the men and women of the military (who they claim, repeatedly, to support and, repeatedly, fail to). Time to take them off.

AP still slanting their stories – Democrats & the Downing Street Memo

The AP is carrying this story wherein Congressman John Conyers wants hearings into the “Downing Street Memo” which, he and his Democrat allies claim, shows that the Bush administration intentionally distorted intel in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. (If you’re interested in that memo, I direct you to Power Line which not only produces the memo in its entirety but shows why it’s not the “smoking gun” Conyers is depending on it to be.) I find it almost laughable that the story relies quite heavily on the commentary of a man who’s been pretty much shown to be a liar:

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Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who advised the Bush administration in 2002 that Saddam Hussein had not tried to buy a certain kind of uranium from Africa, said Conyers’ hearing was important. “We are having this discussion today because we failed to have it three years ago when we went to war,” Wilson said. “It used to be said that democracies were difficult to mobilize for war precisely because of the debate required,” and the lack of debate in this case allowed the war to happen, he said. Wilson wrote a 2003 newspaper opinion piece criticizing the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger. After the piece appeared someone in the Bush administration leaked the identity of Wilson’s wife as a CIA operative, exposing her cover.

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The fact of the matter is that Wilson said he advised the Bush adminstration that the uranium buy hadn’t occured. His report, on the other hand, was reviewed by the Senate Intelligence Committee and they found that his report to the administration strengthened the conclusion that the attempted by had, indeed, happened. And they’re still peddling the story about the administration leaking his wife’s ID, mentioned in the above story as a fact, not an allegation in spite of that same investigation showing no evidence of that at all. When the media continues to push their story, facts be damned, and leave off the part about investigations showing otherwise, it’s no wonder the public’s view on the progress in the war on terror is skewed. I shake my head constantly, these days, when I watch or listen to the MSM news and I wonder how anyone can believe a word they’re saying. Then I recall that although millions of people read blogs, many, many more millions don’t. The MSM is the only news they have and that’s the information they must form their opinions with. Poor souls…