Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

From Time’s Mark Thompson:

The incoming Obama Administration says it wants to shut down the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay. But even if Guantánamo closes, the controversial U.S. practice of jailing suspected al-Qaeda militants and other terrorists indefinitely won’t end, because such detentions continue on an even greater scale at the U.S. military base at Bagram, Afghanistan, 40 miles north of Kabul. Approximately 250 detainees are currently being held at Guantánamo; an estimated 670 are locked up under similar conditions at Bagram.

The original U.S. prison, established early in 2002, was the main screening site for those captured by Americans and their allies during initial fighting in Afghanistan. At least two detainees died there in December 2002 after being beaten by U.S. troops. While conditions are said to have improved since then, hundreds of prisoners remain in wire mesh pens edged with coils of razor wire, and earlier this year U.S. military officials revealed that a Bagram interrogator had been convicted of assaulting an Afghan detainee who later died. Just last month, the military issued a statement saying it would investigate whether a pair of U.S. soldiers had abused Afghan detainees.

[International Justice Network executive director Tina] Foster and a consortium of other human rights lawyers will be in Federal District Court in Washington on Jan. 7 to demand that those being held at Bagram get the same habeas corpus rights — the right to know the charges against them, and to be freed if a court deems those charges insufficient — that the Supreme Court gave Guantánamo detainees last summer. Their case centers on Redha al-Najar, a 43-year-old Tunisian national who has been held without charge in U.S. military custody since May 2002. Al-Najar was arrested in Karachi, Pakistan, where he had been living with his wife and child. According to his attorneys, al-Najar spent the next two years being shifted among various CIA “black sites” before ending up at Bagram. They argue he has been held for more than six years, virtually incommunicado and without charges or access to a fair means to challenge his imprisonment. The suit asks the court to order al-Najar’s release.

“It is ok that I vote how I want for any reason I want…don’t ya think bubba?”

*
That comes from none other than Okie blogger Jim Martin of Fried Green Onions infamy, who has made it his personal mission on his blog to publicly criticize and belittle every other blogger and citizen who takes a position differing in the least from his extreme right-wing worldview while crying foul if anyone dare question the wisdom of his positions or viewpoints.

This was emailed to me earlier today:

A doctor was addressing a large audience:

“The material we put into our stomachs is enough to have killed most of us sitting here, years ago. Red meat is awful. Soft drinks corrode your stomach lining. Chinese food is loaded with MSG. High fat diets can be disastrous, and none of us realizes the long- term harm caused by the germs in our drinking water. But there is one thing that is the most dangerous of all and we all have, or will, eat it. Can anyone here tell me what food it is that causes the most grief and suffering for years after eating it?”

After several seconds of quiet, a 75-year-old man in the front row raised his hand, and softly said, “Wedding cake.”

As a follow up to my post from earlier today, here’s more post mortem analysis of the recent election by Guardian writer David Wiegel in which he states, “the Republican party can no longer fool itself into thinking that the US electorate is naturally slanted towards it.”

The map is breaking down, and Republicans – outside of the south and a few areas of Appalachia – can no longer count on the old red/blue district lines.

What this means in the short term is that Republicans have to give up the rosy predictions of Barone and Fund. They can no longer go after “red” districts with Democratic incumbents and hope to win a majority. In just the preliminary numbers put together by Swing State Project, there are 24 Republicans whose districts voted for Bush in 2004 and Obama in 2008. Lee Terry, a Nebraska Republican, now represents a “blue” district. So does Mary Bono Mack, whose Palm Springs, California district has not been at risk since her late husband, Sonny Bono, won it 14 years ago.

And Obama’s victory turned many swing seats into safer Democratic strongholds. In 2006, liberal newspaper publisher John Yarmuth scored an upset victory in Kentucky’s 2nd district, which contains the city of Louisville and had voted only 51-49 for Kerry. This year Yarmuth won a rematch with his 2006 opponent as Obama carried the district by 13 points. Freshman Democrat Chris Murphy represents a Connecticut district that split 49-49 between Kerry and Bush but went by 14 points for Obama. Seats like these fall off of Republican target lists – strategists from both parties mark them “safe” and move on.

What does it mean in the long term? After all, can’t the pendulum swing right back? Of course it can. But it doesn’t swing by itself. It needs to be pushed by something – by a crisis of faith in the ruling party, by reforms in the opposition party, by demographic shifts that give one party a leg up.

Republicans can no longer fool themselves into thinking the country is naturally slanted toward them, or that they have a built-in majority. If the Democrats can win Hastertland, the Republicans need to figure out how to take it back, or how to win somewhere else.

That banner headline comes from renowned radical left-wing USA-hater Matt Drudge, who linked to this Reuters story:

Israeli tank fire killed up to 40 Palestinians at a United Nations school in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, medical sources at two hospitals said.

Two tank shells exploded outside the school, spraying shrapnel on people inside and outside the building, where hundreds of Palestinians had sought refuge from fighting between Israeli soldiers and Hamas militants. In addition to the dead, several dozen people were wounded, the officials said.

Medical officials said all the dead were either people sheltering in the school or local residents.

*
Inhumanity is inhumanity and atrocities are atrocities no matter what flag it’s perpetrated under.

It’s interesting that those who throw around pejoratives like “commie red” and “liberal pinko” belong to the party that defines itself in shades of red.

I’m not sure if it was this post or this post or some other catalyst that got Jim Martin’s dander up about election maps and 2008 election results, but he continues to blather on about how the electorate was evenly split and the last several Presidential elections being “with a margin of error of a few idiots on the far left side of reality.” In his post’s headline, he asks, “How many times do I have to show the 2008 election map?”

The answer, quite simply, is until he gets it right.

In the post, two of the three electoral maps he cites are projections from March and July — not even the final, actual election results. The last map he includes is the familiar, but deceptive county-by-county map that paints the country in a sea of red, where land mass is given more weight and importance than actual votes.

As I pointed out shortly after the election, this nation is not quite as red as it appears. When you look at a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states are rescaled according to their population, the electoral map looks significantly different.

Even more, when you take the actual proportional voting margins rather than the all-or-nothing extremes shown on Mr. Martin’s cited map, you get an even more accurate picture of where the country stands — even in Oklahoma (not quite so starkly red anymore).

*
To get to Mr. Martin’s claim of an evenly split electorate that was, as he called it, “with[in] a margin of error of a few idiots on the far left side of reality,” the 53% to 46% — a 7% spread — is certainly outside of most credible polls’ margins of error. It is certainly a wider margin than the 52% to 47% — a 5% spread — in 2004 and even more certainly greater than the incredible negative win margin of 47.9% to 48.4% — a negative 0.5% margin — in 2000.

Furthermore, Obama’s electoral win of 365 to 173 (+192 margin) is a significantly more decisive victory than either of Bush’s 2000 or 2004 victories — 271-266 (+5 margin) and 286-252 (+34 margin) respectively.

In both electoral college margins and actual voting percentage margins, the country was much less divided — especially given the significant Democratic gains in both houses of Congress — and certainly much less “evenly split” in 2008 than in the prior two elections.

So, Mr. Martin, you can keep showing your maps, but it doesn’t change the reality. Perhaps you aren’t factoring in the much larger margin of error of a not-so-few idiots on the far right side of reality.

From Matthew Yglesias:

Mitch McConnell says Republican senators “represent half the American population.” James Surowiecki does the math and concludes that they actually only represent 37 percent of the voters. All the more reason not to worry too much about getting 80 votes for anything.

Of course, this is the same math that said Bush’s 48% and 51% wins in 2000 and 2004 respectively equaled ‘a mandate’ while Obama’s 53% win in 2008 does not equal a mandate. And it’s the same math that says the GOP losses in 2008 of the White House, more seats (8) in the Senate and even more seats (21) in the House does not equal a shift away from the Republican Party but rather equals an evenly-divided country that still remains center-right. And, this is the same senator who supported Bush’s fiscal recklessness and mind-numbing deficits, yet all of a sudden urges “caution” and “restraint” with the new president’s spending plans.

With this type of math, it’s no wonder we are in the mess that we find ourselves in today.