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But does KSM really “deserve” the honor of a military trial? That is a privilege normally reserved for defendants entitled to call themselves warriors.

It’s no surprise that al Qaeda members would want to be seen as soldiers at war with the United States. Terrorist groups always want to be seen as warriors. Just think of the names they give themselves: the Lord’s Resistance Army, Lashkar-e-Taiba (“Army of the Righteous”), or the Irish Republican Army, to name a few. The warrior mystique helps them to recruit glory-seeking young men to join their cause. It helps them justify the killing of their enemies and portray all of their victims as casualties of combat. It enables men like Osama bin Laden to portray themselves not as outlaws hiding in caves but leaders of great armies, confronting the world’s superpower on a global battlefield.

via KSM Doesn’t Deserve to Be a War Criminal | Foreign Policy.

This strikes me as correct. To think the country that leads the western world in incarceration will have a jury that will acquit KSM is ludicrous. The GOP is delaying the inevitable and are aggrandizing terrorists: people that use guerilla tactics to attack unsuspecting innocents. Holder’s justice department threw out evidence gleaned by torture from KSM. They instead gathered new evidence to try KSM without engaging in torture. The GOP does not want this to come to light. This is part of the party of no strategy, the longer this trial is put off, the longer they can say 44 and his administration are weak on terror. Obama and Holder cannot blink.

Try him in federal court, with all due process, in a domestic venue. It is what the American people deserve.

Liberals smell a rat in the White House! How dare Obama say this! How dare it!

President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.

via Obama Doesn’t ‘Begrudge’ Bonuses for Blankfein, Dimon (Update1) – Bloomberg.com.

What? You think they deserve it Obama! What did my fellow liberal bloggers and Obama supporters do to deserve this BETRAYAL?!

Apparently Obama wanted to make sure the CEOs know he’s on their side too. I mean, the poor CEOs have had their itty-bitty feelings hurt so much lately. Will you shed a tear with me in honor of the hard work these Wall Streeters do for the country even if we have to bail them out when they screw it up on a cataclysmic scale?

via Did he really say that? | Crooks and Liars.

Except, that ain’t what he said. Here is the relevant excerpt from Business Week:

QUESTION: Let’s talk bonuses for a minute: Lloyd Blankfein, $9 million; Jamie Dimon, $17 million. Now, granted, those were in stock and less than what some had expected. But are those numbers okay?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, first of all, I know both those guys. They’re very savvy businessmen. And I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That’s part of the free market system. I do think that the compensation packages that we’ve seen over the last decade at least have not matched up always to performance. I think that shareholders oftentimes have not had any significant say in the pay structures for CEOs.

via Don’t “Begrudge” Obama His Bloomberg Interview – The Atlantic Business Channel.

Bloomberg’s chopped up quotes from the Bloomberg/Business Week interview to get a bunch of juicy SEO ready link backs from all the bloggers. They removed the caveat of success from the Obama’s “who deserves a bonus” equation. Obama clearly stated the bonuses of wall street execs don’t match their performance as execs and shareholders do not have appropriate input to executive compensations. It wasn’t barn burner, I hate Wall Street populist rant, but this president is not that guy and never will be. In my opinion, it comes off lame when he tries to be. Regardless, it is a statement that’s pretty consistent with his prior rhetoric.

My point here is that we need to stop trusting interpretations of politicians quotes when they are paraphrased, especially in business news sources. Everyone trusted the Bloomberg interpretation, which is at best an over simplification and at worst a bold distortion. The way Obama’s position is presented by Bloomberg (Obama does not begrudge Dimon and Blanfein’s bonuses) is simply different from Obama’s stated opinion: there is nothing wrong with bonuses as long as bonuses reflect performance, and shareholders have an appropriate say in compensation criteria for executives.

Eyewitness reports vetted by reliable groups are now coming out of Iran, indicating that the government response specifically targeted opposition leaders to demoralize the protesters.

Opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi was ambushed as he descended from his vehicle at Sadeghiyeh Square, his son Hossein said in an interview with Tehran Bureau, an independent Western news organization affiliated with PBS’s “Frontline” that reports extensively from Iran. He said Karroubi was being treated for burns to his face and eyes after having been attacked repeatedly with pepper spray.

Hossein Karroubi also confirmed that another of Karroubi’s sons, Ali, had been arrested. He said the family didn’t know where he was being held or how he was being treated.

via Tehran tries to cut off the head – World Blog – msnbc.com.

As usual Tehran Bureau and The Daily Dish are two top resources for this.

I strongly disagree. The only thing that happened is that the Senate drug their feet and didn’t have a bill ready prior to the December of 2009. The White House should have pushed them harder to stay on schedule and produce a bill prior to any special election. Other than that, a bill was successfully passed in the house and the senate and was on the way to the President’s desk after conference committee.

Unbelievable.

President George W. Bush and his senior aides considered — and rejected — a military response to Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia, according to a new history of the conflict and interviews with former officials in the Bush administration.

With desperate Georgians begging for American help in closing down the key route through which Russian soldiers were pouring into the country, Bush’s national security aides outlined possible responses, including “the bombardment and sealing of the Roki Tunnel” and other “surgical strikes,” according to a new history of the conflict and independent interviews with former senior officials.

“In that moment of desperation these issues came onto the table, and came to the principals committee” consisting of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and top Cabinet members, said Ron Asmus, a Clinton administration State Department official whose book, out this week, is called “The Little War That Shook the World.”

“There were people on [Vice President Dick] Cheney’s staff and [National Security Adviser Stephen] Hadley’s staff who said, ‘We can’t let Georgia go down like this.’”

via U.S. pondered military use in Georgia – Ben Smith – POLITICO.com.

Simply Unbelievable. If Cheney’s staffers and advisors thought “We can’t let Georgia go down like this” that means Cheney agreed and was probably the source of that hawkish opinion. Contrast that with how Cheney declined Bush’s request that he head up Katrina relief. (Wrap your head around that: the Vice President declined to fulfill a request to head up a domestic emergency relief mission from the President). You know, we are lucky the country wasn’t in worse shape when Obama took office.

Watch the recorded program in full from CSPAN here.

This is an all too cynical and dangerous approach to governance.

The second problem is that, even if Democrats could reduce the deficit on their own and somehow could be insulated from the political harm, they have no incentive to do it. Why should they, when the Republicans don’t share the goal? I strongly supported the Clinton administration’s push to save the budget surplus in the late 1990s rather than spend it. In retrospect, that was a mistake. It just made it easier for Republicans to pass big, budget-wrecking tax cuts when they took office. There’s no set of fiscal circumstances under which Republicans would not enact large tax cuts if given the votes to do so.

When you combine these two dynamics, the effect is truly toxic. The more Democrats do to reduce the deficit, the easier they make it politically for Republicans to retake power, and the easier they make it fiscally for Republicans to wreck the budget when they do. So, why try?

via The Impossibility Of Fiscal Responsibility | The New Republic.

I voted for Obama to support a return to some sort of adult governance and a focus on real problems. Easing up on deficit reduction efforts to deliver programs that will please everyone is not that. Republicans retook power because they controlled the narrative, organized a better ground game and were consistently better at gaming the electoral system.

Sens. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Dick Durbin of Illinois have been working intensely on a jobs bill for more than a month, talking with relevant committee leaders and other members and dispatching aides to dozens of other meetings in the hopes of crafting a bill that could get through the Senate quickly.

And when they walked into a meeting in the office of Reid (D-Nev.) on Jan. 22, they thought they were about to cross the finish line — the Dorgan-Durbin plan would be blessed by the small group of senators in the room, presented to the full Democratic Caucus on Jan. 28 and then taken straight to the floor for a vote.

But Montana Sen. Max Baucus had other ideas.

The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, where the health care bill was debated for months last year, surprised the senators gathered in Reid’s office by suggesting he wanted a chance to mark up portions of the bill under his committee’s jurisdiction before it went to the floor, according to several people who attended the meeting.

via Democrats squabble over jobs bill – Manu Raju and Meredith Shiner – POLITICO.com.

Here is what I have to assume, Baucus wants to do what he did with the moderate health care bill: water it down, send it through weeks of useless negotiations and see how his constituents (aka industry and angry tea baggers from the right) feel about it before he comes up with a bill that no one likes. Now mind you, the President and the Democrats are under pressure to get more done for job creation. Durbin and Dorgan were proactive and Baucus inserts his ass on the tail end of the process (no pun intended). One of these kids is doin’ their own thing.

Why, if gays are allowed into the military, Chambliss said, soon the armed forces will allow all sorts of other things.

Like what?

“Alcohol use, adultery, fraternization, and body art,” said Chambliss.

“If we change this rule of ‘Don’t Ask, Dont Tell,” he asked, “what are we going to do with these other rules?”

via Chambliss: Repealing DADT Would Open Door To ‘Adultery’ And ‘Body Art’ In The Military | TPM LiveWire.

Yes, because as we know, straight military men do like or engage in teh:

• drink
• adultery
• playing of pranks, jokes, becoming fast friends or identifying with concentric organizational units as close to extended family
• tattoos

WTF planet is Chambliss on?