It's official. The United States now has torture, detention with no recourse and presidential authority to "interpret international standards" as he/she sees fit on its lawbooks.
Take that, moral authority.
The wishy-washy Arlen Specter tried to amend this abomination to get habeas corpus included, then turned around and voted for it, as did the sainted McCain, the noted centrist Lieberman, the other two "independents" Warner and Graham, and, to their everlasting shame, eleven Democrats.
Posted by Linkmeister at September 28, 2006 03:49 PM | TrackBackInteresting to note that six of those Democrats (Carper, Lieberman, Menendez, both Sens. Nelson, and Stabenow) are up for election this year.
Posted by: Keith at September 28, 2006 09:24 PMNebraska's Nelson I can understand, sorta. That's a very red state. But Florida's Nelson? His opponent is freakin' Katherine Harris! Her campaign has crashed and burned so hard she'll be lucky to get 20% of the votes!
Lieberman - meh. Holier than thou. I wonder how he rationalizes torture with his religion.
Menendez is in a race that's closer than it should be, or so I've read.
I don't get Stabenow; the governor of Michigan's got a problem with the car company layoffs, but that's not usually a Senator's purview.
I don't know squat about Carper (in fact, I've never even heard of Carper).
I suppose some of these people are standing on a principle; I just can't imagine what it might be.
Posted by: Linkmeister at September 28, 2006 09:30 PMI don't get Stabenow either. She has never been an uber liberal by any stretch but she has been very good about standing pat against a lot of this sort of shit in the past. Maybe it's just my bias because her office helped deal with some nasty slum lords in Lansing who were in collusion with the very corrupt, city planning/code compliance office a few years ago. With the support of her office a very small group of disenfranchised tenants and a few property owners were able to blow the lid off the coruption. There is little chance we would have succeeded without her help.
I guess this is what happens when you ignore other aspects of an elected representative after they did you a favor.
Posted by: DuWayne at September 29, 2006 06:23 AMNot to mention the Statue of Liberty has been abducted!
Posted by: yank_in_london at September 29, 2006 07:13 AMDefinitely not the principle of getting elected. The Cook Report rates Menendez a toss up, Stabenow and Nelson (NE) leaning Dem, and the rest solid Dem. I don't know why they would want to piss off the Dem base when the national Dems are going to need to hold on to every blue seat to tip the balance.
Posted by: Keith at September 30, 2006 10:08 AM