Dead Snow

Norway+Zombies+Nazis.=???

Remembering Tiananmen

Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times was in Beijing during the events of 1989 which culminated in the June 4th Tiananmen Square massacre. In a series of short audio recordings, he recounts the events as he remembers them.

Also from the Times, a discussion of the famous Tank Man photo (more accurately, photos), can be found here.

As the 20th anniversary of the massacre approaches, the Chinese Government has closed Tiananmen Square, and blocked such internet sites as YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, HuffPo, Blogspot, and others. 

Update: The Tank Man from a never-before-seen angle.

ZOMG! Obama's a socialist!

Proof yet again that the Right doesn't understand the meanings of words.

Some Good Questions...

Jack Balkin over at Balkinization raises some good questions about how we ought to respond to the domestic terrorism of Scott Roeder seen over the weekend:

(1) Should the United States be able to hold Roeder without trial in order to prevent him from returning to society to kill more abortion providers? If we believe that Roeder and other domestic terrorists will plan further attacks on abortion providers and abortion clinics if we let them free, can we subject them to indefinite detention?

(2) The Obama Administration is currently considering a national security court to make decisions about the detention of suspected terrorists, with the power to order continued preventive detention. Should this court be able to hear cases involving U.S. citizens, whether they are Muslim or Christian?

(3) The U.S. government has argued that at least some terrorists should not be tried through the criminal process with its various Bill of Rights protections but instead can and should be tried through military commissions, where the standards of proof and various procedural protections are lowered. If Roeder is a domestic terrorist, can the U.S. government subject him to trial by a military commission instead of a criminal prosecution? Although the current version of the 2006 Military Commission Act does not bestow jurisdiction to try citizens, could we or should we amend it to include citizens who we believe are likely to commit or have committed terrorist acts?

(4) One of the most important reasons for detaining terrorists (suspected or otherwise) is to obtain information about future terrorist attacks that may save lives and prevent future bombings. To procure this information, can the government dispense with the usual constitutional and legal safeguards against coercive interrogation? Should it be able to subject Roeder to enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding and other methods, to determine whether Roeder knows of any other persons who are likely to commit violence against abortion clinics or against abortion providers in the future? Would your answer change if you believed that an attack on an abortion provider or a bombing of an abortion clinic was imminent?

(5) Terrorists and terrorist organizations need money and resources to operate effectively. Often the only way to stop them is to dry up their sources of financial and logistical support. Can the U.S. government freeze the assets of pro-life organizations and make it illegal to contribute money to a pro-life charity that it believes might funnel money or provide material support to persons like Roeder or to organizations that practice violence against abortion providers? Can the government arrest, detain, and seize the property of anti-abortion activists who helped Roeder in any way in the months leading up to his crime, for example by giving him rides or allowing him to stay in their homes?

Reno 911 Lotto Clip

This is an (NSFW) unaired clip from Reno 911.  I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did.

via.

A Decent Article on Sotomayor

There has been a lot of hand-wringing on the right about Sonia Sotomayor, claiming that she is a judicial activist and a racist. Daniel Larison from the American Conservative handily refutes these charges.

Glenn shares his experience.

Also, some of the quotes gettingthe right so flustered express sentiments voiced by two of their SCOTUS darlings, Alito and Scalia.

Update: Tom Goldstein over at SCOTUSblog examines Sotomayor's record on racial discrimination cases:

Of the 96 cases, Judge Sotomayor and the panel rejected the claim of discrimination roughly 78 times and agreed with the claim of discrimination 10 times; the remaining 8 involved other kinds of claims or dispositions. Of the 10 cases favoring claims of discrimination, 9 were unanimous. (Many, by the way, were procedural victories rather than judgments that discrimination had occurred.) Of those 9, in 7, the unanimous panel included at least one Republican-appointed judge. In the one divided panel opinion, the dissent’s point dealt only with the technical question of whether the criminal defendant in that case had forfeited his challenge to the jury selection in his case. So Judge Sotomayor rejected discrimination-related claims by a margin of roughly 8 to 1.

Spurrier, Tactful as always

I am sure most of you have heard about the moron that Tennessee hired as their head football coach. Well there were a few sparks at the SEC spring football coaches meeting in Florida this weekend. The OBC still has it. FUCK TENNESSEE!!

Prototype

Video Game - E3 2009 - Video Game Trailers

Un-Broke: The Seth Green Cribs Edition

Un-Broke: The Seth Green Cribs Edition - watch more funny videos

Post #900, ya'll.

BoozeTown

In the early 1950's, Mel Johnson embarked on a quest to create a city whose sole purpose was to cater to the needs of drunks. BoozeTown, as it was to be called, would have its own police, whose job was to assist drunks, its own currency, backed by whiskey reserves, and a network of fallout shelters connected to a distillery in order to keep the party going in the event of nuclear war. This man, clearly, is a genius on the order of Hawking and Einstein. 

The Problem With Young People Today Is...

Every word this man says is true.

Via Metafilter.

Gilmour with the Tap

Big Bottom

Jack Bauer and Ticking-Time Bombs

Mortimer Hayden Smyth of the Center for American Free Thought (click title for more videos).

Spinal Tap meets Lego

Jesse Ventura on that Hannity show

I am sad that Ventura seems to have washed his hands of politics. 

From the same link:

Yeah, it's from The View. Don't worry, you won't get cooties.

Obama's Bad Week:

From Glenn Greenwald:

Monday - Obama administration's letter to Britian threatening to cut off intelligence-sharing if British courts reveal the details of how we tortured British resident Binyam Mohamed;

Tuesday - Promoted to military commander in Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChyrstal, who was deeply involved in some of the worst abuses of the Bush era;

Wednesday - Announced he was reversing himself and would try to conceal photographic evidence showing widespread detainee abuse -- despite the rulings from two separate courts (four federal judges unanimously) that the law compels their disclosure;

Friday - Unveiled his plan to preserve a modified system of military commissions for trying Guantanamo detainees, rather than using our extant-judicial processes for doing so.

A Forensics Charlatan Gets Caught in the Act

Christopher Ploud, a lawyer and legal specialist in forensic science, angerd by the misuse of bite-mark analysis in courtrooms, manages to expose a prominent fraud:

In October 2001, working for Plourd, a private investigator named James Rix sent West the decade-old photographs of the bite marks on Ancona’s breast. Rix told West that the photos were from the three-year-old unsolved murder of a college student in Idaho. Rix then sent West a dental mold of his own teeth, but told him that they came from the chief suspect in the case. He also sent a check for $750, West's retainer fee.

Two months later, West sent Rix a letter and accompanying 20-minute video. In the video, West meticulously explains the methodology he uses to match bite marks to dental molds. Using the photo of Ancona’s bitten breast and Rix's own dental mold, West then reaches the conclusion Plourd and Rix suspected he would: That the mold and the photos were a definite match.

Obama Seeks to Block Release of Detainee Photos

The President today said that he would attempt to block the release of photographs of detainee abuse by American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. His rationale was that these photos could endanger the troops, while adding nothing to our knowledge of what occurred. While he may be correct that the publication of such pictures would inflame anti-American sentiment (though whether the open acknowledgement of such wrong doing by our government would have the same effect as the knowledge of the wrong doing itself is questionable), practical expediency does not seem to be a legitimate reason for this sort of action.

The ACLU had won a motion at the Federal District Court level related to the release of these photographs, and the Obama administration, along with the DOD, had agreed to release the photos, reasoning that they could not succeed in convincing the Supreme Court to weigh in on the matter. Obama's decision today is a reversal of his own position from last month, and is in opposition to the lower court ruling (I am guessing that the administration intends to make an appeal to the high court in this matter).

The long and short of this is that Obama is engaging in a cover-up of Bush-era policies that, by now, are hardly disputable as crimes. He is reneging on his campaign promise of transparency, and is doing so not by appealing to firm legal grounds, but by appealing to national security (the sort of rationale that lay behind much of the Bush administration's attempts at secrecy). By now, the country, and the world, knows that the US engaged in abuse - torture and worse. The release of these photos isn't necessary to prove that. But it would be helpful in establishing the extent to which these things occurred, and could help justify in the minds of Americans the need for investigations. Their release would also signal to the world that the US has changed course, and is attempting to regain its place among the decent, lawful nations of the world. Preventing their release, on the other hand, would be inimical to investigations (and perhaps this is one of the motives) and would signal to the world that the US will, above all else, protect its own, justice be damned.

Commentary by Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald (as per usual). Chris Cillizza weighs in with whatever it is he does. 

zombie ants

This is furkin awesome! Just one question? What problems are these zombie making flies gonna cause? If one crawls in my ear at night then what? Sorry, two questions.

R.L. ain't gonna lend you no 40 nickles for a bag of chips