the NYT is sounding defensive

The people who got fucked over are happy :)

The kind of people who fucked them over are sad :(

So, everything is okay!

quibbles with greenwald

As a result, law has been completely perverted from what it was intended to be – the guarantor of an equal playing field which would legitimize outcome inequalities – into its precise antithesis: a weapon used by the most powerful to protect their ill-gotten gains, strengthen their unearned prerogatives, and ensure ever-expanding opportunity inequality.
- Glenn Greenwald (emphasis mine)

Arthur Silber is fond of pointing out that policy which fails to meet the goals of its creators is quickly modified. Glenn's choice of words is inappropriate. The intentions he attributes are how law is often described, but talk is cheap. Law has always been a weapon of the powerful.

Otherwise, right on!

thinking out loud

what would happen if all these Occupy groups demanded the release of Bradley Manning? if they started talking a lot about him... he becomes a rallying cry... that makes BO look pretty bad, right?

governments don't understand

“They don’t know why they’re there. They’re just mad,” Broun told us. “This attack upon business, attack upon industry, attack upon freedom – and I think that’s what this is all about.”

Note that on the one hand the Occupy protesters are "just mad," worthy of dismissal for not channeling their anger to an end that a Republican can comprehend, but on the other hand they're "attacking," which is presumably a serious threat, making them deserving of ridicule if not more severe punishment. Note further that the one thing the protesters aren't doing is "attacking," and that they've been attacked by police.

Expressing anger by any means other than violence is clearly confusing and threatening to governments.

on sense and senselessness

One of the verbal tics that's most in evidence now is the catechismal insertion of the adjective senseless before the word violence. What kind of violence was it, Mister President? Sensless violence. You see, when you are the plenipotentiary of the world's foremost death machine, when you are ordering, literally every day, the killing of human beings, the destruction of homes, the bombing of farms and factories, then obviously you can't just go out and condemn violence. You have to condemn "senseless" violence. You can't condemn killing. You have to condemn pointless killing.

IOZ

The American Government, plenipotentiaried by a constitutional scholar who promised to lead the most transparent administration ever and to support whistleblowers, has now been brutally caging Bradley Manning for 500 hundred days for the alleged "crime" of exposing government crimes. While major newspapers are proposing Manning as their Nobel Peace Prize nominee, the actual Nobel Peace Prize winner caging him employs a secret government committee that puts Americans on kill lists, refuses to show any evidence to even attempt to justify their murderous plans, then sends killer flying robots to execute the hits on men (who totally said bad things!). And probable innocence is clearly no obstacle government machinery of death.

Help me make sense of this!

ALL HAIL THE DEAD RICH MAN! GNASH THY TEETH AND REND THY GARMENTS!

uuuuugh

REMARKABLE!

Reading the Times is funny:

It is a remarkable feature in the Arab world these days how little Al Qaeda actually comes up in conversations.

And the opening sentence is good, if only because it exposes BO's death worship.