Complete withdrawal is the only Iraq plan we can accept from a Democratic candidate. Luckily it looks like Obama is on the right side of this.

With democrats in charge we are starting to get new coverage of some of the rather egregious lies to come out of this war.

Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch. People who I think really are admirable people who were lionized with lies to sell the public on the war. I think Jessica Lynch is even more of a hero for coming out and telling the truth. She could have gone with the flow, pretended the story was true and gone on a right wing speaking tour. But she decided to tell the truth instead.

via tbogg.

This is a tragic story. Our Immigration enforcement system is seriously fucked up. This has nothing to do with national security, but rather a system that tolerates substantial error because it doesn’t care about the parties unfairly affected by arbitrary and sloppy enforcement. I seriously don’t understand what policy goals are advanced by tolerating an administrative agency that is as incompetent as DHS. This IS NOT just a partisan issue. Check out this opinion from the Conservative pragmatist Richard Posner.

Tolerating these kinds of errors as innocuous is basically equivalent to admitting that the administration is allowed to do indirectly what they can’t do directly (keep people out of the country who they don’t want in (for whatever reason) even when the law will not tolerate their deportation). Enforcement matters. And the more we tolerate this kind of bullshit, the more the Administration is emboldened to try to get away with whatever the fuck they want.

There needs to immigration reform, but a solution can’t focus solely on false negatives. And it’s hard not to ascribe the worst motives (desire to preserve a certain kind of identity) to people who only care about false negatives and ignore the false positives that our system quietly endorses.

. . . is to dutifully watch epsidoes of 24 for tips on how we as civilians can help in the fight against terrorism. If you don’t have the time, here’s a few simple steps you can take (courtesy of Joseph Cho):

1) Find people who vaguely resemble what you think a terrorist looks like

2) Follow them, accuse them of being spies, and physically assualt them when they deny the charges

3) Find out where they live, shoot off the lock to their apartment door with your 9mm, and search their apartment for anything suspicious

4) When you’re arrested, claim mental instability; the cops will understand