The Malcontent

The Miami-Dade County police use a Taser on a six-year-old.

Those officers just got a confirmed reservation for their special place in hell.

News outlets should have this story momentarily, The Malcontent just happened to stumble on the live AP feed on the internet, and for once, actually had some “news” in a timely fashion. (Thanks, AP!)

I know, we at The Malcontent House of Delayed Media Scavenging are surprised, too. Don’t worry, this won’t become a habit.



Follow-up: Murder in the 1st for his wife, murder in the 2d for his child. Just finished polling the jurors. On to the sentencing process, which will take about a week. For now, the jurors will get a week off.

Try reading the letter from right-wing “Christian” zealot Bob Jones III to President Dubya.

Particularly good passages include:

In your re-election, God has graciously granted America—though she doesn’t deserve it—a reprieve from the agenda of paganism. You have been given a mandate.

Sure, that’s it. A mandate!! Even though we don’t deserve it.

Don’t equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ.

Of course! There are no liberal Christians. Sorry, we here at The Malcontent forgot for a second that your head is full of pus, “Dr.” Jones.

And finally:

If you have weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them.

I think he means Dick Cheney, Mr. President. Don’t you let that Bob Jones talk smack about your Uncle Dick.

Yesterday, The Malcontent congratulated the Emperor Dubya on his nomination of Alberto Gonzales for the position of Attorney General (see “Nice job, d-head.”)

Could it get any better? Sure. Slate runs a column today questioning Gonzales’ competence as a lawyer. Besides the already widely-discussed concerns about Gonzales’ advice regarding the Geneva Conventions, Phillip Carter provides a telling glimpse into the kind of advice Gonzales offered Texas Governor Dubya regarding death penalty cases. Gonzales was “to provide a legal memo on the morning of each execution day outlining the key facts and issues of the case at hand.”

Carter’s conclusion is chilling (boldface not in original):

It’s not clear whether Bush directed Gonzales to provide such superficial and conclusory legal research, or whether Gonzales did so of his own accord. Regardless, the point remains that the White House’s new nominee to head the Justice Department turned in work that would have barely earned a passing grade in law school, let alone satisfy the requirements of a job in which life and death were at stake. Perhaps more important, these early memos from Texas revealed Gonzales’ startling willingness to sacrifice rigorous legal analysis to achieve pre-ordained policy results at the drop of a Stetson.

Hmm, shocking.

Part of what is difficult about fighting terrorists is their ability to blend in, indistinguishable from friendlies and non-combatants. However, often people will make a public action (a “slip”) that marks them as suspect–whether is is financial support for institutions that hate freedom, or just a public aligning with a suspect individual or organization.

In the Bush administration’s pre-emptive approach to defense, when such “slips” occur, it seems to The Malcontent that the government may wish to move immediately to contain the threat, either through invasion, seizure of the individuals involved, or other appropriately aggressive action.

First up for such treatment? The highly organized and dangerous Gorbachev Foundation, which recently held its annual meeting of Nobel Peace Prize laureates, and presented its “Man of Peace” award to the highly suspect Yusuf Islam, formerly Cat Stevens.

Oh, the insidiousness of these wily Peace Prize winners! Clearly they are sleeper agents for the Axis of Evil!! (Think about it. Among the attendees were Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa, and Rigoberta Menchu Tum, all of whom played roles in toppling governmental power in their respective countries. See? See?!? Do not be fooled, Dubya! Be ever vigilant, you vigilante! )

Oh, John Ashcroft, where are you when we need you?!? (Oh, wait. The General is still at work, so maybe it will all be OK.) At minimum, we here at The Malcontent House of Sarcastic Hyperbole expect all Nobel Peace Prize laureates to be put immediately on a “no-fly” or “watch” list.

Man, can the President pick ‘em, or what?

Alberto Gonzales as attorney general. Did the President not read our post earlier today?

Law.com reports it’s Gonzales, and finally says what we here at The Malcontent Coalition for a Civil Society have been thinking:

Gonzales has been at the center of developing Bush’s positions on balancing civil liberties with waging the war on terrorism — opening the White House counsel to the same line of criticism that has dogged Ashcroft.

For instance, Gonzales publicly defended the administration’s policy — essentially repudiated by the Supreme Court and now being fought out in the lower courts — of detaining certain terrorism suspects for extended periods without access to lawyers or courts.

He also wrote a controversial February 2002 memo in which Bush claimed the right to waive anti-torture law and international treaties providing protections to prisoners of war. That position drew fire from human rights groups, which said it helped led to the type of abuses uncovered in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Some conservatives also have quietly questioned Gonzales’ credentials on core social issues. And he once was a partner in a Houston law firm which represented the scandal-ridden energy giant Enron.

Well, The Malcontent sure feels a lot safer. How about you?

The Malcontent regrets the recent neglect of the Wednesday food section, but brings forth this gem: a website for finding good sushi. We here at The Malcontent Foundation for the Consumption of Uncooked Fish cannot wait until every city is represented.

And just to bring your attention to another good use for the internet–facilitating one’s flight to Canada.

That’s right, every lefty’s favorite freedom-hating protofascist, John “Call me General” Ashcroft resigned his position yesterday as head of the US Department of Justice.

Some of the names being floated around as possible replacements are not exactly heartening (say, political weasel and former Montana governor Marc Racicot), but one is truly chilling: White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales. Gonzales is generally held to be one of the prime architects of the slippery (and probably ultimately erroneous) legal arguments that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to those the President deems “enemy combatants.” These arguments helped pave the way for the barbarities of Abu Ghraib.

C’mon, Dubya, even Grover Cleveland knew the rule that applies here: “A man is known by the company he keeps, and also by the company from which he is kept out.”

Now, The Malcontent has to read a lot of science writing (a lot)–most of it very good, but not exactly the kind of writing that grabs you. That’s why the cutline for a picture in a New York Times story on supernovas is a welcome refresher:

A three-billion-degree bubble of thermonuclear hell mushrooms upward through a star in the milliseconds of a supernova explosion. Sweeping around the star’s surface, the bubble could collide with itself, setting off a fatal detonation.

Yowza. And it’s a good illustration, too.

From CNN’s coverage on Falluja:

There has been less organized resistance than expected so far, said Lt. Col. Pete Newell with Task Force 22 of the 1st Infantry Division.

From The New York Times’s coverage on Falluja:

Hundreds or thousands of insurgents met the American attack, sometimes contesting every inch of the advance and sometimes melting back into the darkened houses of the city they have held for more than six months.

From The Washington Post:

Significant fighting was reported overnight in the southern sections of the city with heavier exchanges in an industrial area along the main highway leading to Baghdad.

From The Washington Times:

Witnesses said fierce battles with rockets, tank shells and automatic fire continued, and that militants claimed to have inflicted heavy casualties on U.S. and Iraqi forces.

So, we here at The Malcontent don’t know what Lt. Col. Newell was expecting, but we are agog at his ability to think positively.