You read that right.  In a speech dated February 8, 2003 The Hon. Joseph Lieberman told the 39th Munich Conference on Security Policy, held at the Bayerischer Hotel, Munich, Germany, February 7-9, 2003 that, because he and John McCain had introduced and sponsored the Iraq Liberation Act, they had set the policy which The Unit has only been enforcing.  These gems come the two antepenultimate paragraphs:

The New Jersey Supreme Court has announced it will release, at 3:00 PM ET today (10/25), its decision in the so-called gay marriage case.

I know.  Today I posted, as comments elsewhere, about the demolition of part of the Autobahn when a construction worker ran over a dud bomb left over from WWII with his machine, and his sad demise.  But the real news in Europe today was an anniversary.  What befuddles me is, how could the Republicans miss this one.

Fifty years ago today, the Hungarian Revolution started.  

Todays comment claim report includes 19 users who had a total of 4380 claimed comments.

The breakdown is included below.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

   This round of comment comment claim operations allowed for 40246 comments to be claimed by 105 unique users which ammounts to 16% of the MT comments. There remain 79354 unclaimed imported comments at this point.

Bush's Absolute Power Grab

On October 17, George W. Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This new law gives Bush power similar to that of Stalin or Hitler, and grants agencies within the executive branch powers similar to those of the KGB or Gestapo.

As the items posted below show (at the very end), TalkLeft has an excellent track record in opposing the use of cluster bombs.  However, it has been a while this this topic has been broached.

I believe that the use of cluster bombs is immoral no matter which nation-state resorts to it.  As indiscriminate weapons, they should be banned by international law.  Using them should become recognized as a war crime.  

Even if one believes (as I do not) that Israel's recent war on Lebanon and Gaza was justified, the just war tradition as codified in international law still requires that a war be conducted in a justifiable way.  That means respecting noncombatant immunity and avoiding indiscriminate weaponry.

I am well aware that the Hague and Geneva conventions were widely violated during the long, terrible and bloody 20th century.   Tens of millions of combatants and civilians were slaughtered without mercy.  There were aerial bombardments of cities, indiscriminate killings, the burning of villages, the erection of death camps, the commission of genocides, the refinement and proliferation of torture, the widespread incidence of rapes and pillagings, and more.

The prospects for the human race are not good.  Among the several reasons is the scourge of war.  Now more than ever it remains true that humankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to humankind.  

Banning cluster bombs and condemning their use would be a modest but important  place to begin.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

   This morning I ran the first comment claim operation for the 185 registered users currently on the site. We were able to confirm authorship of 11330 comments of the 130,930 total imported comments. That leaves obly 119600 to go. As more MT-site visitors register their Scoop accounts we'll be able to confirm authorship for more comments.

I expect we'll be running comment claim cycles every few weeks while MT-site visitors visit the Scoop site for the first time and create their account and monthly thereafter.

With it appearing more and more likely in the past few weeks that we may see one or both of the House and Senate revert to Democratic control this November, and keeping in mind that there needs to be a new direction and mindset develop in the country to contrast with and provide an alternative to the darker vision that has driven US Foreign Policy and governance under the Bush Administration and the Republican Party, I wrote this earlier this month partly in an attempt to offer some of my thoughts on Islamic Terrorism in response to an oft repeated claim from the right that the left simply 'hates' Bush and his policies, particularly his foreign policies, but never produces any concrete suggestions as to what they would differently.

This originally appeared on our good friend Sailor's blog, VidiotSpeak, with his sponsorship, on October 08 this year, and Talkleft has kindly offered me the opportunity to present it here. My thanks, Jeralyn. I look forward to all comments.

Some people say that they are tired of voting for Democrats each election cycle only to be later burned by a wimpy party that bows to special corporate interests or, in the past 2 cycles, Mr. Unilateral-Preemptive Decider. I say - please get a grip, because if Bush remains in office with a GOP-controlled Congress, the whole world is now his stage, ripe for more global wars that even reach the heavens.

There have been, here and elsewhere, many posts about the overuse of SWAT Teams and the general militarizaion of policing.  Here's another.  

A Connecticut interfaith religious group has called them by their true name.  The Hartford Courant reports:

Weighing in on Connecticut's hotly contested congressional races, a group of religious activists unveiled a giant billboard Monday off busy Interstate 95 that accuses four candidates of voting to allow torture.  

The billboard in Stratford names Democratic U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman and Republican Reps. Christopher Shays, Rob Simmons and Nancy Johnson as supporters of the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

It's a big billboard, in a prominent place: