Happy Hour Open Thread
* Closing Guantanamo polls really badly for the White House right now.
* A Gitmo detainee who was around 31 and had been held without charges since 2002 dies in an “apparent suicide.” Glenn Greenwald says it’s the fourth such death at the facility.
* Eric Kleefeld reviews the dwindling options of Norm Coleman.
* Michael Goldfarb says that Obama tapped John McHugh as Army Secretary, despite McHugh’s aggressive push against closing Guantanamo, in order to give himself cover on the issue.
* Don’t know much about McHugh? Check out our big profile of him at WhoRunsGov.com.
* Robert Gibbs says that McHugh is with Obama on “changing” Don’t Ask Don’t tell.
* Joe Sudbay says that “change” better mean “repeal.”
* McHugh, however, didn’t say anything about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell at the official announcement of his nomination today, though, as Ben Smith notes, he’s well positioned to take the issue on.
* Andrew Sullivan flags a fascinating poll on gay marriage.
* Taegan Goddard highlights some fascinating new info about Obama’s secret campaign meetings with Reverend Wright.
* Dan Froomkin says Obama will push Israel to make tough decisions — in its own interest.
* Manuel Miranda, the leader of conservatives against Sotomayor, is walking back his oddly suggestive claim that Mitch McConnell is “limp-wristed” when it comes to judicial nominations.
* Dave Weigel beat me to the punch on Miranda’s weird talk about Hispanics and African Americans.
* And Meghan McCain is really, really angry about, well, something.
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Okay, not that much earlier. Working on it.
Perhaps you meant McHugh’s aggressive push against closing Gitmo?
dammit, yep, that’s exactly what I meant
“Robert Gibbs says that McHugh is with Obama on “changing” Don’t Ask Don’t tell.”
Now if those three could just get the Democratically-controlled congress to “change” the law we’d be in business!
This “changing it” sidestep is a bunch of **** – gay people should be allowed to serve – period.
I keep asking and maybe someone can explain it to me. If President Obama repealed DADT, then correct me if I am wrong but doesn’t that mean that any **** in the military are free game to be investigated, outed, and thrown out until a new law is in place? And if that is the case isn’t changing DADT much better than repealing?
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Im just sayin.
sg, DADT is a law, the President can not repeal it on his own, Congress must repeal it. Homosexuality is against military law, and if DADT the law is repealed, so to must the prohibitions against homosexuality in the Uniform Code of Military Justice to stop persecution of homosexuals in the military.
williamc
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But wasn’t homosexuality already criminalized in the military pre DADT and so if DADT is repealed wouldn’t that mean we would just go back to how it was pre DADT when military officials could actively investigate people who were gay and out them to get them kicked out?
Greg
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Major props on getting a lot of play on KO for catching that line in Cheney’s speech walking back his contentions
So Cheney oversaw some of the interrogation briefings for Congress. I’m not sure of the implications of this, but it does highlight the extent to which this was his program.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/02/AR2009060203999.html?hpid=topnews
ABC
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I think that pretty much confirms that the two documents Cheney wants released are in fact propaganda pieces that he himself got the CIA to put together to sell lawmakers on the program rather than just to provide information. Not sure why the people who wrote the article never touched on that.
Unusual to see Tweety on Hardball go after Manuel ethically challenged Miranda and sidekick plus after Cheney with the MacLatchy team. Has he temporarily regained sanity?
alan
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Thats the thing about Tweety. He has moments that make you d@mn near stand up and cheer. But then he will come back the next day with the same old weaksauce. I think he might have ADD or something.
Let me offer up another possiblity on McHugh appointment and whether Obama is ‘covering himself’…
As a CEO at Alcoa and in other executive roles prior, Paul O’Neil had developed a policy process whereby he sought out personnel who held a range of ideas, often quite contradictory to his own. He’d seen the serious limitation that arise when a board or company directorship were populated with ‘yes men’. He credits his executive success to this sort of forced and unstinting challenge to the fixed ideas that people and institutions fall prey to so easily. It was the lack of such processes which left him very relieved when Cheney told him he was fired.
We could consider, and I think we have good reason to consider, that Obama is rather more in the mold of O’Neill than Cheney/Rove.
I don’t have the facts and figures on this, but it’s my sense that the upper echelons of the military, general officers in particular, tend to be Republican. By having a Sec’y of the Army with that party affiliation, Obama may enhance his level of trust with the people charged with operating two wars. That is, he eliminates an initial layer of skepticism about his actions. And of course the Secretary will serve at his pleasure.
I’m not sure why anything that Michael Goldfarb says has any bearing on anything. We have Pat Buchanan’s own word that Michael is a dimwit since he graduated without any honors at all from Princeton and according to Buchanan, Princeton awards honors to everyone with a grade point average above a D+.