It’s always nice to get confirmation of the self-evident. The Australian Broadcasting corporation has obtained emails from two former military prosecutors claiming that, in the words of one prosecutor, the trials are “a half-hearted and disorganised effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly low-level accused in a process that appears […]

Yesterday, BTC News noted secretary of state Condi Rice’s plea for people to “stop making excuses for terrorists.” Today, via Newsweek, we note that the US has provided yet another such excuse.

In a somewhat mysterious story on product placement in newspapers and magazines, Media Daily News says that newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune have all accepted fees for product placement.
The report projects consumer magazines will take in $15.6 million worth of […]

Led by Dick Cheney, the administration adamantly oppose efforts by congressional Republicans to moderate the administration’s contempt for international treaties and other standards of behavior for treatment of prisoners. Led by Don Rumsfeld, the administration adamantly refuse to forswear permanent military bases in Iraq. Led by an entire cabal of clueless idelogues, the administration refuse to acknowledge that their own behavior has an impact on the other side’s more clued in ideologues; the ones who make terrorist recruiting posters from every bit of Bush administration arrogance and inhumanity.

Washington Post reporters Ellen Knickmeyer and Omar Fekeiki filed a story from Baghdad tonight about a move by Iraq’s Interior Minister banning alcohol sales at Baghdad International Airport.
The airport duty-free shop so far has refused to comply with the order by Salam Maliki. Airport officials said Maliki threatened to have the store’s $800,000 supply of […]

According to Title 18, Section 1621 of the US Code, anyone who “in any declaration, certificate, verification, or statement under penalty of perjury as permitted under section 1746 of title 28, United States Code, willfully subscribes as true any material matter which he does not believe to be true” has committed perjury.
On July 18 […]

BTC News White House correspondent Eric Brewer asked a question in yesterday’s White House press briefing that neatly highlighted the hypocrisy of this administration, not that that’s been an extraordinary challenge of late.

Associated Press reports that after weeks of denials, the State Department acknowledged tonight that contrary to assurances provided a Senate committee, the Bush administration’s nominee for the position of US ambassador to the UN lied on a form asking whether he had been interviewd for or testified to a grand jury in any investigation […]

The bottom line is that no matter the corruption and incompetence and inefficiencies that sometimes bedevil unions, every advance in the rights of workers has been good for this country. We need a strong middle class, and unions have been the springboard out of poverty and into if not affluence, at least security. Union insistence on decent working conditions and environmental protections has been the driving force behind many of the protections working Americans enjoy whether or not they’re unionized; for every former hippie and Nader disciple in the environmental movement there’s a steelworker or a meatpacker who has had just as much of an impact, whose demands for a safer environment inside the plant have helped create a safer one outside it as well.

Those are the people Democrats need to support, and if a few Democratic politicians lose their jobs and the swanky benefits that come with those jobs because Andy Stern is busy helping less well-paid workers keep their jobs and get benefits amounting to a fraction of what Congresscritters get, well, tough. Any Democrat who can go to the doctor for free or pick up a $5 prescription at the pharmacy or collect that $10,000 paycheck every month and doesn’t think about what he or she can do for people living on a quarter of that or less with few or none of the benefits doesn’t deserve to be called a Democrat and certainly doesn’t deserve to be in office.

Although long foreshadowed by the dominant influence of Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani and the overwhelming success of his largely religious Shiite electoral list, the influence of religion over civil law will be a major blow to the rights of women in Iraq. The secular consitution of Saddam’s Iraq guaranteed equal status for women in matters of civil law including marriage, divorce, inheritance and other areas.