and the Dutch. “The Freedom Party (PVV),” read yesterday’s press release, “is shocked by the Amsterdam Court of Appeal’s decision to prosecute Geert Wilders for his statements and opinions. Geert Wilders considers this ruling an all-out assault on freedom of speech.” The appalling decision to try Wilders, the Freedom Party’s head and the Dutch Parliament’s only internationally famous member, for “incitement to hatred and discrimination” against Islam is indeed an

In the statement he made on signing the executive order to close Guantanamo. Apparently, the WaPo’s Dana Priest didn’t get the memo. Later on, though he was reading from a prepared statement in the first case, he perhaps has caught himself enough to refer instead to “the ongoing struggle against violence and terrorism.” So, maybe it’s not a war. Maybe it’s just an “ongoing struggle.” Scrappleface: The CASE against terror

Patterico outlines the LA Times’ repetition of hooey: In a story about the Messiah’s Crackberry, the L.A. Times tells us: Even if [Obama] won’t be scanning his own groceries or buying his own milk — former President George H.W. Bush was portrayed as out of touch with those markers of American life — he may be in casual contact with friends who are. The paper neglects to mention the fact

Was it a twelve-step program? The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year. The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana, in

Where’s the rage? While performing at the inaugural ball honoring America’s military veterans, some wounded vets are reported to have walked out on funk Musician George Clinton over a perceived on stage insult to George W. Bush. The Washington Times is reporting that during the Heroes Red, White and Blue Inaugural Ball a white towel with the word “[Expletive] GEORGE” spelled out on it was displayed by band members of

from Day One: If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past. Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts. What

As many of you know, my son Aidan suffers from Childhood Onset Schizophrenia. It’s nice that there are interest groups who will defend his right to have his psychosis express itself: On June 20, 2006, William Bruce approached his mother as she worked at her desk at home and struck killing blows to her head with a hatchet. Two months earlier, William, a 24-year-old schizophrenic, had been released from Riverview

This morning, while returning after dropping Aidan at school, I was treated to the following op-ed on Vermont Public Radio: (HOST) President Obama is setting a new agenda for the nation, and veteran ABC News correspondent and commentator Bill Seamans is wondering if one particular item of old business will be included. (SEAMANS) It was an inauguration that will stand above most of the others since 1789, when George Washington

David Thompson is in fine fettle today, writing of John Pilger, who’s been let go from the staff of the New Statesman, to the tune of Steam’s hit. A lefty blogress by the name of Sunny Hundal thinks that losing such a voice of conscience is a blow to the left, and David picks up the ball from there: Wild imaginings are, of course, a signature of Mr Pilger’s rhetoric,

Over at the PW pub, Andrew has put up a post that I think speaks for many of us. On Bush and the “Na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye” thing: You just had to, didn’t you? You couldn’t just enjoy your victory, couldn’t just let the man slip away beneath the radar of your Profound and Righteous Contempt. You had to channel your inner adolescent and flip him