Just a quick postscript to Bob’s post below: the designated talk radio (and, I’m willling to bet, Fox News) culprit for the California fires is environmentalists who oppose controlled burns.

If not for them, apparently, none of this would be happening. As for global warming, well, ha ha ha ha Al Gore snicker snicker.

… more here.

Steve Bergstein has the amazing end to the story of Egyptian citizen Abdallah Higazy:

Higazy was staying in a hotel in New York City on September 11 and the hotel emptied out when the planes hit the towers. The hotel later found in the closet of his room a device that allows you to communicate with airline pilots. Investigators thought this guy had something to do with 9/11 so they questioned him. According to Higazi, the investigators coerced him into confessing to a role in 9/11. Higazi first adamantly denied any involvement with 9/11 and could not believe what was happening to him. Then, he says, the investigator said his family would go through hell in Egypt, where they torture people like Saddam Hussein. Higazy then realized he had a choice: he could continue denying the radio was his and his family suffers ungodly torture in Egypt or he confesses and his family is spared. Of course, by confessing, Higazy’s life is worth garbage at that point, but … well, that’s why coerced confessions are outlawed in the United States.

So Higazy “confesses” and he’s processed by the criminal justice system. His future is quite bleak. Meanwhile, an airline pilot later shows up at the hotel and asks for his radio back. This is like something out of the movies. The radio belonged to the pilot, not Higazy, and Higazy was free to go, the victim of horrible timing. Higazi was innocent! He next sued the hotel and the FBI agent for coercing his confession.

But that’s not the end of the story. The end of the story is that all this came out in the decision in Higazy’s case, which was posted online last week. But the court apparently realized they’d made a mistake in allowing Americans to read about the threats the FBI made against Higazy’s family–so the court took down the decision, then replaced it with a version that redacted those parts, and actually called a blog which had published that section and asked them to TAKE IT DOWN. The blog said no.

See Bergstein for all the details. How I love our little websites.

And what’s the best part, beyond the cruelty to Higazy and unknown others? The best part is the FBI has unlimited money, time and trained agents, so there’s no possible way they’d miss a real threat to our lives while dicking around with all their coerced confessions.

(Via Jim Henley, who’s been on the Higazy story since the beginning.)

AND: Remember this was no idle threat. A story about the Egyptian government’s extraordinary brutality–including their willingness to drug and rape thirteen year-olds, videotaping it all the while–is here.

Bob is going to be was at at Firedoglake today Sunday at 5 pm ET to talk about his new book Who Hates Whom.

As it happens, my friend Mike Gerber and I were talking just moments ago about what a great piece of work it is—hilarious, informative and humane. We decided every television sold should come with a copy, so that people can understand what the hell’s going while watching the news. Until that happens, though, you can always buy it separately.

I understand that New York Times columnists are not subject to much interference from their editors, but someone needs to tell Thomas Friedman that he should really, really, really lay off the use of taxicabs as illustrative examples.

Related cartoon here.

Many thanks to generous longtime reader Mike E. for the wish list gift package that appeared unexpectedly on my doorstep yesterday.

As mentioned previously, the initial draft of this week’s cartoon was actually written a couple of weeks ago, and was originally intended as a general riff on the Right Wing Noise Machine in the wake of the “General Betray-us” stuff. Except, while I was on vacation, they actually started attacking children.

And now they’re at it again.

I tell ya, these are tough times for satire. Reality itself is just too damned weird.

One of Hannity’s current riffs is that the Clintons are very vengeful people, and if Hillary is elected, people are warning him that they will send the IRS after him, etc., etc. He then goes on to recite a list of people harassed and/or destroyed by the Clintons, which, oddly, includes Ken Starr.

Only in rightwing world would Inspector Javert be portrayed as the victim of relentless Jean Valjean.

Brown County GOP Chairman Donald Fleischman has resigned his post, says a spokesperson, after being accused of enticement and fondling of an underage boy, reports the Green Bay Press-Gazette Saturday.

Story.

*Name for phenomenon suggested by reader S.T.:

Perhaps espousing anti-gay positions while secretly craving homosexual love should enter the lexicon as “having a wide stance”.
Besides being a highly quoted Craig line, it can be taken to mean your public stance is way wide of your private stance, as it were.

Cheney, Rumsfeld, Libby & co. didn’t start fixing the intelligence around the policy in 2002. That’s been their MO their entire careers. What they did regarding Iraq was completely predictable, and in fact was predicted by people who knew their history.

The best known pre-Iraq example is the “Team B” affair from the mid-seventies, where they made up lots of stories about how the Soviet Union was just about to overwhelm the U.S. with their overwhelming overwhelmingness. Shortly thereafter, the Soviet Union collapsed. Whoops!

There are other episodes almost no one knows about, though. One is the effort by Cheney and others in the eighties to cover up Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons, as well as the way we and the Saudis were helping. (They couldn’t let the truth get out because Pakistan was helping us with our proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, which of course turned out to be a giant success in its own right.) In order to do this, they had to crush a government nuclear analyst named Richard Barlow who was loudly warning about what Pakistan was up to.

Today the Guardian is running an excellent story about Barlow—what they did to him, what’s happened to him since, and the chance he may receive a small measure of justice. It provides a real glimpse into how the US government truly works, which is why it appears in a foreign publication. I encourage you to read it all.

This week has been like a gourmet, five-course meal of wingnuttery. Naturally, the main course was the stalking and harassment of 12-year-old Graeme Frost. That alone would be a week’s worth of conservative lunacy, but it was complimented by an even more hilarious side dish. When Ezra Klein decided to take Michelle Malkin at her word that she wanted a “a good-faith argument” on the merits of SCHIP expansion met, not did Michelle show her true colors by cravenly turning down his offer to debate, but one of her fans took the absurdity to another level by challenging Ezra to a boxing match.

Adding to the right wing dipshittery, John Gibson’s analysis of yesterday’s school shooting included the observation that “Hip-hoppers do not kill themselves.” Fox News asked viewers if Air America was in a “War on God?” (Does that mean that the all-powerful God is losing?) And, you probably already guessed this, Ann Coulter said some more crazy bullshit that will help her sell more books and get her booked on more cable news shows.

For your digestif, here’s Iain Murray at The Corner suggesting that Al Gore should share his Nobel Prize with Osama Bin Laden.