Office of the Republican Whip

Seeking to disprove the notion that he can’t even get himself arrested, Alan Keyes is in South Bend, Indiana, today, brandishing bloody dead-baby dolls to demonstrate his commitment to opportunistic self-promotion.

The occasion is Barack Obama’s upcoming commencement speech at Notre Dame, itself needing a distraction from holding the NCAA record for consecutive bowl-game losses. The announcement of Obama’s visit quickly became a political football (you’re welcome!) when anti-abortion groups declared that a Catholic university shouldn’t be hosting a man who feasts upon the blood of the unborn between trips to the hamburger joint.

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Wired commits journalism, actually looks into that Fed kidnapping story making the wingnut rounds, and finds — nothing:

The claim that the boy is a victim of USA PATRIOT, though, appears to have been cut from whole cloth. While there’s plenty to criticize in that post-9/11 law, it doesn’t contain any provision that abrogates a defendant’s right to a trial. It’s also not responsible for making it illegal to phone in a bomb threat. That’s been a federal crime since 1939.

The boy’s mother, Annette Lundeby, has even acknowledged in interviews that her son has been formally charged, has a court-appointed attorney, and has already made appearances in front of a judge.

So, where did the claim of Patriot Act abuse originate? Mom made it up.

Bloggers, TV, Go Nuts Over Misleading ‘Patriot Act’ Arrest Claim [Wired]

Oh, Now It’s Tyranny [Stinque]

Last year around this time, Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston did what teenagers have done since the dawn of Man, and will continue to do until Our Mr. Sun bloats us out of existence.

It was the biggest mistake of their lives.

No, not because Levi forgot to wear a little rubber thingy on his John Thomas, although he should have known better. The mistake was one we all share: Inability to see the future.

Who could have guessed, that passionate moment in Spring 2008, that Bristol’s mom would be plucked from obscurity a few months later and immediately begin methodically abusing every minor within her reach?

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As devoted practitioners of the Raised Eyebrow, we got a good workout Monday night when this headline appeared at WorldNetDaily: “Teen homeschooler jailed under Patriot Act.”

That’s pretty rich, we thought, coming from a website that is deeply concerned about Michael Savage being fingered as a hate-speech terrorist by Britain. Somehow we don’t expect to find an ACLU card in Joseph Farah’s wallet.

But setting aside their angle for the moment, let’s look at the case.

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Our interest in the Bush Administration’s torture program remains focused on its early development, but with the Zelikow Memo heating up, it might help to look at what light it sheds on what we’ve learned.

Philip Zelikow, Condoleezza Rice’s counselor at State and executive director of the 9/11 Commission, will be testifying before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee next Tuesday. Zelikow saw the torture memos from Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel shortly after they were issued in May 2005, and wrote up “an opposing view of the legal reasoning.”

Zelikow was not on Rice’s legal team, and so had no official standing in the discussion. But apparently a written memo was more than the torture advocates could bear:

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