Back in the USSR, Gulag edition

Read Glenn Greenwald's take on the NY Times' report on a video of Jose Padilla's trip to the dentist. The Padilla case and the entire administration that has committed it are national disgraces.

As Jeralyn Meritt said yesterday with profound understatement: "There should be a greater outcry over this." As I have said many times, the most astounding and disturbing fact over the last five years -- and there is a very stiff competition for that title -- is that we have collectively really just sat by while the U.S. Government arrests and detains people, including U.S. citizens, and then imprisons them for years without any charges of any kind. What does it say about our country that not only does our Government do that, but that we don't really seem to mind much?

I was talking to the leader of our local ACLU chapter yesterday. She said several ACLU representatives visited Senator Debbie Stabenow(D-Michigan Soviet Socialist Republic)'s office to register disgust at Stabenow's vote for the horrid and unconstitutional Military Commissions Act, aka the Torture Bill, passed in October. The staffers were apparently driven to tears, apparently agreeing more with the Constitution's defenders than their own proto-fascist boss. It is probably time to drive more staffers to tears, and hopefully resignation. People destroying the Constitution, like Stabenow, don't deserve help.