Disclaimer: Spotted this on SmirkingChimp.com; I have no idea what the source of this video may be, but verified stories coming out of Iraq make this look tame by comparison, so odds are it’s legit. It seems more like a sure-fire method for creating an insurgent, rather than a way to instill a sense of justice. When the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, you’re just asking for rebellion. And when you stick a bunch of kids with guns in the middle of someone else’s civil war and don’t give them the planning, training and tools they need to do their job (whatever the hell that is), you’re just asking for punishments that don’t fit crimes.

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Democratic Senator Tim Johnson may have suffered a stroke today. Strokes are serious business. My mother suffered through one years ago and I’m not sure she ever fully recovered, even though they caught it early. Everyone wished her well and we’ve been pulling for her because we love her. But my mother wasn’t the deciding vote in the United States Senate. If Senator Johnson is unable to serve, his replacement will be appointed by a Republican governor, and will most likely be a Republican — denying Democrats control of the Senate.Count on the conservative blogs to salivate over this (while offering half-hearted “best wishes”), not because they’re evil, but because they care more about regaining power than they do about the life and health of a human being. Count also on the liberal blogs to be deeply concerned for Senator Johnson’s health, not because they truly care about him, but because they care about holding on to their party’s newly-won power. The latter is only slightly less odious.It’s also human nature.•••

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Nice try, Chicago Sun-Times:

Barack Obama’s week-old presidential campaign has been hit with a smear. Hillary Clinton’s White House bid, launched Saturday, has been attacked with an unfounded accusation. Contrary to what was reported in Insight magazine and then repeated on Fox News and in other news outlets, including a column that ran in the Sun-Times by free-lancer Mark Steyn, Obama was not educated in a radical Islamic school when he was an elementary student in Jakarta.And there is no evidence whatsoever that Clinton’s campaign had anything to do with spreading the damaging rumor that Obama hid a Muslim background.The source for both slurs started in a report posted on the Web site of Insight, a conservative magazine published by the Washington Times. The article with no named sourcing alleged that researchers connected to Clinton dug up information about Obama as part of a “background check.”

You mean Obama didn’t attend a radical Islamist madrassa when he was six? Are they trying to tell us he didn’t plot the destruction of America between nap-time and Play Doh lessons? Next the Lib’ral Media’s going to try telling us he never actually burned the flag while cross-dressing when he ran that abortion clinic in San Francisco. They must think they’re dealing with idiots.

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Like alcoholic parents trying to disavow their crack-whore son, the Washington Times is attempting to distance itself from the bogus Obama-madrassah story — a story that they and Fox News had amplified.

The Washington Times, which is also owned by the Unification Church, but operates separately from the Web site, quickly disavowed the article. Its national editor sent an e-mail message to staff members under the heading “Insight Strikes Again” telling them to “make sure that no mention of any Insight story” appeared in the paper, and another e-mail message to its Congressional correspondent instructing him to clarify to Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama that The Washington Times had nothing to do with the article on the Web site. “Some of the editors here get annoyed when Insight is identified as a publication of The Washington Times,” said Wesley Pruden, editor in chief of The Washington Times.

But can the Washington Times disavow itself?

Barack Obama announced last week he was forming an exploratory committee to explore whether he can really be as fabulous as the media say. And happily the answer is: Yes. He is young, gifted and black, and white and Hawaiian and Kansan, and charismatic and Congregationalist, and Muslim. He rejects the way “politics has become so bitter and partisan,” he represents “a different kind of politics.” He smokes, which is different.He was raised in an Indonesian madrassah by radical imams, which is more than John Edwards can say. …The madrassah stuff was supposedly leaked to Insight Magazine by some oppo-research heavies on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s team. If true, that suggests Hillary is losing her touch. It’s certainly the case that a foreign education doesn’t always assist in electoral politics: John Kerry didn’t play up the Swiss finishing school angle. But look at it from a Democratic primary voter’s point of view, the kind who drive around with those “CO-EXIST” bumper stickers made up of the cross and the Star of David and the Islamic crescent and the peace sign. Your whole worldview is based on the belief that deep down we would all rub along just fine and this neocon fever about Islam is just a lot of banana oil to keep the American people in a state of fear and paranoia. What would more resoundingly confirm that view than if the nicest, most nonbitter, nonpartisan guy in politics turns out to have graduated from the Sword of the Infidel Slayer grade school in Jakarta?

Maybe someone at the Washington Times needs to circulate another memo.CNN, through the rare implementation of something called “journalism,” debunked this nonsense last week::

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Real life continues to make comedians look like prophets.From Yahoo News:

Two executives at a company that once helped build a fence to keep illegal immigrants from crossing the Mexican border were sentenced Wednesday to six months of home confinement for hiring undocumented workers. Mel Kay, founder, chairman and president of Golden State Fence Co., and manager Michael McLaughlin had pleaded guilty in federal court to knowingly hiring illegal aliens. U.S. District Judge Barry Ted Moskowitz ordered each to serve 1,040 hours of community service and spend three years on probation.Kay, 64, was fined $200,000 as part of a plea agreement, and McLaughlin agreed to pay $100,000.Federal prosecutors took the rare step of seeking prison time after the men acknowledged hiring at least 10 illegal immigrants in 2004 and 2005. The charges carried a maximum possible penalty of five years in prison.However, prosecutors were unable to find a previous case in which an employer had been sent to jail for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants.”Prosecution is long overdue in this area,” Moskowitz said. “Honestly, the government’s efforts have been at the border, not with the employer. Obviously, the government has signaled a change with this case.”

…either that, or the sheer amount of irony involved in a company using undocumented immigrants to build a wall to keep out undocumented immigrants was just too much to ignore. One set of prosecutions could just as easily signal a prosecutor who had nothing else to do or a prosecutor with an aversion to blatant, arrogant crimes as it could a substantial change in policy.

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Like most Americans, I care whether I live or die — which means, by extension, I care about the state of our nation’s health care system. So when I heard Michael Moore was going to appear on Larry King Live to discuss the failings and possible fixes for that system, I dutifully set my TiVo. What did I find when I tried to watch it? They’d bumped Michael Moore off the show so Larry could waste an hour chatting with Paris Hilton.”CNN: the most trusted name in nonsense.”

…Yeah, that was so much more relevant to our lives than what we could have gotten.

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When Laura and I walked out of the Arclight in Hollywood after seeing Michael Moore’s Sicko, I scanned the floor ahead for rusty nails, sharp-toothed dogs, falling satellites — anything that might necessitate a trip to Kaiser. Laura would probably tell you I’m a bit of a hypochondriac. That couldn’t be further from the truth. It seems to me hypochondriacs like going to the hospital, whereas I avoid the hospital like the plague since I’d surely catch something in the waiting room. It’s not that I have some pathological aversion to germs, it’s that like most self employed, non-unionized people, I have to fund my own health insurance and I can only afford basic coverage. That means I have high deductibles, high prescription fees and while I haven’t checked, I’m fairly certain I have to pay for that paper gown that won’t close in the back. That gown, by the way, is representative of my insurance: if I think my ass is covered, I’m wrong.Anyway, over green salads at the Arclight’s Charcoal Bar & Grill, Laura made me promise that if anything were to happen to her, my second call would be to 9-11 — my first would be to Kaiser (the HMO Nixon fell in love with — just go watch Sicko already), so we wouldn’t end up like a woman in the film whose ambulance ride after a car wreck wasn’t covered because she hadn’t first called her insurance provider. While she lay unconscious in the street (or the mangled car, it wasn’t clear which).Imagine my relief when CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta dispelled all the horrible myths Michael Moore had subjected us to:

What relief! What glorious deliverance from fear and anxiety! Thank you, thank you thank you, CNN, for reminding me that while we don’t live in the best of all possible health care systems, it couldn’t get all that much better anyway. While I may despair at the high deductibles and live in fear that they’ll count that skinned knee I had when I was four as a “pre-existing condition” should I ever need a knee replacement — at least I don’t have to live with the frustration that comes with knowing we could have a much better system than we have if we’d only cut out the profit motive. I love you, CNN.

D’OH!…Oh, wait a sec, Moore can’t prove any of this, can he? Of course he can’t. Dr. Gupta, after all, is a journalist, and CNN is the most trusted name in news. I’ll just go check Moore’s website. No way he could have posted the so-called “evidence” he promised Wolf.D’OH!

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As previously mentioned, GW Bush claimed to have experienced an epiphany after a horrible bombing in Iraq. No more would the families of dead and mutilated soldiers have to suffer alone — no, the President too would suffer along with them. By giving up golf.

Well, as Keith Olbermann pointed out in his latest special comment (toward the end), the president who lied a nation into war, who lied about the Valerie Plame incident, who lied about… well, it would probably be quicker to just list what he didn’t lie about. Anyway, he wasn’t even telling the truth about the golf thing. The AP photographed him playing golf two months after he said he’d made his fateful decision to give up playing his game.

You know you haven’t got much to say about your opposition when you resort to condemning their logistics. First Fox News ran a “days since Barack Obama promised to appear on our show” clock. Now the Republican Party’s homepage is running their own countup clocks which count the days since Obama’s (a) visited Iraq, and (b) was invited to ten town hall meetings by John McCain.

Is the GOP sure it wants to play this game? The Democrats could easily respond with clocks of their own. Such as (dates are rough estimations):

1. “Days since John McCain flip-flopped on off-shore drilling: 2 days”

2. “Days since John McCain officially approved of torture: 730 days”

3. “Days since John McCain used 100 heavily-armed soldiers, 3 Blackhawks, 2 Apache gunships and a flak jacket to prove he could walk around an Iraqi marketplace without protection: 565 days”

4. “Days since the Iraqi marketplace he walked through was back under the control of insurgents: 330 days”

5. “Days since President Bush promised to fire whoever committed treason by outing an undercover CIA operative: 1,460 days”

6. “Days since President Bush vowed to capture Osama Bin Laden: 2,355 days”

7. “Days since President Bush vowed to rebuild New Orleans: 895 days”

8. “Days since President Carter called energy independence a national security matter, vowed to free us from Middle East oil, and was consequently mocked by Reagan and the next two generations of Republicans: 13,870 days”

9. “Days since President Truman tried to give Americans universal healthcare, but was rebuffed by Republicans in Congress: 21,900 days”

Etc…

Of course, none of that’s as important as Barack Obama’s travel itinerary or the burning question of whether he’ll stick to the five debates he’s offered McCain, or accept McCain’s invitation to ten.