No lengthy appeals process for the likes of Saddam Hussein, his one and only appeal court said he must die within thirty days:

See It Now

Two points: 1) What else will be happening 30 days from now? Uh, the SOTU, during which Bush will be trying to justify the Surge in troop levels that he thinks was indicated by November's election and the Baker Hamilton report. How unbelievably convenient.

2) Saddam's sentence here was only one of many that were supposed to follow. This was the easiest case for prosecutors to make, but the scope of the inhumanity here was comparatively small, "covering one case involving the execution of 148 men and boys in the northern town of Dujail in 1982," according to the above linked article in the NYT.

My question is two fold: Will we still try Saddam for the alleged hundreds of thousands of other murders he's responsible for, or will we let those slide, seeing as he's going to be unable to participate vigorously in his own defense, what with the being dead and all?

And the second fold of my question is this: even under the absolute best interpretation of our prosecution of this war in Iraq, we have been responsible for well more than 200 deaths of innocents, women and children and men. It's frankly impossible to believe that it's less than a few thousand. So the question is, when does Mr. Bush's capital trial start, and which version of the appeals process will he be availed of, the one he found so needlessly lengthy and overcautious in Texas, or the one he seems to approve of in Iraq.

Not a fairy tale, but grim.

US casualties in Iraq now greater than those incurred on 9-11. If you'd asked Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld in March '03, they'd have said we'd never get that high, and you were a traitor for suggesting it. And the really sick part is that they probably believed that.

See It Now

And now the guessing game is: on what day and hour will Tony Snow or Bush himself deny that this is a "milestone"? Because that's what they always do when we hit a milestone. Deny deny deny. The denied it at 1,000, at 1,500, at 2,000 and they'll deny it early next year at 3,000.

If you're not disgusted, you're not paying attention. Could you please teach us how to do that?

Draft on Tap?

NYT on the recent "surge" of draft rumors: See It Now

Okay, set aside the actual issue of a potential draft for a moment. We all thought it was coming right after the '04 election and it didn't, but that won't stop many of us from worrying that it's coming any minute now, and Bush's denials are impossible to lend any credence to, mainly because they are issuing from the mouth of one GW Bush, a mouth known to lie about 10 times for every truth it utters.

Here's a laughable yet frightening quote from the article; note the transition between the two paragraphs:

William A. Chatfield, director of the Selective Service, said Friday that “we try to send out a signal of strength that we’re prepared.” The Selective Service, he said, needs to be ready “if something totally unforeseen should come upon us.”

But for now, the chances of that happening are “very, very, very low,” Mr. Chatfield said. “There’s nothing even being discussed in a remote fashion, but you have people trying to create fear when there’s nothing there.”

Did you get that? The chances of "something totally unforeseen," happening are "very, very, very low." I'll repeat: The chances of "something totally unforeseen," happening are "very, very, very low." Aren't they always? Does this give you any confidence in the selective service apparatus at all? Because it scares the yule log right out of me.

Am I alone in seeing this as possibly the stupidest piece of "reasoning" ever to emanate from any Bush official? And, BTW, to hear BushCo tell it, wasn't the whole protracted insugency/useless quagmire/lack of WMD thing "totally unforeseen"? And isn't this the same brain trust among whom: "No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon... into the World Trade Center, using planes as a missile." The unforeseen seems to be par for the putt-putt course with these guys.

Conversely, the chance of Christmas coming on Monday remains high, as long as you're not one of the 10 or 15 American "volunteers" who will die in Iraq or Afghanistan before then. And if you are one of them or one of their comrades, Standing Eight loves you and thanks you and wants you brought home, alive, victorious or not, as soon as possible.

Inside the Redactors Studio

The NYT got a hold of one of the CIA's black highlighters:

See It Now

Half the redactions are pretty guessable, if you know the style of the NYT op-ed page. There's one paragraph that's blacked out entirely, others are just names or one-liners. I have my guesses but I don't want any MIBs or NSAs showing up ruining my Festivus.

Stay Tuned for The Eight's new look coming in 07.

Bush now officially 'worse than nothing'

The old Tony Snow/ Bush apologist trope about "hey, our guy's numbers are low, but congress' are even worse" is no longer true. The incoming congress, a body which has done precisely zero, is more trusted than the president:

See It Now

This either proves that Bush is a la-hame duck, or that the American people will buy anythingfor a while. We think probably both.

Getting Blogged Down

Some dude is running an experiment to see how fast news travels.

Read this then link to it if you are a blogger yourself:
Acephalous: Measuring The Speed of Meme: An Experiment in which You Will Participate, Or Else...

(The fatal flaw of this experiment may be that the link above is not actually 'news' so we're really measuring how fast 'experiment' travels. My suspicion is that the old adage is correct, in that 'bad news travels fast'est, followed by good news, followed by value-neutral junk like this. But we're game. The 'scientist' in question assures us his idea is not a chain letter, and since he's not a known republican we believe him. (joke.))