Night Owls, Early Birds and Expats Open Thread

driftglass is just getting warmed up with this:

If your idea of eternal damnation is watching the watching the same, lame junior varsity debating team banging the same, stupid arguments together forever...then welcome to Hell. The usually non-vomit-inducing "Face the Nation" was the worst of the lot [Sunday], with Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich) building his Party's rhetorical fortress on the following foundation: "We're going to go back into New York City, the scene of the tragedy on 9/11. We're now going to rip that wound wide open, and it's going to stay open for, what - two, three, four years, as we go through the circus of a trial in New York City?" Hoekstra's concern-troll distress over "going to go back into New York City, the scene of the tragedy on 9/11" would seem a lot less, oh, liar-ish had the political party to which he proudly belongs not spent virtually every fucking day of the last eight years making an entire multi-level marketing industry out of ruthlessly mining the "wound" of 9/11; using every propaganda tool in Karl Rove's toolbox to flay and scald and salt the "wound" from the worst national security failure in America history into a bottomless cornucopia of politically exploitable rage and fear. ... A campaign of terror which reached a peak of depravity at the 2004 Republican National Fear-Fest which the GOP held in heart of New York City... ...and their Fear-Fest Redux in 2008, which was carefully scheduled to coincide with the anniversary of 9/11 and reaching its depraved apotheosis within a three-minute 9/11 "snuff film" ... Democratic Patrick Leahy effortlessly demolished the idiocy [Crooks and Liars has video here.] I think that Eric Holder, our Attorney General, is right; I think the president is right in holding the trials of these murderers in New York City. What we're saying to the world is, the United States acts out of strength, not out of fear.     [...] I was a former prosecutor. I'd like to just see them prosecuted, in the same way which we prosecuted Timothy McVeigh. We're not afraid to do that. We're the most powerful nation on Earth. We have a judicial system that is the envy of the world. Let's show the world that we can use that power. -- but I doubt it changed any minds. Because the pants-pissing cowards of the Party of God just love America too darn much to have any faith in its most sacred institutions or values.

There's a lot more where that came from.

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jlms qkw has posted the Overnight News Digest.