Last Call

A well-dressed thief walks into an upscale Paris store, brandishes a gun, and gets away with millions in jewelry.

Ahh, the city of lights...

Building A Wall

Israel seems rather annoyed that Obama is sticking to his guns on the Israeli settlement issue. Clearly both sides are setting boundaries here: Israel fully expects Obama to cave under pressure from the Israel lobby, and Obama clearly expects Israel to deal with the fact that Obama is a different President.

These two notions are not mutually compatible. One or the other is going to have to give. As D-day points out, the GOP is a little busy calling Sonia Sotomayor a racist bigot governed by her menstruation cycle, but as soon as the Wingers figure out what's going on, the attacks on Obama will begin in earnest:

It's really fascinating, and I honestly don't know how it'll play out. The wingnuts are preoccupied with calling a circuit court judge a racist right now, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the Wurlitzer ramp up on this before too long. Expect some stories about the Black Muslim in the White House siding with the Palestinians, when in actuality, Obama is siding with the Israelis by insisting on the only avenue for progress. Bully for him.

But Israel doesn't want peace. Netanyahu will continue to build those settlements and dare Obama to do something about it. Obama and Hillary Clinton can insist all they want, but they are going to have to bring real pressure on Bibi to get anything done.

And as soon as they get that, the "Obama the Israel Hater" campaign will go full speed ahead.

Petraeus Drops A Bomb

Naturally, Army Generals tend to do that kind of thing, but David Petraeus did it on FOX News.

The head of the US Central Command, General David Petraeus, said Friday that the US had violated the Geneva Conventions in a stunning admission from President Bush’s onetime top general in Iraq that the US may have violated international law.

“When we have taken steps that have violated the Geneva Conventions we rightly have been criticized, so as we move forward I think it’s important to again live our values, to live the agreements that we have made in the international justice arena and to practice those,” Gen. Petraeus said on Fox News Friday afternoon.

Petraeus made the comment in the context of being asked about the Bush administration’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The now-Central Command chief said he believed that banning the more extreme techniques had taken away “a tool” employed by “our enemies” as a moral argument against the United States.

Petraeus didn’t say which parts of the Geneva Conventions he thought he and other administration officials had violated.

Now, in one sense it could be a slip. in another sense, our top General in Iraq just admitted that the American military has committed international war crimes.

Not "if". Not "others say we have". It's "We have taken steps that have violated the Geneva Conventions". That's devastating. We are bound by international law to investigate and prosecute based on this.

Yet...nobody seems to have caught this other than the lefty blogs, and Petraeus goes on to say that he not only believes that we violated the Geneva Conventions on torture, but that Gitmo should be closed, and that terrorists should be tried in courts of law...basically everything I've been saying for the last several months.

And yet both the President and the Wingers are suddenly ignoring the guy. Talk about a Friday Night News Dump.

My opinion of David Petraeus up until now has not been very high. All that has changed dramatically in the space of a five minute interview with FOX.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Jay Leno bid his farewell after 17 years on The Tonight Show with "Goodbye, I'm not going anywhere."
• An off-duty black cop was shot and killed in Harlem by another NYPD officer.
• A Miami judge awarded $1 billion in damages to a man who tracked Che Guevara for the CIA, but collecting the money from Cuba may be impossible.
• California will officially be broke on July 29th unless major budget changes are made.
• Senate Commerce Committee chair Jay Rockefeller takes on web loyalty programs that charge people monthly fees without their knowledge.