Door destroyed, house entered, no warrant shown, dogs shot, couple bound.

CNN article

There's a few circumstances where a residence can be searched and entered without a warrant; for example, if a crime was committed near a window or otherwise can be seen from outside, if criminal evidence is in plain sight and only that evidence is obtained and the residence isn't searched, or if a suspect flees into a residence after committing a crime.

I do not know Maryland animal and police brutality law, but the dogs probably did not post a lethal or serious threat, so it's likely that the police used excessive force, and they probably used excessive force by not knocking. Furthermore, if the dogs were threatening enough to legally merit shooting them in a lawful search, I wouldn't be surprised if shooting them is illegal anyway since this search was unlawful. It could be reasonable to not knock if the marijuana recipients (read the article now if you haven't already) knew that marijuana was being mailed to them and would thus hide the marijuana when the police announce their entry. However, the couple did not know that the package contained marijuana because the distributor planned to mail it to have it intercepted before the couple received it.

I doubt there's any legal precedent to suggest that it's reasonable for these cops to think that what they were doing was legal, so official immunity shouldn't protect them.

In defense of Pelosi and other alleged Bush enablers

EDIT: Earlier, I briefly attacked Pelosi for enabling Bush's policies, but I rethought it:

A few days ago, Nancy Pelosi called Bush "a total failure" after she criticized House Democrats for not passing a spending bill in twenty-six days.

Now, many of us liberals are thinking, "well, Pelosi enabled Bush's policies, so she has no right to attack him." "Why didn't she block FISA?" we asked a little while ago. "What about cutting off war funding? What about impeachment?"

Pelosi has very liberal personal convictions, but she's very pragmatic. She'd rather go along with something and gain a few concessions than oppose it, lose, gain no concessions, and irritate the conservative wing of her party.

"But what about principles? Why don't Democrats stand up for their principles?" many lamented after the FISA vote, and the 2007 Iraq funding bill. In short, Pelosi and other Democrats would stick to their principles less than they do now if they were stubborn and tried to block every single bad piece of legislation that Bush and McCain try to push through Congress since the resulting legislation would be worse since she, and other Democrats, extract concessions by going along with Bush and McCain.

After the 2006 midterm elections, the Democrats held 233 seats to the Republicans' 202, which means that the GOP needed to flip only 16 Democrats if every Republican toes the party line. They've lost a handful of special elections between 2006 and now so they'd need a couple more, but the forty-nine Blue Dogs, many of whom are flat-out Bush Dogs, are always eager to prove their conservative, anti-San Francisco liberal credentials to their constituents.

The bottom line is that conservative Democrats prevent Pelosi and other moderate and liberal Democrats from defeating the Bush-McCain agenda, so they go along with it and get whatever crumbs they can. But if we hold tight and win this election then we can establish a long-term liberal and communitarian consensus, and finally end the polarization that's plagued the nation since the Vietnam War.

"He's got eight tires sitting on twenty-two rims."

http://www.johnmccain.com/STETour/

First McCain golf gear, and now this?

When I thought Republicans couldn't get any more lame, McBush decided to make this video called "McCain Cribs" about the Straight Talk Express, the mobile lobbyist firm that also serves as his campaign bus.

Bush Republicans

I always hear "real conservatives" claim that "Bush isn't the Republican Party."

As Sheldon Whitehouse said, "If you think your opinion doesn't matter then maybe you should speak louder." Chafee was no classic conservative, and was perhaps the last liberal Republican in national office, but Whitehouse's advice applies to allegedly classic conservative Republicans too, since they gave Bush unprecedented support during the six years where he controlled at least one house.

The Republican congressmen and senators have a lot of back pedaling to do before the GOP goes back to its alleged small government roots; at this point, pretty much every national Republican is a Bush Republican.

The Dukakis-Kerry era draws to a close

I saw this video of Terry Mcauliffe, Hillary's campaign chair, and remembered a friend telling me that many of Hillary higher-ups are incompetent.

Mcauliffe definitely seems to be one of them. He virtually says "the election will be about national security since John McCain knows nothing about the economy" and "we're going to let McCain frame the debate and react to them on his terms, and Hillary's a fighter so she can beat McCain on his terms."

It's almost as if Mcauliffe was Dukakis' and Kerry's campaign chairman, since both of those candidates tried to out-Republican the Republicans, but he's too young to have been Dukakis'. Luckily, people are so pissed at the Republicans that Hillary will win the November election anyway if she gets the nomination.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/24745502#24738885

Parents (and schools) need to chill out.

In 2005, Senator Hillary Clinton proposed codifying videogame ratings and making it illegal for stores to sell M-rated games to people under age 18. Today, some secondary schools ban social networking not only to free up their limited computer resources for more studious activities, but also because they fear that students will post personal information. If they're allowed to create their own content and publish it online with school computers, schools fear that they'll be tricked into meeting or be kidnapped by a child molester.

Some secondary schools even ban Wikipedia because they think that minors take everything at face value and are thus vulnerable to Wikipedia's supposed unreliability. It was feared that a 2006 bill would have required all schools that receive federal funding to prohibit Websites that allow students to publish their own content, like Wikipedia, but the Internet community may have simply overreacted and and overstated the bill's scope.

The thing is, even though schools and helicopter parents often fail to teach kids to not accept everything they learn as fact, kids are pretty sensible and can filter out poor and inaccurate information, and know better than to fall victim to online sexual predators. Though more violent kids may be more drawn to violent videogames than less violent kids, there's no evidence to suggest that kids absorb the violence they're exposed to in fictional videogames and recreate it in the real world. Kids aren't dumb sponges who unquestionably believe everything they're told by their teachers, friends, and parents, and read in Wikipedia, Britannica, and school textbooks.

Fortunately, I think a backlash against overbearing schools and helicopter parenting is just beginning, and it's about time. Moral panics only last for so long.

Five years later, John McCain attempts to rewrite history on his "mission accomplished" statement

I'm not surprised that it took the peace Senator five whole years to do this.

In 2003, during a Fox News interview...
CAVUTO: ... Senator -- after a conflict means after the conflict, and many argue the conflict isn't over.

MCCAIN: Well, then why was there a banner that said 'mission accomplished' on the aircraft carrier? ... the conflict -- the major conflict is over, the regime change has been accomplished..."

In 2008, on the fifth anniversary of Bush's carrier appearance...
"I don't know if you could ever say, quote 'mission accomplished,' as much as you could say 'Americans are out of harm's way.'"

So McCain was referring to the regime change, not the occupation, in 2003, but he still said that the major conflict is over, so at best he had poor judgment and at worst he sold out his short-lived life as a maverick to become a Bush hack so that he could get the nomination. In late 2007, he hit the Bush administration for deceiving the public about how easy the war would be, saying that "People were lead to believe that this would be a walk in the park...". McCain shouldn't be able to spin his "mission accomplished" statement as referring only to the ousting Saddam, and argue that he's been a pro-war maverick who's critical of the Bush Administration's handling of the war, since in 2003 he also said that "the end is very much in sight." Us Democrats can nail him for that.

In fact, Barack Obama nailed him for those words today, saying "Five years after George Bush declared 'mission accomplished' and John McCain told the American people that 'the end is very much in sight' in Iraq, we have lost thousands of lives, spent half a trillion dollars, and we're no safer."


The infamous words:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSIrSNf0m7Q
Another time in 2003, McCain said "This is a mission accomplished."

The retraction:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24418639/