In case you really want to know more about the current state of political turmoil in Germany, read my latest in The Daily Standard. I also mention a possible replacement for Ambassador Dan Coats that is sure to drive conspiracy mongers insane.

Chapomatic has a depressing set of links to stories about people who want to do the United States harm. The most depressing is this Washington Post story, which is a stunning rebuke to those who think that all of the detainees at Guantanamo are nice fellows who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time:

The thundering F-16 and A-10 warplanes reduced the fighters’ compound in Afghanistan to smoldering rubble. No one could still be alive, figured the U.S. soldiers crouched nearby. But inside, saved by a half-standing wall, a lanky 15-year-old waited as the wary soldiers neared.

As the Americans recount it, he leapt up, threw a grenade and was cut down by the soldiers’ fire. The grenade scored: A 28-year-old sergeant was mortally wounded.

The boy was not, however. Blinded in one eye, his chest ripped opened by bullets, Omar Khadr lay on the ground and asked the soldiers to kill him — in perfect English.

He was a Canadian.

“Everybody who walked by wanted to put a round in him,” said Master Sgt. Scotty Hansen, who was awarded a Bronze Star for Valor after the battle in 2002. “But we all knew that’s not the way we do it.”

Omar Khadr survived. Today, he is 18, a prisoner at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and an increasingly awkward presence there for the Canadian government. His mother, sister and brother Abdurahman — who was briefly imprisoned with Omar at Guantanamo — have become what Omar’s lawyer calls “the most despised family in Canada.”

Abdurahman has publicly declared them to be al Qaeda members. His sister has said they all wished for martyrdom. Family members have spoken scornfully of Canadian society, as they receive medical care and welfare payments that keep them in a pleasant apartment in Toronto. . . .

But as Omar’s confinement at Guantanamo grows longer, he has begun to gain grudging support from constitutional experts and editorial writers. They are pushing the government to demand that the United States either put him on trial or release him.

“Regardless of how much the Khadr family is despised here, Canada’s lawmakers cannot look the other way when a citizen is held in foreign custody for years, under abusive conditions, and denied due process,” said an editorial in the Toronto Star in February. “That makes Ottawa a silent partner in human rights abuse.” . . .

“Canadian citizens should not be left beyond the reach of law,” said Alex Neve, head of the Ottawa office of Amnesty International, a human rights group.

[The Khadr family lawyer Dennis] Edney neither confirms nor contests the U.S. soldiers’ account indicating that Omar threw a grenade at them. He has called for a trial that would bring the evidence out in the open, allow cross examination of witnesses and deal with the question of Omar’s age. Under international law, he is a minor.

The entire story is worth reading.

Showing what a fine colleague he must be, Paul “Wolfman” Krugman takes another shot at Daniel Okrent today:

It’s not a pretty picture – which is why right-wing partisans try so hard to discredit anyone who tries to explain to the public what’s going on.

These partisans rely in part on obfuscation: shaping, slicing and selectively presenting data in an attempt to mislead.

In an otherwise obscure passage to Justice Scalia’s opinion on the case Alaska v. United States (which concerned a dispute over who controlled submerged lands in Glacier Bay), Nino gets off a pretty fantastic joke:

The only part of the Court’s opinion on Glacier Bay that displays genuine enthusiasm is its Ursine Rhapsody, which implies that federal ownership of submerged lands is critical to ensuring that brown bears will not be shot from the decks of pleasure yachts during their “distressing[ly] frequen[t]” swims to islands where they feast on seabirds and seabird eggs.²

That footnote leads us to this fabulous bit:

²It is presumptively true that the seabirds consider these visits distressingly frequent, and demonstrably true that the brown bears do not. It is unclear why this Court should take sides in the controversy.

Who said the law couldn’t be fun? Many thanks to Galley Friend T.K.

Erasmus has caught the bug and has been, at least temporarily, won over to The Inside.

I was looking forward to writing about my dinner last night with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey. But as the 25 or so guests assembled around the tables at the Willard Hotel, one of the first things Turkish ambassador Logoglu declared was that the conversation would be off the record. It’s a shame–you won’t believe what they have planned!

Of course I am kidding. But the sad fact is it gives me not much to report. So here’s what we had for dinner: wild mushroom soup (far and away, the highlight), spinach feta in phyllo triangle (isn’t feta Greek?), field greens with walnut vinaigrette, roasted black angus beef tenderloin (a bit overcooked), gratin potatoes, seasonal vegetables, and caramelized pearl onion sauce. Dessert was a fine selection of Turkish pastries and vanilla ice cream. (And no, no matter what you think, it was not baklava!) They also served an exquisite 2001 Robert Mondavi Cab–not that the Turkish delegation had a drop to drink. In addition, the waiter who served Mr. Erdogan was a nice looking burly man with a bushy mustache, presumably trained in the use of firearms.

It was a hearty dinner and the off-the-record “conversation” was pleasant, even if it required the use of earpieces to hear the translator. (Mr. Erdogan also tended to keep his microphone on, so we had the bonus of occasionally hearing him slurp his soup, gulp down some water, and, in one instance, grind his steak knife across the china, sending a shiver up my spine.)

When I said farewell to the prime minister, he kindly looked at me with his sharp eyes, glanced at my necktie, lifted it for closer inspection, and said through his translator, “These are the colors of my favorite team.”

Commenter arrScott notes that Andrew Sullivan’s exploration of Jesus Christ and family values is heavily drawn from Julia Sweeney’s monologue on This American Life, which aired, coincidentally, on NPR last weekend. Here’s Sweeney on This American Life:

I have to say the most upsetting thing to me about Jesus is his family values. Which is amazing when you think how there’s so many groups out there who say they base their family values on the Bible. I mean he seems to have no real close ties to his parents. He puts Mary off cruelly over and over again. . . . Jesus actually discourages any contact his converts have with their own families. He himself does not marry or have children. And he explicitly tells his followers not to have families as well and if they do, they should just abandon them. . . . So that’s the New Testament family values for you.

And here’s Sullivan from yesterday:

And yet, when you read the Gospels, you find something very strange. Jesus barely mentions marriage. He never married. He demanded of all his disciples that they abandon their own families and wives, without even saying goodbye. He was openly contemptuous toward his own mother and father in adolescence and early adulthood. His fundamental response to adultery was forgiveness of the adulterer and suspicion of the morally superior. His contemporaries must have regarded him as illegitimate, since he was conceived out of wedlock. So this illegitimate, single man who broke up family after family, whose closest female friend was a childless former prostitute, who scandalously stayed alone in the home of two unmarried women, who offended every family value of the time … has been turned into the chief architect of “family values!”

As we’ve seen before (and before that and before that and before that), Andrew Sullivan has made a habit of this sort of thing. It isn’t plagiarism. But shouldn’t the former editor of The New Republic know better?

Even wire reporters sometimes find time to do a funny bit of writing:

Karla Irving’s husband, David, who was taking a shower upstairs, heard the commotion and called 911. Sheriff’s deputies let the bear out through a back door. It has not been seen since.