Internal Monologue

TPM Election Central: Here's another interesting number buried in the new Pew Research poll released today that we referenced below: Less than half of Republicans know Rudy is pro-choice. Although Rudy has led in all the national Republican polls, some have wondered if those numbers reflected the possibility that many grassroots conservatives and other Republicans don't even know that Rudy holds views that are anathema to them. Bwahahahah! I can just picture all those Republicans waking up after the Feb 5th de facto national primary day and saying "Oh shit! He's pro-choice!?!?"

This LA Times piece really makes vivid the oppression of women in that country: Then he said it: "Men only." He didn't tell me what I would learn later: Starbucks had another, unmarked door around back that led to a smaller espresso bar, and a handful of tables smothered by curtains. That was the "family" section. As a woman, that's where I belonged. I had no right to mix with male customers or sit in plain view of passing shoppers. Like the segregated South of a bygone United States, today's Saudi Arabia shunts half the population into separate, inferior and usually invisible spaces. At that moment, there was only one thing to do. I stood up. From the depths of armchairs, men in their white robes and red-checked kaffiyehs stared impassively over their mugs. I felt blood rushing to my face. I dropped my eyes, and immediately wished I hadn't. Snatching up the skirts of my robe to keep from stumbling, I walked out of the store and into the clatter

Travesty of the day : Nobody much likes the fact that Alabama does not provide indigent death row inmates with lawyers. ''Perhaps, in a perfect world, every inmate would have a lawyer at the ready at all times,'' the state's attorney general told a federal appeals court in a brief defending the practice last year. ''But we live in the real world.'' Three judges on that court, the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, also made sympathetic remarks about a utopian alternate reality in which prisoners about to be executed might actually be provided with lawyers. ''If we lived in a perfect world, which we do not, we would like to see the inmates obtain the relief they seek,'' Judge Joel F. Dubina wrote. The court unanimously rejected a class action suit from inmates asking for lawyers. Not every bad idea is unconstitutional, the state and the judges said, and Alabama -- the only state that refuses to provide i

If our Congress can't do it, maybe the Iraqi parliament will : The parliament today passed a binding resolution that will guarantee lawmakers an opportunity to block the extension of the UN mandate under which coalition troops now remain in Iraq when it comes up for renewal in December. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose cabinet is dominated by Iraqi separatists , may veto the measure. The law requires that any future extensions of the mandate, which have previously been made by Iraq's Prime Minister, be approved by the parliament. It is an enormous development; lawmakers reached in Baghdad today said that they do in fact plan on blocking the extension of the coalition's mandate when it comes up for renewal six months from now. Reached today by phone in Baghdad, Nassar al Rubaie, the head of Al-Sadr bloc in Iraq's Council of Representatives, said, "this new binding resolution will prevent the government from renewing the UN mandate without the parliament's p

Here's a challenge to all those presidential candidates who think English should be the "official" language of the United States: will you forswear using any other languages in your campaign materials? Apparently, McCain called Romney on this during the Republican debate. Sullivan : The line of the night from McCain to Romney: Governor, muchos gracias . It's rare to see a fraud exposed quite as clearly in real time as the Republichameleon. So he's for making English the national language, but runs campaign ads in Spanish: an almost perfect representation of the plastic one's bullshit.

Image from here (HT: Mad Latinist from the IM comments ) Tofu is weird. Eat BOFU(TM) instead.

Image of "Scooter" Libby from MTV , of all places. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Firedoglake is the place to go for all the Libby updates. Here's their latest on Libby's sentencing : Arguments on whether or not Libby will be allowed to remain free on bond pending appeal will occur next week — but Judge Walton has already indicted that he is disinclined to buy such arguments from defense counsel. That sets a high bar for them in terms of changing the judge's mind on that issue. In the meantime, Libby was sentenced today to a 30-month term in federal prison, with a 2-year term of supervised release following the completion of that sentence, a $250,000 fine, and a requirement of 400 hours of community service.