Month: March 2009

Can Of War Crimes

by digby

Dday is blogging like a madman over at Washington Monthly so be sure to check in over there to see what he and the rest of the gang are up to.

He references this amazing story about Spain potentially indicting the Cheney Gang for war crimes and writes.

The amount of material connecting these six to the creation, authorization and direction of state-sanctioned illegal torture, based on perverse and discredited reasoning, is voluminous, and given the record of Garzon, I would imagine this will lead to arrest warrants. This story shows once again the growing global unease with the implicit policy of the United States to conveniently forget the torture and other abuses of the Bush regime. In England, police are investigating whether British intelligence officers knew about and prolonged the torture of Binyam Mohamed, the recently released Guantanamo detainee. As Glenn Greenwald notes, other countries have not abandoned their commitment to the rule of law.[…]The end of the NY Times article shows why the US can hardly claim that Spain is acting irresponsibly beyond its own borders and violating the soveriegnty of other nations, because in one recent case we did almost exactly the same thing:

The United States for the first time this year used a law that allows for the prosecution in the United States of torture in other countries. On Jan. 10, a Miami court sentenced Charles Taylor, the former Liberian leader, to 97 years in a federal prison for torture, even though the crimes were committed in Liberia. Last October, when the Miami court handed down the conviction, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey applauded the ruling and said: “This is the first case in the United States to charge an individual with criminal torture. I hope this case will serve as a model to future prosecutions of this type.”

So do I.

Me too.
I honestly think they opened a can of worms that the United State government may end up wishing they’d dealt with themselves. Wars have been started on less provocation. We’ve even started some of them.

Compromise

by digby

Fred Clarkson, doing his usual superlative job of tracking the religious right, has noticed a new approach to framing the abortion issue by some Catholic groups. It illustrates once again just how sophisticated the anti-abortion industry has become in shifting its marketing tactics to fit changing political circumstances. They operate strategically in both the long term and the short term, constantly reevaluating their tactics and tweaking them as necessary. (American business could learn something from them at this point.)

Clarkson has seen a new set of talking points emerge that builds upon some of the changing rhetoric on the culture war in the last couple of years as Democrats rushed to embrace the notion that they need to find a middle ground on abortion rights (and absurdly held that anti-abortion zealots would sign on to increasing access to birth control as a compromise.)

He writes:

I first encountered their screed in the form of an op-ed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper, which was promoted by the abortion reduction advocacy group, Faith in Public Life. Then it was featured on SojoNet and promoted in an e-blast to their national list. This article is titled: “What Makes Liberals and Conservatives Angry? Abortion Reduction”. In this article I learned that any of us who disagree with the authors are ipso facto, making “`the perfect’ the enemy of `the good.'”

This is very clever stuff. They are piggy-backing on the Obama campaign’s rhetoric of post-partisanship and are placing their position as being the common sense “middle ground” that conventional wisdom has been telling us for the last year is exactly what the people want. Clarkson continues:

Common sense tells us that just because Gehring and Campbell claim to represent a moderate and responsible middle between two alleged extremes, does not necessarily mean that in fact they do. And indeed, the amount of invective they were able to cram into a short space in the service of their strawman arguments, should give pause to anyone who might be inclined to consider whether their views are, in fact, moderate or reasonable. Here is a sampler of terms they use in discussing those of us who disagree with them: “malign,” “righteous zeal,” “absolutist devotion,” “predictable to the absurd,” “demonization” “hardened agendas” and – my personal favorite — a “scorched earth rhetorical style.” They conclude with a call to the rest of us to “embrace a spirit of greater humility, compassion and critical introspection…” It was not hard to figure out where I, (as one of those who has written critically about the politics of abortion reduction) fit on Gehring and Campbell’s enemies list. I must be among that notorious lot of unnamed “liberal bloggers” who allegedly “slam Catholics and evangelicals working on this approach as radical ‘anti-choice’ hardliners cozying up to the Religious Right.” I say “allegedly” because Gehring and Campbell offer no examples and make no effort to actually address any of our points.

They could have named me too. I do believe that Catholics and evangelicals who are working with the Religious Right to outlaw abortion are worthy of criticism. If they were operating in good faith, they would admit that.
I certainly don’t oppose greater access to birth control and better sex education and income assistance. As a liberal I was for such things before they were cool. But you don’t have to be clairvoyant to see that they believe this will lead to a “compromise” in which they agree to make birth control more accessible, and we agree that abortion should be illegal.But that’s not a compromise, it’s a capitulation on a fundamental human right to control your own body for the opportunity to have something (birth control) that people should have anyway as a matter of common decency. Despite what Lord Saletan insists, the need for abortion is not just a matter of stupid, promiscuous girls not understanding the seriousness of unprotected sex. Its the result of the most basic human drive there is and will always be necessary even, sometimes, for women who do everything “right.” And there is no judge on the planet, not even Will Saletan or the pope, who is in a position to judge which women those are.
This fantasy middle ground exists only for those who think that if only women would be responsible there would be no abortions. I think we already tried that. Before Roe vs Wade, unwed motherhood was verboten, female sexuality was considered dirty and women who got inconveniently pregnant were shunned. Society placed a very, very high value on female chastity and fidelity and women certainly weren’t stupid or lacked understanding of the consequences. And yet millions of women had sex and got pregnant and had back alley abortions anyway.
Now we have legal abortion, unwed motherhood is practically the norm, female sexuality is open and accepted and birth control is advertised on television. And yet millions of women still have sex, get pregnant and have abortions. The difference is that they don’t have to die in some seedy motel when they get one and they aren’t shunned and treated like whores for doing something that every human animal on the planet is programmed to do.
Brazil still outlaws abortion except in the case of rape or to save the mother’s life, as do a many other Catholic countries, with the predictably disasterous results:

The number of legal abortions of girls ages 10 to 14 more than doubled last year to 49, up from 22 in 2007, the Ministry of Health reported. That was out of 3,050 legal abortions performed last year in a country of more than 190 million. But the vast majority of Brazil’s abortions are not legal. The Ministry of Health estimates about one million unsafe or clandestine abortions every year. Brazil’s abortion laws are among the strictest in Latin America. Only Chile, El Salvador and Nicaragua, which have banned abortion outright for any reason, are stricter, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, which supports abortion rights. In some parts of the region, most notably Mexico City, where first-trimester abortions are now legal, laws have been relaxed. But in other areas and countries, legislators have sought to toughen the restrictions on abortion.Twenty years ago, Brazil had just one center to perform abortions. Today, beyond the 55 clinics that can perform them, another 400 or so treat patients that have been sexually abused.

If anyonee belives that every one of those one million illegal abortions could have been prevented with better access to birth control, I want to know what they’re smoking.
That story, btw, is actually about this, which renders the church unqualified to make moral judgments about any of this in my view:

While much of Brazil has been riled by the case of a 9-year-old girl who aborted twins this month after claiming her stepfather raped her, her ordeal was an all too familiar one at the clinic. The girl’s story of rape and pregnancy at such a young age seemingly caught the nation off guard, reviving a tense debate over reproductive rights in a country with more Catholics than any other. But doctors, clinic workers and other experts say her case is symptomatic of a widespread problem of sexual abuse of under-age girls — one that has long been neglected and may be getting worse. “Unfortunately, this is becoming more and more common,” said Daniela Pedroso, a psychologist who has worked here for 11 years.Weighing just 79 pounds and barely four feet tall, the 9-year-old girl, from Alagoinha, a town in the northeast, underwent an abortion when she was 15 weeks pregnant at one of the 55 centers authorized to perform the procedure in Brazil. Abortion is legal here only in cases of rape or when the mother’s life is at risk. The doctors’ actions set off a swirl of controversy. A Brazilian archbishop summarily excommunicated everyone involved — the doctors for performing the abortion and the girl’s mother for allowing it — except for the stepfather, who stands accused of raping the girl over a number of years.“The law of God is above any human law,” said José Cardoso Sobrinho, the archbishop, who argued that while rape was bad, abortion was even worse. The storm intensified when a high-ranking Vatican official supported the excommunications. But then a conference of Brazilian bishops overruled Archbishop Sobrinho, saying that the child’s mother had acted “under pressure” from doctors who said the girl would die if she carried the babies to term, and that only doctors who “systematically” performed abortions should be thrown out of the church. Finally, the Vatican’s top bioethics official, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, also criticized the initial stance, saying the “credibility of our teaching took a blow as it appeared, in the eyes of many, to be insensitive, incomprehensible and lacking mercy.”

Seriously, if they had this much trouble sorting out the correct moral stand on that, then I honestly don’t see how they can possibly have any credibility on this subjectat all. (You are, of course, allowed to believe whatever you want …)

Clarkson goes on to point out that the second of these new talking points is to frame the issue as between religious and non-religious, which is incorrect of course. Abortion rights are supported by a majority of Americans and a very large majority of Americans describe themselves as being religious. Anyone can do the math from there.

The third new talking point is that “President Barack Obama has made abortion reduction a priority of his Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.” That’s not correct. The Democratic platform went a different direction, which I wrote about here, and changed the emphasis to reducing unwanted pregnancies and therefore, the need for abortion. As Clarkson points out, this “reflects the view that under the law, the Constitution, the party platform and the view of the vast majority of Americans, abortion is a legitimate ‘need.'”

I prefer the language of civil liberties myself, but the fact is that the Democrats pulled back from the brink and stopped talking about the need to “reduce the number of abortions” and I hope we hold them to it. Reducing unwanted pregnancies is a laudable policy, and I support that 100%. I also know that it will never result in a 100% reduction in the need for abortion. Life is not that simple.

Finally, Clarkson reports that these new talking points claim that liberals are angry about the idea of reducing abortions. That’s drivel, of course. Nobody thinks that way. Pro-choice liberals simply live here on planet earth rather than in some clean utopian world where accidental pregnancy never happens and pregnant women are always thrilled at the prospect of either a lifetime commitment or giving their offspring up for adoption — as if all these things are simple, easy decisions compared to the moral darkness of the ugly alternative. On planet earth abortion reduction is a hopeful side effect of the reduction of unwanted pregnancy, not a goal in itself.

I don’t buy that passing out birth control will eliminate the need for abortion, which is quite obviously where these people want us to grant that this “middle ground” leads, and which obviously leads to a ban on the practice. (And anyway, if access to birth control were what they truly cared about, we wouldn’t have any need for abortion today. Condoms are available in every 7-11 in America. )

This is just another in a long line of very slick tactical moves by the anti-abortion movement. They are quite good at moving the debate their way in small increments, as they’ve been doing for decades now. And unfortunately, some in the Democratic party have all too often been their willing pawns particularly in their needy propensity to appear “reasonable.” It’s that neediness to which these talking points are designed to appeal (and sadly, which are being exploited by certain factions within the coalition who seek to expand their influence by being mediators.) Let’s hope the Dems have learned their lessons and don’t fall for it.

The shrill, unreasonable people are those who think the state should intrude on the most private, intimate matters of personal human sexuality and biology on the basis of certain religious beliefs. Reasonable people hold that everyone has a right to their own beliefs on these private matters but that the state cannot make just decisions on something so complicated and personal. Within that reasonable, if imperfect, framework a compromise was worked out long ago. It’s called Roe vs Wade.

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The Fatuous Gasbag And His Little Dog Bobby

by digby

Julia discusses the news that Little Bobby Jindal is doubling down with El Rushbo for the long haul. You can’t blame him. Rush is the only person in America who still takes him seriously.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, R, reignited the controversy surrounding the Republican Party and Rush Limbaugh Tuesday night when he said it is OK to hope President Barack Obama fails.

Speaking to a conference of Republican leaders, Mr. Jindal, a man who many believe has an eye on the White House in 2012, said it is appropriate to hope the president fails if it means the president’s policies will jeopardize the nation’s security and stability.

“My answer to the question is very simple: ‘Do you want the president to fail?’ It depends on what he is trying to do,” Mr. Jindal said.

…

“Make no mistake: Anything other than an immediate and compliant, ‘Why no sir, I don’t want the president to fail,’ is treated as some sort of act of treason, civil disobedience or political obstructionism,” Mr. Jindal said to a crowd of about 1,200. “This is political correctness run amok.”

No word on whether or not they feel “Betrayused.”

Meanwhile, Little Bobby’s BFF is talking some amazing gibberish these days. I’ve been able to keep up with the GOPs spiritual and intellectual leadership much better since Media Matters started the LimbaughWire. I can only actually listen to his bombastic blather for a few minutes before I literally get nauseous. It’s a great service (and entertainingly written too.)

The sheer volume of utter nonsense that the man spews out in just one program, much less each and every day for 20 years is amazing. It’s even more amazing his listeners’ heads haven’t exploded from the sheer amount of dissonance their brains have to process. These highlights just from the last hour of Friday’s show alone are awe inspiring:

LIMBAUGH: If the American people are ready for the destruction of capitalism, if the American people are ready for the destruction of the opportunity for the American dream, if the American people are ready to vote for an end to their chance to be prosperous, it must mean a lot of them want to sit around and do their doobies. But what’s the big disconnect?

[…]

LIMBAUGH: The Obama administration said it supports the Copenhagen treaty process if, in the words of a U.S. State Department spokesman, it can come up with an effective framework for dealing with global warming. In other words, damn the consequences.

If we can claim that it fights global warming, we will do it. It fits right in, ladies and gentlemen, with Obama’s plan to destruct the foundation of capitalism in this country and replace it with a giant government and a huge, huge welfare state.

[…]

LIMBAUGH: There is no global warming, so when you say that we have a solution to it, I — you know, I throw my hands up. There’s no solution to it, because there isn’t any global warming. And I don’t care if there is warming or cooling, there’s nothing we can do about it. We’re just human beings. There’s not a damn thing we can do to cause it or to stop it. We’re just prisoners here.

[…]

LIMBAUGH: It’s like I said yesterday: “Cheat on me, but don’t tell me. Obama can do” —

CALLER: Exactly. So —

LIMBAUGH: “Obama can do anything in the world. Just don’t tell me what he’s really doing, because I love the guy.”

He’s a cult leader. Battered liberal syndrome: “Cheat on me, just don’t tell me.”

[…]

LIMBAUGH: Nancy, honey, taxpayers are paying for health care. I don’t care if it’s coming [from] their company, their insurance — taxpayers — government health care is taxpayer-paid health care. The government can’t pay for anything without taking money from people who produce it, unless they print it, which is sadly what is happening now. The third person in line for the presidency in this country is a complete airhead.

(By that logic, taxpayers just paid for my lunch and filled up my gas tank too. And he calls Pelosi an airhead?)

Those excerpts represent just one hour out of the week.

While nobody knows if his numbers are actually rising (and there is good reason to suspect they’re not) I would expect that it won’t matter. If the media believes they are real we will see Limbaugh’s star actually rise, as ridiculous as that is. It’s his money and success that enthralls them.

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Pinch-Blogging

by dday

I’m substituting for my pal Steve Benen over at his site at The Washington Monthly for the next few days, and I have several posts up there, about Obama’s meeting with the banksters, another group press corps whine, and the dumbest argument against climate change legislation I’ve ever heard, among other things. Stop by and say hello if you like.

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Recession Proof Your Brain

by digby

I just heard CNN’s week-end money team giving stock tips to their viewers to “recession proof” their lives. Now, I don’t doubt that there are great buys to be had in the market and that some people may be in a position to invest right now and make some big bucks over the long haul. But if the hosts of the show also feel it’s necessary to first explain what a stock is and tell them that the odd letters on the screen stands for the company’s ticker symbol, I think maybe stock picking may be over the heads of their audience.

I used to think the political media was as bad as it gets, with their high school kewl kid mentality and their boundless lack of self-awareness. The financial media make them look like sober, mature professionals by comparison.

What’s Up With Chuck?

by digby

Has Chuck Grassley always been such a loose cannon or is something weird going on with him? He’s calling for executives to commit suicide and endorsing a spending freeze in the middle of a recession to “stop socialism”. And now this:

Marking up budget legislation can be a brutal affair, often beginning early and lasting long into the night.

But buried within the hours of debate in the Senate on Thursday is an exchange you’d be more likely to hear in a locker room than a congressional hearing.

Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) was on the receiving end of this one, after telling Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), “Oh, you are good.”

“Well, your wife said the same thing,” Grassley responded.

Bada-bing!

I never thought of Grassley as being especially colorful, but lately he’s giving James Inhofe a run for his money.

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Of Course He Did

by digby

From Congressional Daily:

Senate Majority Leader Reid said today he would drop a cram-down provision from a House-passed banking bill if the language threatened to keep the Senate from passing the overall bill. The provision would allow a bankruptcy judge to reduce a homeowner’s mortgage principal. “If we can’t get the votes for that, and I am hopeful we can — I am semiconfident we can — then what I’ll do is take that off [the bill] and do the other banking provisions,” Reid said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast. Reid said he would work to keep the package intact, but raising the prospect of pulling the provision seemed to acknowledge assertions by Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., and others that the cram-down bill cannot pass due to opposition from Republicans and some Democratic moderates.

Apparently, the “compromise” is to only apply cramdown to subprime mortgages, which sounds terrific, right? Except, as Kagro points out here, most of the subprime mortgages have already defaulted. So that’s all over. The big money boyz don’t want regular qualified borrowers who are caught up in the recessionary blowback of unemployment and soaring uncovered health care costs to be able to renegotiate mortgages through bankruptcy. Moral hazard, dontcha know. Because, gawd knows, these lending institutions are all about morality.

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Vexing

by digby

Yesterday there was a lot of discussion about Obama’s response to the question about marijuana at his online forum. (Dday covered it here.) A lot of pro legalization activists as well as online activists rightly, in my view, were a bit miffed at the dismissive attitude.

But I think this speaks to the deeper problem of our government’s approach to dealing with drugs everywhere. When Obama and his very enthusiastic audience laughed and applauded his condescension, it was sadly obvious that administration is as irrational and anti-intellectual on that issue as the Bush administration was on science during its eight years. It’s a dangerous attitude considering what’s happening south of the border right now. We need rationality more than ever right now.

And it’s an even scarier thing when you consider Afghanistan. That’s why these comments from Richard Holbrooke are rather intriguing:

Holbrooke did speak somewhat candidly about a vexing part of the Afghanistan problem: drugs. What to do about the opium flowing out of Afghanistan has always been a knotty element of US policy regarding Afghanistan. How much of a priority should it be? (Simply put, if you attack the the opium trade, warlords and locals get pissed off and join or support the other side.) Asked about the priority of drug fighting in the Afghanistan review, Holbrooke, as he was leaving the briefing, said “We’re going to have to rethink the drug problem.” That was interesting. He went on: “a complete rethink.” He noted that the policymakers who had worked on the Afghanistan review “didn’t come to a firm, final conclusion” on the opium question. “It’s just so damn complicated,” Holbrooke explained. Did that mean that the opium eradication efforts in Afghanistan should be canned? “You can’t eliminate the whole eradication program,” he exclaimed. But that remark did make it seem that he backed an easing up of some sort. “You have to put more emphasis on the agricultural sector,” he added.

For years, officials of the US government and other government have pondered what to do about the poppy fields of Afghanistan. Holbrooke indicated he favors a significant shift in this front of the war on drugs. But what specific policy does he fancy? He offered no clues, and then began talking to several reporters in French. Whatever he was saying, it sounded quite good.

A very smart political friend and I were chattering about Afghanistan a couple of months ago and he wondered if it wouldn’t be cheaper for the American government simply buy up the opium crop at top prices rather than spend the money on redevelopment and military action that never seems to work. My immediate thought was that even if people agreed that it would work, it would be impossible because of our irrational view of drugs in this country (as compared to billions spent on useless wars ….) But maybe I was wrong.

And maybe Holbrooke is just yammering about something completely different. But it would be great if there was some fresh thinking about this stuff. being irrational about drugs has gotten us absolutely nowhere. (And yes, Holbrooke needs to share some of that fresh thinking with his boss.)

They’re Baaack…

by dday

You didn’t think Bill Kristol and the PNAC crowd would just go away, did you?

What do you do if your previous organization — and the ideology behind it — has become inextricably bound in the public’s imagination to one of the worst foreign policy blunders in American history? Obviously, shut it down, and start a new organization with a new name.

The Foreign Policy Initiative lists Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, and Dan Senor on its board of directors, so no prizes for guessing what they’re about (more power, less appeasement, stronger wills.) Kagan and Kristol need no introduction, they’re the Tick and Arthur of disastrously counterproductive military adventurism. Given the staggering costs in American blood, treasure, security, and reputation incurred by their boundless enthusiasm for blowing stuff up, you might think they’d have had the decency to retreat to a Tibetan monastery by now, but sadly no. The way it works in Washington is, if you’re willing to argue for more defense spending, you’ll always find someone willing to fund your think tank.

Dan Senor is less known to the general public, but familiar to those who’ve followed the Iraq debacle closely. From 2003 to 2004, Senor served as a Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman under Paul Bremer. After that smashing success, Senor returned to Washington, where, among other things, in September 2004 he helped write speeches for Iraqi interim prime minister Ayad Allawi’s U.S. visit, and then apparently went on television to praise those speeches as evidence of Bush’s accomplishments in Iraq.

Senor is also Campbell Brown’s husband, so I’m sure this will be covered extensively on her show, which as you know is both no bias and no bull.

Spencer Ackerman and Ari Rabin-Havt have more. Interestingly, this little group’s first public event is a half-day conference on how to succeed in Afghanistan, featuring some of the same cheerleaders who blundered us into war in Iraq.

FPI, whose founders and principals include Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, and Dan Senor, will host a summit next Tuesday titled “Afghanistan: Planning for Success.” Billed as a “half-day conference” to “discuss how the United States and our allies can succeed in Afghanistan,” the event will feature appearances and discussion from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Rep. John M. McHugh (R-N.Y.) — ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee — and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), who chairs of the House Homeland Security Intelligence Subcommittee.

“I know these people and recognize where they’re coming from,” the Congresswoman said of her appearance at the event. “I’m coming from a different place and want to be sure that point of view is heard. My point of view will be extremely sympathetic to the Obama Administration position on Af/Pak.”

Maybe Harman could go ahead and not show up to give a point of view that none of the magical thinkers and armchair generals who make up this outfit would possibly care about. But I am intrigued by the focus on Afghanistan. As Matt Duss notes, the better title for the conference would be “Afghanistan: Dealing With The Huge Problems Created By Many Of The People On This Very Stage.” The relentless focus on Iraq drew attention and resources from Afghanistan and helped to put us in this predicament. But the current dynamic shows Republicans both praising Obama’s Afghanistan/Pakistan plan and calling it “the new surge.” Here’s John Cornyn.

I commend President Obama on his plan for a surge in Afghanistan, which is our front line in the Global War On Terror. Victory there is imperative, and President Obama and our troops on the ground in Afghanistan have my full support. I will do everything in my power to ensure that Congress provides any and all resources required to accomplish the mission […]

It is my hope that President Obama’s surge in Afghanistan achieves results similar to the surge in Iraq, enabling victory and bringing our fighting men and women home as soon as possible.

You can see an outline of the foreign policy critique here. First of all, the neocons are trying to redeem the Bush strategy in Iraq by casting it as a success (I have hundreds of thousands of reasons why this is not the case). Then there is the support of Afghanistan, which will quickly turn into “there needs to be a greater commitment” as it falters. Neoconservatism cannot fail, of course, it can only be failed. And so the argument will be that Green Lantern’s will just needs to be stronger and we can exterminate the brutes and claim victory. Which is actually not Obama’s Af/Pak plan (a plan I don’t fully support), so the space on the right can be easily carved.

It would be easy to say “Forget about these idiots who wrecked the world, they have been totally discredited,” but the country’s politics have never worked that way. The same discredited group one year returns to power the next. And so it’s crucial to keep tabs on these knaves and see what most excellent adventure they have planned for the country when they claw their way back.

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Compliance

by digby

TChris reports:

NFL running back Ryan Moats just wanted to get his wife to the hospital before her mother died. You can’t blame him for rolling through a red light. You can blame the officer who pulled him over outside the ER, ignored his pleas (and those of hospital staff), threatened to screw him over, and took his time writing a ticket.

His mother in law passed away while the offer forced Moats to remain in his car as he checked for outstanding warrants.

He’s lucky he didn’t get tasered.

H/t to reader Bill, who points out that the best cops are good sociologists and psychologists, common sense law enforcement skills which seem to have disappeared in the age of forced compliance by any means necessary.

The Dallas police department apologized, which is terrific and all, but one wonders if the person wasn’t an NFL player if he’d even get that.

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