Drive-By Monday: June 11, 2007

> You've heard of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is there to protect us from unsafe toasters and toys. How about a Financial Product Safety Commission?


> GOP prez candidate Mike Huckabee thinks Gitmo is a nicer place to be a prisoner than the state pen. Assrape, torture, assrape, torture -- six of one, half a dozen of the other, right, Mike?


> Supreme Court nixes "enemy combatant" policy.


> GOP almost-candidate Fred Thompson challenged by the religious right; Fake Fred talks back.


> U.S. government's security contractor Blackwater Security Consulting countersues families of four American contractors who were burned, beaten, dragged through the streets of Fallujah, and their decapitated bodies hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River.

Protests at Soldiers' Funerals

Kansas, New Hampshire, and Maine (and who knows who else) have all been moving to outlaw protests at funerals, motivated mostly by disgust at protests being staged at funerals of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. (The protests cut both ways -- protests against the war, and protests against homosexuality (go figure).)

Once again, it is a story so frustrating we are left snarkless.

It's just never the right way to go to try to limit the First Amendment. Tastelessness can always be called out for being tasteless; that's the real answer.

But honestly -- protesting outside soldiers' funerals? The tragedy is that those lives were lost because they were thrown into a system that treats them not as individual human lives but as disembodied tokens to be moved around on a game board for political purposes. Protests outside their funerals replicate that same tragedy -- taking the service which is supposed to honor their lives and bring closure for their survivors and sucking the meaning out of it so that it can be used as a backdrop for a political show.

Losing Two Fights at the Same Time

One of the lessons of 9/11 was that many of us were finally forced to learn about Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden -- and how the U.S. backed bin Laden's fight against the Soviets and then promptly ignored the country when the Soviets were repelled and Afghanistan was left in ruins.

So, after the 9/11 attacks and the U.S. military toppled the Taliban, what did President Genius do -- but essentially abandon Afghanistan. Oh, we're still there, but Afghanistan has been reduced to a city-state surrounded by lawless regions, because the U.S. once again left Afghanistan in ruins as President Genius diverted our resources and set us on the fatally foolhardy adventure in Iraq.

Now comes word that five U.S. soldiers were killed when a NATO helicopter was shot down. Additionally, per WaPo, this crash "was the 13th deadly helicopter incident involving U.S. troops since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2002." Emergency responders responding to the crash were ambushed as well. This crash occurred in the Helmand province, about which "[l]ocal officials in recent months have said the situation . . . is out of control."

November changed nothing.

We try to have a snarky blog thing going on over here, but this is all so deeply frustrating that we are out of snark right now.