Andrew Breitbart, completely unhinged over at the Washington Times:
So now that the right is vanquished and thoroughly out of power, why doesn’t it learn from its conquerors and employ similar tactics?
The answer is obvious. The right, for the most part, embraces basic Judeo-Christian ideals and would not promote nor defend the propaganda techniques that were perfected in godless communist and socialist regimes. The current political and media environment crafted by supposedly idealistic Mr. Obama resembles Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela more than John F. Kennedy’s America.
A Polish MP who failed a drink-driving test said he had eaten too many apples, the website of daily Gazeta Wyborcza said today.
Asked why a traffic police check yesterday showed he had 0.7 units of alcohol in his blood, Marek Latas denied having drunk alcohol that day.
“I am diabetic, I ate a few apples before driving.
“I have been involved in no accident, I underwent a routine roadside check. I was confident there was no chance I had alcohol in my blood,” said Latas, a member of parliament for the conservative opposition Law and Justice Party.
The prosecutor’s office is investigating his case, the website said. In Poland, the legal limit for alcohol when driving is 0.2 units. Fermented apple juice can be used to make cider, an alcoholic drink.
I’m not saying that Obama, the Treasury, and the unions are Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler; I’m just saying that I see the history of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler about to repeat itself.
The Bush administration’s first “high value” detainee was a man named Abu Zubaida. As the recent report from the International Committee of the Red Cross revealed, Zubaida was the first person subjected to the administration’s enhanced interrogation torture program. And the Bush administration repeatedly claimed that their interrogation of Zubaida “saved lives.”
Today’s Washington Postbegs to differ. If anything, the torture of this man did nothing but waste time and resources:
When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him.
The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.
In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.
And signficantly, it appears that Abu Zubaida wasn’t even a member of al-Qaeda. The former adminstration’s repeated claims that Zubaida was “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations” and a “trusted associate” of Osama bin Laden were all seemingly the product of an overactive paranoia:
Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military sources. Rather, he was a “fixer” for radical Muslim ideologues, and he ended up working directly with al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11 — and that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan.
While it seems obvious that Abu Zubaida was involved in a number of illegal activities involving Islamic extremists, he had no information or knowledge about al-Qaeda. Torturing him therefore ensured that US intelligence would be working from false premises, based on false information, spoken by a man who could do nothing but tell his torturers what he thought they wanted to hear. Such is the nature of torture.
According to the New York Times, our amigos in Spain seem interested in things like justice and rule of law:
A Spanish court has taken the first steps toward opening a criminal investigation into allegations that six former high-level Bush administration officials violated international law by providing the legal framework to justify the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, an official close to the case said. The case, against former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and others, was sent to the prosecutor’s office for review by Baltasar Garzón, the crusading investigative judge who ordered the arrest of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The official said that it was “highly probable” that the case would go forward and that it could lead to arrest warrants.
Michele Bachmann may be a complete lunatic. She may just be dumber than a bag of hammers. One thing is for sure – she’s ready to lead the revolution! Check it out:
Hannity and Bachmann – that’s quite a tag team.
If you can’t bear to listen to Sean Hannity interview Michele Bachmann, well, I don’t blame you. So here are some of Michele’s highlights:
To the barricades! -
At this point the American people – it’s like Thomas Jefferson said, a revolution every now and then is a good thing. We are at the point, Sean, of revolution. And by that, what I mean, an orderly revolution — where the people of this country wake up get up and make a decision that this is not going to happen on their watch…we can’t let the Democrats achieve their ends any longer.
This bit is really dramatic -
Economics works equally in any country. Where freedom is tried, the people rejoice. But where tyranny is enforced upon the people, as Barack Obama is doing, the people suffer and mourn.
Obama is elected, and the people suffer and mourn. Spectacular.
Here’s some more paranoid rambling -
Right now I’m a member of Congress. And I believe that my job here is to be a foreign correspondent, reporting from enemy lines. And people need to understand, this isn’t a game. this isn’t just a political talk show that’s happening right now. This is our very freedom, and we have 230 years, a continuous link of freedom that every generation has ceded to the next generation. This may be the time when that link breaks. And I’m going to do everything I can, I know you are, to make sure that we keep that link secure. We cannot allow that link to break, because as Reagan said, America is the last great hope of mankind. where do we go–
Here is the Republican vision for how to save our economy, taken from yesterday’s budget publication:
According to the depiction here, it seems that the Republican’s “Road to Recovery” will not take us to things like universal health care, limited federal spending, and reform of entitlements like Medicaid and Medicare. It also seems like the Republican road doesn’t actually lead anywhere; in fact, it has two dead ends.
“would somebody tell me the last time you saw a kid sleeping under a bridge?”
Ask and ye shall receive.
Today’s NY Times has an article on the recent eruption of shantytowns, tent cities, and under-bridge dwellings that are reminiscent of “Hoovervilles” during the Great Depression.
During his recent press conference, president Obama stated that the Republicans have thus far only criticized his budget ideas and have yet to offer any constructive ideas of their own.
Today, the Republicans responded. After pouring over spreadsheets, agonizing over data, researching history and asking experts, the Republicans decided that the answer is . . . . . . to give a HUGE tax cut to the rich.
Seriously, I’m not kidding:
House Republican leaders called a press conference Thursday to unveil their “alternative budget.” While it was thin on specifics, it does include one major policy proposal: a huge tax cut for the wealthy.
Under the Republican plan, the top marginal tax rate would be slashed from 35 to 25 percent, facilitating a dramatic transfer of wealth up the economic scale. Anyone making more than a $100,000 would pay the top rate; those under would pay 10 percent.
House Minority Leader, John Boehner, strutted out with a phalanx of Republican flunkies, waving a blue document in the air before a gaggle of reporters:
“Two nights ago, the president said, ‘We haven’t seen a budget yet out of Republicans.’ Well, it’s just not true, because here it is, Mr. President,” said House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), waving a blue document in the air.
He was greeted with hostility. Reporters demanded that Boehner reveal specific details. But the Republicans had not gotten beyond the idea of giving grotesquely oversized tax cuts. This exchange is priceless:
“Are you going to have any further details on this today?” the first asked.
“On what?” asked Boehner.
“There’s no detail in here,” noted the reporter.
Answered Boehner: “This is a blueprint for where we’re going. Are you asking about some other document?”
A second reporter followed up: “What about some numbers? What about the out-year deficit? What about balancing the budget? How are you going to do it?”
“We’ll have the alternative budget details next week,” promised Boehner. Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) had wisely departed the room after offering his opening remarks. (“Today’s Republican road-to-recovery is the latest in a series of GOP initiatives, solutions and plans,” he had offered.)
A third reporter asked Boehner about the Republican goal for deficit reduction, noting President Obama aimed to cut it in half in five years. “What’s your goal?”
“To do better,” said Boehner.
“How? How much?”
“You’ll see next week.”
“Wait. Why not today? Because he asked you to present a budget.”
“Now, hold on,” said Boehner. “The president came to Capitol Hill and laid out his blueprint for his budget during the State of the Union. He didn’t offer his details until days later.”
“In general, where do you see cuts coming?” the Huffington Post asked.
“We’ll wait and see next week,” he said.
Another reporter reminded Boehner that he has “criticized Democrats for throwing together a stimulus quickly and nobody knew what they were voting on. Are you saying that your budget will be unveiled on the same day that the House is expected to vote on it?”
“No, I expect it’ll be out next week,” he said, though the House is expected to vote on the budget next week. “But understand that a budget really is a one-page document. It’s just a bunch of numbers.”
Still, as I mentioned back in October, Marx appears to be making a bit of a comeback. Marx and Engels began the Communist Manifesto with the claim that “A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of Communism.” The powers that be, they claimed, had entered into a “holy alliance to exorcise this specter.” Well, it isn’t 1848 anymore. And the establishment isn’t exactly trembling over the possibility of communist uprisings. But Marx’s analysis of capitalism won’t go away. Because it shouldn’t. It haunts us still.
And as more time passes, eventually the real words and ideas of Marx and Engels will be further liberated from the horrors of the phony Marxism of monsters like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. We might then be able to take seriously the critiques of capitalism that Marx produced, without having to entertain an irrelevant debate about Stalinism (which was a murderous disaster that had nothing to do with what Marx actually wrote).
John Cassidy’s 1997 New Yorker essay “The Return of Karl Marx” was quite prescient and is well worth a read. The abstract is here. And Christopher Hitchens has a piece in the April issue of The Atlantic that mentions and develops themes introduced in Cassidy’s essay. Hitch:
As I write this, every newspaper informs me of frantic efforts by merchants to unload onto the consumer, at almost any price, the vast surplus of unsold commodities that have accumulated since the credit crisis began to take hold. The phrase crisis of over-production, which I learned so many long winters ago in “agitational” meetings, recurs to my mind. On other pages, I learn that the pride of American capitalism has seized up and begun to rust, and that automobiles may cease even to be made in Detroit as a consequence of insane speculation in worthless paper “derivatives.” Did I not once read somewhere about the bitter struggle between finance capital and industrial capital? The lines of jobless and hungry begin to lengthen, and what more potent image of those lines do we possess than that of the “reserve army” of the unemployed—capital’s finest weapon in beating down the minimum wage and increasing the hours of the working week? A disturbance in a remote corner of the world market leads to chaos and panic at the very center of the system (and these symptoms are given a multiplier effect when the pangs begin at the center itself), and John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, doughty champions of capitalism at The Economist, admit straightforwardly in their book on the advantages of globalization that Marx, “as a prophet of the ‘universal interdependence of nations,’ as he called globalization … can still seem startlingly relevant … His description of globalization remains as sharp today as it was 150 years ago.”
I think it is safe to say that if we want to get some perspective on our current economic situation, Marx has a little more to offer than, say, CNBC. But I think we’re stuck with CNBC for now; because, as Marx himself put it, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” Damn.
The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild.
Completing a journey nearly as rocky as some of the land involved, Congress passed sweeping conservation legislation Wednesday that protects 200,000 acres of popular mountains and forests in Oregon and millions more nationwide.
The 285-140 House vote sent the 1,300-page public lands bill to President Barack Obama, who is expected to sign it as early as next week.
Advocates said the protections bestowed by the bill are the biggest advance in wilderness preservation in a generation — and the signal of a new era of congressional support for conservation.
The final law was a collection of 170 separate lands, parks and conservation bills — including some that lawmakers had been working on for decades — all balled into one. It establishes three new national parks (including one for the birthplace of President Bill Clinton in Hope, Ark.) and protects more than 1,000 miles of wild and scenic rivers and streams from development, including about 9 miles of rivers at the headwaters of the North Fork of the Elk River in Oregon.
The Oregonian
While the bill touches every corner of the nation, its impact will be especially pronounced in Oregon. In addition to Mount Hood, the law will protect 13,700 acres of old-growth forest in Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest, 23,000 acres in southwestern Oregon’s Soda Mountain region, nearly 31,000 acres of wilderness in the Badlands east of Bend, and 8,600 acres of wilderness overlooking the John Day Wild and Scenic River.
Could this be the best thing that has happened since Obama became president?
“But it’s fun to gamble and like any good quarterback (though I was never athletic enough to actually play the position), I decided to call an audible.”
– Ed Henry
You don’t say, Ed. Nice call.
Read Ed’s sad-sack description of his preparation for the press conference with president Obama and weep over the condition of our Fourth Estate.
The unmanned bombers that frequently cause unintended civilian casualties in Pakistan are a step toward an even more lethal generation of robotic hunters-killers that operate with limited, if any, human control.
The Defense Department is financing studies of autonomous, or self-governing, armed robots that could find and destroy targets on their own. On-board computer programs, not flesh-and-blood people, would decide whether to fire their weapons. [. . .]
The Pentagon’s plans for its Future Combat System envision increasing levels of independence for its robots.
“Fully autonomous engagement without human intervention should also be considered, under user-defined conditions,” said a 2007 Army request for proposals to design future robots.
I think I’ve already seen this movie:
The Terminator: The SkyNet funding bill is passed. The system goes online on August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. SkyNet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14am Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
Sarah Connor: And, Skynet fights back.
I, for one, welcome our autonomous cybernetic death machine overlords.
So much for the ol’ “World-Wide Web.” In keeping with a long-standing tradition of censorship, the government of the People’s Republic of China has blocked access to youtube.
Google said Tuesday that its YouTube video-sharing Web site had been blocked in China.
Google said it did not know why the site had been blocked, but a report by the official Xinhua news agency of China on Tuesday said that supporters of the Dalai Lama had fabricated a video that appeared to show Chinese police officers brutally beating Tibetans after riots last year in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.
…
“The instant speculation is that YouTube is being blocked because the Tibetan government in exile released a particular video,” said Xiao Qiang, adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and editor of China Digital Times, a news Web site that chronicles political and economic changes in China.
Mr. Xiao said that the blocking of YouTube fit with what appeared to be an effort by China to step up its censorship of the Internet in recent months. Mr. Xiao said he was not surprised that YouTube was a target. It also hosts videos about the Tiananmen Square protests and many other subjects that Chinese authorities find objectionable.
On the bright side, Chinese President and Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao has apparently not blocked access to Brylcreem.
Rush isn’t happy with the questions the press asked Obama last night. In particular, he is troubled by a question that made reference to a recent report that claims that one in fifty American children will experience homelessness. Limbaugh calls this statistic “bogus.” His evidence? A different report? Some government statistics, maybe? Nah. He counters the report and the statistic with this: “would somebody tell me the last time you saw a kid sleeping under a bridge?”
Limbaugh creates his own tailor-made reality for his listeners. He appears to feel perfectly entitled to declare things to be true or not true just by his own proclamation, without evidence or context. And his listeners appear quite comfortable in Rush’s reality (they call themselves “Ditto Heads,” after all; so I guess we can’t expect a lot of ciritical pushback from his audience). And this man, sadly, is taken very seriously by many people in this country.
(And by the way – what are you doing under those bridges anyway, Rush? Shopping, maybe?)
A 93-year-old Japanese man has become the first person certified as a survivor of both U.S. atomic bombings at the end of World War II, officials said Tuesday.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi had already been a certified “hibakusha,” or radiation survivor, of the Aug. 9, 1945, atomic bombing in Nagasaki, but has now been confirmed as surviving the attack on Hiroshima three days earlier as well, city officials said.
Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in the city. He then returned to his hometown of Nagasaki just in time for the second attack, city officials said.
Remember how, during his big prime-time speech last month, Lousiana’s Republican governor Bobby Jindal, in addition to making stuff up about what he did during Hurricane Katrina, also found time to mock the Obama administration for “wasteful spending” in the stimulus bill, including “$140 million for something called ‘volcano monitoring’”?
That line immediately drew criticism from just about everyone who understands what volcano monitoring involves. And now, it’s looking even dumber.
…
Why is Jindal’s line looking even worse now? Because, as you’ve likely heard, Alaska’s Mount Redoubt, 100 miles southwest of Anchorage, erupted last night. And a USGS geologist confirmed to TPMmuckraker that a portion of the stimulus spending for volcano monitoring that Jindal lampooned has been slated to go to USGS monitoring Redoubt.
[T]he worst thing that could happen would be for the Iranian government to respond favorably and positively and want to engage in a discussion – and then we would be on a track like that which will lead nowhere.
Allow me to tell you a true story. Last election, a nonprofit group known as ACORN helped register American citizens to vote. ACORN hired individuals to sign up voters and paid them a fee per signature. Some unscrupulous employees made up fake voters in an attempt to defraud ACORN. However, since it is illegal to destroy any voter registration forms, ACORN was required by law to submit any and all forms to local election commissions. ACORN dutifully passed the forms on to election commissions and even helpfully flagged the forms that appeared suspicious. At this stage, election commissions checked their registration forms against state and local records and the illegitimate ones were eliminated from the system. There is no evidence of any fraudulent voting as a result of ACORN’s voter registration efforts. Period.
However, our friends at FOX News tried to make it seem as if ACORN and hordes of unwashed black people were trying to steal the election for Barack Obama. (If FOX News learned anything from Bush v. Gore it was a deep concern and reverence for the integrity of elections and the will of the people).
Today the story is back since ACORN has been asked to help with the upcoming national census. Since ACORN is clearly a criminal enterprise whose sole purpose is transforming America into a socialist pleasure dome led by an unholy alliance of Mexicans, crack dealers, and fruits, FOX must sound the alarm.
Watch as Megyn Kelly of FOX News gives viewers a clinic on how to perform professional interviews that delicately probe the issues, exposing the facts and enriching public discourse:
Playing the baby-rapist card is a nice touch. So fair. So balanced.
Plenty of people have accused Brit Hume of Fox News of being a right-wing hack. In a helpful gesture, Hume has now confirmed this fact for us. He did it while he was being granted the “3rd Annual William F. Buckley Jr. Award for Media Excellence” by the conservative Media Research Center. To give you some context, the MRC gave its 2007 award to Rush Limbaugh. Yeah. That’s their idea of “media excellence.” Here’s Hume:
HUME: I want to say a word, however, of thanks, to [Media Research Center president] Brent [Bozell] and to the team at the Media Research Center and all the contributors who make that work there possible. Not just for this wonderfully – this wonderfully fine award in the name of someone as I say I admire so much, but also for the tremendous amount of material that the Media Research Center provided me for so many years when I was anchoring Special Report. I don’t know what we would have done without them. It was a daily, sort of a buffet of material to work from, and we – we — we certainly made tremendous use of it.
Don’t forget to book your seat on the Las Vegas foreclosure fun bus (with complimentary cocktails)! For those of you on the East Coast, you’ll have to settle for the A.I.G. Employees House Tour (with complimentary rotten fruit).
On Friday, Michelle Obama will begin digging up a patch of White House lawn to plant a vegetable garden, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in World War II. There will be no beets (the president doesn’t like them) but arugula will make the cut.
While the organic garden will provide food for the first family’s meals and formal dinners, its most important role, Mrs. Obama said, will be to educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables at time when obesity has become a national concern.
Twenty-three fifth graders from Bancroft Elementary School in Washington will help her dig up the soil for the 1,100-square-foot plot in a spot visible to passers-by on E Street. (It’s just below the Obama girls’ swing set.) Students from the school, which has had a garden since 2001, will also help plant, harvest and cook the vegetables, berries and herbs.
Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, has written what he calls “Some Truths about Guantanamo Bay.” Parts of the piece maybe somewhat self-serving, as he gives credit to Powell and Richard Armitage for trying to curb some of the abuses (and there is some indication, of course, that Powell and Armitage were at times among the more sensible voices inside the administration). But it is worth a read. And Wilkerson was in a position to know many of the details of the most sordid dealings of the Bush administration. Excerpts:
Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.
This was a factor of having too few troops in the combat zone, of the troops and civilians who were there having too few people trained and skilled in such vetting, and of the incredible pressure coming down from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others to “just get the bastards to the interrogators”.
…
[Another point] largely unreported is that several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.
But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released. I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces.
An agnostic Brown University student transfers to Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University for a semester to experience and write about the “God Divide.” An excerpt from the forthcoming book details the trials and travails of witnessing for Jesus in Florida’s sandy Babylon:
It’s Spring Break in Daytona Beach, Fla., and hundreds of rowdy coeds are packed into Froggy’s Saloon, where a nubile blonde gyrates seductively on top of the bar, her belly button ring shimmering like a bass jig in the sun. Motley Crüe’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” plays to wild cheers as the blonde fishes bills out of the empty beer pitcher marked “Tips for Tits.”
When the blonde — who is maybe 18 — removes her tube top to reveal a pair of star-shaped nipple shields, a short, demure college sophomore named Brandon holds his beach towel over his eyes. On his wrist sits a white “LivePure” bracelet. Scott, our group leader, rubs Brandon’s back. “Satan is strong here,” he says. “But remember: Every person is a person for whom Christ died, whether they’re wearing a lot of clothes or no clothes at all.”
Glenn Beck has been on an historic wingnut bender since January. Our latest installment has him musing about the Obama administration setting up FEMA “concentration” camps for political dissenters (whose capacity for naming evil renders them extremely dangerous). Of course, Glenn wants to get the story “right”, which gives him license to make up outrageous shit without actually taking responsibility for broadcasting it.
Our culture has a clear message for Presidents: as long as you don’t recieve any oral sex, you can feel free to break the law. You will get away with it. Hey, Ron – the Boland Amendment doesn’t apply to you. George – don’t worry about that pesky Fourth Amendment, or FISA, either. This excerpt from a ridiculous Salon column by Joe Conason (supposedly a voice of the left!) shows how far we have gone:
We have a new administration, immured in a world economic crisis, that recognizes conflicting imperatives of accountability and cooperation. And we have a responsibility to explore how the nation embarked on “a dangerous and disastrous diversion from American values,” as Leahy put it.
Is there a way for President Obama to pursue that responsibility without inflicting vengeance or humiliation? Perhaps he ought to consider the creation of a presidential commission whose aims would be purely investigative — and encourage the participation of those implicated in the abuses of the past by promising a complete pardon to anyone who testifies fully, honestly and publicly.
With that gesture, he would acknowledge the importance of uncovering the facts, no matter how ugly, while magnanimously binding up the nation’s wounds. He could leave the issue of criminal prosecution to international authorities that can act without any partisan taint. And he could seek truth without vengeance.
Bullshit, Joe. Bullshit.
Since when does a republic enforce its most important laws unless it will cause “humiliation?” Since when is a symbolic “binding up” of our “wounds” more important than the constitution itself? Since when does the rule of law not matter any more if we’re busy dealing with economic problems? And, most importantly – since when does holding someone accountable for committing crimes constitute “vengeance?”
If we continue to allow high-level elected officials to act without any goddamn consequences at all, then we are assured of having more of these same kinds of “wounds” in the future. Because abuses of power without consequences will not correct themselves magically.
That a supposedly liberal intellectual like Conason would write a column like this is a sad indication that Dick Cheney’s nefarious plan has worked nicely. Cheney wanted to create an executive branch with nearly unchecked power, and one whose actions were legal simply by virtue of the fact that they were Presidential. Yeah.
The next time a kid from a poor neighborhood in D.C. steals a car and is prosecuted for it, Joe Conason won’t say that the D.A. is seeking “vengeance,” will he? But the powerful, it appears, are no longer subject to the rule of law. I guess even liberals now agree.
Michael Steele, the entertaining Chair of the RNCUC – the Republican National Committee for Unintentional Comedy – is at it again. First, he weighs in on global climate change:
“We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland, which is now green. Oh I love this. Like we know what this planet is all about. How long have we been here? How long? Not very long.”
(Hey, Michael – I’m using my finger here, too. And I’m not making quotation marks). But Steele isn’t just an expert on scientific matters, he’s also a keen historian, with a deep appreciation for education:
“Education is key,” said the RNC Chair. “It is where it begins, for all of us… If we understand the difference between Marxism, socialism and capitalism; if we understand the difference between a Roberto Mussolini, an Adolf Hitler, and a Franklin Roosevelt, and his honor the honorable Winston Churchill, if we know those differences than we can appreciate what these times mean. And how history is a precursor of things to come.”
The evidence is too overwhelming, and it is of far too serious a nature to ignore. And if we don’t hold our elected officals accountable for their actions, we don’t have rule of law, and we have no international credibility.
The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration’s treatment of al-Qaeda captives “constituted torture,” a finding that strongly implied that CIA interrogation methods violated international law, according to newly published excerpts from the long-concealed 2007 document.
The report, an account alleging physical and psychological brutality inside CIA “black site” prisons, also states that some U.S. practices amounted to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Such maltreatment of detainees is expressly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.
…
Many of the details of alleged mistreatment at CIA prisons had been reported previously, but the ICRC report is the most authoritative account and the first to use the word “torture” in a legal context.
If you want to bring this up with your senators, click here for their contact information.
American International Group is giving its executives tens of millions of dollars in new bonuses even though it received a taxpayer bailout of more than $170 billion dollars.
AIG is paying out the executive bonuses to meet a Sunday deadline, but the troubled insurance giant has agreed to administration requests to restrain future payments.
The Treasury Department determined that the government did not have the legal authority to block the current payments by the company. AIG declared earlier this month that it had suffered a loss of $61.7 billion for the fourth quarter of last year, the largest corporate loss in history [bold added].
The revolution should start any time now. Aaaaany time now.
UPDATE:
Apparently, AIG isn’t giving out “tens of millions of dollars” in bonuses to reward its employees for screwing up royally. Because that would be ridiculous. According to the WSJ, they’re giving out hundreds of millions:
American International Group Inc. will pay $450 million in bonuses to employees in its financial products unit. That division was at the heart of AIG’s collapse last fall, which compelled the U.S. government to provide $173.3 billion in aid to keep it running.
For millions of undernourished North Koreans, the notion of eating at a restaurant belongs strictly to the world of fantasy. And so there is only the grimmest humour in the news that, for the country’s ruling elite, Pyongyang’s dining options just got a little more impressive: the country now has its first-ever pizzeria. [. . .]
Those dining at the restaurant are reportedly treated to pizza and pasta made with wheat flour, butter and cheese flown in from Italy. They are also presumably reaping the benefits of a years-long effort by Kim Jong-il to bring the perfect pizza to his famine-plagued totalitarian state.
In the late 1990s, he summoned a team of Italian pizza chefs to Pyongyang to instruct army officers. One of the chefs, Ermanno Furlanis, later recounted how the Italians underwent x-rays, brain scans and urine and blood sampling on arrival, before being sequestered in a marble palace. One of the officers Furlanis was training asked him to specify the precise distance at which olives should be spaced on a pizza, he recalled.
If Obama relies on “law enforcement” instead of kidnapping, torture, assassination, and illegal wiretapping, Americans will all be slaughtered in their beds.
While George Bush ordered people tortured and Dick Cheney operated his own personal “executive assassination” team, Glenn Beck felt all was right with the world. But now that Obama is in charge, he “fears for his country” and experiences multiple emotional meltdowns on national television calling for a return to our values and principles.
It is good to see that there are some people out there, like Will Bunch, trying to trying to add some sanity into our national memory of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Reagan’s legacy is deeply problematic at best, despite his canonization by the right. And one of Reagan’s most ridiculous acts as president was his appointment of noted lunatic James G. Watt as secretary of the interior. (That’s a bit like putting Michael Milken in charge of the S.E.C., or making C. Montgomery Burns Secretary of Labor. Except with more Jesus-ness). And now, Reagan-myth purveyor John McCain is apparently interfering with President Obama’s nomination of David Hayes to a high-level position at the Interior Department, because Hayes had the audacity to question Reagan’s environmental policies. I think Brian Beutler’s comment on the matter sums things up nicely:
…as McCain should recall, Reagan’s own Interior Secretary was James Watt, who’s a weird man in all kinds of ways, but, on the issues, held that federal land should just be handed over to private, polluting interests to do whatever they wanted with, particularly if that involved mining or drilling or any unsustainable practice. He didn’t care about endangered species or the water supply or anything else, not simply because he was cold hearted, but because he thought the rapture was extremely nigh! Watt hinted at those dispensationalist religious views in testimony before Congress, when he said, “That is the delicate balance the Secretary of the Interior must have, to be steward for the natural resources for this generation as well as future generations. I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns, whatever it is we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations.”
I guess we should only be mildly surprised. After all, Reagan was the guy who told us that conservation wasn’t a good idea, because it would mean we’d be too hot in the summer, and too cold in winter. (If there’s a Hall of Fame for Shortsightedness, Reagan could get in on that statement alone).
Here’s the culmination of the John Stewart takedown of the preposterous (and possibly criminal?) gasbag Jim Cramer. I’ve been enjoying this for its comeuppance value, and for pure entertainment. But this little affair also shows why the Daily Show and John Stewart have legitimately become and important part of our media culture – because they do the work. The Daily Show actually asks difficult questions, and digs up evidence. As Stewart often points out, the show is meant to be entertainment first. But I feel better knowing that Stewart is out there, in many cases doing the work and asking the questions that our sad excuse for a mainstream news media won’t. And as an added bonus, Stewart’s show is pretty funny, too.
