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Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 3 months ago

None dare call it treason. Except Hitchens; he dast. Plus, Reid torpedoes Obey

by Weldon Berger | Dec 13 2007 - 10:54am |  The Smirking Chimp

Lots of people are upset that the CIA destroyed video showing the torture of two terrorism suspects, but only one person is upset because he thinks the tapes would have been a great public diplomacy tool. And he's so upset that he's accusing the agency of treason and mutiny.

Hitchens is also incensed by the recent Iran NI

That would be Christopher Hitchens, who writes in Slate that "[a]t a time when Congress and the courts are conducting important hearings on the critical question of extreme interrogation, and at a time when accusations of outright torture are helping to besmirch and discredit the United States all around the world, a senior official of the CIA takes the unilateral decision to destroy the crucial evidence. This deserves to be described as what it is: mutiny and treason." The implication being that people all around the world are perfectly capable of distinguishing between torture and "extreme interrogation", with waterboarding obviously falling into the latter category, and that visual documentation of the difference will redound to our national credit. Ay-yup.

E, which his own intelligence network proves is nought but opinion, and he's still mad at the CIA for dissing Ahmad Chalabi, resisting regime change in Baghdad—all those skeptical banned weapons assessments, donchaknow—and outing Bob Novak. It's a pocket tour de farce.

Meanwhile, you may have missed it, but for about 30 seconds this week a Democrat drew a line in the sand on funding for Iraq. And then another Democrat shot his foot off.

Appropriations maven David Obey, defying the White House, Congressional Republicans and House Majority Leader Steny "Stand Fast, Retreat Faster" Hoyer, announced that he was pulling the plug on a budget deal that would have given Bush no strings money for his vanity war in exchange for increased funding for Democratic budget priorities. Obey said that since Bush was threatening to veto the spending bill despite the Democratic decision to include unconditional money for Iraq, he would reinstate a version that included no money for Afghanistan and Iraq and hewed to the president's spending limit by trimming the president's priorites. "When the White House continues to stick it in our eye, I say to hell with it."

That was Monday. A day later, Senate Majority Leader Harry "Mind On My Money And Money On My Mind" Reid said that Obey's plan to eliminate all earmarks from the legislation was a non-starter—"I have the right ... to determine what money should be spent in Nevada"—and Nancy Pelosi, who had initially supported Obey's plan, displayed the same strength of character that led her to become a war criminal and switched sides.

The result is that Bush will get his money and Democrats will get a few pieces of silver to distribute to the folks back home. Mission Accomplished. Again. Salon's Glenn Greenwald provides a visual representation of the outcome.

 

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All The President's Liars: Where the Hell are The Washington Post and New York Times on McClellangate?!

by Steve Young | Nov 21 2007 - 9:37am |  

article tools: email | print | read more Steve Young

Do the investigative reporters at the Washington Post and New York Times fall under the Writers Guild Contract? Are Bernstein and Woodward too busy in makeup? Can the WGA and Producers get together and give satirical news an exemption?

While the Writers Strike keeps The Daily Show from cleverly pointing out the obvious, The Washington Post and New York Times ignore the obvious altogether.

We've been lied to by this White House.

Who says? Scott McClellan, the guy who was paid to lie for the guys who lied in the first place.

Of course, if he really wanted to bare his soul he would have let Helen Thomas write the foreword of "What Happened: Was I Lying Then Or Am I Lying Now?"

Point is, other than blogs and the Keith Olbermann network - and the Writers Strike continuing to keep Jon Stewart, Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert on the sidelines - we're left with the right to spin an insider story of a White House coverup.

The so-called liberal Mainstream Media? Try to find the McClellan revelation in todays liberal bastions, Washington Post or the New York Times.

Wonder if Howard Kurtz will wonder how his print employer, the one that was Ben Bradlee's once proud publication during Watergate, could have been missed what should be a blockbuster tale of deception of the American people at the very highest level.

The McClellan story may not be the smoking gun that leads to impeachment, but it could unlock the inner-workings of a White House who doesn't trust the American people with the truth and sees the betrayal of a covert CIA spy as acceptable politics. And that's not worth of a mention?

That's not to say that the broadcast's Lords of Loud won't cover McClellan's story.

Bill O'Reilly: It's a non-story. I said so in "Culture Warrior", now out in paperback.

Sean Hannity: Vince Foster, Kathleen Willey, Could have had bin Laden on a silver platter.

Mark Levin: McClellan is a brownshirt of the Clinton crime family.

Sean Hannity: George Soros, Moveon.org, I did not have sex with that woman...

Rush Limbaugh: So, McClellan is a proven liar. Why would we believe anything he says?

Sean Hannity: ACLU, New York Times, Human effect on global warming a sham

Michelle Malkin: Why is hell is Ingraham sitting in for Bill?

And The Washington Post?

(Cricket sound here)

If Ben Bradlee were dead he'd be spinning in his grave.

_______

Could Be The Guy Who Wrote This Column

BLOG: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-young/ VIDEO: www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOQzt0ZPTAs

NEWSPAPER: http://www2.dailynews.com/steveyoung

POLITICAL COLUMN: www.monitor.net/steve

BOOK(S): www.GreatFailure.com /

 

About author Steve Young is an award-winning television writer and failed talk-show host who authored "Great Failures of the Extremely Success" www.greatfailure.com

  -----------------------------------------------------------


 

 

 

Reader's comment:  "What a nice story!  Frank Rich is really blossoming as a political pundit.

June's comment: It is a delicious article.

November 18, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

What ‘That Regan Woman’ Knows

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/opinion/18rich.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

 

NEW Yorkers who remember Rudy Giuliani as the bullying New York mayor, not as the terminally cheerful “America’s Mayor” cooing to babies in New Hampshire, have always banked on one certainty: his presidential candidacy was so preposterous it would implode before he got anywhere near the White House.

Surely, we reassured ourselves, the all-powerful Republican values enforcers were so highly principled that they would excommunicate him because of his liberal social views, three wives and estranged children. Or a firewall would be erected by the firefighters who are enraged by his self-aggrandizing rewrite of 9/11 history. Or Judith Giuliani, with her long-hidden first marriage and Louis Vuitton ’tude, would send red-state voters screaming into the night.

Wrong, wrong and wrong. But how quickly and stupidly we forgot about the other Judith in the Rudy orbit. That would be Judith Regan, who disappeared last December after she was unceremoniously fired from Rupert Murdoch’s publishing house, HarperCollins. Last week Ms. Regan came roaring back into the fray, a silver bullet aimed squarely at the heart of the Giuliani campaign.

Ms. Regan filed a $100 million lawsuit against her former employer, claiming she was unjustly made a scapegoat for the O. J. Simpson “If I Did It” fiasco that (briefly) embarrassed Mr. Murdoch and his News Corporation. But for those of us not caught up in the Simpson circus, what’s most riveting about the suit are two at best tangential sentences in its 70 pages: “In fact, a senior executive in the News Corporation organization told Regan that he believed she had information about Kerik that, if disclosed, would harm Giuliani’s presidential campaign. This executive advised Regan to lie to, and to withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik.”

Kerik, of course, is Bernard Kerik, the former Giuliani chauffeur and police commissioner, as well as the candidate he pushed to be President Bush’s short-lived nominee to run the Department of Homeland Security. Having pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors last year, Mr. Kerik was indicted on 16 other counts by a federal grand jury 10 days ago, just before Ms. Regan let loose with her lawsuit. Whether Ms. Regan’s charge about that unnamed Murdoch “senior executive” is true or not — her lawyers have yet to reveal the evidence — her overall message is plain. She knows a lot about Mr. Kerik, Mr. Giuliani and the Murdoch empire. And she could talk.

Boy, could she! As New Yorkers who have crossed her path or followed her in the tabloids know, Ms. Regan has an epic temper. My first encounter with her came more than a decade ago when she left me a record-breaking (in vitriol and decibel level) voice mail message about a column I’d written on one of her authors. It was a relief to encounter a more mellow Regan at a Midtown restaurant some years later. She cordially introduced me to her dinner companion, Mr. Kerik, whose post-9/11 autobiography, “The Lost Son: A Life in Pursuit of Justice,” was under contract at her HarperCollins imprint, ReganBooks.

What I didn’t know then was that this married author and single editor were in pursuit of not just justice, but sex, too. Their love nest, we’d later learn, was an apartment adjacent to ground zero that had been initially set aside for rescue workers. Mr. Kerik believed his lover had every moral right to be there. As he tenderly explained in his acknowledgments in “The Lost Son” — published before the revelation of their relationship — there was “one hero who is missing” from his book’s tribute to “courage and honor” and “her name is Judith Regan.”

Few know more about Rudy than his perennial boon companion, Mr. Kerik. Perhaps during his romance with Ms. Regan he talked only of the finer points of memoir writing or about his theories of crime prevention or about his ideas for training the police in the Muslim world (an assignment he later received in Iraq and botched). But it is also plausible that this couple discussed everything Mr. Kerik witnessed at Mr. Giuliani’s side before, during and after 9/11. Perhaps he even explained to her why the mayor insisted, disastrously, that his city’s $61 million emergency command center be located in the World Trade Center despite the terrorist attack on the towers in 1993.

Perhaps, too, they talked about the business ventures the mayor established after leaving office. Mr. Kerik worked at Giuliani Partners and used its address as a mail drop for some $75,000 that turns up in the tax-fraud charges in his federal indictment. That money was Mr. Kerik’s pay for an 11-sentence introduction to another Regan-published book about 9/11, “In the Line of Duty.” Though that project’s profits were otherwise donated to the families of dead rescue workers, Mr. Kerik’s royalties were mailed to Giuliani Partners in the name of a corporate entity Mr. Kerik set up in Delaware. He would later claim that he made comparable donations to charity, but the federal indictment charges that $80,000 he took in charitable deductions were bogus.

Amazingly, given that he seeks the highest office in the land, Mr. Giuliani will not reveal the clients of Giuliani Partners. Perhaps he has trouble remembering them all. He testified in court last year that he has no memory of a mayoral briefing in which he was told of Mr. Kerik’s association with a company suspected of ties to organized crime.

Ms. Regan’s knowledge of Mr. Giuliani isn’t limited to whatever she learned from Mr. Kerik. She used to work for another longtime Giuliani pal, Roger Ailes, the media consultant for the first Giuliani campaign in 1989 and the impresario who created Fox News for Mr. Murdoch in 1996. A full-service mayor to his cronies, Mr. Giuliani lobbied hard to get the Fox News Channel on the city’s cable boxes and presided over Mr. Ailes’s wedding. Enter Ms. Regan, who was given her own program on Fox’s early lineup. Mr. Ailes came up with its rather inspired first title, “That Regan Woman.”

Who at the News Corporation supposedly asked Ms. Regan to lie to protect Rudy’s secrets? Her complaint does not say. But thanks to the political journal The Hotline, we do know that as of the summer Mr. Giuliani had received more air time from Fox News than any other G.O.P. candidate, much of it on the high-rated “Hannity & Colmes.” That show’s co-host, Sean Hannity, appeared at a Giuliani campaign fund-raiser this year.

Fox News coverage of Ms. Regan’s lawsuit last week was minimal. After all, Mr. Giuliani dismissed the whole episode as “a gossip column story,” and we know Fox would never stoop so low as to trade in gossip. The coverage was scarcely more intense at The Wall Street Journal, whose print edition included no mention of the suit’s reference to that “senior executive” at the News Corporation. (After bloggers noticed, the article was amended online.) The Journal is not quite yet a Murdoch property, but its editorial board has had its own show on Fox News since 2006.

During the 1990s, the Journal editorial board published so much dirt about the Clintons that it put the paper’s brand on an encyclopedic six-volume anthology titled “A Journal Briefing — Whitewater.” You’d think the controversies surrounding “America’s Mayor” are at least as sexy as the carnal scandals and alleged drug deals The Journal investigated back then. This month a Journal reporter not on its editorial board added the government of Qatar to the small list of known Giuliani Partners clients, among them the manufacturer of OxyContin. We’ll see if such journalism flourishes in the paper’s Murdoch era.

But beyond New York’s dailies and The Village Voice, the national news media, conspicuously the big three television networks, have rarely covered Mr. Giuliani much more aggressively than Mr. Murdoch’s Fox News has. They are more likely to focus on Mr. Giuliani’s checkered family history than the questions raised by his record in government and business. It’s astounding how many are willing to look the other way while recycling those old 9/11 videos.

One exception is The Chicago Tribune, which last month on its front page revisited the story of how, after Mr. Giuliani left office, his mayoral papers were temporarily transferred to a private, tax-exempt foundation run by his supporters and financed with $1.5 million from mostly undisclosed donors. The foundation, which shares the same address as Giuliani Partners, copied and archived the records before sending them back to New York’s municipal archives. Historians told The Tribune there’s no way to verify that the papers were returned to government custody intact. Mayor Bloomberg has since signed a law that will prevent this unprecedented deal from being repeated.

Journalists, like generals, love to refight the last war, so the unavailability of millions of Hillary Clinton’s papers has received all the coverage the Giuliani campaign has been spared. But while the release of those first lady records should indeed be accelerated, it’s hard to imagine many more scandals will turn up after six volumes of “Whitewater,” an impeachment trial and the avalanche of other investigative reportage on the Clintons then and now.

The Giuliani story, by contrast, is relatively virgin territory. And with the filing of a lawsuit by a vengeful eyewitness who was fired from her job, it may just have gained its own reincarnation of Linda Tripp.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 19, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist

Republicans and Race

Over the past few weeks there have been a number of commentaries about Ronald Reagan’s legacy, specifically about whether he exploited the white backlash against the civil rights movement.

The controversy unfortunately obscures the larger point, which should be undeniable: the central role of this backlash in the rise of the modern conservative movement.

The centrality of race — and, in particular, of the switch of Southern whites from overwhelming support of Democrats to overwhelming support of Republicans — is obvious from voting data.

For example, everyone knows that white men have turned away from the Democrats over God, guns, national security and so on. But what everyone knows isn’t true once you exclude the South from the picture. As the political scientist Larry Bartels points out, in the 1952 presidential election 40 percent of non-Southern white men voted Democratic; in 2004, that figure was virtually unchanged, at 39 percent.

More than 40 years have passed since the Voting Rights Act, which Reagan described in 1980 as “humiliating to the South.” Yet Southern white voting behavior remains distinctive. Democrats decisively won the popular vote in last year’s House elections, but Southern whites voted Republican by almost two to one.

The G.O.P.’s own leaders admit that the great Southern white shift was the result of a deliberate political strategy. “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization.” So declared Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, speaking in 2005.

And Ronald Reagan was among the “some” who tried to benefit from racial polarization.

True, he never used explicit racial rhetoric. Neither did Richard Nixon. As Thomas and Mary Edsall put it in their classic 1991 book, “Chain Reaction: The impact of race, rights and taxes on American politics,” “Reagan paralleled Nixon’s success in constructing a politics and a strategy of governing that attacked policies targeted toward blacks and other minorities without reference to race — a conservative politics that had the effect of polarizing the electorate along racial lines.”

Thus, Reagan repeatedly told the bogus story of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen — a gross exaggeration of a minor case of welfare fraud. He never mentioned the woman’s race, but he didn’t have to.

There are many other examples of Reagan’s tacit race-baiting in the historical record. My colleague Bob Herbert described some of these examples in a recent column. Here’s one he didn’t mention: During the 1976 campaign Reagan often talked about how upset workers must be to see an able-bodied man using food stamps at the grocery store. In the South — but not in the North — the food-stamp user became a “strapping young buck” buying T-bone steaks.

Now, about the Philadelphia story: in December 1979 the Republican national committeeman from Mississippi wrote a letter urging that the party’s nominee speak at the Neshoba Country Fair, just outside the town where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. It would, he wrote, help win over “George Wallace inclined voters.”

Sure enough, Reagan appeared, and declared his support for states’ rights — which everyone took to be a coded declaration of support for segregationist sentiments.

Reagan’s defenders protest furiously that he wasn’t personally bigoted. So what? We’re talking about his political strategy. His personal beliefs are irrelevant.

Why does this history matter now? Because it tells why the vision of a permanent conservative majority, so widely accepted a few years ago, is wrong.

The point is that we have become a more diverse and less racist country over time. The “macaca” incident, in which Senator George Allen’s use of a racial insult led to his election defeat, epitomized the way in which America has changed for the better.

And because conservative ascendancy has depended so crucially on the racial backlash — a close look at voting data shows that religion and “values” issues have been far less important — I believe that the declining power of that backlash changes everything.

Can anti-immigrant rhetoric replace old-fashioned racial politics? No, because it mobilizes the same shrinking pool of whites — and alienates the growing number of Latino voters.

Now, maybe I’m wrong about all of this. But we should be able to discuss the role of race in American politics honestly. We shouldn’t avert our gaze because we’re unwilling to tarnish Ronald Reagan’s image.

 

 

---------------------------------------------------------------

Misremembering Vietnam

http://badattitudes.com/MT/archives/2007/11/misremembering.html

 

The following is from Sam Smith at Undernews (via Xymphora).

The journalist Bernard Fall noted that the French, after Dien Bien Phu, had no choice but to leave Southeast Asia. America, with its vast military, financial, and technological resources, was able to stay because it had the capacity to keep making the same mistakes over and over.

 

Our war against “terrorism” has been in many ways a domestic version of our Vietnam strategy. We keep making the same mistakes over and over because, until now, we could afford to.

 

One of these has been to define the problem by its manifestations rather than its causes. This turns a resolvable political problem into a irresolvable technical problem, because while, for example, there are clearly solutions to the Middle East crisis, there are no other solutions to the guerrilla violence that grows from the failure to end it.

 

In other words, if you define the problem as “a struggle against terrorism” you have already admitted defeat because the guerrilla will always have the upper hand against a centralized, technology-dependent society such as ours.

 

There is one way to deal with guerrilla warfare and that is to resolve the problems that allow it to thrive. The trick is to undermine the violence of the most bitter by dealing honestly with the complaints of the most rational.

 

I may complain about diffidence on the part of Democratic leaders. But then you get ledes like this:

House Democrats on Friday pushed through an $80 billion bill to block the spread of a dreaded tax on middle-income people. The White House and Republicans, protesting tax increases in the bill affecting mainly investment fund managers, maintained that it would never become law.

PS: I missed this:

The White House also said language in the bill to terminate an IRS program farming out delinquency cases to private debt collectors would subject it to a veto.

Privatization — and tax farming, no less, which went out with the French Revolution — trumps aid to the middle class.

------------------------------------------------------

We Don't Want More Liberal Representatives, We Want Stronger Ones

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/10862/print

 

 

Created Nov 6 2007 - 3:50pm

There is this misconception in the press and in Washington that the netroots and other progressive activists want their representatives to be more liberal. The myth is that we want to drag the party all the way to the left and take them away from the center. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We don't need elected officials to be any more liberal or progressive; we just need them to be stronger. Is Senator Schumer's problem that he isn't liberal enough? I don't think so. His problem is that he caves in to the Bush administration on anything that might vaguely be in the "national security" realm because he's scared and miserably weak.

I know that the Mukasey confirmation is a little different because Schumer had parochial interests in mind as well. Well, how heroic! So, he's not only afraid of Bush on national security but also interested in putting his local political machine over his voters' interest. Very heart-warming.

But as we all know, it's not just the Mukasey appointment. It's not just Schumer. It's warrantless wiretapping, it's torture, it's Iraq, it's Iran, it's signing statements, it's the US attorneys firings, it's the Patriot Act, it's presidential secrecy, it's the Geneva Conventions, etc., etc. The list of Democratic cave-ins is so long that it's painful to think about. You could open up a buckle store with all these Democratic buckles.

Just this week, they caved in on Mukasey [1] and Iraq funding [2]. How many times are we going to hear these annoying bloviators talk about how terrible the war is going and then quietly fund the debacle anyway? They must think we're stupid. I like how Schumer and Feinstein coordinated their Friday press releases [3] on Mukasey to take pressure off each other. And they released it on a Friday night. Did you think we wouldn't notice?

It's not that the Senators don't agree with us on the Iraq War, it's that they don't vote that way! I don't need them to be more liberal - I don't even know what the "more liberal" position on Iraq is. I'm not even sure what the so-called liberal position on Iraq is. I know that we should leave Iraq because George W. Bush is never going to figure out the right strategy there and the central government of Iraq is a fraud. Is that a liberal position?

If I thought the central Iraqi government was working, would that make me a conservative? I now think our negotiated deal with the Sunni tribal chiefs is a step in the right direction. Since I think this piece of the Iraq puzzle is working better, have I become more conservative overnight? Or is it possible that these labels are silly?

On many domestic and trade issues, Chuck Schumer is way to the left of me. I don't need him to be more liberal. I need him to have a spine. I need him to stand up for what he pretends to stand up for.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll [4] confirms that a majority of the country is dissatisfied with the Democratic Congress not because they won't compromise with Bush, but because they will.

A majority of independents say that Democrats aren't fighting Bush enough (53% of independents say this, which closely matches 55% of all Americans who agree). Yet, our press tells us that we need Democrats who compromise more. God, do they have any idea how ridiculous that sounds?

The press is obsessed with being centrists. [5] I actually think this is a generally positive urge normally. But it needs to be combined with good judgment. You need to consider the circumstances on a case by case basis to see where the centrist position is. The mid-point between Democrats and Republicans is not always the center of the country.

The mid-point between this Congress and President Bush is way, way, way to the right of the mid-point between 1990 Democratic Congress and George H.W. Bush. So, let me ask these wise centrists of the press - which is the real center of the country?

Some can claim that the country has become a lot more conservative. There is only one problem with that thesis. It isn't true. The polls don't back it up [6]at all. Democrats now enjoy huge leads in nearly every issue in the country. And I don't know if people noticed this, but the Democrats crushed the Republicans in 2006. They picked up 36 Republican seats and lost none. [7] That's an amazing fact.

Why do you think this is? Has the country all of sudden gotten a lot more liberal between 2004 and 2006? Of course not. It is a realignment. It's the American people letting Washington know - you have slipped too far to the right, come back to the center!

The problem isn't that the country is too conservative (or too liberal, depending on the election you look at), the problem is Washington takes so long to adjust. The press and the politicians are still reacting as if we're in 2003 and Bush still has any sway on national security matters. The guy is at 24% [8]. He doesn't have any sway over anything.

Even more importantly, the press is assuming the center of the country is between these Democrats and these Republicans when that isn't anywhere near true. These Republicans are grossly unpopular and these Democrats couldn't stand up to them if you put a wall behind them.

We're all so tired of the buckles. What we're even more tired of is the press telling us that we just want the Democrats to be more liberal because we are left-wing extremists. We're standing right in the middle of the country politically. The difference between us and the Democratic politicians isn't that they are standing to the right of us; it's that they aren't standing at all.

 
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http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=6A01EBD304069F6BA0FE9A659D8D15CA?diaryId=2250

 

 

USA v. Pakistan---Dictatorship? Democracy? You Can't Tell Without A Program!

by: Paul Rosenberg

Wed Nov 07, 2007 at 09:00:00 AM EST

Signs To Look Out For USA Pakistan
Unitary Executive Check! Check!
Stolen Elections Check! Check!
Military Loyal To President, Not Constitution Check! Check!
VP Shoots People In Face Check! Not so much
Criminalization of Political Opposition Check! Check!
Constitution Suspended Check! Check!
People Noticed Constitution Suspended Check! Check!
Media Noticed Constitution Suspended Not so much Check!
Judiciary Stands Up for Rule Of Law No, but they do stretch their arms from time to time Had to fire the whole lot of them!
Lawyers revolt over lawlessness of government You're kidding, right? Check!
President as popular as syphilis Check! Check!
Paul Rosenberg :: USA v. Pakistan---Dictatorship? Democracy? You Can't Tell Without A Program!

 

--------------------------------------------------------- 

 

From a reader:

Altho there seems to be some controversy over who said what and when, the below seems right to me:

The average life of a Republic during the course of history is about 200 years.

1. bondage to spiritual faith;

2. spiritual faith to great courage;

3. courage to liberty;

4. liberty to abundance;

5. abundance to complacency;

6. complacency to apathy;

7. apathy to dependence;

8. dependence back into bondage (today's dictator.)

ARE WE THERE?

 

---------------------------------------------------------------

Thursday, November 01, 2007  

Torture Is Not Football By Other, Or Any, Means

 

 

by tristero

Y'know what objecting to torture is, don't you? Monday morning quarterbacking, that's all:

“There is a culture of concern about where Monday-morning quarterbacking could lead to,” Mr. Chesney said. If Mr. Mukasey declared waterboarding illegal, “it would make it politically more possible to go after interrogators in the future,” he said. “Whether it would change the legal equities is far less clear.”

Just to make this clear: When Dershowitz and other moral relativists were making the case for putting bamboo splints under the fingernails of people who are as capable of feeling excrutiating pain as themselves, I, along with the the entire civilized world, denounced torture under all circumstances. That was long before Bush set up the organized and extensive American torture network that is still working overtime to destroy this country. There was no second-guessing on our part. We saw torture for what it was long before Bush strapped the first prisoner down to be waterboarded.

Bush claims that if we don't give him the right to make people scream out in sheer agony at what American officials physically inflict on them, he will not be able to keep you and me safe. George W. Bush is completely full of shit. I am prepared to accept whatever risk that goes along with living in a country that doesn't ever torture its enemies. Because I know that there is no such risk, that in fact torturing people places a country at greater risk, morally and existentially, than not. Whatever the reasons he has for torturing people, he is not doing it for the good of ordinary Americans and I reject his insinuation that either my fellow Americans or myself are somehow the reason he feels he must indulge in such perversions.

A word about Bush-hating seems appropriate right about now. It is a subject which deeply concerns so many thoughtful members of the cowardly, fainting classes, ie, Republicans and the mainstream press. When people like me speak out in disgust at what this sick man is doing, it is cause for moral outrage - at the person speaking out! As if hating Bush was in any way morally comparable to the deliberate inflicting of mind-damaging pain on another human being! To those folks, we need to spell it out:

What Bush and his henchmen have done, and what they are presently doing is, in fact, truly hateful, if that word has any meaning at all. But not only are Bush's actions capable of being hated by all reasonable people (and deserve to be). They are also acts which themselves are full of hate and sadism. There's another thing I hate:

Bush will go down in history as the torture president. I hate that this country ever had a president who made the torture of human beings official government policy.

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------

 

Withholding money is one way to make sure a project doesn’t move forward.

When the White House omitted funding for the Census Bureau in a stopgap budget covering October 1 though November 16, leading the bureau to cancel and postpone crucial preparations for the 2010 count, the House committee that oversees the census called a hearing to investigate.

The committee had every reason to be alarmed. As the editorial page has argued , the Bush Administration has tried time and again to thwart the upcoming census.

Of course, as is so often the case with this administration, there is a political angle here. Republicans have a tactical opposition to a well-run census. A vigilant count that finds the hardest people to find — the poor, the homeless, the elderly — is more likely to boost the political strength of Democratic regions, and of Democrats. A poorly done census that disproportionately counts the well-off helps Republicans.

The hearing turned into yet another example of the corrosive secrecy that pervades the administration’s dealings with Congress.

At that hearing, the director of the census, C. Louis Kincannon, refused to answer when Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) asked what seemed like an obvious question: Had Mr. Kincannon asked the White House to budget the money his agency needed?

What follows is an excerpt.

MR. KINCANNON: You know, discussions in the ongoing process of the budget

are internal to the administration.

REP. MALONEY: Pardon me, you did ask for it, yes or no?

MR. KINCANNON: I didn’t answer that question. I’m not going to answer that question. That’s not the practice that is followed in the executive branch of government. We don’t talk about our individual budget discussions back and forth between the different levels of review in the administration.

The final decisions are made based on a large number of factors that are considered. And that’s what goes up. I’ve worked 35 years in the executive branch, six of those years at OMB, [the Office of Management and Budget at the White House] and I understand that that is a logical practice and not just somebody’s directive.

REP. MALONEY: Well, this is a congressional hearing, and we’re having a problem because you didn’t get your funding. And we want to find out why because it’s going to cost us money; it’s going to cost efficiency; it may delay the census on which we base our members of Congress and also the funding level for localities. It’s very, very important. So you’re telling me that you can’t tell me whether or not you asked for the appropriate budget for your department? Is that what you’re saying? That’s a secret discussion?

At that point, Mr. Kincannon tried to blame Congress for the lack of money, because it has not yet passed appropriations bills for the 2008 budget year. But that’s irrelevant. At issue were discussions with the White House that resulted in the stopgap budget, not the full-year appropriation. Ms. Maloney asked again, but Mr. Kincannon steadfastly refused to answer.

After the hearing, Ms. Maloney asked the Congressional Research Service to look into Mr. Kincannon’s claim of confidentiality. The C.R.S. found no legal or judicial support for the notion that keeping administration discussions private trumps the oversight duties of Congress. The researchers also found little support for the notion that special considerations apply in the budgetary context.

Mr. Kincannon, who has resigned from the Census Bureau and plans to leave this month, has been a dedicated and competent director. There is little doubt he was doing the administration’s bidding by not revealing details of its handling of the census budget.

One thing is clear, despite the stonewalling: in lowballing the census the administration has been at best incompetent and at worst, deliberately destructive. To lessen the damage to the census and to its own tarnished image, the White House should request full funding for the census in the budget that begins in mid-November.

 

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People for the American Way - scary quotes:

 

Pat Robertson (click on the mask to download a printable PDF)

Scary Quotes:

"The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

 

"[Homosexuals] want to come into churches and disrupt church services and throw blood all around and try to give people AIDS and spit in the face of ministers."

 

"The Antichrist is probably a Jew alive in Israel today."

Suggested Costume Accessories:

DARWIN LIED lapel pin; "Age-defying energy shake" (that will allow you, just like Robertson, to leg press 2,000 pounds!)

 

 

Ann Coulter (click on the mask to download a printable PDF)

Scary Quotes:

"It would be a much better country if women did not vote. That is simply a fact."

 

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building."

 

"We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors."

 

Suggested Costume Accessories:

Guide to homophobic slurs; guide to anti-Muslim slurs; guide to anti-Semitic slurs; etc.

 

 

James C. Dobson (click on the mask to download a printable PDF)

Scary Quotes:

"Homosexuals are not monogamous. They want to destroy the institution of marriage. It will destroy marriage. It will destroy the Earth."

 

"We ain't dead yet." (Addressing the 2007 Values Voter Summit, refuting reports on the declining status of the Religious Right)

Suggested Costume Accessories:

Strong hand, ready for child discipline; outsized sense of righteous indignation; love letters from Republican presidential candidates.

 

 

Rush Limbaugh (click on the mask to download a printable PDF)

Scary Quotes:

"If this Virginia Tech shooter had an ideology, what do you think it was? This guy had to be a liberal … So it's a liberal that committed this act. ... I do believe that it was liberalism that got a hold of this guy and made him hate things, professors and this sort of thing."

 

"Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?"

 

Suggested Costume Accessories:

Utter lack of shame; collection of phony tin soldiers; Michael J. Fox punching bag.

 

 

Bill O'Reilly (click on the mask to download a printable PDF)

Scary Quotes:

"Secular progressives ... don't want Christmas ... they don't want any message of spirituality or Judeo-Christian tradition because that stands in the way of gay marriage, legalized drugs, euthanasia, all of the greatest hits on the secular progressive play card."

 

"If Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead."

 

Suggested Costume Accessories:

Air horn to silence unruly guests; multiple (pre-signed!) copies of The O’Reilly Factor for Kids for anyone who will take them off your hands.

 

As a policy matter, I don’t understand why Obama would choose to make a big deal of the small Social Security funding shortfall — which may not even exist.

As a political matter, I don’t understand why he would essentially try to undermine the first big victory progressives won against the Bush administration and the rightward tilt of the Beltway consensus.

This isn’t 1992. The DLC isn’t the Democratic party’s leading edge. The center isn’t somewhere between Joe Lieberman and Jon McCain. I can’t understand how Obama can be this out of touch.

 
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October 25, 2007

Another $200 Billion

President Bush waited until he had vetoed a relatively inexpensive children’s health insurance bill before asking for tens of billions of dollars more for his misadventure in Iraq. The cynicism of that maneuver is only slightly less shameful than the president’s distorted priorities. Despite a pretense of fiscal prudence, Mr. Bush keeps throwing money at his war, regardless of the cost in blood, treasure or children’s health care.

Mr. Bush is threatening to veto most of the 12 domestic spending bills now before Congress because Democrats want to provide $22 billion more than the $933 billion he has requested. His argument? Something about the president’s responsibility to rein in lawmakers’ “temptation to overspend.”

 

This from a leader who turns federal surpluses into deficits, believes that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars can be financed on a separate set of books with borrowed money, and keeps having to go back to Congress for “emergency funding” because he cannot or will not tell the truth about what it is costing to fight these wars.

Mr. Bush’s latest emergency request is for $46 billion. That would bring the 2008 price tag for Iraq and Afghanistan to $196.4 billion. Starting at Sept. 11, 2001, war-fighting expenses total a staggering $800 billion or more. The nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments says that by the end of the year spending on Iraq will probably surpass that on the Vietnam War.

Mr. Bush has said most of the new money would go for “day-to-day” military operations and “basic needs” like bullets, body armor and mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, which are designed to withstand bomb attacks, a rising threat to American forces in Iraq. The troops need safer vehicles and better armor, but it is beyond our ken why Mr. Bush could not cover this in his original budget submission, unless he wanted to confuse the public and limit Congressional oversight.

And there is no end in sight. Mr. Bush clearly plans to keep fighting this pointless war until his last day in office. The new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, told The Times that he will press Congress to sustain current military spending levels even after the Iraq war ends so the Pentagon can repair and replace worn-out weapons and rebuild ground forces.

The Pentagon will certainly need help recovering, but the country cannot keep signing blank checks. The next president, and Congress, will finally have to impose some discipline, starting with an honest review of what is needed to keep America safe, not just enrich military contractors and their lobbyists.

Democrats have failed repeatedly to end the Iraq war or to substantially change its course. Now they face another test. Mr. Bush will try to ram his spending request through Congress before Christmas, using the impending holiday to create a false sense of urgency. They must resist that, and try again to use their power of the purse to force the president to begin serious planning for a swift and orderly exit from Iraq. They cannot have it both ways — opposing the war and enabling Mr. Bush to keep it going full speed and full cost ahead.

If the Republicans block that, then the Democrats must at least insist on the fiscal prudence that Mr. Bush and his party claim to believe in so fervently. Representative David Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, is already calling for a war tax. That, at least, would be a more honest and responsible way to ensure that all Americans share the financial burden of this war.

 

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October 25, 2007

Your World in Charts: War on Terror Edition                 http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/10/your-world-in-c.html

 

Via Mark Thoma comes this CBO report totaling "the funding provided through fiscal year 2007 for military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and other activities associated with the war on terrorism, as well as for related costs incurred by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for medical care, disability compensation, and survivors’ benefits." The trend is telling: 

Gwotcosts

 

 

The numbers are striking. 2001 and 2002 are straight efforts against terrorists, against the Taliban, in pursuit of those who harmed us on 9/11. 2003 and forward are those costs, plus Iraq. And Iraq's costs are huge. Imagine a strategy aimed at global jihadism which used the same resources, the same billions, to track terrorist networks, to improve intelligence gathering, to deploy soft power and humanitarian efforts aimed at improving our image, to increase financial incentives for Middle East powers to play a constructive role in the Israel/Palestine peace process, etc, etc, etc.

Instead, that money, those hundreds of billions, have funded a failed war, subsidized the deaths of thousands, destroyed our image in the Muslim world, harmed our global moral authority, recruited terrorists and trained them in urban operations, weakened our military and exposed the limits of our power. That is what we have spent it on. That is what we have bought.

October 25, 2007 in Charts | Permalink

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James Carroll is the son of a high ranking Pentagon official, former priest, and columnist for the Boston Globe. His background gives him a thoughtful perspective of the world. 

Forgotten Faces of War

by James Carroll

One news story from Afghanistan last week told of two tragedies. In Paktika Province a young man, whose chest was wrapped with an explosive vest, was en route to the place where he would detonate himself. But then, he saw people at prayer in a mosque, and he changed his mind. He went to the police. He began removing his explosive vest, but it went off. He alone was killed.

In Uruzgan Province, a young man, recently home from Pakistan where he had attended a religious school, announced a similar intention to his family. He was going to kill the enemy by killing himself. The article said that he handed over $3,600, presumably a reward for what he was about to do. In front of his mother, brother, and two sisters, he displayed his explosive vest. The young man?s mother was horrified, and she immediately tried to remove the vest from his body. The bomb detonated. The young man, his mother, and his three siblings were killed instantly.

Reports from Afghanistan and Iraq have been numbingly discouraging, in part because, in the United States, they come as a steady stream of abstraction. We see the faces of American casualties on the evening news, and the fate of wounded GIs draws sympathy, but otherwise the human cost of the war is kept vague.

We know to the single digit how many coalition fighters have died, but estimates of Iraqi deaths span a range from tens to hundreds of thousands. A single death - a tragedy; a million - a mere statistic. Meanwhile, as the suicide bombers treat their bodies as weapons, so do we, as if those faceless killers are indeed the automatons their masters want them to be. Yet this tale of two bombers suggests that every such deed, no matter how prompted by indoctrination or despair, must involve human responses.

During World War I, when the British Parliament was enacting a conscription law, so that draftees could replace the depleted ranks in the trenches, a politician declared, ?The necessary supply of heroes must be maintained at all cost.?

A seemingly endless supply of suicide bombers is what makes the American war the horror that it is. Villains to one side, heroes to the other - but who are those bombers? Who are their mothers, brothers, and sisters? The two incidents from Afghanistan offer rare glimpses into the human depth of this otherwise inhuman act. Ambivalence and fear surely accompany each bomber on the way to destruction; anguish and dread must fill the hearts of their family members, if they know ahead of time. After the fact, grief must anchor every feeling.

I think of that mother. What was the meaning of her life if not the well-being of her children? What could be worse than the death of one?s children by one?s child? As the mother saw the suicide vest on her son, and as she then tried to wrestle it off, how could she not have been screaming inside, ?Who did this to my child??

I think of the siblings, witnessing the horror unfolding before them. How helpless they must have felt, with their last glance fixed on a violation of all they had been taught to love and value. I think of that first bomber, who, en route to killing, accidentally caught a glimpse of worship, which is nothing but the wish to affirm life, which is another name for God. I think of the bomb masters, who recruited those boys, manipulated them, tricked them into imagining that death could be an affirmation. And I think of those who created the situation within which all of this unfolds.

What is that situation but an explosive vest? It does no disrespect to these dead people to recognize this image as a metaphor of what we Americans have created. We are the bomb masters who have wrapped the body of Iraq in wires and plastic explosives. How can we remove the vest without blowing it up?

Iraqi civil war, conflict with Iran, Turkish-Kurdish violence, chaos throughout the Middle East - and now President Bush tells us that, if we don?t defuse the regional body vest carefully, World War III will start. There it is. Bush himself acknowledging at last what, under his leadership, the United States has done. We have put an explosive vest on Earth itself.

And now our job is to get it off. The revelation here is that, in the new age, every bomber is a suicide bomber.

James Carroll?s column appears regularly in the Globe.

 


 

 

---------------------------------------------------------------------ader:

I think that Nancy Pelosi has made one too many missteps. This is the first time that I have witnessed a Democratic Congressman with any sign of piss and vinegar. Congressman Stark was right and he was just a bit too cautious for me. When I heard that Pelosi had made these comments I was in the middle of traffic and became so agitated that I almost hit a band new Dodge Charger whose driver had tried to cut into my lane. I tried to call Nancy Pelosi’s office and her voice mail was full. Fortunately for me because I was going to be rude. Here is her number (800) 614-2803, go ahead and blow it up! Let her know that you are thinking what Rep. Stark said and that she was off base to ask for any apologies or even to publicly chastise him.

 http://www.wtopnews.com/?nid=116&sid=1272308

 

 

 

------------------------------------------------------------------ 
Stuart

 

Priests Protesting Torture Jailed
 
By Bill Quigley
 
Louis Vitale, 75, a Franciscan priest, and Steve Kelly, 58, a Jesuit priest, were each sentenced to five months in federal prison for attempting to deliver a letter opposing the teaching of torture at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. Both priests were taken directly into jail from the courtroom after sentencing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 From a reader:

The editorial board of the NYT has just announced the formation of a blog!  I think it'll be a welcome addition.  Their URL is:

 

http://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/

 

Here's a little tidbit I just pulled off it:

 

 

“If you don’t have countervailing institutions, then the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development.”

– Condoleezza Rice, quoted in today’s Times, expressing concern about the state of the judiciary, legislature and news media. In Russia.

 

Irony is dead.

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