Somewhere Over The Rainbow

I don't want to get Pollyannish here or maudlin. It's just a pretty song by the cast from Glee against the backdrop of the catastrophe in the Gulf. Any song with those images would be moving. It's a pleasant thought on the last weekend of spring to imagine a world where public policy debates aren't some dreadful political football game all about scoring points at someone else's expense. Instead, the implementation of thoughtful and reasonable ideas based on the best empirical evidence available that benefits the greater good and is not the product of superstition and age old prejudices. That people care about their fellow man and would never make fun of a hungry child or resort to torturing one's enemies. That such behaviour would be deemed unthinkable and the perpetrators of such cowardly acts could never show their faces in public again - that's if they could first escape prosecution.

Pity. The 21st Century had such promise.

Torture

Hello, and sorry I've been unable to look at the intertubes. The surfeit of bad news by the end of a week takes a strange toll on my psyche. Lots to post but don't really know if I'll get to it all. Wanted to start with the subject that began all this for me, torture. Back in 2005 I could all kinds of evidence that torture was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan - but none of it surfaced in the MSM in any  significant way. If you read up on torture you`ll discover that from a practical standpoint it doesn`t really work. From a moral standpoint it`s not only indefensible, it`s self defeating. It creates more enemies than it eliminates.

Last week GWB jr. glibly said that he ordered Khalid Sheik Mohamed water-boarded (183 times) and he`d do it again if it saved lives. Well, it didn`t and it constitutes a war crime. The reaction south of the border was one big collective shrug. Have a listen as Keith Olbermann interviews US Air Force interrogator Mathew Alexander and he explains how Abbu Ghraib recruited terrorists.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

GWB jr. once claimed Jesus Christ was his favorite philosopher - I would like to ask him who would Jesus water-board, and how many times would he repeat this "enhanced interrogation" technique?

Thursday Blogging Roundup

 

Starting to feel like there's nothing going on in the world except that disaster in the Gulf sometimes, but the crimes are so egregious and the people behind them so shameless.

Tony - I want my life back - Hayward and BP have a new advertising campaign going to try and salvage his/their reputation, because that's what is really important here! That's going tobe tough when you get caught trying to hide evidence of dead marine life in the hopes of the ocean washing them away. Quote: There is a lot of coverup for BP. They specifically informed us that they don’t want these pictures of the dead animals. They know the ocean will wipe away most of the evidence. It’s important to me that people know the truth about what’s going on here,” the contractor said.

Getting clean-up crews to sign waivers prohibiting them from speaking to the media looks suspicious too. Denying credible scientific reports about the massive oil plumes that are underneath the surface of the Gulf waters seems pretty muddleheaded too - especially when there's video evidence of their existence. Oh, the latest attempt at mitigating the spill has suffered a setback, and it turns out BP was unprepared for such a spill even though they had declared that they were ready for one ten times the size.

A reminder, 21 years later Alaska's coast still has not fully recovered from the Exxon Valdez spill. This of course doesn't stop Republicans who are in the pockets of big oil from making ridiculous statements understating the damage being caused to wildlife and delicate eco-systems.

George Bush still thinks torture is awesome: "It's what Jesus would do!"

Another fake Obama scandal gets debunked. Apparently all these ad hominem attacks are having an effect on Obama's disposition - for the better! They (the Republicans) gave us tax cuts that weren’t paid for to millionaires who didn’t need them. They gutted regulations and put industry insiders in charge of industry oversight. They shortchanged investments in clean energy and education, in research and technology. And despite all their current moralizing about the need to curb spending, this is the same crowd who took the record $237 billion surplus that President Clinton left them and turned it into a record $1.3 trillion deficit.

Robert Scheer risks being called a self-hating Jew to call the Israeli attack on the Gaza blockade-busting flotilla an act of international terrorism. There can be no valid claims of self-defense on the part of Israeli commandos who attacked a ship of protesters in international waters, killing nine civilians and kidnapping more than 600 others -- including 15 international reporters who were prevented from filing their stories by a nation that claims to be the beacon of democracy in the Mideast. And Israel is not making it easy for anyone to defend their actions, rejecting any international investigation into what happened.

Shooting Evil People in a Barrel!

Hello there to anyone who stumbles onto our site as we get it ready to launch. I'm making my 1st posts easy by shooting at the ridiculously cartoonish and evil people that made the last 8 years so disturbing. This is John Yoo. He wrote some of the memos used in the justification for bush/cheney to use torture. He is an extra-ordinairy asshole!

Glennzilla:

The fact that John Yoo is a Professor of Law at Berkeley and is treated as a
respectable, serious expert by our media institutions, reflects the complete
destruction over the last eight years of whatever moral authority the United
States possessed. Comporting with long-held stereotypes of two-bit tyrannies,
we’re now a country that literally exempts our highest political officials from
the rule of law, and have decided that there should be no consequences when they
commit serious felonies. John Yoo’s Memorandum, as intended, directly led to —
caused — a whole series of war crimes at both Guantanamo and in Iraq. The reason
such a relatively low-level DOJ official was able to issue such influential and
extraordinary opinions was because he was working directly with, and at the
behest of, the two most important legal officials in the administration: George
Bush’s White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and Dick Cheney’s counsel (and
current Chief of Staff) David Addington. Together, they deliberately created and
authorized a regime of torture and other brutal interrogation methods that are,
by all measures, very serious war crimes. If writing memoranda authorizing
torture — actions which then directly lead to the systematic commission of
torture — doesn’t make one a war criminal in the U.S., what does?

Good question!

Here are some questions and thoughts on the matter from Naomi Wolf. This bit is telling:

...of the recently departed bush administration: asserts Bush's right
to do whatever he wants to innocent US citizens in this kind of custody, and
rejects the notion that Congress would have any role in how US citizens are held
or treated -- say, by the hypothetically deployed military - on US soil. It
seems also to claim the right to hold innocent US citizens in domestic military
custody while Bush has the right to do anything he wants to them. Anything he
wants. Remember this is an administration in which Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld and
Cheney have now been proven by Jameel Jaffer's revelations in Administration of Torture to have known about
and okay'd not just waterboarding as a policy but ok'd the discretion for
interrogators to use tactics such as electrodes attached to genitals, sexual
assault, threats against family members, suffocation, the beating of prisoners'
legs to "pulp," and in some cases the covering up of their murders. This memo
gives Bush the authority to do those things if he wants to innocent US
citizens.

Back soon with more "Kicking evil people in the nads... because this is the intertubes and we can!