;)
The Commentariat -- Dec. 12, 2014
New York Times Editors: "When the long-lost grail of bipartisan compromise finally re-emerged on Capitol Hill this week, the spending bill for 2015 turned out to be weighted with some of the most devious and damaging provisions imaginable for good government. Written in secrecy, presented as the take-it-or-leave-it alternative to a government shutdown, the bill, which narrowly passed the House Thursday night, includes two regressive 'riders' aimed at warming the big-money hearts of donors who leave Congress increasingly vulnerable to special-interest corruption." ...
... Rebecca Shabad, et al., of the Hill report on some of the arm-twisting that got the bill passed: "The bill's passage, as a result, was a remarkable victory for both Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and President Obama, who were able to cobble together the votes for passage." CW: So Boehner & Obama were "victorious" over the citizenry. Congratulations, fellas. And you wonder why the public holds these guys in low regard. ...
... Greg Sargent is fairly sanguine about the deal. ...
... Charles Pierce, not so much. ...
... Thursday @ 9:05 pm ET: MSNBC is reporting the House will vote "shorty" on the appropriations bill to fund the government. ...
... Update: @ 9:50 pm ET, the spending bill passed the House 219-206, with 57 Democrats voting for it. ...
... Ed Kilgore: "Hang tight for another Orange Man crisis." ...
... Ed O'Keefe of the Washington Post: "Just hours before a possible government shutdown, House leaders were struggling to shore up support for a sweeping bill to fund most of the federal government, change campaign finance laws and make it harder for the District of Columbia to legalize marijuana. The White House said President Obama supports the bill and would sign it, but also criticized lawmakers for using the 1,603-page bill to tweak financial regulations and campaign donation limits.... In a notable public break with the White House, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) used a floor speech to blast Obama and Republicans for backing the bill." ...
... Update. New Lede: "A sweeping bill to fund most of the federal government for the next year, change campaign finance laws and make it harder for the District of Columbia to legalize marijuana passed the House on Thursday even as Congress plans to give itself more time to avert a government shutdown and complete unfinished business."
... Emma Dumain & Matt Fuller of Roll Call: "Unsure whether they have the votes to pass a trillion-dollar federal spending package, House GOP leaders on Thursday afternoon delayed a final vote on the 'cromnibus.' They did so with mere hours to go until the government is set to run out of funding, and just before the House was scheduled to vote." ...
... Mike Lillis of the Hill: "With just hours to go before a scheduled government shutdown, the Democrats launched a lobbying blitz to counter calls made by Obama and other White House officials urging passage of the bill. Leading the charge was Rep. Maxine Waters (Calif.), the senior Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, who is up in arms over the face that Obama has agreed to accept a GOP rider to undo parts of the 2010 Wall Street reform law as part of the package. 'We don't like lobbying that is being done by the president or anybody else that would allow us to support a bill that ... would give a big gift to Wall Street and the bankers who caused this country to almost go into a depression,' she said. 'So I'm opposed to it and we're going to fight it.'" ...
... Peter Schroeder & Kevin Cirilli of the Hill: "Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday sought to rally opposition to the $1.1 trillion government funding bill, spearheading a revolt on the left that has put her influence in the Democratic Party to the test. The Massachusetts liberal pleaded for House Democrats to withhold support for a government funding package due to a provision she said would change the Dodd-Frank financial reform law to let 'Wall Street gamble with taxpayer money.'"
Mark Mazzetti & Matt Apuzzo of the New York Times: "John O. Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, defended the agency's use of waterboarding and other brutal interrogation tactics on Thursday, sidestepping questions about whether agency operatives tortured anyone. Mr. Brennan, responding to an excoriating Senate report detailing years of brutal interrogation tactics in secret C.I.A. prisons, criticized only those officers who he said went 'outside the bounds' of the guidelines established by the Justice Department. Those guidelines allowed for waterboarding, a week of sleep deprivation, shackling prisoners in painful positions, dousing them with water, and locking them in coffin-like boxes." CW: So the Democrats' very own Dick Cheney. ...
... Rosa Brooks of Foreign Policy: "Writing in the Wall Street Journal, former CIA Directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden and three former CIA deputy directors insist that all that waterboarding and rectal feeding wasn't pointless: 'It led to the capture of senior al Qaeda operatives ... [and] the disruption of terrorist attacks ... [and] added enormously to what we knew about al Qaeda as an organization.' Besides, they say, the SSCI report leaves out the all-important 'context' -- which is that everything the ACLU insists on calling 'torture' happened way back when things were really scary.... [But] in real life you don't get actual ticking bomb scenarios, with their certainty, simplicity, and urgency. In real life, you get ambiguity and uncertainty.... The insistence that 'torture works' just leads to more slippery slopes.... Once we start justifying immoral actions based on their utilitarian outcomes, there's no principled place to stop." ...
... Kimberly Dozier of the Daily Beast: "A top CIA official in charge of the agency's interrogation program claimed he was unaware of some of the most gruesome techniques revealed by the Senate's torture report. Working from CIA documents, the report said detainees were made to stand on broken limbs, or forced to take in food or water rectally. But Jose Rodriguez, head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center at the time, said the newly revealed abuses caught him off-guard, too.... Rodriguez's narrative of those early years of the war on terror appears to be contradicted in part by the Senate report." ...
... Putting Torture "in Context," Ctd. Matt Spetalnick & Bill Trott of Reuters: "One of the two psychologists who devised the CIA's harsh Bush-era interrogation methods said on Wednesday that a scathing U.S. Senate report on the torture of foreign terrorism suspects 'took things out of context' and made false accusations. 'It's a bunch of hooey,' James Mitchell told Reuters from his home in Florida when asked for his response to the Senate Intelligence Committee's findings released on Tuesday. 'Some of the things are just plain not true.'" CW: It sure looks like the torture proponents are all working off the same talking points memo. ...
Digby has an excellent post in Salon on another secret torture report, the "Panetta Review," a taste of which Sen. Mark Udall revealed in his Senate speech (embedded in yesterday's Commentariat). According to Udall, here's the smoking gun: "The Panetta Review found that the CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Congress, the president, and the public on the efficacy of its coercive techniques." ...
... Driftglass: "If CIA and top White House goons and National Security officials really did conspire to create and execute torture policy while keeping the Commander-in-Chief in the dark for years, then what happened can only be described as the first coup d'etat in American history." ...
... ** Frank Rich: "Whatever credit [President Obama] deserves for shutting down our government's practice of torture is mitigated by his refusal to hold anyone accountable for the crimes committed in our country's name." Read the whole commentary.
... Tim Egan contrasts reactions from Dick Cheney & John McCain to release of the Senate torture report. "As McCain walked off the [Senate] floor, with the cautious gait of a man physically hobbled by his service nearly a half-century ago, Senator [Dianne] Feinstein kissed him on the cheek. It was a way of saying thanks to a war hero whose words, if this country believes what it preaches, will outlast the scowling remarks of a chicken hawk. ...
... Duped! Adam Serwer in BuzzFeed: "Most damningly -- and politically conveniently -- the report somehow manages to combine harrowing details of torture while exonerating nearly every top official whose job it was to prevent it from happening, and place the blame on a powerful political entity that is the most likely to emerge unscathed: the CIA itself."
Jeremy Peters of the New York Times: "The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted Thursday to authorize the military campaign against the Islamic State, a party-line decision that raises difficult questions for Republicans and intensifies a debate over war powers that has split President Obama from many in his own party. The 10-to-8 vote put on display an unusual alliance between some Democrats and some Republicans as well as contemplations about morality, obligation, constitutional prerogatives and the proper balance of power between branches of government."
Rachel Bade of Politico: Republicans are planning multiple attacks on the IRS, gutting appropriations, forbidding it to do its part in administering the ACA, disallowing its regulatory oversight of PACs & cutting taxpayer services as well as audits.
Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times: "The share of prime-age men -- those 25 to 54 years old — who are not working has more than tripled since the late 1960s, to 16 percent. More recently, since the turn of the century, the share of women without paying jobs has been rising, too. The United States, which had one of the highest employment rates among developed nations as recently as 2000, has fallen toward the bottom of the list." ...
... Amanda Cox of the Times looks at what these non-working men are doing,
"Mad as Hellas." Paul Krugman: The latest flare-up in the long-running Greek economic crisis "is what happens when an elite claims the right to rule based on its supposed expertise, its understanding of what must be done -- then demonstrates both that it does not, in fact, know what it is doing, and that it is too ideologically rigid to learn from its mistakes.... There's a real lesson in its political turmoil that's much more important than the false lesson too many took from its special fiscal woes."
Cecilia Kang, et al., of the Washington Post: "The hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment has escalated into a humiliating public crisis for the company as deeply held secrets -- including business practices, pay disparities and ugly personal feuds -- continue spilling onto the Internet in ways that experts say could damage the Hollywood studio for years to come.... The consequences for Sony have been swift and devastating since the attack became public last month, exposing the company to potential lawsuits and backlash from key Hollywood players. The inside drama revealed this week was the unraveling of a high-profile project at Sony to produce a biopic of the late Apple founder Steve Jobs -- the movie was eventually lost to a rival studio." ...
... Michael Cieply & Brooks Barnes of the New York Times: "Salaries of its top executives. Unpublished scripts. Sensitive contracts. Aliases that stars use to check into hotels. Those are just some of the disclosures from a devastating hacking attack on Sony's movie studio last month. But among all of the information that has spilled forth, perhaps nothing has riveted Hollywood more -- and laid bare the machinations at the highest levels of the film industry -- than a humiliating email exchange between Amy Pascal, Sony's co-chairwoman, and the producer Scott Rudin over Angelina Jolie and a planned Steve Jobs biopic.... Mr. Rudin referred to Ms. Jolie as 'a minimally talented spoiled brat' and pressured Ms. Pascal to shelve 'Cleopatra.' .... 'This is not about salacious emails being batted around by Gawker and Defamer,' Mr. Rudin said on Wednesday. 'It's about a criminal act, and the people behind it should be treated as nothing more nor less than criminals.'" ...
... Those Rich, White Liberal Obama Supporters Are Racists, Too. In the latest revelation, Sony Pictures chair Amy Pascal & producer Scott Rudin exchanged e-mails making fun of President Obama's race, stereotyping him as someone who would prefer movies starring & about black men. Matthew Zeitlin of BuzzFeed first reported the e-mail exchange. ...
... Cecilia Kang: "Thursday, Pascal apologized, breaking weeks of silence on the building and damaging leaks." ...
... Mike Fleming of Deadline: "Producer Scott Rudin has issued a public apology for the racially insensitive comments that surfaced last night in an exchange of hacked private e-mails between him and Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman Amy Pascal." ...
... If you can about Hollywood backstabbing, Sam Biddle of Gawker has the scoop on some exchanges re: the making of the Steve Jobs biopic.
Daniel Strauss of TPM: "A woman charged with shooting and killing her ex-husband and stepdaughter has strong connections to groups advocating for expanding open carry gun laws in Texas. Local news outlets on Wednesday reported that Veronica Dunnachie was arrested and charged with shooting and killing her ex-husband and step daughter." ...
... Adam Weinsten of Gawker has more.
Top model Beverly Johnson, in a Vanity Fair essay, recounts how Bill Cosby lured her to his home & drugged her in the 1980s. Johnson has not previously revealed this incident publicly.
CW: I haven't followed this because it's a stupid story, but in case you were wondering if Harvard professors are pricks, well, yeah. Clint Rainey of New York: "Harvard-educated Harvard professor Ben Edelman has now apologized for threatening legal action against Sichuan Garden for overcharging him $4, and now Boston.com, where four of the top five stories right now involve the academic, breaks the news to readers that he may have done something similar in 2010." Make that serial pricks. Here's the Boston Globe's latest, by Hillary Sargent.
Presidential Election
Joshua Green & Miles Weiss of Bloomberg Politics: "Jeb Bush has a Mitt Romney problem.... Bush's recent business ventures reveal that he shares a number of liabilities with the last nominee, Mitt Romney, whose career in private equity proved so politically damaging that it sunk his candidacy.... BH Global Aviation is one of at least three such funds Bush has launched in less than two years through his Coral Gables, Fla., company, Britton Hill Holdings. He's also chairman of a $26 million fund, BH Logistics, established in April with backing from a Chinese conglomerate, and a $40 million fund involved in shale oil exploration, according to documents filed in June.... 'Running as the second coming of Mitt Romney is not a credential that's going to play anywhere, with Republicans or Democrats,' says John Brabender, a Republican consultant and veteran of presidential campaigns. 'Not only would this be problematic on the campaign trail, I think it also signals someone who isn't seriously looking at the presidency or he wouldn't have gone down this path.'" ...
... Ed Kilgore thinks Jeb's "Mitt problem" makes Mitt look better to GOP fatcats: "f you're going to run a candidate who is perceived as 'the second coming of Mitt Romney,' why not go with the original." ...
... Ben White & Maggie Haberman of Politico: "While some people close to Romney insist he hasn’t moved from saying he has no plans to run, the 2012 Republican nominee has sounded at least open to the idea in recent conversations, according to more than a dozen people who've spoken with him in the last month. In his private musings, Romney has sounded less than upbeat about most of the potential candidates in the 2016 Republican field, according to the people who've spoken with him....
CW: Aw, c'mon, Mitt. There's this guy:
Running for the presidency's not an IQ test. -- Rick Perry, the GOP's dumb candidate, touting his bona fides.
Perry, dumb as he is, seems to be aware that a dumb Texas governor can become president. -- Constant Weader
Running a close second in the contest for dumbest GOP presidential candidate is Scott Walker, who wrote to a Jewish constituent, "Thank you for you letter regarding the Menorah Display. Yes we would be happy to display the Menorah celebrating 'The Eight Days of Chanukah' here at the Courthouse.... Thank you again and Molotov." ...
... As for Perry, he's totally cool with "the Jews":
News Lede
Guardian: "Attempts by opposition parties in Germany to bring Edward Snowden to Berlin to give evidence about the NSA's operations have been thwarted by the country's highest court. The Green and Left parties wanted the whistleblower to give evidence in person to a parliamentary committee investigating espionage by the US agency, but Germany's constitutional court ruled against them on Friday." ...
... CW: Forget Ed Snowden. The lede is an excellent example of why every newspaper should ban use of the passive voice. Using it twice in one lede is extraordinary.
Share Article
Reader Comments (26)
Remember sitting in the gallery of the California Assemby and watching Maxine Waters scurry around the floor cementing votes for some bill (I don't remember what) the Willie Brown wanted passed. She's a lady with a big heart and a very, very short fuse.
I'm with Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren. I doubt keeping the government open is worth backstopping Wall Street gamblers and encouraging billionaire influence peddlers.
"John O. Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, defended the agency’s use of waterboarding and other brutal interrogation tactics on Thursday... Mr. Brennan... criticized only those officers who he said went 'outside the bounds' of the guidelines established by the Justice Department. Those guidelines allowed for waterboarding, sleep deprivation, shackling prisoners in painful positions, and locking them in coffin-like boxes." CW: So the Democrats' very own Dick Cheney. .."
GEEZ, CW: Great minds think alike. After seeing Brennan's speech I could not stop thinking about how like Darth Cheney he is--no heart and cut off at the neck. It is discouraging to me that Obama considers him such a close friend and confidant, or so he says. To me, Brennan and his ilk (the rest of the Brass and operatives) are small-minded, uncreative, in-the-box thinkers who never got out of junior high. And they weren't smart enough to play "Dungeons and Dragons."
Then there is their complete denial (or unawareness?) that our torture of Al Qaeda and other "bad Arabs" is probably the best recruiting tool anybody could possibly use for creating more eager jihadists. And we wonder why they hate us. Really?
"Warren/Waters to top the Democratic ticket in 2016" ~ how is that for a headline (of hope)?
Frankly, Mushiba, that isn't going to happen and there IS no hope. I am so NOT in love with Obama these days. He's really covered himself with glory lately: pushing for votes on the odious keep-the-government-open bill and refusing to throw the torturers in the clink-- ugh. Democrats are as stupid as repugnicans, it seems.
"Molotov"?
Is Walker suggesting a course of action for a more festive holiday?
Or is he just a moron?
Wow. Could the GOP find stupider people to carry their banner?
On a brighter note, all my Jewish friends will be getting this story in their in boxes within minutes. It might be a while before I can say "mazel tov" without falling over.
Molotov, guys!
I'm enjoying the ribbing that Scott Walker is taking about his using "molotov" instead of "mazel tov" (which in itself is an inappropriate usage).
Franklyn Gimbel, to whom he was writing, isn't just a constituent, but a very well-known and influential attorney in Milwaukee. I've seen excuses claiming "Wisconsin has very few Jews" which is ridiculous. Both Madison and Milwaukee have vibrant Jewish communities. It's almost incomprehensible to me that Walker remains so insulated. It's a reflection of his arrogance and his limited world experience.
This flap likely won't hurt Walker. We've learned in the last four years that the teflon coating is thick on this one. However,if portraying Wisconsin as a hick state with a clueless governor helps to take this petty little tyrant down a few notches, we're willing to take a few hits for the team.
Thanks as always, Marie, for providing a forum for me and everyone else to comment on the days' events.
@Mushiba. Maxine Waters is 76 years old. And she has a history of engaging in corrupt practices, including corrupt banking practices. I don't think she would be Warren's first -- or 31st -- choice for veep.
Marie
Jeanne P.: I partially agree with your comment about Obama. Unlike you, I have been heartened by some of his actions after the "thumping" of the midterms. Especially his willingness to invoke executive action to ease the immigration problem, but also his fairly strong statements critical of the proposed Keystone Pipeline (see, for example, his comments in his appearance on Stephen Colbert Monday: http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2014/12/post_575.html). And then he had to go and support this budget "compromise" and we're almost back to square one. It reminds me too much of all the willingness to negotiate away Social Security protections in previous budget negotiations. I'm back to scratching my head a bit trying to figure out the President's priorities. But I still have enormous respect for him and realize he is in a very difficult position which is only going to get worse come January.
As you may know, President Obama is planning to be among the unemployed in a couple of years. The missus, who used to be the principal family breadwinner, turned into a lazy, stay-at-home mom once the family got a rent-free house & servants.
However, once Mr. Obama loses his job, one or both will have to do something. I suspect Obama's enthusiasm for this bank-pleasing bill will go on his or his wife's job applications. Expect to see at least one of the First Couple dressed for success in downtown Manhattan (or at least on a bank board or two).
Marie
@Marie: I hope you're wrong, but not confident enough to place a friendly wager.
It would be kind of fun , though, to make some predictions about the future and revisit them on predetermined dates!
Re; re re. The horror, Think of what was left out of findings of the day to day workings of our spooks. "Mistakes"were made, buried or dumped and never got on the books. Just a guess.
Torture works. Yeah? Then why the fuck are we still engaged in our fifteen year of the Islamic wars? Are there still some young men out there who hate our way of life? Let's torture them to get them to change their minds. Makes sense to me.
Molotov, back at you Mr. Scott, but lit... Flaming asswipe.
When does outrage slump, exhausted, into numb apathy?
The midterm results certainly shoved me in that direction.
But not yet. Not as of this morning when the local paper printed an editorial cartoon (from Holbert of the Boston Herald) depicting the IRS taking pointers from the CIA torturers to use on two hapless American citizens who were hung on the IRS office wall, clearly victims whose fate was about to worsen.
It seems the prevalence of false equivalency's extraordinary heights and dumb discourse may be the lowest and most effective blows of all delivered to our democracy.
Aside from the stark and what should be to all the obvious difference between actual and grisly torture, done in secret yet in our name, and the IRS pursuit of deadbeats and cheaters, the cartoon perpetuates the myth that when the IRS tries to do its job and questions the influence of unfettered Big Money on our elections, they were picking on the poor millionaires and billionaires who last night managed to get even more anti-democratic riders attached to the budget bill that barely passed in the House.
And from what I read, one of that bill's provisions was to cut IRS funding even more.
That the CIA and the elected and appointed officials who oversaw and approved of their reprehensible conduct will live on without consequence, that bankers will get more opportunity to play with other peoples' money, that the Big Money spigot to politicians will be opened even wider....and now this stupid cartoon, all this taken together, keeps outrage alive and apathy at bay.
At least for now.
From what I understand Obama's thinking re: the budget stuffing was that, yes, there are things in it that are not to our liking, but once the new Republicans take their seats in January and would have to pass a new budget it would be ten times worse. It's accepting the bad because if not it would get "badder"––sort of thing. Pelosi called it "blackmail" and rightly so, but I'm afraid we ain't seen nothin yet. Now that the Right has the upper hand, they is gonna hand us some pretty awful stuff since it looks to me they are not working for us citizens or for the country itself, but for themselves and the corporate entities. Nothing new, only now so obvious.
Re: Udall's brave speech: Good man–-what a damn shame he lost his seat. Since "The Panetta Report" refers to Leon Panetta, was there anything in that book he was hawking some months ago about torture and his involvement in it? Never heard him mention it.
A few days ago I looked up the Church and Pike hearings––the first time the CIA was put in the hot seat. Makes for interesting reading and one gets the distinct feeling of de´ja´vu––and of course one thing stands out: Our foray into Iran back in the good old Eisenhower days started this whole ball of wax. "All the Shah's Men"–– busy little beavers building those dams that eventually brought the towers down so many years later. We reap what we sow––old as dirt.
I have discovered a pallative for the angst I feel about the near future of this country. It's called tequila.
Ken,
I checked out that cartoon. I was curious because the Herald is one of the more reliable of right-wing propagandists. If wingers hate it, it will appear in the Herald on a regular basis as the object of ridicule and propeller-hatted outrage.
But note how insidious this cartoon is. It never really addresses the subject of torture as planned and executed by a conservative administration the Herald cheered on with pom-poms flying. Instead, it tacitly suggests that the horrible actions detailed in the report are now being adopted by the hated IRS, which comes off looking far more evil, nefarious, and amoral than the actual propagators of real torture.
So in one quick move, they can use the horror of torture without ever acknowledging that their newspaper and plenty of their editors and writers supported wholeheartedly, to point fingers at the IRS for the increased harm they intend to continue inflicting on taxpayers.
Of course, as you point out, the people hanging on the wall are average citizens, not Masters of the Universe, because those people don't even pay taxes. Something else the Herald supports.
It's nice to note, too, how the subject of torture can be mined for laughs. Pretty funny stuff I guess. If you're an asshole.
Those crazy wingers are at it again!
Well kids, I was going to send you all a couple of light links to brighten the mood, this being Friday and all, but first, I had to take a moment to point out one of the Teabag He-roes, Allen West, as h's doing the "Rand Paul", aka, the Plagiarism Tango. And man, can he cut a rug with that thing.
You may recall a while back when a Democrat, John Walsh, senator from Montana, was bagged copying from unnamed sources on his homework at the War College. Allen West was outraged. OUTRAGED, I tells ya. On his blog he pointed to the scurrilous work of Sen. Walsh as a blanket indictment of all lefties. We're all bad because plagiarism by one guy. He also whined that the story was buried and getting hardly any media attention. I seem to recall plenty of attention in all the major news outlets, but we can overlook that small ignorance of facts, Allen was on a roll.
But since then it appears that he must have been kinda digging the idea of taking someone else's words and passing them off as his own.
And so.....
In a screed all about how Obama hates cops and wishes they would all just drop dead so he could hang out with his gangsta homies and off the pigs at will, ol' Allen lifted paragraph after paragraph (he even left in the typos! pretty funny, eh?) from a viral online screed. Hey, Allen, if you're gonna steal, try to avoid sources connected to the word "viral". It's a pretty good bet a few people will have read it.
But no attribution. No nothin'.
So sorry, Allen. What was that you were saying about how one guy's hypocrisy tarred everyone else in his political camp?
A-hem.
And now for that light stuff I promised.
It's just Sen. Warren and a few un-bought and paid for colleagues who stand between the filthy rich and even more filthy lucre, among other atrocious nonsense. Not to mention another crack at the roulette wheel whereat, if they lose, we have the honor of paying up. Tails they win, heads we lose. Ain't it always the way?
But that got me to thinking. If I were an unscrupulous pig stabbing member of the smirking obscenely rich oligarchy, what would I do with all that extra moolah that was imminently on its way into my sweaty grasp?
Then someone sent me these links:
Let's buy this $2,000 child's bed. It's distressed. Oh! We can pretend we're poor. What fun!
Pictures from the Restoration Hardware guide to effete shit for rich kids. They have a Restoration Hardware kids catalog? Who knew?
and...
Lobster Mac n' Cheese, from Maine. Only $100! Let's get four.
The 2014 guide for Williams-Sonoma Catalog Haters.
What will those rich people ever do with all that extra cash? How 'bout a $2,000 espresso machine? Priced to move too. Originally $2,500. Don't know about you guys, but I just gotta have me one a' these things. And I don't even drink espresso!
Oops...something funky happened to that Restoration Harware link.
Let's try it again.
If I hear Torquemada Cheney smirk that the end justifies the means once more, I'm gonna have to put him on the list for rectal rehydration.
I don't want to get into the validity of the whole Utilitarian or Consequentialist philosophical stances about ends and means, but if you're going to defend this position, the end justifying the means, as a blanket protection against punishment for actions the United States has agreed is illegal, then you need to consider its use in other contexts and situations. He needs a very strong, logical rationale for avoiding prison, in my opinion (even though that will never happen), because torture is about as bad as it gets in treatment of other human beings (some philosophers make a case that it's actually worse than a quick death). We said so when we signed a United Nations human rights document in 1994. Torture is wrong. It's illegal. We said that. And it doesn't matter if an army of John Yoos come marching into a courtroom and announce that beating people to death, shoving things up their anus, drowning them, and plunging them into ice baths and leaving them to freeze to death do not constitute torture, no sensible person would or could ever agree. They are lying assholes.
But if Torquemada wants to claim that the end justifies the means, then he's going to have to agree that, in order for this rationale to hold water, it must be acknowledged to be a strong defense when applied in certain cases (it would be silly to state that any illegal action was okay as long as someone got something good out if it--the place would be even crazier than it already is).
So my question is, what about 9/11?
Don't those Al Qaeada operatives and the entire Al Qaeada chain of command from the planners down to the hijackers get to state that the end justifies the means?
What say you Torquemada? What's that? Oh, only Americans get to say that? What's that? Oh..only YOU get to say that.
I see. Well, at least you have an airtight logical argument.
Who has the number for that rectal rehydration guy?
My inbox is innundated with appeals to sign petitions opposing various parts of the current spending bill. I just delete them. I give up. The voters put this travesty in place, with a lot of help from the Supremes. A friend of mine up here always votes Republican, yet she hates guns and hunting, doesn't have a prejudiced bone in her body, which leads to why? Right to life and Personhood.
When we first came to Georgia, if you didn't run as a Democrat, you didn't have much of a chance. Now the roles are reversed. The average Southern voter doesn't know or care what their R's stand for (those that bother to actually vote).
So, I'll just wait it out. I used to have AK's fire, but that burned out. I only have the strength to fight ALS now. Gloom and doom.
@Marie, I agree with you.I, also, believe that Waters is no different from any of the pols currently on the national stage, including Warren, I suspect. However, I liked the alliteration of ‘Warren/Waters’ and that it, alone, might be enough to grab the attention of the 65%+ of eligible voters who do not vote.
@Jeanne, despite all the gloom and doom, I like to think that, 'Hope Springs Eternal' rather than to give in to the darkness of having no hope.
I think it's time we all go down to the local pub and have a few
rounds of Molotov cocktails. Maybe we'll forget what's coming
in January 2015 when the R's take over the circus.
@AK: Regaled my mister during gin and tonic time about your story of Allen West––at first he wasn't sure who exactly was West, ––there are so many of these dip wads––but all at once he remembered and said, "Oh, THAT M-Fucker!" which I laughed at because his vocabulary is not as raunchy as mine. We had fun making fun of that M-fucker––thanks for the laughs.
I have been too busy with work--keeping the head above water--to comment here, although I have been enjoying all that CW puts on her front page and the comments on the back page (so to speak). But I did want to report on my adventure in the great land of the ACA. As a self-employed person since 1987, I have much experience in the joys of trying to get health insurance without breaking the bank. By 2012, the bank was breaking--nearly $400/month for a policy that covered virtually nothing (one checkup/year from my family doc, one annual gynecological checkup, one mammogram) and had a $5000 deductible. Kept pushing that deductible up to stave off the rising premiums, until I was told that the deductible was as high as it would go. Last year, I waited out the worst of the ACA website troubles and explored my limited choices. Since I'm in NH, I could choose only among a few offerings from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield--which was not such a shock for any of us up here. At that time, I think Anthem covered about 80% of the insured people in NH. I was excited at the prospect this year of more insurers to choose from. I think we ended up with four in all. But in the end (just finalized my enrollment today) I am still with Anthem because, in a word, coverage. One MA insurance company did not include any local hospitals; the nearest in-network one is a 40 minute drive away. Another one, my gynecologist was not in-network. The last one simply didn't offer as good a product as Anthem. But with the federal subsidies, my premium is close to $200/month; and the deductible is only $1000. A much better deal compared to where I was two years ago, but there is no doubt that this system of trying to find a plan from so many options, comparing them--which is sometimes apples to apples, sometimes apples to oranges--trying to predict the future, is time consuming and a bit stressful. Two friends of mine ended up having to buy their own insurance this year. They proclaimed the process was dreadful, but I told them they will probably find it easier next year, just as I found my second year easier.
But this does bring me to the Supreme Court agreeing to hear a challenge to the ACA, again. I was not at all worried about Republicans posturing in Congress about repealing it. Knew that would never make it past the president. I am not quite so confident about how the Supreme Court might rule, and how Congress would then respond if the Court says, "Yep, you're right, all you who bought through healthcare.gov, give your subsidy back." Probably my new rep, Frank Guinta, will be on my doorstep with his hand out, asking for a check.
As for all the other bad news, particularly this latest budget (and did these people ever consider that if they got their work done in a timely fashion, earlier in the year, they wouldn't have to stay late and risk taking the red eye home Christmas Eve?), I'm wondering if I should simply cancel my NY Times subscription for the next 18 months. I fear there is going to be much news I'd just as soon not know.
Keep fighting ALS, Barbarossa. We'll let Ak and the rest handle the Congress.