;)
The Commentariat -- Dec. 8, 2014
Internal links removed.
David Rogers of Politico: "House-Senate negotiators neared agreement Sunday on the last pieces of a $1.1 trillion spending bill designed to avert any shutdown this week and put most government agencies on firm footing through next September. Building on a long weekend of talks, the goal was to file the giant measure by late Monday and then push for quick floor action before the current funding runs out Thursday night." ...
... Greg Sargent opines that since Boehner needs Democrats to pass the bill in the House, "That should mean House GOP leaders will not be able to attach anything to the funding bill that would undermine Obama's action."
The Bush Pre-buttal. Peter Baker of the New York Times: "A long-awaited Senate report condemning torture by the Central Intelligence Agency has not even been made public yet, but former President George W. Bush's team has decided to link arms with former intelligence officials and challenge its conclusions.... Mr. Bush and his closest advisers decided that 'we're going to want to stand behind these guys,' as one former official put it.... The former officials said that neither Mr. Bush nor his advisers had been interviewed by the committee."
Rachel Huggins of the Hill: "President Obama will sit down with BET Networks to discuss calls for criminal justice reform after two controversial grand jury decisions cleared white officers in the death of black men.... The interview, hosted by BET host and TV journalist Jeff Johnson, marks the president's first network discussion outlining his strategy to investigate the incidents and ways the country can unify during this time." There's a clip here. ...
... Jonathan Chait: White conservatives are outraged that President Obama said racism is "deeply rooted" in our culture. Hell, they're not racist. They don't even know any black people. CW: It's extremely unfortunately that this branch of De Nial runs right under the Supreme Court building. ...
... Allen McDuffee of the Atlantic: "New York Mayor Bill de Blasio on Sunday admonished former mayor Rudy Giuliani for his repeated recent comments that 'responsibility is on the black community' for reducing the necessity of police officers in their communities. 'I think he fundamentally misunderstands the reality,' said de Blasio on ABC's This Week. 'There is a problem here. There is a rift here that has to be overcome. You cannot look at the incident in Missouri; another incident in Cleveland, Ohio; and another incident in New York City all happening in the space of weeks and act like there's not a problem.'" ...
... Vanessa Williams of the Washington Post on de Blasio's blunt remarks on racism & policing & why the mayor is able to speak more forcefully than is President Obama. ...
... Timothy Cama of the Hill: "The New York Police Department (NYPD) has launched its investigation into the killing of Eric Garner, but it could take up to four months to complete, the department's head said. NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said the decision last week by a grand jury not to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo for killing Garner meant that the internal investigation could kick off.... He promised a transparent investigation into possible violations of department policy, including a public trial if necessary. Bratton will then have the final say on any potential punishments for Pantaleo, he said." With video. ...
... Mike Carter of the Seattle Times: "Federal prosecutors say they will review an incident in which a Seattle police officer punched and seriously injured a handcuffed, intoxicated woman, after King County prosecutors said Friday they won't charge the officer." The policeman asserted the woman kicked him though a hospital exam showed no indication of physical injury.
... Connie Schultz in Politico Magazine: "A boy's death and a damning Justice report put Cleveland at the center of a national police crisis." Schultz, a syndicated columnist, is married to Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). ...
... You will want to know what Rush Limbaugh thinks about the killing of Eric Garner in a Fox Sunday show segment that had Chris Wallace -- who is accustomed to interviewing the wing-nut contingent -- asking, "What are you talking about?" ...
... AND, over at the winger screed Power Line, Paul Mirengoff seems to think it's ridiculous that young people would be upset by the grand jury's decision to free Eric Garner's killer. I don't know if Mirengoff is smart enough to know that Columbia University is essentially in Harlem.
John Harwood of the New York Times: President "Obama has long since concluded that pursuing dreams of reconciliation in his final two years in office is a fool's chase. So he is offering an alternative model for 21st-century presidential success.... It turns ... on advancing the major policy goals that Mr. Obama embraced as a candidate. Through that prism, he continues to make progress."
Donna Cassata of the AP: "Republicans will hold at least 246 House seats come January, according to election results Saturday, giving the GOP a commanding majority that matches the party's post-World War II high during Democratic President Harry S. Truman's administration. The GOP retained control of two seats in runoffs in Louisiana, expanding the advantage for Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, who can afford defections from his increasingly conservative caucus and still get legislation passed." ...
... Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast: "Trying to win Southern seats is not worth the ideological cost for Democrats.... The Democratic Party cannot (and I'd say should not) try to calibrate its positions to placate Southern mores.... It's lost.... If they get no votes from the region, they will in turn owe it nothing, and in time the South, which is the biggest welfare moocher in the world in terms of the largesse it gets from the more advanced and innovative states, will be on its own, which is what Southerners always say they want anyway.... Let the GOP have it and run it and turn it into Free-Market Jesus Paradise...." Read the whole post.
E. J. Dionne: "Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). They have co-sponsored a bill that ... would create a 15-member commission to study ... [on] 'how best to expand the use of data to evaluate the effectiveness of federal programs and tax expenditures.' The commission would also look into 'how best to protect the privacy rights of people who interact with federal agencies and ensure confidentiality.' ... They're saying, you should want government programs to achieve what they set out to do. And in this age of Big Data, there are more metrics than ever to allow you to have a clear sense of how well they are working." ...
... CW: I would take this bill a little more seriously if Ryan were not the co-sponsor. For instance ... Matt Yglesias of Vox: "Conservatives in Congress led by Paul Ryan are thinking of bringing back an accounting gimmick from the 1970s called dynamic scoring [which was] used by Ronald Reagan to help sell the country on gigantic income tax cuts...." Unless Murray has tricked Ryan into co-sponsoring a bill that will prove he's a charlatan, their data-analysis bill is a joke. Even if it ain't funny.
"Recovery at Last?" Paul Krugman: "At this point we have enough data points to compare the job recovery under President Obama with the job recovery under former President George W. Bush, who also presided over a postmodern recession but certainly never insulted fat cats. And by any measure you might choose -- but especially if you compare rates of job creation in the private sector -- the Obama recovery has been stronger and faster. Oh, and its pace has picked up over the past year, as health reform has gone fully into effect.... We can now say with confidence that the recovery's weakness had nothing to do with Mr. Obama's (falsely) alleged anti-business slant. What it reflected, instead, was the damage done by government paralysis -- paralysis that has, alas, richly rewarded the very politicians who caused it."
Oh, the "Death Panel" Again. Sarah Ferris of the Hill: "The GOP is refocusing its attention on the courts as it searches for any way to weaken President Obama's signature healthcare law while he continues to wield a veto pen. Twenty-five Republicans asked the Supreme Court to take on another lawsuit against ObamaCare on Thursday, this time against a controversial Medicare advisory board that the party has assailed as a 'death panel.' Rep. Phil Roe (R-Tenn.), who is leading the charge in Congress against the Independent Payment Advisory Board, said legal challenges against ObamaCare 'make a lot more sense' than writing repeal bills that are guaranteed a veto." ...
... Mike Lillis of the Hill: "Liberals on and off Capitol Hill are defending President Obama's healthcare law from the friendly fire of fellow Democrats. The liberals say the criticisms from Sens. Charles Schumer (N.Y.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) are not only flat wrong, but also pointless coming four years after the law's passage. 'I disagree with both of them,' said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), who helped usher the bill into law as then-chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. 'I disagree with what they said, and I can't quite see a lot of value in it.'... Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, delivered a similar message, arguing that, while there are plenty of improvements that could be made to the law, the critics should focus their attention on getting those things done instead of questioning the value of the law as it stands."
ALEC Attack -- Bought & Paid For. Tom Hamburger of the Washington Post: "Oil, gas and coal interests that spent millions to help elect Republicans this year are moving to take advantage of expanded GOP power in Washington and state capitals to thwart Obama administration environmental rules. Industry lobbyists made their pitch in private meetings last week with dozens of state legislators at a summit of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an industry-financed conservative state policy group." ...
... Marcus Stern & Sebastian Jones for the Weather Channel (yes, the Weather Channel!): "InsideClimate News, The Weather Channel, and The Investigative Fund have monitored the regulatory response to oil train explosions this year, focusing on whether the agency that oversees the railroads -- the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) -- is able to ensure that the nation's aging railroad infrastructure can safely handle its latest task: serving as a massive, rickety network of pipelines on wheels. We found that regulators don't have the resources to catch up with -- let alone, get ahead of -- the risks posed by exploding oil trains. That has left the FRA politically outgunned by the railroad industry, leaving it largely to police itself." CW: I thought maybe this article was going to end up being an advocacy piece for Keystone XL since two of its major owners are the Blackstone Group (founded by Pete Peterson) & Bain Capital (Mitt!), but it doesn't seem to be.
Brian Murphy & Daniela Deale of the Washington Post: "The Pentagon was putting final touches on a rescue mission in hopes of freeing American Luke Somers. At a South African-based charity, negotiators believed they were within hours of reaching a deal for the release of South African teacher Pierre Korkie. Neither side was apparently aware of the other -- or even that the two men were held together -- in the days before an unsuccessful raid by U.S. Special Forces on Saturday that left both captives dead."
Annals of "Journalism," Ctd.
Erik Wemple of the Washington Post: The Rolling Stone story of the alleged gang rape of UVA student Jackie keeps looking worse: "Fire the Rolling Stone editors who worked on this story." ...
... Margaret Talbot of the New Yorker: "One of the article’s strongest points was that ... the campus administrators who heard about [Jackie's] claims chose not to investigate them. Rather than force her to confront the alleged perpetrators, they allowed her to choose whether to press charges, request a campus hearing, or just go on with her life. Yet by not seeking the men out, Erdely and Rolling Stone made the same mistake. By arguably violating journalistic ethics to respect Jackie's wishes and her fears of the accused, they let the allegedly evil bros remain as hidden and unaccountable as they would want to be." ...
... Jessica Roy of New York: "The past few weeks cannot have been particularly uplifting for sexual-assault survivors, who have been forced to watch as Jackie, the woman at the heart of Rolling Stone's controversial campus-rape story, has had her character picked apart, been thrown under the bus by the magazine she agreed to open up to, and even had men's-rights activists publish what they claim are her full name, phone number, and address to the internet. But now Emily Clark, Jackie's freshman-year suite mate, has penned a moving letter in UVA's student newspaper reemphasizing her belief in Jackie's story.... Here's hoping the Twitter wackos won't use this gesture of support as an excuse to drag Clark through the mud, too." ...
... Hanna Rosin in Slate: "In the story, reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely called her subject by the name 'Jackie,' which I think many reading the story assumed was a pseudonym (many of the other characters in the piece go by pseudonyms).... Erderly then told a Washington Post reporter that the young woman's real first name is Jackie.... From there, it's a short distance to some vicious trolls, including the singularly vile Charles C. Johnson, threatening to doxx her. Johnson tweeted Jackie's full name on Sunday and wrote that he would give Jackie until midnight 'to tell the truth' or else he will 'start revealing everything about her past.'... Others are already a few steps ahead of him, posting pictures from Jackie's Facebook feed -- and even her mother's Facebook feed -- and adding nasty captions."
Chris Hughes, owner & publisher of the New Republic, defends himself in a Washington Post op-ed. He also suggests TNR journalists who walked out (a dozen, according to him) are a bunch of backward-looking whiney-babies. ...
... Ravi Somaiya of the New York Times: "The New Republic magazine said on Saturday that it would not publish its next issue, but would return to newsstands in February next year, after dozens of its top editors and contributors resigned in the face of a leadership change.... Some of the journalists who left had requested that their articles be removed from the coming issue, according to former staff members...."
White House: "On December 7, 2014, President Obama delivered remarks at the 2014 Kennedy Center Honors reception":
... In case you forgot, here's Obama, two years ago, at a fundraiser at the Apollo Theater in New York:
News Lede
Oakland Tribune: "On Sunday, the morning after protests resulted in six arrests and injuries to three police officers, witnesses to the unruliness insisted the number of police present escalated the tension after a person vandalizing with a skateboard touched it off. They also took exception to any characterization that the protests were violent.... A Sunday evening protest began much less aggressively, with just one bottle being thrown at officers from the otherwise peaceful crowd. However, demonstrators broke off into two groups about 8 p.m., with one continuing peacefully into neighborhoods and a more aggressive group heading full steam toward Highway 24. Those protesters tried to light patrol cars on fire and threw bottles, Molotov cocktails and rocks at officers, California Highway Patrol officials said." The San Francisco Chronicle story of the Saturday protests is here.
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Reader Comments (17)
For another example of the delusional thinking of humans, last
night's news was a very important story of this couple named William and Kate who apparently earn millions for the job of occasionally shaking hands with people. The most important part of their trip to the US is shaking hands with the POTUS. How exciting!
..." ... Mike Lillis of the Hill: "Liberals on and off Capitol Hill are defending President Obama's healthcare law from the friendly fire of fellow Democrats. The liberals say the criticisms from Sens. Charles Schumer (N.Y.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) are not only flat wrong, but also pointless coming four years after the law’s passage.
Don't know what bug got up Harkin's ass--though he is leaving the Senate for good, lost to the pig squealer Joni Ernst--and maybe is a bit resentful. But Chuckie Schumer, The Senator from AIPAC, should stick to shilling for right wing Israelis and stop his false outrage. He would not want to hurt his good friend, Hillary, or his prized banksters, and that is exactly what may happen if he does not shut his trap. I don't know what it is about guys named "Chuck," but currently Chuck Todd and Chuckie Schumer are Nos. 1 and 2 on my shit list.
I will never forget how Chuckie Schumer tried to take over Obama's inauguration in 2012 by talking endlessly at the speakers' podium and inserting himself into every official photograph he could push his way into. What an ass wipe!
@Kate: It's sometimes hard to place these congress critters in the right box, but Tom Harkins, a democrat from Iowa, didn't run against anyone––he announced his retirement before the election. Joni Ernst, (R-ND) on the other hand, beat a perfectly fine fella, Bruce Braley who just couldn't match her strident porcine perfection. Whenever one of your own starts bad mouthing the home base follow the money. Let's see what Tom Harkins has set for himself after leaving Congress. As for Schumer–-his pockets are lined with that stuff that buys people like Chuck––and Chuck has always been for Chuck.
What a pleasure to watch Obama at the Kennedy Center Honor's reception. I swear, that man could be a stand-up comic without too much trouble––his timing, his delivery, and his material (don't know if he writes that stuff himself, but it's damn good.) There was a male laugh in the audience that was like an Ed McMan to his Johnny Carson–-getting such a kick out of Obama and that laugh was so infectious you'd have to laugh at the laugh itself. And how wonderful that the people who were honored have given so much to our culture and have enriched our lives in such significant ways. I can understand why Obama finds this receptive honor one of his favorites.
Re; blame this on Marie, "Furries flee gassing, seek refuge at dog show, terrier group has field day."
There's a lot of bad stuff out there, a good laugh helps.
@JJG: I go to a lot of trouble to bring you the important gnus, & I'm really insulted that you think it's funny.
For instance, have you considered the economic implications of the furries convention? Just today, I've linked to Krugman's column about the recovery, & I'm pretty sure he wrote it before news of the furries convention hit the wires. Otherwise, he would certainly have cited it as further compelling evidence of the recovery. After all, if quite a few people have a few thousand bucks to burn on fake-fur outfits & travel to Chicago to cavort in said costumes, then things must be going very well. Think of the costume-maker jobs this group is creating. I'm sure Krugman will add the furries test to his bag of economic-analysis tools now that I've made him aware of it.
But you, you don't care. For some reason you think adult people dancing around in animal costumes, showing up at a dog-grooming show is hilarious. If more of us were furries, there would be more jobs. I'm going next year as a laughing hyena. Hope to see you there. Save the last dance for me.
Marie
A great dance number for Furries: "What does the Fox say?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jofNR_WkoCE
Marie,
I think you're on to something. Krugman is behind the curve on this one. Maybe in addition to other indicators, economists should now add the Furry Index.
But they could also, perhaps, add the Deadly Weapons Index.
People have money for dressing up in funny costumes and flying off to conferences, but they also have money for guns. And lot's of 'em. Although, now that I think of it, that might not be a good way to determine a rise or fall of purchasing power. Some people would rather spend $1,000 on an AK-47 than food for their kids. Let 'em eat lead.
Not to mention the fact that I noticed last week that gun sales were down. A year ago, in the wake of all the sky is falling bullshit about Obama taking away their guns, wingnuts stocked up on guns, guns, guns, ammo, ammo, ammo. But this year sales are way down. Oh, that is, if you only read the 1,200 articles from the MSM.
The wingnut "press" has a different story. This is really a hoot too. Just do a search for "gun sales down" and you'll see lede after lede: Sales down, Smith and Wesson report diminishing sales, Ruger sales down 76% from same quarter last year, gun sales plunging, Americans buying fewer guns....etc., and then you see "Gun Sales Up!!" from townhall.com, one of the worst of the ideological deadender sites, all from around the same time frame a few months ago. If you go to the article (which is called "a reality check", ha!) you'll see the "writer" goes off on a tear about a report that misrepresented shootings in schools and had to be corrected. Damn lying liberals!
The report listed 74 school shootings since Newtown. And that wasn't fair. Not fair at all. According to CNN who fact checked the report by a group called Everytown for Gun Safety, started by Micheal Bloomberg,You see the report, if you look into it (Townhall won't make this distinction), listed all the instances of deadly weapons going off in or around schools, including janitors accidentally shooting at the wall in the gym, for instance. Hey, no kids were killed. "Almost killed" doesn't count, neither does "could have been killed", so what's the big deal?
CNN states that there were only 15 school shootings similar to the Newtown Massacre. "That works out to about one such shooting every five weeks, a startling figure in its own right." I mean, hey, that's not so bad, right?
Like I said, "reality check".
So I guess we can forget the Deadly Weapons Index. Chuck Todd's analysis of this data would go like this: 1,200 reports of gun sales down. One report of gun sales rising. Not enough information to make a clear decision. Besides, both sides lie about these things. For the sake of balance, we'll go with "gun sales up".
I missed the colloquy over the weekend on all things god, especially the posting about the (jaw dropping) number of supposedly sentient people who can, one would assume, walk and talk at the same time, read without moving their lips, and multiply 5 X 25 without doing the carry the number thing on paper, but who believe natural disasters have supernatural causes.
Old friend Randy Newman has the answer from a god who kills your kids, burns down your cities, inflicts horror, suffering, death, disease, and war on you and yours:
You all must be crazy to put your faith in me
That's why I love mankind
God's Song: That's Why I Love Mankind
We all know that logical fallacies propagate on the right like algal blooms in a red tide, but events such as the recent spate of high visibility killings of unarmed black citizens by white cops trigger a substantially higher number of the usual apologias and "explanations" from the wingers.
Some of these are not quite so easy to spot, the ones perpetrated by slightly more astute liars, but the link below offers examples of the balance fallacy and the false analogy good enough for a guidebook on Logic for Idiots.
Lou Cannon, Reagan hagiographer, although not as bald faced an ideological flag waver as some, shows that he can false analogize with the best. And because he was a reporter for the Post at one time, he can even point out his false analogy while maintaining his balance fallacy. A neat trick!
The gist of this piece is that we just don't know. We just don't know all the reasons a nice white cop or cops, might want to beat the ever loving sheeeit out of some asshole black guy. OR why or if an illegal chokehold clearly displayed on videotape even contributed to the death of another black guy. So, we shouldn't make conclusions based on evidence.
So on one hand, we have the Rodney King video and on the other, the Eric Garner video. Neither tells the whole story, according to Cannon. In the case of Rodney King, he was uncooperative with the police and refused to stay down after his initial tasing and beating, prompting the LA cops to put him in the hospital. The video we've all seen of Rodney King's beating didn't include an additional 11 seconds which, according to Cannon (we have to trust him on this because I've never seen it) showed categorically why King deserved that kind of treatment. So video can't be trusted. And, as Cannon slyly suggests, even though the Eric Garner case isn't exactly the same, it IS exactly the same because we don't really know. And video doesn't tell the whole story.
The upshot? We aren't in the shoes of the cops who felt compelled to beat/kill unarmed black guys, so we can't judge, 'cause even if there's videotape, tape can lie. Besides, as Cannon points out, videotape can't tell us what was in Officer Pantaleo's mind and heart when he strangled Eric Garner, and, after all folks, isn't that what really matters? The guy didn't MEAN to kill him. Maybe. We just don't know. I'm pretty sure that argument wouldn't matter if a white officer was shot by a black guy who didn't MEAN to kill him, but never mind that now.
It really is a thing of beauty how these people twist things around to fit their ideological requirements.
Beautiful in the same way a tornado tearing up a house and flinging it a mile away is beautiful.
Because, you just don't know...
I can't wait to read the Torture Report to find out what our Freeeedom Lovin' Leaders were doing in our name in black sites across the world. I also can't wait for the imminent return of Darth Cheney across the teevee world scowling and snorting with glee and contempt. I see Dubya might even put down the paintbrush long enough to try to put together a few incoherent sentences, lean on the podium and smirk into the lights before he slinks away back to fantasy land where nothing has consequences beyond your immediate horizon.
In another (related?) story, the Kenyan government has admitted to running death squads with an assassination program against alleged Muslim extremists. The US and UK government have been bankrolling the Kenyan government's counterterrorism programs for some time, and allegedly knew about the program.
http://www.aljazeera.com/video/africa/2014/12/kenya-police-admit-extrajudicial-killings-201412894130719731.html
Seeing how our support for death squads worked so well in Central America to destroy the region and shred the social fabric, maybe Cheney saw it as a shining example of Reagan's visionary largesse in foreign policy.
Concerning the formation of assassination programs, from a 2009 article in the Guardian...
"The CIA apparently did not put the plan in to operation but the US military did, carrying out several assassinations including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of the programme." Substitute "quashing" for "reforming and layering it with secrecy"...
Put two and two together. Hopefully more light will be shed on this program to discover its origins. I sincerely hope it doesn't have the US Government seal of approval, but seeing as we had lawless torture lovers in charge who couldn't give a fuck about the lives of brown people across the world, signs point to yes.
@PDPepe--Oops, I did know that Tom Harkin is retiring and did not "lose" to Joni Ernst. What I meant to say is that she is now taking his seat (yup, she is from Iowa), and that pisses him off. Maybe she ran in North Dakota too? She's a piece of work, for sure! She will definitely challenge Marie's laughing hyena costume next year with her homemade outfit as a squealing pig (sans testicles) at the Furries Roadshow. I hear Chuck Todd is going as a Sea Slug.
Delusional idiot or lying sonovabitch, you make the call:
"This report on torture--I mean, we haven't read it yet--but no matter what it says it is doggone wrong if it don't go along with what I say. Cuz I'm The Decider."
Torturer in Chief, George W. Bush.
But it appears all the biggest proponents torturers have a built-in out. According to the Times article, some CIA field officers may have "misled" higher ups. Yay, a few more flunkies to take the fall. Ooh! And another Get Out of Jail Free card for Bush and his pet shark. Some enterprising grad student should spend a few years working on a doctoral thesis that investigates exactly how many times Bush has gotten away scot-free on his many, many capital crimes, underhanded schemes, lies and misdemeanors. It would be thousands of pages long.
But never mind that. The wingnuts must be gearing up for battle even though they haven't seen word one of this report yet (and don't you think for a minute that they'll bother to when it's released). "Prebuttal" says it all.
Smell that? Wingnuts are getting ready to light the fuses of victimhood once again.
"Fucking towel heads! You'd all be dead now if it wasn't for our brave boys torturing every non-Christian, non-white they could get their hands on. We're the victims here!"
And before I forget, the writer Christopher Hitchens, a supporter of the Iraq War, voluntarily underwent waterboarding in 2008. His conclusion?
Believe me, it's torture.
Hitchens concluded: "'I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.'"
Torquemada Cheney will have none of it. As late as earlier this year, this sneering rat bastard is still claiming that waterboarding is NOT torture. But a group in 1947 pressed to have a Japanese officer who used waterboarding to torture American prisoners, convicted as a war criminal. It was a slam dunk. He was sentenced to 15 years hard labor. The group? The United States government.
Whatever is in this report, as long as it has some truth and doesn't try, once again, to paper over the shameful behavior of the Bush torturers, will be beneficial to history which has a long memory and will, if there is any justice and intellectual honesty left in the world, brand these bastards for all time as the inhuman monsters they are.
So, let's see. So far today, we see the right telling us that evidence doesn't matter if a black person is killed by a cop. That torture is not torture and they'd do it again if they had the chance, that they're working day and night to deprive citizens of the most life changing legislation to come along in a generation, and now they want a committee to talk about how "effective" government programs are.
E.J. Dionne prob'ly means well, but, like Marie, I am tired of listening to the lying bullshitters and I refuse to do it anymore. Anything even tangentially connected with Paul Ryan is a scam and that's that. The only true statement I've ever heard him make, that is, one that could be verified by actual evidence--as opposed to the usual GOP lies--is that it gets cold in the mountains of Afghanistan in the winter.
Very good, Paul. Now sit down and shut the fuck up.
Why Democrats want to give cover to liars like Ryan is beyond me. Hey, People, they HATE YOU. Their goal is to use you.
Wake. Up.
I'd like to see Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, et al take a few trips overseas without their Secret Service contingents. They probably couldn't step outside their hotels without peeing or shitting their pants for fear of being extraordinarily renditioned.
That extra suitcase they're dragging everywhere must be filled with spare Depends.
Al-Jazeera updated their story and it doesn't seem to directly implicate the US, but rather mentions Britain and Israel directly. But as Ak mentions above, putting a few low level middle men between the Deciders and the evidence has been used masterfully by those with dirt on their hands. I didn't read through all the files although some of the videos link American elements to the assassin squad (notably intelligence). Regardless, this still means that we should immediately suspend funds earmarked for security to the Kenya government until this situation is resolved.
http://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/KenyaDeathSquads/
@Kate––my oops! you are correct, Ernst is from Iowa, not from N.D. Somehow I connect her with Fargo and all that bloody wood chipping business. Thanks for correcting me.