When The President Does It, It's Not A Beagle

Just a Position or Juxtaposition?

Today I'm instituting a new feature on this blog. It's labeled 'juxtaposition.'

Example 1: (which I've slightly rearranged for clarity):

when asked what he would tell family members contemplating a trip to Mexico during the flu outbreak [...] “I wouldn’t go anywhere in confined places now,” Biden said [...] “You’re in a confined aircraft when one person sneezes; it goes all the way through the aircraft.”
[...]
“If you’re out in the middle of a field and someone sneezes, that’s one thing,” Biden said. “If you’re in a closed aircraft, or closed container, or closed car or closed classroom, it’s a different thing.”

Umm, seems reasonable to me. The CDC says “When it is absolutely necessary to enter a crowded setting or to have close contact with persons who might be ill, the time spent in that setting should be as short as possible.”

Who could object to that? Ohhhh, these folks:

Hotel executives said their business began to suffer after Obama warned at a Feb. 9 town-hall meeting in Elkhart, Indiana, that companies receiving bailout money “can’t go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers’ dime.”

Wow! Ending all those CEO parties on the taxpayer's dime was the reason their business is suffering!? Hmmph.

Example 2:

Napolitano Facing Republican Calls for Her Ouster

Obama's Security Chief Ignites Firestorm by Warning of 'Right-Wing' Extremism in U.S.

Umm, what 'firestorm?' Oh, the one by rightwing extremists:

Oklahoma Man Arrested for Twittering Tea Party Death Threats

An Oklahoma City man who announced on Twitter that he would turn an April 15 tax protest into a bloodbath was hit with a federal charge of making interstate threats last week

But wait, there's more!

Sweep targets gang

Seven arrested in two-county skinhead bust

A sweep of skinhead lairs throughout the Inland Empire on Monday twice took sheriff's deputies to maternity wards where pregnant women were trying to bear babies on Adolf Hitler's birthday.
[...]
The white racist street gang has been responsible for murders in the High Desert, drug trafficking, home invasion robberies and countless assaults, officials said.

Abortion clinic bombers, skin heads, Tim McVeigh, militia groups are the republican base, or at least they must be because republicans are up in arms about labeling them terrorists.

BTW, my friends from across the aisle are right to be worried. President Obama wants to take your guns and put you in reeducation camps and as a bonus feature, he's gonna f*#k all the white women too! Morans.

Example 3:

Opponents of Climate Change Bill Launch Ad Campaign

Opponents of federal limits on greenhouse gases are launching ad campaigns in the districts of moderate Democrats negotiating a bill in the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The radio ads, sponsored by the American Energy Alliance, are running in the districts of nine committee Democrats and one Republican, Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania. The ads contend that the bill would hurt the economy and cost jobs.

The lobbying and advocacy group, which was formed last year, is headed by Thomas J. Pyle, a former energy policy aide to onetime Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas (1985-2006). It is affiliated with the Institute for Energy Research, a public policy center advocating what it terms “freely functioning energy markets.”

Hmm, OPEC is a “freely functioning energy market?”
But if you call now you'll receive:

Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

"The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood," the coalition said in a scientific "backgrounder" provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that "scientists differ" on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

"The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied," the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

Go Johnny go!

We're proud over here to consider the lovely and talented John Amato, proprietor of Crooks & Liars, a friend of this blog. We've known John since '05, hung out with him many times, and I can say that he's a really smart, passionate dude.

So imagine our excitement when we heard this:

I wanted to confirm to my readers that I am considering running for Jane Harman's seat. I've had meetings with bloggers and activists way before this story broke and they have urged me on. I've also been contacted by established campaign managers who have won elections which included huge upsets in the past that have expressed a serious interest in managing my campaign. This is a very important step in the process. At this point I am considering it, but haven't made a decision yet. I'm going to take my time before I decide, but I thought I owed it to you to confirm this report. Now back to our regularly scheduled content.

Indeed! John would be a real asset to the CA congressional team, and his politics are sound. We'll do everything we can to help him in this venture. (Note the use of the royal 'we'. I mean Pam & I, here at SteveAudio central. My co-bloggers are under no obligation to follow. Though they should.)

Harman, while hardly the worst Democrat, is still deeply flawed, as recent events have conclusively proven. She represents the CA-36 Congressional district, and is married to Sidney Harman, who runs Harman Industries and has ruined vast areas of professional audio equipment manufacturing in the U.S.

Glenn Greenwald on Harman's latest debacle:

So if I understand this correctly -- and I'm pretty sure I do -- when the U.S. Government eavesdropped for years on American citizens with no warrants and in violation of the law, that was "both legal and necessary" as well as "essential to U.S. national security," and it was the "despicable" whistle-blowers (such as Thomas Tamm) who disclosed that crime and the newspapers which reported it who should have been criminally investigated, but not the lawbreaking government officials. But when the U.S. Government legally and with warrants eavesdrops on Jane Harman, that is an outrageous invasion of privacy and a violent assault on her rights as an American citizen, and full-scale investigations must be commenced immediately to get to the bottom of this abuse of power. Behold Jane Harman's overnight transformation from Very Serious Champion of the Lawless Surveillance State to shrill civil liberties extremist.

Yeah. So go Johnny go!

Mean What You Say, Say What You Mean

Guess who said this?

March 17, 2003
War crimes will be prosecuted. War criminals will be punished. And it will be no defense to say, "I was just following orders."

The people who performed the torture, the people who used tortured legal logic to rationalize the torture, the people who approved the torture, to the people who knew about the torture and did nothing to stop it should be tried for war crimes.

This isn't a partisan issue, it's a war crime issue. Whether you're a Dem or a Repub, go to the International Court; do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to the court and get a fair trial.

p.s. CIA official: no proof harsh techniques stopped terror attacks
p.p.s. Torture does work! (If by 'work' you mean being tortured until you tell the torturers exactly what Bushco wanted to hear.)

I can't believe there is even a debate about torture in our country. Or even a debate about what constitutes torture. We've had this debate, as has the rest of the world, and we came to specific conclusions about torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Ronald Reagan signed it.

Even if it did work, which it doesn't for purposes of 'actionable intelligence', it's wrong, it's wrong on so many levels!



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

It's gonna be alright

"Hey everybody, how ya doin' tonight? Say, have you checked out that Twitter thingie? Do ya tweet? I mean, what is there to say in just 140 characters? I mean, my mom takes that many letters to say how much she hat. . ."

OK, all fooling aside. I enjoy teh™ Twitter, and have it linked to my Facebook page. I check every few days to see who might be 'following' me anew. As I mentioned a while back, I was surprised to find I was being followed by Karl Rove, after I had followed him. Clearly he doesn't read anything I tweet, he must automatically follow anyone who follows him. Thus, I am in rare company with only 25,000 or so of Karl's closest friends.

I checked tonight and saw that I was being followed by a man named Herb Meyer, whose bio said:

Herb Meyer, formerly a senior intelligence official for President Reagan, now helps people understand what's happening in the world.

Interesting. Can't recall the name, but let's see what's up. He lists his website as stormkingpress.com, which sounds vaguely Teutonic and creepy, perhaps a little close to StormFront. So I started reading some of Mr. Meyer's essays, and that's when it all became perfectly clear:

On the other side of this culture war are the Left-Wing Liberals. They are uncomfortable with our traditions, with the inevitable inequalities of our free-market economy, and with our military power. They dislike our values, our morality, and our unabashed displays of patriotism. At first -- back in the 1960s -- they were content merely to develop and pursue their own radical culture within ours. They tuned out, turned to drugs, and pushed the level of sexual license to a point our country had never known. They were so distressed by our imperfections that they refused to recognize or celebrate our achievements.

Then they tuned in, and developed a political agenda whose logical outcome would be the overthrow of the American Revolution itself. While we believe that power flows from God to the people, they believe the supreme power is the State, which decides what rights, if any, should be allowed to the people. And because there is no God above the State, there also is no truth; no such thing as right or wrong, good or evil. Since they are working to do good -- by their definition of the word -- whatever crimes they commit along the way don't matter. But if we are bent on doing what they define as harm, they will use any legal trick in the book to stop us. In short, the rule of law means whatever they want it to mean at any given moment.

They believe that rights are more important than responsibilities, that groups are more important than individuals, and that one's stand on public issues is more important than one's private actions or morality. And while they are careful never to condone the tactics of our country's foreign enemies, they always see some justification in our enemies' cause. They don't actually want us to be defeated by our foreign enemies; they wish merely to see us humbled and humiliated by them.

Yeah. About that. Straw man, anyone?

I won't belabor the point, Mr. Meyer is clearly not in a frame of mine to debate or discuss. I'll just hope that his failed logic and ideology will sink slowly into the sunset. As it should have back in 1968 when it had any relevance.

Oh, and I didn't 'Follow' him either. Waste of space/bandwidth. Kinda like Rove.

You're Slowly Disappearing From My View

...Would you mind going faster?

;>)


SteveAudio:

On a kinda-but-only-tangentially-related note, I did sound for a concert for the above-lampooned Flock of Seagulls in '83. The company I worked for brought in the big sound system, and I was Front Of House tech support. The FOS guys, especially Mike Score (he of the severe 'do') were gracious gentlemen, a real pleasure to work with. And live, they rocked pretty hard.

But don't try to get yourself elected

Michael Steele, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, has done a superb job of fund raising and getting Republicans elect . . .

Hahahahahaha!

Actually, in another entry in the long-running FAIL of Steele's Chairman-ship, Republican Jim Tedisco-ball has conceded defeat in his quest to take Kirsten Gillibrand's seat in the NY-20:

Steele was bound to take a hit on this one, even if the seat was previously held by Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand, now New York's junior Senator. The RNC chairman went to 20th congressional district twice to campaign for Jim Tedisco, the Republican candidate and state assemblyman. He sent money and party resources there as well. And with the seat having been in Republican hands prior to Gillibrand's 2006 election, it was viewed as a real chance for a GOP pick-up.

So, Michael, how's that working out for you now?

Don't Take The Bait, Old Chum

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

But a footnote to a 2005 memo made it clear that the rules were not always followed. Waterboarding was used "with far greater frequency than initially indicated" and with "large volumes of water" rather than the small quantities in the rules, one memo says, citing a 2004 report by the C.I.A.'s inspector general.

Officials Say U.S. Wiretaps Exceeded Law

The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year, government officials said in recent interviews.

F.B.I. and States Vastly Expand DNA Databases

Law enforcement officials are vastly expanding their collection of DNA to include millions more people who have been arrested or detained but not yet convicted.

Gee, government agencies have actually exceeded the incredibly unconstitutional powers that were granted them without our knowledge ... and then they were granted them ex post facto!?

Wow, no one could have predicted ...



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one

Obama consulted widely on memos

White House senior adviser David Axelrod says President Barack Obama spent about a month pondering whether to release Bush-era memos about CIA interrogation techniques, and considered it “a weighty decision.”
[...]
A former top official in the administration of President George W. Bush called the publication of the memos “unbelievable.”

“It's damaging because these are techniques that work, and by Obama's action today, we are telling the terrorists what they are,” the official said. “We have laid it all out for our enemies. This is totally unnecessary. … Publicizing the techniques does grave damage to our national security by ensuring they can never be used again — even in a ticking-time- bomb scenario where thousands or even millions of American lives are at stake."

I'll ignore the standard Politico method of giving anonymity to anyone who asks for it, (it's been covered), and go straight to the heart.

Those 'techniques' the Bush official was unwilling to lay claim to? Yeah, that would be torture, illegal by moral, US & International laws. And the 1st thing President Obama did in office was to outlaw those methods.

Now back to Bushworld "It's damaging because these are techniques that work, and by Obama's action today, we are telling the terrorists what they are" - actually the torture methods have been proven not to work. They weren't designed to elicit information, they were designed to elicit false confessions.

And, point of fact, the methods have already been published, (raise your hand if you've heard of 'waterboarding?'), just not the memos that authorized the torture. And what Obama was signifying to the world was that we have begun to climb out of the immoral & illegal abyss that 8 years of Bush & Co sunk us in.

More from the NYT:

Interrogation Memos Detail Harsh Tactics by the CIA.

[...]
Together, the four memos give an extraordinarily detailed account of the C.I.A.'s methods and the Justice Department's long struggle, in the face of graphic descriptions of brutal tactics, to square them with international and domestic law. Passages describing forced nudity, the slamming of detainees into walls, prolonged sleep deprivation and the dousing of detainees with water as cold as 41 degrees alternate with elaborate legal arguments concerning the international Convention Against Torture.
[...]
In the memos, the Justice Department authors emphasized precautions the C.I.A. proposed to take, including monitoring by medical personnel, and the urgency of getting information to stop terrorist attacks. They recounted the C.I.A.'s assertions of the effectiveness of the techniques but noted that interrogators could not always tell a prisoner who was withholding information from one who had no more information to offer.

The memos include what in effect are lengthy excerpts from the agency's interrogation manual, laying out with precision how each method was to be used. Waterboarding, for example, involved strapping a prisoner to a gurney inclined at an angle of "10 to 15 degrees" and pouring water over a cloth covering his nose and mouth "from a height of approximately 6 to 18 inches" for no more than 40 seconds at a time.

But a footnote to a 2005 memo made it clear that the rules were not always followed. Waterboarding was used "with far greater frequency than initially indicated" and with "large volumes of water" rather than the small quantities in the rules, one memo says, citing a 2004 report by the C.I.A.'s inspector general.

Further:

2 Suspects Waterboarded 266 Times

C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.
[...]
A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Wow, either waterboarding doesn't work or these guys really like their job!

p.s. John McCain, that flaming liberal, says:

"It's unacceptable," McCain said, adding:

One is too much. Waterboarding is torture, period. I can ensure you that once enough physical pain is inflicted on someone, they will tell that interrogator whatever they think they want to hear. And most importantly, it serves as a great propaganda tool for those who recruit people to fight against us.

p.p.s. Digby says it better than I can.



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak