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Too many tabs (2)
Sep. 16th, 2009 10:23 amThis is pretty free-form and I've spent too much time on it already to clean it up further.
If you want to tell Barney Frank what you think of his anti-DOMA-repeal commentary (and coverage for Mr. Obama's broken promises), he doesn't want to hear from you. But if you want to send mail anyway, go to the US House of Representatives email contact webpage and falsify your registration by entering New Bedford, MA 02740. That'll get you a contact form. I used 1 Dykeville for the street address, but use whatever you want - the form doesn't validate that part.
Talking more of Mr. Obama's broken promises, here's a series of joys for you: Mr. Obama is defying Federal court orders by refusing to release prisoners ordered released, "despite court rulings that the government hasn’t shown the men have done anything wrong or present any security risk." Mr. Obama's administration is also refusing to release evidence courts have ordered released. And while Gitmo may get closed - sort of, eventually, sometime, but if so much later than promised - it won't matter that much because they've built a new one in Bagram, complete with Bushian military tribunals that have already been ruled unconstitutional. The plan - and the defence of this is already filed, by the way, this isn't speculation - is to spend another few years in arguments that the new location means everything is somehow different, and that - just as the Bush administration argued for Gitmo - the detainees at Bagram have no rights whatsoever and the administration can do whatever the hell it wants with them.
Oh, and there's his 'preventive detention' proposals, again inherited from Mr. Bush; the power to arrest anyone, anywhere, whether they've done anything wrong or not, and imprison them, forever.
And, of course, we're already seeing Obama administration's use of abusive rendition, picking up right where the Bush administration left off. That was, by the way, all for a low-level corruption case - there wasn't even a pretence of "terrorism." And there's also Mr. Obama's endorsement of torture not just by refusal to investigate or prosecute American torture as policy under the Bush administration, but more, to initiate a scapegoat investigation that takes John Woo's bad-faith torture-approving memos as accepted law. John Woo's bad-faith restroactive torture approval memos become the baseline, the new standard for "moving forward."
Yeah. This is lots better.
Anyway, other tabs:
Wow, Stephen Harper really does want to be an American, doesn't he? A Republican in particular. I thought that whole "we want to be you" speech several years ago to GOP leadership was just sucking up, but damn, he talks that way behind closed doors to Canadians, too. What a schmuck.
Let's face it: terrorism (and threats thereof) works. Particularly when media et al refuse to call it that. despite petitions and such, Mr. Obama announced that abortion would not be covered in any national health bill. Yay?
Iraq's government has reverted to its old ways, with systematic use of torture and other things Americans used to consider atrocities.
Here, this is appalling. Genetic and nutrient flaws in Muslims damage their brains make them terrorists, so the US needs to capture and execute the 100,000 or so worst ones to "cleanse" the healthy Muslim body of their "cancer." It'd be the usual sort of eugenicist bullshittery except it was published in The Intelligencer: The Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies for the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, whose honorary board of directors includes one former US president, and various other people of influence.
Tracing the 2 Million Protestor lie. The fake crowd figure as a specific figure isn't so much interesting as the route taken to reach it and the lie about who generated the lie to start.
Read star beltway 'journalist' David Broder arguing against torture prosecutions and demanding immunity for the powerful from prosecution:
If you want to tell Barney Frank what you think of his anti-DOMA-repeal commentary (and coverage for Mr. Obama's broken promises), he doesn't want to hear from you. But if you want to send mail anyway, go to the US House of Representatives email contact webpage and falsify your registration by entering New Bedford, MA 02740. That'll get you a contact form. I used 1 Dykeville for the street address, but use whatever you want - the form doesn't validate that part.
Talking more of Mr. Obama's broken promises, here's a series of joys for you: Mr. Obama is defying Federal court orders by refusing to release prisoners ordered released, "despite court rulings that the government hasn’t shown the men have done anything wrong or present any security risk." Mr. Obama's administration is also refusing to release evidence courts have ordered released. And while Gitmo may get closed - sort of, eventually, sometime, but if so much later than promised - it won't matter that much because they've built a new one in Bagram, complete with Bushian military tribunals that have already been ruled unconstitutional. The plan - and the defence of this is already filed, by the way, this isn't speculation - is to spend another few years in arguments that the new location means everything is somehow different, and that - just as the Bush administration argued for Gitmo - the detainees at Bagram have no rights whatsoever and the administration can do whatever the hell it wants with them.
Oh, and there's his 'preventive detention' proposals, again inherited from Mr. Bush; the power to arrest anyone, anywhere, whether they've done anything wrong or not, and imprison them, forever.
And, of course, we're already seeing Obama administration's use of abusive rendition, picking up right where the Bush administration left off. That was, by the way, all for a low-level corruption case - there wasn't even a pretence of "terrorism." And there's also Mr. Obama's endorsement of torture not just by refusal to investigate or prosecute American torture as policy under the Bush administration, but more, to initiate a scapegoat investigation that takes John Woo's bad-faith torture-approving memos as accepted law. John Woo's bad-faith restroactive torture approval memos become the baseline, the new standard for "moving forward."
Yeah. This is lots better.
Anyway, other tabs:
Wow, Stephen Harper really does want to be an American, doesn't he? A Republican in particular. I thought that whole "we want to be you" speech several years ago to GOP leadership was just sucking up, but damn, he talks that way behind closed doors to Canadians, too. What a schmuck.
Let's face it: terrorism (and threats thereof) works. Particularly when media et al refuse to call it that. despite petitions and such, Mr. Obama announced that abortion would not be covered in any national health bill. Yay?
Iraq's government has reverted to its old ways, with systematic use of torture and other things Americans used to consider atrocities.
Here, this is appalling. Genetic and nutrient flaws in Muslims damage their brains make them terrorists, so the US needs to capture and execute the 100,000 or so worst ones to "cleanse" the healthy Muslim body of their "cancer." It'd be the usual sort of eugenicist bullshittery except it was published in The Intelligencer: The Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies for the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, whose honorary board of directors includes one former US president, and various other people of influence.
Tracing the 2 Million Protestor lie. The fake crowd figure as a specific figure isn't so much interesting as the route taken to reach it and the lie about who generated the lie to start.
Read star beltway 'journalist' David Broder arguing against torture prosecutions and demanding immunity for the powerful from prosecution:
That media elites -- ostensibly devoted to accountability for the powerful -- fulfill the exact opposite role by demanding immunity for their lawbreaking is why elite lawlessness is so rampant. But that's well-established by now, so I want to focus on another point raised by this Broderian opposition: a completely self-serving falsehood that lies at the core of the debate over investigations.And so on.
The standard claim made by investigation opponents in the media is that we all know that torture is abhorrent and that what was done is terribly wrong, but that prosecutions would just be too disruptive. Broder asks: "Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock? . . . The cost to the country would simply be too great."
But it's simply not true that these journalists vehemently objected to torture as abhorrent but now merely believe prosecutions are an over-reaction. The reality is that they did not object to the torture regime as it was implemented. They did the opposite: they mocked those who objected to it and who tried to stop it as overheated, hysterical, fringe leftists -- as Broder did in a November, 2004 Op-Ed, deriding as "unhinged" those who were arguing "that 'the forces of darkness' are taking over the country."
