Politics
pharyngula | April 20, 2009President Obama has released memos on the policies on prisoner interrogation under former President Bush. These are horrifying documents that expose the immorality of the previous administration. Unfortunately, Obama has not gone far enough: it's a good start to reveal the truth, but what needs to be done next is to investigate the senior officials who advised the perpetrators that torture was legal.
That investigation should start with the lawyers who wrote these sickening memos, including John Yoo, who now teaches law in California; Steven Bradbury, who was job-hunting when we last heard;…
ddobbs | April 20, 2009Earlier today I drew attention to a post by Questionable Authority on The Torture Memos, Medical "Professionals", and the Hippocratic Oath. Says Mike,
I cannot remember ever in my life being as ashamed of my country as I am at this moment. The contents of the memos are so insanely wrong that I'd like to believe that they're fiction, but they're clearly not.
He ends by calling for the AMA to identify the medical professionals involved and help them find new lines of work. A commenter on one of my earlier posts on psychologists, doctors, and torture, T. Hunt, joins him:
While the modern…
gregladen | April 20, 2009In one of the more nauseating passages, [of the recently released torture memos] Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.
These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors' statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for…
gregladen | April 20, 2009You can bank on it, I think. Eric Holder has apparently been moving in that direction, and JD officials were a bit put off on hearing Rahn Emanuel's comments to the contrary. Holder may name an outside counsel to investigate torture.
This is coming from Newsweek via Rachel Maddow.
gregladen | April 20, 2009This is being reported:
President Barack Obama does not intend to prosecute Bush administration officials who devised the policies that led to the harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said Sunday.
[Earlier,] ... he said "it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice, that they will not be subject to prosecution." He did not specifically address the policymakers.
Asked Sunday on ABC's "This Week" about the fate of those officials, Emanuel said the president…
oracknows | April 20, 2009David Irving has made a career out of being a Holocaust denier and then protesting when someone calls him a Holocaust denier. As you may recall, he even sued Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt for correctly referring to him as a Holocaust denier in one of her books.
Let's take a look at what's on his website today. If you go to Irving's main website and click on today's newsletter, this is what you will see as a flash screen before the website goes to the newsletter:
That's right! It's a big fat, sloppy 120th birthday kiss to Adolf Hitler, straight from David "I'm not a Holocaust denier…
illconsidered | April 20, 2009I'm sure most of us remember how incoherent Sarah Palin was about climate change (well, okay, about most things), but John Boehner seems to have his sights set on out doing the master!
In an interview with George Stephanopoulos (partial transcript here) his mangling of anything even remotely resembling an intelligent thought is really quite astounding!
His answer to climate change incredibly includes:
we need American-made oil and gas
Because foreign CO2 has such a higher greenhouse potential than good ol' American CO2.
Boehner offers this boner about the recent EPA ruling:
the idea that…
denialism | April 20, 2009Via Brayton I caught this disturbing video of the new right-wing fringe movement:
Now, if you guys have been following along for the last few years of denialism blog, you know you should immediately be suspicious of people alleging conspiracy theories. This one is a doozy. The administration as a culmination of a 5 decade communist plot to take over the country? This movement is disturbing, and as radical and unhinged as the 9/11 truthers. I would emphasize as always, no political ideology is safe from this paranoid fringe, and this is a great example of how ideology is the universal…
j7uy5 | April 20, 2009
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Amy Goodman,
the lead journalist for Democracy
Now!, has been traveling around the country, giving talks, and
promoting her book
href="http://www.democracynow.org/store/product/5/BKSUTMHC">Standing
Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times.
This (standing up to the madness) is inherently difficult.
The photo shows her discussing a video of
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2008/09/protests_in_minneapolis.php">her
arrest in St. Paul, while covering the Republican convention in
2008.
Ms.
Goodman happens to be one of our…
gregladen | April 20, 2009A joint project by Democrats has flipped traditional fund-raising on its head, by starting a campaign aimed at collecting $1 a day from supporters "to make Norm Coleman go away."
The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a new group working to get like-minded candidates elected, has teamed up with Howard Dean's Democracy for America to tap the wallets of Democrats who are disgruntled by the five-month-old ballot contest in Minnesota between Mr. Coleman, the former Republican senator, and Al Franken, the Democrat.
source
terrasig | April 20, 2009I never will forget the look on the faces
Of the men and women that awful day,
When we stood around to preach their funerals,
And lay the corpses of the dead away.
We told the Colorado Governor to call the President,
Tell him to call off his National Guard,
But the National Guard belonged to the Governor,
So he didn't try so very hard.
- Woody Guthrie, Ludlow Massacre (1944)
I've written variations on this post a few times, for both Labor Day and the anniversary of a major turning point in US labor relations that was kept alive by historian Howard Zinn and others. I had planned to…
pharyngula | April 19, 2009Legislators in Louisiana are considering a bill to prohibit human-animal hybrids. We've been all over this subject before — it's ridiculous and founded on complete incomprehension of what the research is all about. How ridiculous is it? SB 115 bans the "mixing of human and animal cells in a petri dish"!
Guess who is pushing this ban? The Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops, a collection of professional ignoramuses, like this guy, Archbishop Alfred Hughes: old, white celibates with clerical collars and heads stuffed full of decaying dogma.
Look, Hughes, let's face up to reality. You aren…
gregladen | April 19, 2009During the election campaign, the Palin/Whatshisname ticket made hay over Obama's statements that he would engage in international conversations with unsavory knee-jerks such as the president of Iran. I call these people knee-jerks because they invoke a knee-jerk response in right wing and even moderate circles. Obama is of course right in that it is counter productive to write off any possibility of communication with another nation or a globally significant faction of any kind a priori. Sure, writing them off a priori makes a point, and does so in a powerful way. But then what do you do…
catdynamics | April 18, 2009Elizabeth Warren on the Daily Show
I think she was about to curse...
ok, so this was some time ago, I'm behind
question is, why don't prime time news shows do interviews like this?
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
M - Th 11p / 10c
Elizabeth Warren Pt. 1
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Economic Crisis
Political Humor
I like her
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
M - Th 11p / 10c
Elizabeth Warren Pt. 2
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Economic Crisis
Political Humor
ddobbs | April 18, 2009Vaughn Bell, looking at the recent reports on torture, finds unsettling information about the participation of psychologists and physicians:
The Washington Post has an article exploring recently released 'war on terror' interrogation memos, showing that "psychologists, physicians and other health officials" played a key part in interrogations widely condemned as torture.
It's an interesting revelation because during the long debates, and some say heal-dragging, over whether the American Psychological Association should ban its members from participation, one of their main arguments was that…
grrlscientist | April 18, 2009tags: HR669, pets, exotic animals, invasive species, pet animal trade, PetSmart, politics
As expected, PetSmart has officially spoken out against HR 669. As a large corporation, you KNOW PetSmart has a flock of lawyers who are studying legislation such as this to make sure that laws are not enacted that would damage them or their clients. While PetSmart supports the primary aim of this bill -- to prevent the introduction of potentially invasive nonnative animal species into this country -- they point out that HR 669, as written, will damage the pet industry and harm pet owners ("pet parents…
gregladen | April 18, 2009Eric Black of MinnPost Dot Com has made an interesting observation. Last week the three judge panel charged with hearing Norm Coleman's "Election Contest" (that's a thing ... an election contest is a kind of suit claiming that an election did not go properly) finished their job. They ruled against some of Coleman's claims, but they did count extra ballots as Colman had insisted. That addition of new ballots -- all absentee ballots -- resulted in Franken's lead growing.
From that ruling, the plaintiff has ten days to file an appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court. The appeal itself is a…
clock | April 18, 2009Today (yes, I know, it was leaked last night), President Obama announced that the first nations' Chief Technology Officer will be Aneesh Paul Chopra.
The Silicon Valley folks are not pleased. Tim O'Reilly thinks he is an excellent choice. What do you think?
oracknows | April 18, 2009One more reason why John Stewart and his writers are geniuses is here, where he examines the "Tea Parties" we in the U.S. were subjected to three days ago, including one in my own town:
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
M - Th 11p / 10c
Nationwide Tax Protests
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Economic Crisis
Political Humor
How is it that to the right comparing Bush to Hitler was overblown and unfair over a great many issues, including the war in Iraq (a criticism that I actually agreed with, even though I was thoroughly opposed to the war--think Hitler Zombie),…
evolvingthoughts | April 17, 2009Obama's decision not to prosecute CIA agents who employed torture and illegal rendition is a bad decision. It politicises legal responsibility and does nothing to reinforce the rule of law. Perhaps every single agent who followed orders will be exonerated by these cases, but they ought to face prosecution for breaking the law, even under orders. The Nuremburg defence didn't play in 1946, and it shouldn't now.
There's a simple principle: if someone breaks the law, they should be tested in a court of law as to whether they had mitigating circumstances. If they didn't, then they should be…