Monday, October 30, 2006
When you come to a fork in the countdown--take it.
With a doff of the chapeau to Cal Ripken and Troy Aikman
Sunday, October 29, 2006
1.3%
In one of the ads here attacking Tammy Duckworth, the scary voiceover says that mean old Tammy wants to charge you a DEATH TAX when grandma hits the road. A DEATH TAX? HOW COULD SHE? GRANDMA'S DEAD!
OH, you mean the federal estate tax that applied to only 1.3 percent of all Illinois deaths as reported in 2004? That one? Pretty scary, huh?
OH, you mean the federal estate tax that applied to only 1.3 percent of all Illinois deaths as reported in 2004? That one? Pretty scary, huh?
Saturday, October 28, 2006
The most ridiculous political ad I ever heard
The right-wing wacko station here (I mean REAL wacko, Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage, etc., so you know their clientele) also broadcasts the regularly-scheduled defeats of my favorite college football team. I heard an ad for Republican candidate Dan Rutherford during today's loss (admittedly, it was one of those "The XYZ committee is responsible for this ad and is not associated with any candidate" ads, but who are we kidding?) talking about Dan and how strongly pro-life he is ("If the unborn could vote, they would vote for Dan Rutherford"--no, seriously, I'm not making that up), and how the pro-life voter should be excited.
Dan Rutherford is running for SECRETARY OF STATE.
Here in Illinois, the Secretary of State oversees:
1) drivers' licenses
2) license plates and titles
3) state corporate filings; and oddly enough
4) the Illinois State Museum.
[editor's note: Unlike in many states, the Secretary of State in Illinois does not oversee elections. That is done by an independent agency.]
While I do not wish to speak for my fellow team members, I believe we are on record here as strongly backing a "pro-life" Secretary of State's office.
We do not believe that abortions should be performed either while waiting for a drivers' license or while at the Illinois State Museum. We also strongly believe that license plates should neither be made from nor issued to aborted fetuses. Finally, aborted fetuses should not be allowed to incorporate.
Thank you.
Dan Rutherford is running for SECRETARY OF STATE.
Here in Illinois, the Secretary of State oversees:
1) drivers' licenses
2) license plates and titles
3) state corporate filings; and oddly enough
4) the Illinois State Museum.
[editor's note: Unlike in many states, the Secretary of State in Illinois does not oversee elections. That is done by an independent agency.]
While I do not wish to speak for my fellow team members, I believe we are on record here as strongly backing a "pro-life" Secretary of State's office.
We do not believe that abortions should be performed either while waiting for a drivers' license or while at the Illinois State Museum. We also strongly believe that license plates should neither be made from nor issued to aborted fetuses. Finally, aborted fetuses should not be allowed to incorporate.
Thank you.
Wow, that's a stunner...
Not a nice company like Halliburton...(story)
A Halliburton subsidiary that has been subjected to numerous investigations for billions of dollars of contracts it has received for work in Iraq has systematically misused federal rules to withhold basic information on its practices from U.S. officials, a federal oversight agency said Friday.The contracts awarded to the company, KBR, formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root, are for housing, food, fuel and other necessities to U.S. troops and government officials in Iraq and for restoring that country's crucial oil infrastructure. The contracts total about $20 billion...."The arrogance is astounding on the part of KBR," said William Nash, a retired Army major general who is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on post conflict zones. "It's time for Congress to step in, because this has just gone too far."
A Halliburton subsidiary that has been subjected to numerous investigations for billions of dollars of contracts it has received for work in Iraq has systematically misused federal rules to withhold basic information on its practices from U.S. officials, a federal oversight agency said Friday.The contracts awarded to the company, KBR, formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root, are for housing, food, fuel and other necessities to U.S. troops and government officials in Iraq and for restoring that country's crucial oil infrastructure. The contracts total about $20 billion...."The arrogance is astounding on the part of KBR," said William Nash, a retired Army major general who is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on post conflict zones. "It's time for Congress to step in, because this has just gone too far."
C'mon Doc, ease up on the Veep
[Presidential Spokesliar and former Fox News mouthpiece Tony] Snow said "Cheney did not interpret the question as referring to water boarding and the vice president did not make any comments about water boarding. He said the question put to Cheney was "loosely worded." In water boarding, a prisoner is tied to a board with his head slanted down and a towel covering his face. Water is then poured on his face to create the sensation of drowning. The administration has repeatedly refused to say which techniques it believes are permitted under a new law. Asked to define a dunk in water, Snow said, "It's a dunk in the water."
You see, Doc, it's not torture. Like you said, it's just the dunk tank
You see, Doc, it's not torture. Like you said, it's just the dunk tank
or a dip in the ol' swimmin' hole.
Speaking of prison...
It was a joy to read this one this morning:
Because of the length of his 292-month sentence [Enron scumbag Jeff] Skilling is almost certainly eligible for no less than a medium-security institution, typically surrounded by a double-fenced perimeter and armed guards. Only those with 10 years or less to serve get assigned to the minimum-security "camps" affording the least restrictions.There is a god.
In medium security, inmates generally share two-person or three-person cells rather than the dorms or cubicles more common in lower-security settings. Every movement is closely controlled by corrections officers. Work and treatment programs take a back seat to the goal of maintaining compliance in a noisy, crowded environment laced with violent offenders....
For federal inmates, structure rules the day. They generally wake at 6 a.m., eat cafeteria-style at 6:30, then start their seven-hour work days around 7:30. Duties range from groundskeeping and maintenance to food service, spokeswoman Billingsley said. Pay ranges from 12 to 40 cents an hour.
Friday, October 27, 2006
It's up to us
There was an interview (talk about a reporter with an agenda) done this week with our dear, sweet, caring, lovable Vice President, ol' Shoot-you-in-the-face.
Hennen: ... And I've had people call and say, please, let the vice president know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we're all for it, if it saves American lives. Again, this debate seems a little silly given the threat we face, would you agree?
Cheney: I do agree. And I think the terrorist threat, for example, with respect to our ability to interrogate high value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that's been a very important tool that we've had to be able to secure the nation ...
Hennen: Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?
Cheney: It's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as being the vice president "for torture." We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in ...
If W had said this, the phrase "no-brainer" would be an easy target, but we all know that Cheney's alien brain is quite sophisticated. It's his heart that doesn't work right.
It's nice to know that waterboarding is apparently just like the dunk tank at the county fair, where the high school principal gets splashed a few times for charity. Frankly, I don't even see why that would get a terrorist to spill secrets, if that's all it was, unless they were the Wicked Witch of the West. So for waterboarding to be a useful interrogation tool, it has to be more than a "dunk".
Here's a picture, from the Washington Post of US soldiers waterboarding a North Vietnamese soldier in 1968. In an article, about the passing of the Military Commissions Act, we learned that
[T]he practice was "fairly common" in part because "those who practice it say it combines the advantages of being unpleasant enough to make people talk while still not causing permanent injury."
The picture reportedly led to an Army investigation.
Twenty-one years earlier, in 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.
"Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told his colleagues last Thursday during the debate on military commissions legislation. "We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II," he said.
A CIA interrogation training manual declassified 12 years ago, "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation -- July 1963," outlined a procedure similar to waterboarding. Subjects were suspended in tanks of water wearing blackout masks that allowed for breathing. Within hours, the subjects felt tension and so-called environmental anxiety. "Providing relief for growing discomfort, the questioner assumes a benevolent role," the manual states.
...Used to train new interrogators, the handbook presented "basic information about coercive techniques available for use in the interrogation situation." When it comes to torture, however, the handbook advised that "the threat to inflict pain . . . can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain."
In the post-Vietnam period, the Navy SEALs and some Army Special Forces used a form of waterboarding with trainees to prepare them to resist interrogation if captured. The waterboarding proved so successful in breaking their will, says one former Navy captain familiar with the practice, "they stopped using it because it hurt morale."
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the interrogation world changed. Low-level Taliban and Arab fighters captured in Afghanistan provided little information, the former intelligence official said. When higher-level al-Qaeda operatives were captured, CIA interrogators sought authority to use more coercive methods.
These were cleared not only at the White House but also by the Justice Department and briefed to senior congressional officials, according to a statement released last month by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Waterboarding was one of the approved techniques.
Approved techniques, eh? In 1947, we prosecute the Japanese for doing it to us, now it's just a little dunk. Well, let's examine some other people who have used this "technique." Like the Khmer Rouge (and if ever there was a group of people one would want to emulate, it would be them).
From David Corn: The similarity between practices used by the Khymer Rouge and those currently being debated by Congress isn't a coincidence. As has been amply documented ("The New Yorker" had an excellent piece, and there have been others), many of the "enhanced techniques" came to the CIA and military interrogators via the SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape] schools, where US military personnel are trained to resist torture if they are captured by the enemy. The specific types of abuse they're taught to withstand are those that were used by our Cold War adversaries. Why is this relevant to the current debate? Because the torture techniques of North Korea, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union and its proxies--the states where US military personnel might have faced torture--were NOT designed to elicit truthful information. These techniques were designed to elicit CONFESSIONS. That's what the Khymer Rouge et al were after with their waterboarding, not truthful information.
That's an interesting conclusion – our government doesn't torture people (for that is what waterboarding is, not withstanding the delusional dunking theory) for information, it tortures them to get confessions.
Confessions lead to convictions.
Convictions lead to W and Darth and Rummy saying "We got the badguys, we'll keep you safe."
That leads to more Republican victories and more power for their small group of "elites". As with the Khmer Rouge and other dictatorships, power isn’t to be used to help the people, to protect the people, or any of the other standard functions of government. It’s used to keep those in power safe. It’s used to give those in power more power. And it will keep on doing that until stopped.
If we don’t stop it now, the mechanisms we have to prevent the torture and death of the many for the benefit of the few become more violent, more bloody, and more destructive to our world.
On November 7, vote. Vote not just to send a message, or to get rid of the corrupt or the evil (though those are necessary things). Vote to safe the weak. Vote to save our national soul. Vote to prevent the armed revolutions of the future, putting right much too late what we can put right now with our choices at the polls.
Hennen: ... And I've had people call and say, please, let the vice president know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we're all for it, if it saves American lives. Again, this debate seems a little silly given the threat we face, would you agree?
Cheney: I do agree. And I think the terrorist threat, for example, with respect to our ability to interrogate high value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that's been a very important tool that we've had to be able to secure the nation ...
Hennen: Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?
Cheney: It's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as being the vice president "for torture." We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in ...
If W had said this, the phrase "no-brainer" would be an easy target, but we all know that Cheney's alien brain is quite sophisticated. It's his heart that doesn't work right.
It's nice to know that waterboarding is apparently just like the dunk tank at the county fair, where the high school principal gets splashed a few times for charity. Frankly, I don't even see why that would get a terrorist to spill secrets, if that's all it was, unless they were the Wicked Witch of the West. So for waterboarding to be a useful interrogation tool, it has to be more than a "dunk".
Here's a picture, from the Washington Post of US soldiers waterboarding a North Vietnamese soldier in 1968. In an article, about the passing of the Military Commissions Act, we learned that
[T]he practice was "fairly common" in part because "those who practice it say it combines the advantages of being unpleasant enough to make people talk while still not causing permanent injury."
The picture reportedly led to an Army investigation.
Twenty-one years earlier, in 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.
"Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told his colleagues last Thursday during the debate on military commissions legislation. "We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II," he said.
A CIA interrogation training manual declassified 12 years ago, "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation -- July 1963," outlined a procedure similar to waterboarding. Subjects were suspended in tanks of water wearing blackout masks that allowed for breathing. Within hours, the subjects felt tension and so-called environmental anxiety. "Providing relief for growing discomfort, the questioner assumes a benevolent role," the manual states.
...Used to train new interrogators, the handbook presented "basic information about coercive techniques available for use in the interrogation situation." When it comes to torture, however, the handbook advised that "the threat to inflict pain . . . can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain."
In the post-Vietnam period, the Navy SEALs and some Army Special Forces used a form of waterboarding with trainees to prepare them to resist interrogation if captured. The waterboarding proved so successful in breaking their will, says one former Navy captain familiar with the practice, "they stopped using it because it hurt morale."
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the interrogation world changed. Low-level Taliban and Arab fighters captured in Afghanistan provided little information, the former intelligence official said. When higher-level al-Qaeda operatives were captured, CIA interrogators sought authority to use more coercive methods.
These were cleared not only at the White House but also by the Justice Department and briefed to senior congressional officials, according to a statement released last month by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Waterboarding was one of the approved techniques.
Approved techniques, eh? In 1947, we prosecute the Japanese for doing it to us, now it's just a little dunk. Well, let's examine some other people who have used this "technique." Like the Khmer Rouge (and if ever there was a group of people one would want to emulate, it would be them).
From David Corn: The similarity between practices used by the Khymer Rouge and those currently being debated by Congress isn't a coincidence. As has been amply documented ("The New Yorker" had an excellent piece, and there have been others), many of the "enhanced techniques" came to the CIA and military interrogators via the SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape] schools, where US military personnel are trained to resist torture if they are captured by the enemy. The specific types of abuse they're taught to withstand are those that were used by our Cold War adversaries. Why is this relevant to the current debate? Because the torture techniques of North Korea, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union and its proxies--the states where US military personnel might have faced torture--were NOT designed to elicit truthful information. These techniques were designed to elicit CONFESSIONS. That's what the Khymer Rouge et al were after with their waterboarding, not truthful information.
That's an interesting conclusion – our government doesn't torture people (for that is what waterboarding is, not withstanding the delusional dunking theory) for information, it tortures them to get confessions.
Confessions lead to convictions.
Convictions lead to W and Darth and Rummy saying "We got the badguys, we'll keep you safe."
That leads to more Republican victories and more power for their small group of "elites". As with the Khmer Rouge and other dictatorships, power isn’t to be used to help the people, to protect the people, or any of the other standard functions of government. It’s used to keep those in power safe. It’s used to give those in power more power. And it will keep on doing that until stopped.
If we don’t stop it now, the mechanisms we have to prevent the torture and death of the many for the benefit of the few become more violent, more bloody, and more destructive to our world.
On November 7, vote. Vote not just to send a message, or to get rid of the corrupt or the evil (though those are necessary things). Vote to safe the weak. Vote to save our national soul. Vote to prevent the armed revolutions of the future, putting right much too late what we can put right now with our choices at the polls.
What price would you pay?
We've established what you are, madam, now we're just haggling price.
So the other day I was listening to Air America in the car. They were asking people why they were voting Republican. One person called up and said that they weren't, but they had asked friends who were that question. The response? "If the Democrats win, they'll raise my taxes by $25,000 a year." Now, those people must be making an awful lot of money for a tax hike to cost them that much, but it's clear what they're saying. The war, the death, the destruction, the removal of civil liberties, the disregard for the Constitution - all of it (not to mention the attacks on social programs, the growing disenfranchisement of the poor, the young, the old, and the sick) - is worth no more than $25,000 a year to them.
I wonder what price they would take. Twenty thousand? Heck, that's about $200 for every US soldier who's died in Iraq this month alone. That's pretty cheap, don't you think?
So the other day I was listening to Air America in the car. They were asking people why they were voting Republican. One person called up and said that they weren't, but they had asked friends who were that question. The response? "If the Democrats win, they'll raise my taxes by $25,000 a year." Now, those people must be making an awful lot of money for a tax hike to cost them that much, but it's clear what they're saying. The war, the death, the destruction, the removal of civil liberties, the disregard for the Constitution - all of it (not to mention the attacks on social programs, the growing disenfranchisement of the poor, the young, the old, and the sick) - is worth no more than $25,000 a year to them.
I wonder what price they would take. Twenty thousand? Heck, that's about $200 for every US soldier who's died in Iraq this month alone. That's pretty cheap, don't you think?
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Not a right-wing dumbass--just a dumbass
J. Schwartz of Niles writes: I'm up in years--like way up. But I enjoy music on the radio and would love to hear music that I danced to years ago. The music now is for kids who should be in school. And I'm sure this type of music is not enjoyed by most people in my age group. While standing at the sink doing dishes, I'd love to sway to my kind of music.
Hint to "J"--if there was a market for your music, it would be on the air. Otherwise, try this newfangled invention called a "compact disc." They have them at the library where you go to talk too loudly by the magazines and to go to the men's room to make sure your pants are hiked up securely under your armpits. J., on your way--
Hint to "J"--if there was a market for your music, it would be on the air. Otherwise, try this newfangled invention called a "compact disc." They have them at the library where you go to talk too loudly by the magazines and to go to the men's room to make sure your pants are hiked up securely under your armpits. J., on your way--
Same morning, different stories
I just checked the blog e-mail on Yahoo, and these were the top two stories on the news headline page. As Rod Serling would say, submitted for your consideration:
DALLAS - Oil industry behemoth Exxon Mobil Corp. said Thursday its third-quarter earnings rose to $10.49 billion, the second-largest quarterly profit ever recorded by a publicly traded U.S. company.
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The number of American troops killed in Iraq in October reached the highest monthly total in a year Thursday after four Marines and a sailor died of wounds suffered while fighting in the same Sunni insurgent stronghold.
DALLAS - Oil industry behemoth Exxon Mobil Corp. said Thursday its third-quarter earnings rose to $10.49 billion, the second-largest quarterly profit ever recorded by a publicly traded U.S. company.
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The number of American troops killed in Iraq in October reached the highest monthly total in a year Thursday after four Marines and a sailor died of wounds suffered while fighting in the same Sunni insurgent stronghold.
See below--they've just been moved
Perhaps he misspoke (what are the odds of that??) but if he really said what he meant to say, the [p]resident dramatically redefined the "mission" in Iraq. According to the commander-in-chief, "the ultimate victory in Iraq, which is a government that can sustain itself, govern itself, and defend itself..."
Democracy? Nah, not happening. Stability and self-defense is now the goal. Stability and self-defense, like......
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
A great quote from the NJ ruling
h/t Atrios:
HELD: Denying committed same-sex couples the financial and social benefits and privileges given to their married heterosexual counterparts bears no substantial relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose. The Court holds that under the equal protection guarantee of Article I, Paragraph 1 of the New Jersey Constitution, committed samesex couples must be afforded on equal terms the same rights and benefits enjoyed by opposite-sex couples under the civil marriage statutes. The name to be given to the statutory scheme that provides full rights and benefits to samesex couples, whether marriage or some other term, is a matter left to the democratic process.
HELD: Denying committed same-sex couples the financial and social benefits and privileges given to their married heterosexual counterparts bears no substantial relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose. The Court holds that under the equal protection guarantee of Article I, Paragraph 1 of the New Jersey Constitution, committed samesex couples must be afforded on equal terms the same rights and benefits enjoyed by opposite-sex couples under the civil marriage statutes. The name to be given to the statutory scheme that provides full rights and benefits to samesex couples, whether marriage or some other term, is a matter left to the democratic process.
Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.
I had no reason to root for Jeff Suppan and the St. Louis Cardinals tonight before I learned about his politics, but now I want to see him get embarassed on national TV.
Oh, and Kurt Warner? Shut the hell up. Stem cell research might not have benefits for 15 years, so we shouldn't invest in it? Why don't you talk about something you understand - not science, obviously - like what it feels like to hold a clipboard?
Oh, and Kurt Warner? Shut the hell up. Stem cell research might not have benefits for 15 years, so we shouldn't invest in it? Why don't you talk about something you understand - not science, obviously - like what it feels like to hold a clipboard?
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