Glenzilla, Digby on Torture

Glenzilla takes apart Peter King, but more broadly, indicts the Right for assuming that their beliefs even have a passing familiarity with those of the founding fathers.


Money:

Few things are more repellent than watching the contemporary Right in America invoke the principles of the Founders -- in general -- to justify their warped and lawless authoritarianism. But nothing is more repulsive than watching them pretend that Thomas Paine -- of all people -- has anything to do with them (Glenn Beck actually wrote his most recent book based on the explicit pretense that he is the modern day Paine). Any casual reading of Paine makes clear that, today, he would be so far on what is deemed the "left" side of the spectrum that you'd be unable to find him. Paine is nothing but what Joe Klein refers to as a "crazy civil liberties absolutist" and what Rush Limbaugh similarly calls "far, fringe, lunatic kooks, far left radical lunatic fringe."
The Right today argues that condemning torture is wrong because the people who were tortured were just Terrorists -- barely human -- and they deserve no defense, not even the force of law. Thomas Paine argued as a first principle that those devoted to liberty "must guard even his enemy from oppression." Could the contrast be any more stark?

Maybe even more importantly, Digby points out that the constant "restarts" on the torture revelations are dilatory and hurtful to the ultimate goal. All of this has been revealed over and over again. Not only did we torture, we tortured innocents, we murdered and disappeared captives held without trial, and it was all approved from the highest levels. The notion that there is anything more or new to reveal is simply wrong. The Holder investigation is good news, but it is long overdue and needs to now move forward unimpeded.

The Loyal Opposition

We probably shouldn't be surprised....

As Atrios says, it won't get as much attention as Michelle Obama's shorts, or the latest insane ramblings of Sarah Palin, but it should be mentioned that the use of the threat of terror in order to affect politics or elections is, um, what terrorists do.

Good God. Can we Revisit that Secession Issue?

It beggars the mind....

Where we find ourselves...

This is where we are with regard to the wingnut right in America. Glen Beck and his guest, Michael Scheuer are openly rooting for an attack on America, to save us from ourselves and our Islamonegrophied President, who is totally into socialism and is plotting to take away all of our guns and ammo. Don't bother to try and stomach the entire clip, it's mainly two chimps throwing poo around their cage. Skip to the six minute mark for the denouement..




Keep in mind that 2.5 million people get their news from this guy.

Quit your bellyaching....

Digby shows us the true Republican approach to healthcare reform in the US.

The GOP concern trolls...

Bret Stephens has an entirely predictable opinion piece in the WSJ today, in which he voices the concern and newfound support for the Iranian populace, who have taken to the streets in an historic and inspiring fashion in order to protest the incumbent regime's handling of the recent presidential election. Leaving aside the obvious ironies of the Katherine Harris/Norm Coleman type, the concern trolls unleashed at the Journal are a bit hard to swallow, as they are the same group that until recently was insisting that it would be a swell idea to bomb the shit out of these same people. As Greenwald points out, at about the same time that Batshit Crazy John McCain was singing "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran", the Journal was running an editorial from Norman Podhoretz, the bloodthirsty ghoul who breathed life into the neocon movement, explaining that he "hopes and prays" that we bomb Iran.

The other toadies of the neocon movement, including Bill Kristol, Dick Cheney, John Bolton, and Joe Lieberman fell quickly into line, supporting pre-emptive strikes against the 70 million or so souls who live in Persia. Their recent conversion to Iranophiles may be somewhat cynically viewed by the protesters in the streets of Tehran, I'd guess.

Look, I don't know whether the election there was fairly counted or not. It seems plausible that the will of the Iranian people may well have been to return Ahmadinejad, certainly some of the polling supports that conclusion. My guess is that Stephen's bold assertion that the "election was so transparently rigged that the only serious question is whether the regime even bothered to stuff the ballot boxes", is probably a rash assertion based upon his hopes and not any familiarity with the facts on the ground or the true wishes of the Persian people. The elections in Iran probably had much more to do with the day to day lives of the citizens there than they did with what Bret Stephens, John McCain, and George Will hoped to happen there.

More to the point is the sad irony that we continue to take seriously the opinions of the Kristol's and Podhoretz' of the neocon right, who have been so transparently wrong on every question on which they have opined, and now cry crocodile tears for a people who up to a few months ago they lusted to destroy.


UPDATE: Leave it to TBogg to play the Pam Geller card. Read the whole post, it's priceless.

All I do is keep the beat....

happy friday.

Long Weekend

Here's yer music:





Jay Farrar and the boys. I actually caught a few minutes of Jeff Tweedy and Wilco at Jazzfest, walking out after a full day of New Orleans sun. James Taylor and Erykah Badu were playing at the same time. Erykah has no competition for best 'fro in the business.

Funny Stuff.

Let's just get this straight. Wanda Sykes silly joke about Rush Limbaugh, the gasbag that routinely calls our President Osama, who spits bile and racist lies on a daily basis to 20 million mouth breathing subhumans, and who when challenged on his hateful discourse hides behind the excuse that he is "just an entertainer", was not not particularly funny. The feigned outrage of hypocritical torture supporters and fear mongering embittered old men like William Bennett are truly pathetic. But tasteless? Over the line? Outrageously insensitive and truly offensive. You want offensive humor at the White House Correspondents Dinner? That I've got:





Give me a break.

Best thing you'll see today

Impromptu jam session by a couple at the Mayo Clinic..

Here's what we got....

And just so we're clear on exactly what we were able to "get" for all of our torture porn, the Senate Armed Services Committee report issued yesterday makes it pretty clear. Jane Hamsher spells it out:

Serial sadists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, the psychologists who were the first to rationalize and implement torture, were not members of the CIA and are not covered under Obama's immunity blanket. They violated their ethics as health professionals, and should lose their licenses and face criminal prosecution.

• Jessen and Mitchell modeled their torture program on methods used by the North Koreans to extract false confessions.

• Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney "demanded that intelligence agencies and interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration," despite the fact that the CIA told them repeatedly that no such collaboration existed. So, extracting false confessions was the goal.

• The Bybee Memo justified the use of waterboarding on enemy combatants because it had been deemed safe for use by US military in a program (SERE) to train soldiers at high risk of capture about what they might expect to encounter. It's sort of like saying it's okay to throw someone out of a plane because you pushed them off the porch and they were fine.

• The doctor whose memo Yoo/Bybee relied upon for assurances that waterboarding was safe, Dr. Jerald Ogrisseg, said that "he was surprised when he found out later that Lt Col Baumgartner had forwarded his memo to the General Counsel’s office." Dr. Ogrisseg testified that when Lt Col Baungartner asked about waterboarding in the real world, he told him that "aside from being illegal, it was a completely different arena that we in the Survival School didn’t know anything about." (h/t Valtin)

• So, Yoo/Bybee based their legal justification for waterboarding on assurances of safety they got from a memo that was talking about something else entirely, and which the author of the memo had expressly said did not apply in the situation.

Rumsfeld and Cheney worked backwards from a survival guide that the army used to prepare their men for torture techniques used by the Chinese and North Koreans. That torture was specifically designed to elicit false testimony. Either the two of them were psychopaths or morons, and probably a health dose of both. Bybee and Yoo gave them all of the legal cover that they requested and required to proceed. The ultimate goal was certainly to force the confession of a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam.

Cheney continues to belch bile....

Couple of things about Cheney's whine this weekend concerning the release of the torture memos, in which he said:

"I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country," Cheney said. "I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was."

First, at this point, Dick Cheney has no more authority to ask the CIA to do anything than I do. It's getting a bit embarrassing, actually. He's probably ordering his neighbors around, and screaming at his secret service agent to bring him some fresh pudding.

Secondly, my guess is that if we had to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in one month, the information we got from him wasn't so super at all. I'd admit to being Ethel Merman after the first dunk, and by number 183, I can't imagine what I'd cop to.

Happy Teabagging Day!

Tomorrow is the big day for the rightwingers, the spontaneous and entirely grass roots "teabagging" movement will take to the streets. Enjoy!

Glen Beck, Historian

It's funny, I remember clearly learning the difference between fascism and communism, within the broad definition of totalitarianism in eighth grade in Mrs. Griffith's history class. We studied the continuum of political beliefs and systems (oligarchy, aristocracy, monarchy, democracy, etc) and discussed how no pure system would really work, including a pure democracy, which would dissolve into mob rule or anarchy.

And when Jonah Goldberg published "Liberal Fascism" last year, it was easy to shrug it off as the meanderings of a third rate conservative slob, because any sentient eighth grader would immediately recognize that liberalism and fascism were and are in diametric opposition.

Interesting to note, then, that one of the highest rated cable news shows, Glen Beck's, continues to promote the notion that the Obama administration is somehow leading us down the road to fascism, and that the policies that we are pursuing to pull ourselves out of the mire that eight years of the Bush administration left us in are somehow akin to those of the Nazi party in Germany. Of course, when I was in Mrs. Griffith's history class, we'd also have recognized Beck as nothing more than a madman screaming at people on the street corner, so perhaps this is all part of a general rise in the stupidity level of Americans.

Anyway, Beck's particular thesis, if it can be dignified with that term, is shredded to pieces by Orcinus, here.

It makes for great reading.

Kudlowmania!

Larry Kudlow denies his interest in Chris Dodd's Senate seat, in a way that makes it clear that all he wants if for a few more people to ask him to run and he'll do it.



Yes, Larry, please run. You are clearly what the GOP needs right now, another thinly closeted, thrice married, apostate recovering alcoholic and cocaine addict.

Yikes, a plan....

Unfortunately for all of us, Krugman is probably right.

The common element to the Paulson and Geithner plans is the insistence that the bad assets on banks’ books are really worth much, much more than anyone is currently willing to pay for them. In fact, their true value is so high that if they were properly priced, banks wouldn’t be in trouble.

And so the plan is to use taxpayer funds to drive the prices of bad assets up to “fair” levels. Mr. Paulson proposed having the government buy the assets directly. Mr. Geithner instead proposes a complicated scheme in which the government lends money to private investors, who then use the money to buy the stuff. The idea, says Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser, is to use “the expertise of the market” to set the value of toxic assets.

But the Geithner scheme would offer a one-way bet: if asset values go up, the investors profit, but if they go down, the investors can walk away from their debt. So this isn’t really about letting markets work. It’s just an indirect, disguised way to subsidize purchases of bad assets.

The banks would be crazy to begin to sell their troubled portfolios of assets while Geithner continues to promise them that at some point somebody will overpay for them. First it was 'the market', then it was 'the hedge funds' and now it is a combination of private capital with an explicit guarantee from you and I.

As Krugman points out, this is looking weirder by the day:

The likely cost to taxpayers aside, there’s something strange going on here. By my count, this is the third time Obama administration officials have floated a scheme that is essentially a rehash of the Paulson plan, each time adding a new set of bells and whistles and claiming that they’re doing something completely different. This is starting to look obsessive.

There are any number of other plans out there that do not rest upon the idea that these assets need to be purchased in such a way that the banks are saved. Temporary nationalization is just one. Why this administration remains fixated on the Goldman Sachs Recovery Plan is now looking very odd.

Round em up..

When I started this blog 360 posts ago, I began with a comment about Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, basically noting that at the core of the Bush Administration's dark heart there were lawyers that were willing to justify imperious and illegal activities in order to support the franchise and curry favor with the fearmongers and "Mayberry Machiavellis" in the White House.

Brad Delong brings us up to speed on how the tide is turning against the actions of Yoo and the Office of Legal Council (OLC). The legal fraternity is slowly warming up to the idea that was clear to so many all along, that Yoo's work was an aggressive and conscious attempt to undermine our Constitution and he, Gonzales and men like David Addington were quite willing to shred 300 years of precedent to further their hateful agenda.

He quotes Brian Tamanaha, who belatedly arrives at this conclusion:

But the recent release by the OLC of several of the relevant memos removes any doubt: these memos were elaborate exercises in manipulative legal argument.... OLC lawyers were faced with a big hurdle: the applicable law was directly contrary to what the Administration wanted to do. (That’s the thing about law—it can get in the way.) Rather than concede that the actions were illegal and could not be done, however, the lawyers constructed a covering legal analysis which arrived at the desired ends. The soundness of their legal argument did not matter. What mattered was that OLC has the power to issue legal opinions that are authoritative for immediate purposes (within the executive branch) and the mere issuance of the opinion supplied the first part of the “good faith” excuse described above (providing a defense to those who directly engaged in the illegal conduct).

Tamanaha highlights on representative conclusion of an OLC memo penned by Yoo:

The courts have observed that even the use of deadly force is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment if used in self-defense or to protect others. Here, for Fourth Amendment purposes, the right to self-defense is not that of an individual, but that of the nation and of its citizens. If the government’s heightened interest in self defense justifies the use of deadly force, then it would certainly also justify warrantless searches.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, quoth Barry Goldwater.


I guess you had to be something other than a lawyer to see that the intent was pure evil all along.

Posted without much comment

Apparently, the GOP doesn't think that Obama's first month in office has been a smashing success.


if only he'd been a bit more bipartisan, I guess.

Obama in a nutshell...

Here are the last eight minutes of so of Obama's speech on Lincoln yesterday, delivered in Springfield, IL. (The first part of the speech is also available at YouTube). If you want to get a sense of the governing philosophy of this administration, and understand the stark differences between Obama's belief in the role of government and that of the GOP, this is a tremendous illustration. Aside from the stunning oratory and the succinct and well designed historical context, this speech brings into high relief the differences between the Luddites who have placed themselves into opposition to the President and this administration, which is founded upon the fundamental belief that the government has a vital and irreplaceable role to play in making this country work for all of its citizens, particularly in troubled times such as today.

This speech highlights the difference between those who would spend a trillion dollars on a pointless and unnecessary war and then advocate broad-based tax cuts in order to starve the government of any ability to act when the inevitable bills came due, and a party who believes that our government has a vital role in providing services and infrastructure for its citizens so that as a polity we are a better thing. It is the same argument that surrounded the fundamental optimism and pessimism of Locke and Hobbes, and if we haven't been living in the ultimate manifestation of a Hobbesian nightmare for the past eight years, I'm not sure what we would call it.