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100 Days of FOX News Bashing Obama
The Banality of Bush White House Evil
On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the photographs from Abu Ghraib on “60 Minutes II.” Here, too, we want to cling to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture, surely it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb scenario out of “24.” If anyone deserves blame, it was only those identified by President Bush as “a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values”: promiscuous, sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie England, Charles Graner and the other grunts who were held accountable while the top command got a pass.
Op-Ed Columnist – The Banality of Bush White House Evil – NYTimes.com
Tax Rates For The Last Several Decades
Clinton Before the Foreign Policy Committee
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified before the House Foreign Policy Committee, and gave an excellent answer to Rep. Mike Pence’s questions:
A Libertarian’s Dream
Pirates, Bankers and Libertarians
By Michael I. Niman, ArtVoice 4/16/09
For Ron Paul’s growing legion of dope-addled contradictarian libertarians, Somalia is like nirvana. There are no taxes. No public education. No national healthcare. No national debt. No labor laws. No environmental laws. No business regulations. No unions. No import or export restrictions. No meddlesome big government—or small government for that matter. And everyone smokes khat, which is a leafy plant that temporarily deludes its users into feeling as if their problems are gone.
Somalia, a country that hasn’t had an operating central government since 1991, is a libertarian Republican’s wet dream, where entrepreneurs can grow their businesses unfettered by laws and regulations.Out of this brave new old world of unbridled capitalism, 21st-century Blackbeards have emerged, shoeless gangstas doing it Somali style on the high seas, making monkeys out of the world’s richest states and most powerful navies. A Vanity Fair story about a hijacking of a French luxury cruise ship described those Somali pirates as being “scrawny” and “dressed in rags.”
One had his pistol tied to his trousers by a lanyard so he wouldn’t lose it if he dropped it, much like a parent tying mittens to a preschooler. Welcome to a wild, weird new century.
The World’s Most Corrupt Nations
The World’s Most Corrupt Nations
Posted by snowhite in Interesting Articles on 04 20th, 2009
Corruption in nearly half the world’s nations is not getting much better and, indeed, in many countries is intensifying–affecting virtually every aspect of life among peoples on every continent.
While a year ago, some 72 out of 158 nations surveyed by the international watchdog group Transparency International were classified as “corrupt,” now 74 of 163 countries fall into the same category. A few, most notably India, managed to bootstrap themselves (just barely) out of the truly corrupt group, while others, particularly Iran, dug themselves more firmly into that camp.
Suppressing the Vote of Minorities and the Elderly in Florida
Editorial
Suppressing the Vote in Florida
Published: April 18, 2009Since 2000, Florida has been synonymous with badly run and undemocratic elections. This distinction has not come to it by chance. Many of the state’s election officials and legislators work hard to keep eligible voters from casting ballots. The Florida Legislature is at it again, threatening to pass new rules that would make it harder for eligible voters, especially those from minorities and those who are poor, to register and vote.
Republican state legislators, who are behind the latest bills, want to make it illegal for anyone to get within 100 feet of a line of voters. That provision would criminalize election protection programs, in which nonpartisan volunteers make themselves available outside of polling places on Election Day to ensure that eligible voters know their legal rights and are able to cast ballots.
The legislation would also impose onerous and unnecessary rules on voter registration drives, including a requirement that registration forms must be turned in within 48 hours. Grass-roots voter registration drives play an important role in getting poor and minority voters registered. If this legislation passes, however, many groups may stop registering voters rather than risk jail sentences or fines.
The elderly, a sizable voting bloc in Florida, would also be hard hit. They would no longer be able to use photo IDs issued by retirement centers or neighborhood associations at the polls. That would be a serious hardship for the many elderly people who do not have driver’s licenses.
Another provision would require election officials to purge voting rolls more frequently, a sore point in Florida, where an improper purge of the rolls before the 2000 election removed many eligible voters.
Republican leaders seem to be trying to push the legislation through quickly, with a minimum of public attention or comment. If they succeed, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida is already threatening to challenge parts of it in court. It is doubtful that significant parts of it, like the prohibition on giving legal advice to voters in line, could survive a constitutional challenge.
Florida legislators should not need a court to tell them not to interfere with the right to vote.
Republican Leader Refuses to Speak Coherently
Meghan McCain: “Old School” Republicans Are “Scared Sh**less”
Speaking to an affectionate crowd of Log Cabin Republicans on Saturday evening, Meghan McCain ridiculed the party her father headed this past election, declaring that “old school Republicans” were “scared shitless” of the changing landscape.
The Senator’s daughter, who has quickly become something of an iconic figure in the gay conservative community since the end of the election, took repeated shots at the GOP for its antiquated mores.
“I feel too many Republicans want to cling to past successes,” said McCain. “There are those who think we can win the White House and Congress back by being ‘more’ conservative. Worse, there are those who think we can win by changing nothing at all about what our party has become. They just want to wait for the other side to be perceived as worse than us. I think we’re seeing a war brewing in the Republican Party. But it is not between us and Democrats. It is not between us and liberals. It is between the future and the past.”
Meghan McCain: “Old School” Republicans Are “Scared Shitless”
Bush Memos Parallel Claim 9/11 Mastermind’s Children Were Tortured With Insects
An excerpt:
Bush Memos Parallel Claim 9/11 “Mastermind’s” Children Were Tortured With Insects
By John Byrne
April 17, 2009 “Rawstory” — Bush Administration memos released by the White House on Thursday provide new insight into claims that American agents used insects to torture the young children of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
In the memos, released Thursday, the Bush Administration White House Office of Legal Counsel offered its endorsement of CIA torture methods that involved placing an insect in a cramped, confined box with detainees. Jay S. Bybee, then-director of the OLC, wrote that insects could be used to capitalize on detainees’ fears.
The memo was dated Aug. 1, 2002. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s children were captured and held in Pakistan the following month, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.
While an additional memo released Thursday claims that the torture with insects technique was never utilized by the CIA, the allegations regarding the children would have transpired when the method was authorized by the Bush Administration.
At a military tribunal in 2007, the father of a Guantanamo detainee alleged that Pakistani guards had confessed that American interrogators used ants to coerce the children of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed into revealing their father’s whereabouts.
The statement was made by Ali Khan, the father of detainee Majid Khan, who gave a detailed account of his son’s interrogation at the hands of American guards in Pakistan. In his statement, Khan asserted that one of his sons was held at the same place as the young children of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
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