August 3, 2009 archive

Weekly Torture Action Letter 20 – Leave Lady Justice Her Blindfold!

Happy Monday and welcome to the Dog’s ongoing letter writing campaign for accountability for the Bush Era State Sponsored Torture program. The premise of this campaign is to write decision makers every Monday urging them to do the right thing in terms of our international treaty obligations and our Federal statutes. This means to investigate the enormous amount of prima facie evidence and where warranted by the evidence, to prosecute. The Dog writes a letter every week, which you, the activist, can either cut and paste or use as the jumping off point for your own letter.

Originally posted at Squarestate.net

DD Writers: August Online Workshop

PLEASE NOTE (update): This is Part One. We’ve moved on to Part Two here. Hurry up! 🙂

Docudharma has such an abundance of talent.

Writers, ring in, speak up.

I have a scathingly brilliant idea. (Uh oh!)

sick of writing Pictures, Images and Photos

dive in…

A government of children

Good Democratic operative Leon Panetta comes before us to say that the CIA and the Bush administration should be excused for all of their crimes because it was to be expected that they would behave like frightened children after the 9/11 attacks. This is the “reality of 9/11” to which Panetta refers. This is a bold attempt at normalizing incompetence and shoddy behavior in America’s leadership.

A stupid, ignorant thug, or a terrified young child, would lash out blindly and break the rules, so why should this standard not apply to the President of the United States and his underlings? This is the final argument of the head of the CIA to protect his agency from repercussions for torturing human beings to extract false confessions to serve the White House.

What is being attempted here is nothing less than the overthrow of our Constitution and laws in favor of the supposedly superior principle of impulsive decision making driven by fear and confusion. The American Founders would be horrified by claims like this. The main purpose of government is to subdue and control the wild impulses of humanity and curb the worst insticts of powerful leaders. But Panetta tells us that the highest principle is to trust the gut decsions of frightened men.

Is our nation truly so debased and dishonored that it will tolerate such offensive nonsense? How low have we sunk if we allow such sophistry to destroy our Constitution? What is to prevent the next rogue President from playing the fear card to inflict even greater outrages on our people? Don’t ask Leon Panetta. He is too busy protecting the frightened children who used to lead our government.

The End of Hope, the Beginning of Change



Photobucket



We’re in a bubble of false hope. The last bubble.

NYT Still Aids Military/Industrial Complex South American Destabilization, New Material Shows

In this American Stupid News edition, “All The News Our Military/Industrial Complex Masters Tell Us To Print Department”, the New York Times continues in the proud tradition set by Judith Miller to foster still more unnecessary American meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations, according to computer material captured from the NY Times in recent hours and under review by bloggers with more than two brain cells to rub together in their heads.

Because, you know, in a world where the value of the US Dollar is falling like a rock and our economy teetering on the brink, we simply NEED more wars and more crime in our own streets to, as Ebenezer Scrooge would surely have said, “decrease the surplus population”.

Those uppity South Americans are starting to have the nerve to want to run their own countries! Don’t they understand that The Supreme Deity, Caucasian Blue-Eyed Only-Jewish-If-There-Are-Jews-In-The-Boardroom Jesus(tm) intended them to forever serve as fruit, vegetable and cocaine farmers for the United States military/industrial complex?

It is no longer enough to strategically deploy thugs and goons from the CIA and WHINSEC/School of the Americas to perform select assassinations and “enforcement” to derail these uppity notions. No, now we suddenly need THREE AMERICAN BASES IN COLUMBIA to help right wing dictator Uribe serve as not just any fascist puppet, but OUR fascist puppet. Where have we seen this formula before? Noriega? Bin Laden? Saddam Hussein?

We are expected to believe that FARC are the ones running drugs to fund their operations, that they are “rebels” and “terrorists” – we are expected to believe this after what we KNOW the CIA’s been doing in other third world nations around the globe and ESPECIALLY in Central and South America for DECADES?

Chip Tatum, the CIA operative who is being interviewed in this 1998 video was “disappeared” one month after this was filmed. There were reports of his badly tortured body washing up on a Panama beach in 2007. This is not the only information available that details cocaine-related air traffic coming through Mena Airport, Arkansas while Bill Clinton was governor, but it is the most damning.

Should the United States build military bases in Columbia, those of you with connections on the street, just watch how the nose candy starts to flood into this country past the entirely complicit noses of our intelligence agencies and the Department of Hopeless Insecurity. Watch how the price drops so that our children can afford it, much as is happening with heroin now. Heck, the first hits might even be free. Watch how local police are crushed between a citizenry forced to a life of crime by their addictions, and the corrupt “law enforcement” and military authorities placed above them who are ALREADY funding their own black and rogue operations by BRINGING ILLEGAL HARD DRUGS INTO THIS COUNTRY BY THE SHIT-TON.

When the Taliban were running Afghanistan, whatever else might have been wrong with that, one thing that WASN’T happening was kids in the greater NYC area, to include Long Island, able to get hits of heroin for five bucks a pop. Now WE’RE supposedly running the show over there, and there’s more horse riding up and down our streets than you’d see during the fucking Triple Crown. Think about it.

The best thing – really, the ONLY good thing about this bullshit-stinking propaganda piece is the comments section. You can only cry “wolf” so many times before the people you are making suffer by doing so start to get a clue. Go below the fold for the best of the best, the Comments Section’s Greatest Hits, and see for yourselves that the rest of America is finally starting to wake up.

President Obama Needs The Left To Raise Hell!!

Interesting interview President Obama had with Busisness Week last week.   This part reveals a key political strategy:

But the last point I would just make in terms of the operating economic philosophy here: My working assumption has always been, if the market could do it better, have the market do it. I have very little confidence in, as I said, some sort of command-and-control regulatory regime.

snip

But I will tell you that if you talk to ordinary Americans right now, they feel at least as cynical about business as they are about government. And part of my motivation here is to channel what is going to be, I think, a lot of populist energy in a constructive way that does not end up preventing us from continuing to be the most dynamic, innovative economy.

msnbc

More after the fold.

To the daughters of this community and America, my deepest apologies

Crossposted at daily kos

   I think of my mother and my sister, and the mothers and sisters of others, and I hang my head in shame.

   I apologize for speaking without knowing what it is like to be the other person. I apologize for the assumption that I may speak in judgement of others without pity. The uniqueness that seperates men from women is a divine one, yet seperate us it does. It blinds us, casting our differences first, and making us judge one another as men and women, and not humans first. We are all brothers and sisters. We are all as one. I presumed to think that I am better than another. I was wrong, and am ashamed.

   I would like to offer my sincere and heartfelt apology to the daughters of this community and America and the world on behalf of my own words and deeds, and that of my fellow brothers. I hope you can forgive me.

 

Docudharma Times Monday August 3




Monday’s Headlines:

Two Sides Take Health Care Debate Outside Washington

‘Cash for clunkers’ interest remains high even as funds dwindle

Iran supreme leader endorses Ahmadinejad second term

50 Palestinians evicted from Jerusalem homes

Three men to inspire Europe

Mozart’s father may have improved his young son’s improvisations

Refugees head home after army scatters the Taliban

India looks to the sun for ambitious surge in green power

New Detainee Site In U.S. Considered

Facility Would Contain Courtrooms, House Some Guantanamo Prisoners

By Peter Finn and Scott Wilson

Washington Post Staff Writers

Monday, August 3, 2009


The administration is considering whether to transfer some detainees at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a facility in the United States that would contain courtrooms to hold federal criminal trials and military commissions to prosecute terrorism suspects, administration officials said Sunday.

The maximum-security facility would be jointly run by the departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, with each assuming responsibility for different sets of inmates. Officials said such a facility could also house prisoners held in indefinite detention and those cleared for release but who have no country willing to accept them. Those convicted in federal court or military commissions could serve their terms there.

Warning: Oil supplies are running out fast

Catastrophic shortfalls threaten economic recovery, says world’s top energy economist

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

Monday, 3 August 2009

The world is heading for a catastrophic energy crunch that could cripple a global economic recovery because most of the major oil fields in the world have passed their peak production, a leading energy economist has warned.

Higher oil prices brought on by a rapid increase in demand and a stagnation, or even decline, in supply could blow any recovery off course, said Dr Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the respected International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, which is charged with the task of assessing future energy supplies by OECD countries.

In an interview with The Independent, Dr Birol said that the public and many governments appeared to be oblivious to the fact that the oil on which modern civilisation depends is running out far faster than previously predicted and that global production is likely to peak in about 10 years – at least a decade earlier than most governments had estimated.

But the first detailed assessment of more than 800 oil fields in the world, covering three quarters of global reserves, has found that most of the biggest fields have already peaked and that the rate of decline in oil production is now running at nearly twice the pace as calculated just two years ago. On top of this, there is a problem of chronic under-investment by oil-producing countries, a feature that is set to result in an “oil crunch” within the next five years which will jeopardise any hope of a recovery from the present global economic recession, he said.

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning

2009 Poems


Cleaving

Double Meaning

Divided we fall

into the abyss

of darkness

hated

for being Other

our difference pitied

treated no better

than animals

We can allow

the axe of intolerance

to separate us

from the support

we need

or we can

cling to those

who will celebrate

with us

the meaning

of our lives

Cleave

has two meanings

–Robyn Elaine Serven

–Juneteenth, 2009

Late Night Karaoke

Open Thread

Health Care is Our Waterloo: Here’s Why

They say that even a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day (or at least it did back in the primitive analog era), and in his recent comment regarding the health care debate being Obama’s Waterloo, Senator DeMint (R-Mordor) proves “them” correct.  DeMint is using the famed 1815 battle as an analogy for a loss in an epic final stand, and while this may be enough to make him appear “smart” in Republican “intellectual” circles, it turns out that upon further inspection, there’s actually some depth to the analogies that can be drawn from the scene of Napoleon’s final defeat.

So join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we’ll take a hair-raising ride through Analogy-Land!  See the president play the role of a French emperor, the Public Option as a well-defended farmstead, and we progressives as the Imperial Guard.  The battle isn’t over, and we don’t yet (and may never) share their fate, but regardless, now is the time to learn what could’ve been done to alter the outcome of the fighting.

Quote for Discussion: Gomorrah

As soon as Linda, one of the girls in our group, saw the dead body slide out from behind the steering wheel, she started to cry and hid behind two of the boys.  A strangled cry.  A young plainclothes officer grabbed the cadaver by the hair and spit in his face.  Then he turned to us and said:

“No, what are you crying for?  This guy was a real shit.  Nothing happened, everything’s okay.  Nothing happened.  Don’t cry.”

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