August 22, 2009 archive

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Iraq’s Maliki pledges victory amid criticism

By Khalid al-Ansary, Reuters

1 hr 31 mins ago

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki assured Iraq on Saturday that its forces would defeat terrorism despite the year’s deadliest bombings, ignoring remarks from a minister that the government had fallen into a false sense of security.

It was Maliki’s first public comment since massive truck bombs killed almost 100 people in Baghdad on Wednesday. A few hours earlier, his foreign minister said he suspected police or soldiers might have colluded in the attacks.

Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari also criticized a decision by Maliki to remove most blast walls from Baghdad’s streets, saying it was one cause of the blasts.

Dark Soul Chapter Eleven

Happy Saturday and welcome to the Dog’s serialization of his novel Dark Soul. This is a work in progress, so if you have any thoughts or suggestions, don’t be shy about offering them up.

If you have just started reading this, you can find the previous chapters at the following links:

Dark Soul – Chapter One

Dark Soul – Chapter Two

Dark Soul – Chapter Three

Dark Soul – Chapter Four

Dark Soul – Chapter Five

Dark Soul – Chapter Six

Dark Soul Chapter Seven

Dark Soul Chapter Eight

Dark Soul Chapter Nine

Dark Soul Chapter Ten

This serialization is only available here at Docudharma!  

Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness … and the WE vs ME

There are some things, we just shouldn’t “Leave to the Markets” to decide what’s best

For Example:



Infrastructure



Public Schools



the Unemployed and the Uninsured

Left to their own devices, Private Interests will UNDERCUT the Public Interest, most every time!

That’s what the Profit Motive is all about — it cares more about the interests of ME, instead of the well-being of the WE, from which Societies are built.

We would have a King if the Founding Fathers were Neo-Cons

Crossposted at Daily Kos and progressiveelectorate.com

   

    Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past    ~ George Orwell, 1984

    In the face of the revisionist historians on the right who would have you believe that Jesus was more important to the founding and building of America than our founding fathers, or that our founding fathers were in some way actually Religious and Fiscal Conservatives, I submit this theory for your approval.

The founding fathers were progressives

The Tories who supported the King of England were Conservatives.

If the Founding Fathers were Conservatives, we would still have a King.

    Conservatives are never revolutionary, not unless that revolution is intended to halt progress and go backwards to the natural state of power in a nation.

    Thus, conservatives conserve power and progressives seek change and progress.

more below the fold

Docudharma Times Saturday August 22

 CIA Used Gun, Drill in Interrogation

IG Report Describes Tactics Against Alleged Cole Mastermind

By Joby Warrick and R. Jeffrey Smith

Washington Post Staff Writers

Saturday, August 22, 2009


CIA interrogators used a handgun and an electric drill to try to frighten a captured al-Qaeda commander into giving up information, according to a long-concealed agency report due to be made public next week, former and current U.S. officials who have read the document said Friday.

The tactics — which one official described Friday as a threatened execution — were used on Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, according to the CIA’s inspector general’s report on the agency’s interrogation program. Nashiri, who was captured in November 2002 and held for four years in one of the CIA’s “black site” prisons, ultimately became one of three al-Qaeda chieftains subjected to a form of simulated drowning known as waterboarding.

At home with the Lockerbie bomber

 From Times Online

August 21, 2009


Martin Fletcher in Tripoli  

Is he the evil perpetrator of the deadliest terrorist attack in British history, or a sick old man, a loving father and grandfather, who has suffered a terrible miscarriage of justice? Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi put on a virtuoso performance when The Times came calling yesterday.

His house, in the Dimachk area of Tripoli, was not hard to find. Policemen stood guard outside. The road was lined with the BMWs of smartly dressed friends and relatives who had come to pay their respects. The high outer walls were festooned with fairy lights and with pictures of the Lockerbie bomber as he looked when he left Libya more than a decade ago. In the garden stood a marquee where he had evidently been welcomed home the previous night.

We sent in our business cards and waited, more in hope than expectation.

Joe Moshe Bar

Is Joe Moshe just another “terrorist” or a whistleblower caught in the dragnet.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

Is Joe Moshe Bar a leading bioscientist who knows what purpose the bird/swine/unicorn vaccine program will serve.

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/…

So, I’m not Uri Geller who claimed to bend spoons with his mind. I’m not exceptional in my paranormal episodes yet last night, the dreams, the visions.

Not good at all.  

Late Night Karaoke

Open Thread

Random Japan

History lessons

A group of American antiwar campaigners from the Seattle area got some less-than-supportive feedback when they announced their plan to take 4,000 paper cranes to Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a gesture of apology. A letter to the editor of a local paper read in part, “Please first ask for Japan to apologize for the harsh treatment of Chinese, Korean and other Asian neighbors they aggressively attacked.” Ouch!

In a related story, Patrick Coffey, a former US Marine who was inspired by an exhibition he saw on the horrors of the atomic bombings, is spearheading a 5,000km drive across America to raise support for a nuclear-free planet.

It was revealed that several works by novelist Osamu Dazai were censored by Allied occupiers in post-war Japan.

The Yokohama Board of Education decided to go ahead and green-light a disputed history textbook for the city’s public junior high schools. The book, penned by the nationalistic Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (a.k.a. Tsukurukai), has riled the Chinese and Koreans for “downplaying Japan’s militarist past and justifying its wartime role.”

Barack O’Hamlet


To Change or not to Change: that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous Teabaggers

Or to take arms against a sea of Progressives;

And by opposing, lose them?

To fold: to Hope No more;

and by Hope to say we end

The facade and the thousand campaign promises

That won us the Presidency, ’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d.

To fold, to sell out;

To sellout: perchance to profit: ay, there’s the rub;

For in that sellout what profits may come

When we have shuffled out of this Oval Office,

Must give us pause: there’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long a term;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of Rahm,

The Lobbyists’ wrong, the Blue Dogs’ contumely,

The pangs of despised wealthy donors, Tom Delay,

The insolence of Lieberman and the spurns

That patients who believe the uninsured unworthy take,

When he himself might his Honoraria make

With a co-op con?

Who would Progressives bear,

To grunt and sweat for penny ante donations,

But that the dread of something after Fold,

The undiscover’d backlash from whose blogs

No Villager returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather keep the Bills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus Change does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of corporate payola

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of sick people,

And enterprises of great greed and power

With this Public Option their shareholders turn away,

And lose their dividends.

–Soft you now! The fair Michelle!

Axelrod, in thy Polls

Be all my sins remember’d.

DISTRACTIONS

Striving to remain on schedule for my Friday night distractions, I seem to be gaining ground.

This week I hope to take you here to my house where all these were taken.

I should correct that statement.

I do believe one, “Sunset Panorama”, was shot at my previous home of 18 years.

As you`ll see, many of the images are composites that I manually merge, & that some are in the final stages & not yet cropped.

There are some that have been cropped to a final image.

The images are comprised of, sometimes a single shot, to up to 16 shots, sometimes three high also.

So come on over to my place.

I`ll set the tone with this mess of shots.

 REARRANGED MERGE

Friday Night at 8: The next big thing

immigration

Eventually our sages in government will legislate something on health care and it will either be written into law or go down in flames, once again a failure of government to serve its people.  Even amid all the turbulence, though, I feel fairly optimistic we will get a bill President Obama can sign into law and it’ll be something we don’t hate too much.

We’ve been told the next thing our country should turn its mind to is immigration reform.

I have to laugh.  I really do.  I’ve heard more than once that one of the reasons we shouldn’t prosecute torturers is that it would cause such a terrible uproar, the Repubs would think we were revenging ourselves on the Clinton impeachment, it would “tear the country apart.”  Like it’s real woven together right now?  Like we have great cohesion and unity?  Anyway, that’s not where I’m going with this essay.

Immigration reform.

The Netroots/Labor Alliance Is Kicking Ass!

We are beginning to see a labor/netroots alliance.  Jane Hamsher is announcing that Richard Trumka, who likely will be leader of the AFL-CIO and is now Secretary-Treasurer, will be on firedoglake on Monday to talk with us.  


Along with Howard Dean, Trumka is one of the only leading figures to defy Rahm Emanuel’s decree that “f&!ing liberals” leave Blue Dogs and ConservaDems alone on health care.

snip

We’re excited to have Richard Trumka on FDL on Monday at 4pm ET/1pm PT to discuss health care reform.

Richard Trumka of AFL-CIO On FDL To Talk Health Care, Monday August 24 at 4pm ET

This week, Trumka said no support for those who vote against public option.

More, after the fold

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