October 1, 2007 archive

“Tradeoffs For Move On”

Matt Stoller writes:

To party committee leaders like Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel, the money coming through Moveon and Actblue is nice but no longer necessary.  There’s no reason to make any trade-offs to progressives to get it, unlike the period from 2002-2006 when business lobbyists had no reason to give to Democrats. . . .

(Emphasis supplied.) What exactly are Move On and Act Blue pushing for? They have been stunningly quiet on pressing Democrats on Iraq. Oh let me guess, this is about the stupid Move On censure, cuz that is what matters. The Dem Capitulation on Iraq? Not so much.  What a joke.

Pimping POAC… HELP

I really like this site.  Project for the Old American Century
http://www.oldameric…

IMO, the best liberal news aggregator on the Tubes.

Today I visited POAC and read this:

Yesterday, thousands of readers were asked to take part in our fall fundraiser. ZERO people made a donation or purchase. Nobody. Out of thousands of readers, not one single person felt that the Project for the Old American Century was worthy of support. Will we still be online in a month? That’s up to you.

Pony Party: Monday NFL Roundup

Houston 16 Atlanta 26
NY Jets 14 Buffalo 17
Baltimore 13 Cleveland 27
St Louis 7 Dallas 35
Chicago 27 Detroit 37
Oakland 35 Miami 17
Green Bay 23 Minnesota 16
Tampa Bay 20 Carolina 7
Seattle 23 San Francisco 3
Pittsburgh 14 Arizona 21
Denver 20 Indiannapolis 38
Kansas City 30 San Diego 16
Philadelphia 3 NY Giants 16

New England @ Cincinnati, 8:30 p.m. edt, ESPN

Communist Tortures, American Ideals

I just got back from a speaking tour through New Mexico with Mike Otterman, the author of American Torture and my colleague Tom Moran.

Here is a piece we wrote from the South West that unfortunately it didn’t get picked up by the local press at the time we were out there. Nevertheless we wanted to post it and hear readers thoughts.

by Michael Otterman, Raj Purohit, and Tom Moran

—- —- —-

Thomas Harrison, of Clovis, New Mexico, called it the “water treatment”.

On May 21, 1951, Lieutenant Colonel Harrison’s F-80 was shot down over North Korea. Two years later, Harrison returned home to Clovis a broken man. Harrison recalled:

“After two weeks of talking, they weren’t getting the information they wanted. So one day in November ten of them came into my cell. They used the water treatment. They would bend my head back, put a towel over my face and pour water over the towel. I could not breath. This went on hour after hour, day after day. It was freezing cold. When I would pass out, they would shake me and begin again. They would leave me tied to the chair with the water freezing on and around me.”

Under torture, Harrison signed whatever was put before him. Every man has his breaking point. In a North Korean prison, Harrison had reached his.

Today, the “water treatment” has a different name though the torture is still the same. In 2002, President George W. Bush authorized the CIA to “water-board” al Qaeda suspects captured during the War on Terror. ABC News reports that 9/11 plotter, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, was water-boarded in a secret CIA prison in Poland. KSM was chained to a wooden board, a rag was fixed in his mouth, then cellophane was firmly wrapped over his face. Cold water was then poured over his mouth until he began to gag and lurch. After two and a half minutes, KSM broke. He admitted to an incredulous 31 different plots- nearly every act of terrorism against the United States since the early 1990s.

Last week we learned from ABC News that White House authorization of water-boarding has been rescinded. While we would like to applaud the decision to move away from using this tactic, the fact that no White House or CIA official has confirmed this on shift on-the-record still gives us pause.

In response to the ABC News report, Arizona Senator John McCain stated: “Water-boarding is a form of torture. And I’m convinced that [banning it] will not only help us in our interrogation techniques, but it will also be helpful for our image in the world.”

While we acknowledge that the Senator has been an important voice on the torture issue, we have to express concern with his belief that: a) water-boarding has in fact been ended by the Administration; and b) that an off the record suggestion that the CIA no longer water-boards will do anything to improve the US image across the globe.

The Bush Administration’s refusal to adhere to core international legal norms in the interrogation arena have made it difficult to believe that such a change has in fact happened without some type of public statement. A positive change in US interrogation policy needs to be articulated by those in positions of real power in the Administration both to improve the US standing in the world and, frankly, to reassure ordinary Americans that their country is once again living up to the ideals of its founding. To restore the American image in the world the Administration needs to do the right thing and be seen to do the right thing.

As we tour through the South West discussing the issue of torture, we are finding that the American public understands that methods of torture once used by our Cold War enemies on New Mexicans like Thomas Harrison have no place in America today. It is past time that their elected leaders in Washington, DC begin to grasp this reality is well.

The Morning News

The Morning News is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 GM may close 2 more plants under deal
By TOM KRISHER, AP Auto Writer
1 hour, 1 minute ago

DETROIT – The tentative contract between General Motors Corp. and the United Auto Workers would allow GM to close a plant each in Michigan and Indiana and possibly shut down several other facilities, according to a detailed copy of the agreement.

The moves are the downside of job security pledges that the UAW won in the negotiations, including commitments for new products at 16 plants. About 74,000 hourly GM workers will vote on the pact starting this week, with a final tally to be done by Oct. 10.

Gregg Shotwell, a GM worker and frequent critic of the UAW, posted most of the contract details on the Internet. He said he received the agreement from a local union official who attended a Friday meeting in Detroit. He would not identify the official, but the accuracy of its contents was confirmed for The Associated Press by a union leader who requested anonymity because members have not yet voted on the pact.

Muse in the Morning

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

Rahm Emanuel Rejects Defunding with a Red Herring

From Real Time with Bill Maher 9/28 (full transcript here)

here is the video.  Sorry, the embed is a little screwy. You’ll just have to search a little bit for the beginning.

 

Pelosi’s Pathetic Doubletalk On Iraq

In an interview with Wolf Blitzer this morning, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi demonstrated she has no intention of doing anything to end the war in Iraq:

BLITZER: Let's talk about the war in Iraq. When you became speaker, you said, “Bringing the war to an end is my highest priority as speaker.”

REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA), SPEAKER: It is.

. . . BLITZER: The war, if anything, is not only continuing, but it's expanding. There's more troops now in Iraq than there were when you became the speaker. What are you going to do about that?

PELOSI: Well, we did, when we took office, we took the majority here. We changed the debate on the war. We put a bill on the president's desk that said that we wanted the redeployment of troops out of Iraq to begin in a timely fashion and to end within a year. The president vetoed that bill.

He got quite a response to that veto, and the Republicans in the Senate then decided he was never going to get a bill on his desk again. So we have a barrier and it's important for the American people to know that while I can bring a bill to the floor in the House, it cannot be brought up in the Senate unless there's a 60 vote, now 60 votes.

He got quite a response? What the heck is Pelosi talking about? He got, FROM HER, a bill with no timetables! Who does Speaker Pelosi think she is fooling? Blitzer is not fooled:

Second Korean Summit

Kim Dae-jong met Kim Jon-il in June of 2000 in what became the first and only meeting between the leaders of that divided country. Whilst Kim Jong-il  promised a reciprocal visit to the South that meeting never took place. Kim’s successor Roh Moo-hyun is on the threshold of a second summit a little more than 5 months before he will leave office in February of 2008 by walking across the Demilitarized Zone into North Korea. Becoming the first President of South Korea to do so.

Progressive Epilogue

It was a third party that captured 22 electoral votes and 4 states in a presidential race, elected governors in 7 states, sent dozens of legislators to Congress, and controlled all or part of numerous state Houses and Senates – yet it was only prominent on the national scene for a decade or so.  The People’s (a/k/a Populist) Party was born of anger and frustration at the failure of either major party to look after the concerns of a large segment of their ostensible constituency, and in the course of their stampede across the American political landscape, they shifted Overtons, crashed gates, and exerted their forceful, righteous will upon the craven Democrats and sold-out Republicans of their day.

It’s a good thing we’re safely removed from that sort of (way) pre-9/11 thinking – it allows us to historiorant in peace about a time when conflicts of class, pretense, and presumptuousness rent asunder the House of Donkey, and ushered onto the stage a cast of characters straight out of The Wizard of Oz.

Pony Party: Sunday music retrospective

Carole King


It’s Too Late

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