February 2009 archive

From RawStory this morning:

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said in an interview Tuesday evening that Bush Administration officials could be criminally prosecuted if they lied under oath as part of a proposed investigation into Bush-era abuses.

Leahy chose his words carefully, to be sure. But his words went slightly farther than that of other Congressional Democrats, who maintain that probing abuses of the Bush era is critical to preserving the integrity of law.

“You’re going to have people, some people will say, let’s go ahead and prosecute everybody,” Leahy told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow Tuesday. “That can take 10 or 15 years. Others want to ignore everything. I don’t agree with that.”

But, he said, the Senate could set up a “truth commission” like that established by Sen. Frank Church in the 1970s, which was aimed at bringing out abuses of the President Richard Nixon era. Church’s commission resulted in an array of reforms that tightened civil liberties protections after Nixon’s infamous wiretapping and Watergate scandals.

“What if a truth commission did a thorough investigation of the type you’re describing and they found that in fact horrible crimes were committed?” Maddow asked. “If there wouldn’t be prosecution, how would say — how would we say now we know and they all legally got away with it, how would that stop these things from happening again?”

Leahy seemed to signal a slight shift — previously his focus seemed more on uncovering misdeeds than in prosecuting officials. While not saying that he was planning for prosecutions, he indicated that they could certainly result.

“I think because of the fact it’s very, very public and the way they find out about it, it makes it very clear to the next person, you try the same thing, you are going to be found out, you are going to be prosecuted,” Leahy said. “You are also going to have some people that will refuse to — perhaps refuse to testify, even though offered immunity. With the evidence from the others, they can be prosecuted. And, of course, anybody can be prosecuted for perjury.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens is in a hand-waving tizzy over the fact that Barack Obama has been president for three whole weeks and world peace hasn’t broken out, lions have not laid down with lambs, and a chorus of angels has not filled the air with joyous strains.  

Barack Obama has now been president for 21 days, following an inauguration that was supposed to have pressed the reset button on America’s relations with the wider world and ushered in a new period of global cooperation against common threats. Here’s what pressing reset has accomplished so far:

This douchebag rails on for hundreds of words that President Obama needs to strike fear in the hearts of the wicked, otherwise we are all gonna diiiieeeee!!!!!!!!

I know!  What was the point of electing him if things weren’t going to get better yesterday?  That’ll teach us to try a different tack, won’t it?

Iran hasn’t closed down Nattanz, North Korea is still posturing, Pakistan hasn’t wiped out all Islamist militants in the tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan, Russia hasn’t unilaterally disarmed and worst of all, he failed to bring a time machine and prevent the war in Gaza.  

Clearly, the Obama administration is an epic fail and we are stuck with this loser for another four years!  O noes!  

What hath democracy wrought???

Physical exercise triggers brain activity that may help reduce craving for cigarettes.

For the first time, researchers used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to investigate how the brain processes images of cigarettes after exercise.

The study backs up previous studies, which have shown that just one short burst of moderate exercise can significantly reduce smokers’ nicotine cravings.

Kate Janse Van Rensburg, doctoral student at the University of Exeter, who co-authored the paper, said: “Our findings add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that exercise can help people give up smoking”.

New York (PTI): Astronomers using NASA’s Swift satellite and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have been witnessing frequent blasts from a stellar remnant 30,000 light-years away, the American space agency reported.

The high-energy fireworks arise from a rare type of neutron star known as a soft-gamma-ray repeater. Such objects unpredictably send out a series of X-ray and gamma-ray flares, NASA reported.

“At times, this remarkable object has erupted with more than a hundred flares in as little as 20 minutes,” said Loredana Vetere, who is coordinating the Swift observations at Pennsylvania State University.

It is slowly dawning on the American citizenry, after Secretary Geithner’s latest performance, that our government has been captured by the financial industry. We are now so deeply in the territory of WTF phenomena that we need to look around to get our bearings. Here is what has been established so far in this incredible journey:

1. The entire United States financial sector is insolvent, i.e., its liabilities exceed its assets.

2. The US government has decided to place unlimited taxpayer resources at the disposal of the financial industry to restore its solvency.

3. The US government has refused to demand any management changes in the corporations that have become insolvent and dependent on taxpayer subsides.

4. The very same people who created the financial disaster remain firmly in control of insolvent institutions.

5. The highly-paid managers who created the financial disaster continue to award themselves huge salaries and bonuses, using taxpayer funds.

6. The US Government refuses to nationalize insolvent institutions, declaring that it cannot do a better job of managing them than the incompetent executives that caused the disaster.

7. We are rewarding and reinforcing failure on an unprecedented scale.

8. Nothing has been done that will prevent a reprise of this financial disaster.

9. The US financial industry has effectively hijacked the Federal Government, and is now looting the Treasury.

10. The American public is helpless to alter the decisions of its elected representatives, who insist on protecting the wealth of financial industry executives and stockholders at all costs.

WTF?

Washington Healthy, older adults who participated in a training programme to improve the speed and accuracy of brain processing, registered twice the improvement in certain aspects of memory.

“What’s unique in this study is that brain processing activities seemed to help aspects of memory that were not directly exercised by the programme — a new finding in memory research,” said Glenn Smith, Mayo Clinic neuropsychologist co-author of the study.

Kochi (PTI): Human-induced global warming and climate change is a reality, which is occurring at a more alarming pace than was expected, Scientists of National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, said.

In their paper on ‘Is Arabian Sea responding to global warming and undergoing a climate shift’, presented at the International Symposium on Marine Ecosystems here, they said the sea surface temperature (SST) has increased after 1995 “associated with a five-fold increase in the development of cyclones of more than 100 km per hour in the Arabian Sea during the past 12 years.”

“Concurrent with these events, there are warmer winters, decreased monsoon rainfall, both occurring over India and an increase in the phytoplankton biomass in the Arabian Sea,” they said.

Warmer winters cause a reduction in the annual wheat yield while decreased rainfall results in the decline of vegetation, increase in aridity and increased occurrence of heat spells over India, they said.  

Washington (IANS): Eligible women were found to be more expressive than men in texting messages, thanks to technology.

Indiana University (IU) researchers found that when men and women exchange text message in a public, interactive dating market, it is the women who use more non-standard, expressive language techniques.

Susan Herring and Asta Zelenkauskaite show that while men historically talk more in public settings, when the exchanges occur via text messaging in a public venue — in this case, Italy’s interactive channel Allmusic, it is the women who push their messages closest to the character-count limit, who use more abbreviations and insertions.

 

I thread therefore I am.