Stephen Colbert has a great idea: Let kids conduct torture trials…
“Kids have no political agenda. They ask great questions like ‘Do dogs go to heaven?’ and ‘When is it appropriate to abandoned the values of our country in order to save our country?’ Plus, kids will accept ‘because I told you so’ as a legitimate answer,” he explained.
Condoleeza Rice recently stumbled while fielding a question from a fourth-grader about torture, repeating the same phrase three times.
Paraphrased, the question was: What did Rice think about the things President Obama’s administration was saying about the methods the Bush administration had used to get information from detainees?
Colbert was inspired by the fourth-grader’s question. “So let’s have Rice, Cheney and everyone else explain the nuance of their rationale to a jury of children,” he said.
How might lawyers argue for torture in front of a jury of children? Colbert explains. “For example, kids, Mr. Bunny was a bad, bad bunny and he had information that President Raccoon needed so the president got his lawyer squirrels to write a magic letter which made everything did he did perfectly legal.”
“Then Mr. Bunny was strapped to an inclined bench with a blanky over his nose and mouth and Willie the Whale squirted water into his face so Mr. Bunny thought he was drowning,” Colbert explained as if he were telling a children’s story. “But, remember, President Raccoon had a magic letter so it was not a violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Then he married a princess. The end.”
Colbert summed up his argument for allowing children to serve as jury to torture prosecutions. “After all, remember children are the future. And if we explain torture to them right, it will be a future where torture isn’t wrong.”
This video is from Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, broadcast May 5, 2009.
May 2009 archive
May 07 2009
Colbert: Let kids conduct torture trials
May 07 2009
Van Gogh’s Ear (A Photoblog)
Vincent Van Gogh’s turbulent and tragic life makes for romantic legend, and much of it is true. But one common misconception is that he cut off his ear over the love of a woman. In fact, the official story long has been that he cut it off after a fight with his sometime friend, Paul Gauguin. The official story now has been called into question.
From Monday’s Guardian:
According to official versions, the disturbed Dutch painter cut off his ear with a razor after a row with Gauguin in 1888. Bleeding heavily, Van Gogh then walked to a brothel and presented the severed ear to an astonished prostitute called Rachel before going home to sleep in a blood-drenched bed.
But two German art historians, who have spent 10 years reviewing the police investigations, witness accounts and the artists’ letters, argue that Gauguin, a fencing ace, most likely sliced off the ear with his sword during a fight, and the two artists agreed to hush up the truth.
In Van Gogh’s Ear: Paul Gauguin and the Pact of Silence, published in Germany, Hamburg-based academics Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans argue that the official version of events, based largely on Gauguin’s accounts, contain inconsistencies and that both artists hinted that the truth was more complex.
Van Gogh and Gauguin’s troubled friendship was legendary. In 1888, Van Gogh persuaded him to come to Arles in the south of France to live with him in the Yellow House he had set up as a “studio of the south”. They spent the autumn painting together before things soured. Just before Christmas, they fell out. Van Gogh, seized by an attack of a metabolic disease became aggressive and was apparently crushed when Gauguin said he was leaving for good.
Van Gogh had wrapped the ear in paper, and when he handed it to Rachel, asked her to “keep this object carefully.” Van Gogh soon was taken into custody, and placed in a hospital, where his mental state was far worse than his physical. The hospital is now a cultural center known as Espace Van Gogh.
May 07 2009
Reducing Economic Inequality: Obama v. Specter
I want to talk about economic inequality, President Obama, the Democratic Party, and the core beliefs Democrats share.
I’ll start with Robert Reich, former Labor secretary for Bill Clinton, who has an interesting article in Salon today that caught my eye: Obama, the enemy of economic inequality
He makes several good points in it, all of which reinforce my fundamental view that the best of President Obama is his core opposition to the extreme economic inequality that exists in America today.
First, he addresses the repeated description of President Obama as a pragmatist, a description President Obama encourages:
Being a pragmatist is a statement about means, not ends. It describes someone who chooses the most practical way of achieving a certain goal but it does not explain why he chooses one goal over another.
Much more, after the fold.
May 07 2009
Pony Party: Your guess is as good as mine
This is a distraction diary. Recently, I have asked you to caption this! Considering that turnabout is fair play, I offer a few of my own captions.
Flame away.
moar funny pictures
Pony Party is an Open Thread. Please not to rec the party.
May 06 2009
Ready For An Openly Gay Supreme Court Justice?
Would it matter to you if the nominee to the Supreme Court which President Obama is going to shortly pick were openly gay or lesbian? The Dog is going to assume his readers are liberal and would care less about a Justices sexual orientation than about her or his views on the law. After all, we don’t seem to care the current Justices are all heterosexual so what difference should it make, right?
May 06 2009
Just Say No to Torture Immunity
Sen. Feinstein and the Senate Intelligence Committee are presently conducting a secret investigation of Bush’s torture, rendition and imprisonment program to determine future US torture policies. Given the current climate favoring the investigation and prosecution of Bush officials, a lawyer would have to be crazy to advise clients to “interview” or testify even at a secret probe without immunity or a similar deal.
The problem is that if Feinstein provides immunity to any of the witnesses, then this Feinstein probe may interfere with any subsequent Congressional investigations (Leahy/Whitehouse or Conyers) and prevent prosecutions of wrongdoers because oftentimes immunity is dished out to the big cheese rather than the grunts. While some think of the Attorney General as being the decision maker in charge of who is provided immunity, it is the politicians who decide the fortunate ones entitled to this get-out-of-jail card of Congressional immunity.
May 06 2009
Four at Four
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The LA Times reports the Red Cross backs reports of Afghan civilian deaths.
Villagers said dozens of people — including women, children and elderly men — were killed while sheltering in crowded civilian compounds as fighting raged in the area Monday. About two dozen insurgents were thought to have died in the confrontation as well. Provincial officials Tuesday put the number of dead around 70.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said its representatives in the area saw dozens of corpses that had been pulled from the rubble in two separate locations in the district. Spokeswoman Jessica Barry in Kabul said the dead included women and children.
The Washington Post reports Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expresses regret for civilian casualties in Afghanistan.
Referring to an airstrike in western Afghanistan Monday that Afghan officials and foreign relief workers say killed dozens of civilians, Clinton expressed “my personal regret, and certainly the sympathy of our administration, on the loss of civilian life in Afghanistan.” She told Karzai: “We deeply regret it. We don’t know all of the circumstances or causes. And there will be a joint investigation, by your government and ours. But any loss of life, any loss of innocent life, is particularly painful. And I want to convey to the people of both Afghanistan and Pakistan that . . . we will work very hard, with your governments and with your leaders, to avoid the loss of innocent civilian life. And we deeply, deeply regret that loss.”
On top of the loss of life, the real problem is the Obama administration doesn’t “deeply, deeply regret” the loss of life enough to stop the air strikes. Each bomb and missile that we use in Afghanistan is an admission our strategy has failed.
Meanwhile, the LA Times reports President Obama prepares for talks with presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Two days of talks are planned, “Afghanistan to overhaul a painstakingly developed security strategy that was unveiled only five weeks ago but already has become badly outdated. The three countries spent months developing their plan to combat an Islamic insurgency centered in eastern Afghanistan, near the Pakistani border. But growing militant activity in Pakistan is forcing them to hastily switch focus.”
The NY Times adds the Pakistani president tries to assure the U.S. over the Taliban. “President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan met privately for 90 minutes with members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee”. His “presentation, however, left some members confused and disappointed, according to a person who attended the meeting. He said little about how the Pakistani government planned to regain momentum in the fight against the militants. And when he asked for financial assistance, he likened it to the government’s bailout of the troubled insurance giant, American International Group.”
The United States has become the punchline to an international joke.
Meanwhile, Pakistan is up to their old con game. The NY Times adds Pakistan claims combat gains before U.S. talks.
Four at Four continues with governmental reports, another two bombs in Baghdad, and a stealth nationalization plan for Bank of America.
May 06 2009
We’ve got it……now what do we do with it?
And “it” is delicious!
From marriage equality to sticking it to Scalia, to the Spanish court saying……uh, guys you gonna do anything about this or do we have to???
From the Pentagon…
To the Banksters needing to still be bought out…
To the Southern Republicans pretending to get ready for the South to rise again.
The old order is crumbling…..FAST.
In watching The Republicans especially, as they flounder and whine and cast desperately about for a life raft……….and come up with only the anchor of Rush Limpbaugh
Without the power of the Bushco government behind the lies to prop them up artificially and give them some shred of credibility….
The much touted Reality Creation of the Rovian Republicans is falling like the house of cards that nominally smart folks (us)always knew it was.
The 2010 Midterms are now just about a year and a half away….and the voters still hate Republicans. And the Republicans have shrunk their party to the size that it could be put in a bathtub and…it IS drowning.
Back in the days when the Dems were still a minority and the Dem leadership told us they were absolutely powerless without a majority…
Back in the days of the impeachment wars when we were told over and over again we don’t have the votes….
Back in the days when republicans were feared, and not a national laughing stock….
We were told that if we ever got a Super-Majority, then ….by god and gumption look out for what “we” (establishment Dems) would do!!!
Well we now have a shaky filibuster proof majority.
And it sure looks like come 2010 we are going to have a solid Super-Majority.
So……what are we going to do with it?
May 06 2009
Heads, sticks, and prosecuting torture memo authors.
Ladies and gentleman, if I may have your ear.
The DoJ is making noises like they will not prosecute the people who wrote the memos that “rationalized” using torture. (See Edger’s diary.) This is tragic because, with the exception of the high-ranking Bush officials who conspired to make these opinions the rule of law, the memo writers are the most complicit criminals on the list. They were the sleight-of-hand smiths who made the torture program possible. There are few involved who can approach the vulgarity that these lawyers attained.
We cannot take these prosecutions off the table and self-consistently seek justice.
May 06 2009
UPDATED: DOJ Inquiry Suggests No Prosecutions Of Torture Memo Authors
Crossposted from Antemedius
A new draft Department of Justice report, not yet approved by Attorney General Eric Holder, is recommending that Bush administration torture memo authors Jay Bybee, John Yoo, and Steven Bradbury not be prosecuted, but will apparently ask for disciplinary reprimands and/or disbarment by state bar associatons.
“The report by the Office of Professional Responsibility, an internal ethics unit within the Justice Department, is also likely to ask that state bar associations consider possible disciplinary action, including reprimands or even disbarment, for some of the lawyers involved in writing the legal opinions, the officials said,” reported the New York Times.
“The conclusions of the 220-page draft report are not final and have not yet been approved by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. The officials said it is possible the final report might be subject to revision, but they did not expect major alterations in its main findings or recommendations.”
“Lawyers familiar with the process said the department’s willingness-as recently as this week-to solicit responses from the former officials indicated that there were no plans to conduct a criminal investigation,” reported Politico. ‘They don’t let you comment if they’re going to refer you for prosecution,’ said one former Justice Department official, who asked not to be named.”
May 06 2009
Muse in the Morning
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An Opened Mind XXXI
Art Link Contention
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