Aug 22 2009
There are some things, we just shouldn’t “Leave to the Markets” to decide what’s best
For Example:
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.
Aug 22 2009
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
Aug 22 2009
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.
Aug 22 2009
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.
Aug 22 2009
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.”
Aug 22 2009
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.
Aug 22 2009
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.
Aug 22 2009
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.
Aug 22 2009
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
Aug 22 2009
There are so many ills tainting our world. People’s inhumanity towards one another expresses itself in so many different ways.
Pick one. Work on it. Make it your Cause. Commit the rest of your life to it. Commit to bring it to an end. Do anything you can to advance that issue, including working on other issues…so that maybe when the time comes someone might have learned enough about you and your issues that they might actually care about them as well as their own.
What? What was that last part? Work on other people’s issues? Why would anyone ever do that? Isn’t that, like, a colossal waste of time and effort?
Actually, no. It’s how something…anything…gets accomplished.
Down here at the bottom of the issue food chain, the only way anyone is going to notice us is if we push other people forward, people who are and issues which are obscuring our existence.
Aug 21 2009
The NY Times reports the Ben Bernanke says the American economy is poised to grow. The chairman of the Federal Reserve claimed today that “the prospects for a return to growth in the near term appear good.”
Not only does Bernanke believe the recession may be ending, but there is a “good” possibility of economic growth. But, he also warned any recovery “is likely to be relatively slow at first, with unemployment declining only gradually from high levels.”
Meanwhile, McClatchy reports What rebound? Foreclosures rise as jobs and income drop. “Delinquency and foreclosure rates for U.S. mortgages continued to rise in the second quarter, with loans to the most qualified borrowers going bust at an unnerving clip”. Numbers “show clearly that rising job losses are worsening the nation’s housing troubles… More worrisome is a trend emerging deeper in the numbers: Subprime loans given to the weakest borrowers are now a declining portion of delinquency and foreclosure rates, while prime loans, given to the most highly qualified borrowers, are a rising share.”
Four at Four continues with the CIA, Obama defying federal courts, an update from Afghanistan, and the Death of the Nile.
