Putting the ass in asshole:

Another thing to hate Dick Cheney for: acting like "rectal rehydration" is a medical procedure.

He probably thinks electrodes to the testicles is a jump start, too.

Also calls this expression a smile.

Our country has lost its mind and its principles

America uses torture, report confirms. So what values are we protecting? Is it the same ones we are now subverting? Russell Brand nails it again:



How much torture is too much? How about ANY???

State sanctioned torture and murder

The story (via ABC News) is disturbingly familiar:

An inmate's execution with lethal drugs in Arizona today took almost two hours as the man gasped and snorted, prompting his lawyers to request an emergency halt to the procedure.

"The execution of Joseph Wood commenced at 1:57 p.m. at the Arizona State Prison Complex (ASPC)-Florence and he was pronounced dead at 3:49 p.m.," Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne said in a statement.

Wood's attorneys filed a motion for emergency stay of the execution after Wood was reported “gasping and snorting for more than an hour,” according to court documents they filed. Justice Anthony Kennedy denied the appeal about a half hour after Wood's death, the Associated Press reported. An AP reporter who witnessed the execution saw Wood gasp more than 600 times before he died. 

But Stephanie Grisham, the press secretary for state's AG, said the claims being made by the media witnesses and defense attorneys are not accurate. "He went to sleep, and looked to be snoring. This was my first execution and I was surprised by how peaceful it was. There was absolutely no snorting or gasping for air." 

"The experiment using midazolam combined with hydromorphone to carry out an execution failed today in Arizona. It took Joseph Wood two hours to die, and he gasped and struggled to breath for about an hour and forty minutes," said Dale Baich, one of Joseph Wood’s attorneys.

Is this what we have become? Regardless of the nature of the man's crime, which was brutal, does anyone deserve to die like this? More importantly, are we willing to torture a person to death under the guise of "justice"? This is part of the insanity that seems to infect our country---that there are those who may be treated as shabbily as we can manage, while we claim a moral high ground. This is horrible, and no amount of rationalization can change that. Capital punishment must stop!

I am Bradley Manning

Timeless

Amazing how this speech, given by Charlie Chaplin in "The Great Dictator" some 75 years ago, is so valid today. Perhaps even more so . . . .

Virginia Is For State Rape

(Via Eschaton): Virginia Is For State Rape: Not optimistic that they'll really back down.

The Virginia abortion bill, which would mandate that the women seeking an abortion get a trans-vaginal ultrasound – a forcible assault at the very least – before having the procedure, has received entirely too much notoriety for the tastes of conservative lawmakers in the state. I’m sure they were hoping to fly under the radar with this bill, one of the most offensive of the anti-abortion bills we’ve seen since the conservative takeover of many state legislatures in 2010.

The clumsy way in which conservatives have attempted to defend the legislation hasn’t helped. Economics professor Tyler Cowen’s tweet (“All of a sudden requiring consumers to be informed is extremely unpopular on ‘the pro-regulation side.’”) generated richly deserved outrage. And tea party favorite Dana Loesch took the position that once a women loses her virginity, she gives up the right to determine what should penetrate her vagina for the rest of her life.

There is no pretense of compassion or decency on the part of these assholes any more. It is about punishing those who do things they define as "immoral."

Those who would use fear to rule are the most fearful

(Via Crooks and Liars)

Larry Wilkinson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, and Larry O'Donnell really let Karl Rove have it on Countdown last night for cheerleading torture from the safe distance of his office:

Wilkerson, former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, interviewed by Lawrence O'Donnell tonight (12 March 2010) on the matter of Karl Rove's book and its attempts to justify the use of torture techniques during the Bush administration.

WILKERSON: "Let me say this, I saw - I had the highest clearance, Top Secret SCI - I saw almost everything Secretary Powell saw. I saw no proof of any of the things that Karl Rove indicated, and, as a matter of fact, no proof that any of the interrogation techniques, other than those used by the FBI, early on, had a real impact on actionable intelligence.

And I've got something else to say about Mr. Rove: No political counselor should have - he doesn't have the need-to-know. He shouldn't have access to that kind of classified information. He has NO BUSINESS having access, so if the White House allowed him to, THAT is a no-no. And I will guess that he's getting his information from Dick Cheney, because he did not have access to that kind of information."

"He's trying to sell his book."

On Rove's contention that waterboarding was not torture because doctors were present, Wilkerson said: "Slick it up with some doctors, and slick it up with some other medical personnel present. That sounds like the Nazis... Nuremburg cites the responsibilities of physicians in that regard and it isn't positive what they say about them..."

O'Donnell started the segment pointing out that Cheney and Rove and Mark Thiessen, the big fans/cheerleaders of torture, never served in the military.

O'DONNELL: "As a military man, what does that feel like to watch the cheerleaders safely positioned on the sidelines, their whole lives, try to tell you what is the most effective process and technique in war?"

WILKERSON: "Well, it says to me, and I'll make no bones about it, that they're all cowards. I mean, it's plain and simple, they're all cowards."

Wilkerson, who is no flaming liberal, has it exactly right. It's time we call these assholes what they are: COWARDS!!! Bush, Cheney, Rove and their cohorts committed war crimes out of fear and political expediency. They had no morality and were motivated by the same thing that kept them out of war when they had their chance to fight: they are pussies.

The definition of morality

Yes, the year of 2009 is at an end, and the first decade of the aughts is also over. It's been a wild ride, with some amazing wonderful as well as some utterly horrid things happening. But if there is one New Year's resolution I'd like to see made, it would be that somehow a sense of morality would be the underpinning of the way we live our lives and treat each other.

When I heard Pat Buchanan say of the underwear bomber:

...frankly if that means you have to deny him pain medication because he's badly burned, I think you go ahead and do that. I'm not arguing for torture, but I am....  arguing for hostile interrogations of this fellow, because our job is to protect American lives. It's not to make sure his Miranda rights haven't been violated.

. . . that to me is an entirely immoral and evil statement. Yet morality has been defined lately about whether you don't oppose abortion (immoral) or if you support gay marriage (immoral). Morality has become not about what you do to others, but about stopping others from doing things you don't believe in. To me it is our job as HUMAN BEINGS to uphold the rights of everyone, regardless of who they are. But the assholes like Buchanan, who is a chicken hawk who never dirtied his hands in a war when he had the chance, use morality like a bludgeon, and they should be called on it.

Mr. Buchanan, who would Jesus deny pain meds to?

Is using a minotaur to gore detainees a form of torture?

(Via The Onion)
Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

Finally! Having this debate is proof that we are a democracy.

That we have to have it at all is proof that we are an empire in decline . . . .

Who would Jesus murder?

(Via truthout)

George R. Tiller, the nation's most prominent provider of controversial late-term abortions, was shot and killed yesterday in the lobby of his Lutheran church in Wichita, where he was serving as an usher.

So the wing nuts who call abortion murder are rattling their sabers and calling murder justice in this instance. And the vigilante who considered himself righteous shoots down a man in cold blood while he is in church.

I have always felt that if Jesus were around in this times, he would be protecting women who are running the gauntlet of rabid protesters to get into abortion providers, or even perhaps protecting the providers themselves as they are in their churches. That is, if he wasn't in Gitmo being tortured as a terrorist.

The true terrorists in our country are the assholes who justify this sort of abomination. Whether or not you think abortion is murder, murder is DEFINITELY murder.

Some perspective here, please

(Via Talking Points Memo)

The Democrats stripped funding out of the defense appropriations bill for the winding down and dismantlement of the Gitmo detention facility. And the background issue is the refusal to bring accused terrorists or possibly at some point convicted terrorists into the US for incarceration. And I'm hearing this senator or that one from this or that state, saying hey, don't bring any of these terrorists to Maine! or maybe, don't bring them to Arkansas or Kentucky or wherever.

But, c'mon, I'm assuming these guys aren't going to be deposited at the county jail in Baltimore or Baton Rouge. We've got an incredibly secure and incredibly hellish Super Max facility in Florence, Colorado. And it seems clear that that's where these guys would end up. (That's where Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, now resides, along with a bunch of other high-profile terrorists.) So can't we at least stop fools from Texas and Idaho from pretending these guys are coming to their state?

Apparently not. When did America become such a nation of scared people and fear mongers? Do we really think our prisons, which we must be expert at since we have so many of our people in them, can't handle these inmates? Or are we only good at incarcerating marijuana smokers and drunk drivers?

Actually, living by the principles this country was founded on may take more balls than America has any more.

The REAL reason for torture?

As I listen to all the brouhaha about torture (Was it legal? Was it effective? Were there other alternatives?), something occurs to me that hasn't been brought up. Is it possible that the principals in this situation (Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, etc.) tortured for the reason that they WANTED to do it? These guys were (and are) power hungry, and they felt they could do anything, so my thought is they are really sick, warped individuals who like having the power of life and death over people. They brought a sense of hierarchical entitlement from their years in the corporate business world, ordering employees under their command to do as they were told or hit the bricks, and here they were, at the pinnacle of power in our world.

In the medieval times, kings would have the people they captured in battle tortured for their amusement and gratification. These are men and women who seem to me to be about on that level. Maybe they didn't care if they got information. It's just so COOL to be able to make someone else water board someone. Add to this the fact that they never had the chance to prove their manhood on the battlefield, having, as Cheney has said, "other priorities," and you have a group of individuals who needed to show just how tough they are.

And as I watch and hear Dick Cheney in the media arrogantly beating his chest and saying "these things worked," my thought is that maybe he's not talking about stopping attacks really. Maybe he means he got his rocks off, and that's what it was all about.

It's got a good beat, and it's easy to drown to:

(H/T to Rachel):

Jonathan Mann (the guy who did the Paul Krugman song) takes the BushCo torture memos and puts them to music.

So apparently, "pain" and "suffering" are separate concepts in BushCo World? Just like truth and reality are, eh?

This circular reasoning makes me dizzy!

(Via The Washington Post)

Days after telling students at Stanford University that waterboarding was legal "by definition if it was authorized by the president," former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice was pressed again on the subject yesterday by a fourth-grader at a Washington school.

(SNIP)

Then Misha Lerner, a student from Bethesda, asked: 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?

Rice took the question in stride. saying that she was reluctant to criticize Obama, then getting to the heart of the matter.

"Let me just say that President Bush was very clear that he wanted to do everything he could to protect the country. After September 11, we wanted to protect the country," she said. "But he was also very clear that we would do nothing, nothing, that was against the law or against our obligations internationally. So the president was only willing to authorize policies that were legal in order to protect the country."

She added: "I hope you understand that it was a very difficult time. We were all so terrified of another attack on the country. September 11 was the worst day of my life in government, watching 3,000 Americans die. . . . Even under those most difficult circumstances, the president was not prepared to do something illegal, and I hope people understand that we were trying to protect the country."

Misha's mother, Inna Lerner, said the question her son had initially come up with was even tougher: "If you would work for Obama's administration, would you push for torture?"

"They wanted him to soften it and take out the word 'torture.' But the essence of it was the same," Lerner said.

Even children understand the fallacy in the logic used to justify the methods the BushCo folks used in their desire to cover their own asses in the days after 9/11.

And here's the circular reasoning that echoes the 1984-speak these creeps use to justify their immoral actions: "The President wouldn't authorize anything illegal, and if the President authorized it, it was by definition not illegal."

Unless we have trials to take these people to task for their actions, this will go on, and on, and on . . . .

Between Iraq and a hard place

This is so true:

(Paul Krugman via Atrios)

One addendum to today’s column: the truth, which I think everyone in the political/media establishments knows in their hearts, is that the nine months or so between the summer of 2002 and the beginning of the Iraq insurgency were a great national moral test — a test that most people in influential positions failed.

The Bush administration was obviously — yes, obviously — telling tall tales in order to promote the war it wanted: the constant insinuations of an Iraq-9/11 link, the hyping of discredited claims about a nuclear program, etc.. And the question was, should you stand up against that? Not many did — and those who did were treated as if they were crazy.

For me and many others that was a radicalizing experience; I’ll never trust “sensible” opinion again. But for those who stayed “sensible” through the test, it’s a moment they’d like to see forgotten. That, I believe, is the real reason so many want to let torture and everything else go down the memory hole.

Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.

This is a very basic fact of the whole Iraq war experience. If you were questioning the logic that led us into that debacle, you were accused of being un-American, a traitor, and supporting the terrorists. Of course, you were also right, as history shows us, but let's forget all that . . . .

The polarizing event of this nation's recent history was a pointless war that has left us broke, exhausted, and less safe. But it was a mistake that the "serious" elites wanted to make, so it must not have been a mistake, eh?

On to Afghanistan, bitches!!!

We are becoming the monsters we are scared of:

(Via The New York Times)

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The moral midgets who came up with this new use for "recycling" should have to was a war crimes tribunal. Our country's soul is at stake here, and BushCo is selling it to the devil.

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.

In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that “every American would be shocked” by the origin of the training document.

Well, not every "American" apparently, because some of them approved the use of these methods. To quote a famous pundit from another age:

It's all in how you look at it:

(Via The American Prospect)

It's difficult, therefore, to know precisely what limits governed DOD-approved interrogation for months thereafter. But if the DOD took the advice of the Central Intelligence Agency, there may have been very few. On October 2, 2002, senior CIA attorney Jonathan Fredman met with staff at Guantanamo Bay to discuss harsh interrogation. "It's basically subject to perception," Fredman said, according to minutes of the meeting. "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."

THAT'S the only limit!?!! Torture is wrong, PERIOD. It is wrong not only for what ti does to the victims, but also for what it does to the souls of the perpetrators. These moral and mental midgets are incredible. What reality do they come from?

Get over it!!?!

(Via Newscloud)

The Italians have a word for assholes like Scalia: douche bag!

(Okay, that's actually two words . . . .)

George Bush confesses to war crimes!

While the media has had a hissy fit about Obama's "bitter" remarks, this is what else is going on:

(Via Crooks and Liars)

In a stunning admission to ABC news Friday night, President Bush declared that he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details of the CIA’s use of torture. Bush reportedly told ABC, “I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.” Bush also defended the use of waterboarding.

“We have always known that the CIA’s use of torture was approved from the very top levels of the U.S. government, yet the latest revelations about knowledge from the president himself and authorization from his top advisers only confirms our worst fears,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. “It is a very sad day when the president of the United States subverts the Constitution, the rule of law, and American values of justice.”

This is amazing, more for the fact that Congress, the media, and the courts are not up in arms about it than that Bush has finally admitted that which we already knew. If you are sick of this travesty, let your Representatives know you want action. Go here to send an email via the ACLU Action Alerts page. Silence is acquiescence. Let's prosecute Bush and his fellow criminals now!

Bowling vs the future of our country

(Via Glenn Greenwald)

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

"Yoo and torture" - 102
"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73
"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16
"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043
"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607
"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079

It is becoming more and more evident, as if it wasn't already, that as citizens we cannot depend on the media to show us the important issues. It is incumbent on us to search out the truth, as the press is far to enamored with the sound of its own voice to decide that for us. Maybe this is really the way it is supposed to be, anyway, but God help us all if we can't see that destroying our Constitutional rights is more important than Obama's bowling score.

One other point to note about all of this is that these fixations are as skewed as they are vapid. Barack Obama is an exotic elitist freak because he went to Harvard Law School and made $1 million from his book. Hillary Clinton can't possibly have any connection to the Regular Folk because her husband, who grew up dirt poor, became quite wealthy after being President. John Kerry was completely removed from the concerns of the Regular People because his second wife was rich.
By contrast, George W. Bush was a down-home, salt-of-the-earth Man of the People despite being the grandson of a U.S. Senator, the son of a President (who greatly magnified his riches in his post-presidency), and the by-product of an extremely wealthy, coddled life. Ronald Reagan was pure Americana despite spending most of his adult life as a very wealthy Hollywood actor (and converting his post-presidency into far greater riches still). And John McCain is as Regular a Guy as it gets, even though he dumped his first wife (the mother of his three children) after she was disfigured and disabled by a near-fatal car accident so that he could marry his much younger, much prettier, and extremely wealthy heiress-mistress, whose family riches then launched his political career and sustained a life of luxury for almost three decades (that's how McCain's rustic "Sedona cabin" -- i.e., his sprawling compound -- came to be).

It would be bad enough if our political press were obsessed with such trivialities. The fact that they do so in such a Republican-leader-worshiping manner makes it only that much worse, particularly given that it's this dynamic, more than anything else, that determines the outcome of our elections

It seems that to the media, torture is fine, but don't you dare get a low bowling score. What a load of crap!