April, 2009 archive
What Torture Revealed 0
The Booman:
Therein lies the reason for the torture: To support Bush’s phony war.
And it didn’t work. They weren’t able to get the false confession they wanted.
This is sick-making.
Newt: Family Salamandridae, Subfamily Pleurodelinae 0
James Wolcott explains:
The thing about Newt is, no matter how big a crock you think he is, he never fails to outperform.
“The Most Simple-Minded Possible Approach . . . Amateurish, Wrong-Headed” 0
The more they talk, the more they indict themselves. Senator Leahy starts to speak sense at about the one minute mark.
Trial by Juries 0
This is truly unusual. I wonder whether they are doing it to save money in these troubled times ™.
One jury will be considering the first-degree murder, kidnapping and lesser charges against 23-year-old Tyrone “Ty” Anderson and the other will consider second-degree murder, kidnapping and other charges against 22-year-old Isaiah “Freaky” Cleveland.
(snip)
There are two juries, Judge William C. Carpenter Jr. explained in his opening remarks, because some evidence that is to be presented will be admissible against only one of the defendants.
The jury for the other defendant will be excused when that evidence is presented.
I don’t know anything about the case, but I predict that the prosecution had better be really careful, or the appeals lawyers will have a field day.
Nothing To Do, Nowhere To Go 0
The result of all that wealth creation.
Initial jobless claims rose a seasonally adjusted 27,000 to 640,000 in the week ended April 18. The four-week average of initial claims fell 4,250 to 646,750. The four-week average is considered a better gauge of labor market conditions than the volatile weekly figures because it smoothes out one-time distortions caused by holidays, bad weather or strikes.
National Service 0
Dick Polman considers the wingnut response to the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. Follow the link and check out the comments. Many of them are from Mars.
Not even this law gets a pass from the paranoid right.
The late Richard Hofstadter, one of our great political thinkers, wrote 45 years ago that our political discourse is often marred by what he called “the paranoid style,” typically employed by “dispossessed” people who feel marginalized by events, and who therefore traffic in “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasies.” Case in point, the reaction to this national service initiative.
For weeks this spring, there was hysteria about Obama’s purported plans to “enslave” young people with compulsory national service. In some right-wing quarters, the measure was nicknamed the “National Enslavement Bill.” But, as Hofstadter might have put it, this was merely one of the fantasies, concocted and nurtured from long-discarded House language. When the bill was initially introduced in the House, it had a suggestion about studying “whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed.” But that suggestion was stripped out long before the House passed the bill, and it never surfaced in the Senate at all.
Meanwhile, the paranoids have never quite made up their minds whether the service initiative is fascist or communist, so they’ve invoked both. There has been blogosphere buzz about brownshits and “forced labor,” and it has been pointed out that the color scheme on the AmeriCorps home page (red, black, and white) is the same color scheme as the infamous Nazi flag. But we also have Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachmann (she was bound to turn up) contending that the law is basically designed to brainwash the kids, by establishing what she calls “re-education camps for young people” – thus borrowing the terminology most closely associated with Vietnamese communists.
And these nuts were in charge of the country for the eight years.
The Torture Memos 0
StevenD theorizes why they were released. It is a thoughtful consideration of the political issues and implications. (The Booman adds his thoughts here.)
Nevertheless, StevenD left out one crucial reason for the memos’ release: The ACLU was going to win its suit demanding the release of the memos. The administration had to fish or cut bait as regards the court case.
It cut bait.
Support the ACLU here.
But Wait! There’s More! 0
At least five more torture memos, that is, including one that concluded that the Military Commissions Act, which specifically prohibited “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of U.S. prisoners” somehow authorized that same treatment. Follow the link to the AP story.
In the Orwellian Bushie world, down is up, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
Via Raw Story.
Lost in a Lost World, Snake Oil Dept. 0
Noz on the plight of the right:
Shorter version:
1. They believe the stuff they make up.
2. They think everyone else will too.
Twits on Twitter 0
Oh, my. One person’s reaction:
I am not making this up. The department has just airlifted Twitter’s Jack Dorsey along with representatives from WordPress, Meetup.com, YouTube and Google into Baghdad to discuss how social media can help build Iraq 2.0.
Cannonball 0
Boyling Over 0
If I see one more article about Susan Boyle, I think I shall scream.
Aren’t His 15 Minutes Up by Now? 0
Joe the (Not a) Plumber, the gift that keeps on giving.
Thanks for the Memos 0
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M – Th 11p / 10c | |||
| We Don’t Torture | ||||
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Via Jack.
Double Speaking Double Dipping 0
Interesting phrasing, “overlapping contracts” and “redundant trades” (emphasis added):
(snip)
Traders have been rushing to cancel redundant trades as federal authorities seek to impose regulations on the market for the first time since it was created a decade ago. After the collapse of Bear Stearns Cos. last year, 17 banks that handled about 90 percent of trading in default swaps agreed to initiatives including trade compression to help reduce day-to- day payments, bank staff paperwork and potential for error.
What those phrases mean was explained in this interview with Frank Partnoy.
The financial geniuses sold the same derivatives over and over to different buyers, because they thought nothing would ever go wrong. Not only did they build a house of cards, they printed the damned cards themselves.
In other words, the city slickers kept selling the Brooklyn Bridge repeatedly, obsessively, to different suckers–in this case, the suckers were not country hicks, but other city slickers.
Then, one day, all the owners of the bridge showed up at once, to discover not only that hundreds of people had deeds to the bridge in sole tenancy (that is, each all to his lonesome), but also that, in the meantime, the damned bridge had fallen down.
On Wall Street, this is called “creating wealth.”
