"Q. What is the purpose of this payment?
A. The plan is that you will use the money to purchase a high-definition TV set, thus stimulating the economy.
Q. But isn't that stimulating the economy of China?
A. Shut up."
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"Q. What is the purpose of this payment?
A. The plan is that you will use the money to purchase a high-definition TV set, thus stimulating the economy.
Q. But isn't that stimulating the economy of China?
A. Shut up."
"Sen. Barack Obama Tuesday said he was outraged by comments made by his former Pastor Jeremiah Wright.I always thought that Obama was right to not attack the man before. But now, he had to do something.
'I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened by the spectacle that we saw yesterday,' Obama told reporters at a news conference."
Davis told Navy Capt. Keith J. Allred, who presided over the hearing, that top Pentagon officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, made it clear to him that charging some of the highest-profile detainees before elections this year could have "strategic political value."The triple play here. Using the justice system exclusively for political leverage, gaming the system to insure convictions, and then using evidence obtained through torture. If you had told me Americans would do this with the full support of the President and Vice President, I would have thought you were crazy just a few years ago. Now, I believe this man.
Davis said he wants to wait until the cases -- and the military commissions system -- have a more solid legal footing. He also said that Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II, who announced his retirement in February, once bristled at the suggestion that some defendants could be acquitted, an outcome that Davis said would give the process added legitimacy.
"He said, 'We can't have acquittals,' " Davis said under questioning from Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, the military counsel who represents Hamdan. " 'We've been holding these guys for years. How can we explain acquittals? We have to have convictions.' "
Davis also decried as unethical a decision by top military officials to allow the use of evidence obtained by coercive interrogation techniques. He said Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, the legal adviser to the top military official overseeing the commissions process, was improperly willing to use evidence derived from waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning. "To allow or direct a prosecutor to come into the courtroom and offer evidence they felt was torture, it puts a prosecutor in an ethical bind," Davis testified. But he said Hartmann replied that "everything was fair game -- let the judge sort it out."
One of the darkest developments of many dark developments in the Bush years has been the slow ascent of Christianism as a core value of the military. The promotion of Christianists throughout the armed services, the insistence by the president that no public institution be regarded as a place where religion should be silent, clear discrimination against Jews and atheists in military educational institutions: the possibility of a secular military dedicated to defending all Americans regardless of their faith or lack of it has been called into question under the current administration. The resilience of the ban on gays - while the military has granted a record number of waivers to criminals - can only be understood if one sees the US military as an increasingly religious institution at this point, and not a rational secular one. The latest story of an atheist soldier being threatened by superiors is believable in this context.The story is a chilling one--if true--where a superior officer threatens to bar soldiers from re-enlistment or even bring charges against them for discussing atheism. They were further told by the officer that they were betraying their country and the founding fathers.
That's the right-wing approach to government management, applied to virtually every domestic agency throughout the Bush years: politicize, privatize, devolve, and cut.It is irresponsible policy and about time that the adult Republicans that I know--the ones who know better--stand up to that wing of the Republican party. Government cannot and will not solve all our problems. But it isn't our enemy either, and there are things that government can do well.
TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect: "REACTIONS TO THE WRIGHT INTERVIEW: THE STUPIDITY CONTINUES.
The transcript isn't up yet, but on Hardball last night, Chris Matthews' roundtable (consisting of Tucker Carlson, Margaret Carlson, and Michelle Bernard) concluded that the Bill Moyers interview of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was very, very bad for Obama. (And they hadn't even seen the whole thing!) Matthews, in his inimitably clueless way, called the Wright 'flap' 'Obama's Iraq,' as if sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians to their deaths was comparable.
The political panel concluded that Wright had dug a 'deeper hole' for Obama and had in fact 'thrown Obama under the bus' when he said, as Kate quoted below, that Obama had said what he had to say as a politician, and that he would say what he has to say as a pastor, and everyone hates politicians. Because people might have otherwise forgotten that Obama is a politician."
Several callers called in to the radio show to denounce Limbaugh's comments, when he later stated, "I am not inspiring or inciting riots, I am dreaming of riots in Denver."I know he is an idiot, but imagine how much America would freak out if Reverend Wright had said these things? The right gets away with a lot in this country. (Crooks and Liars has a rough transcript of a caller who took Rushbo to task for calling for violence. He ends up calling her the racist and a "mush mind," and says his main goal is to put liberals out of business.)
Limbaugh said with massive riots in Denver, which he called "Operation Chaos," the people on the far left would look bad.
"Republicans said even if some abstinence-only programs do not work, others do, and it would be wrong to end the funding.Sure. What is more important? The message or the outcome? And the message here is that we would rather kids catch an STD than tell them about ways to prevent it beyond abstinence?
Rep. John Duncan, a Tennessee Republican, said that it seems 'rather elitist' that people with academic degrees in health think they know better than parents what type of sex education is appropriate. 'I don't think it's something we should abandon,' he said of abstinence-only funding.
Charles Keckler of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said the Bush administration believes abstinence education programs send the healthiest message."
McCain spoke last week during to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on Foreign Policy, and reiterated his support for governmental intervention in the global warming debate, proposed shutting down Guantanamo, blamed the U.S military for torturing prisoners of war and promised to pander to our European allies before defending America's interests around the worldSigh. It just warms your heart, doesn't it? The founder of Focus on the Family doesn't mind torture.
"Pastor Roger Byrd said that he just wanted to get people thinking. So last Thursday, he put a new message on the sign at the Jonesville Church of God.He is just asking, mind you--just TRYING TO GET PEOPLE TO THINK. HE ISN'T A RACIST OR A MORON OR AN IDIOT.
It reads: 'Obama, Osama, hmm, are they brothers?'"
And while his ministry is not to men in particular, Mark Driscoll, pastor of Seattle's Mars Hill Church, nevertheless desires greater testosterone in contemporary Christianity. In Driscoll's opinion, the church has produced "a bunch of nice, soft, tender, chickified church boys. … Sixty percent of Christians are chicks," he explains, "and the forty percent that are dudes are still sort of chicks."Nope, calling men "sort of chicks" isn't offensive, nor intended to shame the men and the women at the same time. Not at all.
The aspect of church that men find least appealing is its conception of Jesus. Driscoll put this bluntly in his sermon "Death by Love" at the 2006 Resurgence theology conference (available at TheResurgence.com). According to Driscoll, "real men" avoid the church because it projects a "Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ" that "is no one to live for [and] is no one to die for." Driscoll explains, "Jesus was not a long-haired … effeminate-looking dude"; rather, he had "callused hands and big biceps." This is the sort of Christ men are drawn to—what Driscoll calls "Ultimate Fighting Jesus."Always nice when you can combine more misogyny with a little gay bashing along the way.
Driscoll comes closest to imagining Jesus as the model of maleness when he argues that "latte-sipping Cabriolet drivers" do not represent biblical masculinity, because "real men"—like Jesus, Paul, and John the Baptist— are "dudes: heterosexual, win-a-fight, punch-you-in-the-nose dudes." In other words, because Jesus is not a "limp-wristed, dress-wearing hippie," the men created in his image are not sissified church boys; they are aggressive, assertive, and nonverbal.Because to truly be a Christian man means I need to be willing to punch people in the mouth.
Larry Wilkerson, a former army officer and chief of staff to Colin Powell, US secretary of state at the time, told the Guardian: "I do know that Rumsfeld had neutralised the chairman [Myers] in many significant ways.
"The secretary did this by cutting [Myers] out of important communications, meetings, deliberations and plans.
"At the end of the day, however, Dick Myers was not a very powerful chairman in the first place, one reason Rumsfeld recommended him for the job".
He added: "Haynes, Feith, Yoo, Bybee, Gonzalez and - at the apex - Addington, should never travel outside the US, except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court."
"To say this about her opponents is just wrong. But to say it about the activist base of her party -- about the people who are motivated enough to show up for caucuses and participate in the electoral process -- is insane. Hillary Clinton is running for the nomination of the Democratic Party. She is trying to represent us. If she thinks that people like publius, who caucused in Texas, is worthy of contempt, or that the stunning increase in Democratic voter participation this year is not a cause for joy but a sign that the dirty f*cking hippies have taken over, why doesn't she just become a Republican? She's certainly talking like one."My friends and I have noted that just three months ago, we were fine with who ever won the Democratic primary. Now, I wince every time I see the Clintons on television.
"But what is clear in both in my memory and my notes is that there was extensive, hard-nosed discussion about why masses of voters did not support Clinton or trust government or base their choices on economic as opposed to what people saw as peripheral life-style concerns. Hillary Clinton was among the most cold-blooded analysts in attendance. She spoke of ordinary voters as if they were a species apart, and showed interest only in the political usefulness of their choices -- usefulness to the Clinton administration, that is.
I vividly remember at the time finding it impressive that Bill Clinton (NOT Hillary Clinton) showed real empathy for the ordinary people whose motives and supposedly misguided choices were under analysis. Ironically, just as Barber reported, Bill Clinton was the one who combined analysis and empathy, much as Obama himself did in his full San Francisco remarks."
It is particularly despicable of them to criticize Obama for the sort of observation/analysis that was routine in and around the 1990s Clinton White House. And I cannot help but feel there is a psychological edge of pure envy in Bill Clinton's attacks: Obama is empathetic and charismatic as well as smart, just like Bill was back then, in those so much better days!
Over and out. I am going to try to find a way to preserve in amber my better memories and feelings about the Clintons, so as not to lose altogether the sense of admiration I once felt, but can no longer.
Obsidian Wings: The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 (Slight Return): "STEPHANOPOULOS: I’m sorry to interrupt, but do you think Mr. Douglas loves America as much you do?Read the whole thing.
LINCOLN: Sure I do.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But who loves America more?
LINCOLN: I’d prefer to get on with my opening statement George.
STEPHANOPOULOS: If your love for America were eight apples, how many apples would Senator Douglas’s love be?
LINCOLN: Eight."
"Who loves America? Jeremiah Wright loved it enough that while Dick Cheney was getting his string of five deferments, Wright voluntarily gave up his student deferment, left college and joined the United States Marine Corps. Wright was valedictorian of his class in Corpsman School. When asked about the sacrifices he'd made, Wright said he was inspired by the words of John Kennedy that he should 'ask what he could do for his country.'
And he did that at a time where there were many restaurants in this country that wouldn't serve him food, hotels where he could not get a room, neighborhoods where he could not hope to live, and whole states where he could not obtain justice. That, damn it, is how much Jeremiah Wright loves this country. What Stephanopoulos asked isn't fair, because there are very few people who have expressed their love for America as clearly as Reverend Wright, especially when America -- then and now -- rarely seems to appreciate their dedication."
You implied throughout the broadcast that you wanted to reflect the concerns of voters in Pennsylvania. Well, I'm a Pennsylvanian voter, and so are my neighbors and most of my friends and co-workers. You asked virtually nothing that reflected our everyday issues -- trying to fill our gas tanks and save for college at the same time, our crumbling bridges and inadequate mass transit, or the root causes of crime here in Philadelphia. In fact, there almost isn't enough space -- and this is cyberspace, where room is unlimited -- to list all the things you could have asked about but did not, from health care to climate change to alternative energy to our policy toward China to the deterioration of Afghanistan to veterans' benefits to improving education. You ignored virtually everything that just happened in what most historians agree is one of the worst presidencies in American history, including the condoning of torture and the trashing of the Constitution, although to be fair you also ignored the policy concerns of people on the right, like immigration issues.An amazing list of issues never raised. I have suggested (almost tongue-in-cheek) that while campaign finance reform may be unworkable, perhaps we could work on some debate reform where we force the candidates to answer real questions about their job. The fact that Obama's lapel pin is still a subject for, well, anyone, is ludicrous.
You asked about gun control -- phrased to try for a "gotcha" in a state where that's such a divisive issue -- but not about what we really care about, which is how to reduce crime. You pressed and pressed on those capital gains taxes, but Senators Clinton and Obama were forced to bring up the housing crisis on their own initiative.
Instead, you wasted more than half of the debate -- a full hour -- on tabloid trivia that for the most part wasn't even that interesting, because most of it was infertile ground that has already been covered again and again and again. I'm not saying that Rev. Wright and Bosnia sniper fire and "bitter" were never newsworthy -- I myself wrote about all of these for the Philadelphia Daily News or my Attytood blog, back when they were more relevant -- but the questions were stale yet clearly intended to gin up controversy (they didn't, by the way, other than the controversy over you.) The final questions of that section, asking Obama whether he thought Rev. Wright "loved America" and then suggesting that Obama himself is somehow a hater of the American flag, or worse, were flat-out repulsive.
Are you even thinking when simply echo some of the vilest talking points from far-right talk radio? What are actually getting at -- do you honestly believe that someone with a solid track record as a lawmaker in a Heartland state which elected him to the U.S. Senate, who is now seeking to make some positive American history as our first black president, is somehow un-American, or unpatriotic? Does that even make any sense? Question his policies, or question his leadership. because that is your job as a journalist. But don't insult our intelligence by questioning his patriotism.
"In January 1995, as the Clintons were licking their wounds from the 1994 congressional elections, a debate emerged at a retreat at Camp David. Should the administration make overtures to working class white southerners who had all but forsaken the Democratic Party? The then-first lady took a less than inclusive approach.
'Screw 'em,' she told her husband. 'You don't owe them a thing, Bill. They're doing nothing for you; you don't have to do anything for them.'"
I know how you feel. I understand Hillary's sense of outrage. It makes me mad too. Sure, we lost our base in the South; our boys voted for Gingrich. But let me tell you something. I know these boys. I grew up with them. Hardworking, poor, white boys, who feel left out, feel that our reforms always come at their expense. Think about it, every progressive advance our country has made since the Civil War has been on their backs. They're the ones asked to pay the price of progress. Now, we are the party of progress, but let me tell you, until we find a way to include these boys in our programs, until we stop making them pay the whole price of liberty for others, we are never going to unite our party, never really going to have change that sticks.Of course, that last one sounds remarkably like Obama, and is what Hillary 2008 would call elitist and patronizing.
It is funny to see wealthy, elitist Republicans chiding a guy who grew up with his single mom. Of course, this is from the same people who said that Bush was a war hero and John Kerry a draft dodging hippie.
My background: I'm an educated centrist, and as it were, gun-owner and sometime duck hunter.
On the 'elitist' debate: I've been amused to see the likes of Bill Kristol, Roger Kimball and Rich Lowry and other conservative commentators so incredibly desperate in their efforts to convince people like me that we're being looked down upon by Obama -- a black guy raised by a single mom who worked as an organizer among the poor of Chicago, etc. etc.
I personally don't feel in the least that Obama is an elitist. Rather, I feel the elitists are those highly educated, inside-the-beltway weenies like Kristol, the bow-tie wearing Kimball, the UVA grad and prepster Lowry who are tripping over themselves to tell me how offended I ought to feel when I know damn well I'm not offended. Id be shocked if Roger Kimball, Lowry or God knows Bill Kristol know the first thing about hunting ducks, or if they could survive ten minutes in a cold duck blind before dawn, the artery-clogging breakfast that follows or the round of beer and whiskey drinking that goes on the night before.
In my opinion, listening to these folks go on and on about how offended I should be makes me feel a hell of a lot more condescended to than hearing some single throw-away line at a fundraiser. Obama said his thing once; these wankers won't shut up. It's as if they think I'm too stupid to figure things out for myself, so they can't miss an opportunity to tell me how I've been slighted. Well sorry, weenies -- I just don't feel slighted, and that's because I'll be damned if I'm going to pick a president based on a stupid gaffe when there is a war going on and when the economy is going in the shitter. These guys must really think I'm a moron.
Critical mass has been reached. “Bitter” and “cling” will forever be tied to Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) in the same way that “Tuzla” and “the laugh” will always evoke Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) when a political junkie thinks of the 2008 Democratic race.Brad, at Sadly, No! responds:
Goddammit, I hate our press corps. I have never in my life seen a such a large collection of catty, shallow and gossipy pieces of garbage. Instead of, say, talking about health care, gas prices, inflation, the Iraq war or the environment, these useless gasbags waste our time finding the most idiotic and petty anecdotes to spread around, all while dutifully handing John Effing McCain boxes of donuts. Do I really give a rat’s ass about how Hillary Clinton laughs? Are you serious?"That is the nature of our press corps. Stupid, and ridiculously following the inconsequential and trivial rather than the substantive. Can Obama bowl? Is he "black enough?"
TPM Election Central | Talking Points Memo |: "'My poor choice of words is regrettable and was in no way meant to impugn you or your integrity,' Davis wrote in a letter that was delivered to Obama's Senate office. 'I offer my sincere apology to you and ask for your forgiveness.'"Congressman, your offense was more than "impugning his integrity," and you should know that.
Talking Points Memo | Hmmmm: "Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY) on Obama: 'I'm going to tell you something: That boy's finger does not need to be on the button. He could not make a decision in that simulation that related to a nuclear threat to this country.'"
"Anthony Lewis writes in the New York Review of Books (subscription required): 'In these last weeks of turbulent events, the single most significant has not been the financial crisis, not the fall of a governor, not the passing of the fifth year of the war without end in Iraq. It has been an American president's formal blessing of the use of torture.I agree. He will always be that in my mind as well.
'That was what President Bush did in early March when he vetoed legislation prohibiting the use of brutal methods of interrogation by American intelligence agents. His action was quickly overtaken by other news. But in its redefinition of American values--of the American character--it had profound implications.
'I grew up believing that Americans did not torture prisoners, as Hitler's and Stalin's agents did. There were rogue episodes of American brutality, but to make torture a national policy? Unthinkable.
'No one should be in any doubt that torture was what President Bush had in mind. No one should be fooled by Orwellian talk of 'enhanced interrogation techniques.' . . .
'George W. Bush can seek his God's mercy for trying to legitimize torture by Americans. But here on earth he cannot escape judgment. For me he will always be the Torture President.'"
''The go-along, get-along strategy is dead,'' Land told the New York Times discussing the GOP in 1998. ''No more engagement," he said. "We want a wedding ring. We want a ceremony. We want a consummation of the marriage.''I think someone who wanted the SBC to become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican party is in any position to criticize any other religious organization for "politicizing religion."
While 72.79 percent of the current Cooperative Program budget--the name for the SBC's unified giving plan--does go to world mission ministries, just $8 million of nearly $290 million received by the International Mission Board in 2006-2007 was designated for hunger and relief. The North American Mission Board spent $1.2 million on disaster relief out of a budget of $125 million.Interesting.
"A federal agency with dominion over such things has renamed it Piestewa Peak, in honor of Lori Piestewa, who became the first Native American woman to die in combat as a member of the U.S. military when she was killed in Iraq in 2003."Piestewa was killed in the same hostile action where Jessica Lynch was captured. All of the attention was lavished on the white girl capitve, and ignored the service and sacrifice of Piestewa. Ignored, that is, except by Lynch who referred to Lori Piestewa as the true hero of that day, and later named her daughter in memory of Lori.
"When Republican Senate candidate Bob Schaffer freely offered earlier this week that the Northern Mariana Islands, notorious for human rights abuses and sweatshops, were a great model for a nationwide guest worker program, it seemed to be coming out of the blue. But a look at Schaffer's time in the House (where he represented Colorado's 4th District from 1997 through 2003) shows that he was one of the most reliable allies for the islands, which were represented for most of that time by lobbyist Jack Abramoff.Seriously. Can the Republican party nominate anyone who doesn't with one hand quote the bible and with the other advocate the worst human behavior?
The Denver Post reported today on a trip Schaffer took to the islands in August of 1999. The trip was nominally funded by the Traditional Values Coalition, though like all the other junkets to the islands, it was really organized by Abramoff."
"But the Olympics shouldn’t be about politics. The games should offer a chance to put all of those worries and troubles aside, if only for a few weeks every four years.Of course, citing the President ALWAYS helps strengthen an argument, but the underlying sentiment is simply ridiculous. The Olympics have always been about politics, and even importantly so. Without the Cold War, the "miracle on ice" was just another hockey game. Watching Paris erupt over the flame brought out conflicted feelings. One was a sense of complicity, that my government has become rather blase about repression of human rights and so connected to China's economy that we cannot really speak our minds and values. The other was a sense of interest for the first time--that the Olympics were once again going to make people (perhaps) more important than the Pepsi sponsorship.
President Bush feels the same way. A spokesman last week said “the president’s position about the Olympics has been that this is not a political event, but a chance for athletes to compete at the top of their class.”"
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan: "'In a move that's sure to be seen as controversial, Hillary has contacted the NCAA Board of Directors to argue that Memphis is actually better qualified to be National Champion.
Ms. Clinton stated that Memphis, while losing the game, had actually shown more ability to act like a National Champion on Day One. She argued that Memphis had passed every test during the game, including scoring more points than Kansas for 38 minutes. For 38 minutes they had shown the experience necessary to be National Champion. 'Just because some team comes along in the last minute and scores more points than the other guy doesn't mean they're necessarily able to be National Champion on Day One,'' - DPolitico.
Rep. Monique Davis (D-Chicago) interrupted atheist activist Rob Sherman during his testimony Wednesday afternoon before the House State Government Administration Committee in Springfield and told him, “What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous . . . it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists!Sigh.
“This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God,” Davis said. “Get out of that seat . . . You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.”
I haven't really been following this issue, mostly because I'm pretty sure that whatever the government is doing to these terrorists wouldn't 'shock my conscience.' Like my man Scalia says, sometimes you're going to have to take these terrorists and 'smack them in the face.' But, some folks are more easily shocked than I am, and they are in full moral outrage mode this morning with the release of a 2003 memo by John Yoo (now a professor at Berkeley!) approving 'harsh interrogation techniques.' Oh, the humanity!"
Mohammed al-Qahtani is among the first six detainees scheduled to go on trial for complicity in the 9/11 attacks; the Bush administration has announced that it will seek the death penalty. Last month, President Bush vetoed a bill that would have outlawed the use by the C.I.A. of the techniques set out in the Haynes Memo and used on al-Qahtani. Whatever he may have done, Mohammed al-Qahtani was entitled to the protections afforded by international law, including Geneva and the torture convention. His interrogation violated those conventions. There can be no doubt that he was treated cruelly and degraded, that the standards of Common Article 3 were violated, and that his treatment amounts to a war crime. If he suffered the degree of severe mental distress prohibited by the torture convention, then his treatment crosses the line into outright torture. These acts resulted from a policy decision made right at the top, not simply from ground-level requests in Guantánamo, and they were supported by legal advice from the president’s own circle.
Those responsible for the interrogation of Detainee 063 face a real risk of investigation if they set foot outside the United States. Article 4 of the torture convention criminalizes “complicity” or “participation” in torture, and the same principle governs violations of Common Article 3.
It would be wrong to consider the prospect of legal jeopardy unlikely. I remember sitting in the House of Lords during the landmark Pinochet case, back in 1999—in which a prosecutor was seeking the extradition to Spain of the former Chilean head of state for torture and other international crimes—and being told by one of his key advisers that they had never expected the torture convention to lead to the former president of Chile’s loss of legal immunity. In my efforts to get to the heart of this story, and its possible consequences, I visited a judge and a prosecutor in a major European city, and guided them through all the materials pertaining to the Guantánamo case. The judge and prosecutor were particularly struck by the immunity from prosecution provided by the Military Commissions Act. “That is very stupid,” said the prosecutor, explaining that it would make it much easier for investigators outside the United States to argue that possible war crimes would never be addressed by the justice system in the home country—one of the trip wires enabling foreign courts to intervene. For some of those involved in the Guantánamo decisions, prudence may well dictate a more cautious approach to international travel. And for some the future may hold a tap on the shoulder.
“It’s a matter of time,” the judge observed. “These things take time.” As I gathered my papers, he looked up and said, “And then something unexpected happens, when one of these lawyers travels to the wrong place.”
Sen. Hillary Clinton made a blunt appeal to North Dakota delegates to switch their support to her, despite the fact that Sen. Barack Obama handily defeated her in the state's caucus in February.
Some say their votes should be ignored and the popular vote in Michigan and Florida should be discounted. Well, I have a different view," Clinton said at a rally here. "The popular vote in Florida and Michigan has already been counted. It was determined by election results, it was certified by election officials in each state, it's been officially tallied by the secretary of state in each state, and the question is whether those 2.3 million Democrats will be honored and their delegates seated by the Democratic party."The vote should be honored unless it goes against Hillary?
"MOYERS: What do you think is stake for democracy and how we journalists cover this war?
MITCHELL: Edward R. Murrow had a quote on his wall in his office from Thoreau in which he said something like, 'To speak the truth, you need two people. One to speak it and one to hear it.' And I think that sums up the relationship not only between the military and the press but the press and the American people. You know, the press often is reporting factual matters. And the public sometimes turns away from it. We entered this war, with upwards of half the people in the country believing that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attack."
Administration Asserted a Terror Exception on Search and Seizure - washingtonpost.com: "Retired Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when the memo was written, said that he never saw the document authorizing harsh military interrogations and that its narrow definition of torture is 'absolutely ludicrous.'
'I frankly don't know anyone in the military who bought into that as a good definition of when you cross the line,' Myers said this week. 'In the end, you want to do the right thing. I worry most about reciprocity, how other countries will treat us.'
Neither the attorney general at the time, John D. Ashcroft, nor his deputy, Larry D. Thompson, were aware of the 81-page memo when it was written and sent to the Pentagon in March 2003, according to several former senior department officials. The Pentagon was told in December 2003 to disregard the legal advice in the memo after Justice Department lawyers raised objections.
The memo was written by John C. Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, who also wrote or co-wrote many of the key legal opinions that asserted an expansive view of presidential power in the Bush administration's early years. Now a California law professor, Yoo has defended his work as a 'near boilerplate' defense of presidential prerogatives and said subsequent criticism has been motivated by politics."
"A recent survey that found some Florida teens believe drinking a cap of bleach will prevent HIV and a shot of Mountain Dew will stop pregnancy has prompted lawmakers to push for an overhaul of sex education in the state.Sure glad that faith based sex ed has kids thinking about DRINKING BLEACH!
The survey showed that Florida teens also believe that smoking marijuana will prevent a person from getting pregnant.
State lawmakers said the myths are spreading because of Florida's abstinence-only sex education, Local 6 reported.
They are proposing a bill that would require a more comprehensive approach, the report said.
It would still require teaching abstinence but students would also learn about condoms and other methods of birth control and disease prevention."
"[Y]ou have to understand the mindset of a lot of these feminists and women. They think they're owed this — just like Obama supporters think they're owed this. These women have paid their dues. They've been married two or three times; they've had two or three abortions; they've done everything that feminism asked them to do. They have cut men out of their lives; they have devoted themselves to causes and careers. And this — the candidacy of Hillary Clinton — is the culmination of all of these women's efforts. And if it gets stolen from them [by] a rookie, radical black guy who can't tell the time of day, they are going to be so miffed," - Rush Limbaugh.Monumentally stupid keeps coming to mind this week.
Nothing less will stop the monster in the closet from allying with the boogeyman under the bed to form a sinister new Axis of Spooky
To gently massage foreign dictatorships into stable liberal democracies through the subtle and delicate eastern art of acubombing
All the older presidents an senators were all hangin out in the boys room an lookin cool an smokin cigarettes an passin around faulty pre-war intelligence an we just hadda invade
In solemn memory of that hypothetically terrible day when Saddam Hussein sent pretend terrorists to attack fictional buildings with weapons of mass imagination
We dared them, and then they double-dared us, and then we triple-dog-dared them, and if we say uncle now all the mullahs'll know we're chicken!
You wanna be president, you gotta pop at least one third-world country before you're parta the gang
If we stopped randomly blowing people up now, someone might think something's wrong with us.
JS: He refused to tell Tim Russert that he made a mistake voting against—he was one of two Republicans that voted against Bush’s tax cuts. Conservatives will tell you that two things that Bush did right…
RM: And then he changed his mind about them, Joe.
JS: No, he hasn’t changed his mind.
RM: He says he wants them to be permanent now…
JS: He told Tim Russert on Meet the Press in New Hampshire when his life…political life was on the line that he made the right call. He was glad he voted against them.
RM: And now he wants them to be made permanent. He is…He’s pandering to the right and it defies the media happy talk that they like about John McCain…
JS: Okay …whatever…
RM: …but how else to do you explain going after the John Hagee endorsement, going after the Rod Parsley endorsement…
JS: Okay…You know what? Let’s see, let’s see…the Democrats…
RM:…changing his mind on torture, changing his mind on the tax cuts…
JS: Rachel… Good lord…