A roundup! part 3…
April 6th, 2008Beautiful day here, what a glorious Sunday afternoon…
You know, when those peksy things called ‘facts’ intrude into your reality:
Though the latest NIE on Iraq was delivered to Congress on April Fools’ Day, you’ll probably never get to see any part of it. The Bush administration decided that the public has no need to know what intelligence agencies think about the state of a country the US invaded and occupied five years ago.
That’s hardly unexpected. A few weeks back when the Pentagon delivered it’s latest quarterly happy talk, “Measuring stability and security in Iraq” (PDF), it did so with minimum fanfare. Quarterly reports have to be published by law, NIEs do not. And just to make sure that everybody understands that there’s no real need to publish this Iraqi NIE, the administration let it be known that it isn’t really an NIE at all.
How embarrassing the last NIE was. Looks like the Bush administration has made sure we don’t ever again know what is really going on behind their closed doors! We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
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Pesky facts, pesky laws…how tiresome this democracy thing must be for them…
The Yoo “Torture Memo” is just the latest and most dramatic example of the Bush administration’s adversarial relationship with the law and the Constitution. Republicans don’t see the law as the foundation of a healthy nation, to be upheld and protected, they see it as an obstacle - to be evaded, ignored, twisted, and exploited.
The Bush administration didn’t just use John Yoo’s memo to justify torture in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Bill of Rights - they pressured Congress to legalize it and to suspend habeas corpus. They ignored FISA, then pressured Congress to make their warrantless wiretapping legal and grant their teleccomplices retroactive immunity.
We’re one goose-step closer every day, huh Cheney?
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The very best thing about Obama:
Spoiler alert!
But I’ll even take it a step further. Because the greatest thing about Obama isn’t really about Obama at all, per se. It’s actually about, well, us.
This is the great revelation: We still got it. The collective unconscious, the deep sense of inner wisdom, that intuitive knowing that borders on a kind of mystical proficiency, where millions of people can actually look beyond rhetoric and media spin and merely feel the presence of something great in the room? Yep, still there. Who knew?
I feel the same way. That we’re fighting back against the Bush Administration is a testament to the remains of our democracy. That our government is helping us NOT AT ALL will ring down through the ages. You’re just as guilty as Rumsfeld, Pelosi. When you walk by a rape and do nothing to help, you are as culpable as the original offender.
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South Park 2.0. I enjoyed the shit out of this episode, and it is very nice that this link has links to the other videos. I’d never seen most of these (my attention span for a video clip is all of five seconds…if it doesn’t get interesting by then (or if I’m not actively trying to gain something from the video) I yawn and move on…) so it was nice to at least see what I am not missing…
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CIA planes, not just good for carrying people to be tortured in foreign countries any longer!
It seems that one of the planes logged on this list of “CIA Prison Planes” has been in a little accident - It crash landed in Mexico after running out of Jet fuel en route to the US. The authorities were more than a little surprised when they found four tons, yes you heard me right, four tons of cocaine on board.
Must be nice to work for the Ministry of Love…
muther- pucking bastards…..