Friday Night Nonsense: Eddie Izzard-Do you have a Flag? No Flag No Country!

Three Eddie Izzard's bits done in Lego. And hilarity ensued!

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No Torture Needed--Cookies Did the Job

Guess what, you don't have to be an evil bastard to fight other evil bastards. Who knew?

clipped from www.eandppub.com Fascinating piece coming in tomorrow's TIME magazine. Reporter Bobby Ghosh writes, “The most successful interrogation of an al-Qaeda operative by U.S. officials required no sleep deprivation, no slapping or ‘walling’ and no waterboarding. All it took to soften up Abu Jandal, who had been closer to Osama bin Laden than any other terrorist ever captured, was a handful of sugar-free cookies.” Former interrogator/member of the FBI Ali Soufan, who testified to Congress last month,  tells TIME: “He was a diabetic ... We had showed him respect, and we had done this nice thing for him .... So he started talking to us instead of giving us lectures.” Ghosh points out,  “Defenders of the Bush program, most notably Cheney, say the use of waterboarding produced actionable intelligence that helped the U.S. disrupt terrorist plots. But the experiences of officials like Soufan suggest that the utility of torture is limited at best and counterproductive at worst.”

Right-wing military writer: We may have to kill war journalists

clipped from rawstory.com Former soldier Ralph Peters has carved out quite a niche for himself in the world of publishing. His work regularly lands on the pages of The New York Post and has cropped up in USA Today. He's even a special contributor to Fox News. Pretending to be impartial, the self-segregating personalities drawn to media careers overwhelmingly take a side, and that side is rarely ours. Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow's conventional wisdom. Because, of course, in Peters' mind America can do no wrong:

According to Peters:

"The point of all this is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win. Our victories are ultimately in humanity’s interests, while our failures nourish monsters."

I would say the opposite. Victories in Imperial wars simply breed more Imperial was of conquest.

On the Misunderstanding of Empathy and Excellence

Excellent post. The audacity of the man talking about empathy in the Law when he went out of his way to twist it in order to justify Evil is astonishing.

clipped from hominidviews.com Empathy Triumphs Over Excellence writes former Bush administration Justice Department Lawyer John Yoo. As if the two are mutually exclusive. John Yoo was one of the extremists lawyers in the Bush Justice department who attempted to provide legal justification for allowing the President to (1) torture detainees, (2) suspend habeas corpus and (3) engage the NSA in domestic spying. Many of Yoo’s most extreme opinions were later repudiated as legally unsound by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. There is an ongoing investigation of Yoo’s shoddy legal work by the Justice Department, and an investigation of Yoo for war crimes by the Spanish government. Which just goes to show…a person can both lack empathy and excellence. Therefore, it makes sense that a person can possess both of these qualities without invoking the need for any kind of tradeoffs. Either way…the Wingnut War on Empathy™ continues….

Hypocricy U

Note: Comments below belong to original clipper.

Is this surprising? Not really. As the article states is that what is surprising is that there were any Democrats at this "university" to begin with. What a joke!

clipped from firstread.msnbc.msn.com Liberty Univ. expels campus Democrats Liberty University, the school in Virginia founded by the late Jerry Falwell, has expelled the Democratic Party club on the campus, saying that the national Democratic Party's views contradict the university's mission. Said a school official in an email to the Democratic club, according to the Lynchburg (VA) newspaper: "The Democratic Party platform is contrary to the mission of Liberty University and to Christian doctrine (supports abortion, federal funding of abortion, advocates repeal of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, promotes the "LGBT" agenda, hate crimes, which include sexual orientation and gender identity, socialism, etc.)." Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe held a conference call with reporters in support of the Democrats at Liberty University. Of course, one must ask: Just how many Dems attend Liberty?

Friday Night Nonsense: Whack-A-Kitty

No kitties were harmed in the making of this video. Only ever so softly whacked!

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The So Called Culture of Life: Obama at Notre Dame

(h/t to BAGnewsNotes, image from Scott Olson/Getty Images)

This is my first post done by request. Quoting Colby:

not to do with this post, but can I request post to do with the Obama/Notre Dame controversy? I mean, because that's all freakin' crazy/dumb/____ yeah.

Shit?

Stupid?

I'll go with stupid. Or at least that is how it appears, on the surface. But what was all the hoopla about Obama giving the commencement at Notre Dame?

Politics.

With a dwindling base the GOP is looking for any wedge issues to split the electorate from the Democratic Party. Enter Obama giving a commencement at a Catholic college. When Tea Parties protecting the interest of the SOBs that used the nation financial system (and the goverment) as their personal escort service don't work (nor calling names for that matter) you go back to the tried and true "issues" such as abortion.

The thing is that this is done under the rubric of the "Culture of Life". The Catholic church embraces this concept (even if they conflated it with medieval sexual theory), but not in the way the GOP does. You see, for the Church, the culture of life means the protection of life at all stages; no abortions, no torture, no capital punishment.

That is not how the GOP, who has raised a big stink about the protest at Notre Dame, sees it. On the contrary, the GOP embraces the opposite:

• Squashing of public services (Medicare,Medicaid, HeadStart,public schools, and welfare in general),

• Disregard for the environment (because who cares what goes into the air you breath or the water you drink),
  
• Wars of conquest against rich yet defenseless nations
• The death penalty
• Torture
  

The only thing this so called "Culture of Life" covers (and finds a common ground with the Vatican) is the time between conception and delivery. After that kid, you are on your fucking own!

Which makes the feeble protest at ND pathetic to say the least. Conservative Catholics are siding with a political movement that ignores much of what their Church espouses and on top of that believes that Catholicism is an aberration (and that is putting it mildly, same for those anti-gay marriage Mormons). It is also a a movement that does not believe in the separation of church and state, a separation that has protected American Catholics for over two hundred years.

But that is not all. In Obama they see a real threat because he is leading the charge to abandon the old Pro-Choice/Anti-Abortion paradigm into one that embraces common sense solutions to teen pregnancy. Of course that means bringing the Church teachings on sex to the twenty-first century. It also means that abortion would lose it's power as a wedge issue dividing Catholics from the Democratic party.

This is not about abortion, or life, but politics. Impure yet simple.

Cheney's MAD

clipped from crooksandliars.com Dick Cheney's MAD, just not in the way you think. As Time, the AP and virtually every pundit across the political spectrum debate the meaning of Cheney's ubiquity on your television screen, it may be an old Cold War theory which best explains his strategy. The former vice president isn't merely trying to rewrite history or work the jury with his repeated claims that torture "saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives" and that there was "nothing devious or deceitful or dishonest or illegal about what was done." With his brinksmanship, Dick Cheney is threatening the political equivalent of Mutual Assured Destruction to produce a stalemate he apparently believes he will win. All of which begs the question: why would a wildly unpopular figure who has proclaimed he has no future political ambitions mount such an unprecedented public campaign to criticize his successors?

Front the article:

"By raising the stakes over the torture issue with his repeated appearances, Dick Cheney isn't merely daring Democratic Congress and the Obama administration to investigate him and other members of the Bush torture team. Cheney's is a scorched earth game he believes he can win.

Cheney's MAD strategy goes something like this. If the DOJ or Congress proceeds with torture probes or prosecutions, Republican retaliation will be massive and total. Nominees will be blocked, legislation filibustered and the gridlock in Washington permanent. The blame for the carnage, the theory goes, will go to the side (in this case, Democrats) which launched the first strike. As Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought."

But wait, there is more:

With the prospect of an atomic political conflict assured of leaving both parties devastated, stalemate is the only alternative. And in Dick Cheney's case, stalemate equals victory. By ratcheting up the public pressure, Cheney is forcing Obama's hand: act on torture, or back down. And by backing down, Obama would in essence codify the Bush administration's criminality. In the unsteady equilibrium which would endure, the Bush torture team would appear to be right, seemingly vindicated. Like the Soviet threat, the risk from torture prosecution would be successfully contained. In his eyes, Cheney's omnipresence isn't a nightmare for Republicans, but their path back.

As the Associated Press noted, "Cheney seemed even more exercised after Obama released memos detailing how 'enhanced interrogation' became a tactic used during the Bush administration."

Cheney's MAD, all right. Just not in the way most people think.

Friday Night Nonsense: Above & Beyond ~ Can't Sleep

Underworld AMV.

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Fred Barnes is wankerific!

Barnes launches on a psycho-babble rant that is nonsensical and outright repulsive. He puts forth evidence of the success of torture when there isn't any, and describes Pelosi's motives like she wrote them in an op-ed. Maybe she talked to him off the record like all the Democratic sources Robert Novak always claimed to have. And let's not forget. Nancy Pelosi was not part of the torture discussion that the Bush Administration had when they decided torturing people was fine for America to be involved with. They implemented it before she was ever supposedly briefed about it. They committed crimes without her knowledge. It's all a smoke screen to take the heat of of them.
Shame on Barnes.

clipped from crooksandliars.com FOX News star Fred Barnes called Nancy Pelosi a liar over the issue of what she knew or didn't know about waterboarding. The CIA has not been persuasive with their smears of Pelosi because they haven't released the facts, just innuendo, to muddy up the water regarding torture. If they have the goods, well, then release it and we can talk about Nancy. Glenn Greenwald wrote this a few days ago: But what's the point of all of this? Secretly telling Nancy Pelosi that you're committing crimes doesn't mean that you have the right to do so. And the profound failures of the other institutions that are supposed to check executive lawbreaking during the Bush era -- principally Congress and the "opposition party" -- is a vital issue that demands serious examination. This dispute over what Pelosi (and Jay Rockefeller and others) knew highlights, rather than negates, the need for a meaningful investigation into what took place. clipped from www.youtube.com

Friday Night Nonsense: Kitteh Plays Whack-a-Mouse

FINISH HIM!

GAME OVER!!!!

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The current Republican party mantra

1. Phony War

2. Ignorance is King

3. Do whatever you want, I will protect you

4. The illusion of safety over the basic needs of a nation

5. Culture....who needs that!

clipped from thinkexist.com “Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”      “Education is dangerous - Every educated person is a future enemy”      “Shoot first and ask questions later, and don't worry, no matter what happens, I will protect you.”      “Would you rather have butter or guns? Preparedness makes us powerful. Butter merely makes us fat.”      “Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my Browning!” clipped from www.youtube.com

Friday Night Nonsense: E-Nomine - Schwarze Sonne

In that I have no idea what their singing!

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