Happy 4th.....

Happy 4th. See you in a week.

Sorry Ms. Kardashian, but this headline was begging me to

...and the other is a statue

Huff Post

NY Times stops referring to waterboarding as torture when US begins in 2002, didn't want to "take sides"

Jason Linkins

Yesterday, we made note of a new study from the Kennedy School of Government that found that America's major newspapers, after decades of reliably and accurately referring to waterboarding as torture, suddenly stopped doing so around 2002, when America started waterboarding people like the dickens! Adam Serwer offered this comment on the matter:

As soon as Republicans started quibbling over the definition of torture, traditional media outlets felt compelled to treat the issue as a "controversial" matter, and in order to appear as though they weren't taking a side, media outlets treated the issue as unsettled, rather than confronting a blatant falsehood. To borrow John Holbo's formulation, the media, confronted with the group think of two sides of an argument, decided to eliminate the "think" part of the equation so they could be "fair" to both groups.

Well, today Yahoo's Michael Calderone has comment from a New York Times spokesman, who -- while maintaining that the Times's official position is that the study is "misleading" -- nevertheless comes right out and confirms that they are in fact precisely the unrescueable cowards that Adam Serwer says they are:

However, the Times acknowledged that political circumstances did play a role in the paper's usage calls. "As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture," a Times spokesman said in a statement. "When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves. Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and in American tradition as a form of torture."

The Times spokesman added that outside of the news pages, editorials and columnists "regard waterboarding as torture and believe that it fits all of the moral and legal definitions of torture." He continued: "So that's what we call it, which is appropriate for the opinion pages."

Isn't that great? Waterboarding is totally torture so long as we are "outside of the news pages," where journalists at the Times are free to believe that waterboarding "fits all of the moral and legal definitions of torture." And, obviously, they want to make it clear that they feel that they deserve credit for having these important feelings about morality, despite the fact that they are too terrified to evince these principles in the "news pages" of a "newspaper" that's best known for publishing "pages of news."

[What's especially dumb about all of this, is that waterboarding wouldn't be newsworthy at all if it weren't torture. If waterboarding was nothing more than say, a light splashing of water to the face, there would be no stories written about it at all. But for decades the New York Times wrote stories about waterboarding specifically because it was torture, referring to it as "torture."]

Of course, none of this explains the other side to the study, which found that, "In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible." It's pretty clear that at the New York Times, as a matter of policy, when someone other than the United States straps a person to a board and performs a harrowing simulation of drowning on them to extract information or mete out punishment, things get a whole lot clearer, morally and legally -- and then suddenly, the very same "news pages" become a lot braver.

At any rate, the big takeaway here is that as long as you are able to frame immorality as an interesting point of view in a political dispute, the New York Times is ready to suspend decades of crystal-clear judgment, subserviently.

GOP is sabotaging America for the hope of political gain

The Republican party, with the help of the Teabaggers and the tacit agreement of the media, is deliberately sabotaging the economic recovery. They've blocked jobs-creation legislation, they're decried economic stimulus to the point of making it a dirty word.

They've blocked and are continuing to block unemployment benefits for the people who have lost their jobs. This means less money goes into the economy, people lose their homes. This devalues property prices and depriving already cash-starved states and municipalities of tax revenue both from decreasing property tax rolls and lost sales tax because the unemployed have no money to spend.

They're happy to let jobs languish until the elections in November of 2012 - 17 months away - in order to try to hurt the President. Have we ever had a situation where the minority party has been willing to plant bombs in our own economy and hurt our country for it's own political gain?

I believe this view of the economy echoes their environmental stance, which seems to be that it's so big (the environment and the economy) that it can't possibly be really, really, really, seriously crippled. You know, America forever, we're exceptional, yada yada yada.

And the media allows it to happen. It acts as if both sides have valid points on every issue. Except they don't. Politics has been reduced to sport: "Strasburg goes for his 4th start against the Dems tonight, let's see if he can blow further oil company incentives past the heart of that Dems line-up."

The Democrats, for their part, are too mealy-mouthed to really stand up and scream. They play the Beltway Game too, while America is dying.

Meanwhile, the largest financial collapse in history happened 18 months ago and we still have no legislation to prevent it from happening again. And the largest environmental disaster in history happened and we're arguing over whether the practices that generated it are really, truly that bad. We also gave the oil companies $38 billion in incentives while denying that same amount in unemployment to resuscitate the economy.

As the Senate discusses a climate bill, John Kerry recites the phrase that, as Ezra Klein says, should be engraved on the dome of the U.S. Capitol: “We believe we have compromised significantly, and we’re prepared to compromise further."

This is fucked up.

Scott Brown potentially dooms bill he agreed to because he wants you to pay tax, not banks

Gawker

It didn't take sexy Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown long to become Washington's Greatest Corporate Whore, did it? After Democrats inserted loopholes specifically to secure his vote, Brown has decided to vote no on the financial reform bill, threatening its passage.

The conference committee that meshed together the House and Senate bills last week worked its ass off just to keep Scott Brown's yes vote from the first Senate bill. While many congressmen and senators wanted a full "Volcker Rule" to ban big banks from proprietary trading, the conference committee changed the provision to allow them to invest up to 3% of their capital in private equity and hedge funds — just to get Scott Brown's vote. Because that's what he wanted! Money for big banks to screw around with.

Well, they just got played! Because Scott Brown, in a letter to Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, officially declared that he cannot vote for this bill. His reason is that the conference committee added a $19 billion tax on large banks and hedge funds to offset the estimated costs of the bill. Scott Brown wants it to be paid for with spending cuts! Because why tax large banks and hedge funds a small amount over the years to pay for their watered-down regulatory bill that forces them to not really change anything when you can just stop funding unemployment benefits and health care and education and other things that average Americans, who didn't destroy the American economy, use to survive?

Now, with Brown switching, and Russ Feingold still opposing the bill from the left, and Robert Byrd dead, the leadership will need the votes of leaning Democrat Maria Cantwell and the three other Republicans who voted yes the first time around — Chuck Grassley, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe — in order to break a Senate filibuster. And the bill, as it stands, is unamendable.

You'd have to think that at this late stage the leadership will find its votes. But wouldn't that be "funny" if the Worst Financial Collapse in History occurred and literally no law of any kind (attempting) to repair this came afterward?

It didn't take the Tea Party candidate long to become a massive corporate whore, did it?

Rose goes in the front, big guy.

GOP use Kagan hearings to trash American hero Thurgood Marshall

Gawker

You all see that Elena Kagan hearing yesterday? Too exciting, what with each senator giving a vapid, grandstanding speech, one after another, all day. And the Republican attack line was crisp: exploit her connection to history's greatest monster, Thurgood Marshall.

Elena Kagan used to clerk for Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice in history and a hallowed figure everywhere and to everyone. When Kagan's nomination was announced, RNC chairman and permanently stocked comedy arsenal Michael Steele went on to attack Kagan for this illicit "connection" of Kagan's, noting that he had once called the original Constitution, as written, "defective," and she had agreed. Yes, the Constitution — our Consitution! America's Document.

People eventually pointed out to Steele that Justice Marshall was explicitly referring to its protection of slavery and racial and gender discrimination as the "defective" parts, and he backtracked. At yesterday's opening hearing, however, as Dana Milbank writes in the Washington Post, the theme went back to "Crush Thurgood Marshall."

"Justice Marshall's judicial philosophy," said Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, "is not what I would consider to be mainstream." Kyl — the lone member of the panel in shirtsleeves for the big event — was ready for a scrap. Marshall "might be the epitome of a results-oriented judge," he said. [...]

Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the panel, branded Marshall a "well-known activist." Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Marshall's legal view "does not comport with the proper role of a judge or judicial method." Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) pronounced Marshall "a judicial activist" with a "judicial philosophy that concerns me."

As the Republicans marshaled their anti-Marshall forces, staffers circulated to reporters details of the late justice's offenses: "Justice Marshall endorsed 'judicial activism,' supported abortion rights, and believed the death penalty was unconstitutional."

Yeah she'll get confirmed.

Meanwhile, the single best line of the day, hands down, went to Republican Sen. John Cornyn: "Liberty is not a cruise ship full of pampered passengers. Liberty is a man of war, and we're all the crew."

Apparently this quote comes from a creepy secessionist/survivalist author who writes novels about people from Wyoming trying to steal nuclear weapons to guarantee their state's independence.

So who is this monster, Thurgood Marshall? What are these un-American values he represents?

Center For History and New Media

After amassing an impressive record of Supreme Court challenges to state-sponsored discrimination, including the landmark Brown v. Board decision in 1954, President John F. Kennedy appointed Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In this capacity, he wrote over 150 decisions including support for the rights of immigrants, limiting government intrusion in cases involving illegal search and seizure, double jeopardy, and right to privacy issues.

Biographers Michael Davis and Hunter Clark note that, "none of his (Marshall's) 98 majority decisions was ever reversed by the Supreme Court."

In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson appointed Judge Marshall to the office of U.S. Solicitor General. Before his subsequent nomination to the United States Supreme Court in 1967, Thurgood Marshall won 14 of the 19 cases he argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of the government. Indeed, Thurgood Marshall represented and won more cases before the United States Supreme Court than any other American.

BASTARD!

check out the Thurgood Marshall A&E Biography

The more things change.....

"If I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: 'President Can't Swim.'"


-Lyndon Johnson

via West Wing Report

Republicans say the darndest (dumbest) things

Oil is not the only brown stuff flowing in the Gulf

L.A. Times

As the shores of Biloxi, Miss., took their turn being slimed by oil Monday, Mississippi officials including Gov. Haley Barbour slammed the federal government and BP for failing to capture the crude offshore.

He cannot have it both ways. He cannot call for an end to government intrusion in state affairs while blasting them for not intruding enough in his state. He cannot rip the Obama administration for not doing enough, when he himself has failed to call up his own National Guard, cost-free to the government, to work the spill.



He's a bloated hypocrite. Three weeks ago, there were no worries...

Barbour described the oil as “weathered, emulsified, caramel-colored mousse, like the food mousse.” “Once it gets to this stage, it’s not poisonous,” Barbour said. “But if a small animal got coated enough with it, it could smother it. But if you got enough toothpaste on you, you couldn’t breathe.”

Gov. Haley Barbour continued to downplay the oil spill and blame the media, without disclosing that oil and gas companies have given $1.8 million to his gubernatorial campaigns.

On June 28th - YESTERDAY! - he was in D.C. raising money for the GOP. “The most important thing right now is the 2010 elections,” he told reporters.

Jon Stewart on the G20 summit

Crazy wingnut candidate, backed by zombie army, compares taxes to slavery and holocaust

Rick "Gather your armies" Barber is back with a new commercial in which the reanimate spectre of Abraham Lincoln compares taxes to slavery in front of a montage of holocaust camps.

Right.

He's nuts, we get it.

What's funny about this though is the zombie army he leads at the end. Check out the half-decomposed one on the left. Click the picture to see the video.

Supreme Court strikes down Chicago handgun ban

Liberaland

In a victory for gun owners, the Supreme Court has declared Chicago’s 28-year ban on gun ownership unconstitutional.

A conservative majority of justices on Monday reiterated its two-year-old conclusion the Constitution gives individuals equal or greater power than states to possess certain firearms for self-protection.

The court however said local jurisdictions still retain the flexibility to preserve some “reasonable” gun control measures currently in place nationwide.

The vote was 5-4, and was along party lines.

However, what I do think is..... interesting.... is a comment on the Liberland site. I wonder how the white bread gun nuts would react. Probably not well.

I say every black man in America should own a gun and we should show up at the next tea baggers klan rally and see if they will have the same heart to call black people ni&&ers as they did when they call John Lewis a ni&&er

Sarah Palin makes word salad, criticizes Obama for doing exactly what she claims she did

via Cesca
This could be the biggest word salad Sarah Palin has ever delivered. It's literally all over the place. She explains how she, as governor, personally forced Exxon to pay victims of the Valdez but then suggests that the president's BP escrow fund is "government overreach."



And the location of the the speech? The Texas Oil Palace.

Favorite salad quotes:

"Such oversight is in the best industry of our nation and the public and industry."

"I want this most exceptional country in the nation to be free, to be prosperous..."

"...I think Obama is kind of flirting with also, some government overreach. We are a rule of laws, not a rule of presidential fiats that I think President Obama would rather have sometimes, it seems."

We are "a rule of laws?"

Glenn Beck warned us about... Glenn Beck

Media Matters

Last Thursday, Glenn Beck devoted an entire show to red-baiting and trying to rehabilitate what he deemed the unfairly tarnished historical legacy of Joseph McCarthy. During the show, Beck and his guest, author M. Stanton Evans, agreed that McCarthy was "telling the truth." Beck went on to explain that progressives "mutate" communism's "evil" so that it "goes undercover." He claimed that "Marxism is alive and well" and "thriving here in the United States."

(Yet) during the promo for his then-upcoming Fox News show that ran on the network last January, Beck decried conservatives who say things like "Oh, those donkeys trying to turn us into communist Russia." He then yelled, "Stop!"

Based on how much farther he's tumbled down the red-baiting rabbit hole since then, it's possible that even the hypocritical Glenn Beck of January 2009 would want June 2010 Glenn Beck to "Stop!"

GOP oil hypocrisy redux(dux)(dux)

From the Rachel Maddow piece linked below comes this CBS stat: the Republican governors of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida have the ability to call up 17,500 National Guard troops, at no expense to the taxpayer. They have called up 1,640. That's 9% of available help.



So they don't call up immediate resources at the state level while screaming that the federal government (read: the black guy in the White House) hasn't done enough. The same big bad federal government guys like Haley Barbour and Bobby Jindal decry as meddling in state affairs in most cases, and yet want more involvement from now. Yet when they have the opportunity to mobilize at the state level at no cost to them, they won't do it.

Here's another conundrum: if the Guard can be deployed at no cost to the state, local or federal government, then who would have to pay for the deployment costs?

Answer: BP.

Any chance these BP apologists are protecting BP's bottom line while trying to expose Obama to further criticism? They wouldn't play politics with the oil spill.... would they?

Also, this happy bit of news: CNN reports that the average life expectancy for an Exxon Valdez cleanup worker is 51 years. Most are dead. (link). Also Corexit is eating through the bottom of boats in the Gulf. That can't be bad for carbon-based life. Can it?

GOP unveils a new logo

Bobby Jindal's hypocritical grandstanding on the oil spill exposed

Cesca

It's great to see the New York Times finally coming around to report on Bobby Jindal's ridiculousness -- and it only took weeks of Rachel Maddow exposing his roid rage grandstanding and nonsensical, ineffectual ideas (like the stupid sand berms) to get to this point. But we're here and it's about time.

Here's a rundown of Louisiana and Bobby Jindal oil spill failures, via Jed Lewison:

1. The state's oil spill coordinator's office has had its budget slashed by 50% over the last decade.

2. Last year, Jindal cut funding from the state's oil spill research program.

3. The state's oil spill contingency plan's include "pages of blank charts that are supposed to detail available supplies of equipment like oil-skimming vessels." A plan for a worst-case scenario was labeled "to be developed."

4. Before Jindal decided to attack the Federal response, state officials signed off on all Coast Guard response plans.

5. Jindal, who raged at the Federal government for not having enough boom, requested three times as much boom as the state's plan had called for -- and 50% more boom than existed in the entire nation.

We might know more, but Bobby Jindal has sealed the state's oil spill response records.

Rachel Maddow exposes Jindal's loud but ineffectual grandstanding:



Jindal's whole thing with this oil spill is to erase his disastrous Republican response address. Now, I totally understand and embrace the idea that government has a significant role in mitigating this disaster. But holy hell. Someone take away Jindal's Red Bull supply before his eyeballs explode.