What is Petraeus saying No Torture. Close Gitmo.

Not long ago, I had a friend of mine got convinced me of the righteousness of torture. He believes,[...]

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British police arrest another photographer under
anti-terror laws

So taking photographs is somehow suspicious and then asking for your rights makes you even more suspicious. Interesting. The photographer did a great job staying calm and asking questions. Of course, by asking questions about his rights, that somehow made him even more suspicious. He was later released after being held for eight hours. The Guardian:

Patefield asked if the officer had any "reasonable, articulable suspicion" to justify him giving his details.

She replied: "I believe your behaviour was quite suspicious in the manner in which you were taking photographs in the town centre ? I'm suspicious in why you were taking those pictures.

"I'm an officer of the law, and I'm requiring you, because I believe your behaviour to be of a suspicious nature, and of possibly antisocial [nature] ? I can take your details just to ascertain that everything is OK."

Patefield and his friend maintained that they did not want to disclose their details. They were stopped a third and final time when returning to their car. This time the officer was accompanied by an acting sergeant. "Under law, fine, we can ask for your details ? we've got no powers," he said. "However, due to the fact that we believe you were involved in antisocial behaviour, ie taking photographs ? then we do have a power under [the Police Reform Act] to ask for your name and address, and for you to provide it. If you don't, then you may be arrested."

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Muse in the Morning

Muse in the MorningDiscombobulated(Click on image for larger view)Part II... UnconnectedThe muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and[...]

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The Week in Editorial Cartoons - Al Gore vs the
Denialists

Crossposted at Daily Kos.  If you choose to recommend it there, the Rec Button may have been pushed to the bottom after the last diary comment made.THE WEEK IN EDITORIAL CARTOONSThis weekly diary takes a look at the past week's important news[...]

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'Amaricas Congress Woman,' Moron Bachmann, Is
Entitled To Her Own Opinion, Not Her Own History

You read that title right. The Web site www.michelebachmann.com actually has America misspelled, and with no apostrophe. Do a search. I don't frequent her home page, so I have no idea how long the Yahoo! search engine has been like that.

Texas has long had a Republican Party platform that makes John Birch Society screeds from the 1960s look moderate. So, I would have thought that no other state could produce a blend of moronic and psychotic quite like this. I'd have to say that Minnesota "Congress Woman" Michele Bachmann wins the prize, far and away, over anything this state has ever produced. Her head is so far up her ass, it's threatening to emerge from her throat.

Here's a video, courtesy of no-spin C-Span, showing Bachmann in all her egregious reign of error:

video details and more

For someone who knows anything about American history, this batshit insanity is so breathtaking that it's hard to know where to begin. And it was spoken by a member of Congress, on the House floor. Of course, I have to throw in that this is a member of Congress who went to college at Oral Roberts University. (aka "Anal" Roberts)

Well, OK, for starters -- the "Hoot-Smalley" tariff was actually the Smoot-Hawley protectionist tariff. It was enacted in 1930, by a Republican-controlled Congress, and signed into law during the first year of the Great Depression by Republican President Herbert Hoover. It predated the New Deal by well over two years. Hoover told the American people that "prosperity is just around the corner." Joblessness rose to nearly 25% before he left office.

Bachmann's Ignorance About History is Nothing Short of Obscene

Let's go on. Calvin Coolidge became president in August 1923, closer to the middle 1920s rather than the "early" 1920s that she talks about. The postwar recession in America was long over by then. It was his thick-headed, horny predecessor, Warren Gamaliel Harding, who inherited a recession. If I recall correctly, Harding played poker and drank whiskey with the larcenous Ohio Gang, and made lots of kissy-face and little nasties with Nan Britton in the White House broom closet, waiting for the whole ugly mess to blow over. He died relatively young, dumb and possibly happy.

Anyway, by Bachmann's "historical account," the "Roaring Twenties" are supposed to have followed Coolidge's supply-side economic policies, which could not have gone into effect until the midpoint of the decade. I have the historical impression that the unbalanced "boom" of the Twenties was already well under way by 1923. Unfortunately, a lot of small towns and rural farm areas weren't included in the "boom." I recall this as one of the weak underpinnings of the 1920s U.S. economy.

Then, according to the scribes of Bachmann Land, the economic downturn that followed the stock market crash of 1929 was supposed to have been a manageable recession. I hear this is what she told CPAC conventioneers in her recent speech to them.

But that evil collectivist demon FDR managed to get the "Hoot-Smalley" tariff passed in 1930, which was an unprecedented feat, since Roosevelt was governor of New York state at the time and the Republicans still controlled Congress.

Yep, then the unemployment rate during that "manageable recession" got close to 25 percent during the grim winter of 1932-33. FDR, still governor of New York, had his evil collectivist tallons dug into the country's fair loins, long before he took office on March 4, 1933.

Aleister Crowley, eat your Satan-worshipping heart out. That FDR dude had astounding mind-control powers that left you and your magic circles in the damp English dust.

Anyway, the American people supposedly suffered for 10 long years under the yoke of that demonic collectivist FDR. But somewhere in the dregs of my mind, I seem to recall that unemployment, though still high, generally trended down after he took office. And, he was obstructed by a right-wing Supreme Court that declared two of his crucial programs unconstitutional. He managed to eventually work around them, and by 1940 the annual unemployment rate was down to 14.6 percent. Then it plunged into single digits when that demonic, collectivist federal government stepped in and put the country on a war footing.

A Basic U.S. History Test for Members of Congress

I hear that Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., proposed during a speech to Tea Party imbeciles that the U.S. should bring back literacy tests for voting.

I have a better idea -- not mine originally, but I want to help give this a hearing. Michele Bachmann is a prime example of why all members of Congress should be able to pass a basic literacy test in American history.

I'm not a historian, but I almost didn't have to be. I took a CLEP test when I was a senior in high school and placed out of 6 hrs. of American history. (Yeah, I know, what a braggart, and why the hell ain't you rich?)

Point is, I would expect even the fucking dumbest member of Congress to know more genuine American history than Michele Bachmann. I don't think a basic cultural literacy test for our Washington reps is something that should be out of the question, since Mr. Tancredo is bringing up standards of republican democracy here.

I find it deeply embarrassing that someone with this much shit for brains can even hold office this high. It makes me feel shame for our country that anyone out there even listens to this fool. Then, there's the matter of how she ever got elected to be anything, even dogcatcher. I own dogs that seem smarter.

By the way, where have the news media been during all this? I know they've been treating right-wingers deferentially, for fear of being accused of liberal bias. But reporters aren't supposed to be just stenographers with amnesia. Joseph Pulitzer said the 3 most important things in journalism are "accuracy, accuracy and accuracy." Politicians should be held to a similar standard. They are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.


Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheyGaveUsARepublic-FrontPage/~3/wrsfqYVlaJw/amari
cas-congress-woman-moron-bachmann-is-entitled-to-her-own-opinion-not-her-own-history

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'Amarica's Congress Woman,' Moron Bachmann, Is
Entitled To Her Own Opinion, Not Her Own History

You read that title right. The Web site www.michelebachmann.com actually has America misspelled. Do a search. I don't frequent her home page, so I have no idea how long the Yahoo! search engine has been like that.

Texas has long had a Republican Party platform that makes John Birch Society screeds from the 1960s look moderate. So, I would have thought that no other state could produce a blend of moronic and psychotic quite like this. I'd have to say that Minnesota "Congress Woman" Michele Bachmann wins the prize, far and away, over anything this state has ever produced. Her head is so far up her ass, it's threatening to emerge from her throat.

Here's a video, courtesy of no-spin C-Span, showing Bachmann in all her egregious reign of error:

video details and more

For someone who knows anything about American history, this batshit insanity is so breathtaking that it's hard to know where to begin. And it was spoken by a member of Congress, on the House floor. Of course, I have to throw in that this is a member of Congress who went to college at Oral Roberts University. (aka "Anal" Roberts)

Well, OK, for starters -- the "Hoot-Smalley" tariff was actually the Smoot-Hawley protectionist tariff. It was enacted in 1930, by a Republican-controlled Congress, and signed into law during the first year of the Great Depression by Republican President Herbert Hoover. It predated the New Deal by well over two years. Hoover told the American people that "prosperity is just around the corner." Joblessness rose to nearly 25% before he left office.

Bachmann's Ignorance About History is Nothing Short of Obscene

Let's go on. Calvin Coolidge became president in August 1923, closer to the middle 1920s rather than the "early" 1920s that she talks about. The postwar recession in America was long over by then. It was his thick-headed, horny predecessor, Warren Gamiel Harding, who inherited a recession. If I recall correctly, Harding played poker and drank whiskey with the larcenous Ohio Gang, and made lots of kissy-face and little nasties with Nan Britton in the White House broom closet, waiting for the whole ugly mess to blow over. He died relatively young, dumb and possibly happy.

Anyway, by Bachmann's "historical account," the "Roaring Twenties" are supposed to have followed Coolidge's supply-side economic policies, which could not have gone into effect until the midpoint of the decade. I have the historical impression that the unbalanced "boom" of the Twenties was already well under way by 1923. Unfortunately, a lot of small towns and rural farm areas weren't included in the "boom." I recall this as one of the weak underpinnings of the 1920s U.S. economy.

Then, according to the scribes of Bachmann Land, the economic downturn that followed the stock market crash of 1929 was supposed to have been a manageable recession. I hear this is what she told CPAC conventioneers in her recent speech to them.

But that evil collectivist demon FDR managed to get the "Hoot-Smalley" tariff passed in 1930, which was an unprecedented feat, since Roosevelt was governor of New York state at the time and the Republicans still controlled Congress.

Yep, then the unemployment rate during that "manageable recession" got close to 25 percent during the grim winter of 1932-33. FDR, still governor of New York, had his evil collectivist tallons dug into the country's fair loins, long before he took office on March 4, 1933.

Aleister Crowley, eat your Satan-worshipping heart out. That FDR dude had astounding mind-control powers that left you and your magic circles in the damp English dust.

Anyway, the American people supposedly suffered for 10 long years under the yoke of that demonic collectivist FDR. But somewhere in the dregs of my mind, I seem to recall that unemployment, though still high, generally trended down after he took office. And, he was obstructed by a right-wing Supreme Court that declared two of his crucial programs unconstitutional. He managed to eventually work around them, and by 1940 the annual unemployment rate was down to 14.6 percent. Then it plunged into single digits when that demonic, collectivist federal government stepped in and put the country on a war footing.

A Basic U.S. History Test for Members of Congress

I hear that Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., proposed during a speech to Tea Party imbeciles that the U.S. should bring back literacy tests for voting.

I have a better idea -- not mine originally, but I want to help give this a hearing. Michele Bachmann is a prime example of why all members of Congress should be able to pass a basic literacy test in American history.

I'm not a historian, but I almost didn't have to be. I took a CLEP test when I was a senior in high school and placed out of 6 hrs. of American history. (Yeah, I know, what a braggart, and why the hell ain't you rich?)

Point is, I would expect even the fucking dumbest member of Congress to know more genuine American history than Michele Bachmann. I don't think a basic cultural literacy test for our Washington reps is something that should be out of the question, since Mr. Tancredo is bringing up standards of republican democracy here.

I find it deeply embarrassing that someone with this much shit for brains can even hold office this high. It makes me feel shame for our country that anyone out there even listens to this fool. Then, there's the matter of how she ever got elected to be anything, even dogcatcher. I own dogs that seem smarter.

By the way, where have the news media been during all this? I know they've been treating right-wingers deferentially, for fear of being accused of liberal bias. But reporters aren't supposed to be just stenographers with amnesia. Joseph Pulitzer said the 3 most important things in journalism are "accuracy, accuracy and accuracy." Politicians should be held to a similar standard. They are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.


Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheyGaveUsARepublic-FrontPage/~3/wrsfqYVlaJw/amari
cas-congress-woman-moron-bachmann-is-entitled-to-her-own-opinion-not-her-own-history

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CPAC, battling sanity

Body

It was a humdinger of a cheerleading conference. I'll give them that much credit.

Every year, like a drug addict seeking to re-experience some primordial high, CPAC's challenge is to outdo itself; for also, like a shark, if it halts perpetual motion it would likely gasp and die. There should be no time to think, no time to pause to even hear itself, since sober reflection could very well be, as the kids say, a real buzz-kill.

Hence it rolls out the old-time religion, retuned and tweaked only slightly for the new year, from the shamelessness of Tim Pawlenty ...

"God's in charge," he thundered, adding that "There are some people who say, 'Oh, you know, Pawlenty, don't bring that up. You know it's politically incorrect,' " to which he then helpfully supplied the audience's comeback: "Hogwash" ...

to Mike Pence's neoConfederate hyper-hyperbole, reminiscent of antebellum Dixie-whistlers and firebreathers who warned of Lincoln's black heart, hellbent on enslaving Southern whites ...

"The bondage of big government" are the chains we must break, exhorted Pence of Indiana, home of the twentieth-century's KKK-central ...

to the laughable hypocrisy of Michele Bachmann ...

it is Barack Obama -- not 30 years of trickle-down malfeasance and neoconservative waste -- she intoned, who "is leading the country toward an economic collapse"; "People can indulge in Fantasy Football, but you can't indulge in Fantasy Economics," Bachmann warned: "It just doesn't work" ...

to, naturally, the CPAC-defining lunacy of Glenn Beck, who, while extolling Calvin Coolidge as presidentially paradigmatic and Franklin Roosevelt as catastrophic, proclaimed that the "disease in America" is ...

progress.

But I'm going to give Mr. Beck credit, too. In a village of idiots, sometimes it's the village's most preternatural idiot who stumbles on some ray of Enlightenment and, by virtue of his transcendent condition, is permitted, unmolested, to utter some Truth.

And this Beck did, spending "more time," as Politico reported, "detailing the problems he sees within the Republican Party" than assailing the opposition and concluding, in his own High English, that "it's not enough just to not suck as much as the other side."

For Republicans, call that a Bingo! moment if you like; yet still, it little advances their partisan cause. For as a GOP consultant also told Politico in an accompanying Beck-moment of "Oh, shit": "Republicans have an ideal" -- namely, smaller government -- "that genuinely resonates with the public. But Republicans don't have viable, sustainable ideas that can actually solve the underlying problems" of the nation.

"Ideas have consequences," wrote a conservative philosopher some decades ago ... as does the lack of ideas. And here, Republicans find themselves in an inescapable bind: They can't possibly offer new and authentically workable ideas, because each must fit into the old, unworkable ideological straitjacket of lower taxes and less government spending. And you just can't get there from here.

For instance on the same day that Glenn Beck was raving to the faithful about the glory of Gilded Age governance, the NY Times' Bob Herbert was pointing out merely one of the unmet challenges we as a nation face:

"Schools, highways, the electric grid, water systems, ports, dams, levees -- the list can seem endless -- have to be maintained, upgraded, rebuilt or replaced if the U.S. is to remain a first-class nation with a first-class economy over the next several decades ... But these systems have to be paid for ... And there are not enough leaders explaining to the public how heavy this lift will be, and why it is so necessary, and what sacrifices will be required to get the job properly done."

Herbert's formulation is incontrovertible. But while Democrats may be doing a lousy job of enjoining national sacrifice, assuming it's "a first-class nation with a first-class economy" we seek, at least their governmental worldview allows, New Deal-like, for the heavy lift of what's necessary.

Republicans' worldview, on the other hand, necessarily contains the seeds of our own destruction; one simply cannot achieve progress through regression, any more than we can screw ourselves to virginal innocence, as "conservative" luminaries implore.

Yet on the other other hand, none of this is to suggest that we won't, in fact, reconfirm ourselves in 2010 as the world's village idiots.

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The Obama Health Care Plan: February 2010

President Obama will unveil his health care plan this morning. It is supposed to be available on the White House web site at precisely 10 a.m. and we'll have a copy as soon as we can.

There is a conference call for media at 8, for a frame of the proposal, but Q&A is embargoed until 10 a.m.

This whole process is leaky as a sieve, so we know some of the things that are in the proposal:

• Individual mandates, but no corporate mandates
• Insurers must allow all comers: no denials for pre-existing conditions
• No annual or lifetime caps
• NO PUBLIC OPTION

Basically, it looks like Baucus Redux.

Just so we're all clear here, if this is the plan, it is the worst of all possible groupings Obama could join together. If you think that the Anthem proposed California premium raises of up to 39% are steep, know that this plan will encourage similar growth in all classes of insurance premium.

It saddens me that Obama and his team have learned virtually nothing from that past year. I hope that at the final moment, a Public Option goes into the mix. As candidate Obama promised. As the White House has signaled it would support if it came out of Congress. As the American people want.  

When you look at the Anthem California situation, you can see a microcosm of the American dilemma. As insurance becomes unaffordable, people who are healthier drop out, upping the costs of the pool, and therefore increasing premiums. Premiums rise to cover both actual costs and profits. And profits are perfectly legitimate so long as insurance companies continue to be for-profit corporations. "Making money" is what they are supposed to do, whether the product is milk, drywall, books, or insurance which means the difference between life and death for its customers.

Increasing costs for the insurance companies, like the proposed Obama plan, without the counterweight of a Public Option, only quickens the pace of increased premiums leading to more drop-outs and still higher premiums.

If Obama talks about selling across state lines, don't fall for it. When you look at the sheer size of California, and you look at the pool problems there, you'll understand that the 'state lines' thing is a tall tale. In California, about 2.5 million people have individual policies, and about 21 million have employer-backed policies. Only 6 states (Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio) HAVE more than 10 million people as total population. We know that, depending on whose number you believe, between 33% and 50% of all people have government-backed insurance. Therefore, there is not an economy of scale which would be large enough to offset the problem of people leaving because premiums are getting too high. How high? Could you and your spouse afford health insurance premiums of over $20,000/year? With median incomes ranging from $42,000 - $60,000 depending on whose numbers you believe, that means health insurance premiums could be a family's highest expenditure of the year. 

The House is back this week. They'll not only be talking about a public option, but there is scuttlebutt that they will also be looking at refusing to fund Obama's Afghanistan troop increase. GOOD FOR THEM! It's nice to see one group of elected officials at least trying to represent the people who voted for change. 

So we'll see if Obama learned anything through this whole health care debate: whether there will be actual change or an adherence to government-by-corporation. 

We'll have more later today - I've got the mold removal people here this morning to make sure they got all the water out of my walls and floors, and a construction team here this afternoon to quote the rebuilding of my home, and to mitigate the hole that has opened between my sliding glass doors and the wall to the outside. In between, I'll get up the information I can: if you find the links and can put them in the comments so I can move them quickly, I'd appreciate it. 

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Haiti: One Of The Undeveloped Mineral Wealth
Treasures On The Planet

Why was the US so quick to send so many troops into Haiti after the January earthquake? Why were there so many fears from around the world of US militarism and exploitation in Haiti?

Oil?

F. William Engdahl is an economist and author and the writer of the best selling book "A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order.", and has written on issues of energy, politics and economics for more than 30 years, beginning with the first oil shock in the early 1970s.

Here Engdahl talks with Paul Jay of The Real News, says that geophysics suggest there could be massive oil and mineral deposits in Haiti, and that the US may be motivated by the desire to strategically deny oil deposits in Haiti to the rest of the world.

ENGDAHL: Well, if you look at a geophysical map of Haiti and the Caribbean, it jumps out that Haiti and Port-au-Prince, Haiti, lies right along the conjunction of what are called tectonic plates, but three separate tectonic plates. If you can imagine a China vase that falls off the table and gets broken in many pieces and you glue it back together, well, these tectonic plates are a bit similar in terms of images.

But three of those converge right at the land area that's called Haiti, and generally where we have such a conversion of tectonic plates, we have a great amount of geophysical motion, energy, and so forth. They tend to be along?in the Pacific you have the Ring of Fire, which is literally the ring of vulcanic activity?. Indonesia is in one such zone; Saudi Arabia and the giant oil fields of the Middle East, from Kuwait and so forth, the Persian Gulf, are another such convergence of such plates.

And up until now there's been very little talk about petroleum and Haiti, but it's not because there hasn't been interest in petroleum in Haiti. My take on it is that there are?according to geophysicists knowledgeable about the geophysics of the Caribbean basin?you probably have large multinational oil companies, US, British oil companies and their allies, who are aware that with a little bit of exploration onshore and offshore, that there are probably enormous oil finds.

And you just had, two years ago, offshore Cuba, just north of Haiti, a giant?supergiant, actually, oil discovery, with several billion barrels of believed reserves of oil there that the Russians are helping the Cubans to exploit. So it stands to reason that the same geological fault line of these tectonic plates?the Caribbean plate, the North American plate, and the South American plate?they all converge north of Venezuela and in the area that's called Haiti.

That also makes Haiti ripe for other unusual minerals, such as uranium, gold, and so forth. And my own sense from talking with geophysicists on this whole Haiti question is that Haiti is probably one of the undeveloped treasures of mineral wealth on the planet...

video details and more

The Real News Network - February 19, 2010
full transcript here

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Which Beast to Starve

Today brings a sharp contrast in political philosophies and economic reality. As Paul Krugman discourses on three decades of Republican attempts to shrink government and "drown it in the bathtub," President Obama discloses his intention to stop feeding the free-market monster that has devoured American health care.

In advance of Thursday's summit, the White House leaks a proposal to oversee and limit double-digit health insurance rate increases such as those the President denounced in his weekly address Saturday.

Legislation introduced last week by Sen. Dianne Feinstein would create a seven-member rate board, the Health Insurance Rate Authority--consumer, industry and medical representatives and experts in health economics--to determine which increases are justifiable and which are unconscionable by insurers who are siphoning off one out of every three dollars spent for "overhead" and profit.

This attempt, finally, to rein in a greedy industry, along with restrictions on denying care to policy holders, should become the centerpiece of streamlined reform legislation to replace last year's fiasco of a bill.

Its thrust, to protect Americans from private greed, is revealing in the light of GOP efforts to "protect" them from their own government, starting in the Reagan era.

The starve-the-beast strategy, Krugman writes, was "a game of bait and switch. Rather than proposing unpopular spending cuts, Republicans would push through popular tax cuts, with the deliberate intention of worsening the government?s fiscal position. Spending cuts could then be sold as a necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate an unsustainable budget deficit."

They did just that in the Bush II years, but his tax cuts for the wealthy and unfunded wars ballooned the deficit, even as Congress couldn't muster the courage to cut popular programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Now both messes, budget deficits and health care, have been inherited by a Change president who is struggling to deal with them over the adamant opposition of those who played the biggest part in creating them.

This week will show how far he can get in trying to slim down the private beast, but it will take his new budget deficit commission a long time to start putting government on a subsistence diet.



Read The Full Article:
http://ajliebling.blogspot.com/2010/02/which-beast-to-starve.html

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