http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/lucky-duckies-by-digby-cnns-week-end.html
There is an astonishing effort by intelligence officials to block Attorney General Eric Holder and White House counsel Gregory Craig from releasing torture memos from the Justice Department. A senior national-security aide named John Brennan is leading the effort to block the release with the backing of people at the CIA. It takes considerable hubris given the CIA's knowing destruction of evidence of torture and obvious motivation to withhold the memoranda to further conceal the agency's involvement in war crimes. One official is quoted as saying "Holy hell has broken loose over this." That is certainly the proper venue for officials still struggling to cover-up evidence of war crimes.
What is most disturbing is the role of Brennan who Obama considered as agency director. Brennan was blocked by critics who rightly saw the former senior CIA official as too close to past officials involved in such programs as the torture program. Brennan has now proven his critics to be absolutely correct about their distrust. Nevertheless, the Obama Administration (which has retained a number of controversial intelligence officials from the Bush years) still put Brennan into a high position overseeing intelligence issues at the National Security Council. There is also a concern over CIA Director Leon Panetta who has adopted a highly defensive role in protecting the agency and is now viewed as less than a reformer at the agency.
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The bombshell from the upcoming Tyra Banks interview with Levi Johnston, is that he claims that Palin, who preaches that abstinence is the only acceptable form of birth control for teenagers, knew that he and Bristol, then 16 years old, were sleeping in the same bed before she got pregnant.
Levi's mom, Sherry and his sister Mercede will also appear on the show.
No word on whether Tyra will ask Sherry Johnston about her arrest in December on charges that she illegally distributed Oxycontin, Rush Limbaugh's narcotic of choice.
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The North Dakota House had passed a ridiculous "personhood" amendment that defined a fertilized egg as a person that had constitutional rights.
The North Dakota Senate voted 29-16 Friday to defeat the controversial House Bill 1572, with no debate.
Good.
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Water wars in the West; Nevada's thirst a threat to Utah
Utah can oppose Nevada's plan to pump water from an aquifer that reaches under Millard County, but Nevada will get its water one way or another. Utah needs to start talking to other western states about changing how water is managed in the west. - Ogden Standard-Examiner
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"My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks." That is what President Obama told the bankers he met with last week in the White House when they tried to soft-soap him on why their kind deserve to be compensated at a rate that is ten to twenty times what the leader of the free world pulls down in a year.
Go read this and then tell me why the pitchforks shouldn't be turned on these two:
"Hedge funds paid me $5.2 million in the last year! And I pulled in a cool $2.7 million by speaking to troubled Wall Street firms and other organizations."
"I'm covering up the massive fraud committed by bailed out bankers!"
If Obama knew anything about their backgrounds and appointed them anyway, then this isn't change I voted for or can believe in.
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Pfizer has reached a broad agreement to pay millions of dollars to Nigeria's Kano state to settle a criminal case alleging that the drug company illegally tested an experimental drug on gravely ill children during a 1996 meningitis epidemic.
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Well, he said Obama was going to take his guns away, and that's why he needed to kill 3 police officers. What radio show do you think he listens to? What TV network do you think he watches? And what party do you think he votes for? AP
Yep. That's right. Three police officers were ambushed by some idiot who believed this insane confabulated fever dream of a rumor that Obama was going to come in the night and take away all his bang-bang toys. It's sickening. It's disturbing. And, for the families and friends of the three dead officers it must seem like some bizarre, surreal, absurdist farce. Except, of course, that it actually happened, and they will have to bury and mourn their loved ones because a band of ignorant jackasses (and more than a few right wing opportunists) invented a story that had no basis in reality, a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, but in this case tragically signifying the needless death of three public servants paid to protect their fellow citizens.
Just like the poor innocent congregants of Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church who witnessed the murders of two of their community because a deranged individual by the name of Jim D. Adkisson, a connoisseur of right wing hatemongers like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, decided to commit a hate crime as revenge against liberals, once more we see how the inane lies and fantasies spread by of a minority of spiteful, fearful, ignorant, bigoted and small minded people have resulted in the deaths of innocents. We keep saying it can't happen here, that we will never see a movement among certain members of our society to kill fellow Americans simply because of their political beliefs or status "government employees" or immigrants, or gays, or blacks, etc. We keep saying this country is not like Cambodia, or Rwanda, or other places where mass violence has erupted because of the hateful propaganda preached by a few power mad demagogues. And yet . . .
And yet these deadly incidents keep happening. And evil media clowns like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and even politicians like Michelle Bachmann keep screaming their twisted diatribes of hate over the airwaves, ratcheting up their deceitful, mendacious and dangerous rhetoric to levels we haven't seen since the days when the Klu Klux Klan dominated vast regions of this country in the twenties and thirties. Days when lynchings were common. Nor do we need to look that far back. It was only 14 years ago, during the administration of another centrist Democratic President that we suffered the worst act of domestic terrorism perpetrated by another crazy bastard who swallowed the far right lies hook line and sinker: a bastard named Timothy McVeigh.
McVeigh's tragic attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma City came at a time when right wing hate radio talk shows and the National Republicans were in full on attack mode against President Bill Clinton and the evils of "Big Guvmint." The rise of right wing militias were in full flower. A time when a white supremacist made a Jewish community center in Los Angeles a free fire zone. And this all occurred during a time of economic prosperity and relative stability. Before Fox News had fully mutated into the master manipulator and fear monger it has become today. A time before Hannity and O'Reilly were household words, and Glenn Beck was just a small time radio personality and recovering ex-alcoholic, not the self described leader of the 9/12 Project whose motto is "We Surround Them," the "them" in this case being anyone who voted for Obama, or who isn't a white, gun loving, tax hating conservative Christian.
The longer the Becks and the O'Reillys and the Hannitys and the Limbaughs and the Savages and all their little wannabe imitators continue this campaign of fear and distortion, spreading hate and lies to their audiences and anyone those gullible enough to believe every misleading canard that they screech from their media pulpits, the more incidents like the murder of these three Pittsburgh police officers by deluded and unstable individuals will continue to occur.
Their eliminationist jokes regarding the deaths of liberals and other "Un-American traitors" were never funny, but they are quickly becoming downright dangerous to our public safety. To Your safety. My safety. Our children's safety. As more and more people lose their jobs the audience for this kind of deluded, scapegoating rhetoric grows larger every day. As does the chance that the violent language of these radical right wing agitators will erupt into more and more instances of actual violence. We already know that President Obama received an unprecedented number of death threats (and several actual foiled conspiracies) before he won election. How long will it be before one of these fruitcake dittohead followers of Beck and Limbaugh and Hannity and Savage make an attempt on his life, or the lives of other prominent liberal spokespeople and/or Democratic politicians?
We've chosen to live in a society where firearms, both the legal and illegal varieties, are ubiquitous. We've chosen to allow a single issue special interest group to promote laws (and heavily fund campaigns of politicians who support their agenda) that make it easier than ever for anyone to buy, carry and use firearms of all kinds, from small caliber concealable pistols to large caliber machine guns.
Big surprise ... not. Rod Blagojevich indicted on 16 felony counts including racketeering conspiracy, wire fraud, extortion conspiracy, attempted extortion and making false statements to federal agents.
The indictment describes a previously unreported failed extortion attempt of Congressman A. Is Congressman A Rahm Emanuel?
An Iraqi defense ministry official reports that at least six gay men have been shot dead in two separate incidents during the past 10 days in a Shia-controlled part of Baghdad. The official said today that three bullet-riddled bodies of gay individuals have been identified in Sadr City:
"Three corpses of homosexuals have been recovered in Sadr City. Two of the bodies, found on Thursday, had pieces of paper attached on which was written the word 'Pervert.' The third body was retrieved on Friday," the official said.
Witnesses told CNN that a Sadr City cafe, which was a popular gathering spot for gays, was also set on fire.
And when the Iraqi government begins executing gays in batches, the numbers will grow.
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Obama's speech in Prague calls for elimination of nuclear weapons
"One of those issues that I will focus on today is fundamental to our nations, and to the peace and security of the world - the future of nuclear weapons in the 21st century...
...So today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. This goal will not be reached quickly - perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change.
Speech here: http://prague.usembassy.gov/obama.html
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Representative Anh Cao (R-LA) promised to be an 'independent' voice in Congress. Here's how that has worked out: first, say you're inclined to vote for the stimulus bill and the President's budget, then, second, at the last minute, vote in lockstep with your party against them. Now that's independence we can believe in!
"Will mass shootings in the United States end any time soon?" someone has asked. What a naive question! Whoever asked it obviously doesn't understand America's longstanding and well-established 'gun culture'. Gun ownership in the USA isn't an accidental freak of nature; it's a religion. And your best chance of surviving this destructive immortality ideology is, quite simply, to not be in the wrong place at the wrong time--like, say, Binghamton, New York, at the American Civic Association, on April 3, 2009.
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