Keith Olbermann interviewed conservative radio host Erich "Mancow" Muller tonigh about his experience being waterboarded. Mancow said he agreed to be interviewed because Olbermann is a "stand up guy" for agreeing to donate $10,000 to a charity benefiting veterans (an offer previously extended to Sean Insanity) after Mancow was waterboarded.
Mancow reaffirmed that the practice was indeed torture and said that his "psychological state" going into the experiment was that he was "laughing at it. I was willing to prove, and ready to prove, that this was a joke, and I was wrong. It was horrific. It was instantaneous. And look, I felt the effects for two days."
Mancow also revealed that his friend Sean Hannity "called me and said 'it's still not torture.'"
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The attacks on Sonia Sotomayor are coming in like a tidal wave by the extreme right, but former Rep. Tom Tancredo, one of the harshest critics of the Latino community ever to run for president, actually called her a racist: http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/tom-tancredo-calls-sonia-sotomayor-raci
General Petraeus just threw a wrench in the whining conservative rants against torture and the closing of Guantanamo Bay:
General David Petraeus said this past weekend that President Obama's decision to close down Gitmo and end harsh interrogation techniques would benefit the United States in the broader war on terror.
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"This was the first time I'd been walking in a neighborhood for 14 years. It's not all that hard, by the way. You take one step, and then you take another." George the Wonder Monkey, mastering the art of walking Link
Keep working on that, George.
After a while, we'll give you a stick of gum.
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Return of the Romanovs: Obama creates yet another czar
President Obama is about to announce the creation of a "cyber czar" who will have broad authority to develop strategy to protect the nation's government-run and private computer networks. Obama's legion of czars has raised concerns among lawmakers about their concentration of power.
Obama now has produced more Czars than produced by the Romanovs who ruled Russia from 1613 to 1917. The score by latest count: Romanovs 18, Obamas 19.
Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said yesterday that the "Pentagon is prepared to leave fighting forces in Iraq for as long as a decade despite an agreement between the United States and Iraq that would bring all American troops home by 2012." "He said his planning envisions combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan for a decade as part of a U.S. commitment to fighting extremism in the Middle East."
Great. Let's keep spending $12 billion a month and letting our soldiers die for crap like this:
The latest New York Post column by Ralph Peters - last seen accusing journalists of treason - isn't going to get much attention, given today's Sotomayor and Prop 8 news, but it's kind of a doozy:
WE made one great mistake regarding Guantanamo: No terrorist should have made it that far. All but a handful of those grotesquely romanticized prisoners should have been killed on the battlefield.
The few kept alive for their intelligence value should have been interrogated secretly, then executed.
Terrorists don't have legal rights or human rights. By committing or abetting acts of terror against the innocent, they place themselves outside of humanity's borders. They must be hunted as man-killing animals.
And, as a side benefit, dead terrorists don't pose legal quandaries....
Does this mean we should have just summarily executed, say, Guantanamo detainee Mohammed Jawad, who was captured in Afghanistan at age 16 or 17, accused of throwing a grenade at an U.S. military vehicle, which would seemingly make him, at most, a guerrilla soldier, not a terrorist? Ah, but it's reported that he was trained by Al Qaeda ... in the use of grenades, a skill I'm sure the illiterate, non-English-speaking Afghan could have used to kill mass numbers of innocent Americans in their beds, somehow. Yeah, he's definitely too much of a super-ultra-mega-monster to be treated like, y'know, a prisoner of war, even though the only act of violence he's charged with was an act of war.
Sure, if you step back, the ordinary rules of war seem absurd -- in the midst of battle you shoot to kill, but killing a soldier captured alive is regarded as brutality. But that's a widely recognized and understandable practice -- except it's not understandable to Ralph Peters, if the enemy in question is not a uniformed soldier but a terrorist (and a terrorist is anyone we say is a terrorist). Then, well, kill him. Kill 'em all.
The Peters column loses steam after that -- he keeps coming back to the notion that if we have to take in Gitmo detainees, they ought to go to Cape Cod, because, well, Kennedy-bashing never gets old and hey, you may as well go to urbanized coastal Massachusetts because it's not as if America has any high-security prisons in sparsely populated states or anything. But really, kill 'em all is a much better solution.
The California court ruled yesterday on the constitutionality of proposition 8, the measure that prohibited same sex marriage. Unfortunately, the court upheld the ban.
California should be embarrassed. Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Iowa, and Vermont allow or will allow same-sex marriages, and New York and New Hampshire are working on it. The trend is going one way, towards recognizing the civil rights of all individuals. Californians better get to work, you don't want Mississippi to beat you to the 21st century. (Although I will be quite pleased when Mississippi legalizes gay marriage, whenever that may happen and no matter what order the states accomplish it.)
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In the last 8 years could anyone have predicted this picture?
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RNC talking points on Sotomayor leaked
Oh my. So much for the super secret wingnutty wurlitzer blast faxer-iffic strategery. The RNC has sprung an unintentional media leak out the wazoo.
If you look at the list of GOP talking points, you'll find this bit of Wingnut crazy speculation as to what Judge Sotamayor would do:
Stripping "under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance
President Obama has set a wide open pitfall trap for the party of Hoover. Most of the party professionals know this and for them, opposing the confirmation of Judge Sotamayor to the Supreme Court is not the hill that they want to die on.
The batshit-crazy base of the GOP either doesn't understand the risks of vigorously opposing the confirmation or they do not care. Given their penchant for over-the-top rhetoric and virulent anti-immigrant bombast, the crazies are almost guaranteed to drift into anti-Hispanic screeds. Even the Former Chimperor recognized that the GOP needs to appeal to Hispanics in order to have a hope to remain a national party, but the various Hindenbergs on the Right don't care.
The GOP needs to get a clue, fast. They are tromping down the track of becoming a smallish regional party with no power at the national level, at least for the next few electoral cycles. They do this nation no good if they cannot at least have enough numbers in the Congress to influence policy and they are dangerously close to that point now.
......
The patriotic Vulgar Pigboy just wants her to fail:
"Do I want her to fail? Yeah. Do I want her to fail to get on the court? Yes. She'd be a disaster on the Court.
Do I still want to Obama to fail as President? Yeah, - AP, you getting this?
He's gonna fail anyway, but the sooner the better here so that as little damage can be done to the country."
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In 1998, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT who said "Nobody denies that Saddam Hussein was supporting al-Qaeda…Well, I shouldn't say nobody. Nobody with brains") was one of just seven Republicans to break ranks and approve Sonia Sotomayor for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. But today on MSNBC, Hatch said that although he found her suitable for the federal bench then, he now might have problems with her:
HATCH: In 1998, for the circuit court of appeals, I did vote for her because I believe in giving the president due deference, especially for circuit court of appeals nominations.
But now we're talking about the most important court on Earth. We're talking about the court of last resort. We're talking about a court that everyone of us takes great interest in. And now we're talking about a woman who has been in the federal judicial system since 1992, who has all kinds of decisions that she's made, all kinds of opinions that she's written, who has written articles, who has spoken in public — all of that has to be looked into.
It should also be looked into that Orrin Hatch ran on term limits in 1977 and is still a senator 32 years later. And also that he is a douchebag.
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