From Bob Herbert's op-ed in yesterday's NYT:
"There is no credible evidence against Jawad, and his torture-induced confession has rightly been ruled inadmissible by a military judge. But the Obama administration does not feel that he has suffered enough. Not only have administration lawyers opposed defense efforts to secure Jawad's freedom, but they are using, as the primary basis for their opposition, the fruits of the confession that was obtained through torture and has already been deemed inadmissible — without merit, of no value."
The person Herbert is talking about was a child when he was captured. A child.
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Corporate Greed and Denial of Reality Are Going to Kill Us
If nothing else, it is becoming painfully obvious that the major players responsible for the economic debacle, the health insurance scam, the looming environmental disaster, and all the rest of the corporate agenda of the last 8 years have no intention of doing a damn thing different than they have been, and no apparent belief that anyone can make them.
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Can we get some news here?
We passed a milestone either today or yesterday, depending on how you choose to look at it. June 30 is the date that US forces pull out of all the major cities in Iraq and turn over security to the Iraqi military. June 30 comes sooner to Iraq than it does here, so -- by the time you read this anyway -- that's already done. Still, today is the date that will be remembered as an Iraqi national holiday....
.....Hours before the Monday night deadline, four US soldiers were killed in combat.
Of course, this didn't get a lot of coverage here, the news having been pretty much canceled in honor of the death of Michael Jackson. Over 4,000 Americans have lost their lives to bring Iraq to this point and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died, but one man's death - even if we was a reclusive, Howard Hughes type who was previously the object of ridicule - is much more important than all of them. In our celebrity-obsessed culture, you don't matter and neither do all those people who lost their lives way-the-hell-and-gone over in Iraq. The oddest thing here is that Michael Jackson didn't really matter much before he died - the fact is that he was sort of a has-been.
http://griperblade.blogspot.com/2009/06/can-we-get-some-news-here.html
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Jonathan Turley:
Recently, Rush Limbaugh explained how Obama economic policies were the cause of Republican Gov. Mark Sanford's affair with a beautiful Argentinian woman. But what caused the economic problems that caused the stimulus package that aroused Gov. Sanford? Oklahoma Rep. Sally Kern has finally answered that question: our sins. Kern has drafted a resolution that puts the current economic crisis squarely on the backs of libertines and godless people who have produced a moral crisis. This includes Obama's refusal to "uphold the long held tradition of past presidents in recognition of our National Day of Prayer."
....
It appears that divorce is "a form of debauchery." It is a bit harder to explain the cause and effect between the Giuliani divorces, which appear to occur regularly in good or bad economic times.
Of course, one has to ignore that fact that the crisis began under President George Bush who was a favorite of the religious right. Obviously, there was a bit of anticipatory economic damnation. Ironically, in a recent article in the Washington Post, it was disclosed how both Sen. Jon Ensign and Sanford frequented a little known house on Capitol Hill dedicated to prayer and specifically the National Prayer Day.
The main concern is how the continuing economic crisis will unravel other GOP leaders and push them into the arms of temptation. What is the danger for innocent bystanders or pets if the bond market continues to decline?....
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How's That New Politics Going? http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/014230.php
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A Matt Taibbi title for the ages: Suck on our Yachts. Matt is not happy with Goldman Sachs and their plan to bilk the world.
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The GOP hypocrisy chickens are still coming home to roost. Gov. Mark Sanford, who voted to impeach Bill Clinton when Sanford was a congressman, now admits to "crossing" certain "lines" w/other women besides his Argentine tango partner. asspress:
Well, that's damn decent of him to have never crossed "the ultimate line." And it reminds me of that guy that said, "well that depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."
During an emotional interview at his Statehouse office with The Associated Press on Tuesday, [Governor Mark] Sanford said [Maria Belen] Chapur is his soul mate but he's trying to fall back in love with his wife.You're not helping your case, there, Marko. That's the sort of statement that is almost guaranteed to lead to your soon-to-be-ex-wife, Jenny Sanford, filing a divorce action. If she really is "an Old Testament woman with a 170 IQ", then ol' Mark is about to experience a heavy application of wrath and scorn.
And he'd better get ready to make child support payments for a very long time.
When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig's condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God's, and signed it "Trig's Creator, Your Heavenly Father."
Also, Purdum reports that Palin lied about not having insurance to show "she could empathize with uninsured Americans." Palin insisted that in her early years of marriage, she and husband Todd did not have coverage, when in fact they had catastrophic coverage. Palin "insisted that catastrophic insurance didn't really count and need not be revealed."
Remember as you read that, just under half of the people in this country who cast a ballot last November voted for these morons.
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Citigroup Inc has increased interest rates on up to 15 million U.S. credit card accounts just months before curbs on such rises come into effect, the Financial Times reported citing people close to the situation.
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE5600ZI20090701
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4,321 soldiers killed in Iraq; 716 in Afghanistan.
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How Dysfunction Helps the GOP: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124640443679876503.html#mod=rss_opinion_main
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The former 'Masters of the Universe' who played with fire and burned our economy to the ground are now pitching an indignant snit because the Obama administration yesterday released a detailed, 150 page proposal to create a new consumer protection agency that would oversee and regulate home loans, credit card fees and other forms of consumer finance, including those awful payday loan places that are stacked up outside every gate in and out of military installations. The proposed agency would set new standards for ordinary mortgages, rein in risky loans, investigate financial institutions and enforce new laws meant to protect credit card customers. Timothy Geithner said in a statement yesterday that the new agency "will have one mission - to protect consumers."
And the bankers - each and every one with a sense of entitlement that ought to be an executable offense - are positively verklempt at the very notion and are vowing to fight it with everything they have - conveniently glossing over the fact that 'everything they have' is due to the bailouts that saved their asses.
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So. U.S. troops met the supposedly impossible June 30 deadline to withdraw from Iraqi cities. Out-of-Iraq-now fanatic that I am, why aren't I celebrating? Because what we've left behind is far, far worse.
Anybody remember the death squads the U.S. trained in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala? The tens of thousands of natives they massacred? The nuns they raped and murdered? The democratic governments they destroyed? The civil societies they set back decades?
Yeah, they were such a huge success the U.S. military has transplanted them to Iraq, where they're already terrorizing the population.
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h/t Dick
A federal judge has struck down the Bush administration's change to a rule designed to protect the northern spotted owl from logging in national forests.
U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken ruled from Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday that the US Forest Service failed to take a hard look at the environmental impacts of changing the rule to make it easier to cut down forest habitat of species such as the spotted owl and salmon on 193 million acres of national forests. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090701/ap_on_re_us/us_logging_ruling;_ylt=AopLmKdzb4Ze5.9pLZ0jYzdH2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTMxMGdtanU0BGFzc2V0Ay9hcC8yMDA5MDcwMS9hcF9vbl9yZV91cy91c19sb2dnaW5nX3J1bGluZwRjcG9zAzUEcG9zAzUEc2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yaWVzBHNsawNqdWRnZW92ZXJ0dXI
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Say it ain't so ....
The concerted effort of international human rights activists to rein in violations of laws of war was given a major impetus when Human Rights Watch researchers presented a report Tuesday on the unbridled use by the Israeli military of unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCLAV), commonly known as drones, during Israel's 22-day assault on Hamas in Gaza at the beginning of the year.
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/06/30/report-cites-indiscriminate-drone-use/
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