Craig Ferguson is goofy for a late night host. Kind of reminds me of David Letterman’s early years on NBC. A couple of weeks ago Ferguson lip synched a song during the opening of his show. It used a couple of people and his cast of hand puppets. It was funny.
Conservatives must be flipping their minds
It must be awful for some of the more right wing conservatives these days. They lose the White House and the Congress. Arlen Specter switches to the Democrats almost giving them a fillerbuster proof majority. Polls are showing more people accept same sex marriage, believe the country is heading in the correct direction, want torture investigated, and give President Obama almost 70% job approval. And now Obama will get to name a Supreme Court Justice. The 20% who refuse to get on the band wagon are seen as the silly people they are with their teabagging and hysterical buying of guns and ammo.
I guess this is what happens when karma hits you in the ass – the people who support hatred, scapegoating, bigotry, and the irrational were dumped like a hot potato by the voting public.
Of course those on the left side of the political aisle are nervous, wondering when the other shoe will drop, waking us all from some kind of dream,
I just think it is so much better to have smart adults in charge of the government who don’t mind sharing information and the processes used to govern.
The photo op with Air Force One over New York was stupid, but if that is as stupid as it gets then I will be pleased.
The Republicans still haven’t accepted their own fault in their own demise and some like Mitt Romney and Eric Cantor are moving on like the 2008 elections never happened:
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney compared the GOP to Americans fighting the British during the Revolutionary War. “We are the party of the revolutionaries, they [Democrats] are the party of the monarchists,” he told the overwhelmingly Republican crowd, saying the Republicans needed to “once again lead the American Revolution.”
Top Republicans kick off campaign to reshape their party’s image
Just really sad with their object denial of their actions the past 8 years.
Weekend Ear Candy: Seal “Crazy”
I will admit that my taste in music has always been mature. While other guys were head banging or playing the latest Rush album when I was a kid, I liked to listen to standards or the music of the Rat Pack – the 1960’s lush lounge music or horn heavy Motown soul. For this week’s weekend ear candy, I am highlighting “Crazy”, the first hit for the singer Seal from 1991. Sure it was a popular song on the radio then, reaching number seven on the Billboard Music Charts, but my friends thought it was a one off novelty song and they didn’t follow his career like I did.
I like his music because of the use of strings and horns on many tunes and the funky electronic sequencing like on “Crazy”. And yes I am jealous that he is married to super model Heidi Klum. Here is a live performance of “Crazy”.
Yes, where WAS the media while the US used torture?
The most ironic thing about this entire torture scandal isn’t that the Bushies and their neo-con lackies are trying to defend the indefensible – which is funny and sad at the same time, but that our mainstream press is now doing their job and asking tough questions and not letting the Bushies off as easy as before. I mean it looks really bad to know they ignored the topic since 2001 when it first came out.
I’m with blogger wmtriallawyer who wrote:
Oh yes, outside of the loons of Hannity, et. al., now many in the mainstream media are showing their absolute indignation (HARUMPH! HARUMPH!) after the Obama administration released the memos to show what we all already knew: the United States of America tortured prisoners, and tried to cook up legal justification for it by calling it enhanced interrogation techniques.
Well, welcome to the club Shep and Norah and whoever else. But you are seven years too late in your outrage.
Where were you this was actually going on? Where were you when the evidence was seeping out? Shoot, where were you when the Bush administration basically admitted they were doing it?
Silent as lambs, you were.
So, while I am happy this issue is being treated how it should be – as illegal and un-American – I want to know where the media was seven years ago?
Obama has no right to decide if torture memos should be investigated or prosecuted
On Thursday, the White House and Department of Justice released four more memos written by President Bush’s Department of Justice rationalizing the use of torture toward detainees caught during our “war on terror”. President Obama said in his comments on the release said “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.” However, due to current Federal and international law, the President and Department of Justice have no choice but to investigate and prosecute anyone who allowed the torture or performed it.
Nothing disgusted me more than learning about the torture condoned by the Bush administration and then reading the memos that have been released by the DOJ showing the bizarre lengths the neo-cons in the Bush DOJ went to justify the “legality” of the torture.
I was extremely disappointed to learn that President Obama doesn’t want to investigate and prosecute those who wrote the memos, ordered their writing, or the people who carried them out.
This isn’t like what happened to President Nixon after he left office. Nixon’s crimes were more of a political nature and the “little guys” who carried out his illegal plans did face justice.
The memos released Thursday dealt with torture – which is a war crime and crime against humanity. The penalty for crimes against humanity can be death or life in prison. The memos show that all levels of the Bush administration knew about the torture and allowed it to happen. One of the men who wrote one of the memos is now a Federal District Court Judge and there are calls now to impeach him.
The Huffington Post had a good article summarizing the issue:
Manfred Nowak, the UN rapporteur on torture, says that the US must try those who used harsh interrogation tactics in accordance with the UN Convention Against Torture.
Calling for an independent investigations and the compensation of victims, Nowak told the Austrian daily Der Standard:
“The United States, like all other states that are part of the UN convention against torture, is committed to conducting criminal investigations of torture and to bringing all persons against whom there is sound evidence to court… The fact that you carried out an order doesn’t relieve you of your responsibility.”
Opposition Grows To Obama’s Decision Not To Prosecute CIA Agents
Some former Bush administration have made the laughable argument that release of the memos reveals secrets to “our enemies” and has some how made us all “less safe”. The fact is we have known these methods have been used for some time – “our enemies” knew it too and used it for recruiting purposes.
The other point is torture isn’t just immoral, it’s also ineffective and counterproductive as written by a former interrogation officer Matthew Alexander in an op-ed in the Washington Post and his book on the subject:
I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology — one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they’re listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of “ruses and trickery”). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.
There is also an online petition that asks the President to appoint a special prosecutor: