Here is something for all of those who claimed the Abu Ghraib abuses were “isolated incidents”:
The International Committee of the Red Cross has charged in confidential reports to the United States government that the American military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion “tantamount to torture” on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Isolated incident… right…
The 51 percent of Americans who voted for George W. Bush earlier this month should not kid themselves. When they voted for Bush, they voted for torture.
I’ve been having a terrible time with comment spammers, so I’ve implemented a new comment authentication function which will hopefully stop them. We’ll see.
If you want to enter a comment, you will be asked to enter a code which will be displayed in a graphic to the right of the code box. If you enter the right code, your comment will be added, otherwise you will be given an error message and will need to hit your browser’s back button and re-enter the code (I’m going to work on making that more seamless in the future).
Hopefully this won’t be too much of an inconvenience for legitimate commenters, and FAR TOO MUCH of an inconvenience for the comment spammers.
And for those reading from the U.S., Happy Thanksgiving! Even those of us who think our country is headed in exactly the wrong direction still have much about which we can be thankful.
I had to chuckle when I read this response from a Microsoft PR rep about the Mozilla Firefox browser (which I highly recommend) cutting into Internet Explorer’s market share:
“I still believe in the end that most users will decide that IE is the best choice when they take into account all the factors that led them to choose IE in the first place,”
You mean besides the fact that you illegally tied the browser to the operating system, nearly driving your primary competitor out of business and thereby forcing them to choose it?
It looks like we have evidence that removing that assault weapons ban really was a good idea after all:
Five deer hunters have been shot dead and three injured in the US state of Wisconsin in a dispute over a tree stand, the local sheriff’s office said.
A man has been arrested over the shootings, which happened on Sunday, the second day of Wisconsin’s popular nine-day annual deer-hunting season.
Tree stands are aerial platforms used by hunters to get a shot at passing deer from above.
Chai Vang was arrested carrying an assault rifle, local police said.
Guns don’t kill people, people with guns kill people. And people with assault weapons kill more people at once.
The Republicans’ “Dirty Little Secret” on race rears its ugly head again:
Civil rights cases made up a tiny fraction of the Justice Department’s total of 99,341 criminal prosecutions in 2003. The study found, however, that only civil rights and environmental prosecutions were down from 1999 to 2003 as the total caseload rose by about 10 percent.
To summarize the article - the number of civil rights complaints has remained constant, but the number of cases being pursued has been cut in half. And in case you’re tempted to think this happened because of the refocusing after 9/11, the number of cases in EVERY OTHER AREA increased.
So much for the “Party of Lincoln.”
Remember a couple years back when the President and his supporters kept going on and on about the evils of “double taxation” with regard to investment interest and the estate tax? Yeah, well I guess “double taxation” is only really evil if it affects the rich. Check this out:
The changes are meant to be revenue-neutral. To pay for them, the administration is considering eliminating the deduction of state and local taxes on federal income tax returns and scrapping the business tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance, the advisers said.
So, let me get this straight. Double taxation of investment income primarily held by the rich. BAD. Double taxation of wages by both the state and the federal government. GOOD.
I would call that doublespeak. And doubleplusungood.
Salon has an interesting idea about blue states forming a “coalition of the willing (states)” to support progressive priorities to which the federal government is increasingly hostile.
It does make you think - if the red states are so upset about the size of the federal government, then maybe liberals should support cutting federal taxes to the bone (and “drowning the government in the bathtub”) so that state taxes can be raised to support progressive policies in places where people want them?
You want to live in a red state with low taxes? Fine, but you better not lose your job or get too sick or want clean air. If you want help with any of those, you’ll have to move to a blue state…
Amy Sullivan from the Washington Monthly has a pointer to an excellent article which seeks to break down the stereotypes that liberals and conservatives hold about each other - from a faith perspective.
I have a hard time swallowing the idea that the Bush administration is doing anything more than exploiting the good intentions of conservative Christians for political gain, but I do not question that for most religious conservatives, their intentions are exactly that - good. I do question whether most conservative Christians would extend the same courtesy to me?
Legislation to fund for the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) or, nuclear bunker buster as it is more commonly known, will be included in an omnibus spending bill that is expected to come before the Senate Appropriations committee on Wednesday. California Senator Diane Feinstein is reportedly ready to offer an amendment to cut the $27.6 million requested for the project by the administration but observers expect the amendment will fail.
Nonproliferation starts at home.
Alas, the last voice of reason has left the Bush administration.
I have lost a lot of respect for Colin Powell for partaking in the lie that was the case for war against Iraq, but he was perhaps the only one in this administration who was willing to tell the President things he did not want to hear.
Not any more. Bring on the “yes” men (and women)!
