Now that SC is a disaster area because of wildfires I just know Mark Sanford is going to reject any federal aid as a matter of principle

Just sayin'

Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Alberto Gonzales, and John Ashcroft were among the Bush administration officials who approved of the detainee abuse

GODDAMNIT will you stop using the newspeak word "detainee"?!?!?!

I dare you to find mention of it in that contaxt pre-Bush. It was invented for two reasons.

First, the Cheney administration wanted to pretend prisoners of war were not, in fact, POWs. They seemed to think that doing so means they are not protected by the Geneva Convention. Of course, the 4th Geneva Convention protects non-POWs, but the US media happily went along with this charade at the time.

Second, "detainee" is like "collateral damage". It's a euphemism intended to make something awful seem mild.

This wasn't "detainee abuse" it was "POW TORTURE".

My God, it's weird how liberals just don't get the power of words, so blithely march along using the terminology that the far right provides. Reagan renames the "inheritance tax" to the "estate tax"? Sure, say liberals, whatever you want. Just don't call us partisan or anything.

Seriously, everyone knows that picture of Nixon with Mao was doctored by Jane Fonda when she was in Hanoi together with Kerry!

O'Reilly knows.

Far too many rank-and-file Republicans believe news of global warming is "exaggerated."

Exaggerated is the wrong word for the Limbaugh-listeners I know. They believe global warming is outright fabricated, a phony socialist plot to destroy American capitalism. Why they think so many scientists would be anti-capitalism and conspire with the evil liberals to destroy it is beyond my ability to comprehend.

Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Alberto Gonzales, and John Ashcroft were among the Bush administration officials who approved of the detainee abuse as early as 2002.

This (both McClatchy's and, somewhat surprisingly, the AP's coverage) is a huge story. Rice signed off on the torture (I refuse to say "detainee abuse") two weeks before the legal "justifications" were produced, a fact she declined to mention in her written report to the Senate AF committee last fall. She also failed to remember this during her oral testimony. The very next month was the month of 83 waterboardings, yet somehow her part in this slipped Dr. Rice's mind.

Harman was the only Intelligence Committee Dem who raised, in writing, questions re: interrogations.

Pelosi, Rockefeller, Graham, et.al. with varying degrees of success, are all now channeling Sgt. Hans Schultz, outright lying, or sending pathetic "hey look over there!" disclaimers over to HuffPo.

Harman can speak directly as to who/when/what in the briefings. Harman then must be damaged.

Who signed off on the Harman wiretap leak?

(nb: I learned Alinsky echomyth dissemination from the best -- You guys!)

Shortstop, @18:10

Rice's specialisation is Soviet Union history, isn't it? Torture must have seemed so commonplace as not to be worth remembering much less mentioning.

GODDAMNIT will you stop using the newspeak word "detainee"?!?!?!

I dare you to find mention of it in that contaxt pre-Bush.

Is Army Regulation 190-8, Enemy Prisoners of War, Retained Personnel, Civilian Internees and Other Detainees (1 October 1997) "pre-Bush" enough for you?

Or should I instead refer you to the Geneva Convention (IV) Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (1949)?

My god, what did they do to Bush's ear?

Texas secede? Oh, please!

.
Yes. I'll add 2¢. Plain.

Here's weirder & funnier news. Fundamentalists close barbers' shops. Blind Governor wanders off somewhere. Science is fixing the cows. Don't know why.
.

"I banned all this"

Well, that's great. What happens when the GOPers get in again? They're not exactly known for being zealots in the name of civil liberties.

"President Barack Obama says he will push for a law to provide 'strong and reliable' protections for the millions of Americans who have credit cards."

Given the public outrage, I wonder if the bankster's friends in Congress will dare to attempt to block this ?

Um, Mr. President...

In order to RE-litigate something....

* Good: "President Barack Obama says he will push for a law to provide "strong and reliable" protections for the millions of Americans who have credit cards. The president on Thursday outlined his priorities after meeting with chief executives of the credit-card lending industry." -- Steve Benen

Well... You may think it's good or, at least, of interest. I may think so too. And it's nice to have a President who seems to think like us. But then, you and I and, perhaps, even the President are "little people", with small problems when it comes to debt and cash flow. Of no interest at all to lardsacks like Sommers, who only care about the problems of millionaires...

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/04/23/summers-sleep/

Much as I dislike Geithner, I'd *really* like a half an hour with Sommers. As soon as I've managed to grow my nails back to lady-like length. *What on earth* was Obama thinking of, when he hired that SOB???

Banned torture my ass. Without prosecutions we are still a torture state flouting ICAT and ICCPR article 7. Fuck Obama, he is the enemy.

"Suicide bombers killed more than 70 people in Iraq today"

What's with these people? Don't they realize we won the war?

Heh, the globe is cooling, folks; for how long even kim doesn't know. But probably for at least 20 years until the Atlantic Multivariate Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation flip back to their warming phases, and possibly as long as a century if the sun gets into the act with another Grand Minimum. The CO2=AGW paradigm is on its last legs. Wake up before you look grotesquely foolish.
======================================

I think they should have named the new assault rifle "The Palinator."

Doesn't seem like kim knows much of anything. Riddle me this, if the globe is cooling, why is so much ice melting? In any case, a quick perusal of realclimate.org shows your "facts" to be seriously in error. Take a look...

idlemind at 10:30

Total Antarctic Ice is greater than ever recently, Antarctic Sea Ice Extent is above the 30 year mean and rising, Arctic Sea Ice Extent, on a seasonally adjusted basis, has been recovering for the last year and a half and is approaching the mean of the 30 years.

You don't know any better than you do because you patronize dishonest sites like realclimate, which censors dissenting opinion.
========================================

My guess is that "kim" is not Kipling's "Kim". It's a double agent -- St Exupery's "Little Prince", hopping from planet to planet. Currently, visiting the planet of the Drunk (why do you drink? To forget. To forget what? That I drink). Nothing else in its postings makes sense.

Steve: "It's hard to imagine the American Prospect without Ezra Klein, but it sounds like Ezra has an amazing opportunity lined up at the Washington Post."

As what? Food critic?

kim: "Total Antarctic Ice is greater than ever recently, Antarctic Sea Ice Extent is above the 30 year mean and rising, Arctic Sea Ice Extent, on a seasonally adjusted basis, has been recovering for the last year and a half and is approaching the mean of the 30 years."

Please cite your source for this information -- unless, of course, you enjoy being accused by people like me of orbiting the earth at 110 miles altitude without a helmet. Because until I see a credible source, that accusation will have to stand.

In regards to Chrysler: Nardelli is a staunch supporter of the Republican Party. He was a major contributor to the fund to help with Scooter Libby's defense fund. He believed that Libby was unfairly treated and deserved an appeal.

Nardelli is the same guy who got fired from Home Depot for running it into the ground.

Cerberus Capital Management that bought Chrysler from Mercedez is run by Republicans, some of them even from the Bush Administration.

It's too bad that Chrysler is going down, and that a lot of ordinary people will get hurt in the process. But is sure is great to see that some Republicans will be loosing their ass on this one.

It's not enough they had to torture detainees, but now they torture the president by not letting his nominees get a vote.

I wonder how Sarah Palin will feel after the first person is killed with the rifle named for her?

A cursory google search will reveal that kim is a professional asshole on the issue of global warming who likes to hear himself talk, and who uses feints and misdirection to make his arguments.

Here's the upshot: total crysopheric ice on the planet? Still diminishing. Glaciers disappearing on a massive scale, permafrost melting, arctic sea ice near record lows over the past five years.

Antarctic ice showing a net growth? Why yes, at less than 1% per decade. How do researchers explain this? Degradation of the ozone over the South Pole creating stronger winds leading to ice growth in parts of Antarctica, while the non-windier parts are showing warming and ice shelves breaking off.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/04/23/2550456.htm

http://www.grist.org/article/antarctic-sea-ice-is-increasing

Also: learn to draw honest conclusions from a graph. A slight recovery from a thirty-year slide cannot be interpreted at this point as anything other than a minor oscillation -- you know, like the decadal oscillations you weren't sure about until you were.

That's the problem with the internets, they force you to own up to your past positions, when you were being a professional asshole grinding your axe with a different opinion.

No, you don't lie, just cherry-pick from discredited sources.

This Palin Rifle sounds, um, wonderful. If it's anything like Sarah then it has poor target acquisition which means it only shoots at mentors, friends, ex-family, Alsakan Natives and the national media.

"Heyyyy Joe! Where you going with that Sarah Palin in your hand?"

"His whole thing is, 'I banned all this. This chapter is over. What we don't need now is to become a sort of feeding frenzy where we go back and re-litigate all this.'"

Our whole thing is, "the law was broken. Do something."

Far too many rank-and-file Republicans believe news of global warming is "exaggerated."

Here's a fun moneymaking opportunity for climate change deniers! Start a major reinsurance company that will cover coastal property, crops, and other liabilities at a discount that those dirty fucking hippies claim are at "risk" from this totally overblown "global warming" thing. For some inexplicable reason, the world's major insurance companies have all been suckered in by the hype and you should be able to make a killing arbitraging all their overly paranoid risk estimates, right? Isn't that what the free market is all about? Being able to take advantage of people who make incredibly stupid financial decisions based on their preconceived ideas rather than rationality?

I guess we should be glad Obama got us a puppy. This is another stomach turner. Who the hell did we elect?

here

President Barack Obama, strangely enough, sounds exactly like someone who would have been against investigating and prosecuting NIXON administration crimes or REAGAN administration crimes.

Who needs Red Cur Republicans in the White House when so many Blue Mutt Democrats in the OBAMA administration seem to be doing such a heckuva job on behalf of the Red Cur Republicans, especially those who committed so many crimes during the Bush/Cheney years?

The 800-lb. gorilla in the room that nobody sees:

The Bush administration committed war crimes (torture) in order to commit a war crime (attacking and occupying a sovereign nation, Iraq).

The White House torture program was created to find an excuse to attack, invade and occupy Iraq. The White House expressed interest in torture in December, 2001. Development of the torture program began in April, 2002. The war in Iraq began March 19, 2003.

The interrogators/torturers say the purpose of their inquisition was to find a link between 9/11, Al Qaeda and Saddam.

That means that Bush knew that he had no case to go to war in Iraq, thus, the frenzied drumbeat to war, the trumped-up propaganda campaign about WMD, "mushroom cloud", creating an atmosphere where careful examination of what was known versus what was merely suspected got you branded unpatriotic and a traitor.

With no link between 9/11 and Saddam and the start date for the war looming (no later than March, everything was in place & ready to go, summer heat looming), Bush went ahead because he was sure WMD would be found, and he could point to that as the justification. When no WMD, no nuclear, no nothing turned up, Bush continued what had never stopped: Torturing, this time of Iraqis swept up in dragnets, to find a link to 9/11 and Al Qaeda.

Rachel Maddow and Ron Suskind explain it all.

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO_2jd78UUw

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSw-B5Iq8tE

Sorry, Juan Williams, First Lady Michelle Obama seems to be getting more popular all the time.
----------------

Sorry Juan Williams? I thought his name was Palin Juan Williams.

Is he still making sh*t up about the First Lady? I wonder whether anyone's asked him why ... and I wonder why anyone's giving him nationwide airtime to do it, too.

On GW and Repudiacans, see this:
http://www.grist.org/article/2009-04-20-house-republicans-bring/

A few weeks earlier, at a hearing on renewable power, Barton raised the question of whether expanding wind power might actually cause the planet to heat up:

Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can’t transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It’s just something to think about.

That is actually a good way of describing the function of winds in the global weather system. Thought it is worth noting that doesn't mean the wind direction at ground level is always or even usually from a warm area to a cold area, and that ocean currents also play a key role.

What makes the statement nonsensical is that even the most massive wind energy projects imaginable wouldn't capture more than some very tiny fraction of a percent of the total worldwide wind energy. Or even a significant fraction of the total wind energy in the regions where the wind power projects were located.