Barack says it’s OK to torture an American soldier who is being held in isolation on an American military base on American soil just miles from the White House. Why? Because the Pentagon said it is. Sound familiar? It should because, just a very short 26 months ago, the other guy who said torture was OK left the White House. It appears he was replaced with his ideological clone, and now, fellow war criminal, Barack who has taken torture, detention and rendition even further than Dick even could have imagined.
State Department spokesperson, P. J. Crowley, who was speaking to a small group at MIT discussing “the new media and the foreign policy”, he let was queried by a young man about Wikileaks:
Charlie deTar: There’s an elephant in the room during this discussion: Wikileaks. The US government is torturing a whistleblower in prison right now. How do we resolve a conversation about the future of new media in diplomacy with the government’s actions regarding Wikileaks?
PJC: “I spent 26 years in the air force. What is happening to Manning is ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid, and I don’t know why the DoD is doing it.
With respect to Private Manning, I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are. I can’t go into details about some of their concerns, but some of this has to do with Private Manning’s safety as well. [my emphasis]
So, let me get this straight, the basic standard of treatment of an innocent man who has yet to be formerly charges for eight months is to apply the standards that were condemned at Abu Grab and Guantanamo in 2002?
Oh, that’s very reassuring — and such a very thorough and diligent effort by the President to ensure that detainees under his command aren’t being abused. He asked the Pentagon and they said everything was great — what more is there to know? Everyone knows that on questions of whether the military is abusing detainees, the authoritative source is . . . the military. You just ask them if they’re doing anything improper, and once they tell you that they’re not, that’s the end of the matter.
I have no doubt that George Bush asked the DoD whether everything was being run professionally at Guantanamo and they assured him that they were. Perhaps the reason there haven’t been any Wall Street prosecutions is because Obama asked Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein if there was any fraud and those banking executives assured the President that there wasn’t.
remaining silent in the face of civil liberties and other abuses by Obama which would provoke, vociferous and constant objections if carried out by George Bush. At the end of the segment, Ratigan acknowledges that some have been consistent and have vocally objected to Obama’s civil liberties abuses generally and the treatment of Manning specifically — he refers to me and FDL as examples — and then clarifies that his criticisms are aimed at Democratic politicians and their loyalists, who opportunistically pretended to care about such things when doing so produced partisan advantage (when there was a GOP President), but now ignore them because they no longer do (because there’s a Democratic President).
This is being done in our names as it was under Bush. It was not acceptable then it is not acceptable now. Not in my name.
P.J. Crowley is resigning as spokesman for the State Department, CNN reports.
Michael van Poppel at BNO News noted on Twitter after the story broke, “Crowley released a statement on Yemen just 2 hours ago. Seems really abrupt.” Shortly after he added, “Clinton: It is with regret that I have accepted the resignation of Philip J. Crowley as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs.”
Politico confirmed reports of Crowley’s resignation on Sunday.
I expected this. You cannot work for the man if you tell the truth.
One might expect that a band that was formed FIFTY YEARS ago this year might have some significant connexions with others, and one would be correct. That is a long time ago, and The Zombies were early, British, and quite good. They were not as prolific as many other bands, and almost became victims of their own success in a manner of speaking.
Interestingly, The Zombies were always more popular in the United States than they were in the United Kingdom. I have no explanation for that other than the hypothesis that when they were getting “hot”, other bands like The Who, The Rolling Stones, and The Beatles were getting even hotter in the UK.
Please come with me to review the career of this very, very underrated British Invasion band. As a preview to Pique the Geek for Sunday evening at 9:00 PM Eastern, the topic for the evening will be a new installment to my off and on series about firearms, this time about the propellants black powder and the modern smokeless powders, with a nod to Pryodex(r), a more modern substitute for black powder.
Broadcast is dead. So is cable, all lazy ass play the same B movie twice programming.
And as if to prove all I have said, here is one of the first to go! A lad who sat before me on these very benches, who gave up all to serve in the first year of the war. One of the iron youth who have made Germany invincible in the field! Look at him. Sturdy and bronze and clear-eyed! The kind of soldier every one of you should envy! Paul, lad, you must speak to them. You must tell them what it means to serve your fatherland.
(I)t’s been a long while since we enlisted out of this classroom. So long, I thought maybe the whole world had learned by this time. Only now they’re sending babies, and they won’t last a week! Up at the front you’re alive or you’re dead and that’s all. You can’t fool anybody about that very long. And up there we know we’re lost and done for whether we’re dead or alive. Three years we’ve had of it, four years! And every day a year, and every night a century! And our bodies are earth, and our thoughts are clay, and we sleep and eat with death! And we’re done for because you *can’t* live that way and keep anything inside you!
Later-
A man’s hands never seem to get clean, even if he don’t touch nothing. They just stay dirty. Sort of a special kind of dirt. G.I. dirt. I bet one of those criminologists could take a sample out of a guy’s fingernail, put it under a microscope, and say, “That’s G.I. dirt.” The dirt’s always the same color, no matter what country you’re fighting in.
A&E– Breakout Kings (this week’s Series Premier repeat)
NEAR RAS LANUF, Libya (AFP) – Rebels battling Moamer Kadhafi appealed for arms and medical aid on Friday, as the European Union insisted he step down and US President Barack Obama said the world was “tightening the noose” on the Libyan leader.
Kadhafi is “a leader shooting at his own people”, EU president Herman Van Rompuy said at the close of an emergency summit of the 27-nation bloc in Brussels to examine the crisis and seek consensus on how to deal with it.
“The Libyan leadership must give up power without delay,” Van Rompuy said.
I could say, “When you’ve lost Scarecrow…” but I haven’t particularly noted him as a proud Obamabot unlike some I could name. Still, I thought this piece worthy of your notice. That clunking sound you hear is Cenk Uygur’s jaw hitting the floor.
Expecting the same Obama who sold out on tax cuts for the rich, the Public Option, Gitmo, torture investigations/prosecutions, and coddling TBTF banksters, etc, to rein in the Tea-GOP is, uh, not reassuring.
In just the last three months, Obama undercut Schumer on limiting the tax breaks to those over a million in income. He undercut Schumer again today by making sure that when the White House’s corporate staff sits at the table with the crazies who would destroy the economy and 70 years of progressive governance, the Tea-GOP will not even be asked to consider raising revenues, let alone taking back the recent gift tax breaks for scofflaw corporations or wealthy Americans.
…
There are simply too many White House betrayals, broken promises, secret deals, dashed hopes, disingenuous dodges, stupid blunders (or were they deliberate?), insults to supporters and every element of the Democratic coalition, including America’s working class, to list here. FDL writes about them every day.
So is Senator Brown honestly expecting this President to lead us? Not a chance. Only Pod People still think America’s working class has a President on their side.
“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”
Governor Scott Walker and his Wisconsin senate Republicans have laid bare the motives for their coup d’etat. By severing the financial part of the bill (which couldn’t be passed without absent Democrats) from the part eliminating the collective bargaining rights of public employees (which could be), and then doing the latter, Wisconsin Republicans have made it crystal clear that their goal has had nothing whatever to do with the state budget. It’s been to bust the unions.
That’s no surprise to most people who have watched this conflict from the start, but like any coup its ultimate outcome will depend on the public. If most citizens of Wisconsin are now convinced that Walker and his cohorts are extremists willing to go to any lengths for their big-business patrons (including the billionaire Koch brothers), those citizens will recall enough Republican senators to right this wrong.
“There is nothing radical or un-American in holding these hearings,” Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) claimed Thursday as he launched his McCarthyite probe of American Muslims. He could not have been more wrong. If King is looking for threats to our freedoms and values, a mirror would be the place to start.
Here’s why. Imagine a young man, a Muslim, who changes in troubling ways. His two best friends become concerned, then alarmed, as the young man abandons Western dress, displays a newfound religiosity and begins to echo jihadist rhetoric about the decadence of American society. Both friends suspect that the young man has become radicalized and might even attempt some kind of terrorist attack.
One friend is Muslim, the other Christian. Does the Muslim friend have a greater responsibility than the Christian to contact the authorities? By the logic of King’s witch hunt, he does.
Earlier this week, I wrote about the fictitious excuse being offered to justify why Obama is continuing the indefinite detentions and military commissions which defined the Bush/Cheney Guantanamo detention scheme: it’s Congress’ fault. Today we have a new excuse: it’s Bush’s fault. Because Bush tortured some of the detainees, this reasoning goes, Obama is incapable of prosecuting them, yet because many of those detainees are Terrorists and/or Too Dangerous to Release (even though they can’t be convicted of anything), he has no real choice but to keep imprisoning them without charges. Here are the NYT Editors — even as they criticize Obama’s indefinite detention policy — making this case, one frequently heard from Obama supporters offering excuses for his policy of indefinite detention:
[T]he Obama administration has still chosen to accept the concept of indefinite detention without trial, which represents a stain on American justice. The president made that acceptance clear in a speech in May 2009. To some degree, he was forced into it by the Bush administration’s legacy of torture and abuse, which made some important cases impossible to prosecute.
snip
There’s a serious moral flaw in the NYT‘s reasoning, and two even worse empirical flaws with this excuse-making for indefinite detention. There are several compelling reasons why the use of torture-obtained evidence is barred by every civilized country for use in prosecution, and has been barred for decades if not centuries. A primary reason is because the most basic norms of Western morality demand that torture not be rewarded, which is what happens when the fruits of it are admissible in court to prosecute people. Those who say that Obama is justified in imprisoning people without charges because the evidence against them was obtained via torture and is thus unusable in court are repudiating this long-standing Western moral principle by justifying imprisonment based on evidence obtained by coercion (we know they’re guilty because of the evidence we got from torture, so we have to detain them).
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THIS MEANS WAR!!!!
We’ve been predicting this for years. Maybe not so much as prophesy, but in direct observation of how the Class War has unfolded incrementally.
There is a full frontal attack directly against American Workers going on, finally blatant enough that even the most sheepish have become enraged as 30 states introduce legislation trying to Union Bust and redirect resources from the elderly, the students, the poor and the working class directly into the hands of Big Business.
People are hitting the streets, rising up, calling for General Strikes…. how long, I wonder before the next wave of awareness hits and our citizens realize that neither Republicans nor their Democratic counterparts truly represent us anymore?
It is time, my friends, for a Worker’s Party to rise from the ashes they have made of our lives and take over.
I am now jaded enough to see the tragedies unfolding from Japan’s horrific earthquake and the tsunamis yet to come as of this writing as something that the Elites will use immediately to manipulate the market and increase their Wealth even more. They undoubtedly will scream “Financial Crisis” and use it to strip us of even more rights and assets. Remember where you heard that first, and do NOT believe them!
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This is a time of hope and wonder… as I told my son last night, “Those people out there in the streets are the salvation of your future!”
Viva la revolucion!
There is much to discuss, join me tonight – Call in!
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On this day in 1851, The first performance of Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi takes place in Venice.
Rigoletto is an opera in three acts with the Italian libretto written by Francesco Maria Piave based on the play Le roi s’amuse by Victor Hugo. It is considered by many to be the first of the operatic masterpieces of Verdi’s middle-to-late career.
Verdi was commissioned to write a new opera by the La Fenice opera house in Venice in 1850, at a time when he was already a well-known composer with a degree of freedom in choosing the works he would prefer to set to music. He then asked Piave (with whom he had already created Ernani, I due Foscari, Macbeth, Il Corsaro and Stiffelio) to examine the play Kean by Alexandre Dumas, père, but he felt he needed a more energetic subject to work on.
Verdi soon stumbled upon Victor Hugo’s Le roi s’amuse. He later explained that “It contains extremely powerful positions … The subject is great, immense, and has a character that is one of the most important creations of the theatre of all countries and all Ages”. It was a highly controversial subject and Hugo himself had already had trouble with censorship in France, which had banned productions of his play after its first performance nearly twenty years earlier (and would continue to ban it for another thirty years). As Austria at that time directly controlled much of Northern Italy, it came before the Austrian Board of Censors. Hugo’s play depicted a king (Francis I of France) as an immoral and cynical womanizer, something that was not accepted in Europe during the Restoration period.
From the beginning, Verdi was aware of the risks, as was Piave. In a letter which Verdi wrote to Piave: “Use four legs, run through the town and find me an influential person who can obtain the permission for making Le Roi s’amuse.” Correspondence between a prudent Piave and an already committed Verdi followed, and the two remained at risk and underestimated the power and the intentions of Austrians. Even the friendly Guglielmo Brenna, secretary of La Fenice, who had promised them that they would not have problems with the censors, was wrong.
At the beginning of the summer of 1850, rumors started to spread that Austrian censorship was going to forbid the production. They considered the Hugo work to verge on lèse majesté, and would never permit such a scandalous work to be performed in Venice. In August, Verdi and Piave prudently retired to Busseto, Verdi’s hometown, to continue the composition and prepare a defensive scheme. They wrote to the theatre, assuring them that the censor’s doubts about the morality of the work were not justified but since very little time was left, very little could be done. The work was secretly called by the composers The Malediction (or The Curse), and this unofficial title was used by Austrian censor De Gorzkowski (who evidently had known of it from spies) to enforce, if needed, the violent letter by which he definitively denied consent to its production.
In order not to waste all their work, Piave tried to revise the libretto and was even able to pull from it another opera Il Duca di Vendome, in which the sovereign was substituted with a duke and both the hunchback and the curse disappeared. Verdi was completely against this proposed solution and preferred instead to have direct negotiations with censors, arguing over each and every point of the work.
At this point Brenna, La Fenice’s secretary, showed the Austrians some letters and articles depicting the bad character but the great value of the artist, helping to mediate the dispute. In the end the parties were able to agree that the action of the opera had to be moved from the royal court of France to a duchy of France or Italy, as well as a renaming of the characters. In the Italian version the Duke reigns over Mantova and belongs to the Gonzaga family: the Gonzaga had long been extinct by the mid-19th Century, and the Dukedom of Mantova did not exist anymore, so nobody could be offended. The scene in which the sovereign retires in Gilda’s bedroom would be deleted and the visit of the Duke to the Taverna (inn) was not intentional anymore, but provoked by a trick. The hunchback (originally Triboulet) became Rigoletto (from French rigolo = funny). The name of the work too was changed.
For the première, Verdi had Felice Varesi as Rigoletto, the young tenor Raffaele Mirate as the Duke, and Teresina Brambilla as Gilda (though Verdi would have preferred Teresa De Giuli Borsi). Teresina Brambilla was a well-known soprano coming from a family of singers and musicians; one of her nieces, Teresa Brambilla, was the wife of Amilcare Ponchielli.
The opening was a complete triumph, especially the scena drammatica, and the Duke’s cynical aria, “La donna è mobile”, was sung in the streets the next morning.
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