Month: April 2009

The marriages will take place soon; and the campaign to protect them starts now:

Via Afrojacks, One imagines that this 1973 design for the Catholic Church's Archdiocesan Youth Commission would not make the cut today. And, yes, it's after the jump for reasons that are self-evident.

Jon Henke writes that politicians are not serious about the deficit:

If Democrats cannot make serious sacrifices (actual, significant cuts) in the spending their coalition groups want, then you can be pretty certain that politicians are unwilling to share in the sacrifices they say we all need to make. This is a very measurable thing.  They need to be held accountable, both by the media and by voters.

The same thing goes for Republicans, too. 

We can't dig our way out of this fiscal hole by "cutting waste".   We certainly can't afford any significant tax cuts at this point.  Proposals that are not politically viable are not "serious"; they are grandstanding for the base.  If Republicans want to be taken seriously, they need to start talking much more seriously about the trade-offs and innovative approaches necessary to address the long term deficit and tax system.  For starters, that probably involves means-testing entitlements.

Hilzoy is must reading, as always:

…not knowing that the SERE program was designed to help soldiers withstand interrogations that had produced false confessions is inexcusable, especially since this was our program. Not knowing that the psychologist who persuaded the CIA to go for this had never conducted an actual interrogation is similarly mind-boggling. The fact that no one knew what the actual interrogators thought of all this is standard for the Bush administration, but it should not have been.

There are all sorts of experts in our government, including experts on interrogation. There’s also more than enough institutional memory to inform the administration about the origins of the SERE program. But the Bush administration, typically, did not bother with them. They preferred to make things up as they went along, because, after all, they always knew better.

What you saw after 9/11 was the danger of the very executive Cheney believes in: it’s too small a circle to allow for checks and balances, too driven by one individual’s will to avoid catastrophic error, and too blinkered to listen to alternative views. It’s the antithesis of classical conservatism – imprudent, dead certain, and addicted to the use of force. And when you see this mindset – and it is an authoritarian mindset – reach for the ultimate tool of torture, enormous danger follows. And so it did.

Ed Morrissey proposes:

Mock executions fit the definition of torture, and they also saved a lot of American lives.  If we can admit to reality, then we can have an honest debate about how far we should go to protect ourselves, and what price might be too high for our public image internationally.

You are writing sentences like this:

Over the course of several months beginning October 2008 to April 2009 I’ve spent some of my spare time between commercial projects searching Google Maps hoping to discover land formations or buildings resembling letter forms. These are the results of my findings limited within the state of Victoria, Australia.

And traffic soars 43 percent in one day, according to USA Today. And they say newspapers do not have a future.

As good as his delegate counting.

A fresh must-read from Jim Manzi.

We know the fate of some torture victims who were named "enemy combatants" by president George W. Bush. But there are over three dozen human beings in that category who seem to have disappeared altogether. ProPublica:

Last week, we pointed out that one of the newly released Bush-era memos inadvertently confirmed that the CIA held an al-Qaeda suspect [1] named Hassan Ghul in a secret prison and subjected him to what Bush administration lawyers called "enhanced interrogation techniques." The CIA has never acknowledged holding Ghul, and his whereabouts today are secret.

But Ghul is not the only such prisoner who remains missing. At least three dozen others who were held in the CIA's secret prisons overseas appear to be missing as well. Efforts by human rights organizations to track their whereabouts have been unsuccessful, and no foreign governments have acknowledged holding them. (See the full list. [2])

What happened to these people? What was done to them?