unastronaut*

Feet on the ground – head in the clouds.

Posts Tagged ‘dick cheney

The Flip-Flop Express

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Senator McCain seems to believe he’ll safely and quickly bring gas and fuel prices down by drilling off the coast of Florida.

Safety: The technology is safer, but safer and safe are not the same thing. There were over 80 reported spills during Hurricane Katrina. This is like thinking your clothes are still clean if you only got a little barbecue sauce on them.

Economy: It will take anywhere from 10 to 30 years to actually see any economic benefit or increase in supply of oil. You will see nothing from this. Oil companies will.

This explains why today President Bush announces his support for opening the same areas to drilling. After leaving office, you can bet your ass George Bush will again be soaked in Big Oil. His Dick, Cheney too.

What about this: There are tons of land-based drilling contracts that oil companies are not acting upon. It’s cheaper, safer and easier to drill on land. But if those three factors are true of the process, then the prices and profits are not nearly as high. They don’t drill until the prices are high. The solution is to use other sources. Don’t think so much of gas pricing for cars just yet, think of all the other sources we can replace. To ease the demand on gasoline but also lower the costs of other sources of energy first. When other sources are cheaper than oil, we’ll see people switch with no public policy necessary.

Every public building rooftop in sunny America should be covered in photovoltaic cells, allowing infrastructure to become our power plants. A similar experiment in Los Angeles actually was able to power nearly 150,000 homes and will begin new projects to power more. This doesn’t immediately address gas prices, but energy becomes cheaper, and conversion research carries a stronger incentive.

This is just a farce to help our current administration stay rich and above-the-law after leaving office. Reject this nonsense, the American people — not oil companies — solve our own problems.

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Kucinich: Impeach Bush, uphold the Constitution (where the hell is the media?)

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They continue to mention the proposed windfall tax on oil companies in the Senate, but haven’t yet mentioned the introduction of Articles of Impeachment against President Bush in the House of Representatives. Do they need a map of the Beltway? It’s not like they’d need to travel far.

Is this the same media that made every marital misstep of President Clinton a national story for months? I’m not saying he shouldn’t necessarily be judged at some point, but maybe in a book — or if you’re religious, by God — and not in a media that should for the benefit of the people. It’s more like the media that allowed a Pentagon-planted propaganda campaign to lead us into a false war of aggression. The Founding Fathers would have loved the internet in its current state, free enough to matter and alert enough to call shenanigans on corruption.

 

Check out Raw Story for more video and a PDF link for the entire Articles of Impeachment.

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A collection of links and video on waterboarding

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This will be sporadically updated and possibly organized better in the future. I want to have a good place to go for all of the information I constantly find myself sharing with people in chunks.

US national intelligence chief Mike McConnell says it would definitely be torture if HE were subjected to it.

There are some accusations of top level administration orders and pressure on underlings to follow-through with the torture. This is starting to have ‘war crimes’ written all over it.

Our Vice President and his chief of staff, David Addington were where the buck stopped for torture. At least until a memo surfaced with the president’s signature.

McCain was against waterboarding before he was for it!

Torture gave them nothing but ‘crap’. If the information is useless, and you are still ‘ok’ with the torture, you’re just a sadist.

ABC News reporting that Dick Cheney had to OK the harsh interrogations.

President Bush says we don’t torture. We’ve said we don’t, so we don’t.

“This is not a simulation.”

Mitt Romney believes we must leave waterboarding open for the ticking time bomb. I wonder how effective drowning someone is in getting them to give up actionable intelligence? Making them go brain dead, temporary or no, will hinder any suspect’s ability to give credible information in the “ticking time bomb” scenario.

Torture, specifically an internationally unacceptable method like waterboarding makes it harder for us to get criminals and terror suspects extradited. This is from an ally like the UK. There are just some times when you have to act as a responsible and moral nation and times you go in both guns blazing. After 9/11 we had the all clear to go into Afghanistan locked and loaded. We don’t have that anymore, and we never really had it with Iraq. Now it’s hurting our international relations and our ability to pursue our own justice against those who plot against us.

Psychological torture is reported to be as damaging as physical torture.

Sensory deprivation – the military’s number one form of ‘torture’.

Not like we shape national security policy by what others think, but the Australians read that our House Majority Leader calls this torture. This is how our war on terror makes us less safe.

The US government finally comes out and admits to waterboarding on February 6th, 2008. The memo referred to surfaced 2 months later.

Dan Levin, a former Department of Justice offical was forced out of his job after conducting his own tests on waterboarding and determining it was not legal. He actually underwent the procedure himself, a rare insight in this debate.

Could the president have a prisoner’s eyes poked out? John Yoo says maybe.

Some issues with the Democrats’ handling of this issue. It’s not like they’ve done anything since 2006 when they took over both houses of Congress. I still think a snake rots from the head, and that this president bred a climate in Washington that made it impossible to get anything done without kick-downs to his buddies at KBR and Halliburton.

In 1947 the US condemned waterboarding as torture and yet our new Attorney General won’t admit it? That sounds barbaric.

A nice time line of the history of waterboarding, from the Spanish Inquisition to Cambodia POW camps circa 1975. I wonder how many other Inquisition torture techniques would work to maim our enemy and bring us more sadistic revenge for 9/11?

Waterboarding used to be a crime. In 1983 federal prosecutors charged a Texas sheriff and three deputies for violating civil rights by forcing confessions through waterboarding.

Former presidential hopeful and no-doubt future candidate Mitt Romney talks about deferring to a “counterterrorism expert” on the issue. His expert is connected to Blackwater, the independent contractor (see militia) group working in Iraq which is linked to at least 30 deaths of Iraqi civilians. Yeah, I’d say he’s considerate of human rights and the implications of condoning torture at a national level.

As recently as March 8th, 2008 President Bush vetoed a bill banning waterboarding.

President Carter argues he knows for a fact that the US tortures prisoners. Why not believe a former president, who has held that office and knows its inner-workings?

Then there are the reports that Iraqis feel the torture is worse in their country after Saddam Hussein’s regime has been removed. Who knows how widespread these feelings are, but it’s not a small matter when the administration already patronized us with phrases like “we’ll be greeted as liberators”.

McCain has talked a big game, but failed to deliver on a torture bill. His claim was that President Bush would inevitably veto the bill. Way to stand up to make sure no one in the military you wish to lead must endure what you went through for five and a half long years.

Congress’s priorities are reflected by the will of the public. A recent CNN poll showed tha 68 percent of Americans said waterboarding was torture.

So what does the White House claim? That the Congress is just being influenced by far-left bloggers. Thats hilarious, if 68 percent of Americans were doing what I am right now we’d be a far less productive nation.

The United Nations also believes that waterboarding should be prosecuted as torture. I know a lot of Americans are told to hate international governmental organizations, but we actually control the UN more than we have to go along with it. It takes a lot more for them to sanction us than for us to put harsh economic crunches on inter-war Iraq, for example.

Brave New Films on the unsuspecting civilians asked to carry out horrific acts, authorized at the highest level. Very powerful! It’s always interesting to hear the private thoughts of people carrying out these orders.

A Scranton native explains how it was partly John McCain’s father who helped communicate the warning of the military industrial complex to President Eisenhower. He also warns against military-funded think tanks.

Would waterboarding be torture if Iranians did it to our soldiers and civilians?

I doubt anything would actually come of this, but the idea of people being called on their transgressions and possibly even taking responsibilty for them gives me a warm feeling. Ahh…fantasy-land.

Matt Lauer confronts President Bush on waterboarding and torture. The president basically says “don’t look behind the curtain…” I wonder if he knows we’re smarter than this, or if he thinks he’s got us duped? Oliver Stone needs to use the song Big Balls by AC/DC in his docu-drama, maybe as W entrance music during the coke-daze in college.

Below are the declassified documents alleged to be memos authorizing torture, which are signed by President Bush. You be the judge, and we’ll see as people with resources investigate. Originally posted at DKos.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, saying that torture isn’t a violation of the 8th Amendment, not because it isn’t cruel or unusual, but because it isn’t punishment.

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Moderate isn’t just a word to attach to your dumb ideas

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So I just received my harsh backlash from docweasel, an incredibly insightful and thoughtful group of anonymous bloggers covering current events with a real world view. Basically they take current events and dumb them down with ignorance. It’s the redneck, gun-toting, bible-thumping, others-hating viewpoint they’re bending over backward to defend. Their pen streams forth with a ray of light. Or with a collection of mindless comics.

Detect this: do I come over to [his] blog and slap the dick out of your Mom’s mouth and tell her how to do her job? Well, yeah, I do, and wipe it off on your little sister’s teddy bear when I’m done, but that’s beside the point.

The entire post is essentially a diatribe of anger and the bitterness a politician recently scratched the surface on. The poster tries to make a few points, like Maguire’s assumption that this ices the Wright cake. This doesn’t ice anything. Reverend Wright is more of a patriot than George W. Bush or Dick Cheney and their multiple deferments by any measure. The post implies the original article, which I responded to, was moderate. What nonsense! This pathetic little cartoonist kid has no view of anything on a political spectrum yet claims to be moderate? You should grab a real book, one without pictures and learn something.

And my original point is made more clear- “Is this typical of the anti-Obama crowd?”

Well, looking at the tags, what level of education was revealed to you, sporty? Since you are about as condescending and fatuous as your boyfriend Obama, I take it you think I flunked out of 4th grade as evidenced by the high negatives I accrued carving “I’m convinced your mom has the same economic bearing as my 10 inch uncircumsized cock” into my teacher’s forehead with a switchblade before stuffing the aforementioned cock down her throat and nearly choking her with the pint of chunky spooge I customarily ejaculate on a slow day.

It’s funny how the education question really is never answered, unless you count the revelation that it was a pre-pubescent teenage based on the word choice. I’m not offended by a 14-year-old’s temper tantrum, it only makes my case. The faux history lesson at the end was priceless as well. First they repeat the agreeably stupid statement by Senator Obama, then he essentially proves it correct. At least the part about clinging to “antipathy for others” rings true in every moronic sentence of both of these posts. They apparently know all about Lincoln and Kennedy, of course because that’s standard cartoonist reading. I’m sure they have intensive studies of history and politics in art school, or middle school.

It’s interesting how they comment on ‘cocked, locked and ready to rock’ in an assumed effort to talk crap on my tag line. They didn’t indicate any understanding at all for where that phrase comes from, which kind of makes me wonder what this loser would define as service to his country. Oh yeah, and being able to read and having open comments from anyone on WordPress are two different things. Your comments are closed without signup. I’m not signing up on your stupid forum just to tell you’re a moron. I do think the comic book cover they made was kind of clever, as a substitute for intelligence I suppose.

Juan Williams analysis of Obama’s ‘guns and religion’ statement was the most fair on Fox

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Last night’s O’Reilly Factor (04/11/08) was hosted by Laura Ingraham since Bill had the night off, but the show still had some interesting pieces. Just keep in mind interesting isn’t a moral distinction. When it looks like a train wreck, no doubt they will be all over it. However, the latest train wreck is the polygamist compound raided and hundreds of children freed from virtual sexual slavery. It’s not interesting in a warm and fuzzy way, but ever since I heard what was going on in Colorado City, I perk up when I hear about a cult or polygamist sect. Sometimes Fox News can inform, you’d think they would be the ones covering the business masquerading as a religion in the Church of Scientology. I wonder if Greta van Susteren’s membership in the church has anything to do with their portion of that media shortcoming?

Tonight again, Fox had to run their “what’s wrong with the Democrats, what’s good about McCain” segments, tonight Obama’s “guns and religion” comment was the subject of discussion. Juan Williams was spot on even in the midst of Ingraham’s list of reasons to bury your head in the sand. In this case, I agree with Juan Williams that there is truth to Obama’s remarks(here). He even said the Republicans play on that fear people in the bible belt and rural areas have of others, and their love of their religion. It’s called the religious Right, which is increasingly becoming more mixed and less conservative. They still work to protect the family and build community, but many are not buying into the Focus on the Family garbage of old.

They also had an interesting segment with Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, an anti-war mother’s group and Lt. Pete Hegseth, executive director of Vets for Freedom. As much as I admire and respect the sacrifices of ALL of our men in uniform, no matter what where or when they served or are currently serving, this Lieutenant’s brushing-off of a legitimate concern, that the majority of American people do not support continued presence in Iraq. This opposition to the war is not a new thing, as nearly that much wanted all combat troops out by the end of 2008 according to a February 2007 USA Today poll.
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This is the way our administration feels about the opinion of the majority, so long as the minority we’re talking about is the “Christian male power structure”. And this representative of Vets for Freedom seems to offer the same brush-off. I know the soldiers should keep their eyes on the ball, but the people are watching this all unfold, and much like John Ashcroft on the conversations leading to some absolutely inhumane and immoral treatment during this war, we’re saying “history will not judge this kindly“.

My favorite analysis of this issue has come from the DailyKos and wmtriallawyer who dared to look up elitist in a dictionary. Check it out here.

Funny ‘documentary’ on Fox News (by the Daily Show)

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Of course it’s a comedy show, but humor is a vehicle for truth. I watch Fox News more than I should, but I recognize all of its faults. It is in no way Fair and Balanced. Most of the time I flip between news stations to see who is covering what at any given time. I’m always interested when they cover completely different stories with the “Breaking News” graphic on the screen. If either one were so important it should be on all networks, but often I find you have to watch everything to get the truth about anything, and even then…you still need YouTube.

Here is part one, my favorite words are “eloquent and visionary”. And part two

An interesting MoveOn.org ad- 6 Months at a Time

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I found this ad over at Think Progress today, it was a very interesting spot, I watched it 3 times before commenting. I have admired and respected Senator McCain for a long time, but I simply cannot support him for President. This nation, and this earth need a resolution of peace. We need to get away from pre-emptive war as a line of thinking. 2009-2016 will be a time of healing and positive change for America, not for more bickering and partisanship while our economy and the fabric of our nation crumbles before us.

We the People, the first three words of our Constitution and thus, this entire country. We the People decided one day to form the most prosperous land on earth. We the People vote, and we will not let our nation be torn further apart. As true as President Lincoln’s words were in June 1858, they are today: a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Throwback: A relevant warning 1961-Present

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That’s funny, I don’t remember learning much about this in school. The YouTube generation and younger teachers really need to utilize the internet to its fullest. I’m passionate about education, even if I’m on a hiatus. I would like to continue to develop some lessons and ideas, so as that happens I’ll post the products here.

Check out the Military Industrial Complex in-depth, see today’s contracts, I’m sure there is some bullshit on that site, some over hyping or misrepresentations, but it’s not completely inaccurate, some of the contracts referenced here have popped up in the news. Like a licensed masseuse receiving a $300 million contract from the Pentagon to supply arms to police in Afghanistan. If 40% of the contracts there are accurate, it’s enough to make any American sick and furious at the same time.

I actually agree with Bill O’Reilly on something

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I think I remember most of the times I’ve fully agreed with Bill O’Reilly and his wish for a homogeneous society. Sometimes it happens, the man reveals he got his post by having some intelligence. I enjoy his interesting perspective when he stops pandering to his niche audience and speaks more of the truth. More often he is playing armchair quarterback on the way he would do other’s jobs. In a way that’s what I’m doing here, but I’m not a prominent anything using a national television show to tell judges, doctors and scientists how to do their jobs. I’m glad he did choose to address how a Vice President should do his job.

Think Progress has the video.

From transcript:

O’REILLY: When that question was put to Dick Cheney a couple weeks ago by an ABC News correspondent, he said so? Wasn’t that a bad answer?

ROVE: No, I think it was a different question that was put to him. The question was put to him, basically the implication, the question was shouldn’t you be making decisions based on what the polls tell you?

O’REILLY: No, no, no. The question, Mr. Rove, with all due respect to you, was here’s the polls. 66 percent don’t like Iraq. What do you think and he went so. Look, I don’t want to debate the issue about that. I’m saying that was bad PR by Dick Cheney.

ROVE: Well, there may have been a better answer to it. But the fundamental implication to the question was shouldn’t you be making decisions based on the latest poll run by our news organization.

O’REILLY: No, I would say no.

ROVE: Yes.

O’REILLY: But I think you can’t just dismiss the folks.

ROVE: Oh, no. And that’s right. Abraham Lincoln said, you know.

O’REILLY: I think Dick Cheney dismissed the folks with the “so” remark. You know, he was a wise guy, was he not?

ROVE: Well, I think he was not dismissing the folks. What I think he was dismissing was the direct implication. I question what that — you ought to be making decisions based on –

O’REILLY: All right.

ROVE: My news organization’s poll, which is –

O’REILLY: We see that a bit differently.

ROVE: Yes, sir.