Smart Talk on Health Care Reform and Its Opponents

 

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This is a great piece of interviewing. Watching this Countdown segment gave me a strange fantasy concerning the upcoming 2012 election:

Rachel Maddow
Progressive Party Candidate for President of the United States

And while I'd love to see Huffington as VP, I think there are Constitutional barriers to that. Still, Arianna could be a valuable cabinet member instead so its all good.

Maddow is the most intelligent person on U.S. television today.

GOP Opposes Job Creation

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

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GOP - The Party of Irrelevancy

Good to know...

Wartime Obama-Ade!

Afghani Quagmire


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Doubling U.S. troops in Afghanistan is wildly unintelligent. I am pretty sure that most votes for Obama were more substantially votes against McCain who is certainly in the mold of a neocon war god. We absolutely voted against the continuance of war in Iraq and I am pretty sure that it wasn't because we thought a war in Afghanistan was some brilliant alternative to that. So what advantage is now being revealed in Obama's policies? Not much of one in my view.

Yup, "continuity we can believe in"...utterly pathetic in terms of leadership. Does Obama have any ideas that don't provide taxpayer subsidized handouts to the military industrial complex, wall street, or his corporate supporters? Is there any chance he's actually going to put forward some progressive policies?

For more of the same bullshit we could have voted for anybody else.

Obama: Neocon Lite

These two ladies touch on my earlier points of discontent so I thought I'd post it.

The Voting Process is Broken

That's a very good point being made there. Time is money, bastards!

Voting requires transparency of process and I therefore remain deeply concerned over the use of voting machines the code to which remains the proprietary secret property of the generally Republican leaning companies that manufacture them. Voting machines should not be privatized nor outsourced. What we need are open source voting machines every process of which can be tracked and accounted for as need be. I can't see why we aren't making state manufactured machines with open source code behind them - that's the only way to be sure of what is going on should problems arise. An alternative might be to buy not only the voting machines but also the rights to the code that run them - I am willing to go there if we have to.

Maybe the U.N. needs to come in to secure the vote in future U.S. elections. That would be an embarrassing but necessary next step.

No Question: It *IS* Torture and Torture is a War Crime

"Countdown: War Crimes Prosecutions Possible" [VIDEO]
http://youtube.com/watch?v=M3PvIFx-WDE

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"Top Bush aides pushed for Guantánamo torture"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/19/guantanamo.usa

He added: "Haynes, Feith, Yoo, Bybee, Gonzalez and - at the apex - Addington, should never travel outside the US, except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court."

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"Worries About War Crimes Heat up in the White House"
http://www.alternet.org/rights/91340/?page=entire

On those larger issues, the evidence is in, merely awaiting adjudication. Mr. Bush's 2005 proclamation that "we do not torture" was long ago revealed as a lie. Antonio Taguba, the retired major general who investigated detainee abuse for the Army, concluded that "there is no longer any doubt" that "war crimes were committed." Ms. Mayer uncovered another damning verdict: Red Cross investigators flatly told the C.I.A. last year that America was practicing torture and vulnerable to war-crimes charges.

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The thugs in the White House don't seem to get it: waterboarding *IS* torture and torture is a war crime. All that's left now is to see if this or any congress we shall see soon has the balls to make a prosecution stick.

The White House administration has done its best to create confusion on the supposed question of whether waterboarding is torture: if it is not torture, then it's not illegal nor a war crime; if it is torture, then it's illegal and war crime - we'll ask our attorneys! There is no question of law to be decided here, there is no doubt that waterboarding is torture and a war crime. Ask the Red Cross, they might know.

The only people asking those idiotic questions and doing all of the hemming and hawing over this bullshit are our own elected officials in D.C. Apparently, they can't do their jobs and defend the U.S. Constitution nor defend us before the international community from being thought of as the people that suborned torture.

Congress's failure to act makes us all into war criminals!