You have to ask yourselves: what on earth do the massive Rove archives of personally damaging intel contain about Joe Lieberman that they (at some point a few years ago) began to trot him out still reeking of mothballs to prove some point private to themselves, put the ridiculous words in his script and pull the string. What have they got on him that he would dishonor himself this way. It's horrible, like seeing some old man soil his pants, and there's nothing, apparently, that he can do to stop it.

Posted at October 6, 2008 2:08 PM in response to Joe Lieberman Today: Seeks "God's Help" to Elect Palin

Thanks for posting this...there's an interview w/ the journalist here: http://www.democracynow.org/2007/11/6/new_pbs_documentary_gives_voice_to

Posted at October 6, 2008 12:17 PM in response to George W. Bush: Torturing Democracy in So Many Ways

By Republican standards, she's perfect because all they basically require in a world leader is someone to wear good clothes, sit in the chair, and sign the papers that open the sluices of federal treasure to the right entities. She's perfect by their standards, because she can take direction, and get off all the right memes without the slightest care about their relative factuality, or the destruction they do to the national fabric or psyche.

Republicans are not interested in intelligence, in democracy, fairness, or justice. They want money. Which makes Palin the PERFECT TOOL.

Posted at October 3, 2008 11:28 AM in response to FLIRTY? Are you kidding me? So manipulative!!!

...would also be interesting to have Valerie Caproni's files as lead counsel at FBI, since she basically directed the FBI at Guantanomo to lay down the paper trail like crumbs in the forest to direct the public line of vision to the evil that was going down.

Posted at October 3, 2008 11:22 AM in response to Explosive Documents: A Question of Evidence

The big item on my "wish list" should be a full accounting in the federal budget and how much public American money was piped to either CACI or to foreign parties to conduct the renditons and the "interrogations." They used a style of "questioning" that was desgined to produce coerced statments for propaganda purposes, not for producing intelligence or truth.

The other items on my "wish list" would be whatever documents were generated inside the rendition countries, so it could be determined how much these practices fueled even more terrorism. Much of what gets portrayed by the Bush administration as "terrorism" is blowback from their policies.

Posted at October 2, 2008 6:41 PM in response to Explosive Documents: A Question of Evidence

Nope, the rest is in cont. above due to technical errors vis a vis Word documents outside Alaska in terms of much-needed reform. See next post, in which the spirit moves to speak in tongues.

Posted at October 2, 2008 6:34 PM in response to Channeling Sarah Thru My Tinfoil Hat

Conservatives will fade back a while, then come back stronger like bacilli. This time now is like the time when they all got so ashamed of Nixon and his evil totalitarian ways. They got scared and ashamed. I don't think conservatives today are scared enough or ashamed enough. And judging from the younger ones waiting in the wings, they will come back without any pre-Reagan memories of any time when homeless mentally ill were cared for in publicly funded institutions or when the Army did not outsource washing its underwear to Halliburton. It's like a pendulum; everytime it swings in their direction, we have a closer brush with totalitarian rule that greases the skids for the capitalists, only they market it as "patriotism."

Posted at October 2, 2008 5:23 PM in response to The Fall of Conservatism? (with thanks to the Help desk)

Brilliant. Thank you.

Posted at October 2, 2008 5:17 PM in response to The Fall of Conservatism? (repost with complete text)

Jane,

Thank you for the book; it is a righteous work.

The Cheney family is seemingly hip-deep in pimping for torture and detainment. Elizabeth, the daughter, was dispensing massive amount of covert and "public" cash to precisely the same countries in 2006 that you outline as torture subcontractors in your book. Armitage probably set it up initially at the State Department; Armitage was Liz's mentor when she was but a wee thing fresh from Colorado College in 1988 with the ink still wet on her senior thesis about the "evolution of presidential war powers."

Richard Armitage and Philip Perry (Cheney's son in law) both have benefited financially from the detainment and torture industry. When Perry was counsel at OMB, he was in a position to conceal any expenditures, and to protect both Cheneys. Possibly he oversaw the invisible pipeline of money that paid for the renditions, detainments, etc. whether it was CIA or State Dept. or both.

Go look at the "investor" section of the CACI website; they measure their "growth" and profit potential by "beds filled." This means that it's nothing personal, the waterboarding and torture, its simply industry, so that the government can be billed according to the number of beds filled.

If you look at the wall full of names of donors to the Bush I presidential library in College Station, TX, it reads like a roster of Iran-Contra alums who have a vested interest in keeping their own records sealed, lest they be prosecuted. Cheney gave a huge amount to Bush I; he will give a huge amount to Bush II. He will miraculously reclassify himself as being part of the executive branch when it suits his ends. We can expect the same systematic concealment here. Cheney is very smart about this kind of thing, and his elf Addington is, we can be sure, toiling away, crafting executive orders that will bury the truth as deeply as they can bury it, and inoculate everyone from prosecution within the U.S. He did one about a month ago on how only the president has the right to decide who is "fit to serve" in the federal government.

These amoral people (and I include Mary Matalin among them) have had years of experience at this kind of thinking. While we were grooving on our own secular humanism in the 1990's these people were seeking the means to centralize wealth and power, and to turn the federal govt. into a money-laundering operation for Halliburton, CACI, CCA, etc.

Posted at October 2, 2008 5:13 PM in response to Explosive Documents: A Question of Evidence

This is what Palin would sound like if she had a Ph.D.

Posted at October 2, 2008 4:49 PM in response to They Put it Out on the Wire Before it Happened