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This follows Cheny's out and out admission - possibly begging for a presidential pardon - that he signed off on torture. Whether he will face consequences entirely depends on the 'politics' - meaning public pressure.
Turley said:
“It most certainly is a crime to participate, to create, to in many ways monitor a torture program. What [Cheney] is describing is most certainly and unambiguously a war crime.”Ron Susskind told Rachel Maddow that the record is clear, Cheney was always clear he wanted to invade Iraq no matter what - "it was a matter of simply selling it like a bar of soap".
“It’s an interesting question, isn’t it? … If someone commits a crime and everyone’s around to see it and does nothing, is it still a crime?”
"Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty
Cassel: Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo...
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that..."
Mr. Bush lifted the economy with his tax cuts and, quote, "responded with bold measures to prevent an economic meltdown."
In 2005, Mr. Bush told a 57-year-old single mother of three, one of them mentally challenged, that it was "fantastic", "uniquely American" that she had to work three jobs unlike half a million people who have no job as of November... in the first presidency for decades during which family earning power fell, and income disparity continued to rise.
The "meltdown" he "prevented" now having claimed several Wall Street institutions which had weathered 1929, and 9/11... but not 43.
And, of course, the old standby, quote, he "kept the American people safe"...
Not counting twenty percent of his first term, January 20th, 2001, until September 11th, 2001. On 9/11, he sat reading "My Pet Goat" for seven minutes after learning America was under attack. Then covered up environmental dangers at Ground Zero, and failed to provide for the health of rescue workers. Helped bin Laden's family flee the country. Opposed the 9/11 Commission, the Department of Homeland Security.
Tried to outsource America's port security to Dubai. Did not keep us safe from the shoe-bomber... alert passengers and crew did that...
Did not keep five Americans safe from anthrax... and never caught their killer.
Still hasn't caught the killer of 17 sailors aboard the USS Cole.
Still hasn't caught the killer of 3,000 on 9/11... outsourcing that to Afghans... turning that country into a narco-state, giving bin Laden a safe haven in the region of Waziristan by literally endorsing a truce that Pakistan signed with the Taliban there.
And most of all, not keeping safe 4,200 Americans dead in his war, a war that made us less safe, invading a country that posed no grave or gathering threat, provided a check on Iran... then igniting insurrection by disbanding the Baathist Party, creating a Muslim theocracy purged of its moderate intelligentsia. One in which freedom has marched backward for women.
Hillary Clinton. Glass ceilings well and truly shattered. Redemption in Denver and, later, Florida.
PUMAs. Clinton's 'loyalists' damned and screwed by Clinton herself. Until September they screamed the same anti-Obama rubbish as McCain ended on (see image, right).
“Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers,” Palin said.And more:
“Boooo!” said the crowd.
“And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,’” she continued.
“Boooo!” the crowd repeated.
“Kill him!” proposed one man in the audience.
In a recent video clip from MSNBC, McCain asked a rally, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" In response to McCain's rhetorical question, a voice from the crowd can be clearly heard to shout in response, "Terrorist!"Translation: this uppity, elitist black man is really a towel-head. There's your divide-and-rule tactic to victory. Rovian campaigning 101 only more so (skirting incitement to assassination).
You may get away with lying to the rest of us, but this man is powerful enough to expose you - and ridicule you. Here's another surreal moment in a campaign where pop cultural figures are standing up to raw lies and power as effectively as the MSM. More effectively, in fact.This is the short version.
Do ya'think journos might have a little, er, self interest here Danny?
Why isn't the electoral map getting much play?
But my second, let's call it nuanced, reaction is to look at what's not being reported.
Like Palin and her 'witchdoctor'. McCain and his lobbyists. The 'maverick' meme'. Zero play for the veterans against McCain. Etc.
'Liberal' US media??? Seems more like a marriage which had been in denial and breaking up these past weeks.
Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find.+ Google kills the Google bomb :{
A disgruntled city computer engineer has virtually commandeered San Francisco's new multimillion-dollar computer network, altering it to deny access to top administrators even as he sits in jail on $5 million bail.US 'Department of Homeland Security' is seriously suggesting that airline passengers wear 'security bracelets' which would deliver taser-like shocks if they 'fail to comply' - seriously.
And it wasn't enough for another woman to show TSA agents nipple rings that set off a metal detector. The agents forced her to take them out.Tracey Ullman has a great character, Chanel Monticello, taking da piss outta this shit.
Mandi Hamlin said, "I had to get pliers and pull it apart."
In Chicago, people like Robert Perry are subjected to exhaustive security checks. He was patted down, his wheel chair was examined and his hands were swabbed, all in public view in a see-through room at the security checkpoint. Perry, 71, is not alone
"It's humiliation," Perry said.
Perry was also taken to a see-through room by a TSA agent when his artificial knee set off the metal detector.
"He yelled at me to get the belt off. 'I told you to get the belt off.' So I took the belt off. He ran his hands down over and pulled the pants down, they went down around my ankle," Perry said.
At that point, Perry was standing in his underwear in public view. He asked to see a supervisor. That made things worse.
If he does not "'take the fall' for election fraud in Ohio".No wonder they're losing online, who'd want to work for them?
A ‘self-serviced’ web transaction is 24 times less costly than a telephone transaction and 46 times less costly than a face - to - face transaction.According to the Daily Mail (FCS):
Ministers had so far failed to put sex education on a statutory footing in the national curriculum.AND
Attempts to search for advice on school computers were often frustrated by filters which block sites containing sexual words.New York Times piece on the challenges of being a Tekkie in Kenya:
Consider Wilfred Mworia, a 22-year-old engineering student and freelance code writer in Nairobi, Kenya. In the four weeks leading up to Apple’s much-anticipated release of a new iPhone on July 11, Mr. Mworia created an application for the phone that shows where events in Nairobi are happening and allows people to add details about them.
Mr. Mworia’s desire to develop an application for the iPhone is not unusual: many designers around the world are writing programs for the device. But his location posed some daunting obstacles: the iPhone doesn’t work in Nairobi, and Mr. Mworia doesn’t even own one. He wrote his program on an iPhone simulator.
Here's good CRM for you. From an email:
We couldn't help but notice that it's been a while since you've visited Current.com, and it's bumming us out.Lincolnshire is truly pioneering with eGov. Apart from the ads they are:
If you have a moment, we'd love to hear from you about your experience on Current.com, what did or didn’t work for you, and how we could make things more enticing for you in the future.
As part of their “Accessibility tested by humans” strategy, Lincolnshire’s website will be tested every 3 months by a panel of disabled users with disabilities ranging from cerebral palsy through to dyslexia. Results will then be published on Lincolnshire’s website for anyone to see.I completely agree with this more 'social' attitude to accessibility.
The draft had threatened to switch off non-compliant websites altogether, warning: "websites which fail to meet the mandated level of conformance shall be subject to the withdrawal process for .gov.uk domain names". The final guidance issues a similar warning, but using the softer formula 'may be at risk' instead of 'shall be subject to': "Government website owners are reminded to follow the conditions of use for a .gov.uk name (Registering .gov.uk domain names (TG114)). Websites which fail to meet the .gov.uk accessibility requirements may be at risk of having their domain name withdrawn".Monbiot point:
A few weeks ago the writer Mark Lynas found a counter-intuitive revelation buried in the small print of an ICM survey. The number of people in social classes D and E who thought the government should prioritise the environment over the economy was higher (56%) than the proportion in classes A and B (47%). It is counter-intuitive only because a vast and well-funded denial industry has spent years persuading us that environmentalism is a middle-class capriceHow guardian.co.uk stays atop the pile:
In the past two months, we have started to combine search engine optimisation - talking to the news desk on the paper about SEO-friendly headlines and underlining SEO with our subs desk [on the website] - with our marketing and pay-per-click activity. If you do two to three small things at one time that can be very significant.Etre (newsletter only) had a great post about 'cognitive illusions', relating this to usability. Citing Bruce Tognazzi from 1989 it notes that:
1) Users consistently report that using the keyboard is faster than using the mouse.Etre's blog had an interesting post about a new ATM interface for Wells Fargo. ATMs are thirty years old - proving that usability is an ongoing and never-ending process.
2) The stopwatch consistently proves that using the mouse is faster than using the keyboard.
This illusion reveals a much more important learning: Users' perception of reality and reality itself are not the same thing - which means that you should always verify their claims through research. You should also take pains to validate your own intuitions, because even when you're certain of something, you can still be very wrong.
Featuring case studies from both local and central government, practical exercises to learn more about how social media could be used within a local authority context and plenty of time for networking and chats over coffee.eGov AU on why UK lgov sites are better than Australian ones. Unfortunately he cites Redbridge :{
He raised his hand as if to say stop.
“That was the formal start of the war,” he said. “Because of the peace agreement they had, nobody was allowed to have guns bigger than 80mm. Okay, so that's the formal start of the war. It wasn't the attack on Tskhinvali. Now stop me.”
“Okay,” I said. “All the reports I've read say Saakashvili started the war.”
“I'm not yet on the 7th,” he said. “I'm on the 6th.”
“Okay,” I said. He had given this explanation to reporters before, and he knew exactly what I was thinking.
“Saakashvili is accused of starting this war on the 7th,” he said.
“Right,” I said. “But that sounds like complete bs to me if what you say is true.”
Thomas Goltz nodded.
They know their candidate will be asked to respond, and that he has no choice but pretend he finds the whole thing amusing, or paraphrase Tucker Bound's [spokesman's] envious, childish response: "Paris Hilton might not be as big a celebrity as Barack Obama, but she obviously has a better energy plan."
I think there is every reason to believe John McCain won't be the nominee. Ok, let me say that again. McCain will not be the Republican candidate in November.Olbermann on the numbers.
The reasons are simple. He can't win. Now that Obama is the presumptive Democratic nominee -- the polls all show that McCain's pro-war stance and Bush endorsement make him a lost cause in November. That combined with soft stand on litmus test conservative issues make him an unpopular candidate among the base. I know some Democrats that think the Republicans are planning to let McCain lose and 'sit this one out' so that they can hang the democrats with a bad economy and a war that is a morass. But that just isn't how they play. They play to win every hand -- think about 2000 with a popular Democratic president and good economy and a solid VP running for president. Why did they put up Bush? And why did they fight so hard? Because, you don't ever throw a game. And they're not going to throw this one.
McCain won't be the nominee.
