Because of the two main stories this week, we've done the layout a little differently - the Senate report on torture is first with three stories and Jon Stewart, then some light relief with videos etc., then three stories on Elizabeth Warren opposing the blatant giveaways to Wall Street......
And #5 is excellent!
1/ The always insightful Frank Rich on the news of the week, and his take on the torture report is especially interesting.....
Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with contributor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: The Senate Intelligence Committee releases its report on CIA torture, the impact of the Eric Garner and Michael Brown protests, and the GOP Establishment dreams of Mitt.
Earlier this week, the Senate Intelligence Committee released itsmuch-anticipated report on the Bush-era CIA's extensive use of interrogation and detention techniques that plainly constituted torture and, according to the committee's findings, did not contribute to the killing of Osama bin Laden or stop any terrorist plots. President Obama — who outlawed the torture techniques during his first week in office — has tried to strike a middle ground in responding to the report, praising the CIA as "patriots" while decrying their former methods. Should he be taking a stronger stance? Can America just move past its torture era, or are prosecutions and formal accountability necessary?
There are two important things to remember about this report: (1) We have only seen a fraction of it — a heavily redacted 524-page executive summary of a document whose full text exceeds 6,000 pages. Given how grotesque that censored executive summary is, it beggars the imagination to guess what horrors didn’t make the cut. (2) Much of the news in this report is not news at all, but has been in essence reported many times by major news organizations in the years since the Abu Ghraib revelations. And yet we are shocked all over again. So is America moving past its torture era? Hardly. We still live in a land of denial.
2/ Matt Taibbi with the details of what the CIA did to prisoners......he describes the most disgusting and inhumane things done to the detainees, with some commentary on the politics of the time. His last paragraph is chilling.....
Capitol Hill yesterday provided America with a classic set piece of partisan performance art: a pair of sanctimonious legislative events, one for each chamber, the two parties blaming each other for high crimes.
On the House side, Republican Oversight Chief Darrell Issa emceed a Fox News reality show in which Obamacare advisor Jonathan Gruber was metaphorically burned at the stake. Issa had finally captured alive the most reviled demon of the Republican myth: a bespectacled coastal intellectual who not only collected millions ($5.9 million, to be exact) from the government helping institute redistributionist policies, but also snickered in his down time about how ordinary Americans are too dumb to govern themselves. If there's such a thing as conservative snuff porn, this was it.
Meanwhile, on the Senate side, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein released a controversial study about perhaps the worst chapter in the history of the Bush administration: the "Enhanced Interrogation" program, which the Senate in its last days of Democratic control has decided finally to call "torture" (see page 4 of the report).
Because of the way our media works, there will be a lot of hemming and hawing about the political implications of yesterday's events, while less attention will be focused on the fine print. Who can guess at the motive behind the release of the Feinstein report, but one clear objective is to place the end of the American "torture" regime in January of 2009. That was when Barack Obama came to office and signed Executive Order 13491, restricting interrogations to the techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual.
I'm not sure I'm buying that the U.S. government suddenly got religion about mistreatment of terror suspects once Obama took office, particularly since this government massively accelerated a drone-assassination program that years from now, when some Senate Republican releases a Feinstein-like report on that chapter of our history, will probably make the Bush torture regime look like pretty weak beer. (This is despite the hilarious protests from mainstream press commentators like this one claiming that having robots murder people from the sky is somehow more humane, and less of a moral and religious outrage, than torture).
http://www.rollingstone.com/
3/ Jon Stewart with a semi-serious riff on the evil Dick Cheney, and his amazing appearance on Meet The Press, where he truly proved, over and over, that he is a psychopath.....9 pretty good minutes.....
Jon Stewart spent the first segment of tonight’sDaily Show diving into a former vice president’sMeet the Press appearance and asking, “Is Dick Cheney a righteous warrior or a psychopath?”
Stewart called Cheney the “best-slash-worst” on this particular issue, and mocked him for setting the nation’s moral bar pretty low by defining the event of 9/11 as torture that the U.S. has not sank to.
And what amazed Stewart is how after all these years, Cheney is “impervious to doubt” and the thought that maybe any of what he says is “complete bullshit.”
Stewart concluded, “George W. Bush, thank you for not dying while you were in office.”
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/
SNL‘s cold open tonight jumped right into the biggest story of the week: the CIA torture report. And the two psychologists who helped design much of those torture techniques bragged onCharlie Rose about how they’re behind some of the most agonizing of everyday tortures.
“Enough is enough with Wall Street insiders getting key position after key position and the kind of cronyism that we have seen in the executive branch,” thundered Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren in a speech on the Senate floor late Friday night that quickly caught fire with progressive activists, gaining close to 150,000 views on YouTube.
http://www.politico.com/story/
(Credit: YouTube)
Just a note - when Cheney has the nerve to equate 9/11 victims to torture, he is pressing a button you might succumb to, but remind yourself - 3000 people were murdered on 9/11, not tortured.
4/ An excellent cartoon from the Times........click on it to enlarge it......
5/ Jimmy Fallon is turning out to be one of the best late night hosts, rivaling Carson. Here is arguably the best clip from his show, a lip-synch battle with Emma Stone where they "sing" two songs each. Fallon is pretty good, but Emma Stone is absolutely amazing. This seven minute segment has 34 million views, and rightly so - well worth your time......
Jimmy Fallon has faced some stiff competition during his recurring lip sync battles, but the comedian faced his most formidable opponent during Monday's episode of The Tonight Show. Emma Stone, who appeared on the late-night talk show to promote The Amazing Spider-Man 2, put his skills to the test.
Fallon kicked things off with a rendition of Iggy Azalea's "Fancy." While the audience loved his humorous interpretation of the hip-hop track, the actress' cover of Blues Traveler's "Hook" was the real showstopper. "I can't even talk to you right now," Fallon, 39, told Stone, 25, after she finished her set. "I forgot all about that song. So good! I really gotta pick it up now. I've gotta up my game."
For his second and final song, Fallon chose Styx's 1983 hit "Mr. Roboto." It was no match for the movie star, however, as Stone flawlessly—and presciently—performed DJ Khaled's 2010 jam "All I Do Is Win."
Indeed she did.
6/ A beautiful four minute movie on a possible future, if mankind ever develops the technology to actually travel in space.....
Wanderers is a short film by Swedish digital artist and animator Erik Wernquist. Though it does not contain a traditional narrative, it combines breathtaking visualizations of space with narration by the legendary astronomer Carl Sagan, reading from his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.
"Maybe it's a little early," Sagan says, as Wernquist's film transports the viewer to the fantastical landscapes of distant moons and planets. "Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds, promising untold opportunities, beckon. Silently, they orbit the sun, waiting."
The best part? All the locations depicted in the film are 100% real. The photo-realistic depictions are recreations of photographs and data compiled by NASA and other astronomical organizations, which means that these jaw-dropping visualizations aren't just fanciful imaginings — they're precursors to sights that we might actually see in person one day.
7/ SNL had a good piece on the two psychologists paid $80 million to come up with how to torture prisoners, and it's quite amusing.....five minutes.....
SNL‘s cold open tonight jumped right into the biggest story of the week: the CIA torture report. And the two psychologists who helped design much of those torture techniques bragged onCharlie Rose about how they’re behind some of the most agonizing of everyday tortures.
They bragged about behind behind Time Warner Cable customer service, the TSA, supermarket self-checkout lines, and autocorrecting.
They brought all this up because, of course, they didn’t want to be pigeonholed as the “rectal-feeding guys.”
8/ A nice four minute video - sometimes good things happen to beings in need......I like the captions telling you where each incident takes place.....
9/ A great column by Simon Johnson, who is one of our premier economic commentators.....he concentrates on what actually happened last week with the Wall Street clause in the spending bill, and what the specific objections Senator Warren had to the inclusion of the repeal of part of the Dodd-Frank provisions - it may sound a little technical, but it isn't.
What he describes is how Wall Street owns Congress and the President, how they exercise their power and the only thing standing in their way is Elizabeth Warren.
And here's the deal - not only do the big banks own Washington, they don't care who knows it.....when you get both Jamie Dimon from Citigroup and President Obama pressuring Democrats to pass the bill, it's blatant.....
Citigroup is a very large bank that has amassed a huge amount of political power. Its current and former executives consistently push laws and regulations in the direction of allowing Citi and other megabanks to take on more risk, particularly in the form of complex highly leveraged bets. Taking these risks allows the executives and traders to get a lot of upside compensation in the form of bonuses when things go well – while the downside losses, when they materialize, become the taxpayer’s problem.
Citigroup is also, collectively, stupid on a grand scale. The supposedly smart people at the helm of Citi in the mid-2000s ran them hard around – and to the edge of bankruptcy. A series of unprecedented massive government bailouts was required in 2000-09 – and still the collateral damage to the economy has proved enormous. Give enough clever people the wrong incentives and they will destroy anything.
Now the supposedly brilliant people who run Citigroup have, in the space of a single working week, made a series of serious political blunders with long-lasting implications. Their greed has manifestly proved Elizabeth Warren exactly right about the excessive clout of Wall Street, their arrogance has greatly strengthened a growing left-center-right coalition concerned about the power of the megabanks, and their public exercise of raw power has helped this coalition understand what it needs focus on doing – break up Citigroup.
In a blistering speech on Tuesday, December 9th, Senator Warren emphasized how much power large Wall Street banks have in Washington. The pushback from those banks’ supporters was, not surprisingly, to deny any special rights and privileges.
10/ Matt Taibbi [again] with the political slant of this story, and how the Democrats are complicit in trying to label Elizabeth Warren as a wild eyed leftist, when she is in reality a true fiscal conservative. Keep this in mind - whatever the mainstream media says is complete BS on this issue.....they're just mouthpieces for the oligarchs.
Personally I believe Taibbi......
Bloomberg/Getty
Senator Elizabeth Warren
Gosh, the Democrats are really pushing hard to save a key portion of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill, aren't they? Like tigers, or Siamese fighting fish they battle! Thrilling to watch!
Oh, wait, that's what they aren't doing. Actually what we're watching in the "Cromnibus" budget fight, is a stage-managed surrender that was inevitable pretty much from the moment the ink began to dry on the so-called sweeping reform of Wall Street the Democrats passed years ago.
The dominant media narrative this past week has been that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, firmly saddled in her high horse, is trying to hold up the passage of the budget over a trifle. In reality, the so-called "Citigroup" provision to kill a rule designed to prevent future bailouts (so named because it was allegedly written by Citigroup lobbyists) is potentially quite an evil and destructive little thing. But the nitpicking counter-spin is already coming hot and heavy.
"It's a marginal regulation," said Patrick Brennan of the National Review,about the Dodd-Frank rule Warren wants to keep. Brennan bro-ishly dismissed "Liz" as an "indefatigable academic" who is "picking a fight that really can't be said to help or hurt the economy," a political fight that is "hardly a hill to die on."
Republicans like South Carolina Senator Linsey Graham derided Warren's gambit as an immature squabble andblasted Democrats in the House who followed her line of thinking. "Don't follow her lead," he said. "She's the problem."
Making the budget fight a news story not about bailouts, but about the ambitions of Elizabeth Warren, is part of the game. And the Beltway hacks have succeeded there. Media on all sides have described last week's episode as Warren's political coming-out party. Former Obama aides sent a letter urging her to run for president, and Fox news said the rebellion showed Warren has the "clout" to "disrupt the best plans of the establishment."
11/ Another Wall Street item you may have missed - the President has appointed an insider to a very powerful job at the Treasury, and Senator Warren thinks he is both unqualified and compromised, but the White House isn't backing down, probably because the economic group advising the President are all ex Wall Street bankers.
Fresh from quelling the progressive uprising against the “cromnibus” spending bill, the White House isn’t backing down on its other major fight with Democratic progressives: the nomination of a Wall Street banker for a top Treasury job.
Liberal opposition to President Barack Obama’s choice of investment banker Antonio Weiss as treasury undersecretary only hardened in response to the inclusion of a bank-friendly provision in the Obama-backed spending bill.
Nonetheless, people who support Weiss are circulating endorsements and promising that once the 48-year-old Lazard banker gets behind closed doors for meetings with undecided Democrats he will convince them he has all the credentials to do the job of undersecretary for domestic finance, the department’s third most senior position.
http://www.politico.com/story/
12/ A chicken farmer who works under contract for Perdue had a come to Jesus moment, and has gone public about how Perdue makes him raise their chickens.....there's a six minute video, which isn't too bad to watch as there's no abuse of the birds, it's just incredibly depressing showing how a factory farm actually operates.
The interesting thing is how Big Ag works - the farmer gets chicks and has to raise them under strict guidelines, and has no say at all on how they are kept. Nor does the farmer make a lot of money.....just Perdue.
And note - these are birds that Perdue markets as "cage free"......watch this excellent video and you will never buy "plastic" chicken again, just organic.....
(Credit: YouTube)
It is usually extremely difficult to obtain high-quality footage inside factory farms–meat and dairy industries know exactly how inhumane the facilities look and work hard to maintain secrecy in order to keep up the facade that we aren’t eating animals that suffered terribly. Now, one South Carolina farmer named Craig Watts has taken the brave step of collaborating with the animal-welfare group Compassion in World Farming to expose the conditions of his barns.
13/ Lily Wood with "A Prayer In C", a pretty good song but the video is one of those rebellious young adult ones, where they put on face makeup and rollerboard through the streets of some dreary German city proving how cool they are......OK OK I didn't like it, but some of you might.....song is great though.....
14/ A sobering story, and you will probably agree with the premise - the oligarchs have decided they don't need some of the bottom half of the country to run the economy, so they're disposable......
The Six-Step Process to Wipe Out the Poor Half of America
American citizens are deprived of living-wage jobs, meaningful education and equal treatment by our system of justice. Rebellion, in the form of violence, is not hard to understand.
One of the themes of the superb writing of Henry Giroux is that more and more Americans are becoming “disposable,” recognized as either commodities or criminals by the more fortunate members of society. There seems to be a method to the madness of winner-take-all capitalism. The following steps, whether due to greed or indifference or disdain, are the means by which America’s wealth-takers dispose of the people they don’t need.
1. Deplete Their Wealth
Recent analysis has determined that half of America is in or near poverty.
15/ A Floriduh story that will give you chills......a young man lends his car to a group of guys, and after they kill a young woman he's convicted of murder, and sentenced to life without parole.....for letting someone borrow his car.
And he's white.....but probably working class, so he's disposable just like the previous story says, so it's OK for North Florida conservatives to eat their own if they're poor.....
| Ryan Holle | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | November 17, 1982(age 32)[1] Pensacola, Florida, United States |
Criminal penalty
| Life imprisonment |
| Criminal status | Incarcerated at Graceville Correctional Facility |
| Conviction(s) | first degree murder, armedburglary, armed robbery[1] |
TALLAHASSEE — Ryan Holle did not kill anyone with his own hands. But he lent his car to friends, who later killed a young woman in her home, and that was enough to convict Holle of first-degree murder.
Gov. Rick Scott and the three elected Cabinet members today will consider whether to release him from his life sentence without parole.
More than 2,000 supporters have signed an online petition that calls his conviction a "travesty'' and seeks his release from prison. His case has drawn national media attention, from the New York Times, the Nation, and TV talk show hosts including Star Jones and Judge Jeanine Pirro.
At the heart of the case is the so-called felony murder doctrine. It holds that an accomplice like Holle is just as responsible as the actual killers when a murder takes place during the commission of a felony.
After a long, boozy night of partying in Pensacola in 2003, Holle handed the keys to his Chevy subcompact to four friends. They burglarized a house looking for cash and marijuana in a safe. They found $425, and used the butt of a shotgun to kill 18-year-old Jessica Snyder.
Holle was at home at the time, a mile and a half away, and had no prior criminal record
Note - as of Dec. 15th I can't find out if his sentence was commuted, but in Rick Scott's and Pam Bondi's Florida there would be no chance.....
Todays video - approved by the NRA......a hunter gets a surprise......
Todays golf joke
Tiger Woods & Stevie Wonder are in a bar...
Tiger says Stevie, "How's the singing career going?"
Stevie replies, "Not too bad. How's the golf?"
Woods replies, "I've had some problems with my swing,
but I think I've got that right, now."
Stevie: "I always find that when my swing goes wrong,
I need to stop playing for a while and not think about it.
Then, the next time I play, it seems to be all right."
Incredulous, Tiger says, "You play GOLF?"
Stevie: "Yes, I've been playing for years."
Tiger: "But -- you're blind! How can you play golf if you can't see?"
Stevie: "Well, I get my caddy to stand in the middle of the fairway and call to me. I listen for the sound of his voice and play the ball towards him. Then, when I get to where the ball lands, the caddy moves to the green or farther down the fairway and again I play the ball towards his voice."
"But, how do you putt" asks Tiger.
"Well", says Stevie, "I get my caddy to lean down in front of the hole and call to me with his head on the ground and I just play the ball towards his voice."
Tiger: "What's your handicap?"
Stevie: "Well, actually -- I'm a scratch golfer."
Woods says to Stevie, "We've got to play a round sometime."
Stevie: "Well, people don't take me seriously, so I only play for money, and never play for less than $10,000 a hole. Is that a problem?"
Woods thinks about it and says, "I can afford that; OK,
I'm game for that . . . $10,000 a hole is fine with me.
When would you like to play?"
Stevie: "Pick a night."
Tiger says Stevie, "How's the singing career going?"
Stevie replies, "Not too bad. How's the golf?"
Woods replies, "I've had some problems with my swing,
but I think I've got that right, now."
Stevie: "I always find that when my swing goes wrong,
I need to stop playing for a while and not think about it.
Then, the next time I play, it seems to be all right."
Incredulous, Tiger says, "You play GOLF?"
Stevie: "Yes, I've been playing for years."
Tiger: "But -- you're blind! How can you play golf if you can't see?"
Stevie: "Well, I get my caddy to stand in the middle of the fairway and call to me. I listen for the sound of his voice and play the ball towards him. Then, when I get to where the ball lands, the caddy moves to the green or farther down the fairway and again I play the ball towards his voice."
"But, how do you putt" asks Tiger.
"Well", says Stevie, "I get my caddy to lean down in front of the hole and call to me with his head on the ground and I just play the ball towards his voice."
Tiger: "What's your handicap?"
Stevie: "Well, actually -- I'm a scratch golfer."
Woods says to Stevie, "We've got to play a round sometime."
Stevie: "Well, people don't take me seriously, so I only play for money, and never play for less than $10,000 a hole. Is that a problem?"
Woods thinks about it and says, "I can afford that; OK,
I'm game for that . . . $10,000 a hole is fine with me.
When would you like to play?"
Stevie: "Pick a night."
Todays cop jokes
A man was driving home late one afternoon way above the speed limit. He noticed a police car with it's red lights on in his rear view mirror. He thinks he can outrun it, floors it and the race is on.
Both cars race down the highway... 60, 70, 80, 90 mph. Finally, his speedometer passes 100 and the guy pulls over to the curb...
The officer gets out of his cruiser and says, "Listen mister, I've had a real lousy day and I just want to go home. Give me a good excuse and I'll let you go."
The man thought for a while and said, "Three weeks ago my wife ran off with a police officer. When I saw your cruiser in my rear view mirror, I thought you were that officer and you were trying to return her..... "
A farmer got pulled over by a state trooper for speeding, and the trooper started to lecture the farmer about his speed, and began to throw his weight around to try to make the farmer uncomfortable.
Finally, the trooper got around to writing out the ticket, and as he was doing that he kept swatting at some flies that were buzzing around his head.
The farmer said, "Having some problems with circle flies there, are ya?" The trooper stopped writing the ticket and said, "Well yeah, if that's what they are, but I never heard of circle flies."
So the farmer says, "Well, circle flies are common on farms. See, they're called circle flies because they're almost always found circling around the back end of a horse."
The trooper says, "Oh," and goes back to writing the ticket. Then after a minute he stops and says, "Hey...wait a minute, are you trying to call me a horse's ass?"
The farmer says, "Oh no, officer. I have too much respect for law enforcement and police officers to even think about calling you a horse's ass."
The trooper says, "Well, that's a good thing," and goes back to writing the ticket.
After a long pause, the farmer says, "Hard to fool them flies, though. . . "
A farmer got pulled over by a state trooper for speeding, and the trooper started to lecture the farmer about his speed, and began to throw his weight around to try to make the farmer uncomfortable.
Finally, the trooper got around to writing out the ticket, and as he was doing that he kept swatting at some flies that were buzzing around his head.
The farmer said, "Having some problems with circle flies there, are ya?" The trooper stopped writing the ticket and said, "Well yeah, if that's what they are, but I never heard of circle flies."
So the farmer says, "Well, circle flies are common on farms. See, they're called circle flies because they're almost always found circling around the back end of a horse."
The trooper says, "Oh," and goes back to writing the ticket. Then after a minute he stops and says, "Hey...wait a minute, are you trying to call me a horse's ass?"
The farmer says, "Oh no, officer. I have too much respect for law enforcement and police officers to even think about calling you a horse's ass."
The trooper says, "Well, that's a good thing," and goes back to writing the ticket.
After a long pause, the farmer says, "Hard to fool them flies, though. . . "
Todays Irish joke
This story happened awhile ago in Dublin , and even though it sounds like an Alfred Hitchcock tale, it's true.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
John Bradford, a Dublin University student, was on the side of the road hitch-hiking on a very dark night and in the midst of a big storm.
John Bradford, a Dublin University student, was on the side of the road hitch-hiking on a very dark night and in the midst of a big storm.
The night was rolling on and no car went by. The storm was so strong he could hardly see a few feet ahead of him.
Suddenly, he saw a car slowly coming towards him and it stopped. John, desperate for shelter and without thinking about it, got into the car and closed the door....
Only to realize there was nobody behind the wheel and the engine wasn't on. The car started moving slowly. John looked at the road ahead and saw a curve approaching. Scared, he started to pray, begging for his life.
Then, just before the car hit the curve, a hand appeared out of nowhere through the window, and turned the wheel. John, paralysed with terror, watched as the hand came through the window, but never touched or harmed him.
Shortly thereafter, John saw the lights of a pub appear down the road, so, gathering strength, he jumped out of the car and ran to it..
Wet and out of breath, he rushed inside and started telling everybody about the horrible experience he had just had.
A silence enveloped the pub when everybody realized he was crying...
And wasn't drunk.
Suddenly, the door opened, and two other people walked in from the dark and stormy night. They, like John, were also soaked and out of breath.
Looking around, and seeing John Bradford sobbing at the bar, one said to the other....
'Look Paddy....there's that fooking idiot that got in the car while we were pushing it!'
