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Health Care Around the World: Why American Health Care for Uninsured is Like that Of 3rd World Nations

11-07-09 7:39 P GMT-08
Interview with TR Reid on the 4 methods of health care in the world and the types of insurance and other bundled medical programs in the developed world found in the nations of the world.

Neda's Mother: She Was Like an Angel

11-07-09 7:16 P GMT-08
Her mom, talks about Neda's life. New: Neda found it impossible to get work because she was divorced.

Why negative thinking makes the world a better place

11-07-09 5:32 P GMT-08
Writer's brush with positive thinking program illustrates how focusing on a positive outlook can hurt in the long run. 'come to think of it, positive thinking started out as a busineess ploy, didn't it? A ploy by already powerful and rich white men to ingnore the harm their business practices have on the world. Maybe they should go back to the EST scam. Oh yeah.that was for underlings. h/t @R_A_W at Twitter.com

Jake Tapper Interviews Roland Hedley Jr. On Twitter

11-07-09 7:03 A GMT-08
Over his new book based on his Twitter posts. (Has to be a first.) The Insufferably sufferable journalist opens up to the ABc's Political Punch columnist, or not. Now I know what I want for Christmas.

Focusing on Ft. Hood Killer's Beliefs Are an Easy Out to Avoid the Deeper Reasons for the Massacre

11-06-09 9:19 P GMT-08
Fort Hood and it's vicinity have have a lot of problems with killings and low morale. The fact that Hasan did not act until the day before he was to be deployed shows his actions were more about being denied his right to avoid war than because of his religious beliefs. Hat tip @ontd_political at Twitter.com for link

New book tells how Right Wing and business push mainstream news media into a right wing bias.

11-05-09 4:18 A GMT-08
Calls liberal bias of news media "and urban legend" and shows how the right forces news media to back up their own propaganda. Hat tip Twitter colleagues, probably either @maafa or @mparent77772

Meg Whitman's radio whoppers

11-02-09 5:04 P GMT-08
Right Now Ms. Whitman is a California concern, but such things go on in your state as well, and it's good to see some reporting on them which we do this far from the election. Beside should she win the governor's seat she's likely to be running for president by 2016 at the latest.

ROFLMAO Slate Imagines Barack Obama's Facebook Wall

11-02-09 4:26 A GMT-08
Must read. No registration required.

Users of Roan Plateau in CO Want Oil and Gas Drillers to Back Off

11-02-09 3:54 A GMT-08
My question is how many of those same people were at the GOP convention or at least in solidarity with the chant "drill baby drill". Just a bit ironic, don't you think?

Scott Roeder As John Brown? I can't begin to say all the things wrong with that

10-30-09 3:12 P GMT-08
While John Brown was helping fight off pro-slavery murderers in Kansas, the predecessors of Scott Roeder were probably there too, on the other side. And the David and Goliath fight was an arranged battle, not a cowardly assassination against an unarmed man attending church.

A Liberal's Hit List: Limbuagh's Crew Misses Hoax and Treats Obama Thesis Satire as Truth

10-25-09 7:11 A GMT-08
Yeah, so Limbaugh got scammed. Well it is important,because though his listeners call him a comedian, they treat him like a news reporter (a similar lack of skepticism is found in Glenn Beck fans. Therefore with Limbaugh and Beck, who make lots of money and can afford quality help it's almost criminal that they don't avail themselves of them. Apparently though TV advertisers are more sensitive to the standards of a show host. After Limbaugh spread racism a few years ago, a concerted effort was made by a large number of liberals to get his advertisers to give him the heeve ho, without much of the success that one group has had getting advertisers to drop Glenn Beck due to his racist remarks. Hat tip @crewislife at Twitter.com

Can You Get a Six Figure Job from the Unemployment Line?

10-25-09 12:27 A GMT-08
I think it would take many years of training and experience. Who's going to hire someone to totally screw Americans unless they know that person is without scuples or compassion. Still Pett's cartoon makes a good point.

"Swine" Flu Declared a National Emergency

10-24-09 9:22 P GMT-08
Order will allow hospitals to place separate H1N1 emergency rooms further from main hospitals. Too bad our government (including Congress) can't fight the oligarchy created by campaign donations from the wealthy as quickly and effectively.

New Book Coming Out in November on Sarah Palin "Going Rouge"

10-22-09 7:17 A GMT-08
No, actually I spelled that correctly. A book about Sarah Palin will be out the same day as her book. The only thing that scares me about the former governor is that we laughed so hard at Ronald Reagan until one day we woke up and he was the president-elect. Hat tip shadowfax_rulz at twittercom

Sci American Podcast: Racist Jokes Are Only Funny to People Who Think They're True

10-20-09 5:31 P GMT-08
Scroll down on Sci Am 60 Second Psych page to which I've linked to It's Funny Because It's True" link. If I link straight to the podcast itself it is likely to bring up ITunes or other player. So Rush Limbaugh is only a comedian. Only? Not exactly.

Support Creative Commons with donation or by purchasing Shepard Fairey T Shirt

10-20-09 3:52 P GMT-08
With all his problems Mr. Fairey seems to have given time to design an emblem for a T Shirt for Creative Commons. Click on notice on Creative Commons page. (Linkblog wouldn't accept link to purchase page.)

BadTux: US Isn't Innovating and Has Done Little Real R&D for 30 Years

10-18-09 5:28 P GMT-08
The only good news is that competing nations aren't inovating either, just developing 30 year old ideas and tweaking current products. (And, of course this isn't really good news.) Read the original. I'm not a tech person myself and probably can't explain even the sunrise as well as BadTux can.

Radio host Tom Joyner's Great Uncles' Murder Convictions Overturned

10-17-09 6:00 A GMT-08
With the help of Henry Gates Jr. (yes, the Harvard professor) radioman Joyner learned that his great uncles were executed for the death of a Civil War Soldier. South Carolina overturned their convictions today, after reexamining the case. Details at link

Why Don't Reporters Ask the GOP When They Are Going to Stop Being Obstructionists?

10-16-09 7:51 P GMT-08
They should ask Republicans when they are going to cooperate so we can get beyond the health care issue (which would help people in New Orleans too) and back to helping this nation recover from the triplet disasters of war, Katrina non recovery, and economic melt down that they and the Bush administration left behind. Liberal Media, My A..

Fox News: Limbaugh Urged to Sue For Defamation Over Losing Place in Team Bidding

10-16-09 6:18 A GMT-08
I guess CNN and MSNBC can then sue him for ten times the defamation jabs Limbaugh often throws their way. But shouldn't the suit be at the man who published the claim in a book? And wasn't the time to claim back when the book was published? Is Limbaugh an idiot who didn't know this was printed in a book?

Democratic Hero, Rep. Alan Grayson Attracts Carpetbagging Republican Opponent

10-16-09 4:59 A GMT-08
I guess the GOP believes there are a lot of Central Floridiians that want to die quickly if they get sick. Nasty bugger Armando Guttierez Jr. is moving from South Florida, says all the property he owns around Lakeland gives him local creds. Isn't that the Republican't way. You are what you own.

AP: Limbaugh dropped from group seeking to buy Rams

10-15-09 1:20 A GMT-08
Ha Ha! Now "The Ego" really has landed!!

"Bash America" becoming the brand of the GOP?

10-13-09 6:28 P GMT-08
Lady ends asking if this is the same thing Democrats did to Bush. Not really because Obama hasn't started any illegal wars lately. There is a difference.

Dylan Ratigan: The Cost of Corporate Communism

10-11-09 4:33 P GMT-08
My synopsis: In the end we have a relatively small group of Americans controlling the government which in turn favors them right back. Industries grow old and inefficient, but are retained because of the largess of the government they control. But in this case, the power emanates from corporations who then use the government as their own piggy bank. Pls read for yourself and see if I'm right.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Overrated Optimism: The Peril of Positive Thinking

10-11-09 4:14 P GMT-08
It turns out that positive thinking is a type of arrogance and foolishness which requires ignorance of reality.

Rush Limbaugh Agrees with Taliban, Iran

10-11-09 6:53 A GMT-08
Also, we heard recently that Limbaugh had lost 90 lbs. Looks like he's found it.

France floats law requiring Photoshopped images carry a warning

10-10-09 9:45 P GMT-08
Good. If they don't ban it, they should carry a warning. The Ralph Lauren ad that got attention recently should have had one that warned about making one want to burn one's eyes out.

Apple, others Drop Out of Chamer of Commerce

10-10-09 9:41 P GMT-08
Finally the CoC steps even on the toes of big comapnies that were for it protecting their rights to profits, and efforts to block unions before they realized what a nut house it was over cliimate change. CoC response illustrates their r/w nuttiness.

Why Have Mainstream Media Neglected the Recession's Human Costs?

10-10-09 9:25 P GMT-08
One word Ms. Vanden Heuvel: Oligarchy You do show how the media tends to promote the needs and problems of the wealthy and business. Kudos

The Real Model Photoshopped by the Ralph Lauren Folk

10-09-09 4:41 P GMT-08
Word in comments at Boing Boing says the Ralph Lauren people stretched her body when she gained a few pounds leading manipulators to stretch her body to lose them. But they must have gone much further. I've seen women who look like the photoshop, but they are often very ill. The real model is beautiful even in a pound adding photo. See at link.

The Above Linkblogs Might Contain "Borrowed" links.

Linkblogs do not substantially contribute traffic to my blog that I can discover. They all go offsite, and are often accessed from my blog. It's possible to access them from the RSS according to my settings. Still, even if I were to get ads clicking on a linkblog from the RSS won't drive more people to my blog than otherwise because they leave my resources. (Note to self, do more posts, less LBs with sources I find). I explain because I sometimes borrow links from people at Twitter, and often forget who put them up. (To fellow Twitterers: If you have a link to your blog, I will point it there, but Twitter, being impermanent, cannot hold your link for people to discover from there. I only 'borrow' them to get news out to as many people as I can who might not have seen the reports and videos found by the smart people I follow at Twitter or find in search rooms.

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Bush Administration CIA Decided on Torture Techniques w/o Understanding Origin Possibly Due To Pressure by CIA For Rapid Approval. Obama Says May Prosecute Officials in Who Promoted Torture

posted 04-22-09

The interrogation methods used in the military SERES program were adapted into the Bush administration's harsh program because none of the leaders deciding on it bothered to find out where the techniques in the program had come from.  (They were adaptions of the tortures that North Korean and Chinese used on American troops) according to New York Times report " ", a report that sounds a little too pat, and depends on people believing that those in the Bush administration Americans are stupid, lazy, and uncaring.

I'm not complaining that this sweeps up supposed Clinton nominee CIA chief George Tenet since Tenet was a name worked out through careful negotiations with the Republican who controlled Congress in the mid to late 90s.  Tenet was the Congress's choice, an acceptable nominee to replace Anthony Lake who was the man former president Clinton wanted for the job (according to Richard A. Clark "Against all Enemies, IIRC)(and the CIA chief was still smarter than most of the Bush administration).

But, as revealed by Ron Suskind last year, the tactics were considered torture when communists used them.  (While promoting his book "The Way of the World" Suskind revealed the origins of the techniques leaving mainstream to run around trying to refute or verify the facts.)

Excerpt above linked report:

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

 

But the claims of a failure to investigate the background of the torture techniques would be more believable if the CIA  was in a rush to use them, and apparently that was the case according to a Washington Post piece "

Excerpt:

Previously secret memos and interviews show CIA and Pentagon officials exploring ways to break Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees in early 2002, up to eight months before Justice Department lawyers approved the use of waterboarding and nine other harsh methods, investigators found.

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The findings are contained in a Senate Armed Services Committee report scheduled for release today that also documents multiple warnings -- from legal and trained interrogation experts -- that the techniques could backfire and might violate U.S. and international law.

One Army lieutenant colonel who reviewed the program warned in 2002 that coercion "usually decreases the reliability of the information because the person will say whatever he believes will stop the pain," according to the Senate report. A second official, briefed on plans to use aggressive techniques on detainees, was quoted the same year as asking: "Wouldn't that be illegal?"

Once they were accepted, the methods became the basis for harsh interrogations not only in CIA secret prisons, but also in Defense Department internment camps at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan and Iraq, the report said.

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the committee, said the new findings show a direct link between the early policy decisions and the highly publicized abuses of detainees at prisons such as Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

And the Post and among others are reporting that the Obama administration holds open the possibility that Bush administration officials will be prosecuted for the harsh interrogation techniques they promoted.

Ha ha.  Looking around I see has a hard time swallowing the NY Times pablum about Bushies forgetting to look into the background of their little interrogation techniques like I did.   And yeah, the Post says CIA wanted to rush, but the Bushies took 8 months to get the plans to them.

What were they doing?  Praying?  Checking the cupboards in the WH to see if there was any hidden gold? Maybe Cheney was looking into his bank account every hour or something to see if he could will it to rise, like a political David Blane.

This could be the politcal equivalent of dark matter.  WTF, did the Bush administration spend their time doing that kept them from having enough time to effect due diligence before making decisions?

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