Indeed, like Rove, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) was apparently unwilling to be seen as endorsing such "funny" sounding priorities as flu "preparedness" in an economic recovery package. Perhaps in an attempt to prove her fiscal conservative bona fides, Collins repeatedly insisted that Obey's pandemic preparedness funding did not belong in the bill:Whoops! It turns out that chortling at stuff that sounds funny, using it as a basis for governing, listening to Karl Rove, and randomly hacking things out of the stimulus package all didn't seem like such smart things to do in hindsight. And the logic seemed so airtight too. Apparently Collins' "it sounds funny, cut it" is a better argument than David Obey's (who put the provision in) "a pandemic hitting in the midst of an economic downturn could turn a recession into something far worse" argument. And why not, they're both rational arguments made by serious people. Well, one is.COLLINS: There's funding to help improve our preparedness for a pandemic flu. There is funding to help improve cyber security. What does that have to do with an economic stimulus package? [CNN, 1/31/09]After the funding was stripped, another moderate Republican attempting to appear tough on "unnecessary" spending in the recovery package, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), endorsed Collins' crusade against the pandemic preparedness funding
COLLINS: I think everybody in the room is concerned about a pandemic flu. But does it belong in this bill? Should we have $870 million in this bill? No. We should not. [MSNBC, 2/5/09]
Circulation at the nation's newspapers continues to fall.Good news. As long as you're a national paper that largely covers one sector of the country (say business/economy) and that sector goes into complete meltdown, then there will be increased interest in your reporting and your circulation numbers will go up.........0.61%. It also helps if you start to move from "right wing" into "crazy right wing" territory. Otherwise your paper drops like a stone as people decide they like reading your newspapers online for free. Maybe another round of price increases, firings of senior reporters, and sending a severed donkey head with a note that say "Thanks" to the guy who created Craigslist will make things all better. Better get that Plan B thing figured out pretty soon, I think things are starting to look dire.
The Audit Bureau of Circulations said Monday that average daily circulation declined 7.1 percent in the October-March period from the same six-month span in 2007-2008.
That was faster than the 4.6 percent fall recorded in the April-September period of 2008.
Sunday circulation fell 5.4 percent in the latest period.
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Newspaper sales have been declining since the early 1990s, but the drop has accelerated in recent years. Circulation revenue has largely held up, though, because of price increases.
An end-of-year college block party spiraled out of control as police fired pellets and used pepper spray to break up hundreds of rioting students who sparked a string of street fires at Kent State University.Wait, I get it: those history buffs at Kent State decided to get a week head start on their planned reenactment of the 1970 shooting. Taking the place of student activists with a cause were student alcoholics with a desire to burn stuff. The burning furniture and street party stood in as metaphors or the burning rage protesters felt over Viet Nam/Cambodia and the two American political parties the protesters felt had betrayed them. The police stood in for the National Guard. In the vein of "improving on the original": rubber bullets stood in for real ones. Those parties involved say it was a tremendous change that allowed them to attain some of the accuracy without so much of that bloodshed and body count.
Video posted on the Internet shows students hurling furniture and street signs into the flames on Saturday night as a SWAT team in riot gear converged on the crowd. Kent police said the party grew violent after one reveler was arrested and students began pelting officers with bottles, bricks and rocks.
It was the first violent clash between Kent State students and police in years. In 1970, four Kent State students were killed by Ohio National Guard troops during a campus protest of the invasion of Cambodia.
Governments are racing to find and contain pockets of swine flu around the globe, seeking to stem both the threat of a pandemic and public panic.It's not a pandemic....yet. Everyone says not to panic.....yet. But the signs are there. We've declared a public health emergency, the WHO is talking about "pandemic potential", and Europeans are being urged to avoid North America lest they get caught up in an EU backed mission to wall up the continent and burn everything inside. It's already spread to NYC, Texas, Canada, and California, and by the end of summer the remnants of society will be collecting in Boulder or Las Vegas to wage apocalyptic battle against one another.
"We're preparing in an environment where we really don't know ultimately what the size or seriousness of this outbreak is going to be," U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Sunday.
In Mexico, the outbreak's epicenter, soldiers handed out 6 million face masks to help stop the spread of the novel virus that is suspected in up to 103 deaths.
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There is not a global pandemic yet, but waiting until scientists know if the new virus is going to spread rapidly and easily would be too late.
Among the many performances at the Coachella music festival, there was one act more disturbing and brutal than the rest. As hundreds of music fans looked on, three police officers beat down and repeatedly tasered a Naked Wizard who apparently wasn’t eager to throw a robe over his magic wand.Click the link, there's video.
Enjoy the rest HERE. And then go the fuck outside. It's gorgeous.
O'DONNELL: Well Liz, we'll get to that argument in a minute, about whether the means justify the ends, whether torture justifies itself...As we see the Cheney genes fully kick in, we get to see her move from basic lying to baldfaced lying, replete with invented "facts" to bolster her lies. SERE training (which stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Evasion. Apparently they couldn't come up with a different second E.) is quite different than the torture that her old man got pushed through. It's so different that even the Bush Justice Department was kind enough to point that out....in their own torture memos. The CIA was kind enough to make the distinction as well.
CHENEY: Well, it wasn't torture, so that's not the right way to lay out the argument.
O'DONNELL: Ok.
CHENEY: Everything that was done in this program, as has been laid out and described before, are tactics that our own people go through in SERE training.
Later in the interview, Cheney insisted that "We did not torture our own people. These techniques are not torture."
Layoffs in the city have spread from the piggy traders on Wall Street to the animals at the Bronx Zoo.One question: How high can the maintenance costs be on a blesbok? Actually, second question: What the fuck is a blesbok?
The institution is closing four exhibits and shipping hundreds of creatures to zoos and aquariums around the country, officials told the City Council Cultural Affairs Committee yesterday. Deer, bats, porcupines, foxes, lemurs, caimans and antelopes will be pink-slipped as part of the 114-year-old zoo's effort to cope with a $15 million budget shortfall.
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The Bronx Zoo -- the country's largest urban zoo, which 2.1 million people visited last year alone -- is shutting its World of Darkness, Rare Animal Range and exhibits of the Arabian oryx and blesbok, two types of antelope.
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The shuttered displays were chosen based on maintenance costs and popularity among visitors, zoo officials said.
The real tragedy here is that this was all so easily preventable. Take heed, Lawrence. The next time you're headed into a meeting room crammed with media, take thirty seconds and swing by Rahm Emanuel's office. Find something that looks like THIS. It's full of pure cocaine. You'll get a lot of work done that day, I promise. And more over, you won't make an utter ass of yourself in front of a badly broken country during a meeting whose express written purpose is to help un-break said country.GRODIN: We can waterboard you?Waterboarding Hannity....for charity. For the troops. Do it on pay-per-view and the DailyKos commenters alone will fund two new Walter Reed hospitals.
HANNITY: Sure.
GRODIN: Are you busy on Sunday?
HANNITY: I'll do it for charity. ... I'll let you do it. I'll do it for the troops' families.
Iraqi forces said today that they had arrested one of the most wanted al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq, even as his suicide bombers killed more than 70 people in attacks in and around Baghdad.See, not another meaningless #2, a real #1 this time. Obama is producing results. Though as a precaution it should be noted that they have announced his capture or killing numerous times in the past and some agencies even doubt his existence. Surely the alleged capture of one of the leaders of a small faction of terrorists that groups in unconnected cells and were only a small part of the insurgency, will make things all right. I mean make things even closer to the paradise that Iraq already is after the surge fixed everything.
Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, a leader of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq, was held in the capital after a tip-off, said Major General Qasim Atta, Baghdad’s security spokesman.
The Islamic State of Iraq is a shadowy, al-Qaeda-linked, Islamist umbrella group that in 2006 declared an independent caliphate in mainly Sunni West Baghdad, as well as in areas to the north and west. Modeled on the Taliban in Afghanistan, it murdered and intimidated anyone who did not adhere to its strict Islamist rulings.
MUSSER: The bottom line is he's a guy that I watched up close in action and I have great respect for his judgment and wisdom in this regard. And having seen the face of terror, you know I've walked through Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay when I was serving in the government, and it changes your nature of the threat to look at the people an the other sides of those fences. And the bottom line isAnd there we see the sort of intelligence level of the torture debate. On one side people arguing law, morality, and humanity.......on the other side people arguing wishes, fear, feelings, and looking at people and knowing they're guilty.
--NORAH O'DONNELL: So just by looking at them, Phil, you can tell they were guilty?
MUSSER: You know, I could tell, I could tell that basically that they --
NORAH O'DONNELL: And that they deserved waterboarding?
MUSSER: Norah, I'm not making any particular allegations against individual people, but what I'm saying is that the nature of this threat is very, very different and the record of the Bush/Cheney administration post-9/11 is to keep people safe. And I think most Republicans - you ask people in Newton, Iowa, they're probably happy our country is doing everything possible to keep our country safe.
HARMAN: I'm just very disappointed that my country -- I'm an American citizen just like you are -- could have permitted what I think is a gross abuse of power in recent years. I'm one member of Congress who may be caught up in it, but I have a bully pulpit and I can fight back. I'm thinking about others who have no bully pulpit and may not be aware, as I was not, that right now somewhere, someone's listening in on their conversations, and they're innocent Americans.And off in the distance we hear the violent explosion of the world's first machine that measures irony. This woman didn't give two shits when she thought the government was just going to illegally spy on the peasant class, but when she finds out they used it to investigate her shady dealings on behalf of AIPAC: OUTRAGE!!!!!!!! at the betrayal of American values and gross abuse of power that she was totally aware of and supported wholeheartedly.
The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture?Ouch. So in addition to failing Basic Humanity 101, Modern Intelligence Gathering 201, and Advanced Legal Bullshittery, they didn't even pass Torture History 101. At least the high marks in Advance Bald Faced Lying and the Lack of Human Decency lab will bring up that GPA.
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This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they wereapproving with little debate.
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The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.
The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.Ahh, Ahmed Chalabi, how could you have steered us wrong? If you can't trust a man who made his living off of getting government money for telling the US what it wanted to hear about Iraq and funneling funds through his phony "Iraqi National Congress" after he made his living defrauding and failing a bank, who can you trust?
Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.
The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.
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"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."
