Sympathy for the Devil

They are better messengers, even if they are shilling sh!t.

there are times, especially when the nation is under threat, when the law can be flexed a bit
- Joe Klien
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Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
- Ben Franklin

BP cut a deal with Obama that happens to be in BP’s best interest. The 20 billion is being paid in installments carefully designed not to bankrupt the company and guaranteeing that when the court judgments DO start rolling in that the company will remain solvent.

To portray this as anything but a win-win for the Oil company is to simply lie.

Sooner or later, the Republicans are going to have decide whether Obama is a Chicago thug or a spineless egg head that coddles our enemies.

I might add that the problem with the violations of the law that BushCo engaged in which have been occasionally known to defend, is the fact that they occured at a time when Bush had Congress in the palm of his hand. If he wanted to legalize the NSA program, he could have done it easily. The object of the game however wasn’t the spying and the torture, it was the reframing of the Constitution to exempt the Presidency from the law in the first place, a project that Obama is happy to allow to continue.
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Like any line in the sand, once you’ve crossed it, how far past it you proceed is suddenly irrelevant.

We may not deserve it, but what if we have to have it? Just saying.

Whatever these candidates say on the campaign trail means little once they gain office.

Sometimes the choice is between living in a free society or living in a safe one. I’ve always valued my freedom enough that I’m willing to give up some safety in order to have it.
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And I say this having lived in DC during last major terrorist attack, and currently living in ATL, the site of the last major domestic terrorist bombing.

…you forgot “or Marxist Manchurian Muslim from Kenya”.

Paul Dirks is exactly right. Why Wehner calls this deal contra “rule of law” and Klein concedes the point is beyond me.

I posted this in Morning Reads, but better here. Supports Paul Dirks’ point that BP got a good deal.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704895204575320064145090860.html?mod=e2tw

Paul Dirks is correct; this fund is in BP’s interest. Settlement funds such as this are set up all of the time to resolve large number of claims quickly and efficiently. If Obama really wanted to bankrupt BP he would have forced them to litigate all of the thousands of claims. The attorney fees would have eaten them alive.

Thanks, Ivy.

He sees a violation of the rule of law in the President’s successful efforts to get BP to establish a $20 billion escrow fund, in which courts should decide BP’s financial punishment

That is almost unbelievably stupid. The rule of law is not violated when people reach out of court legal agreements. BP undoubtedly estimated the business costs of further angering the government and the American public, and decided that the deal was in its best interests. Upholding the rule of law does not require prohibiting businesses from crafting legal agreements that reflect business realities. Ironically, Wehner’s kind of thinking is almost totalitarian in its implicit assumption that the state (i.e. the courts) must decide everything.
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In addition, BP’s legal team may have been concerned that the courts would award harsher damages.

If BP had had the good sense to volunteer to put up the $20 billion about a month ago, then they could have just considered it a marketing/PR expense. Instead, they most likely thought that extended litigation about claims would work to their advantage. (I doubt that such litigation is going to be considered newsworthy a year or two down the road.) Even as it is, the $20B will be considered a tax deductible business expense.

BTW, would all the people who are complaining about the off shore drilling moratorium at least concede that the leases should renegotiated? Not just for safety, something that should be painfully obvious by now. But to the best of my knowledge, the companies that drill in the Gulf are not required to sell the oil in America. If the supposed rationale is energy independence, why are oil companies allowed to sell gulf oil on the open market? (If I’m wrong about this I’d be glad to be corrected.)

Due process has not been sidestepped. This time, though, the horse is pulling the cart:
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Just like any citizen has the right to sue separately outside class action suits, BP retains the right to argue that since “due process” was sidestepped, they would try to sue each and every recipient to give their money back.

“Torture is okay, when the Cheney-Bush Administration does it”

If this statement is not accurate, where are the prosecutions?

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/the-ceremony-of-innocence/

Some right wingers seem to confuse rule of law, which remains intact and not in the least diminished, with the President’s bully pulpit and need for persuasion, not to mention BP’s making a rational business decision. It’s not as if he used illegal military or other armed force as the right wingers themselves are wont to do.

If the supposed rationale is energy independence, why are oil companies allowed to sell gulf oil on the open market?
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Anyone want to try to answer that?
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Liberals?
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Democrats?
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Conservatives?
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Republicans?
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Anybody?

When did Time subcontract to the DNC? Joe doesn’t even try to be balanced. If Bush was so loose on regulations why did this happen 16 months into Obama’s term. If Bush violated the law on torture why no charges? The delaying of reading mranda rights in certain serious cases isn’t flexing the law. It is entirely legal This is pure liberal porn. Joe isn’t a journalist he’s an advocate. And not n especially good one.

There is a reason the world is passing Time by. Despite all of their nonstop clearleading Obama is underwater in all of the polls and most of his issues well underwater.

If the world were passing Time by, you would be very lonely here, but you’re not. Now please expand your analysis of slanted media and enlighten us with your view of Fox news, please.

Conservatives are not confused on the rule of law. What BP did was entirely legal. As you say Obama can use the bully pulpit to ‘presuade’ others to bend to his will. While there are lines not to be crossed the real question here is if it was smart. Obama has made a great case for being anti-business, especially anti-big business. He’s efforts to demonize BP might be good political populism but questionable economics. Every CEO in the world will know to protect their wallets in his vicinity. In a country desperate for private sector jobs that can’t be smart.

Please note that my term for the obstructionists I refer to is right wingers. I don’t consider them to be, nor do I label them, by the more respectable term, conservatives.

If Bush was so loose on regulations why did this happen 16 months into Obama’s term.
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For the same reason that 9-11 was Bill Clinton’s fault.
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Actually failing to address the rot at MMS does constutute a failure on Obama’s watch. But the strategy of allowing Corporations to police themselves is a disaster no matter who’s advocating it. It’s the policy – not the people – that matter.
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If Bush violated the law on torture why no charges?
Another fine question. File under prosecutorial discretion. That the law was indeed violated however is not in question.

He’s efforts to demonize BP might be good political populism

There’s no effort necessary. BP’s leak is doing all the necessary demonizing. If other businesses have anything to learn from Obama’s conduct, it’s “please refrain from causing massive environmental disasters!” If that’s ‘protecting their wallets’ then so be it.

Time like most of the MSM has had a rotten decade recently helped out by the struggles of Newsweek as it abandons this segment. Joe himself spent most of the decade opposing Bush with little success and now gets treated with contempt by Obama who has a lot less time for the MSM. Joe now often rails at people like Krauthammer, Wehner, Fox, Hannity, Talk Radio etc., but it’s an exercise in futility. They all have higher ratings and more influence and this is so because they are clearer and more coherent. Thinking waterboarding is torture it doesn’t make it so. It’s a classic example of a MSM pundit reporting opinion as fact. Joe fancies himself a journalist but he writes opinion pieces.

I find swampland interesting for the same reason as Andrew Sullivan and the Huffington Post. It’s funny to see what the liberals are thinking. Clearly they have not been successful for Obama. Virtually every poll shows him underwater and his issues well underwater. They are all as liberal as Obama but none are able to put earings on this pig. We’re going to see a problem when the Bush tax cuts roll off because congress can’t possibly allow that to happen. Think about his. Obama isn’t rolling back Reagan. He’s trying to roll back GWB to get tax policy back to Clinton levels. This is the best you can do and all you have to show for it is another election cycle that might be worse than 1994?

Um, because nobody has a spine?
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Everyone takes some campaign $ from them?
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It’s hard work???

“pure liberal porn”
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‘Guess we’re all gonna have our computers seized now.

“…People like Krauthammer, Wehner, Fox, Hannity, Talk Radio etc…all have higher ratings and more influence…because they are simple-minded and richer than 98% of us.”
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Fixed it for you.

There was no law violated. Moreover Obama has done nothing to make it a violation of the law. He issued an executive order to end a practice that was ended 4 years ago. He intentionally did not pass legislation. Obama has in fact kept EVERY one of GWBs national security policies and enhanced several. It’s one of the great ironies of politics. Because Obama is a man of the left the left is loathe to oppose him on this thus weakening him on other issues. Thus the policies become defacto law. He just won a major victory ensuring prisoners at Baghram can be kept without trial until they die of old age. He used the same arguments Bush used for Gitmo. We all know his drone wolfpacks are mere assassination squads. The left knows this has to be illegal but does nothing. Their concern over the slaughter of innocents depends on how is doing the slaughtering. If it’s a democrat it’s OK.

(1) “torture” means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;
(2) “severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from—
A: the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;
B: the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;
C:the threat of imminent death; or
D: the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality; and
(3) “United States” means the several States of the United States, the District of Columbia, and the commonwealths, territories, and possessions of the United States.

much richer, forget 98%, more like 99.8%. How much do you think it pissed off Joe and the folks in the MSM Limbaugh had the financial wherewithall to be an NFL owner?

You and Joe s/b so simple-minded. Limbaugh gets more listeners than CBS, NBC and ABC combined. Isn’t Capitalism all that?

It’s funny how Bill Clinton and his team of merry liberal were determined to start their own talk radio network and got together with soros and the rest of the useful idiots to bankroll it. Limbaugh laugh at them starting his mocking one day one predicting they’d fail. He said you were too dumb. I don’t know if that’s what happened but fail you did.

Hate to break it to you, but Rush-ian never became an NFL owner. He never will be as long as he spouts off.

You are kidding right? GWB and the CIA requested and received clarification from one of the great legal minds of this generation, John Yoo. Waterboarding is not torture. He’s never been challenged in court. Libs tried some stupid witchhunt but he used his notoriety to write a book and make millions. Perhaps you saw him on Jon Stewart?

Look, from an intellectual perspective you got your heads handed to yourselfs on this. Obama has maintained or strengthened EVERY SINGLE Bush policy on national security. Warrantless wiretaps? Oh yeah, we can do it. Rendition, Oh yeah! Use Baghram the way Bush designed gitmo? Absolutely, Obama even went to the Supremes and got their blessing. Reverse the Bush policy and try KSM in NYC? I don’t think so! Close gitmo? I don’t think so!!

My own favorite are drone wolfpacks. This is so cool because so few know about it and he’s doing it ALL THE TIME. Joe Klein isn’t covering it because he prefer to keep it secret. Just flash forward to the time when these drones are ever more powerful. Our guys are well out of harmsway but they can deliver a warhead to anyone’s pillow. It makes war so much safer for us and more punishing to them.

BTW: for supporters of Israel our investment in counter-insurgency has been a gift from God. Our toys make us (and Israel) far more lethal as we’re also safer. We’ve picked up the investment every year and Obama hasn’t changed it.

“You and Joe s/b so simple-minded. Limbaugh gets more listeners than CBS, NBC and ABC combined. Isn’t Capitalism all that?”
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Well, that’s an astounding claim! Let’s take a look at the numbers:
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NBC Nightly News 7,530,000
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ABC Nightly News 6,930,000
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CBS Nightly News 5,440,000
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Rush Limbaugh’s estimated average: 3.59 million listeners.
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You’re either ignorant or a liar. Either way, you’re wrong.

You are kidding right?
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I simply posted the law verbatim and your response is “you’re kidding?”
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I guess that says it all.

Paul, it’s basic common sense not to cause environmental disasters. They cost a fortune. It’s no accident BP was the one to suffer this disaster. Exxon has a much better safety record for a reason. I don’t care about BP anymore than you. Actually I’m rather enjoying Obama’s floundering.

Think about this. His entire political philosophy is big govt and he needs govt to operate efficiently and effectively in order to sell that concept. Psst, I don’t think this is helping. Regarding Joes attempt to parrot Obama’s whinning “this is all Bush’s fault,” note the sensitivity to the term ‘wuss’. Joe doesn’t get this any more than he gets elitist. Obama come off as a wuss often and for various reasons. One sure sign of a wuss is whining and Obama is a chronic complainer. One sure sign of an elitist is Joe thinking that because Obama might order other men into harms way Obama gets the credit for having the balls. That’s not how it works. It’s the guys wearing the uniform and only they.

rdw has mistaken his peers’ audience size for the size of his, uh, “member”…

Ok Paul, I’ll play the stupid game. where does the law specifiy waterboarding is illegal. and then after you render your opinion of why you think it’s illegal tell me why so many lawyers don’t agree with your keen legal opinion. And then perhaps you can explain why the liberals in congress clearly agree it wasn’t illegal because they didn’t attempt to press charges. Maybe after that you can explain why the great and good Obama didn’t pass a law thru Congress making it unambigiously illegal once and for all?

It’s pretty straightforward.
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Simulated drowning IS a threat of imminient death.
You needn’t be a legal scholar to figure out what the plain language of the law says.
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The fact that the CIA is being given political cover by the administration and Congress is unsurprising but that doesn’t change the simple language of the statute.
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By the way Jack Goldsmith is also a pretty astute Conservative legal mind as well and he happens to know that John Yoo is a hack, even if you’re not particularly interested in admitting it.

Limbaugh hasn’t had an audience that small since 1990. He just signed a $400M contract you moron. He also makes more than the three anchors combined.

The man is a genius. He not only mocked Bill Clinton for starting his liberal network he mocked Obama for going after him personally. This is how clueless liberals are regarding commerce. All news is good news for Limbaugh. For him and most of the new media their shows are up 20% since Obama has been elected. I think Oreilly now beats Olbermann 4 to 1. Beck gets more at the dead hour of 5PM than MsNBC for their entire prime time lineup.

You probably don’t know this but Limbaugh and the others don’t work for their stations or any network. They work for themselves. They get their own advertisers. Want to arrange a boycott of Rush because he offended you. Go ahead airhead. He handpicks his advertisers. His audience is the one they want to address.

What might be more amazing is others like Hannity and Beck also enjoy very large audiences over 10M and there are dozens of others well over Time’s reach. I don’t listen to much and not to hannity or beck at all. I like medved a bit, bennett and dennis millar is great.

So rdw56, is that how big your “member” is?
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Other than that, who the hell cares about audience size.
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Maybe it might be better for you to actually defend the things these loons say rather than point at how big their *** are…

Waterboarding is not simulated death and it is not torture. If it was we would not do it to our own troops as a matter of routine training.

You got no case pal. You are pathetic. Obama did NOTHING to make it illegal. He issued an executive order which he knows, and you know, can be rescinded with the slip of a pen and we might not even know it. Obama didn’t make it illegal because he didn’t want to. The Congress didn’t make it illegal because they didn’t want to.

BTW: WTF is your guy doing on KSM? NO sane person wants that scumbag to set foot in the USA and he wants to try him in NYC? Yeah, it’ll only cost $200M. We’ve got so much spare cash sitting around. Your messiah stepped in it on that one. How’s that new prison in Illinois coming?

You don’t have to break anything to anyone. Just take a little longer and try to comprehend what you read. I didn’t say he became an owner. I said he has the finanicals to become one. He’s not going to change a thing to become an owner. He loves football and is a frequent guest in the booth whenever the steelers play monday or sunday nights. When asked recently to be a part-owner he warned the group not to bother unless they ran it by the commissioner 1st and were prepared for the media backlash. They said they were. He agreed. They weren’t prepared. He backed out without hard feelings. He’s stunned himself he’s in that position.

RDW, It’s fairly obvious that you’ve drunk a fair amount of Rush-flavored Kool-aid. Here do some research yourself: http://articles.latimes.com/2009/mar/09/entertainment/et-limbaugh9
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Oh and Glenn Beck’s Fox audience has dropped below 2 million average viewers per airing.
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For some perspective on that, Betty White’s new sitcom on the TV Land network pulled 4.75 million viewers.
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Let me repeat. Betty White more than doubled Glenn Beck’s Fox audience with a sitcom on TV Land.

“who the hell cares about audience size”

Joe cares as well as the editors and for damn sure the owners. Audience size is influence you twit.

Consider the perky one. At 5.4M that’s up from her summer audience of 4.9M. At the rate she’s going this summer she’ll be lucky it’s 4.5M. Oreilly is starting to get over 4M periodically for his 1st show and gets over 1M consistently for his 2nd. Couric was warned almost a year ago there won’t be another $15M contract. By the time it comes up for renegotiation Oreilly will have a bigger audience on cable. This is a major loss for the DNC.

Look at what’s happened to Newsweek. Those liberal loons are running it into the gound.

“great legal minds of this generation, John Yoo.”
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Wait…what?

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/mar/09/entertainment/et-limbaugh9

Why are you using numbers from a year and a half ago?

Why are you comparing Beck with a pure comedy show?

The relevent comparison is to the direct competition, i.e., cable news. That’s CNN and McNBC or in the case of evening newscasts add ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS.

The most important look isn’t 2010 but 2010 versus 2006 or 2002 or 1992. It’s the waning influence of the MSM. We’d all think Obama is doing a swell job it it was 1980 and 3 networks.

“Oreilly is starting to get over 4M periodically for his 1st show and gets over 1M consistently for his 2nd.”
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That would be a lie.
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He didn’t even break 3 million last Thursday.
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http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/ratings/the_scoreboard_thursday_june_17_165171.asp

John Yoo is terrific. You had to see him on Jon Stewart. Book sold well too and he’s got a nice think tank position. Libs tried to make his life miserable. He cried all the way to the bank.

IN fact, his level of genius really doesn’t matter. We can talk until the cows come home abot John and not resolve anything. What is important is what Obama did to end waterboarding.

N O T H I N G!

And Congress?

N O T H I N G!

“Why are you comparing Beck with a pure comedy show?”
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I think the answer to that is obvious.

Well, that’s one answer.
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Thank you.

Dadgum, Joe, you sure are hard on pore l’il ole Michelle Malkin; why, you sound like you maybe don’t like her.

(That’s okay; if I ever meet you, we’ll talk about her, and likely agree. )

m0mentom0ri, I like Klein’s writing, but I’ve got to go with you on this one. (Sorry, Mr. Klein.)

It probably cannot be done within the current legal framework, either.

Oops. I meant Michelle BACHMAN. 3:00 A.M. came early. Or late. Whatever. (I’m in Asia.)

Well, rdw, I might point out that what they say is more important.
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But, have it your way.
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Sarah Palin is beautiful*. Keep flogging that meat…
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*In the eyes of the beholder. To me, she looks like a strung out crackhead with a ton of makup. Yech.

I’ve been told by friends in the oil industry — though not in the Gulf of Mexico and not BP employees — that indeed they can sell wherever they want. (The people I know are field personnel, such as drillers, mud engineers, etc., not office types.) As for me, I don’t know jack about it other than what I read and hear.

“[Miss Prissy] looks like a strung out crackhead with a ton of mak[e]up”
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Or, if you’re a Looney Tunes aficionado, she looks like MISS PRISSY.
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“YEE-essssssss.”

I suspect Joe despises Beck even above Limbaugh. I don’t listen to either his radio or TV show although I see enough clips to know what he’s about and he’s more influencial than Joe. Glen for example single handedly returned Jonah Goldberg’s book, liberal fascism, to the very top of the NYTs best seller lists.

The theme of the book is that fascism is a religion of the left and always has been. It’s a rather easy concept today since all of the isms except conservastism are big government systems. Conservstism stands alone as a small govt system based on classic liberal concepts developed long ago by such notable thinkers such as David Hume and others. Modern liberalism belong to the same totalitarian school as socialism, communism, marxism and nazism.

The other interesting theme Goldberg hit on was the nasty racsm of President Wilson and the progressives of that era. It’s someone how out textbooks have sanitized most of his Presidency. As it happens it’s become common knowledge Wilson was a nasty racist and thsu much harder in this PC times to praise him. It’s much like Che. Still an Icon in Europe and much of the ignorant world once you learn he was a serial killer and how many assassinations and executions without hearing he personally carried out you realize Che was a total scumbag.

The reason Goldbergs book received new life, it has been on top of the NYTs best seller list months before, is Becks reach.

Think about this. Never in one million years would Joe Klein tell anyone Wilson was an open racist. But Joe knows between Radio and TV Beck has explained the facts to 15M. Makes it impossible to fein ignorance when it comes up and of course political correctness means he can’t even tout the virtues of Wilson. Ditto for the common sense placement of Fascism on the left.

MM @ 14.13: It’s so obvious the bird just flew into the plate glass window.

Sarah Palin is a very attractive woman. She’s also quite wealthy.

@ 16.7: Waterboarding’s still going on??? Must’ve missed that one. OH, you mean was anyone prosecuted?? That doesn’t mean the perpetrators and their bosses are innocent.

I disagree:
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She’s a sleazy dominatrix crackhead slut, and has no loyalty to either job or duty, who will dive at the slightest hint of greater opportunity.
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Her icon of worship is Sarah Palin.

@14.16: Makes her a richer quitter. Doesn’t make her smart.

Of course, one thing that Beck didn’t mention, and won’t, for obvious reasons is that the “progressives” of Wilson’s time evolved into those who opposed the Civil Rights Act, and later, fled to the GOP to build up their base under the Libertarian umbrella in the ’70s and ’80s.
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Nasty bit of unwanted history, but I’m sure that the TSB will make sure no one hears of it…

Bush ended waterboarding after using it successfully 3x’s. That’s probably why it’s remained popular. It was tightly controlled. A majority of Americans support it. He ended it long before Obama came into office.

The reason no one as prosecuted is because it would have been horrible PR. It was never considered except on the freak left. There’s no legal basis for a prosecution and the politics were bad. The more obvious fact the cry was pure theatre was the fact Congress never attempted to make it illegal.

I don’t know if Yoo is a hack or not but they used him for their own politcal purposes and he used them. He wrote a best selling book and is working at a think tank. Waterboarding was never anything more than base politics at a minor level. It was never an influencial topic for the left. Bush was reelected quite easily and not one single law or practice was changed as a result. A majority of Americans support watergoarding to this day.

It’s odd Klein even brings it up. He pretends to be an open minded centrist. His stuff reads like dribble from the DNC. He gets the Time readership and his pals are pretty far left and for some reason thinks he needs to say he’s a centrist. Time is pretty far from the center.

“Horrible PR is more important than the truth??? Go to your room for that one!

It was ended because the legal opinions that presumed to argue that it didn’t violate
TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 113C
CHAPTER 113C—TORTURE were withdrawn by John Yoo’s new boss because they were unsupportable deformations of logic.

There’s no need to write any new legislation concerning the practice because it’s still illegal under current law.

” after PR

Sarah has made about $15M since resigning as governor and hasn’t been breaking a sweat. You’ve got to be savvy to do that. She’s also made herself into a kingmaker within the GOP and to wield influence among the tea party set and much of the Reagan fans. She just handled a snafu with the writerJoe McGinnis brilliantly portraying him as a child molestor and vastly outsmarter David Letterman last year when that sleezebag told a weak joke about her 9-yr old daught having sex with arod during the 7th inning stretch. It wasn’t funny and it could not have been lower class, and from that dirtbag of all people. But he has been on TV for 30 years and you’d think he owns the medium. They had a week long staring contest with her essentially callig him a piece of garbage and him doing the typical liberal male wuzz act pretending he was misunderstood before he realized even his friends in the media couldn’t help and he bent to her will. He gave to total, real apology admitting he was a piece of garbage.

Not many people can do that.

Obama and Hillary Clinton both fancy themselves progessives. The progressives of the 1917′s were long dead before the civil rights acts of the 60′s. There was no evolution. Todays liberals are yesterdays progressives. Same party. Same people.

doesn’t matter what Yoo’s boss did years after the fact after Bush had aready removed it as an option. We only have 5M lawyers with 5M readily available opinions, all different. The fact is Waterboarding has NOT been made illegal legislatively and it would have been quite easy to do. Nor has Obama ended warrantless wiretaps and rendition. He’s step up Bagram for permenant detention of insurgents without a trial ever andhads approved more assassinations than the last 10 Presidents combined.

“Horrible PR is more important than the truth???”

What what is your explanation for why the democratic Congress didn’t prosecute? If they thought it a war crime then wasn’t it their duty?

It wasn’t bad PR for Bush. He had public support.

rdw56- I find it interesting that you mention the horrible tactics Obama has adapted from the Bush administration, and it is true that he has has often not only continued but enhanced them and used Bush legal arguments in order to defend them, then you call Obama liberal. I think no independent-minded liberal would consider Obama one. Unfortunately, many professed liberals identify with Obama- I feel they believe the media package rather than seek answers for themselves, much the same way that self-identified conservatives feel that Bush or current establishment republicans are conservative- we often accept a portrayal at the expense of reality.
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Many liberals criticize Obama, they have not yet forced their arguments onto corporate media. It will happen, liberals will make it so.
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And for the record, waterboarding is absolutely torture and incapable of achieving anything but inflicting pain and soliciting false confessions.
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According to former chief of staff of the Department of State under Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson, waterboarding “was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida”, used specifically to gain false confessions, and made “legal” by hack Yoo well after the admin had already authorized its use and it had been employed (link).
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Shame on Bush, shame on Obama.

Per waterboarding used “successfully”. If you mean used to propagandize and start the Long War, then yes. If you mean to gain information that would protect US citizens from attack or prosecute terrorists, then no.

Obama is without question liberal. He is in fact far left. This is a man very much the product of his household, the Ivy league and South Chicago. National Security isn’t as partisan an issue as taxes and other govt control type issues and the liberal complaints against Bush were never more than garden variety partisan politics. Contrary to the NYTs and other liberal outlets GWBs wiretaps of foreign calls and decisions on rendition were never held as illegal by a court and have since in fact been approved. Further Clinton used rendition before Bush.

Waterboarding is absolutely not torture and we know this because the Democratic leadership in Congress has absolutely refused to rule it illegal. We waterboard thousands of our own troops as part of their training each year.

The fact is a majority of American have consistently supported waterboarding with the most recent poll on Abdulmutullah shopwing 58% support waterboarding and 71% military interrogation. That’s an almost 2 to 1 ratio supporting waterboarding.

You haven’t just lost the debate you’ve been crushed.

“Many liberals criticize Obama, they have not yet forced their arguments onto corporate media. It will happen, liberals will make it so.”

Liberals have a much harder time with this because they represent a smaller slice of the population. Conservatives outnumber liberals 2 to 1. They lose Obama as President they know a conservative will replace him. The parallels to Carter should terrify you. If not for his gross incompetence Reagan would not have been possible. Right now virtually all polls are signalling a train wreck of an election cycle for democrats this November.

Liberals have been boxed in, especially on National Security. They get their well earned reputation as sissy’s would be toxic if Obama came to be viewed that way. Thus he’s being ‘tough’ in Afghanistan yet it’s clear he has no appetite for it. He’s long decision making process was properly defined as dithering and setting a deadline a stupid, unforced error. That was a concession to his left but exceedingly poorly thought out. Still his critics on the left have been essentially silent with the most egregious compromise on their values the assassinations from drone wolfpacks. It’s an especially aggressive and devastating form of attack so valuable because no American lives are at stake. It’s going to be a favorite tool for decades to come and it was made legal by Barak Obama. By what rationale are liberals in the future going to oppose this policy having already accepted and approved it.

If you mean to gain information that would protect US citizens from attack or prosecute terrorists

I mean using waterboarding used successfully to get KSM to sing like a bird. He did a core dump of useful verifiable information the results of which are classified. It was used on three men and all three started singing. I will actively support the use of waterboarding on ALL terrorists.

pintortwo,

one area where conservatives didn’t play along with Bush was on supreme court justices. Roberts was a great pick and Miers totally unacceptable. She was forced out and replaced with the equally great Alito. By contrast conservatives were furious with the spending under Bush but less aggressive in blocking it. GWB never ran as a small govt guy.

If I were a liberal I’d bee sharply disappointed with Obama’s picks for the court. While Sotomayer and Kagan will be reliably liberal they’ll also be mediocre. This nonsense Kagan’s interpersonal skills will serve to affect votes is garbage. Neither have the smarts, savvy or experience to discuss the law on the level of Scalia or Roberts or Alito or Kennedy or Thomas. Roberts is a brilliant chief justice having mastered in a short time the decision to go for a narrow or broad decisions to get the vote count he wants.

For example he was willing to accept 5-4 on the Heller case in order to declare gun ownership as an individual right for the 1st time in a decisive victory for the NRA. All the more demoralizing for liberals is the suggestion Kennedy seems to have become more solidly conservative. Neither Sotomayer nor Kagan bring the intellectual heft of Breyer or Ginsburg. Clinton and bush did much better jobs. GWB needed more help but came through.

I can’t believe this comparison!

One is where people not arrested under peacetime rules of probable cause are forced into simulated drowning and held in captivity forever without ever seeing a court room and the other was when some very powerful corporate executives has a meeting with the president and decided to voluntarily put up a fair share of the money they are already obligated to pay by law up front.

“Bully Pulpit” indeed is the best explanation of what happened. The administration sat down with BP and discussed having one common problem: the people of the Gulf are in severe economic straits due to an accident BP is 100% liable for.

So, to solve BP’s PR problem, the fund was a brilliant idea. Since it was going to be a government appointed third party, Kenneth Feinberg, BP can say that they are not going to have somebody biased against giving out claims. Since this would satisfy some of the pundits saying the president is not doing enough about the situation, Obama won.

When that very same man, Kenneth Feinberg was appointed by George W Bush to handle the 9/11 victims funds, where the recipients agreed not to sue the airlines, the federal government or the city or state of New York (remember Republican mayor and Republican governor at that time) where was this Republican anger?

Republicans lost a talking point. The were dying for Tony Hayward not to do anything or to do something less productive and have more complaints about Obama to sell the people. Since Obama worked with or, more likely, rubber stamped BP’s PR plan of releasing money they already know that they owe and it sounds very reasonable to people from the Gulf region, Republicans have to find a way to cry foul.

Rule of law?

Since when was it against the law for the president of the United States to ask a company to do something good. Nancy Reagan told us all not to take drugs (I never wanted to try drugs and never did, but, when I saw Nancy preaching down to us on TV, the thought of taking drugs crossed my mind) was Nancy “strong arming” America’s youth? Was Nancy Reagan violating the rule of law? Was the 9/11 fund Kenneth Feinberg also ran a violation of the rule of law? Were people getting “strong armed”?

This is just pathetic!

RDW is just going over the same thing over and over about how much Republican pundits get paid.

Well it cost more to hire a professional actor than it does a reporter. Telling boldfaced lies and not even pretending you’re acting has got to be one of the hardest things to do. I, myself, would never want to be a Rush Limbaugh for a billion dollars a year.

Democrats’ refusal to prosecute waterboarding does not make it legal nor make it not torture. Weak argument on your part.
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Yes we have tortured/waterboarded American soldiers as part of Special Ops training. And the “torturers”- the SERE instructors themselves- call waterboarding torture and say it is a completely ineffective interrogation technique:
- http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/10/waterboarding-is-torture-perio/.
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Public support for waterboarding is simply proof that the media is overwhelmingly what we refer to today as “conservative” -ie corporatists or ideologues with an ulterior agenda. You and your publication are part of this propaganda campaign against US citizens.

He did a core dump of useful verifiable information the results of which are classified

If all the information is classified, how is that you know it was useful and verifiable? Perhaps you should rethink that one.

Waterboarding is absolutely not torture and we know this because the Democratic leadership in Congress has absolutely refused to rule it illegal.

You should really quit while you are behind. Congress can not pass an ex post facto law. They could pass a law making it illegal, but as Paul Dirks has already demonstrated, torture is illegal as currently codified in law. The Justice Dept. could investigate those that ordered and carried out said torture but, inexplicably, they have not.

no one is making a comparison between waterboarding and the $20B slush fund. They are two totally different things.

Waterboarding came up only to mock Joe over his so-called centrism and objectivity. The point is it’s a silly, shallow sham. Joe does what all MSM ‘centrists’ do in confusing opinion for fact. There are dozens of reliable litmus tests to know if one is liberal or conservative or neither. If one thinks waterboarding has been determined to be torture they are almost certainly liberal. Otherwise conservative. Joe states as fact it is torture. Despite ample opportunity and total control of the Congress democrats never attempted to make waterboarding illegal. The use of an executive order is a joke. it can be reversed with the stroke of a pen, secretly, if it already hasn’t been.

This also ties in the the vast sums made by conservative pundits because they have such larger audiences because they are authentic Joe pretends to be a centrist and that pleases morons and insults same people. Thus he has the more limited audience thus his influence is limited.

So Pat, one had nothing to do with the other. As regards the slush fund what Obama did to convince BP this was in their best interests (and in fact it might be for reasons Obama is not aware of) was legal assuming no real threats were made, i.e, IRS harrasment, etc. There are lines which cannot be crossed. But assuming Obama did not cross them, and there’s no evidence he did, his use of the bully pulpit in this regard was smart politics. It was almost certainly smart policy in the short term however it also more clearly paints him as a thug regarding corporations and disincents them from creating jobs in the US. This part is unknowable for now but in this economy giving people a reason to go elsewhere can hurt.

Did BP agree?
So, when there is a mutual agreement between sides – why to call for the law?
The deal is settled, Joe.

You said – You would not live in the country …..?
Then Leave.

“Congress can not pass an ex post facto law”

Of course they can’t. Who suggested they could? Today there is no law ruling waterboarding illegal. There is an executive order prohibiting it that can be reversed at any time and for all we know already has been.

Paul Dirks hasn’t demonstrated a thing. He’s provided another opinion. We’ve got 5 million lawyers and 5 million opinions. Until a court rules on the meaning of the statute it’s meaning is a guess and anyone suggesting otherwise is a moron. This Congres has had plenty of time to pass a very simple one line law making waterboarding illegal and has actively vhosen not to do so.

The fact of the matter is polls show support 2 to 1 in favor of waterboarding. This again makes my point Joe has limited influence. He is certain waterboarding is illegal and immoral and has made the point often. Yet only a few agree with him. His choir. On an intellectual basis, he and the rest of you, have been failures. As on this and so many other skills Obama has been useless as a communicator.

If one thinks waterboarding has been determined to be torture they are almost certainly liberal.
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(from my link @ 22.1)
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As a former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the US Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego, California I know the waterboard personally and intimately. SERE staff were required undergo the waterboard at its fullest. I was no exception. I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people. It has been reported that both the Army and Navy SERE school’s interrogation manuals were used to form the interrogation techniques used by the US army and the CIA for its terror suspects. What was not mentioned in most articles was that SERE was designed to show how an evil totalitarian, enemy would use torture at the slightest whim. If this is the case, then waterboarding is unquestionably being used as torture technique.

What rdw conviniently forgets to mention is that all those millions that go to Rushbo, Bleck and Lady Sarah – they come out of conservative wallets.
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When was the last time a liberal bought over-priced and useless stuff after watching scam ads for survival seed banks and Gold coins?
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If there are enough zombie fools on the liberal side, who buy whatever junk advertised on their masters show, then even Joe Klien would have been a multi-millionaire.

A fool and his money are soon parted.
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That does not mean Rushbo, Bleck, Hannity and Lady Sarah are fools.
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It just means their followers/viewers are..present in their millions.. So more money in the bank for Rushbo/Bleck et al.. Nothing to be proud about.

“It was almost certainly smart policy in the short term however it also more clearly paints him as a thug regarding corporations and disincents them from creating jobs in the US. This part is unknowable for now but in this economy giving people a reason to go elsewhere can hurt.”
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So, with no threats of any kind how could he be a “thug”?
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Second, imagine this:
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rdw is now the new CEO of BP… forget even one company removed, BP itself… and, after paying for everything there are big profits to be made by drilling another well somewhere in US territory.
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Do you:
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A) Show how POed you are at Obama and forget about a potential $50Billion or $60 Billion in profits
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or
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B) Higher, higher and higher until you have enough people to operate that well and forget that you are helping the unemployment numbers of a president who insulted you (maybe).
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If you choose A you are out of business. The “invisible hand”, just as with the spill, the financial crisis, the fact that American car makers couldn’t accept a good design for a car people wanted if you had a loaded gun to their head (while Germans and, $500K/yr Japanese CEOs can do so very, very well) is going to turn into a fist and punch you and your company out.
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Topic two: there are three basic categories of conservatives who, in a multi-party system would have their own separate party:
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Fiscal conservatives such as Bush Sr. (Not very religious not as much of a big military spender as his son).
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Thoecrats: see Mike Huckabee and the Shah of Iran.
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Nationalist: see Oliver North.
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Your water boarding litmus test should be if you are a flag waving jingoist or not. If you are, then if a US soldier gets bruised when being taken captive it is a horrible tragedy. If we water board or connect his personal areas to a car battery of electric shocks, he must deserve it. That is the jingoist. Of course jingoists on the other side will beat the fck out of us and think nothing of it while we start wars with them and beat the fck out of them and think nothing of it and have perpetual, merciless wars taking no quarter.
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Fiscal conservatives and theocrats are mostly against waterboarding within your right wing coalition known as the Republic Party.
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Sorry, you litmus test is weak.

rdw56,
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Thanks for your many great comments.
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They were enlightening, factual and logical.
I don’t see many comments on this very Liberal Blog that meet those criteria.
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Stop back often. This blog could use some intelligent balance.
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Unfortunately when an intelligent non liberal comments here, he usually throws the towel in after a few days realizing the Liberal loons here can not accept rational facts and are incapable of intelligent debate.
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You commented that you do not listen to or watch Glenn Beck. I would offer you a challenge. Go to his website and watch his Monday night show. It was very special and enlightening. If you take this challenge you will truly know what he is about and whether he is worth watching. You will learn some facts that will simply amaze you.
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I offer the same challenge to all you Liberals who post here. Do you have the courage to watch Beck first hand without being led by one of your left wing MSM sources telling you what you should think? Take the challenge if you are opened minded enough.

Patrick,
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You have very little personal business experience. You’ve taken a few business courses and live in the bubble of NYC.
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You giving business advice, as if you knew what you were talking about, is a joke.
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The only thing you know about business is a little theory and what you find on the internet. You than give links from sources that support your views.
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You need both education and lots of experience before you are qualified to give business advice.

You certainly have better solution, right?
then it is just one step left for You – make it happen.

what is a sense in killing be?
you can not eat dead meat

The perky one makes 15M while helping CBS slide even further. Fox is killing CNN and MsNBC. The WSJ is one of the few papers to maintain it’s base and talk radio is booming. It’s called savvy management. Time and all if it’s cousins are losing ground because they are fundamentally dishonest and having lost control it’s impossible to hide. It’s hard to know if Klein is so delusional he really thinks he’s an objective centrist or if he thinks that’s how he has to market himself. But either way it’s insulting to sane people. Times base has shrunk to liberals needing their comfort zone.

As far as fools buying Gold, how stupid are you? Gold just set new highs. The fools are dancing in the street.

pintortwo

This isn’t remotely complicted. How many fingernails did they pull out at training? How many time’s did they hook your genitals up to a battery for some shock treatment? None? Is that because those two things are torture and clearly illegal? While waterboarding is safe and legal?

patrick, you have no clue about business. BP, Exxon, Shell all have a range of options for their next investment and in most cases those at the top of the list are fairly close in profit potential. The USA sites have all been put out of consideration for 6 months and wold have been flagged anyway because the regulatory environment is shifting. They can’t figure out the potential profits until the landscape clears. It’s a certainty the cost of doing business is going to increase substantially making the gulf less attractive. With vast new finds all over the world we are hardly the only game in town. Brazil and the West coast of africa are exploding and the North Sea is still expanding. It would be one thing if the anti-business Obama only spooked oil companies. He is clearly anti-profits however. He spooks them all.

“You need both education and lots of experience before you are qualified to give business advice.”
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First, this is not business advice. It is an exercise in reasonable thinking.
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Second, the US is the least regulated and least bureaucratic country in the developed world. Having a meeting with POTUS where you announce a plan which is beneficial both to your own miserably awful public relations, get his stamp of approval that you are now, if not a good guy coming far closer to being one than you ever were before and saving yourselves tens of millions of dollars of litigation costs is not making the US less appealing to businesses to invest here.
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Third, you are such an extreme ideologue that (in theory of course – this won’t happen for centuries) a world treaty banning dictatorships, militaries and war goes into effect you would find some reason to call it a failure and sign of weakness.
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Please tell me 3X that if you were CEO of BP and had access to an extremely profitable project in the future that you would, to spite Obama, refuse to higher here and, if you did do so that you would not forgo some wonderful profits and be removed as CEO for that decision. Then, please tell me that BP lost from this deal.
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Tell me both of those things and I will now know that you are such an extreme ideologue that your opinions aren’t worth more than dog crap on the sidewalk (which will get you a $200 fine if you do not pick up after you dog here and, therefore, hope to get paid $200 per entry to read your drivel).

Glen is funny but a little too over the top for me. I don’t watch any of the cable shows except possibly random channel surfing. I like the last half of the newshour for the roundtable and get most of my news online. I do love the niche he’s carved out and I think he’s gonig Gods work with teaching about the constitution and progressivism and what kind of people Wilson and FDR were versus the sanitized crap we were fed. Wilson was actually ranked among the top 5 Presidents. He’ll never be top 15 again and will likely fall out of the top 30. Hillary and Obama both wanted to grab the progressive label but Beck has done a great job pointing out what scumbags those people were. Few people are trying to follow them.

So you know torture and waterboarding better than SERE Master Instructor Nance? -an individual that has been waterboarded and supervised it dozens of times. He’s wrong, you’re right?
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And you still haven’t addressed the crux of my posts on the topic. Waterboarding is an ineffective interrogation technique- you always get the “right” answers: “yes there is a link between al Qaeda and Iraq, yes Iraq has WMDs, yes I was the shooter on the grassy knoll…, please stop!” The waterboardee will say anything to make it stop. Further, the administration had no intention that waterboarding would protect us from terror attack- they wanted “confessions” showing a link between Iraq and terror groups and were afraid that the CIA wouldn’t find any using proven interrogation techniques (with good reason, there were none).
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Making this a left vs right issue is a dishonest effort on your part (and fellow neocons) to cause confusion and division. Libertarians, true conservatives and the original Tea Partiers, were very much against this and many other Bush programs. They believe the Obama administration should prosecute- not for punishment’s sake, but because the law should be followed and so that these abuses won’t be repeated by future administrations. So, where are the new TPers on this? Where is your outrage?
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Poor showing by Congressional Dems and Obama admin., poor showing by Reps and Bush, poor showing on your part.

“patrick, you have no clue about business.”
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Typical right wing propaganda that Bill Gates, the founders of Google are not real business people because they are no actively supporting conservative causes and Google even openly mocked GWB and that George Soros is somehow corrupt and could not have been an honest business man and a liberal while GWB, who drove three of daddy’s businesses into the ground is a genius at business.
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I am sure that I know far more about business than you do and that is a very, very low bar you set.
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“BP, Exxon, Shell all have a range of options for their next investment and in most cases those at the top of the list are fairly close in profit potential.”
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Therefore forgoing any potential profits just because it is inside the US while Obama is the president is going make or break the company and no CEO who wants to continue making his multi-million dollar income would forgo those profits to spite Obama.
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“With vast new finds all over the world we are hardly the only game in town. Brazil and the West coast of africa are exploding and the North Sea is still expanding.”
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With Inidan and Chinese markets demanding more oil at an exponential pace taking advantage of all of these options is absolutely mandatory for any oil company today. One hundred twenty years ago untapped oil was floating to the surface everywhere from upstate New York through the South West and West of the US. During WWII both the Germans and the Americans in the African front in Libya accused one another of tainting the water wells with oil before the realized that the ground was so rich in oil that even at the depth of an unsophisticated water well you would, accidentally strike oil. Oil is so rare today by comparison and the demand so unimaginably high that oil companies would not deny themselves a profit for any political reason ever.
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So, the idea that these jobs are gone for long is just another talking point of your you learned from Fox. That’s up there with the concept that we didn’t have a recession for 30 years, Clinton did not pay off Reagan’s debts, water boarding is fine by many Americans and that GWB is better than the worst president in US history.

This isn’t remotely complicted.

This may be the first thing you’ve said that makes any sense. You’re correct; it’s not complicated. Waterboarding is torture,. Whether or not Americans support it matters not. Polls do not make laws.
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If waterboarding is not torture, how come the Japanese were prosecuted for precisely that after WWII?

After World War II, an international coalition convened to prosecute Japanese soldiers charged with torture. At the top of the list of techniques was water-based interrogation, known variously then as “water cure,” “water torture” and “waterboarding,” according to the charging documents. It simulates drowning.
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In a recent journal essay, Judge Evan Wallach, a member of the U.S. Court of International Trade and an adjunct professor in the law of war, writes that the testimony from American soldiers about this form of torture was gruesome and convincing. A number of the Japanese soldiers convicted by American judges were hanged, while others received lengthy prison sentences or time in labor camps.

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2009/04/yes-we-did-execute-japanese-soldiers-waterboarding-american-pows

Waterboarding is supported by Americans by a two to one margin. All fo you are simply babbling. That’s why Obama and Congress didn’t move to pass a law specifically banning waterboarding. It absolutely IS a good litmus test because by far the largest proportion of those opposed are liberals.

Note I said liberals. Not democrats. Liberals make up about 20% of the population. That doesn’t mean every liberal.

You people have lost all of the intellectual arguments on the war, the economy, taxes and spending.

doesn’t really matter where its sold or even who, specifically, you by from. you just have to think about it all in terms of Total supply worldwide. if what we produced was all sold here it still wouldn’t effect the $ Chavez gets. it would just shuffle buyers and transport routes a bit. thats not to say increasing production in the free world doesn’t matter. it still has the general effect of decreasing the $ made elsewhere.

The fact that a bigot like O’Reilly has come out against Michelle Eichmann, er, Bachmann speaks for itself.
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I guess even hatred has it’s limits, but apparently Michelle hasn’t found it…

“Waterboarding is supported by Americans by a two to one margin. All fo you are simply babbling.”
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“58% Favor Waterboarding of Plane Terrorist To Get Information.”
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Look more carefully and you will find this:
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“Fifty-eight percent (58%) of U.S. voters say waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques should be used to gain information from the terrorist who attempted to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 30% oppose the use of such techniques, and another 12% are not sure. ”
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http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/december_2009/58_favor_waterboarding_of_plane_terrorist_to_get_information
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The problem being we did not have the Jack Bower/24 moment.
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Now, take into account a few things:
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1) Like intelligence agencies, the best organized terrorist groups do things on a need-to-know basis. So, the odd are almost 100% that the people in captivity do not have anything to spit out when being waterboarded except water and, probably vomit.
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2) Like intelligence agencies, the best organized terrorist groups have well planned fake stories, so that if you torture nine people they may well have told you that, instead of the truth about the Christmas Day bombing attempt, it would be a New Year’s Eve attempt on the Empire State Building, for example.
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3) We had no idea who to put under the faucet because it was a failure to combine about four different sources which could have stopped the attempted bomber before he packed his bags in the Netherlands on the way to the airport.
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So, when asked about a hypothetical situation which never actually happened (somebody in custody knew is that hypothetical) people answered “yes”.
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If you asked, instead, should we waterboard hundreds of people we have in custody on a random basis with, maybe, a 1% chance that one of them know something (which is reality) I am sure that the answer would have been different.
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Ask the question the right way and you’ll get the answer you want in a survey.
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Now, torture somebody enough I bet you’d be thrilled to confess your secret plans to blow up the White House, too. (For the record, I do not believe that about you. You are just a woefully misinformed man rdw56).

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rdw56 (dead thread, I know…)
Libertarians are against our involvement in Afghanistan, against military aid to foreign nations, for prosecution of Bush admin war crimes, and for slashing the military budget. They are fiscal conservatives, they are the original Tea Partyers.
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Your making this about liberals and conservatives is a deliberate effort to distort and pit us against one another. You are not debating honestly, you are a pursuing your own agenda.