Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
As some of you may have sussed out, since November of 2007, I’ve been working 99% of the time out of my basement office…with a huge long line of doctor’s excuses, bases on either my non-healing foot wound, or my weak response to infections casing raging problems on and off. The office finally said that [...]
I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all. But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to [...]
…from Think Progress. Give it a look for a summary of why it’s major bad news, if you didn’t know that already…unless you think you’re Jack Bauer or something. As Jesse Ventura said on The View: “If waterboarding is OK, why don’t we let our police do it to suspects so they can learn what [...]
Another note on torture issues. This post seems to put it all together that the prime people who got good, reliable information in World War 2 were people who followed the same gold standard we followed before George W Bush changed things around; that torture is only good for causing people to suffer and say [...]
Gitmo: People reviewing the cases of prisoners are finding out that there’s really no solid files as such on anyone, and that a lot of material is suspect or worthless – and scattered, disorganized and fifth-hand. The realization is coming through that people were supposed to get confessions and information first and worry about anything [...]
..of the Bush administration, a casualty of the war on terror, troubled and victimized soul that he is.
W. Mark Felt obituary in the Washington Post. “As Deep Throat, Felt helped establish the principle that our highest government officials are subject to the Constitution and the laws of the land,” the prosecutor, John W. Nields, wrote in The Washington Post in 2005. “Yet when it came to the Weather Underground bag jobs, he [...]
Details after the cut.
From the Bailout plan: Sec. 8. Review. Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency. So we give you 700 billion dollars without any kind of accountability or oversight? To spend [...]
Seems that the lack of vetting that McCain did was the same that Bush did. (starts singing from Fiddler on the Roof here) Next time around, I suggest that they use a divining rod or the Urim and Thummim – especially if it’s Romney.
Julia Child, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Arthur Goldberg – spied for America. Amongst others…
Very good article that explains the real limits of Chinese power down the road. Here’s a mix of his points and some of my thoughts on the matter: Cheap labor and fair access to markets is about their main strengths. Quality is not as important if the manufacturers can slide by. Labor is starting to [...]
Susan and I recently added HBO onto our cable lineup to catch RECOUNT and the JOHN ADAMS series, amongst other stuff. The RECOUNT-connected documentary HACKING DEMOCRACY was on, and we found it fascinating and troubling. The story of the documentary was about a woman who founded a citizen’s group called Black Box Voting, which concerns [...]
Want a secret passage in your house so that you can decamp off to your Batcave or private library? Try these guys. They Don’t Work Cheap. (h/t to Ysabetwordsmith, who is a golden god of blogging neat stuff.)
The Veteran’s Affairs Department’s head of mental health states that there’s no suicide epidemic amongst returning Iraqi War vets – and gets caught with top-secret internal emails that admit that the stated amounts are BS, and that around 1000 suicide attempts a month take place: But in this e-mail to his top media advisor, written [...]