Tortured logic

Both Glenn Greenwald and Dan Froomkin have taken the Obama administration to task for Obama's sudden reversal about releasing further photos taken at Abu Ghraib.

Froomkin, in a Washinton Post editorial lambasts Obama and pulls apart each and every excuse the administration concocted to explain their reversal.

Greenwald admits to puzzlement over a public which seems to agree that our government should not release evidence of its own wrongdoings. It's what the Bush administration did, again and again. To see the Obama administration walk this path is frustrating, angering and impossible to understand.

It's pretty clear. Either we tortured, or we didn't. And the answer to that question, inevitably seems to be, "we tortured."

And if we tortured, then we broke laws, we allowed immoral, unethical behavior in our names, and the people who put us in this postion need to be revealed, at all levels, and brought to justice so it never happens again.

As a torturing country we are in the company of Stalin's Russia, Pinochet's Chile, Idi Amin's Uganda, Saddam Hussein's Iran, Marcos Phillipines.

While it drains the life from any moral imperative we thought we had, new evidence shows that on a practical level, it may increase the use of terrorism on these shores.

Each and every one of us needs to stare hard at what our leaders ordered the men and women of the military to do. Then, only after we've seen every photograph, should we decide whether men like Dick Cheney, John Yoo, Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush belong in a cell.

Sweating ink

Almost as ubiquitous as gloomy talk about the economy is gloomy talk about the demise of newspapers. You can read it in Time Magazine. You can hear it on NPR.

I've spewed my share of electronic words here about the way in which a combination of forces - corporate ownership, financial constraints, an aging readership, competition from electronic media - have pushed newspapers to, and over the brink.

As a c0-founder of a local newsblog (The Middletown Eye), I'm acutely aware of the failure of the legacy media, and the difficult, if not impossible task, of filling the gap with volunteer community journalists.

I bridle at the accusations, hurled by media analysts, that the news can only be delivered by trained journalists, and that the resulting loss of "objectivity," depth and grasp of the "truth" will doom us to a hobbled democracy.

In fact, objectivity and the truth are slippery concepts which reporters and editors have rarely grasped firmly.

Certainly, "untrained" reporters ought to be aware of the difference between reporting news, and opinion. They should understand that checking facts, and having two (ideally three) sources before printing a fact, is the time-honored path to approaching the "truth." They should know that the facts will save them, and having those facts reported accurately in a notebook and on tape are the way to protect them from accusations of inaccuracy, libel and slander. They should know that there are at least two sides to every story. Reporters should be aware that sophisticated sources will try to spin them, and unsophisticated sources may be so lost in a passionate argument that accuracy falls by the wayside.

Unfortunately, if those rules were followed by the legacy media, we might not be in this mess.

The New York Times bought into the administration selling points prior to the Iraq war. The White House Press was cowed into allowing the Bush administration to lie for eight years. Here at home The Hartford Courant the editorial board endorsed Joe Lieberman, John Rowland and Eddie Perez, even as intrepid reporters were working to reveal the vile political manipulations of these politicians. In my hometown, which the Courant has abandoned, the Middletown Press doesn't even have the horses to cover the basic stories.

All this, to point you to one of the best essays I've read recently on the topic.

In a truly thought-provoking Salon essay, Gary Kamiya posits that it's not only the death of newspapers we should worry about, but the death of reporting.

We need to remember that our founding fathers understood the importance of a free press to a well-regulated democracy. At its most desperate juncture, our local state paper, The Hartford Courant, is focusing a microscope on crooked politicians, venal appointees and incompetent corporations.

We can't afford to lose that microscope, even if all it reveals are the viruses which are making our communities sick.

Like the ice going out on the river

(Reuters photo.)

Leave it to Garrison Keillor to find the moment in the day with the most power.

Emotions ran high, but never as high as when the crowd realized that the chopper over their heads, the chopper heading away from Washington, was the chopper carrying the former president away from governance for the last time:
"When the blades started turning, the cheering got louder, and when the chopper lifted up above the Capitol and we saw it in the sky heading for the airport, a million jubilant people waved and hollered for all they were worth. It was the most genuine, spontaneous, universal moment of the day. It was like watching the ice go out on the river."

And I wrote all this before I realized Colin McEnroe had addressed the same topic yesterday afternoon.

Yeah, huh, you think?

Like I said.

Creepy Joe™ and the craven empty Democratic leaders

Glenn Greewald explains why Creepy Joe™ must go, and why the Democrats in Congress don't seem to be up to the task.

As if we here in Connecticut didn't know.

Is bliss

The McCain campaign has finally figured out America.

What we don't know, can't hurt us. Or can it?

So, we have a Presidential candidate who has found a way to avoid a debate in which he will clearly be at a disadvantage. He's retreated from a cozy relationship with the press, to one which is downright frigid. He puts his campaign on "hold" though it doesn't seem to include not running commercials, or keeping his advisors from commenting in the press.

And a vice-presidential candidate, who is truly, "Bush-in-skirts," in the way she demonstrates a remarkable incurious attitude to anything outside of her immediate purview. Visit a foreign country? Why bother, Alaska is just fine. Think about the national economy? No need, Alaska's got oil. Worry about war, famine, disease? No worry, trust in Jesus.

We are now faced with a campaign willing to do damn near all to prevent us from knowing anything about them.

And so, as Glenn Greenwald apologizes, he got Sarah Palin wrong, and his revelation has come via Katy Couric.

Is that a saber in your pocket, or are you just unhappy to see me?

I'll admit a good deal of ignorance on the relationship between Russia, and the now independent states which used to be part of the Soviet Union.

But this I know, a country which has preemptively invaded a sovereign nation has no right to criticize a country which had done the same. The US no longer has moral ground to stand upon to criticize Russia for invading Georgia, when we invaded Iraq, for reasons which now can be seen as specious, at best, and at worst, similar in justification to Russia's invasion.

Worse still, two of the prominent promoters of war in Iraq Senators Lindsey Graham, and Connecticut's own Creepy Joe™ Lieberman, are at a more severe moral ebb tide than many other Americans who protested the invasion of Iraq.

Graham and Lieberman have co-authored an editorial on the Russian invasion of Georgia in today's Washington Post. Glenn Greenwald critiques it here.

The co-authors are shocked that Russia: spent last week destroying the country's infrastructure, including roads, bridges, port and security facilities. This was more than random looting. It was a deliberate campaign to collapse the economy of Georgia, in the hope of taking the government down with it.

Sounds like the techniques the US used in Iraq, and which Graham and Lieberman supported.

The pair is also aghast at: the innocent men, women and children displaced by the fighting, some of whom we saw last week. Would that this pair of death angels felt the same about the tens of thousands of dead and wounded innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan, or that Lieberman could find a shred of empathy for any dead or wounded Palestinian child.

It's beginning to appear that the apocalypse twins haven't found a war they don't like - Iraq, Russia, Palestine, Iran, Syria. Bring 'em on.

Many commentators are concluding that the disastrous conflict between Russia and Georgia was propelled by an incompetent foreign policy, initiated by the Bush administration, which coddled the belligerent Putin, and urged on a naive and reckless drive for democracy by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.

Welcome to castle anthrax

Glenn Greenwald, who is quick to indicate that he has no evidence on which to make a statement about Bruce Ivins' guilt in the anthrax case, has plenty to say about how the press and the FBI has handled the case, from the beginning.

In addition, Greenwald offers lots of reasons why we can't, with any assurance, say "case closed."

Don't worry pundits, satire is not new to the flyover

As I suspected, all the worry America's pundits have flooded upon the "dreadful" New Yorker cover, is nothing but crocodile tears.

There are smart people all over this country who know how satire works, and how worthless pundits are.

From the NY Times, this morning, an explanation.

Hell, Gary Kamiya says it better than me

I don't get the folks at Buzzflash. First they skewer Ralph Nader, and now they rail against satire.

They actually write a headline that reads, How About A New Yorker Cover With The Editor's Head Up His Ass?

Ho, ho, now that's funny, in a childish, unsophisticated, sophomoric kind of way. The editorial is the most stupid misunderstanding of satire that I've ever read. How about a Buzzflash headline that reads, "This Just In: Stephen Colbert Is Not A Right Wing Asshole!" Mark Karlin, better re-read your idiotic "editorial" (notice the "ironic" use of quotation marks, Mark), because your own predjudices are on display.

At Salon, Gary Kamiya diagnoses a severe "loss of sense of humor" on the left, as a result of cynicism overdose.

Where's Kurt Vonnegut when we need him?

I wanna spit in the face of these badlands

Wrong place, wrong Time

If you have a few moments of leisure to do some heavy reading in what's left of this Thanksgiving weekend, read the marvelous Glenn Greenwald's dissection of Joe Klein's serious lies and inaccuracies about FISA in this week's issue of Time.

Greenwald further extrapolates about the abysmal condition of in-the-beltway reporting.

Jane Hamsher at firedoglake, provides even more evidence of a complicitly lazy Klein.

The 60 vote Senate myth

Yesterday I put blame for the confirmation of Attorney General nominee directly at the feet of Senators Schumer and Feinstein. After reading Glenn Greenwald's astonishing analysis of the lack of filibuster on the vote, I'm more convinced than ever that, as Ralph Nader said when he made his run for President, "there's not a dime's worth of difference" between the parties. It's obviously about power, politics, incumbency and doing what they damn-well please.

If you don't believe it, listen to this debate between liberal radio show host Ed Sculzt and Florida Representative Debbie Wasserman about the way in which Democratic leadership (Nancy Pelosi) blocked Dennis Kuchinich's resolution to impeach Dick Cheney.

Anybody here, seen my friend Robert

Glenn Greenwald (how does this man research and write as many columns a week as he does?), resurrects Robert Kennedy to demonstrate why the FISA bill should not provide retroactive immunity to the telecoms.

Tip of the hat to Mr. Gill.

I should go back and look that up.

Creepy Joe Lieberman is so cocksure on so many topics he seems to know little about (uh, supporting an invasion of Iraq and Iran, for example), funny he's so mealy-mouthed about Alberto Gonzales.