Month: August 2010

Failure to Rise

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

I watched Krugman on PBS’ Newshour last night. Looking at his face, I thought, “Here is a deeply frightened and worried man.” And he is, clearly:

I’m finding it hard to read about politics these days. I still don’t think people in the administration understand the magnitude of the catastrophe their excessive caution has created. I keep waiting for Obama to do something,something, to shake things up; but it never seems to happen.

Here’s what I wrote in February 2009. It’s pretty rich that now the usual suspects are accusing me of having shared the administration’s optimism. But that’s a trivial point; the important thing is that all signs are that the next few years will be a combination of economic stagnation and political witch-hunt.

This is going to be almost inconceivably ugly.

Please Don’t Feed the Trolls

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

I’m going to be largely offline for the weekend, as there’s a wedding to attend (no, not my own).

Anyway, I’m sure Dr. S. and others will be helping to take up the slack, and I’ll have a few posts coming up when I return.

in my absence, please don’t feed the trolls. You can sometimes forget which people are reasonable human beings and which are complete fucking fruitcakes who can’t even keep track of their multiple personalities.

And now, Gene Vincent!

Department of No Shit Sherlock

~ susie ~ 28 Comments

NO FUCKING DOI:

The Bush administration insisted that “enhanced interrogation techniques” — torture — were necessary to extract information from prisoners and keep Americans safe from terrorist attacks. Never mind that it was immoral, did huge damage to this country’s global standing and produced little important intelligence. Now, as we had feared, it is also making it much harder to try and convict accused terrorists.

Because federal judges cannot trust the confessions of prisoners obtained by intense coercion, they are regularly throwing out the government’s cases against Guantánamo Bay prisoners.

A new report prepared jointly by ProPublica and the National Law Journal showed that the government has lost more than half the cases where Guantánamo prisoners have challenged their detention because they were forcibly interrogated. In some cases the physical coercion was applied by foreign agents working at the behest of the United States; in other cases it was by United States agents.

By the time you get done reading the whole thing, your desk will have a six-inch deep imprint of your forehead. And here’s one last paragraph to gt you started:

Even in cases where the government later went back and tried to obtain confessions using “clean,” non-coercive methods, judges are saying those confessions too are tainted by the earlier forcible methods. In most cases, the prisoners have not actually walked free because the government is appealing the decisions. But the trend suggests that the government will continue to have a hard time proving its case even against those prisoners who should be detained.

The Bush Administration fucked it all up, the whole ball of wax. Bin Laden’s still alive, we lost in Iraq, we’re going to lose in Afghanistan, and now we have one more reminder of what happens when you put an incompentent C+ legacy student and his CIA father’s corrupt chums in charge of the government: when you try to skirt the law and due process, you end up losing.

All of this was, of course, predicted by the rational people. Not that it matters.

So my remaining question is, when do we hang Jay Bybee and John Yoo on national TV from RFK Stadium?