Together in peace.

In the late Senator Teddy’s case, with the solace of readily available government-paid end of life aid and assistance.

Edward Kennedy was a Senator who understood and extolled the service part of the phrase public service and who worked to make conspicuous and to never forgo the concept, responsibility and utilization of benevolence in government.

If directly calling for openly flouting and opposing the Constitution is not anti-American, what is?

From the U.S. Constitution, Article VI (emphasis added):

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

One can stare at that as many times as one likes and parse it ’til the cows come home and it still nowhere says “except Oklahoma.”

Republican mayoral candidate Anna Falling said Tuesday that putting a Christian creationism display in the Tulsa Zoo is No. 1 in importance among city issues that include violent crime, budget woes and bumpy streets.

[snip]

Falling, who has founded several Christian nonprofits and is a former city councilor, also said the next mayor needs to appoint people to city boards, authorities and commissions who will “honor God.”

[snip]

When asked whether she meant she would recruit Christians to serve the city, Falling said she was talking about “people committed to their churches,” and when asked whether she meant Christian churches, she said, “churches, yes.” Source

Fanaticism is a dish best not served at all.

There is more than ample evidence of the immature kindergarten level* to which political discourse has sunk, but this ludicrous stab mines untapped contemptible depths of sheer stupidity:

Dr. Regina M. Benjamin, Obama’s pick for the next surgeon general, was hailed as a MacArthur Grant genius who had championed the poor at a medical clinic she set up in Katrina-ravaged Alabama.

But the full-figured African-American nominee is also under fire for being overweight in a nation where 34 percent of all Americans aged 20 and over are obese.

Critics and supporters across the blogsphere have commented on photos of Benjamin’s round cheeks, saying she sends the wrong message as the public face of America’s health initiatives. Source

* With apologies to actual kindergarteners, who aren’t old enough yet to know any better.

Liz Cheney (more) — an American iteration of Imee Marcos?

Put as simply (and broadly) as possible, the partisan arguments in Congress regarding emergency funds for the automotive industry boiled down to:

Republicans - The government should maintain a laissez-faire position (while concurrently mandating concessions from labor) and the market should be the determinant of business decisions and viability.

Democrats - Monies for a large and many-tentacled sector of industry as a buffer and stopgap to allow a window of opportunity for major and wrenching labor and management decisions involving a restructured bsuiness model, but avoidance of a direct takeover of operations by the government.

Except for when, in both cases, those loudly proclaimed stances and principles are simultaneously tossed out the window.

A majority of House members have signed onto a bill to reverse the closing of 789 Chrysler dealerships and block General Motors Corp. from closing more than 1,300, while the full House could vote on the bill as early as next week. Source

Recession or no, there’s no slump in the commerce of bought and paid for legislators.

To paraphrase the anecdote regarding the Model T: You can have a Congress in any color you want, so long as it’s yellow.

Citing a philosophy of conscience based on the foundation of a refrigerator magnet, and a strange, tangled thicket of indistinct language slanted to evince personal victimhood (including mention of the voiced “Yes” vote of a one-year-old), Gov. Sarah Palin today announced that she is going Galt (ref.).

Don’t let the door hit ya in the butt on the way out.

Still far from practicing what we preach.

…”For the DoD to instruct its employees that lawful protest activities should be treated as ‘low-level terrorism’ is deeply disturbing in and of itself. It is an even more egregious insult to constitutional values, however, when viewed in the context of a long-term pattern of domestic security initiatives that have attempted to equate lawful dissent with terrorism.” Source

With friends like these…

Among the countries congratulating Mr Ahmadinejad on his victory were Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela and North Korea. Source

More:

As European capitals appear to weigh their reaction to the Iranian poll against their desire to engage Tehran in constructive talks, most of Iran’s neighboring states have opted for simply congratulating the winner.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai was the first head of state to do so as he called Ahmadinejad on June 14. Karzai’s office said he congratulated the Iranian people “for making a decision about their destiny” and hoped Afghanistan’s ties with Iran would continue to strengthen during Ahmadinejad’s second four-year term in office.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani followed shortly after with a telegram to Ahmadinejad expressing confidence that their two countries “friendly and neighborly relations” will improve in the coming years.

Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, told Ahmadinejad the victory was “an acknowledgment of your outstanding services.”

[snip]

Arab League Secretary-General Amr Musa also congratulated Ahmadinejad….Source

’nuff said.

Other side of the coin: Unlike major capitals of the EU, Canada voices sharply stated outrage.

Applying law enforcement to criminality as a primary tool. What a concept.

Though the initiative is a work in progress, some senior counter-terrorism officials and administration policy-makers envision it as key to the national security strategy President Obama laid out last week — one that presumes most accused terrorists have the right to contest the charges against them in a “legitimate” setting.

The approach effectively reverses a mainstay of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism, in which global counter-terrorism was treated primarily as an intelligence and military problem, not a law enforcement one. That policy led to the establishment of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; harsh interrogations; and detentions without trials. Source

Jury is still out on the robustness (if any) of oversight and accountability measures to be included, as well as strictures applied or unapplied to such activities as wiretapping, warrantless searches, etc.

Level-headed layout.

President Barack Obama’s support for preventively detaining terrorism suspects undoubtedly surprised some of his longtime backers.…

But the possibility had been percolating for months. With his pledge in January to close the Guantanamo prison within a year, Obama set off a fierce, mostly under-the-radar debate among legal experts about whether it will be possible to meet the goal he announced yesterday: to build “a legitimate legal framework” for imprisoning terrorism suspects indefinitely.

The question affects more than Guantanamo. The fates of 169 detainees there remain undecided, according to Obama’s numbers yesterday, and administration officials have suggested that they will be unable to prosecute as many as 100. But the legal status of thousands more held by the United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas also hangs in limbo, and any detention policy will have ongoing effects as the fight against al-Qaida continues.

Here are some of the key issues facing the architects of a new preventive detention system, or, as it’s sometimes called, a “national security court”… Source

…yet remain too widely unlearned or willfully ignored.

Officials use torture when they have already dehumanized their victims —- a witch is not a normal person, a “terrorist” is a beast —- when a government puts revenge before other goals, and when a sense of helplessness rules.

Promoting fear of the unknown enemy who must be exposed through torture gives officials a great sense of their own importance; and, because they can waterboard a suspect like Abu Zubaydah 83 times, they do have considerable power —- to inflict pain, not to obtain useful information. In the process, the torturers dehumanize themselves.

Leaving all moral qualms aside, are we to learn nothing from the experience of keen observers who have understood torture’s uselessness over the centuries? Source

Why and how is there still any public deliberation deeming any approving torture as a tool of the state even marginally credible?

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.
– – Winston Churchill

And for those armchair Torquemadas who would still smugly or vengefully (and absent any record of proof, particularly of any sole or unique and testable, replicable value) tout that “torture worked” — well, slavery worked. Quite efficaciously for many centuries too, but the weight of its innate and central immorality, bigotry and wretched, corruptive maleficence properly cast it into obliteration as accepted practice.

As for Mr. Cheney, ye old scribe turns once more to Churchill:

A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.

The dangers and consequences of validating leadership, fomenting policy or upending and twisting universal, civilized illegalities into mandated practice under the banner of fanaticism are historically self-evident.

Update May 21: After listening to both speeches today, some quick thoughts.

Cheney: PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) is real, and giving a wide banner labeled ‘credibility’ to an obvious untreated long-term PTSD sufferer to spout rabid, repetitive and one-dimensional points, many spun out of the flimsiest of data(if indeed any at all) does not serve to bolster nor advance any cogent argument. Indoctrination by fear is no less offesnive and repugnant than is indoctrination by force.

Obama: Quicker and more sure-footed progress is always made when standing on solid ground than when balancing on a high wire. The latter position is where he chose to perch too frequently. Splitting the difference on inalienable human rights affords no rights at all, merely a facade of same. Compromise on basic tenets of justice gives succor and viability to the unjustified.

Top-notch critique of today’s “let’s slap a coat of paint on and maybe it’ll sell” announcement and backpedaling regarding military commissions:

Let’s concede that if the U.S. is going to continue to try accused terrorists in newly-created military commissions — rather than under our normal, long-standing system of justice — then it is better to have more safeguards than fewer. That’s just true by definition. Let’s further concede that many of the past criticisms voiced about Bush’s military commissions, including some of Obama’s criticisms, focused on the specific rules of those commissions, some of which (though far from all) are addressed by Obama’s modifications, including the most important change that coerced statements are no longer admissible. Nonetheless, the overwhelming bulk of the objections to what the Bush administration did was to the very idea of military commission themselves. The controversy — one of the most intense of the Bush era — was grounded in the argument that there was absolutely no reason, other than to pervert justice and enable easy and due-process-free convictions, to create a separate tribunal rather than use our extant judicial processes.

[snip]

…if the state is willing to accord due process only when it is guaranteed that it can win, but then creates a new system of diminished due process whenever it believes it cannot win, the guarantee of due process, for rather obvious reasons, becomes completely illusory (”we’ll give due process as long as we’re sure we can win, and if we can’t, we’ll give you something less”). Source

Painting broadly now, but consider this:

Iraq, a country under martial occupation, while an economic and societal basket case, while riven by ongoing and constant political, partisan and sectarian chaos, allowed Saddam Hussein trial in a newly nascent and still unsteady judicial system under a fledgling, subservient government barely operational and in crisis, mostly in public proceedings and venue.

Can the U.S., a country of relative plenty, a country of social and civil calm, under no immediate widespread lethal or destructive threat and suffering no ongoing programs of internal violence, do no less than channel a few handfuls of alleged criminals through its own longstanding, primarily respected and proven, long evolved, publicly accountable judicial branch — as established by its founding document — for trial?

And under circumstances of justice and of incarceration which do not deliberately institute and replicate individually a curriculum of some of the most brutal and repugnant tactics of repressive power and abuse of authority often ascribed to regimes incontrovertibly engaged in and sutained by thuggery, barbarity and fear.

Wanting to portray ourselves as a collective portrait of liberty and to be held up as a standard of freedom requires much, much more than just talking the talk.

The high ground holds no place, no corner, no nook or cranny, no refuge for the dark side.

Thank you, Mr. Sorenson. Thank you.

“Intellectually and morally dishonest lawyers (in the Department of Justice) disgraced not only their country but their profession” in claiming that waterboarding and other forms of torture were legal, he said.

“In a country based on the rule of law, in which no man is above the law, whatever his rank or title, no man can undertake, authorize or immunize unlawful conduct,” Sorensen said.

[snip]

“…the moral authority of the United States, its traditional ability to occupy the moral high ground in an international conflict, is an important part of our security,” he said.

“More important than the worthless statements extracted from torture’s victims who will cry out anything to halt it.” Source

A bit more:

Virtually every lawyer worth his diploma knows that the United States is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions on War Crimes and the 1984 Convention Against Torture; that waterboarding is torture and that torture is illegal, regardless of pieces of paper from Justice Department lawyers who disgraced not only their country but their profession, a fact of which their respective Bar Associations should take note. Those lawyers apparently thought in 2003-04 that their client was the President and later his Attorney General. Wrong. Their client was the American people who had a right to expect that their lawyers would know the law and uphold it, not attempt to redefine it or interpret it away… Source

Not yet.

As the castiagting and purging of Republican party members for ‘purity’ advances, mayhaps we can expect a 3-way cage match of Sarah Palin, Samuel Wurzelbacher, Karl Rove and Glenn Beck as the last act in attempting to ideologically reach that ever elusive 99 and 44/100 per cent level (ref.).

Needless to say, substitute your own more contemporary (say, from Ronald Reagan onward) bits for the lyrics in this nevertheless relevant ditty from 1962 on the aciduous diminishment accompanying a hellbent for leather run via culling to some unattainable idealized endzone of party purity:

As for Sen. Specter, he’s spent a Congressional career talking out of both sides of his mouth as a matter of course (from among an virtual encyclopedia of examples, a topically relevant one here), so there are virtually no expectations from ye old scribe of his demonstrating anything approaching a stiff backbone or core stances in any case. His announced party switch today is just the other bookend to the one made of convenience and expediency when he first successfully ran for an office back in 1965 (ref.).

Under the precept that this is “a nation of laws, not men,” when the weight of evidence mandates warranted investigation and the submission of charges, the intrinsic operation of the legal machinery of the judicial and prosecutorial system is not optional and not beholden to decision or whim, and escpecially must remain exempt from political manipulation. Contra the previous administration on that last bit, the tectonic stress of truth has raised a growing mountain of evidence, with one more stratum added now (emphasis added).

“There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.

“Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”

Senior administration officials, however, “blew that off and kept insisting that we’d overlooked something, that the interrogators weren’t pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information,” he said.

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

Excerpts from Burney’s interview appeared in a full, declassified report on a two-year investigation into detainee abuse released on Tuesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

[snip]

The report, the executive summary of which was released in November, found that Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and other former senior Bush administration officials were responsible for the abusive interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo and in Iraq and Afghanistan. Source

Could not agree more with this in principle, though any decision as to whether or not to prosecute if legal determination so warrants (inclusive of both laws and treaties), any decision whether or not to honor, follow, have the proper authorities follow through and obey the law is not in the President’s bailiwick — nor a responsibility of the White House (to deny in such cases would be an obstruction of justice, to proceed absent just cause malfeasance and a miscarriage of justice) — it is an automatic “Yes” imposed by the oath of the office:

…Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m sick and goddamn tired of being told that, as a citizen, I am too fragile to bear the horrible burden of watching public criminals pay for their crimes and that, as a political entity, my fellow citizens and I are delicate flowers encased in candy-glass who must be kept away from the sight of men in fine suits weeping as they are ripped from the arms of their families and sent off to penal institutions manifestly more kind than those in which they arranged to get their rocks off vicariously while driving other men mad.

Hey, Mr. President. Put these barbarians on trial and watch me.… Citation

Over strident objection from entrenched interests, the administrtion has relased the latest four lengthy memos contrived by the previous regime’s torture (attempted) justification squad.

.pdf file formats of all four accessible here.

Page after page after page of convoluted (dare one say tortured) acquiescence to sadism, thuggery, flouting accepted law and parsing the vomit of tyranny.

Were these ‘techniques’ indisputably inflicted on a dog or other animal, the perpetrator along with any who gave the green light would rightfully be charged, convicted and punished.

Update April 17 12:30 p.m.: Indeed.

The four legal memos released by the Obama administration on Thursday confirm in excruciating detail that the Bush administration employed twisted and macabre legal reasoning to authorize the unspeakable – the torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of human beings.

[snip]

A child would recognize these tactics as cruel and inhumane. The United States itself treated waterboarding as torture when the Japanese used it against our troops in World War II. Yet through pages and pages of dense legal reasoning, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers somehow reach the conclusion that these tactics, even when employed in combination and over a 30-day period, are not torture, and not even cruel, inhuman, or degrading. Source

Comparing the sterile, soulless theories of institutionally sanctioned terrorism with the realities of application:

One memo, written in August 2002 and signed by then OLC Chief Jay Bybee, approves a list of 10 “enhanced interrogation” techniques that the CIA wanted to use against Abu Zubayda, who was believed to be a senior member of al-Qaeda. The techniques are described in a detached, clinical manner: “walling,” the act of throwing detainees against a “flexible wall,” and “close confinement,” the act of placing a detainee within a confinement box that forces the detainee to stand or sit. The memo also approves the use of insects with the confinement box to enhance detainees’ sense of terror.

[snip]

Alex Abdo, a legal fellow with the ACLU’s National Security Project, says comparing the clinical description in the OLC memos to the ICRC report was surreal. “The four memos were written by lawyers trying to construct a legal regime that allowed the unthinkable. The sterilized language they use in the memos as compared with the graphic descriptions of the ICRC report make that patently clear,” Abdo says. “It’s as though you’re in Alice in Wonderland.” Source

One shudders to contemplate what other segments of a panic-driven curriculum which would make Torquemada blanch ( for example) still remain shielded by claims of secrecy.

Walking the walk of reason, the core issue doesn’t get more crucial than as outlined by Mark Danner in the secon of two pieces published in The New York Review of Books:

Investigating what kind of intelligence torture actually yielded is not a popular task: those who oppose torture do not like to admit that it might, in any way, have “worked”; those who support its use don’t like to admit that it might not have. It is a regrettable but undeniable fact that torture’s illegality, or the political harm it may do to the country’s reputation, is not sufficient to discourage the willingness of many Americans to countenance it. However one might prefer that this be an argument about legality or morality, it is also an argument about national security and, in the end, about politics. However much one agrees with President Obama that Cheney’s “notion” that “somehow…we can’t reconcile our core values, our Constitution, our belief that we don’t torture, with our national security interests,” the fact is that many people continue to believe the contrary, and this group includes the former president and vice-president of the United States and many senior officials who served them.

[snip]

The only way to defuse the political volatility of torture and to remove it from the center of the “politics of fear” is to replace its lingering mystique, owed mostly to secrecy, with authoritative and convincing information about how it was really used and what it really achieved. That this has not yet happened is the reason why, despite the innumerable reports and studies and revelations that have given us a rich and vivid picture of the Bush administration’s policies of torture, we as a society have barely advanced along this path. We have not so far managed, despite all the investigations, to produce a bipartisan, broadly credible, and politically decisive effort, and pronounce authoritatively on whether or not these activities accomplished anything at all in their stated and still asserted purpose: to protect the security interests of the country.

This cannot be accomplished through the press; for the same institutional limitations that lead journalists to keep repeating Bush and Cheney’s insistence about the “legality” of torture make it impossible for the press alone, no matter how persuasive the leaks it brings to the public, to make a politically decisive judgment on the value of torture. What is lacking is not information or revelation but political credibility. What is needed is not more disclosures but a broadly persuasive judgment, delivered by people who can look at all the evidence, however highly classified, and can claim bipartisan respect on the order of the Watergate Select Committee or the 9/11 Commission, on whether or not torture made Americans safer.

This is the only way we can begin to come to a true consensus about torture. By all accounts, it is likely that the intelligence harvest that can be attributed directly to the “alternative set of procedures” is meager. But whatever information might have been gained, it must be assessed and then judged against the great costs, legal, moral, political, incurred in producing it. Torture’s harvest, whatever it may truly be, is very unlikely to have outweighed those costs.

[snip]

There is a sense in which our society is finally posing that “what should we do” question. That it is doing so only now, after the fact, is a tragedy for the country–and becomes even more damaging as the debate is carried on largely by means of politically driven assertions and leaks. For even as the practice of torture by Americans has withered and died, its potency as a political issue has grown. The issue could not be more important, for it cuts to the basic question of who we are as Americans, and whether our laws and ideals truly guide us in our actions or serve, instead, as a kind of national decoration to be discarded in times of danger. The only way to confront the political power of the issue, and prevent the reappearance of the practice itself, is to take a hard look at the true “empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years,” and speak out, clearly and credibly, about what that story really tells. Source

The vile repellant stain on the national fabric must be expunged, and the lesson be writ large: this is not who we are; this is not what we stand for; this shall not be permitted to be done in our name in any circumstance.

Several pieces today of blatant importance, but shall refrain from much commentary. Go read ‘em. Promise it’s worth your while.

The Good:
1:

The Obama administration said Wednesday it will participate directly in group talks with Iran over its suspect nuclear program, another significant shift from President George W. Bush’s policy toward a nation he labeled part of an axis of evil.

The State Department said the United States would be at the table “from now on” when senior diplomats from the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany meet with Iranian officials to discuss the nuclear issue.… Source

2 (all emphasis added — and, by the way, an indicator of the sad state of affairs in general that it is necessary to have to say what is bolded here):

…A new white paper prepared by a group of former US ambassadors and progressive foreign policy experts urges the Obama administration not to succumb to hawks pushing an unduly harsh and counterproductive stance regarding Iran. At issue is how to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. In clear reference to Iraq invasion (remember those elusive WMDs Saddam was supposedly stockpiling?), the Iran Nuclear Policy Group warns, “publicly assuming the worst in the absence of evidence–and issuing an ultimatum based on that assumption–is a singularly bad idea.” Source

The Bad:
1)

Late on Friday, the Obama Justice Department filed an astonishing document with a San Francisco court. Seeking the dismissal of Jewel v. National Security Agency, a suit brought by persons who had been subjected to warrantless—and thus presumably unlawful—intercepts by the National Security Agency, the Justice Department advanced two arguments. First, it fully embraced the discredited Bush Administration view that by claiming “state secrets” it could simply terminate the lawsuit. This is a position that Senators Obama and Biden both criticized and members of their campaign insisted would never be asserted by an Obama Administration. That promise has now been repeatedly broken. Still more pernicious was a second argument. Directly contradicting the assurances of the legislation’s sponsors that suits against the government could proceed undisturbed, the Obama Justice Department argues that FISA amendments giving immunity to the telecom service providers accidentally granted “sovereign immunity” to the government, shielding it from suits by Americans in American courts.

[snip]

…These claims ring hollow. The real threat that the Justice Department seeks to combat is a citizenry that is increasingly angered by a national intelligence apparatus that ignores the law. We need a government that fears its citizenry, and not a citizenry that lives in fear of its government. Source

The Ugly:
1 (emphasis added, and possibly the most chilling – and, regretably, accurate – statement encountered in a long, long time):

“To hide relevant and exculpatory evidence from counsel and from the court under any circumstances, particularly here where there is no other means to discover this information and where the stakes are so very high . . . is fundamentally unjust, outrageous and will not be tolerated,” [Judge Emmett] Sullivan said, according to a transcript of the hearing.

“How can this court have any confidence whatsoever in the United States government to comply with its obligations and to be truthful to the court?”

[snip]

“I’m not going to continue to tolerate indefinite delay on the part of the United States government,” Sullivan said. “I mean this Guantanamo issue is a travesty . . . a horror story . . . and I’m not going to buy into an extended indefinite delay of this man’s stay at Guantanamo.” Source

2 (emphasis added):

When Sgt. X went to see [Army psychologist Douglas] McNinch with a tape recorder, he was concerned that something was amiss with his diagnosis. He wanted to find out why the psychologist had told the medical evaluation board that handles disability payments that Sgt. X did not, in fact, have PTSD, but instead an “anxiety disorder,” which could substantially lower the amount of benefits he would receive if the Army discharged him for a disability. The recorder in Sgt. X’s pocket captured McNinch in a moment of candor. (Listen to a segment of the recording here.)

“OK,” McNinch told Sgt. X. “I will tell you something confidentially that I would have to deny if it were ever public. Not only myself, but all the clinicians up here are being pressured to not diagnose PTSD and diagnose anxiety disorder NOS [instead].” McNinch told him that Army medical boards were “kick[ing] back” his diagnoses of PTSD, saying soldiers had not seen enough trauma to have “serious PTSD issues.”

“Unfortunately,” McNinch told Sgt. X, “yours has not been the only case … I and other [doctors] are under a lot of pressure to not diagnose PTSD. It’s not fair. I think it’s a horrible way to treat soldiers, but unfortunately, you know, now the V.A. is jumping on board, saying, ‘Well, these people don’t have PTSD,’ and stuff like that.”

[snip]

McNinch added that he also received pressure not to properly diagnose traumatic brain injury, Sgt. X’s other medical problem. “When I got there I was told I was overdiagnosing brain injuries and now everybody is finding out that, yes, there are brain injuries,” he recalled. McNinch said he argued, “‘What are we going to do about treatment?’ And they said, ‘Oh, we are just counting people. We don’t plan on treating them.’” McNinch replied, “‘You are bringing a generation of brain-damaged individuals back here. You have got to get a game plan together for this public health crisis.’” Source

The Other:
1)

With this publication, taxpayers can take stock of how the federal government spent each 2008 income tax dollar: 37.3 cents went towards military-related spending (military and military-related debt), while environment, energy and science-related spending split 2.8 cents.… Source

Make it. so. Passing the committee is now the first obastacle passed. Still too many more to go, but this is vitally required legislation (even in a watered down version) to set the playing field for consumers on more level ground.

In a blow to financial firms, the U.S. Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday signed off on legislation that seeks to ban abusive credit-card practices.

While consumer groups and key Democrats lauded the committee’s move, the 12-to-11 vote in favor of the controversial bill was very narrow. Thus, the committee’s chairman, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.), said he would work with lawmakers–both Democratic and Republican–to modify the bill and broaden support before the bill hits the Senate floor.

[snip]

The bill seeks to prohibit card issuers from unfairly raising interest rates. It would prohibit applying rate increases retroactively to existing balances and it seeks to boost consumer disclosures. Additionally, it seeks to limit certain over-the-limit fees and interest charges and creates new requirements for card issuers looking to extend credit to youngsters under the age of 21. The amended bill would also make it easier for gift-card recipients to use the cards.

[snip]

Still, one key Democrat joined Republicans to vote against the credit-card proposal. Sen. Tim Johnson (D., S.D.), said in a statement that the legislation “goes too far in prohibiting lenders from adjusting prices to account for increased risk.”…

[snip]

“The American Bankers Association is very disappointed by the action today of the Senate Banking Committee,” the bank group said in a statement after the committee vote. “We have deep concerns that the legislation passed by the committee will harm consumers and the economy at the very time our country can least afford it.”

At the same time, the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act, or CARD Act, is strongly backed by consumer groups such as the Consumer Federation of America and Consumers Union. Source

Gee, what might prompt a Congressperson from South Dakota to vote nay regarding reining in bank and credit cards, pray tell? (That’s a rhetorical question — see the link.)

The most efficient time to change course of the ship of state is when one has control of the helm.

Over objections from the U.S. intelligence community, the White House is moving to declassify—and publicly release—three internal memos that will lay out, for the first time, details of the “enhanced” interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration for use against “high value” Qaeda detainees. The memos, written by Justice Department lawyers in May 2005, provide the legal rationale for waterboarding, head slapping and other rough tactics used by the CIA. [“rough tactics,” even as a euphemism, is a decidedly milquetoasty and diluted defining construct — voxd] One senior Obama official, who like others interviewed for this story requested anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity, said the memos were “ugly” and could embarrass the CIA. Other officials predicted they would fuel demands for a “truth commission” on torture.

Because of an executive order signed by President Obama on Jan. 22 banning such aggressive tactics, deputies to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. concluded there was no longer any reason to keep the interrogation memos classified. But current and former intel officials pushed back, arguing that any public release might still compromise “sources and methods.”… Source

Do it.

Especially do it before becoming subsumed in the groupthink of entrenched bureaucracy. Whether it causes embarrassment or ruffles feathers are irrelevant considerations. Agencies or their officials operating devoid of informed critique or restraint by that very nature operate outside the framework of the governmental system. Such shrouded policies and methods carried out under our name are either defensible under the rule of law and the Constitution or they are not. Being indefensible is no rationale for sweeping them under the rug.

---

FYI (and, if an actual reversal and when assiduously followed through, much more than symbolic — a reaffirmation of leadership and partnership in the company of nation-states):

The White House is set to reverse a key Bush administration policy by allowing some of the 240 remaining Guantánamo Bay inmates to be resettled on American soil.

The US is pushing for Europe to take a share of released inmates, but the Obama administration is reconciled to taking some of them, even though there will be noisy resistance from individual states.

Washington has told European officials that once a review of the Guantánamo cases is completed, the US will almost certainly allow some inmates to resettle on the mainland.

George Bush’s refusal to countenance a resettlement programme on US soil contributed to European reluctance to play host to freed prisoners.

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Some of those to be released can return to their own homelands, but there are many others who cannot, such as the Chinese Uighurs who would face the risk of a death sentence.

A European diplomat said today the change of course in Washington would make it easier to persuade her government to take part in an international resettlement plan. “It changes the whole tone,” she said. Source