The Trauma of 9/11 Is No Excuse Washington Post Op-Ed By Richard A. Clarke May 31, 2009 Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense… I have little sympathy for this argument… Cheney’s admission […]
Kansas Abortion Doctor Slain at Church By Scott Butterworth Washington Post May 31, 2009 George Tiller, perhaps the most prominent of the handful of doctors in the United States who perform late-term abortions, was shot and killed at his Wichita, Kan., church this morning, authorities said. Police arrested a suspect in the slaying several hours […]
Who Is to Blame for the Next Attack? The New York Times by Frank Rich 05/31/2009 The Beltway antics that greeted the great Cheney-Obama torture debate were an unsettling return to the post-9/11 dynamic that landed America in Iraq. Once again Cheney and his cohort were using lies and fear to try to gain political […]
Horton confirms reports that unreleased torture photos show rape and sexual assault. This week, the Daily Telegraph reported that the torture photos President Obama recently decided to withhold from the public depict “rape and sexual abuse.” The Pentagon denied the report, saying, “None of the photos in question depict the images that are described in […]
Larisa Alexandrova [At-Largely, Raw Story] has a few photos that might come from the "secret" ones – Photos Obama won’t release include images of rape…(warning, graphic). I know warnings to not look fall on dead ears, but I’m actually sorry I looked at them. It’s the kind of "bad apple" stuff that Cheney is still […]
Conservative Federalist Society Can Expect Its Status to Shrink By Robert Barnes Washington Post November 21, 2008 Last year, there was a candlelight dinner at sold-out, shut-down Union Station to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Federalist Society, with President Bush on stage and three Supreme Court justices in the audience. This year, it’s "welcome […]
Senate Republicans Won’t Fight Sotomayor Open Left by: Chris Bowers May 27, 2009 It looks like the Sotomayor nomination fight is over before it began: Top Senate Republican strategists tell POLITICO that, barring unknown facts about Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the GOP plans no scorched-earth opposition to her confirmation as a Supreme Court justice. More than […]
emptywheel‘s coblogger, bmaz, has a post up about what "Nancy Pelosi, Jane Harman, Jay Rockefeller, Bob Graham, or any Congressmember that had knowledge, [could] have done about the wrongs of the Bush Cheney Administration, even in relation to national security level topics." It hinges on two things: a clause in the Constitution about Senators and […]
Some 50 years ago, there was a flurry of writing in the psychoanalytic literature about the uniquely human process we call empathy. All of the writings distinguished empathy from sympathy, the latter implying a positive connection with the plight of another person. empathy, on the other hand, is about experiencing something of the emotional life […]