AP Newsbreak: SC gov ‘crossed lines’ with women Washington Post The Associated Press June 30, 2009 South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford declared his Argentine mistress his soul mate Tuesday but said he is committed to reconciling with his wife in hopes of saving his family and what is left of his political career. Sanford, who […]
The judge sentence Madoff to 150 years in prison for his white collar crime. What do you think the punishment should be for Cheney, Addington, Yoo, Bradbury and the others for their terrible crimes against humanity? The media still doesn’t seem to want to shine a spotlight on the repulsive treatment of prisoners we are […]
In an action movie, why are the "bad guys" so bad? They don’t care about others and mostly seem driven by evil intentions. "Good guys," however, are just plain constitutionally good. In either case, these movie characters aren’t like real people – people with complex, ambivalent, multifaceted motivational systems. Sure enough, there are people like […]
Madoff Sentenced To Maximum 150 Years In Jail Washington Post June 29, 2009 " Your Honor, I cannot offer you an excuse for my behavior. How do you excuse betraying thousands of investors who entrusted me with their life savings? How do you excuse deceiving 200 employees who have spent most of their working life […]
Last summer, an old friend said to me, "America will never elect a black President." I’ve thought about that a lot since then. He was obviously wrong, and his reason for saying it wasn’t just a political observation, it was a reflection of his Republican classist ways of seeing America. But it has stuck with […]
The last entry on Sanford’s web-site is his announcement of the "media availability" Wednesday [yes, that one]. I reckon his staff isn’t keen on cataloging much of his recent press. But I started looking for things from before – what the guy stood for. Without listing the various things I ran across, I left with […]
In the end, it always comes down to individuals – like, for example, Osama bin Laden. In the books [Angler and The Dark Side], it’s very clear that David Addington, Dick Cheney, and the walk-on, John Yoo, also determined the fate of thousands of people in multiple countries – many of whom never heard of […]
The first high value detainee of the War on Terror, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, was captured by the Pakistanis when he tried to cross the border. He was a paramilitary trainer in the Al Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan and personally knew Osama bin Laden. After being captured, he was initially successfully interrogated by the F.B.I., […]
The reason I’m musing about tabloid drivel, Mark Sanford and the naked Mayor, is that it’s hard to gather my thoughts. I just finished Barton Gellman’s Angler, and I’m a third of the way through Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side. After four plus years of following these stories like a soap opera junkie, the reality […]