Among the unbelievable stories that appear on our front pages, this one takes the cake. Ahmed Chalabi was the guy with all the very wrong Iraqi Intelligence who Cheney and friends were going to set up to run Iraq after we invaded. It turns out that we destroyed the Baathist and Hussein for him. Now […]
Inquiry into missing e-mails written by Bush lawyers is demanded Washington Post By Carrie Johnson February 26, 2010 Senior Democrats and watchdog groups demanded Friday that the Justice Department investigate the disappearance of e-mail messages by Bush lawyers who drafted memos blessing harsh interrogation tactics, saying their absence cast doubt on an ethics report that […]
Some lines deserve repeating. In the Opening Ceremony, Slam Poet Shane Koyczan was dazzling with his poem, "We are More." This morning, he was on the Today Show while I was making coffee. It was a poem about what the Olympics had been, and it had this great line: The future just ain’t what it […]
The Torture Lawyers New York Times February 24, 2010 Is this really the state of ethics in the American legal profession? Government lawyers who abused their offices to give the president license to get away with torture did nothing that merits a review by the bar? A five-year inquiry by the Justice Department’s ethics watchdogs […]
Whistleblower resists Nobel Nomination DispatchOnlineFebruary 25, 2010 ISRAEL’S nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu has asked for his name be removed from the list of candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize. But his name would stay on the list – and he had little chance of winning anyway, the institute’s head, Geir Lundestad, said. Lundestad said Vanunu […]
Internal WellPoint e-mails reveal company increased premiums to maintain higher profits ThinkProgress By Igor Volsky February 24, 2010 Today, during a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee, Reps. Bart Stupak [D-MI] and Henry Waxman [D-CA] questioned WellPoint CEO Angela Braly about the company’s proposed rate increases in California’s individual health insurance market. […]
After my rambling post yesterday about the insanity of the Middle East, I survived our unwanted cold snap watching the Olympics. But on the side of my mind, I kept thinking about Israel and Iran. Why are they in an arms race? Israel doesn’t want to conquer Iran. Iran doesn’t want to conquer Israel. What […]
One of my more thoughtful teachers once was discussing the relationship between cognition [thought] and emotions. I think the topic was Schizophrenia – an illness where there is a "schism" between the two. He said something like, "We like to think that our thoughts result in emotions. That’s backwards. Our thoughts are driven by our […]
I went looking for the Israeli response to the the bad press on the Mabhouh assassination. I didn’t find it in the expected places – the Israeli papers. But there it was in the Wall Street Journal – written by an Israeli political scientist who has authored a number of similar articles [I’m beginning the […]
I seem to be a single story blogger these days. I’ve been curious about Meir Dagan, Isreal’s spy chief since reading this in an earlier piece: The tone of his directorship is set by a photograph on the wall of his modest office in the Tel Aviv headquarters. It shows an old Jew standing on […]