Gone Now Hare This.  Foxy by Proxy originally posted July 19, 2011.

Thank goodness for Baseball.

Because they tape early Jon (D.L. Hughley) and Stephen (Donald Sadoway) will be mercifully free from actual debate coverage.  If even that is a mite too much there is always…

The Hypnotoad

"Television is a vast wasteland"

• ABC Family– Practical Magic
• AMC– Halloween, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
• Bravo– Real Housewives (premier)
• Discovery– American Chopper, Fast ‘n Loud (premiers)
• ESPN– Monday Night Football, Lions @ Bears
• FX– Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Easy A
• History– American Pickers, Pawn Stars
• Lifetime– The Preacher’s Daughter, Walking the Halls
• Vs.– XXX Olympics (Women’s & Men’s Diving)
• Spike– Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (x 2)
• Style– Spanglish
• Sci Fi– From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money
• TBS– Family Guy
• Turner Classic– Woman of the Year, Without Love
• TLC– Breaking Amish (2 x premiers)
• TNT– The Mentalist (x 2)
• Travel– Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations (premier)
• USA– Monday Night RAW

Or you can watch a different kind of professional wrestling where the results are fixed.

This debate is back to the 10 minute segment, 2 for each candidate, 6 minutes of freestyle all the Very Serious Progressives agreed that Jim Lehrer did a bad job at because Obama lost.  My attitude is that if principles and fairness don’t matter more that personality worship and the jingoistic triumph of the tribe you can hardly claim to be very ‘progressive’ at all, let alone serious.

Most likely it will be a contest to see who can pander the most to Benjamin Netanyahu who is not to be confused with the State of Israel or the Jewish people.  Part of that is practicing anti-Muslim bigotry which is why Muslims like us so much.

Well, that and the fact that we keep stealing from them and killing their families and friends which are always sympathetic qualities calculated to influence hearts and minds.

As I said in Kill List it’s not really a question about them.  Just as with W you may be excused for not understanding initially who you were voting for and what their policies actually are.

After 4 years you have no excuse.

The question you have to answer for yourself is this one-

What will it take?  How many innocents will have to die before you can no longer ignore the corpses?

Are you a ‘Good German’ or not?

There are vast differences, vast I tell you!  At least the trains run on time!

Do they?

The group that consistently cares more about the deficit are, simply put, rich people. They don’t want their hard-earned massive tax cuts to get clawed back because the deficit gets so high that they can no longer use the “job creator” charade to shield themselves. So they obsess about the deficit, as a means to cut anything but their tax cuts. That’s the game. And the rich spend tens of millions to make that a reality, shaping opinions in Washington. The Democrats have sought to become the party of austerity in many ways to curry favor to a political class that demands so-called “fiscal responsibility.” But in reality, without our large deficit, we would not even have the recovery we have, a recovery that has outpaced the rest of the world, particularly in Europe, where they are mired in far more damaging austerity.

I confess that I find myself far more interested and invested in Sports Futures than I am in anything that’s likely to be said or done in Florida tonight.

This is an Open Thread.

What do you know, this one stuck.  Originally posted July 15, 2011.

Lon Cheney– The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) (1:48)

A ‘silent’ movie close captioned for the hearing impaired?  Why yes, yes it is.

There’s no denying that it’s getting on toward Halloween time and I’ve already shown you some pretty ‘scary’ movies-

• Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari
• Der Golem: wie er in die Welt kam
• The Phantom of the Opera

Here’s one I’ve been holding for the appropriate moment.

F. W. Murnau– Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie Des Grauens (1922) (1:24)

I have always believed that a man can fairly be judged by the standards and taste of his choices in matters of high-level plagiarism.- Stockton

A sequel of sorts to What Will It Take?

Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will

By JO BECKER and SCOTT SHANE, The New York Times

Published: May 29, 2012

WASHINGTON – This was the enemy, served up in the latest chart from the intelligence agencies: 15 Qaeda suspects in Yemen with Western ties. The mug shots and brief biographies resembled a high school yearbook layout. Several were Americans. Two were teenagers, including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years.

…

“How old are these people?” he asked, according to two officials present. “If they are starting to use children,” he said of Al Qaeda, “we are moving into a whole different phase.”

…

Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war.

…

It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.

This secret “nominations” process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia.

…

One early test involved Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. The case was problematic on two fronts, according to interviews with both administration and Pakistani sources.

The C.I.A. worried that Mr. Mehsud, whose group then mainly targeted the Pakistan government, did not meet the Obama administration’s criteria for targeted killing: he was not an imminent threat to the United States. But Pakistani officials wanted him dead, and the American drone program rested on their tacit approval. The issue was resolved after the president and his advisers found that he represented a threat, if not to the homeland, to American personnel in Pakistan.

Then, in August 2009, the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, told Mr. Brennan that the agency had Mr. Mehsud in its sights. But taking out the Pakistani Taliban leader, Mr. Panetta warned, did not meet Mr. Obama’s standard of “near certainty” of no innocents being killed. In fact, a strike would certainly result in such deaths: he was with his wife at his in-laws’ home.

…

The very first strike under his watch in Yemen, on Dec. 17, 2009, offered a stark example of the difficulties of operating in what General Jones described as an “embryonic theater that we weren’t really familiar with.”

It killed not only its intended target, but also two neighboring families, and left behind a trail of cluster bombs that subsequently killed more innocents. It was hardly the kind of precise operation that Mr. Obama favored. Videos of children’s bodies and angry tribesmen holding up American missile parts flooded You Tube, fueling a ferocious backlash that Yemeni officials said bolstered Al Qaeda.

…

In Pakistan, Mr. Obama had approved not only “personality” strikes aimed at named, high-value terrorists, but “signature” strikes that targeted training camps and suspicious compounds in areas controlled by militants.

…

Mr. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director and now an adviser to Mr. Obama’s Republican challenger, Mr. Romney, commended the president’s aggressive counterterrorism record, which he said had a “Nixon to China” quality. But, he said, “secrecy has its costs” and Mr. Obama should open the strike strategy up to public scrutiny.

“This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, and that’s not sustainable,” Mr. Hayden said. “I have lived the life of someone taking action on the basis of secret O.L.C. memos, and it ain’t a good life. Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a D.O.J. safe.”

The remarkable, unfathomable ignorance of Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian

Friday 19 October 2012 20.38 EDT

On 29 May 2012, the New York Times published a remarkable 6,000-word story on its front page about what it termed President Obama’s “kill list”. It detailed the president’s personal role in deciding which individuals will end up being targeted for assassination by the CIA based on Obama’s secret, unchecked decree that they are “terrorists” and deserve to die.

Based on interviews with “three dozen of his current and former advisers”, the Times’ Jo Becker and Scott Shane provided extraordinary detail about Obama’s actions, including how he “por[es] over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre ‘baseball cards'” and how he “insist[s] on approving every new name on an expanding ‘kill list'”. At a weekly White House meeting dubbed “Terror Tuesdays”, Obama then decides who will die without a whiff of due process, transparency or oversight. It was this process that resulted in the death of US citizen Anwar Awlaki in Yemen, and then two weeks later, the killing of his 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, by drone.

The Times “kill list” story made a huge impact and was widely discussed and condemned by media figures, politicians, analysts, and commentators. Among other outlets, the New York Times itself harshly editorialized against Obama’s program in an editorial entitled “Too Much Power For a President”, denouncing the revelations as “very troubling” and argued: “No one in that position should be able to unilaterally order the killing of American citizens or foreigners located far from a battlefield – depriving Americans of their due-process rights – without the consent of someone outside his political inner circle.”

That Obama has a “kill list” has been known since January, 2010, and has been widely reported and discussed in every major American newspaper since April 2010. A major controversy over chronic White House leaks often featured complaints about this article (New York Times, 5 June 2012: “Senators to Open Inquiry Into ‘Kill List’ and Iran Security Leaks”). The Attorney General, Eric Holder, gave a major speech defending it.

But Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic Congresswoman from Florida and the Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, does not know about any of this. She has never heard of any of it. She has managed to remain completely ignorant about the fact that President Obama has asserted and exercised the power to secretly place human beings, including US citizens, on his “kill list” and then order the CIA to extinguish their lives.

…

One expects corrupt partisan loyalty from people like Wasserman Schultz, eager to excuse anything and everything a Democratic president does. That’s a total abdication of her duty as a member of Congress, but that’s par for the course. But one does not expect this level of ignorance, the ability to stay entirely unaware of one of the most extremist powers a president has claimed in US history, trumpeted on the front-page of the New York Times and virtually everywhere else.

digby says–

Somebody needs to get Debbie a subscription to the New York Times.

…

She appears to think that story isn’t public for some reason. Or is pretending that it isn’t public. And  her annoyance at the ill-mannered hippie asking her “inappropriate” questions outside the approved 2012 campaign topics is palpable. She looks completely ridiculous.

Via Greenwald who is, unsurprisingly, appalled. He thinks she really has never heard of the kill list.  I suppose that’s possible. Which is even more appalling.

Ignorant or lying?

Stupid or evil?

Who cares about Debbie Wasserman Schultz digby?  The question is to you.

What will it take?  How many innocents will have to die before you and the rest of the ‘Good Germans’ can no longer ignore the corpses?

Just days after taking office, the president got word that the first strike under his administration had killed a number of innocent Pakistanis. “The president was very sharp on the thing, and said, ‘I want to know how this happened,’ ” a top White House adviser recounted.

In response to his concern, the C.I.A. downsized its munitions for more pinpoint strikes. In addition, the president tightened standards, aides say: If the agency did not have a “near certainty” that a strike would result in zero civilian deaths, Mr. Obama wanted to decide personally whether to go ahead.

The president’s directive reinforced the need for caution, counterterrorism officials said, but did not significantly change the program. In part, that is because “the protection of innocent life was always a critical consideration,” said Michael V. Hayden, the last C.I.A. director under President George W. Bush.

It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization – innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.

This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s trusted adviser, said that not a single noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the “single digits” – and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants.

But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expressed disbelief that the number could be so low. The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties.

“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”

Once again I have to substitute another print and this is part of what’s frustrating about YouTube.

Another part is finding anything in particular at all.  Originally posted July 14, 2011.  Happy Bastille Day!

Binders

Atrios, Eschaton

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Jokes aside, the binders of women comment was basically the core of all of the mostly mythical affirmative action in this country. It’s about recognizing that if you’re a product of a good old white boy network, it’s a good idea to make the effort to read those binders, to make the extra effort to look at qualified women and minorities.

This isn’t a comment on what actually happened when Mitt was in office, just pointing out that if you embrace that story you embrace affirmative action, because aside from a teeny bit of minority business contracting and civil service hiring provisions, that’s what affirmative action actually means in this country.

Missing, The Heckling Hare.  This next one originally posted July 13, 2011.

Yeah, I know not everyone is as big a fan as I am but she’s also considerably left of ‘Pragmatic’ Villager opinion.

Part 1

Part 2

Not One Debate Question Last Night Touched on the Deficit

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Wednesday October 17, 2012 11:34 am

The deficit was arguably the primary point of discussion in the Jim Lehrer debate, and Martha Raddatz featured it prominently as well. Voters don’t seem to care. They’re far more interested in things directly affecting their lives, like jobs, women’s rights, immigration, gun violence, gas prices, all topics that didn’t come up previously. Heck, even foreign policy, or at least the foreign policy situation of the moment in Libya, rated more pressing a concern than actuarial projections of the federal budget 20 or 30 years down the road.

I’m not always partial to the idea of the wisdom of crowds, but in this case, the political class would do well to follow the public. Polling consistently shows that voters don’t care about the deficit, and last night’s breadth of topics showed the same.

The group that consistently cares more about the deficit are, simply put, rich people. They don’t want their hard-earned massive tax cuts to get clawed back because the deficit gets so high that they can no longer use the “job creator” charade to shield themselves. So they obsess about the deficit, as a means to cut anything but their tax cuts. That’s the game. And the rich spend tens of millions to make that a reality, shaping opinions in Washington. The Democrats have sought to become the party of austerity in many ways to curry favor to a political class that demands so-called “fiscal responsibility.” But in reality, without our large deficit, we would not even have the recovery we have, a recovery that has outpaced the rest of the world, particularly in Europe, where they are mired in far more damaging austerity.

The more politicians realize that the public does not share the concern of the Beltway establishment on the deficit, the better off they – and the rest of us – will be.

Aoooooooow.  Originally posted here July 11, 2011.