Smiff is onto something?

Well, either he or Dick "Dick" (Dick) Dick...

Feeling grumpy 'is good for you'

Though the bright sunny days of San Diego seem to negate that somewhat...

They warned us!

AIG employee quits at 'betrayal'

The mass exodus of those who would "save" "AIG" has begun. They won't get their bonuses, so they're outta dere. Taking with them their expertise in er, um, ah, I'll get back to you on that one.

Spoken like the piece of shit, degenerate sadistic old man, war criminal that he IS

A TREMENDOUS @SSH@LE UNTIL THE VERY END...

Cheney says Guantanamo should stay open, waterboarding OK

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The Guantanamo 'war on terror' detention center should remain open indefinitely, Vice President Richard Cheney told ABC News in an interview Monday, while also defending the harsh interrogation method known as waterboarding.

Cheney was asked when the detention camp at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba can be "responsibly" be shut down. "Well, I think that that would come with the end of the war on terror," he told ABC.

And when is that? "Well, nobody knows," Cheney said. "Nobody can specify that."

In previous wars the United States has "always exercised the right to capture the enemy and then hold them till the end of the conflict. That's what we did in World War II with, you know, thousands, hundreds of thousands of German prisoners," Cheney said.

"The same basic principle ought to apply here in terms of our right to capture the enemy and hold them.

The other option, Cheney said, "is to turn them over to somebody else. A lot of them, nobody wants. I mean, there's a great resistance sometimes in the home countries to taking these people back into their own territory."

According to Cheney, some 30 detainees who were released from Guantanamo "ended up back on the battlefield again, and we've encountered them a second time around. But they've either been killed or captured in further conflicts with our forces."

Cheney also said he helped authorize interrogation methods used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an Al-Qaeda operative detained in Pakistan and sent to Guantanamo who has confessed to being a top planner of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States.

Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to a forced interrogation method that simulates drowning known as waterboarding.

"I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do," Cheney said.

"And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it," Cheney said.

ABC asked him if in hindsight he thought the tactics went too far. "I don't," Cheney said.

The Cheney interview is to air on ABC late Monday and early Tuesday, the network said, as it released an advanced transcript of the questions and answers~

The System Works (cont'd)

The gap between rich and poor in the United States has widened exponentially over the past three decades. The Congressional Budget Office reports that since 1979, the average income for the bottom half of American households has grown by 6 percent. In contrast, the top 1 percent of earners have seen their incomes shoot up by a 229 percent during that same period. Under the Bush administration, the average income of most Americans has fallen, but the average income of top wage earners (those above the 95 percentile range) has increased from $324,427 in 2001 to $385,805 in 2006. Only one other year has seen a comparable income gap: 1928, the year before the Great Depression.

dudes... if you're not a puppet, why is Cheney's fist so far up your @ss he can wiggle your arms?

Iraqis bristle as U.S. opens world's largest embassy

BAGHDAD — For the average American who will never see it, the new US Embassy in Baghdad may be little more than the Big Dig of the Tigris.

Like the infamous Boston highway project, the embassy is a mammoth development that is overbudget, overdue, and casts a whiff of corruption.

For many Iraqis, though, the sand-and-ochre-colored compound peering out across the city from a reedy stretch of riverfront within the fortified Green Zone is an unsettling symbol both of what they have become in the five years since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and of what they have yet to achieve.

"It is a symbol of occupation for the Iraqi people, that is all," says Anouar, a Baghdad graduate student who thought it was risk enough to give her first name. 'We see the size of this embassy and we think we will be part of the American plan for our country and our region for many, many years."

The 104-acre, 21-building enclave - the largest US Embassy in the world, similar in size to Vatican City in Rome - is often described as a "castle" by Iraqis, but more in the sense of the forbidden and dominating than of the alluring and liberating.

k-mad not just getting over it

In 1971, when the Times printed excerpts of the Pentagon Papers on its front page, it precipitated a constitutional showdown with the Nixon Administration over the deception and lies that sold the war in Vietnam. The Pentagon Papers issue dominated the news media back then. Today, however, Barstow's stunning report is being ignored by the most important news media in America -- TV news -- the source where most Americans, unfortunately, get most of their information...

Joseph Goebbels, eat your heart out. Goebbels is history's most notorious war propagandist, but even he could not have invented a smoother PR vehicle for selling and maintaining media and public support for a war: embed trusted "independent" military experts into the TV newsroom...

so not shocking it's shocking how not shocking it is

WASHINGTON -- Yesterday, the New York Times exposed a secret Pentagon effort to spread favorable views of the war by recruiting and planting military analysts in the nation's news media. These pundits became fixtures of war coverage on most major network, cable, radio and print news outlets without disclosing their considerable conflicts of interest in their own work as consultants, lobbyists and contractors for military interests.

propping up Iran's newest ally

BAGHDAD — In the Iraqi government’s fight to subdue the Shiite militia of Moktada al-Sadr in the southern city of Basra, perhaps nothing reveals the complexities of the Iraq conflict more starkly than this: Iran and the United States find themselves on the same side.

supporting the troops (Cheney-style) (cont'd)

That Other Military Draft

Thousands of Navy and Air Force personnel are now serving non-traditional roles in Iraq -- posts they never signed up for. Steven, who asked I not use his last name in print, said he's to receive six weeks of weapons training at a California Army base before being flown over to Iraq for a year-long deployment.