Puffin’s Place

If you missed Obama’s speech to Congress last night, I am posting a video of it below. It appears to this listener that he balanced the uncivil and morose Republicans in the audience with some of the best Obama-isms possible. Now let’s see if he will “call out” the fear mongers and the liars. Let’s [...]

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The current flogging of the torture issue may very well drive this blogger to a scream: the loathsome and without scruples Dick Cheney says such treatment called forth city-saving intelligence. Others argue that other, legal means would have had equal success.
And both side fog endlessly about who bears the ultimate responsibility: those who carry out [...]

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Well, well, Mr. Bush is pursuing a new law to make the world safe for the pious: the conscience law by which various up-close and way-distant members of the health care team can refuse such meds, procedures, and permissions as they individually may find repugnant.
The christians are whooping and carrolling in glee:
The rule, supported by [...]

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After Bailout, AIG Executives Head to Resort
UPDATED: 11:31 a.m.
Less than a week after the federal government offered an $85 billion bailout to insurance giant AIG, the company held a week-long retreat for its executives at the luxury St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, Calif., running up a tab of $440,000, Rep. Henry [...]

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Most of us have read reports of the impact of the torture-ready Fox tv show 24 on the Administration’s reframing of interrogation guidelines and the rise of Jack Bauer among the fantasist policy makers in the Bush White House..
A recent (August 4, 2008) issue of Newsweek develops this scenario:
According to British lawyer and writer [Philippe] [...]

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It often seems that the issues that most galvanize Americans are those that involve legislating someone else’s behavior. My state of North Carolina has ruled that all state school system locations will be entirely smoke-free. Most states tell cyclists what they must wear on their heads. Some states still outlaw anal sex. The current Feds [...]

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All of the hullabaloo about Michele and Barack Obama might remind us that being among the elite is no bad thing to be. Especially when the label is applied by others.
For reasons transparently envious, the Obamas are constant targets of the unfunny (cf Joel Stein’s strained efforts to write standup in a recent LA Times [...]

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Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) joined Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and 25 other Democrats in voting against the bill. (Today’s Washington Post.)
Obama voted for the amendment and then, when the amendment failed, for the bill.
Go figger.

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The upcoming release of some of the grand jury documents for the Rosenberg case is one good reason to visit the National Security Archive, one of the FOIA petitioners in this case.
The site, housed at George Washington University in DC, includes an astonishing number of documents. Want to know more about September 11, 2001 backstage? [...]

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Reprinted at the request of moveon.org:
“No matter what happens in Iraq, the Bush administration and John McCain always have an answer: 6 more months.
“When the ’surge’ began a year ago, they told America things would get better by September. In September, they said we’d know more by spring. And this week, General Petraeus is on [...]

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