OLBERMANN: And it also tries to pick it, as you suggest, and leave it for posterity as something that went up the chain rather than down. Yet, in the "Vanity Fair" thing, there's a story about September 2002; there are three visitors to Gitmo, Cheney's counsel, David Adington, Rumsfeld's counsel, Jim Haines, Alberto Gonzales, who at that point was still Bush's counsel. They discussed the interrogation techniques, then they watched them being employed, and one of the attorneys in Gitmo, Diane Beaver (ph) said, they left this clear to do-here's the quote-"whatever needed to be done." That was a green light from the top." That's it, a green light from the very top.
TURLEY: Right. It is really amazing, because Congress, including the Democrats, have avoided any type of investigation into torture, because they do not want to deal with the fact that the president ordered war crimes. But evidence keeps on coming out. The only thing we don't have is a group picture with a detainee attached to electrical wires. Every time we see more evidence; we have more and more high ranking people at the scene of this crime. What you get from this is that this was a premeditated and carefully orchestrated torture program. Not torture, but a torture program."
Let's examine some other of his "Straight Talk Express" statements.
The article "McCain's fiscal program is either a joke or a fantasy." at http://www.slate.com/id/2187570/ states "John McCain, fresh from a whirlwind tour aimed at demonstrating his foreign-policy credentials, took a somewhat different approach. There's an emerging theme surrounding his campaign: The problem with the last eight years isn't that the Bush administration had the wrong policies or was incompetent. No, the problem is that it lacked intensity. Which is why McCain is bent on offering a more concentrated, sustained, high-energy form of Bushism. Bush has been adamant about staying in Iraq until the end of his presidency; McCain is adamant about staying up to 100 years, if necessary. Bush has taken to carefully cherry-picking facts and metrics (the number of soccer games visible from the air, to cite one) to construct a narrative on how well things are going there. (I bet there weren't many soccer matches in Sadr City today.) McCain prefers simple declarations to data points: "We're winning. I don't care what people say. I've seen the facts on the ground."
Big bro 43 was never a republican. He sponsored a robber baron form of capitalism.
McCain's views makes his views regarding the economy as vile as torture view.
The above article continues "The same holds true for the economy. By virtue of his history as a deficit hawk, a foe of earmarks, and an opponent of the Bush tax cuts-not to mention the presence of reality-based advisers like Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office-McCain deserves some benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, the brains behind the economic operation seems to be former Sen. Phil Gramm, the Texas A&M economist-turned-senator who confidently forecast in 1993 that the Clinton program of spending cuts and tax increases on the wealthy would be "a one-way ticket to recession." And the sections on McCain's Web site about domestic policy reveal, as Matt Yglesias noted, "a nearly astounding level of vacuity."
Reading McCain's economic agenda and listening to his speech, it appears that the problem with the last eight years is that we haven't seen enough tax breaks for the wealthy, that economic royalism hasn't been pursued with sufficient vigor, and that the middle and working classes haven't been stiffed sufficiently."
If you aren't in the top 1% you're screwed!
The article continues "McCain wants to extend the Bush tax cuts, which he once opposed as a needless sop to the rich in a time of war. (I await David Brooks' inevitable explanation of how opposing taxes in a time of war in 2001 and 2003, when deficits were low, but supporting them in 2011, in a time of war and high deficits, is deeply moral and admirable.) But McCain wants to see Bush's tax relief and raise it some. McCain would slash the corporate-income-tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent (because corporate profits as a percentage of GDP didn't spike enough this decade?), and he'd abolish the Alternative Minimum Tax, which would be a welcome move for many upper-middle-class taxpayers. "In all, his tax-cutting proposals could cost about $400 billion a year, according to estimates of the impact of different tax cuts by CBO and the McCain campaign," the Wall Street Journal reported. And how to make up for the lost revenues? Hmmm. McCain promises to cut earmarks; to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse; and to reduce the projected growth of Medicare; but he won't provide many numbers."
For McCain the fat cats will just get fatter and he follows the typical GOP plan of loosening regulations which means these corrupt ghouls will leech every last cent out of the bottom 99% they can.
The article continues "Straight talk? No doubt. At a time of rampant economic insecurity and low consumer confidence, at the end of a business cycle in which median incomes didn't rise and the percentage of working people with health insurance fell, McCain won't succumb to the easy temptation of saying that government policy can help improve the situation. But smart politics? I wonder. What's left of the Republican Party is becoming increasingly downscale, and many swing states have been ravaged by the housing crisis (Nevada, Florida) and globalization (Ohio, Michigan). Besides, he's already got the let-them-eat-cake vote sewed up."
There is some controversy as to whether Marie Antoinette uttered the "let-them-eat-cake" phrase or not because it ushered in the beginning of the French Revolution and ended in Marie Antoinette being executed by guillotine in 1793. McCain will get his surrogates to retract portions of his evil fiscal policy. Of course that will mean McCain will be flip-flopping again.
The article "Economic Slump Underlines Concerns About McCain Advisers" at click here makes the salient point that the people McCain leaps upon for help in his economic policies-remember he stated he didn't understand our economy, aren't people we want. It states "One of them helped deregulate the financial services industries in the 1990s, and now sits in the corporate suites of Swiss banking giant UBS, which yesterday announced $19 billion in investment losses tied to the crumbling U.S. real estate market.
The other pushed one of the most aggressive and controversial mergers of the technology boom, then was sacked by the disenchanted board of Hewlett-Packard. Former senator Phil Gramm, with his aw-shucks Texas drawl, may at first blush have little in common with Carly Fiorina, the telegenic former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard. But they share a bond: Both are leading economic advisers of Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the presumptive Republican nominee for president, and both have reputations as the kind of aggressive capitalists that may be sliding from favor as the nation's economy edges toward recession.
Democratic opponents are already plotting attacks on two advocates of what Robert Reich, a former Clinton labor secretary, described as "dog eat dog capitalism," an economic philosophy that works well when the economy is on the upswing but may not play so well in a trough."
Winston is an ex-Social Worker, burnt out by too much indifference regading our weak and weary who had too little interest in politics until the illegal Iraq War started.
81 % of Americans say we are headed in the wrong direction
The primaries are turning out 2 , 3 times as many Dem's, as Repub's, and yet we have MSM news polls trying to make us believe that at of 45% of people polled will vote for McCain.....another Republican after the damage and destruction that this Republican White House with a rubber stamp Republican Congress has brought us..are the people in this country really that stupid..or are we being "set up" again, for the Republican theft (with the Supreme Courts help, again!) of the Presidency..and what will we do about it (if it happens, again) this time...? Pee our pants in protest?
by
Susan Nelsen (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 250 comments)
on Sunday, April 6, 2008 at 6:50:38 PM
