Doctor of Goodfeels: Wayne Holt

Verse
by Dee Newman

Our brilliant, gifted and good friend, Wayne,
Though endowed with a sizeable brain,
Has lived a life of a student,
Frugal, but certainly not prudent,
In fact, rather wickedly profane.

With a vision, astute but askew,
Clearly quite different than me or you,
Lost in a realm of his own
From another time and zone,
A genius, without a clue,

Obliviously insensible,
With a wit, incomprehensible,
Crude, sardonic and crass,
Often leaving us aghast,
Yet, endearingly defensible.

He has lived a simple life, infused
With the thought that things can be reused.
With a carbon-footprint so small
It’s hardly evident at all,
Surely, his excesses can be excused.

So, we’re here, at last, to celebrate
Our friend finishing his doctorate.
Since it took him quite awhile,
You may think he’s a bit senile,
But it’s just that he’s always been late
And a bit of a degenerate.

Bank of America Should Fire CEO Ken Lewis

Kenneth D. Lewis was named "Banker of the Year" in 2001 and in 2008. In 2007, he was listed as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the world by Time Magazine.

While CEO of Bank of America in 2007, Mr. Lewis earned a total compensation of $20,404,009, including a base salary of $1,500,000 and a cash bonus of $4,250,000.

In 2008, he earned a total compensation of $9,003,467, which included a base salary of $1,500,000, plus stocks and options totaling $7,228,342.

On April 29, 2009, the shareholders of Bank of America narrowly voted to remove Mr. Lewis from his position as Chairman of the Board, though they voted in favor of retaining him as president and CEO.

President Obama at the White House Correspondents Dinner Part 1 & 2

Last night at the annual black-tie White House Correspondents Dinner attended by an array of politicians, celebrities and journalists, the President poke fun at himself and his own administration, as well as, his critics and a number of Republicans.

Ridiculing his administration’s efforts to pick members of his cabinet, he joked, "No president in history has ever named three commerce secretaries this quickly."

Playing off the threat of the spread of the swine flu virus that began in Mexico, he assured the audience that though he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been political rivals, "these days, we could not be closer . . . In fact the second she got back from Mexico, she pulled me into a hug."

He also mocked both his frequent use of a teleprompter and Vice President Joe Biden's tendency to speak off the cuff.

Though, they may have wished otherwise, the Republican Party did not escape the President’s humor. He told the gathering that former Vice President Dick Cheney could not make the dinner because he was writing his memoir, "How to shoot friends and interrogate people."



Addressing directly Republican National Committee Chairman, Michael Steele, who was in the audience, he said, "Michael for the last time, the Republican Party does not qualify for a bailout. Rush Limbaugh does not count as a troubled asset . . ."

Turning serious, he praised journalists for holding government officials accountable and asserted, "A government without newspapers, a government without a tough and vibrant media of all sorts is not an option for the United States of America.”

Jason Mraz: "I'm Yours"

The NYT Finally Prints "Torture"

by Andrew Sullivan






Here we have it in broad daylight: the New York Times' cowardice in the face of its own government. In an obit today, the editors manage to use the word "torture". It's in an obit. The obit runs:

Col. Harold E. Fischer Jr., an American fighter pilot who was routinely tortured in a Chinese prison during and after the Korean War, becoming — along with three other American airmen held at the same prison — a symbol and victim of cold war tension, died in Las Vegas on April 30. He was 83 and lived in Las Vegas. The cause was complications of back surgery, his son Kurt said.

From April 1953 through May 1955, Colonel Fischer — then an Air Force captain — was held at a prison outside Mukden, Manchuria. For most of that time, he was kept in a dark, damp cell with no bed and no opening except a slot in the door through which a bowl of food could be pushed. Much of the time he was handcuffed. Hour after hour, a high-frequency whistle pierced the air.

After a short mock trial in Beijing on May 24, 1955, Captain Fischer and the other pilots — Lt. Col. Edwin L. Heller, First Lt. Lyle W. Cameron and First Lt. Roland W. Parks — were found guilty of violating Chinese territory by flying across the border while on missions over North Korea. Under duress, Captain Fischer had falsely confessed to participating in germ warfare.

You will notice how the NYT defines torture when it comes to foreign governments - isolation, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation. Much milder than anything the US did to one of its own citizens, Jose Padilla. But the parallel is almost perfect: these are, after all, the exact Chinese Communist techniques that were reverse engineered from the SERE program. So you have a perfect demonstration of the NYT's double-standard. If Chinese do it to Americans, it's torture; if Americans do it to an American, it's "harsh interrogation." Does Jill Abramson really expect us to take this lying down?

You will also notice the quality of the intelligence procured through methods milder than the Bush administration's:

“He wanted me to admit that I had been ordered to cross the Manchurian border,” Captain Fischer told Life magazine. “I was grilled day and night, over and over, week in and week out, and in the end, to get Chong and his gang off my back, I confessed to both charges. The charges, of course, were ridiculous. I never participated in germ warfare and neither did anyone else. I was never ordered to cross the Yalu. We had strict Air Force orders not to cross the border.”

“I will regret what I did in that cell the rest of my life,” the captain continued. “But let me say this: it was not really me — not Harold E. Fischer Jr. — who signed that paper. It was a mentality reduced to putty.”

Dick Cheney believes that a "mentality reduced to putty" is the best source of reliable intelligence; that methods designed to give you false confessions should be the basis for national security assessments.

The NYT's incoherence and double standards, equally, are self-evident. But I would like to know if Bill Keller will remove the t-word from this obit and replace it with "harsh interrogations" as he does when referring to the US government's use of identical techniques. If not, why not? Remember: these people won't even use the word torture to describe a technique displayed in the Cambodian museum of torture to commemmorate the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge - as long as Americans do the torturing.

I mean: the NYT isn't just a vehicle for US propaganda, is it? It's a newspaper, right? It has standards that it maintains across its copy. Right?

A Cheney Cover-Up?

Someone in the White House tried to deep-six Philip Zelikow's anti-torture memo. Welcome to the latest Bush-era whodunit.
by Nick Baumann and David Corn | Mother Jones

Who in the George W. Bush White House tried to shred a memo challenging the use of torture?

On April 21, Philip Zelikow, who was counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the Bush administration, revealed on Foreign Policy's "Shadow Government" blog that he wrote a memo in 2005 disputing the conclusions of Bush Justice Department lawyers that torture was legal. The existence of such a memo was a surprise. But Zelikow also disclosed that the "White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo."

This story is not over. Zelikow tells Mother Jones that he doesn't know for sure who in the White House ordered the suppression of his memo, but he says that his "supposition at the time" was that the office of Vice President Dick Cheney was behind the cover-up. In an email exchange with Mother Jones, Zelikow notes that Cheney's office did not have the authority to request that his memo be deep-sixed: "They didn't run the interagency process. Such a request would more likely have come from the White House Counsel's office or from NSC staff." But that request did not reach him in written form. "It was conveyed to me, and I ignored it," Zelikow recalls. But he suspected that Team Cheney was probably behind it.

Zelikow, who is scheduled to testify before a Senate judiciary subcommittee on Tuesday Wednesday, also notes that his memo was not the only one raising questions about the administration's legal rationale supporting so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques": "There were a number of papers, mainly arguing for alternative legal frameworks." But his memo, he adds, was "a more direct assault on [the Bush Justice Department's] own interpretation of American law."

(UPDATE: The Senate judiciary subcommittee just formally announced the testimony, which will be on Wednesday, not Tuesday, as earlier reports had indicated.)

Congressional Democrats are already seeking any surviving copies of Zelikow's memo. They might now also want to request these other papers. (No such documents have been declassified or released so far.)

Cheney's office was reportedly the hub of the Bush administration's torture program. And Neil Kinkopf, a law professor at Georgia State University, who served in the Clinton administration's Office of Legal Counsel, notes, "People in the White House—Dick Cheney for example; David Addington, his legal adviser—didn't want the existence of dissent to be known. It's not hard to imagine David Addington playing very hardball internal politics and not only wanting to prevail over the view of Zelikow but to annihilate it. It would be perfectly consistent with how he operated."

Zelikow, who ran the 9/11 Commission before joining the State Department, wrote in his original blog post that he believed the administration had failed to erase the evidence of his dissent: "I expect that one or two [copies of the memo] are still at least in the State Department's archives." And four top congressional Democrats on Monday wrote Secretary of State Hillary Clinton [PDF] and Adrienne Thomas, the acting national archivist [PDF], requesting surviving copies of the Zelikow memo.

In their letter to Clinton, the Democrats—Reps. John Conyers, Howard Berman, Jerry Nadler, and Bill Delahunt—ask for a search of the archives that Zelikow believes may contain his memo. But the Dems' letter to the archivist requests more. In that letter, Conyers and the others request the Zelikow memo along with "[c]opies of any 'documentary materials'" that "mention or refer to" the Zelikow memorandum or "are related to or reflect any effort by an official of the Bush Administration to collect, destroy, or impede the preservation or retention of this memorandum." In other words, they are looking for evidence of who attempted to bury Zelikow's opposing view.

This could even have legal implications. Federal law—including the Presidential Records Act—requires that the White House adhere to strict record-keeping standards. If a White House official tried to disappear an inconvenient memo, he or she might have committed a crime. Concerning the Presidential Records Act, the Bush administration never was a stickler. If millions of emails can disappear, what's one memo?

The Dems want to get Zelikow's allegations of a cover-up on the record and under oath, and they will. In his email to Mother Jones, Zelikow says that when he testifies next week he plans to "go through a brief chronology of the various arguments for changing the administration position." But since Zelikow doesn't appear to know who attempted to smother his memo, congressional Democrats may have to do some legwork—which could include questioning various Bush White House officials—to solve this latest Bush-era mystery.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission

After watching the video go to: Take Action: Support a Truth & Reconciliation Commission and sign the the petition.

Media Matters: Fox News: Fair and Balanced?

I received the following from Media Matters:

Fox News continues to make a mockery of its "Fair & Balanced" slogan.

Over the past two weeks alone, we have documented multiple instances of Fox News airing video clips of progressives that were cropped in a way that blatantly misrepresented their original statements.

For example, on the May 1 edition of The O'Reilly Factor, guest host Laura Ingraham presented clips of Al Gore's April 24 congressional testimony to suggest that Gore has profited from his environmental advocacy. The clips had been edited to remove his statements that he donates all of the money he makes from climate-related work to a nonprofit organization that seeks to solve the climate crisis.

Far from being a solitary instance, Fox's distortive editing is evidence of a larger pattern at the network. The same night Ingraham smeared Gore, Fox aired a report by congressional correspondent Major Garrett that purported to give "a description" of how President Obama's nominee to replace Justice Souter on the Supreme Court "will interpret the law." Garrett proceeded to air a statement by the president expressing how he views empathy as a quality he would like to see in a justice. Garrett then claimed that this sentiment "aggravates those who believe justices should follow the Constitution and legislative intent." But Garrett cropped out the very next sentence of Obama's speech, when he stated that he will "seek somebody who is dedicated to the rule of law, who honors our constitutional traditions, who respects the integrity of the judicial process and the appropriate limits of the judicial role."

Watch the video, then email Fox News and let them know we deserve the unedited truth, not manufactured smears.



Dating back to 2006, we have documented numerous examples of Fox News airing deceptively edited footage of President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, former President Bill Clinton, Rep. Barney Frank, and several Democratic senators.

These smears stand in stark contrast to basic journalistic ethics. Fox News is doing its viewers a disservice by providing them with blatant misinformation that blurs the line separating news and legitimate commentary from political activism and demagoguery.