Prairie Recommends: The Torture Thirteen

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Marcy Wheeler/emptywheel has compiled a comprehensive index to the most reprehensible of the Bush-Cheney Administration's torture team leaders. You can read about it over at salon.com

And diarist cbl2 over at firedoglake's Oxdown Gazette gives a milepost Jaw Dropping: to a further detailed torture resource from Batocchio blogging as Vagabond Scholar.

With so much information "out there" and being indexed and compiled by the blogging community, you'd think the media elites of Teh Inbred Village of DeeCee would be all over this story. Instead, the dismissive-sniffery of the Usual Suspects [aka gasbag pundits and their ilk] have decried the blogs.

So now that MoDo's been caught cribbin' from Josh Marshall and his Talking Points Memo, maybe there's only one thing to say: it's a start....
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UPDATE: Froomkin adds another perspective to counter the torture apologists' ticking time bomb bamboozlement--call it the I-think-therefore-I-am-a-god complex most recently exemplified by the ridiculous and offensive torture lovefest of Chris Matthews and Donny Deutsch.
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crossposted at firedoglake's Oxdown Gazette: Blogosphere Chipping Away at Torture Apologists

Torture Truth Will Out

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There's been a great hue—look away! and cry—look forward! among the media P-class. Pundits and politicians alike doing their best to deny, avert their eyes, hide their noses behind their lavender-soaked hankies lest they breathe the stench of the T-word.

But maybe this time it won't work. Just as the rightwing teaparties were ultimately a great colossal failure in large part because the media stopped being compliant megaphones for the FOX/con propaganda machine, so too can we stop the momentum of see-no-evil hear-no-evil which makes-us-evil, if we seize the opportunity to make right what was done so very wrong in our name.

We're seeing right here in the progressive blogosphere that the chorus of voices calling for reason and accountability are building. For plain old common sense. Time to use that common sense for the common good.

Mistakes were made. Legal opinions were followed. It all rings pretty hollow, now doesn't it.

Better we lance this gangrenous infection of the body politic now lest it destroy us all. My grandparents emigrated from Germany in their youth, and their son, my father, fought with his fellow Marines against the tyrants in World War II. I am as mindful of their legacy as I am of my young grandson who will inherit the results of how we act these days. Never let it be said, in their name, that I shirked from standing against tyranny in this land they and I love so much.

Even for the deniers of history, the ignorers of history, one thing remains...truth will out. Sooner. Or later.

Please, join in: Sign the petition telling Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate torture here.

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crossposted at firedoglake's Oxdown Gazette

Fair? Balanced? That's Teabag

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Just in case we didn't already know the un-fair and im-balance is far bigger than FOX,

what digby said.
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Unprotected Sex with Merrill Lynch

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Tom Friedman on the Imus Show this morning called the election situation in Israel a complete, bloody mess.

'course that phrase pretty much sums up what the Obama Administration has inherited, as well, in both foreign policy and the state of the economy.

And poor ol' Tom, he's reduced to staying home from the cocktail circuit with his head in his hands, dithering over whether to put his paycheck in Citibank or under the mattress.

At least he's got a paycheck.

Friedman tells us: be afraid, be very afraid. This is a national emergency we're in and people are acting as if it's business as usual....I find the grandstanding and partisan bickering appalling.

Well there we agree.

And as Friedman notes, the worst of it is, when contemplating the "banksters" who testified yesterday, they're a bunch of dopes. Bank of America, he says, was going along fine and then had unprotected sex with Merrill Lynch and the rails came off.

Friedman's solution is getting the heart that runs America pumping again, and that's the banking credit system.

So now what?

Friedman's willing to give Obama six months, a year to work through this current mess. Because, as he notes, this is not a test. This is real.

There's a whole lot of hysteria percolating right beneath the surface all over the place these days, as Friedman's commentary shows.

I take heart from looking at the totality of what the Obama Administration has already done. Obama promised his team would hit the ground running, and they have. Appalling last minute Bush directives have been overturned. A cabinet has been assembled.

Sure, if you listened to the dinosaur media, you'd think the only thing going on is the stimulus package and whether Drug-Rush will rule Republicanville.

But if you step back and take a deep breath, you'll see the same strategic thinking that sustained and grew the Obama campaign is now up and running in Washington.

And that's a good thing.
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UPDATE: Maybe part of the problem is the 5 percent factor.

"I Will NOT Be Ignored...."

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Start the water boiling...here comes the press with the bunnies. Listening to the old guard media blathering on and on about the "distraction" of Blago and why don't the Obama team just spill their guts, one can only shake one's head.

The distraction is the creature of anachronistic media's effort to gin up a scandal. Hey, did you hear that Chris Matthews was seen entering a certain building in Washington DC that Elliot Spitzer has also entered? "Some say" that's fodder for hours of cable speculation....

Look, for all the dancin' around the issue, the fact is that Fitzgerald has said that no one on the Obama team is under scrutiny for the matter of Blagojevich's alleged effort to sell the Senate seat or whatever else Fitzgerald may be investigating Blago for.

What's going on here, asks Tweety?

Scandalmongering. That's what's going on here.

For ratings points. And sad to say, even Shieffer's not immune, with his "what if" Sunday morning. In these dire times, furthering the RNC's talking points isn't going to cut it anymore.

Spare us.

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crossposted at firedoglake's Oxdown Gazette

Media in Vapid Vapors Mode

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Watching the "journalists" on MSNBC immediately after Obama's latest, virtually daily, press conference in Chicago one can only wonder, what are they thinking?

Let's see, they're whining because they don't get to ask interminable question after interminable question about Blago, which Obama has clearly stated he cannot and will not discuss at the request of the U.S. Attorney. After the U.S. Attorney himself, at his press conference, said there were no persons on the Obama team under any scrutiny by his office.

Mark Whitaker pontificates about the role of the press—a role he and his colleagues apparently developed an eight-year amnesia about during the Dumbya years.

All in all a painful exercise in watching the likes of David Schuster, Chuck Todd, Jonathan Alter (the lone voice of reason I heard, as he pointed out the press has been staking out Rahm Emanuel's home of late) and the aforementioned Whitaker as they wrung their hands trying to make controversy and innuendo out of a typically "no-drama" grown-up press conference.

Albeit a short one. As each of the other nearly daily press conferences have been. Short, to the point, fact-based, not what-iffy—you know...what we voted for.

So grow up, "journalists"—you wallowed in W the last eight years and the onus is not on the president-elect these days. He's doing his job. The polling numbers show the public knows he is.

Now how about you do yours? There's still tons of unfinished business over at 1600 and the current administration. What about covering that?

Prairie's Reading: Media Scandalmongering is Back

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Atrios posted this milemarker to Media Matters deconstruction of the return of media scandalmongering. Take a moment to re-visit the '90s and the Usual Suspects of breathless bloviating, and then take a look around. They're still here.

And then give this Newsweek commentary a look. Obama has been the reformer. Those who scramble to paint him otherwise, with word or innuendo, this time, must suffer the fate of fools. And that means all of us must hold them, and ourselves, to a higher standard.

So as the bloviating ratchets up about Blagojevich's "ties" to Obama...just remember. We've been here before.

Blair Which Project?

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It started small enough. The Obamas asked about moving into Blair House earlier than the usual five days before Inauguration, so that they could have as easy a transition as possible for their young daughters' schooling.

But no, said the White House, no can do.

Seems that Blair House is all booked up before the fifteenth of January.

By whom?

No foreign dignitaries, according to the State Department.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Could it be that Team BushCo decided to turn Blair House into its official fundraising headquarters after seeing the uproar over the Clintons and the Lincoln Bedroom?

Will we ever know?

'cause the way the corporate media are shedding "journalists" these days, you have to wonder if there's anyone left to do actual ol' gumshoe reporting. If they were actually so inclined to tear themselves away from the desperate effort to somehow tie Barack Obama to Blagojevich's corruption.

Of course, the media stenos have given Team BushCo a pass for the last eight years. Why would they start doing actual reporting now?

I must remember to ask Dancin' Dave about that one....

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crossposted at firedoglake's Oxdown Gazette