How Unpatriotic!

When I’m wrong, I say so.  Now I’m a staunch Democrat, but that would not excuse blindness.  When my party is wrong, it’s my duty as a patriot to say so.  My party could not be more wrong on this one.

In the wake of congressional Democrats' reauthorization and extension of the USA Patriot Act, few elected Democrats have been as vocal about the post-9/11 security measures as they were during the Bush administration.

Leave it to stalwart House progressive Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) to raise a rallying cry against what he called America's love of its fears.

“This legislation extends three problematic provisions of the PATRIOT Act and, at the same time, leaves some of the most egregious provisions in place, absent any meaningful reform and debate," he declared in a media advisory.

The specific provisions he cited are the Patriot Act's powers to conduct roving wiretaps, conduct surveillance of people not thought to have any association with terrorism and tap into your personal records, such as library accounts.

The extensions were approved by Congress and sent to President Obama on Thursday, several days before the Patriot Act's most nefarious portions were set to expire. President Obama had yet to sign the bill at time of this writing.

The Associated Press called the votes a "political victory for Republicans."

Some Senate Democrats did attempt to propose some modifications to the legislation that would have allowed for greater oversight, but they were ignored. Democratic leadership bowed to the wishes of Republicans and conducted a voice vote on Wednesday, upon which the one-year extension was passed. The House voted 315-97 in favor on Thursday.

"Thrown away were restrictions and greater scrutiny on the government's authority to spy on Americans and seize their records," AP added.

"While I strongly support using the most robust tools possible to go after terrorists, Congress must revise and narrow -- not extend -- Bush era policies," said Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-CA), according to Reuters.

Kucinich's scorn for the legislation was even more pronounced.

"Despite years of documentation evidencing abuse of these provisions during the Bush Administration, the Department of Justice has failed to hold Bush Administration officials accountable for illegal domestic spying by barring any lawsuits to be brought against those officials," he said. "Months into this Administration, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had 'intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits,' and that the practice was 'significant and systematic.' Passage of this legislation today continues to make Congress complicit in these violations of our basic constitutional rights."

The title of his press release pleaded for congress to "repeal" the Patriot Act and "restore Constitutional rights to Americans."

"As Members of Congress sworn to protect the rights and civil liberties afforded to us by the Constitution, we have a responsibility to exercise our oversight powers fully, and significantly reform the PATRIOT Act, ensuring that the privacy and civil liberties of all Americans are fully protected," he said. "More than eight years after the passage of the PATRIOT Act, we have failed to do so. As National Journal correspondent Shane Harris recently put it, we have witnessed the rise of an 'American Surveillance State.' We have come to love our fears more than we love our freedoms."

The USA Patriot Act was passed by Congress in the weeks proceeding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Many Democrats criticized its passage as too hasty, with some even claiming they did not have a chance to read the hefty legislation before the vote. At the time, the Republican majority did not question it, falling in line to support the legislation seemingly regardless of what the Bush administration put in it... [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Raw Story>

I think that Democrats feared giving national security ammunition to the GOP.  I think their rationale is that Obama id far less likely to abuse the power than a GOP President.  I think they are right.  However, if America should ever be cursed with another Republican President, this power will be turned against us with a vengeance.  Given the current makeup of the Extreme Court, the Patriot Act’s unconstitutional provisions would be ignored.  For the Democrats not to repeal those provisions was an act of cowardice.

GOP Sweetheart – 2/25/2010: John Yoo

The sicker he gets, the more the Republicans love him.

Fresh off a news cycle that saw him define executive power as bestowing the president the right to massacre whole villages, notorious torture lawyer John Yoo has published a new piece in the Wall Street Journal, boldly titled “My Gift to the Obama Presidency.” [Murdoch delinked]

“Barack Obama may not realize it,” he writes, “but I may have just helped save his presidency.”

How? By winning a drawn-out fight to protect his powers as commander in chief to wage war and keep Americans safe.

Stunning megalomania aside, it is an eerie thing for John Yoo to declare victory of any kind. Reading his op-ed is a little like listening to Emperor Palpatine crow that Luke Skywalker’s journey to the Dark Side is nearly complete. (”Welcome, young Skywalker. I have been expecting you … “)

Yoo begins by describing Obama’s sad devotion to the rule of law as a newly-inaugurated wet-behind-the-ears president.

“In office only one day,” he writes, “Mr. Obama ordered the shuttering of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, followed later by the announcement that he would bring terrorists to an Illinois prison.”

What follows is a brisk re-cap of what he sees as Obama’s most grievous moments as Commander-in-Chief:

He terminated the Central Intelligence Agency’s ability to use “enhanced interrogations techniques” to question al Qaeda operatives. He stayed the military trial, approved by Congress, of al Qaeda leaders. He ultimately decided to transfer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of the 9/11 attacks, to a civilian court in New York City, and automatically treated Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, as a criminal suspect (not an illegal enemy combatant). Nothing better could have symbolized the new president’s determination to take us back to a Sept. 10, 2001, approach to terrorism.

It’s a veritable runaway train of right-wing talking points and, frankly, it merits no rebuttal...

Inserted from <Alternet>

Only a true GOP sweetheart could be party to gathering bogus intelligence, violating the Geneva Convention, committing war crimes, and making the US an international pariah, while calling it a GIFT!!

Keith Olbermann Takes on ChickenHawk Cheney's Lies

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson joins Keith to expose the extent of the lies Dead Eye used in his bogus attempts to justify his torture program.

 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Now I ask you this.  Were it not for evil government run health care, Cheney would be dead.  If a proven war criminal deserves such benefits, don’t the rest of us?

Beyond the OPR Report

I did not cover the horrid OPR report, absolving GOP war criminals Yoo and Bybee, because I had already covered its contents when it was leaked last month.

Daphne Eviatar has prepared an excellent article on why the OCR report should not be the end of this matter.

The New York Times this morning writes that the Justice Department's ethics report on the work of the lawyers who approved Bush administration's torture of detainees "brings to a close a pivotal chapter in the debate over the legal limits of the Bush administration's fight against terrorism and whether its treatment of Qaeda prisoners amounted to torture."

The Washington Post says the report represents "the end of a 5-year internal battle" at the Justice Department.

In fact, the Office of Professional Responsibility report is just the beginning of a bigger and more important battle. Legal ethics investigators concluded that former Office of Legal Counsel lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee committed "professional misconduct" in advising the Bush administration that it was not against the law to torture, humiliate and abuse detainees despite longstanding domestic and international prohibitions against doing so. The battle now will be over whether the U.S. government will meet its obligations to thoroughly investigate what happened and hold the perpetrators accountable.

The final OPR report chastises the two OLC lawyers for reaching bizarre legal conclusions that were wholly unsupported by the law. For example, one of their memos claimed that torture was legal so long as an interrogator's goal was to obtain information rather than to inflict severe pain or suffering - even if he knew he would inflict severe pain or suffering in the process. As one OLC lawyer commented on the memo at the time: "The way it reads now makes you wonder whether this is just an anti-sadism statute."

Meanwhile, the memo's now-infamous definition of "severe pain" as necessarily "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death" not only relied on an irrelevant medical benefits statute for its definition, which the OPR report calls "illogical," but actually misquoted the language of that statute so as "to add further support to their 'aggressive' interpretation of the torture statute," the OPR report concludes. Ultimately, the definition could lead an interrogator to believe, the OPR found, "that pain could be inflicted as long as no injury resulted." It's the "leave no marks" theory of torture.

The list of twisted and inexplicable legal conclusions is long and impressive. In another instance, the lawyers relied on extremely narrow interpretations of the international Convention Against Torture proposed by the Reagan administration that the U.S. had never adopted. And they completely ignored far more relevant sources of law on torture, such as federal court cases interpreting the Torture Victims Protection Act, which found torture had occurred in situations far less severe than the brutal interrogation techniques being contemplated in these memos. In one case, for example, a federal court held that imprisonment for five days under bad conditions while being threatened with bodily harm, interrogated and held at gunpoint amounted to torture.

David Margolis, the Deputy Associate Attorney General ultimately overrode the recommendations of the ethics office to refer the lawyers to state bar associations for disciplinary proceedings, because he decided that the OLC's standards for referral were unclear. But the report of the investigators who actually read and analyzed the memos that authorized such brutal conduct as "waterboarding" (controlled drowning), slamming prisoners' heads repeatedly against a wall ("walling"), weeks of sleep deprivation, stress positions, and confinement in a cramped box with insects provides an astonishing look at how the lawyers tasked with providing objective legal advice to the White House on its most sensitive policies completely contorted ordinary logic and legal reasoning to reach the conclusions desired.

Justice Department lawyer Patrick Philbin at one point asked John Yoo why he included a wholly unsubstantiated section in one of the memos that concluded that the president of the United States, as commander in chief, can completely ignore any law he wanted - such as the prohibition against torture. Yoo said it was in the memo because "they want it in there" -- "they" presumably being whoever had requested the opinion. The memo never explained how the prohibition against torture could be construed in any reasonable way so as to conflict with the president's authority as commander in chief.

Whether John Yoo and Jay Bybee face professional sanctions (that's now up to their respective state bars) is far less important than whether we get to the bottom of what really happened at the Bush White House: who ordered these lawyers to come up with legal reasoning to justify torture? The OPR report suggests that David Addington, Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, played a significant role. Who was he getting his orders from?

The OPR report is just another piece of the slowly-emerging puzzle of how the country plunged into what Dick Cheney has aptly called "the Dark Side," abandoning its most basic belief in human dignity and the rule of law to zealously combat terrorism in a way that's ultimately backfired; we're now less safe, and mired in a vicious and protracted war.

In concluding that Yoo and Bybee exercised "poor judgment" rather than "professional misconduct", Margolis emphasizes that "his decision should not be viewed as an endorsement of the legal work that underlies these memoranda," which he notes were "seriously flawed" and represent "an unfortunate chapter in the history of the Office of Legal Counsel." In Yoo's case, his conclusions represented a "loyalty to his own ideology and convictions" which "clouded his view of his obligations to his client" and led him to author opinions reflecting "extreme" views of executive power.

Yoo was among the very small group of lawyers entrusted to write these opinions for the White House because he was already known to hold these extreme opinions. That he ignored or contorted opposing views should not have come as a surprise to his employers; that's what he'd been doing all along as an academic.

It's clear from the report, too, that that's what Yoo was expected to do. As John Bellinger, the Bush administration's legal advisor to the State Department told OPR: "Yoo was 'under pretty significant pressure to come up with an answer that would justify [the program]' and that, over time, there was significant pressure on the Department to conclude that the program was legal and could be continued, even after changes in the law in 2005 and 2006."

Some of those memos were also being demanded under very tight time frames to justify particular interrogations.

So who asked Yoo and Bybee to write these memos, and what exactly were the instructions given? Were they pressured to reach a particular conclusion and provide a "golden shield" for illegal conduct that the White House had already chosen to undertake? The report points out that the OPR investigators were not able to access most of John Yoo's e-mail messages from the time period: "most of Yoo's e-mail records had been deleted and were not recoverable." Why did Yoo delete those messages, and what did they say?... [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Huffington Post>

I have little to add.  This must not end here.

The Afghanistan Story

On November 5, I posted this article as part of Blog Blast for Peace.  I am reposting it today, because they are featuring this article as I learned in the following email:

I wish the world could recognize today the sound of all our voices - crying for peace.
I applaud your entry for BlogBlast For Peace on November 5, 2009. I learned and was reminded of a great deal in this post. I am just now getting around to all the entries....reading them carefully.
One thing is certain: Bloggers and journalists in 50 countries have spoken in record numbers and continue to speak.
When will they listen?
You are #1640 in the official peace globe gallery found here. http://blogblastforpeace.com/
It will post February 19, 2010 and will be linked back to this post.
Welcome to the peace globe movement. I am reminded to keep going and let the people speak.
You spoke eloquently.
I appreciate your time and effort, Tomcat.
Mimi Lenox

Thank you, Mimi.  Contributing my small part was an honor.
Before I begin, I wish to give credit to a rather remarkable woman on Facebook named Mimi Lenox.   She started a Facebook “cause” which has become quite successful, Blog Blast for Peace.  It is an annual event every November 5, and this article is my contribution to that cause.
Before long, President Barack Obama will have to commit himself on a way to proceed in the Afghanistan War.  It struck me that most Americans know little or nothing about that nation, because that’s not how the MSM covers news.  Most major networks cover only the sensational.  The one that does try to do a small amount of education does so only because they are the propaganda arm of the Republican party.  Education based on lies is not helpful.  So to assist you, here’s my take on the subject.
Afghanistan occupies an area between the middle east and the Indian sub continent.  It is peopled by at least a dozen separate ethnic groups including Baluch, Chahar Aimak, Turkmen, Hazara, Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek, Nuristani, Arab, Kirghiz, Pashai and Persian.  The Pashtun are the largest and represent about half the population.  The Tajik represent about one fourth of the population.  While there are small religious communities from other faiths, Islam is the country’s principle religion, brought there by Arabs in the eighth and ninth centuries.  Before that, Afghanistan was often occupied but seldom ruled by the Persians, Greeks, and Sassanians.  The Mongols ruled there from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries.  Next Afghanistan was caught between two warring empires, the Mughal of India and the Safavid of Iran.  Both concentrated on destroying the region’s population and resources to deny it to each other.
In 1747, Ahmad Shah, a Pashtun, unified and expanded the country well beyond it’s present borders.  After his death Afghanistan entered a period of civil war.  In the nineteenth century, Afghanistan became a bone of contention between the British Empire and Czarist Russia.  It became a British protectorate until 1919.  Following the Russian Revolution, Afghanistan revolted with Soviet help.  Britain agreed to Afghanistan's independence, but secretly organized a coup by King Zahir Shaw.  He ruled as a complete dictator until ke was overthrown in 1973 by family members who declared a Republic.  Dahoud became President, supported by the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan, a pro Moscow party.  The PDPA overthrew Dahoud in 1978.  Moscow, not pleased with the progress of “reforms”.  They invaded in 1979 and turned the government over to Karmal.
Following the Soviet invasion, the USA provided aid and weapons to the Mujahedeen.  The CIA, under Reagan and the GOP,  paid $30 million to Osama bin Laden to organize a network of terrorists and unleash them against the USSR.  In 1989 the Soviets withdrew.  The US had a perfect opportunity to help build the nation and use the goodwill we had developed.  But with the Soviets gone, GHW Bush and the GOP had no interest.  The country remained in a state of chaos until the ISI, Pakistani Intelligence, aided a new religious group, the Taliban, who stabilized the country over the next ten years.  In the meantime, Osama bin Laden had turned against the US, because he objected to US forces being stationed in his Saudi homeland during and after the First Gulf War.
To the north, a vast reserve of natural gas was discovered in Turkmenistan.  Allowed to develop without interference, it would become part of the Russian Gazprom network.  But Big Energy in the US had other ideas.  Unocal planned a pipeline between the Caspian Sea in Turkmenistan and Karachi in Pakistan on the Gulf of Oman, cutting Russia out of the loop.  The route ran across Afghanistan, right through the enclave being used by bin Laden for his training camps.  So Unocal, backed by the Carlisle Group, a hedge fund whose most active participants are the Saudi Royal family and the Bush family, for the Taliban to agree to an election, to give the Taliban an aura of legitimacy, and a deal to build the pipeline.  The Taliban would not agree to an election.  Women’s rights groups got wind of the negotiations and objected in support of Afghan women and Clinton refused to invade as Unocal requested, so Unocal backed off and began negotiations with the Northern Alliance.  In 2,000 the pipeline was back on the table, because a stolen election in the US put the GOP back in power under GW Bush.  He threatened the Taliban to either turn over bin Laden or face military consequences.  Bin Laden launched his own preemptive strike to hit the US before we could get him.  That strike was the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon on 9/11/2001.  The rest is history.  The US invaded Afghanistan and installed a Unocal employee, Hamid Karzai to head our puppet government there.
Had we started nation building at that time, we still had an opportunity to stabilize Afghanistan, but GW “Chicken Hawk” Bush, Dick “5 deferment” Cheney, and Donald “I got Saddam his first chemical weapons” Rumsfeld were focused on attacking Iraq, in a failed attempt to control their oil and establish permanent military bases there.
In the meantime, Afghanistan has divided into two camps: a small, thoroughly corrupt, urban elite that controls the large cities and a much more populous, decentralized rural majority that hates the elite minority and the foreign powers whose backing keeps that minority in power.
So this is the mess Obama inherited.  The Afghan people have good cause to distrust foreigners, developed over centuries, and thanks to GOP duplicity from three different administrations, they have ample cause to hate Americans.  As much as I would love to see Afghanistan brought into the 21st Century, and Afghan women given the human rights they deserve, our troops are the wrong nationality in the wrong place at the wrong time to accomplish that goal.
Unfortunately, we have commitments with several allies to be there, so we cannot arbitrarily withdraw and leave them holding the bag, but the time has come to negotiate a withdrawal with those allies and work with the UN to alter the mandate backing our presence there.  Our men and women in uniform are far too precious to spend their blood on a war that we will not win.

Corporate Death Squads Coming Home to Roost

As Latin America moves to free their people from US corporate slavery, corporate crimes are finding their way to court.

A federal judge recently refused to dismiss a civil suit filed against Chiquita which charges that the company paid leftist (FARC) guerrillas operating near its plantations in Columbia -- during a period when the FARC killed four American missionaries, according to CNN.

The company's position -- which it has held consistently since it voluntarily disclosed the payments to the Department of Justice -- has been that both left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries forced the company in an extortionate manner to make the payments "to protect the lives of its employees."

But that's become an increasingly untenable position -- especially since some of the same paramilitaries who took the payments have come in from the cold, disarming and submitting to Columbia's "Justice and Peace" process -- which allows them to receive reduced jail time for confessing to all of their terrorist crimes. The problem for Chiquita -- and now for Dole (and potentially for Del Monte) -- is that the confessions reveal a much different story.

One of the ex-paramilitaries -- Jose Gregorio Mangones Lugo (aka "Carlos Tijeras") -- was the former commander of the William Rivas Front of the United Defense Forces ("AUC") -- the group that operated in northern Columbia, in the zone where the companies and their suppliers grew bananas. In a sworn statement Tijeras described the AUC's relationship with the multinational banana companies as "an open public relationship" involving everything from "security services" to the kidnapping and extrajudicial assassination of labor leaders fingered by the companies as "security problems."

Tijeras' statement -- which reads like the confessions of a corporate death squad leader and directly refutes his paymasters' version of events -- has now been entered into the record in a case filed against Dole last April in California by attorneys with Conrad and Scherer:

"I've been told that Chiquita has asserted that they paid the AUC funds, but that this was coerced and was a form of extortion. I have also heard that Dole claims to have never paid us any funds. Both of these assertions are absolutely false. In fact, my agreement with Chiquita and Dole was to provide them with total security and other services."

Tijeras is not a lone whistleblower by any means. Salvatore Mancuso, the overall commander of the AUC, also testified in early 2008 that Dole and Del Monte, like Chiquita, had been providing major support to the AUC since its inception. He repeated the accusation to "60 Minutes," which originally aired the segment in September, 2008.

According to these and other witnesses as well as investigators familiar with the bloody history of Columbia, the AUC was originally hired by the companies to drive the leftist FARC guerillas out of the banana-growing region and protect their plantations from "the gangs of common delinquents that robbed their supplies and equipment." (Tijeras) Once the FARC was vanquished and order restored, the banana companies continued to pay the AUC to "pacify" their work force, suppress the labor unions and terrorize peasant squatters seeking their own competing land claims.

Tijeras: "After we restored order and became the local agents of law enforcement, managers for Chiquita and Dole plantations relied upon us to respond to their complaints...We would also get calls from the Chiquita and Dole plantations identifying specific people as "security problems" or just "problems." Everyone knew that this meant we were to execute the identified person. In most cases those executed were union leaders or members or individuals seeking to hold or reclaim land that Dole or Chiquita wanted for banana cultivation, and the Dole or Chiquita administrators would report to the AUC that these individuals were suspected guerillas or criminals."

According to Tijeras, for years the companies provided up to 90% of the AUC's income.

When a case was filed by the families and heirs of dozens of victims against Dole this past April (2009), the company immediately rejected the charges as "baseless allegations" that "are the product of the most untrustworthy sources imaginable" and "nothing more than the false confessions of convicted terrorists from Columbia, who had every motive to lie about their activities in order to minimize their jail time."

(The plaintiffs' complaint is a horrific litany of summary executions, off-the-bus abductions, forced-entry murders and kidnappings, ghoulish disappearances and other crimes committed against trade unionists and land reform activists.)… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <AlterNet>

Frankly, I hope these companies are soaked for an arm, a leg, and other body parts that shall remain unmentioned.  If ever there were a case that proves that corporations’ special status having the privileges of personhood without the responsibilities needs to be revoked.  Greed machines have no soul. Were it up to me, I would extradite the CEO, COO and CFO of each of these companies to Columbia to face trial and imprisonment there.  If that means that my three bananas a week double… triple… quadruple in cost.  So be it.

I suspect that the upshot of this will be that these corporate criminals will hire the GOP SS, aka Blackwater (now Xe) to commit their murders.

Are Americans Really This Easy to Manipulate?

With my background in public opinion polling, I knew that a poll could be influenced by how questions are worded and ordered, but the extent of this difference surprised me.

A fascinating new CBS/New York Times poll reveals that attitudes about gays and lesbians serving in the military turn on how the question is asked. It turns out that 42% of Americans oppose allowing "homosexuals" to serve openly in the military, but only 28% oppose allowing "gay men and lesbians" to serve openly. Conversely, 58% of Americans favor allowing "gay men and lesbians" to serve openly in the military, but only 42% favor allowing "homosexuals" to serve openly. Apparently, some 15% of Americans don't know that "gay men and lesbians" are "homosexuals."

It's possible, of course, that those 15% are drawing a sharp distinction between sexual orientation and sexual conduct. On this view, "gay men and lesbians" are only inclined toward homosexual conduct, whereas "homosexuals" actually "do it." But this gives the befuddled 15% more credit than they're due. The subtlety of this distinction is not captured in any common definitions of the terms, both of which are generally held to embrace both same-sex attraction and same-sex conduct.

A more logical explanation has to do with the emotional connotations of the respective terms. "Homosexual" conjures up dark visions of filthy bodily acts that arouse deeply-rooted feelings of disgust and ancient fears of Sodom and Gomorrah and hell and damnation. "Gay men and lesbians," on the other hand, increasingly reminds us of people we know -- sons and daughters, cousins and classmates, nieces and nephews, coworkers and neighbors. It would appear that 15% of Americans cannot stomach the thought of homosexuals, but can tolerate and even try to understand gays and lesbians…

…So, what's in a name? Does a rose by any other name smell as sweet? Is "colored" the same as African-American? Is "spic" the same as Hispanic, "dago" the same as Italian-American, "hymie" the same as Jew, "redskin" the same as Native-American, "mick" the same as Irish-American? Do words affect beliefs and politics?

What this poll leads me to think is that the word "homosexual," though once thought to be a neutral term like "colored" or "crippled" or "retarded," should now slip out of our responsible public discourse. For 15% of Americans -- or some forty million of us -- the very use of this word apparently triggers deeply emotional and hostile responses, responses that apparently can be softened or even avoided entirely simply by substituting the less fearsome phrase "gay men or lesbians."

When we hear religious leaders or politicians referring to "homosexuals in the military," "homosexual marriage," or "special rights for homosexuals," we must recognize what they are doing. Especially for the 15% of Americans who react so viscerally to the term "homosexual," they are trying to chew their way into the worst parts of our psyches in order to manipulate our beliefs and values and make us worse people than we really are… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Huffington Post>

I have seen LGBT folks become quite upset at the use of the term ‘homosexual’.   I admit, I lack their degree of sensitivity to the issue, as does anyone who cannot wear another’s skin.  But I had no idea that this word could cause a 15% swing public opinion.  I tried an experiment on my own.  When I googled ‘homosexual’ more of the images returned were negative, such as my bottom graphic above.  When I googled ‘gay and lesbian’ , more of the images were positive, such as my top graphic above.  I chose that graphic because it represents my own position and policy for this blog.

What really upsets me the most is that the GOP has been able to use this difference to influence Americans.  You can be sure that the difference did not come from the teabaggers.  They would oppose LGBT service regardless of terminology.  I’m equally certain that progressives would support LGBT service regardless of terminology.  Therefore the Americans the GOP are manipulating are in the middle.  These are the folks we need to educate and win over.

Lawrence O'Donnell Blasts GOP Torture Monger

Let’s give him a big ‘thank you’.

Political analyst Lawrence O'Donnell is known for his strong opinions and occasional passionate outbursts. In 2004, he repeatedly shouted down [wing-nut delinked] Swift Boat Veterans spokesman John O'Neill with cries of "liar," leading conservative blogger Michelle Malkin to describe him as "unhinged."

Now O'Donnell has repeated the performance by confronting Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush, staunch defender of "enhanced interrogation," and author of Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack.

During an appearance Friday on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Thiessen began by telling host Joe Scarborough, "Barack Obama has eliminated the CIA's interrogation program, which is the single most successful and important intelligence program in the war on terror and possibly in the history of the CIA. ... You've got to think back to the period after 9/11. We didn't even know who hit us. ... This program is why we did not have another 9/11."

O'Donnell wasn't buying it, however. He told Thiessen, "You actually published a book that says that the president of the United States ... 'is inviting the next attack.' Isn't it true that the president you worked for invited the first attack by having no idea what was going on with al Qaeda?"

By this point, Scarborough had already begun attempting to cut O'Donnell off, repeatedly saying, "Lawrence, that's ridiculous," but O'Donnell continued inexorably.

"You just admitted that when you were hit on 9/11, you just said, 'We didn't know who hit us,'" O'Donnell stated. "You were told who was going to hit you before we were hit on 9/11, and your administration invited the first attack -- for which you should live in shame!"

As Thiessen attempted to respond by counting up the number of terrorist incidents under the Clinton administration and O'Donnell continued to talk over him, Scarborough finally jumped in to say, "We're going to break, right now ... and I'm going to be interviewing Marc by myself."

When the show resumed, Scarborough could be heard saying to Mika Brzezinski, "...if you don't balance the meds just right, crazy Lawrence..."

This time Thiessen was allowed to make his argument that we were "caught blind" by the Christmas bomber because we no longer have the ability to torture terrorists. "The Obama administration has thrown that out and gone back to the pre-9/11 approach," he concluded.

Given just 30 seconds to respond, O'Donnell asked Thiessen, "I'm wondering about your own personal experience with torture. I know you grew up in the richest zip code in America, on the Upper East Side. You went to the only boarding school in Connecticut that I know of that has a golf course ... and, of course, like all the torture-mongers in the White House, the Cheney family included, you never served a day in the military. ... With that background, what is it that gives you an expertise in torture? What makes you love it so much?"

"I actually met with the actual interrogators," Thiessen replied. "That's my expertise."...

Inserted from <Raw Story>

Thiessen lied when he said we didn’t know who hit us.  When Thiessen tried to list Clinton’s shortcomings when confronted with the Bush/GOP failure responsible for the catastrophe, Thiessen was using deferment.  This is a criminal thinking error I teach prisoners and former prisoners to avoid.  Rather that face up to it, Thiessen deferred by changing the subject.  Of course the ‘interrogators’, actually torturers, believe what they did was worthwhile.  Without that belief, how could they sleep at night?  Thiessen thus based his so-called expertise on the least reliable possible source.

Scarborough should be ashamed for trying to allow Thiessen to parrot his GOP lies unopposed, and his ‘balance the meds’ comment was despicable.  I will be calling MSNBC later today to complain.  If you care to join me, their number is (212) 664-4444.

Keith Olbermann also debunked Thiessen’s bogus claims, and discussed the incident with Lawrence O’Donnell.

 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Obama killing too many terrorists?  Whatever he’s drinking, it must be mighty strong!

Why is the GOP so intense in their support for torture?  Here’s why:

A New York Times / CBS poll confirms the findings from other polls that I reported here yesterday:  The public approves of Barack Obama’s handling of “the threat of terrorism” far more than it approves his performance on any other issue.

But the new poll asked a couple of question that the earlier polls I linked to did not, and the results are kind of startling.

“How likely do you think it is that there will be another terrorist attack in the United States in the next few months?” — not next few years, next few months.  58% say very or somewhat likely.

“What do you think is the most important problem facing the country today?” 1% say “terrorism.” One percent!

If my math is right, 57% of the respondents — presumably a representative cross-section of the American people — expect a terrorist attack here in the next few months but do not think it’s the most important problem we have to deal with. I suppose they expect to happen somewhere else, not where they live.

Yet, as I noted yesterday, Obama’s political standing depends rests heavily on public approval of the way he’s handling terrorism. If he didn’t have high marks in that department, he might very well be even lower than the 46% overall approval that this Times / CBS poll gives him… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <AlterNet>

Since Karl Rove took over GOP strategy, attacking strength and falsely portraying it as weakness has been their standard ploy, and it’s been quite effective. For example, John Kerry was a war hero running against GW ChickenHawk, who used GHWB’s influence to get into the Air Guard, opted out of foreign deployment, and even ducked out of that commitment.  Rove attacked Kerry’s strength with the Swift Boat lies, and they worked well enough for Diebold creativity in Ohio to enable Bush’s second theft of the White House.  What the GOP is doing now in their quest for totalitarian power is no different.  The good news is that Lawrence O’Donnell heroically refused to let Thiessen propagate their lies unchallenged.

Republicans Demand That Brennan Resign

The level of GOP hypocrisy is going up faster that the economy went down under their governance.

Almost immediately after Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab failed to detonate a bomb on an airplane on Christmas Day, conservatives rushed to politicize the attempted terrorist attack. “People have got to start connecting the dots here and maybe this is the thing that will connect the dots for the Obama administration,” Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) said before he’d even been briefed on the incident. Karl Rove and Rep. Peter King (R-NY) criticized President Obama for issuing a statement on the failed bombing 72 hours after the event, even though President Bush waited longer to comment on “shoe-bomber” Richard Reid’s failed attempt to bring down an airliner in Dec. 2001.

The drumbeat of political criticism from conservatives since then has been unrelenting, especially focusing on the fact that Abdumuttalab was read his Miranda rights after he awoke from surgery. Recently, the Obama administration has begun pushing back at the GOP’s political onslaught. On Meet The Press this past Sunday, Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan, a 25-year veteran of the CIA, pointed out that he had kept key Congressional Republicans informed of Abdulmuttalab detainment by the FBI:

On Christmas night, I called a number of senior members of Congress. I spoke to Senators McConnell and Bond, I spoke to Representative Boehner and Hoekstra. I explained to them that he was in FBI custody, that Mr. Abdulmutallab was, in fact, talking, that he was cooperating at that point. They knew that “in FBI custody” means that there’s a process then you follow as far as Mirandizing and presenting him in front of a magistrate. None of those individuals raised any concerns with me at that point.

Brennan followed up his critique with a USA Today op-ed arguing that “too many in Washington are now misrepresenting the facts to score political points.” Brennan’s op-ed included the highly-charged assertion that “politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda.”

Republicans have responded to Brennan’s pushback with incredulity. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, citing former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen’s misunderstanding of the facts, called Brennan “troubling” on Fox News yesterday. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) called Brennan an “egomaniac.” Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) declared Brennan “needs to go,” and is no longer “credible.” On Fox News today, Hoekstra, who repeatedly referred to Brennan as a “White House staffer” as opposed to an intelligence “professional,” said Obama should “fire” him. Watch it:

 

On MSNBC today, Chuck Todd and Savannah Guthrie grilled Bond about whether the “Republican Party deserve[s] some blame” for terrorism becoming “too politicized.” Bond responded in denial, saying, “give me a break.” “They’re the ones who went out and called politics and they played politics,” said Bond of the White House. In an ironic twist, however, he then claimed that criticisms of the Bush administration’s terrorism policy during the past eight years had been “political attacks.”… [emphasis original]

Inserted from <Think Progress>

The principal GOP argument to deflect the criticism that their leadership was informed  is that they had no idea that Abdulmuttalab had received Miranda rights because FBI representatives are included in a special group to deal with terrorists.  Bull!  Brennan told then Abdulmuttalab was in FBI custody, not that of a new terrorism group.  When asked about Richard Reid receiving Miranda rights under Bush, Newt Gingrich claimed it was because Reid is a US citizen.  If fact, Reid is a Brit.  This is a manufactured issue, made up weeks after the fact.

Admittedly, Abdulmuttalab should not have had a Visa, and would not have were it not for a misspelling of his name in the State Department database.  That database, like everything else that deteriorated under Republican rule, desperately needs updating.  That is not Obama’s fault.  It’s part of the conditions he inherited.  Since that original error, our performance in dealing with Abdulmuttalab has been nothing short of magnificent.

Finally! A GOP Budget!!

The GOP was doing well as the Party of NO, but in a desperate attempt to prove that they really do have ideas, they have given us something to compare.

GOP Rep. Paul Ryan handed House Democrats the perfect wedge issue last week, and they're going to use it.

House Democrats want to kick House Republicans where it hurts, and are exploring ways to force the minority party to take a stand on Rep. Paul Ryan's budget "roadmap" that has become a political minefield in advance of this fall's elections.

A Democratic leadership source told TPMDC they are considering options for turning the Ryan plan into a bill. Once that's done the Democrats would put the bill on the floor, forcing Republicans to vote for or against a plan they don't want to talk about.

Why is it such a minefield? Because he wants to eliminate Social Security and Medicare, and has put GOP leadership in a very difficult position: of course Republicans want to get rid of Social Security and Medicare, it's been their raison d'etre since the programs were established. But they're coming off of a year in which their loudest opposition to the Democrats' healthcare reform bill was "Medicare cuts." Yglesias links to a Roll Call story:

Republican leaders bashed the Democratic health care plans for cutting more than $400 billion out of Medicare, but GOP budget hawks view controlling Medicare costs as essential to balancing the budget.

A Republican who asked to have his name withheld said the party’s leadership and rank and file aren’t ready to follow Ryan’s lead. “There’s a lot of worry that we beat the Democrats up on health care for cutting Medicare and now we’re going to turn around and do it,” the Republican said.

As Matt says, the major difference here is that the Dems had very targeted cuts aimed at whittling away at inefficiencies in Medicare, while Ryan's budget "just goes after Medicare with a chain saw." And he's doubling down on his plan, despite opposition in his own party.

A floor vote on Ryan's Republican budget could be the best thing that's happened for Democrats in months… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Daily Kos>

That is so bad that even Baucus could not come up with a worse idea.  Demand a vote on the GOP budget!

Theocons Sue for Right to Advocate Hate Crimes

Seldom have I seen a lawsuit where the actual intent was so despicably transparent.

A Christian group in Michigan has filed a lawsuit alleging that a package of hate crimes laws named after murder victim Matthew Shepard is an affront to their religious freedom.

Far from the intended purpose of severely punishing criminals who commit unspeakable acts against a persecuted minority group, the religious activists claim the laws are a guarded effort to "eradicate" their beliefs.

Filed by the Thomas More Law Center [theocon delinked]-- which bills itself as the religious answer to the American Civil Liberties Union -- the complaint claims that protecting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people "is an effort to eradicate religious beliefs opposing the homosexual agenda from the marketplace of ideas by demonizing, vilifying, and criminalizing such beliefs as a matter of federal law and policy."

The suit was placed on behalf of American Family Association of Michigan [theocon delinked] president Gary Glenn, along with pastors Rene Ouellette, Levon Yuille and James Combs.

  Claiming "there is no need" to extend hate crimes definitions, Thomas More chief counsel Richard Thompson attempted to minimize the impact of violent crimes against homosexuals.

"Of the 1.38 million violent crimes reported in the U.S. by the FBI in 2008, only 243 were considered as motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation," he wrote on the group's Web site [theocon delinked]. "The sole purpose of this law is to criminalize the Bible and use the threat of federal prosecutions and long jail sentences to silence Christians from expressing their Biblically-based religious belief that homosexual conduct is a sin."

However, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act clearly stipulates that it does not apply to constitutionally protected speech.

(3) CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTIONS- Nothing in this Act shall be construed to prohibit any constitutionally protected speech, expressive conduct or activities (regardless of whether compelled by, or central to, a system of religious belief), including the exercise of religion protected by the First Amendment and peaceful picketing or demonstration. The Constitution does not protect speech, conduct or activities consisting of planning for, conspiring to commit, or committing an act of violence.

(4) FREE EXPRESSION- Nothing in this Act shall be construed to allow prosecution based solely upon an individual’s expression of racial, religious, political, or other beliefs or solely upon an individual’s membership in a group advocating or espousing such beliefs.

The Thomas More Law Center's argument is eerily similar to a fundraising letter circulated by the Family Research Council at the end of 2009, in which the conservative group claimed that extending workplace non-discrimination rules is really Obama's secret plot to "impose" homosexuality on America.

However, according to the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, "[the non-discrimination rule] exempts all religious organizations, which includes corporations, associations, and religious societies. In addition, all educational institutions are exempt if the educational institution is at least substantially controlled or owned by a religious organization or if the institution's curriculum is directed towards the propagation of a religion."

The Thomas More suit, however, goes even further than just challenging hate crimes protection for LGBT people; it challenges the findings of the Matthew Shepard investigation.

"Thomas More attorneys make the case that the perpetrators of the murder of Matthew Shepard were subject to more several criminal penalties under existing state criminal law than under the new federal Hate Crimes Act," religious news outlet Christian Post notes [theocon delinked]. "They also say there is evidence demonstrating that the senseless and brutal attack on Shepard was not motivated by hate or bias; rather, it was motivated by money and drugs."

Matthew Shepard was a 21-year-old gay man from Wyoming who was tied to a fence and beaten to death in 1998. A foundation carrying his name played an important role in helping to broaden hate crimes definitions to cover LGBT people.

The Post's story, which does not point out that the actual law carries protections for constitutional speech, claims that plaintiffs are merely seeking "judicial reassurance" that they can continue to disparage homosexuals "without being investigated or prosecuted by the government."… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Raw Story>

The law on this is crystal clear.  Speech in opposition to what these bigots call homosexuality, however misguided, perverse, and obtuse, is Constitutionally protected speech.  Since the judicial reassurance they claim to seek is already written into the law, that claim must be a law.  Were this law to be overturned, the only right they would gain is the right to advocate hate crimes.  Therefore, that is what they are seeking to obtain.

I have to make one more point here, even though I’ve beaten it to death.  Real Christians do not advocate hate crimes.  We advocate acceptance for all people of good will.  The American Taliban represent Supply-side Jesus, a GOP/theocon invention to justify their dogma of fear, hate and greed.  Historical Jesus opposed religious hypocrites, the religious right of His time on earth.  So should we.

Teabaggers Embrace Racism for Tancredo

The Teabagger Convention opened in Tennessee with 600 attendees, soon to be exaggerated by Faux Noise into thousands.  After omitting the Pledge of Allegiance, since they forgot to bring an American flag,  they turned to failed GOP Presidential candidate, Tom Tancredo.

The opening night speaker at the Tea Party convention suggested a return to a "literacy test" to protect America from presidents like Obama -- a segregation-era method employed by southern US states to keep blacks from voting.

In his speech Thursday to attendees, former Republican congressman Tom Tancredo invoked the loaded pre-civil rights era buzzword, saying that President Barack Obama was elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country."

Southern states used literacy tests as part of an effort to deny suffrage to African American voters prior to Johnson-era civil rights laws.

"Prior to passage of the federal Voting Rights Act in 1965, Southern (and some Western) states maintained elaborate voter registration procedures whose primary purpose was to deny the vote to those who were not white," a website for civil rights veterans explains. "In the South, this process was often called the 'literacy test.' In fact, it was much more than a simple test, it was an entire complex system devoted to denying African-Americans (and in some regions, Latinos) the right to vote."

"Because the Freedom Movement was running "Citizenship Schools" to help people learn how to fill out the forms and pass the test, Alabama changed the test 4 times in less than two years (1964-1965)," the site adds. "At the time of the Selma Voting Rights campaign there were actually 100 different tests in use across the state. In theory, each applicant was supposed to be given one at random from a big loose-leaf binder. In real life, some individual tests were easier than others and the registrar made sure that Black applicants got the hardest ones."

White applicants could be approved even if they didn't pass the test.

"Your application was then reviewed by the three-member Board of Registrars — often in secret at a later date," the site continues. "They voted on whether or not you passed. It was entirely up to the judgment of the Board whether you passed or failed. If you were white and missed every single question they could still pass you if — in their sole judgment — you were 'qualified.' If you were Black and got every one correct, they could still flunk you if they considered you 'unqualified.'"... [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Alternet>

Keith Olbermann gave a short comment that is truly a magnificent explanation of Tancredo’s hypocrisy.

 

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It’s clear to me that the second precept of GOP Teabaggerism (the first is hate Obama) is racism.  Are you as sickened by this as I am?

Three to Scorn: Palin, Emmanuel, Limbaugh

Moving ahead with her standard GOP mindset, Mooseolini is a complete hypocrite.

It seems that even the queen must bow to the king, in this, the latest installment of the "retards" controversy ...

Let's start with a brief recap: Last year, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel used the word "retards." A few days ago, Sarah Palin caught wind of the story, clutched her pearls, screamed political gold my baby! and promptly wrote a Facebook [Mooseolini Delinked] entry, demanding that Emanuel be fired. Enter Rush Limbaugh, who in the course of mocking Emanuel, used the word repeatedly to attack liberals ("calling people who are retards, retards"). So Greg Sargent at The Plum Line asked the Palin camp for a reaction to Limbaugh's use of the word and was told:

Governor Palin believes crude and demeaning name calling at the expense of others is disrespectful."

Pretty mild, right? Especially when compared to the seven paragraph Facebook entry dedicated to Emanuel's single use of the word, where Palin was reacting:

... as an everyday American wanting my child to grow up in a country free from mindless prejudice and discrimination, free from gratuitous insults of people who are ostensibly smart enough to know better.

But apparently the mere suggestion that Palin would criticize Limbaugh for (repeatedly) using the word was enough to get the Palin camp fired up [Faux Noise Delinked]:

Sarah Palin, the former Governor of Alaska, Republican mega-star and Fox News contributor, was quick to fire back at Washington Post blog, The Plum Line, for a report that Palin is at war with conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

... with the suggestion that it was a ploy by the Washington Post to "take the pressure off of the White House" (White House reaction: huh?). And then:

But Stapleton told POLITICO that the comment given to The Plum Line was not specifically aimed at Limbaugh.

Au contraire, says Mr. Sargent, who produced the email he sent, specifically asking about Limbaugh. Says Sargent:

I subsequently emailed her to be absolutely certain that it applied to Rush. She didn’t dispute this, answering that it applies to “anyone” who uses the term.

That’s how it happened.

Bottom line? Apparently perceived "mindless prejudice and discrimination" and "gratuitous insults" against her son only matter if Palin can make political hay out of them… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Daily Kos>

First, was Caribou Barbie right to object to the use of the term “retarded”?  Yes, as much as it pains me to agree with her on anything, Emmanuel’s comment was insensitive at best.

Second, Should Rahm Emmanuel be fired?  Yes, but not for his comment.  He should be fired for being a corporatist pig and undermining the people who caused Obama to be elected.

Third, was the Dingbat Diva right to downplay Limbaugh’s far more egregious use of the term? No.

Fourth, does that make Snake Oil Sarah a GOP hypocrite?  Yes. 

Fifth, is the Alaska Asshole afraid Limbaugh?  I’ll leave that one to Keith Olbermann.

 

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Are you now well armed on this topic?

Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann Expose More GOP Lies

I have a pair of excellent videos for you today.  In the first, Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes nail Susan Collins and other GOP Senators for their lies about the handling of the underpants bomber:

 

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What we see here is GOP desperation.  For years they have hoodwinked Americans into believing that they are the national security party, even though the second worst national security disaster (after Pearl Harbor) in US history occurred through incompetence on their watch.  They insisted that EITs (torture) were necessary to get the intelligence needed to keep America safe, even though most experts on interrogation agree that EITs produce faulty intelligence.  They belittled claims by Democrats that following the law is the best way to proceed and called us weak on terrorism.  Now that the bomber is singing like a canary, the proof that the Democrats were right is staring them in the face, and they are besides themselves.  So they are lying.

In the second, Keith exposes the Frank Luntz memo, instructing Republicans to lie about finance reform.

 

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Why do Republicans lie so much?  I was thinking about that as I commented on another blog yesterday, and the answer came to me.  It’s simple.  If Republicans told the truth, nobody in their right mind would vote for them.

Arar Appeals to SCOTUS

This is shameful.

A Canadian man who was deported by US officials to Syria, where he was imprisoned and allegedly tortured, has appealed a court ruling preventing him from suing the US.

Maher Arar filed a lawsuit before the US supreme court on Monday, appealing a lower court ruling that rejected his case because it involved national security information.

Arar was arrested by US authorities while transiting through New York's JFK International Airport in 2002, on his way home to Canada from a family vacation in Tunis.

He was detained on information shared by Canadian police that suggested he had ties to "terrorist" groups…

...US authorities held him in solitary confinement and interrogated him for nearly two weeks before deporting him to Syria.

He was imprisoned for a year in Damascus, the Syrian capital, during which time he says he was tortured before finally being released and returned to Canada.

A Canadian commission eventually cleared him of any connections to "terrorist" organisations [sic] and concluded that he had been tortured.

He was awarded $10.5m in compensation.

Arar's suit before the Supreme Court questions whether "federal officials who conspired with Syrian officials to subject an individual in US custody to torture in Syria may be sued for damages".

David Cole, a lawyer for Arar, said: "The courts below ruled that federal officials cannot be sued for sending an innocent man to Syria to be tortured because the case would be too sensitive."...

Inserted from <Aljazeera>

I wish Mr. Arar every success here.  What Bush and the GOP did to this innocent man is unconscionable.  I think we can translate too sensitive in the lower court’s ruling can be translated as too damning to the Bush/GOP regime.  Sadly, given the current makeup of SCOTUS, my hopes are not high.

Where is the coverage of this story in US media?

McCain on Truth: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

While I hope for implementation more quickly than it appears, I was most please to learn that America’s top military brass has come out in favor of repealing DADT.

The US's two highest-ranking defense officials have thrown their weight behind President Barack Obama's call to repeal the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy that bars homosexuals from serving openly in the military.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday that repealing DADT was "the right thing to do," while Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the committee that the policy would be enforced leniently while the Pentagon studies options for how and when to end it.

"Mullen's line is perhaps the strongest statement to date from a top military official at the Pentagon in support of a 'Don't ask, don't tell' repeal," The Hill reports. The New York Times called Gates' and Mullen's announcements "a major step toward allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the United States military for the first time in its history."

During his State of the Union address last month, President Obama said, "This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are."

While gay-rights activists applauded the president's move, some were alarmed by the fact that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were present at the address, sat silently instead of applauding when Obama made the remark. Some saw this as a sign the military brass weren't behind Obama's plans. But today's announcement signaled that top military officials are willing to work on the policy.

In his comments before the committee, Adm. Mullen said it was his "personal and professional belief that allowing homosexuals to serve openly would be the right thing to do."

"I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens," Mullen said. "For me, it comes down to integrity -- theirs as individuals and ours as an institution."

Mullen added that he believed military culture had evolved to the point where "the great young men and women of our military can and would accommodate such a change" -- though he admitted that he did not "know this for a fact, nor do I know for a fact how we would best make such a major policy change in a time of two wars."

Human Rights Campaign, one of the leading gay-rights groups pushing for the repeal of DADT, called today's testimony "a historic step forward.

"When the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense, who also served under President Bush, direct the military to mitigate the pace of discharges while moving toward implementation, we know that Don't Ask Don't Tell is on its way out," HRC said in a statement emailed to the press.

For his part, Secretary Gates made it clear he is following the orders of his commander-in-chief.

“We received our orders from the commander-in-chief, and we are moving out accordingly,” Gates told the committee.

The Pentagon has launched an 11-month study of DADT, which will report back at the end of 2010 on how best to proceed with a change in the policy. Some observers say this means the law won't be changed this year, as Obama had implied in his State of the Union speech.

News reports this week indicate that the Pentagon will take a more lenient approach to enforcing DADT while the policy is reviewed. The Pentagon is expected to limit dismissal of serving members who are outed by third parties, and not by their own actions.

But the move is already attracting criticism from some corners. Sen. John McCain, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said it was the role of Congress, not the Pentagon, to change the policy.

"You are embarking on not whether the military should make a change, but how best the military should prepare for it," McCain told Mullen. "In my view, and I know that a lot of people don’t agree with that, the policy has been working and I think it’s been working well."...

Inserted from <Raw Story>

What makes McConJob’s outburst so distasteful is that in 2006, his position was the exact opposite of what it is today.  This must be particularly sweet for Rachel Maddow.  The glee sparkled in her eyes as she rubbed McConJob’s nose in his own hypocrisy.

 

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Did he make a fool of himself or what?  Furthermore, Traitor Joe LIEberman and and two other GOP goose steppers proved their own idiocy as well.