Interestingly, there are several conditions that actually would have aided Mr. Muller’s ability to resist the torture. He was not completely bound. He was not waterboarded by anyone with experience. He was not sleep deprived or otherwise mentally unprepared. And he had the comfort of knowing that he could stop the waterboarding at any moment. Despite those advantages, he is now thoroughly convinced that waterboarding is torture.

It is immensely shocking then, that Gawker.com would try to invalidate Mr. Muller’s experience. They wrote:

“he hasn’t actually experienced it, or anything remotely approaching what actual torture victims experienced.”

So, they argue, if Mr. Muller did not get the full experience it is not legitimate.  I’m sorry but that only works in one direction.  All the mitigating factors at work, the ones I just listed, serve only to give him comfort.  The fact that he was not a part of the full experience only means that it would be that much worse in Guantanamo and other sites – not easier, or somehow less tortuous.  Gawker’s argument would only hold water if Mr. Muller still believed that waterboarding was not torture.

They went on:

“We’ve learned that Mancow can’t take six seconds of having water poured on his face—we guess he doesn’t take showers?”

Perhaps I have been showering incorrectly my whole life.  But, when I shower, I don’t generally lean my head back and force water into my nose and mouth.  But perhaps that explains Gawker’s faulty logic – not enough oxygen to the brain.

Here is Erich Muller’s response to Gawker aired on Keith’s Olbermann’s Countdown.

Instead we rehash the bone fides of Sonia Sotomayor.  We repeat videos of Iranian missile tests with nothing new to report.  Both worthy debates but hardly worth losing sight of all else.  Meanwhile our unemployment rate rises, our TARP and stimulus money flies out the window, and national health care reform is ignored.

So let’s see some of that mentioned.  I’ll get the ball rolling.  Just how did we come to giving money to the people who lost all our money?  I speak, of course, of the bankers and Wall Street bandits who swindled the system for years and then came crying for help when it all went sour, like a child poking a bear cub.

How are they too big to fail?  What, exactly, makes them too big?  Are the smaller banks too lazy and stupid to fill those shoes?  Or was the system just built for a monopoly?  And don’t tell me it wasn’t a monopoly.  If there was a competitive market for banks then I have a profound misunderstanding of both “competitive” and “market.”  Every bank offered the same services, exacted the same arbitrary fees, and took it’s major directions from the government/Federal Reserve.

So we all got tied to the tracks while bankers swam in money like Scrooge McDuck.  Then, when the train came, we had to ask the very same bankers for help.  Sure we should blame the bankers.  But shouldn’t the government take blame for letting us get tied to the tracks in the first place?  I think FDR was onto something when he spoke at his 1933 Inauguration:

“Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers.”

Evidently we’ve gained more to fear than just fear itself since those days.  And we, by allowing ourselves to be led to the tracks, have forgotten the one thing that was explicitly stated to redeem the great depression:

“These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.”

First and foremost I would like to let our generation know that “blog” is an incredibly stupid word and, frankly, I’m upset that we couldn’t have coined something sounding less like a bodily function. Not only is its widespread use going to forever permeate our common vernacular, but it can also be a noun and a verb! Couldn’t we have thought of something cooler?

That being said. Twitter is a cool word. I don’t tweet, but I seem to be in the minority there.

Most of my friends tweet. They tweet about parties, concerts, dude – did someone leave a shoe in my bathtub last night?? Politicians tweet. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich tweets.

If Newt and I were friends and I were the twittering type I would have recently gotten a text telling me:

“Imagine a judicial nominee said “my experience as a white man makes me better than a latina woman” new racism is no better than old racism”

Newt’s twitter was about Judge Sotomayor’s lecture in the New York Times where she says, essentially, that her experiences as a Latina woman would make her a better judge than a white man.

So there it is. The GOP argument. It’s simple, straightforward and easy to follow. I’ve had several friends agree with our former Speaker already. I myself want to agree with him. Why is it that the color of her skin and her gender makes her a better judge? That is, after all, the same argument made by racist and sexist institutions throughout our history. Shouldn’t we be deciding Justices based purely on qualifications?

The problem with this tweet is that it falls under the assumption that we live in a cultural vacuum. What Judge Sotomayor was saying is that her life experiences will bring a different perspective to the bench. She is better qualified because she is uniquely qualified.

The issue of “reverse racism” (which is bullshit term – by the way. racism is racism.) is that it doesn’t take into account the fact that white men still hold most of the power in this country.

Very recently, there was an example of a need for this unique qualification. SCOTUS recently heard oral arguments for Safford United School v. Redding.   The case involved a 13 year old girl who was strip searched for allegedly having Advil. In hearing oral arguments, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said: “In my experience when I was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once a day, we changed for gym, OK? And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear.” His point was that this was common place, not a big deal.

Experience has everything to do with being a Justice or Judge. Had Supreme Court Justice Breyer had the experience of a recently developing 13 year old GIRL he may realize that the two situations are not comparable. Different experiences flesh out our legal system. When we’ve never had a Latina justice before, it can be said unequivocally that there are things she will see in a case that the other 8 white people and 8 men would not see.

This is a nuanced issue. Judge Sotomayor’s lecture was a five page long account of what it is to be a Latina in the Justice System.

Newt and those making the argument that Sotomayor is a racist might not be racist themselves, as the left immediately scrambles to proclaim, but they are being criminally disingenuous. They are oversimplying an incredibly complex issue of personal experience and judicial bias.

In sum:  Twitter might be a cool word but a 140 character limit is not enough space for this kind of argument. So let’s keep it to finding drunken partiers’ shoes and keep the heavy stuff where it belongs.

In today’s email Sen. Durbin said,

“Some, including Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont, have called for an independent “truth” commission to investigate decisions of the previous administration relating to detainee treatment and interrogation. I am not aware of any legislative proposals having been put forward in the Senate to establish an independent commission to investigate these issues.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is currently conducting a thorough investigation of the detainee issue. This investigation will likely take several more months to complete and the committee should be given the time needed to complete its work. Meanwhile, more information than ever is available to the American people regarding these policies.”

The Senator is referring to a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation concerning the very same topic.  The report asserts that it will likely take one year to complete.  So an independent truth commission would probably be seen as superfluous, at best, and undermining, at worst, to the Senate Intelligence investigation.  That official press release can be read here: http://intelligence.senate.gov/press/record.cfm?id=309152

The Senator ended the email with his own allegations.

“On February 12, 2008, Senator Whitehouse and I sent a letter to the Justice Department’s Inspector General requesting an investigation of Justice Department officials within the Office of Legal Counsel who issued legal opinions authorizing waterboarding and other abusive interrogation techniques. That investigation was allegedly completed before the end of the Bush Administration and then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey refused to release it because of objections to the report’s findings.

Senator Whitehouse and I sent another letter to the Justice Department on February 16, 2009 inquiring about the status of the report. While the preliminary report has been completed, Steven Bradbury, one of the lawyers being investigated, was provided access to the pre-release report and had the opportunity to respond to its content before its release outside of the Justice Department. This is a cause for concern. The report is now being reviewed by the CIA. It is my hope that this report will be released soon and that an unclassified version of the report will be made available to the public.”

This meeting aired on July 09, 2008.  It’s fairly long but his main point is between 0:56 and 1:30.  He tells, then Attorney General, Michael Mukasey that initiating investigations would be within the “clear standard of the law.”

But she’s probably not going to see many cocktail dinners with the Bush family either.  Truth is, neither wing is particularly enamoured with her.  True, Fox anchors despise her and MSNBC commentators fall over their own compliments for Obama’s newest choice.  But the people who have a choice in the matter aren’t so strongly poised.

Sotomayor has several notable ruling under her belt:

• She ruled against a group of white firefighters claiming reverse discrimination.
• She ruled against corporations weighing the cost of organisms killed against the cost of improved technology designed to reduce pollution.  She was overturned in the Supreme Court but Ginsburg and Souter agreed with Sotomayor stating that such practices were “pernicious.”
• She upheld a Bush policy which precluded foreign aid agencies from receiving federal money if they performed or supported abortions.

Those are somewhat telling and worthy of informed debate.  So read them while you can because here comes the media railroading.  Here is what you will see on Fox, MSNBC, and CNN for the next week.  It is a video of Sotomayor stating that the “Court of Appeals is where policy is made.”

Is this the harmless musing of a local official?  Or is this the inner preview of Sotomayor’s dangerous legislating from the bench intent?  Ah, but why settle for such something so tame as that?  Youtube user kirktrombone writes:

“Ok…that is scary. Might as well come out with it though. Democrats don’t respect the Constitution…pretty soon we’ll be having a president say, “Oh,..I make policy, decide what it means, AND execute it….chuckle, chuckle, chuckle.” Newsflash: that’s a dictatorship. Wake up Americans!!”

“I guess this sounds controversial, but only to people who are too stupid to know what “precedent” means.

Rulings at the appeals level set precedents. At the district level, they don’t.”

- more after the jump -

But I do think that Carlin speaks clearly to us still.  We’ve all had that fear, at least a flash of doubt.  Maybe they don’t care.  Maybe we, the voters, aren’t a representation of popular will to be help steer the nation.  Maybe we’re just a calculation in some rigged game.  Is the table tilted?

Well, I certainly hope not.  But it’s almost cliche to call out a politician for contradicting himself or even flat out lying.  People make a great living of it.  I’m looking at you, Jon Stewart.  I’ll tell you what – you show me a politician who contradicts himself into a position against polling data and I’ll buy you a Coke.  And I think I’ve already made my point about the media being bought and sold.

I leave you with an example of both given to us from The Huffington Post.

Whether you want to express your discontent with the bailouts, win $27,599, or even both, you may want to check out Right.org’s new video contest.  The bailouts, unpopular with people on both sides of the aisle, should spawn some very interesting contest videos.  This video contest is even popular enough to be featured on the front page of the GOP official blog.

- select entry videos and more after the jump -

Right.org offers a “Bailout Calculator” on their site as well.  It uses your income to approximate how much you will pay into the bailouts.  I must say, their results are extraordinarily high and, therefor, at least mildly suspect.

Here are a couple of my favorite entries.  But I couldn’t watch them all.  So if you see any gems in the entries page, please comment a link.

So the facts, as I understand them, point to the a few things.  The CIA admits to having intentionally misled Congress in the past.  The CIA also admits that their own records regarding Pelosi’s briefing may be flawed.  So here’s the bomb that the right doesn’t want to admit: maybe Pelosi wasn’t told about U.S. torture policies.  Oh, no.

What is the GOP so afraid of?  It certainly won’t hurt their poll numbers.  It would take a lot more to push those down further.  The only consequence is their ‘They knew so it wasn’t THAT bad’ defense for torture gets busted.  Not that it’s a real defense to bust anyhow.  Maybe they should get a real GOP thinker on the case.  Here’s a video nail in the coffin too.

All this really says to me is that we need some sort of truth commission.  Sorry readers from the right but it’s the only thing that can hope to settle this.

Politico’s Ben Smith just ran an interesting piece on conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer.  Smith describes Krauthammer as “a coherent, sophisticated and implacable critic of the new president.”  Here’s Krauthammer in an interview on Fox.

Another video and more after the jump.

Krauthammer says some pretty remarkable stuff here.  First, I must say, he is much more convincing than most of the disorganized yelling coming out of the GOP lately.  He skillfully breezes over a key Democrat point here.  At 1:05 he implies that Democratic social change is not something democrats feel “government has to do.”  What is remarkable about this is not that he disagrees with the Democratic agenda.  But it is rather that he implies that the Democrats themselves see the increased capital gains tax as outside the function of government.  Bold.  Of course it’s far better than the latest Republican web video.

Here is a fascinating defense of George W. Bush that he gave during Bush’s waning presidency.

I actually have no major qualm with this.  I present it as a relatively well-formed and seemingly genuine set of remarks.  I would say that the term”the war” is somewhat confusing.  Is Krauthammer referring to the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, or on Terror?  Big differences there.  But all in all, I think the public discourse is quite a bit higher with that level of rhetoric coming from the right.  I leave you with this comment a YouTube user made about this video.