While cable news outlets and major newspapers continue to use euphemisms such as “harsh interrogation tactics” to describe the Bush administration’s approach to intelligence gathering, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) used a more succinct term Thursday: “torture.” — [ Read More ]
From MediaMatters: More Fox figures pick up tenuous claim that harsh interrogations thwarted L.A. plot
Neil Cavuto, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Catherine Herridge joined other Fox News figures in advancing Marc Thiessen’s claim that the use of harsh interrogations techniques on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed “stopped an attack on the Library Tower.” But the Bush administration has said that the attack was thwarted more than a year before Mohammed was captured. [ READ MORE ]
Osama Bin O’Reilly joked: “I think we’ll [waterboard Henican] tomorrow during the Beck segment”
Conservative media claim prosecution of Bush administration officials will turn U.S. into “banana republic”
Conservative media figures are comparing possible prosecutions of Bush administration officials for their roles in authorizing the use of harsh interrogation techniques to circumstances in a “banana republic,” in “Third World … dictatorships,” or “some little Latin American country that’s run by … the latest junta.” [ READ MORE ]
RUSH LIMBAUGH Fill-in Steyn’s road to green economy: Living in mud huts and women beating laundry on rocks by the river — [ READ MORE ]
Reference: USS Cole bombing — The USS Cole bombing was a suicide bombing attack against the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Cole (DDG 67) on 12 October 2000 while it was harbored in the Yemeni port of Aden. Seventeen American sailors were killed.
“The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that former GOP vice presidential candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has ‘apparently’ retained Robert Barnett, a well-known D.C.-based attorney who brokered book deals for President Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Barnett also helped put together television deals for Brian Williams, Lesley Stahl, Neil Cavuto, Christiane Amanpour, Dr. Sanjay Gupta and others.” — cbsnews.com
Even folks who aren’t enamored of Bill and Hillary Clinton will have to concede that they are intellectual heavyweights. Most people, regardless of political affiliation, would be interested in reading anything written by the Clintons.
Sarah Palin on the other hand has all the gravitas of a feather duster, and anything written by her would have the heft of a coloring book. Palin thinks she’s a foreign policy guru because she can see Russia from her back porch, and she imagines she’s a writer because she’s been to a library a couple of times.
Palin will have to hire a ghostwriter to pen her tome, but the hired hack will have to dumb it down or nobody will believe she wrote the thing.
According to some reports Palin’s agent is seeking an advance of $11 million. I have to give the lady credit for trying to parlay her 15 minutes of fame into millions of dollars.
I wouldn’t buy Palin’s book even if it included photographs of her dressed in a bikini, I do have some standards.
GILA BEND, Ariz. — Soon after Antonio Torres, a husky 19-year-old farmworker, suffered catastrophic injuries in a car accident last June, a Phoenix hospital began making plans for his repatriation to Mexico.
Mr. Torres was comatose and connected to a ventilator. He was also a legal immigrant whose family lives and works in the purple alfalfa fields of this southwestern town. But he was uninsured. So the hospital disregarded the strenuous objections of his grief-stricken parents and sent Mr. Torres on a four-hour journey over the California border into Mexicali.
For days, Mr. Torres languished in a busy emergency room there, but his parents, Jesús and Gloria Torres, were not about to give up on him. Although many uninsured immigrants have been repatriated by American hospitals, few have seen their journey take the U-turn that the Torreses engineered for their son. They found a hospital in California willing to treat him, loaded him into a donated ambulance and drove him back into the United States as a potentially deadly infection raged through his system.
By summer’s end, despite the grimmest of prognoses from the hospital in Phoenix, Mr. Torres had not only survived but thrived. Newly discharged from rehabilitation in California, he was haltingly walking, talking and, hoisting his cane to his shoulder like a rifle, performing a silent, comic, effortful imitation of a marching soldier.
‘In Arizona, apparently, they see us as beasts of burden that can be dumped back over the border when we have outlived our usefulness,’ the elder Mr. Torres, who is 47, said in Spanish. ‘But we outwitted them. We were not going to let our son die. And look at him now!’ — [READ MORE]
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MILTON, Fla. — Three months after the local police inspected more than a dozen businesses searching for illegal immigrants using stolen Social Security numbers, this community in the Florida Panhandle has become more “law-abiding, emptier and whiter.”
Many of the Hispanic immigrants who came in 2004 to help rebuild after Hurricane Ivan have either fled or gone into hiding. Churches with services in Spanish are half-empty. Businesses are struggling to find workers. And for Hispanic citizens with roots here — the foremen and entrepreneurs who received visits from the police — the losses are especially profound.
‘It was very hard because the community is very small, and to see people who came to eat here all the time then come and close the business,’ said Geronimo Barragan, who owns two branches of La Hacienda, Mexican restaurants where the police arrested 10 employees. — [MORE]
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Behind The Veil: America’s Anti-Immigration Network — Video details the common origins of many of the country’s leading anti-immigration groups and their ties to White supremacists.
Lou Dobbs and Codewords Of Hate — A study by the Anti-Defamation League on the use of hate rhetoric in the immigration debate
