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Does a better job than I did.

Idiot right-wing pundits who are paid to know what they're talking about got this 100% wrong. ONE HUNDRED PERCENT WRONG. But do they lose their jobs? No. And they have the chutzpah to rant about homeowners, many of them who relied on these idiots for advice, getting bailed out?

Catholics and the Pope

Here's what I don't understand. How do grown men and women take Catholicism seriously when the pope is so ridiculous?

Sure, there are crazy rabbis and plenty of crazy imams, but none is officially the head of their whole religion. In the pope, you have all the hypocrisy and evil and pomposity of religion wrapped up in one man.

Now the current pope isn't as bad as, say, Alexander VI, but he's hardly a paragon of moral virtue or wisdom. Shortly after un-excommunicating a holocaust-denying bishop, he has named a guy who said Hurricane Katrina was "God's punishment" and that the Harry Potter books spread Satanism to bishop.

Before he was pope, he and the previous pope covered up the child-abusing spree of Marciel Maciel. (He's also an overtly anti-gay man who wears a dress and bright red Prada shoes and has suspiciously handsome assistants, but that sort of argument is beneath this blog. Yeah right.)

All the popes dress in ridiculously over-the-top costumes and live in gigantic palaces controlling 10-15$ billion in wealth while preaching against greed and materialism and pretending to be against povery. I mean, seriously, how does a grown person look at this guy and see a spiritual leader? It's beyond me.

Bush and Rumsfeld Are War Criminals and Cowards

Authorization for torture at Guantanamo and in Iraq and Afghanistan came from the highest levels of government:

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Ranking Member John McCain (R-Ariz.) today released the executive summary and conclusions of the Committee’s report of its inquiry into the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody.

From the executive summary and conclusions (.pdf):

Senate Armed Services Committee Conclusions

Conclusion 1: On February 7, 2002, President George W. Bush made a written determination that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, did not apply to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. Following the President’s determination, techniques such as waterboarding, nudity, and stress positions, used in SERE training to simulate tactics used by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions, were authorized for use in interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody.

Conclusion 2: Members of the President’s Cabinet and other senior officials participated in meetings inside the White House in 2002 and 2003 where specific interrogation techniques were discussed. National Security Council Principals reviewed the CIA’s interrogation program during that period.

Conclusions on SERE Training Techniques and Interrogations

Conclusion 3: The use of techniques similar to those used in SERE resistance training – such as stripping students of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, and treating them like animals – was at odds with the commitment to humane treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. Using those techniques for interrogating detainees was also inconsistent with the goal of collecting accurate intelligence information, as the purpose of SERE resistance training is to increase the ability of U.S. personnel to resist abusive interrogations and the techniques used were based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to elicit false confessions.

Conclusion 4: The use of techniques in interrogations derived from SERE resistance training created a serious risk of physical and psychological harm to detainees. The SERE schools employ strict controls to reduce the risk of physical and psychological harm to students during training. Those controls include medical and psychological screening for students, interventions by trained psychologists during training, and code words to ensure that students can stop the application of a technique at any time should the need arise. Those same controls are not present in real world interrogations.

...

Conclusion 13: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there. Secretary Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 approval of Mr. Haynes’s recommendation that most of the techniques contained in GTMO’s October 11, 2002 request be authorized, influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques, including military working dogs, forced nudity, and stress positions, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Conclusion 19: The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.

President Bush and his administration blamed the torture that went on at Guantanamo Bay on a "few bad apples" and let Lynndie England hang out to dry while he and Rumsfeld continued on their merry way.

England went to prison, as she should have. Why is Bush still sitting in the White House? Why is Don Rumsfeld a free man?

(HT: Andrew Sullivan, who has been relentless on the torture issue.)

Palin Vetoed Funding for Homeless Teen Moms

Wow.

ST. PAUL -- Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee who revealed Monday that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, earlier this year used her line-item veto to slash funding for a state program benefiting teen mothers in need of a place to live.

After the legislature passed a spending bill in April, Palin went through the measure reducing and eliminating funds for programs she opposed. Inking her initials on the legislation -- "SP" -- Palin reduced funding for Covenant House Alaska by more than 20 percent, cutting funds from $5 million to $3.9 million. Covenant House is a mix of programs and shelters for troubled youths, including Passage House, which is a transitional home for teenage mothers.

According to Passage House's web site, its purpose is to provide "young mothers a place to live with their babies for up to eighteen months while they gain the necessary skills and resources to change their lives" and help teen moms "become productive, successful, independent adults who create and provide a stable environment for themselves and their families."

I've got nothing to add.

Official Texas GOP Platform on Gays - No Kids Allowed

In pointing out the hypocrisy of Republican hawks who've suddenly become concerned for Iranian gays, Glenn Greenwald provides a link to the official 2006 State Republican Platform of Texas, highlighting these excerpts:

Homosexuality - We believe that the practice of sodomy tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the family unit, and leads to the spread of dangerous, communicable diseases. Homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God, recognized by our country’s founders, and shared by the majority of Texans. Homosexuality must not be presented as an acceptable “alternative” lifestyle in our public education and policy, nor should “family” be redefined to include homosexual “couples.” We are opposed to any granting of special legal entitlements, recognition, or privileges including, but not limited to, marriage between persons of the same sex, custody of children by homosexuals, homosexual partner insurance or retirement benefits. We oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith, conviction, or belief in traditional values.

Texas Sodomy Statutes - We oppose the legalization of sodomy. We demand that Congress exercise its authority granted by the U.S. Constitution to withhold jurisdiction from the federal courts from cases involving sodomy.

The official GOP platform in Texas is that gay people should not be allowed custody of their children. Before we bomb Iran because they hang gay people, maybe Mr. Bush should have a little talk with his colleagues back home. Taking children away from homosexual parents is not as bad as executing gays, but that's kind of like saying slavery isn't as bad as murder. One wonders how many Texas Republicans would in fact privately support gay executions, considering what they're willing to say in public.

Snark of the Day: Bush and Hypocrisy

WaPo:

President Bush today called on the Iranian people to reject their hard-line government, saying they "can do better" and need not be isolated by a leadership that destabilizes its neighbors and pursues a suspected nuclear weapons program.

LOL. Yeah, you should have leadership like ours, which destabilizes critical non-neighbors while adding "tactical" nuclear weapons to our thousands of existing nukes.

(Note: I am NOT in favor of Iran acquiring nukes. I just thought this was funny.)

Okay, Now They're Just Messing With Us

Senior Official Linked to Escort Service Resigns, via Andrew Sullivan.

Deputy Secretary of State Randall L. Tobias submitted his resignation Friday, one day after confirming to ABC News that he had been a customer of a Washington, D.C. escort service whose owner has been charged by federal prosecutors with running a prostitution operation.

Tobias, 65, director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), had previously served as the ambassador for the President's Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief.

A State Department press release late Friday afternoon said only he was leaving for "personal reasons."

On Thursday, Tobias told ABC News he had several times called the "Pamela Martin and Associates" escort service "to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage." Tobias, who is married, said there had been "no sex," and that recently he had been using another service "with Central Americans" to provide massages...

As a top official overseeing global AIDS funding to other countries, Tobias was responsible for enforcing a U.S. policy, enacted during the Bush administration, that requires recipients to swear they oppose prostitution and sex trafficking. USAID adopted a similar policy in 2004.

And a snippet from wikipedia:

In his capacity as Director of Foreign Assistance, Tobias encouraged sexual abstinence, and discounted the use of condoms, in preventing HIV/AIDS. "Statistics show that condoms really have not been very effective," Tobias told a news conference in Berlin on April 21, 2004.^[2]

So to sum up, Bush put someone who worked for chemical companies in charge of the EPA, an anti-OSHA activist at the head of OSHA, the guy who wants the UN destroyed as ambassador to the UN, a horce racing expert as the head of FEMA, and the dude who (allegedly) is a regular customer of prostitutes as the head of his abstinence campaign. Sometimes I think Bush and his friends are just having fun seeing how far they can go. ("Come on Dick, ten bucks says you can't shoot your friend in the face and then have him apologize to you on national t.v.")

(Full disclosure: my last two sentences were inspired by a comment on MetaFilter a while back.)