The Republic of T.

I won’t watch a movie if I’ve missed the beginning, and I hate missing endings so much that I won’t start watching a movie I can’t see through to the end. As a writer, the beginning and end are two of the most important parts of the story to me. They answer two important important questions in any story: “How did we get into this?” and “How do we get out of this?”

Monday night, I watched Too Big To Fail — HBO’s eponymous adaptation of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book — from start to finish. Yet, I still ended up feeling like I’d missed the two most important parts of the story: the beginning and the end. Thus, I never got answers to those important questions: How did we get into this mess? How do we get out of this mess?

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Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last 24 hours, you’ve probably heard that Osama Bin Laden is dead.

And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network.

Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.

Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.

The world may well be a better place without it. It is certainly no worse off without him. But, this isn’t really the end of anything.

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I think Ezra got it about right, re: NPR’s decision to fire Juan Williams, following his “Muslim=Terrorist” remarks on Fox News. It may have been that NPR was looking for a reason to fire Williams, and he gave it to them. They, however, acted too drastically and too quickly. As Ezra said, if NPR wanted to fire Williams the best option would be to simply wait out his contract and quietly declined to renew. Maybe people would have questioned whether it was his remarks to O’Reilly that put him over the top, but NPR could have simply declined to comment. (Heck, they wouldn’t even have to tell Williams himself.)

And, no, I don’t buy Williams claim that NPR’s decision is a “chilling assault on free speech.” I say the same thing to Williams I said to Dr. Laura.

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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. George W. Bush might have been slightly better president if he’d listened to the women in his family. That’s become even more evident, now that he’s safely out of office, and some of the women in the family are more free to speak their minds.

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Conservatives who squawk about the deficit — and Democrats who should know better, but squawk anyway — tend to do so selectively. That is, they tend to focus only on spending. But spending is only half of any deficit equation. After all, a deficit is “the amount by which expenditures or liabilities exceed income or assets.” When it comes to the government “income” really means “revenue,” and that means if we’re going to have an honest discussion about the deficit we have to talk about about taxes.

That half of the deficit equation — income or revenue — rarely enters the discussion, but the reality is the surest way to create a deficit is to increase spending while deliberately decreasing income or revenue. Who would do something like that? Something so obviously unsustainable?

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Sarah Palin’s keynote speech was quite a hit at this weekend’s Tea Party convention. She even took a shot at pinning responsibility for the deficit on the Obama administration.

“The Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda will leave us less secure, more in debt and under the thumb of big government,” she added, saying voters all over the country are sending a message that they want change in Washington.

She harkened Obama’s famous campaign slogan, asking, “How’s that hope-y, change-y stuff working out for you?”

It’s too bad Palin didn’t have proper notes on hand, as she did for the Q & A after her speech. Then again, the message that it was actually the Bush administration that left us more in debt and less secure, wouldn’t go over well with her audience.

Besides, she probably couldn’t fit it all on her palm.

Nonetheless, should the former governor address the subject again, here’s a quick crash course that might help her keep her facts straight.

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George W. Bush may be on his way to becoming the Rodney Dangerfield of American politics (except that he’s a lot less funny, or at least a lot less intentionally funny), because the man gets’s no respect.

There was this:

But now it seems the man can’t even get a slice of pizza in peace.

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“Stuff happens.”
- Donald Rumsfeld on the looting of Iraq following the U.S. invasion.

Forget about “the Aughts.” Never mind “the Naughts.” The decade just passed — and which promises to leave a lingering, bitter aftertaste — deserves a better, more descriptive name. So for what it’s worth, I hereby dub the past ten years “The Uh-Ohs: A Decade of Conservative Failure.”

It’s as good as any of the others I’ve heard. Perhaps better. Here’s why.

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Time and again, I’ve written about how the disastrous consequences of the Bush administration’s HIV/AIDS policy agenda in Africa.

Yes, Bush increased aid to Africa. Yes, the Bush administration’s global AIDS policy has been cited as a redeeming positive piece of his legacy; perhaps, even, the one aspect in which he may have done some good.

I beg to differ.

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Wow. Break out the spatulas, and get ready to scrape the exploded brains of right-wingers off the ceiling, walls, etc. Apparently, President Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize.

US President Barack Obama has been awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. prepare for a Level Five Spatula Alert

The Nobel Committee said he won it for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples”.

The committee highlighted Mr Obama’s efforts to support international bodies and promote nuclear disarmament.

Mr Obama’s spokesman said the president was “humbled” to have won the prize. He said he woke Mr Obama up when he called with the news early on Friday.

There were a record 205 nominations for this year’s peace prize. Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and Chinese dissident Hu Jia had been among the favourites.

The laureate – chosen by a five-member committee – wins a gold medal, a diploma and 10m Swedish kronor ($1.4m).

It’s a surprise, but I think I understand why the committee made this choice: You generate a lot of good will among people when your foreign policy message is something besides “It’s our world, and the rest of you are just living in it.”

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[Ed. Note: WARNING. Graphic Pictures Below Fold. NSFW. Possible Trigger.]

Word is, at least one of the pictures the Obama administration decided not to release shows an American soldier raping a female prisoner.

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.

Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.

Allegations of rape and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He has now confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.

The graphic nature of some of the images may explain the US President’s attempts to block the release of an estimated 2,000 photographs from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan despite an earlier promise to allow them to be published.

Maj Gen Taguba, who retired in January 2007, said he supported the President’s decision, adding: “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.

Not that it pleases me in the least to say, but …

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I so appreciated DanK’s Torture Timeline on DailyKos. That I created a SMILIE Timeline version, which I’ve imported into Dipity, and embedded below.

I intend to keep this updated with further developments, and fill some events I though should have been included. But I thought I’d share.’

I’ve been spending my evenings pouring over the torture memos. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, or what I expect to find, but I want to get an idea of how bad it got. (Besides, you can find amazing things in the footnotes. Ask Marcy Wheeler a/k/a EmptyWheel. Though if I found something, it’d be days before I actually had time to post about it. Maybe even a week. Unless I just did a quick copy-and-paste. Otherwise, I’m pretty much left with analysis long after the story has broken.)

It won’t make headlines, but I have given the “torture memos” a nickname, if only in my own head: “The Not-So-Funny Papers” or the “Un-Funny Papers.”

Anyway, while researching material for a possibly upcoming post, I came across all kinds of editorial cartoons about the Bush administrations torture policies. “The Not-So-Funny Papers” popped into my head again, and this post was born as a means of sharing them.

Enjoy.

We did this 266 times.

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This is one of those times when I really hate to say, “Told ya so.” But…

Well, I did.

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Oh, boy. It’s gonna be a fun eight years if president Obama keeps giving interview answers like these.

First, he confuses and confounds conservatives by doing pretty much what he said he would do when he was just candidate Obama. (Somehow, that, plus his margin of victory, and approval rating don’t suggest to them that he’s also doing what people elected him to do.)

But his additional answers to a New York Times interview are likely to cause a few fits on the right.

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Far be it from me to criticize anyone in government. (Yeah. Right.) But there’s something that’s been on my mind ever since people started piling on the auto industry, and this comment from Rahm Emmanuel brought it back to mind.

The president’s chief of staff criticized U.S. car companies Sunday for relying too long and gas guzzlers and not investing enough in alternative energy vehicles.

Rahm Emanuel also said the automakers have an outdated health care cost structure. He said the companies are making the kind of changes now that many people long had told them to make.

President Barack Obama’s auto industry task force is trying to restructure General Motors (GM) and Chrysler by a March 31 deadline. If the Obama administration fails to approve their turnaround plans, earlier loans could be called back and the companies could be forced into bankruptcy.

…”They never invested in both alternative energy cars. They got dependent on big gas guzzlers. They didn’t do — they have a health care cost structure that’s outdated,” Emanuel said, repeating the administration’s premise that health costs must come under control or else risk breaking all other pieces of the budget.

OK. I’ll be the first to say the auto industry has made some huge mistakes and some horrible business decisions. (I still haven’t figured out how or why it is that equally destructive decisions and business practices on Wall Street didn’t get half as much of an angry response as the auto industry.) But this is one they have some help with.

Help from the U.S. government, that is.

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Every morning, my neighbor and her six-year-old daughter share a bus stop with a terrorist — or a member of a terrorist organization, at least. That’s distressing enough, because my son rides the same school bus, but I recently discovered that the terrorist at my son’s bus stop is me; his Dad, who puts him on the bus each morning. And another terrorist, his Papa, picks him up from school every day.

We became terrorists one morning in February 2006, when we got dressed up, put a coat and tie on our then four-year-old son, and drove to the state capitol.

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