All posts tagged "politics"
Precious normality »
EXERPTS
His use of the English language, frequently derided by his opponents during the election campaign as verbal garlands, has proven to be a useful and necessary tool of government at a time of profound crisis.
He is both bold and measured. It is called nuance - and America and the world have been yearning for it.
It appears that Mr Obama understands the unavoidable truth that reality is a bit more complex than most politicians usually care to admit.
Without this degree of honesty he could not even begin to launch the dramatic changes that he is hoping to engineer in this country.
Pragmatist and Law - Supreme Court »
EXERPTS
Pragmatism has its detractors, and in a confirmation battle, Mr. Obama’s nominee could face charges that he or she does not give enough weight to formal law. But although Mr. Obama is results-oriented, he retained an overall skepticism for what courts can accomplish, said David Strauss, a former colleague at University of Chicago. In Mr. Obama’s due process and voting right classes, he showed students the broad failures of Reconstruction-era amendments that tried to establish equality for blacks.
Even as law review president, Mr. Obama de-emphasized his own views and instead made himself a channel for those of others. His decision making was “about the group sentiment and what the group majority might agree to,” said Nancy McCullough, a fellow editor.
Obama to Select Justice - Justice Résumé »
EXERPTS
The current court is the first to be made up entirely of former federal appeals court judges. And only a few of those appeals courts at that: seven of the justices served on what might be called the court of appeals for the Acela circuit, in Boston, Philadelphia and Washington.
In voting against the nomination of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. as a senator, Mr. Obama said that “adherence to precedent and rules of construction and interpretation will only get you through the 25th mile of the marathon.”
Rumsfeld's war »
“Top Rumsfeld aides were already laying the groundwork for torture barely two months after the 9/11 attacks, and just weeks into the war in Afghanistan. The Pentagon’s general counsel’s office contacted the military agency that runs the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape programs — schools where U.S. personnel and contractors are taught how to resist abuses that prisoners of war have been through before — in December 2001 to find out how the SERE training could help interrogators break al-Qaida suspects. Military officials at the time told top Pentagon aides that the SERE techniques produced “less reliable” information.”
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On April 16, 2003, Rumsfeld authorized 24 techniques at Guantánamo including sleep deprivation, messing with detainees’ diets and pretending the interrogators were from a different country — one where torture was even more acceptable — in order to scare them into cooperating. And he told commanders to ask him for permission to use additional techniques.
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By 2004, when news of the abuses at Abu Ghraib got out, the military had already grown accustomed to a culture of abusive interrogation that made that scandal possible — even if the Bush administration tried to claim it was a blip in an otherwise clean record. And as the Senate report makes clear yet again, that culture came about thanks to Rumsfeld.
Bush's - Law »
- NYT: Any Indictment of Interrogation Policy Makers Would Face Several Hurdl
Efforts to prosecute the high-level Bush administration officials who created and authorized the interrogation program in 2002 - like Vice President Dick Cheney; the C.I.A. director, George J. Tenet; the defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld; and Alberto R. Gonzales, who was then White House counsel - also “would be extremely difficult,” said Eric Posner, a University of Chicago law professor.
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The shield against prosecution provided by the Bush legal team’s assurances has led some critics to focus on the role played by the lawyers themselves, like Mr. Cheney’s counsel, David S. Addington; Mr. Rumsfeld’s counsel, William J. Haynes II; and the authors of the Justice Department memorandums: John C. Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Steven G. Bradbury.
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“No one is above the law,” Mr. Holder said. “So we’ll see what happens.”
The St. Petersburg Times has won Pulitzer Prize for national reporting
The board cited PolitiFact’s use of “probing reporters and the power of the World Wide Web to examine more than 750 political claims, separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters.”
Neil Brown, executive editor of the St. Petersburg Times, which launched PolitiFact in August 2007, said the award was “proof that the Web is not a death sentence for newspapers. In fact, PolitiFact marries the power of old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism with an extraordinarily powerful way to present it.”
•> also see: FactCheck
a nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.
The Annenberg Political Fact Check is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania
21st Century American Politics with and the 18th Century Brain
The Political Mind — Rockridge Institute
“In What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank pointed out that a great number of Americans actually vote against their own interests. In The Political Mind, George Lakoff explains why.
As it turns out, human beings are not the rational creatures we’ve so long imagined ourselves to be. Ideas, morals, and values do not exist somewhere outside the body, ready to be examined and put to use. Instead, they exist quite literally inside the brain—and they take physical shape there”
George Lakoff
see also:
World Affairs Council podcasts
Internet Archive Audio Archive
