January 8, 2014

McCain Calls Rodman An 'Idiot,' Harry Reid A 'Dictator

TOM KLUDT – JANUARY 8, 2014, 6:29 AM EST

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was characteristically combative on Tuesday during an interview on CNN. Host Piers Morgan asked McCain about some of the day's top stories and, true to form, the senator responded in pugnacious fashion.

What does he make of Dennis Rodman, the hall of fame basketball player who gave a bizarre interview on Tuesday while on his latest visit to North Korea.

"I think he's an idiot," McCain said while laughing, adding that Rodman has emerged as a mouthpiece for North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

"I think he's the very person that of not great intellect who doesn't understand that he really does provide propaganda for this very brutal ruthless young man."

more
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/mccain-rodman-reid-idiot-dictator

January 8, 2014

Governor Paul LePage: Let Maine's 12-Year-Olds Go To Work

CATHERINE THOMPSON – JANUARY 8, 2014, 8:01 AM EST

How do you energize a state's economy when "47 percent of able-bodied" residents don't have a job? Let 12-year-olds into the workforce. That's what Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) told attendees Tuesday at an agricultural trades show, according to the Portland Press-Herald.

“We don’t allow children to work until they’re 16, but two years later, when they’re 18, they can go to war and fight for us,” LePage said, as quoted by the Press-Herald. “That’s causing damage to our economy. I started working far earlier than that, and it didn’t hurt me at all. There is nothing wrong with being a paperboy at 12 years old, or at a store sorting bottles at 12 years old.”

Last year, the outspoken governor was recorded telling an audience of conservative women that "about 47 percent of able-bodied people in the state of Maine don't work," echoing former presidential candidate Mitt Romney's memorable comment dismissing 47 percent of the American public for not paying income tax.

LePage has long pushed to lower the legal working age to 12, according to the Bangor Daily News, based on his own experience working at a younger age. Children under 16 must obtain a work permit and be enrolled in school before beginning a job under current Maine law, but the state's Department of Labor is expected to streamline that process this month.

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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/paul_lepage_child_labor

January 8, 2014

Al From, Architect of Democrats’ Comeback in the ‘90s, Welcomes the Populists

The battle is on within the Democratic Party over whether a newly emboldened and resurgent left threatens the carefully cultivated centrist brand Bill Clinton rode to the White House, and which helped elect Barack Obama. Al From, founder of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) credited with bringing the Democratic Party back into the mainstream, said in an interview that he’s not worried about the party damaging its brand and losing electoral strength as it embraces a more populist message focused on economic inequality.

“Back in ’92 I might have looked at it differently, but every Democrat ought to want to reduce inequality,” he said. “We can have an argument, or a debate, over the methods. A small increase in the minimum wage can’t alone eliminate poverty, but I don’t have any problem with arguments over the means.”

Clinton’s successful presidency restored the Democratic Party’s credibility as a steward of the economy, with an Internet boom and 20 million jobs created. “Now the focus is on income inequality, and that’s fine,” From said. It’s what he calls a Big Idea, and he likes it as long as the party doesn’t get too carried away with inequality at the expense of policies that promote economic growth.

“The Democratic brand is going to be determined by what happens over the next three years in the Obama administration: Whether the economy continues to grow, whether he gets health care right, and it works. I personally like the plan but the implementation has been awful. What kills the Democratic brand is when government doesn’t work.”

more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/08/al-from-architect-of-democrats-comeback-in-the-90s-welcomes-the-populists.html

January 8, 2014

An Unauthorized Book Leaks and Roger Ailes Declares War

In ‘The Loudest Voice in the Room,’ charges of anti-Semitism, Bill O’Reilly mockery, and a trophy from Lachlan Murdoch’s tenure. All lies, says Fox News, of a book they’ve yet to read.

Television wizard Roger Ailes and his combat-ready army at the Fox News Channel, the cable-news powerhouse he launched in 1996, have spent three years preparing for all-out war over New York magazine writer Gabriel Sherman’s forthcoming Ailes biography, The Loudest Voice in the Room.

And now, with the book’s official publication two weeks away, war has finally been declared. After contents of the book leaked on Tuesday, a Fox News spokesperson quickly accused Sherman of writing falsehoods after receiving zero cooperation from his subject.

:::snip:::

According to a report posted late Tuesday night on The New York Times website, Sherman’s 560-page biography, to be published by Random House, is every bit as harsh as Team Ailes had feared—kind of a literary Pearl Harbor.

The Times account, based on the paper’s obtaining an early copy of Sherman’s book, reports that the author asserts that Ailes viciously mocks Fox News stars behind their backs; gloats over backroom victories against corporate opponents (specifically Lachlan Murdoch, elder son of Ailes’s boss Rupert Murdoch, who runs News Corp., Fox News’s parent company); once offered a prospective female employee an extra $100 a week in salary for sex; and flung an anti-Semitic slur during an argument with a rival television executive who happened to be Jewish. Sherman also claims, according to the Times, that Ailes—who was a celebrated Republican media consultant in his previous life—hoped to use Fox News for his political agenda during the 2012 presidential campaign, telling fellow executives: “I want to elect the next president.”

more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/08/an-unauthorized-book-leaks-and-roger-ailes-declares-war.html

January 8, 2014

Congress to Iraq’s Maliki: Be a Good Boy to Get Guns

By Josh Rogin

Capitol Hill was ready to give Apache helicopters to Baghdad to help fight al Qaeda, but now senators worry the prime minister will use the weapons on domestic enemies.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki still hasn’t done enough to prove that he can be trusted with heavy U.S. weapons such as Apache helicopters, several top Senators told The Daily Beast.

As Iraqi army forces prepare to mount an offensive to take back control of the city of Fallujah from al Qaeda’s Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), the Obama administration is in a full court press to urge Congress to allow the sale of dozens of Boeing AH-64 Apache helicopters the Maliki government has been seeking for years. Both the House Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had been holding up the sales, out of concern Maliki will use them against his domestic political enemies. Senators in both parties also lament Maliki’s increasingly sectarian style of governing and his alleged cooperation with Iran to aid the Syrian regime.

The Daily Beast has learned that the House Foreign Affairs Committee has now dropped its hold on the Apache sales but one senior senator still refuses to allow it to go through – Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez (D-NJ). Congressional aides said Tuesday that Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns has been lobbying Menendez to release his hold on the sales and Burns has also been reaching out to other senators who have problems with Maliki. Maliki pressed Vice President Joe Biden to deal with congressional opposition to the Apache sales during his November trip to Washington.

Menendez said Tuesday he was reviewing a letter sent to him by Maliki outlining steps he is taking to govern more equitably and ensure American weapons would be used only for counterterrorism, but Menendez has not yet agreed to allow the Apache sales.

More
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/08/congress-to-iraq-s-maliki-be-a-good-boy-to-get-guns.html

January 8, 2014

I Could Have Stopped Waterboarding Before It Happened

An exclusive account from the CIA’s former top lawyer.

By JOHN RIZZO
January 05, 2014

:::snip:::

About a week later, a couple of our lawyers (our contingent at the CTC (Counter terrorism Center) had tripled from three to nine since 9/11) came to my office. They told me about a different approach the CTC had just devised to deal with Zubaydah. It had a deceptively bland name: “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” and from the start they were called EITs for short. During my previous 25 years as an Agency lawyer, I had never heard of anything remotely like this.

Evidently aware of the distinct possibility that what they were proposing would scare the hell out of me, the CTC contingent prefaced their presentation with a number of assurances: The EITs they were proposing to employ on Zubaydah were not techniques the CTC had just dreamed up; with a couple of exceptions, the U.S. military had used them for years in training exercises (called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) on thousands of soldiers to prepare them in case they were captured and subjected to such methods by the enemy. Further, CTC analysts, psychologists and a couple of outside consultants had carefully culled only those EITs from the SERE menu that they believed best suited, and most likely, to break Zubaydah’s resistance. Finally, the EITs would be judiciously applied, beginning with the ones that were least coercive, for a limited period of time, and would end as soon as Zubaydah demonstrated that he was no longer resisting and was ready to cooperate. They had no intention of employing EITs any longer or any more harshly than was absolutely necessary. While I don’t remember them saying it exactly, their message was implicit: We want no part of torture.

“OK,” I said, bracing myself. “Describe everything you’d like to do. In the order you’d do them. In detail, and take your time.”

And so they began. The following is my best recollection of the way the CTC guys described their proposed techniques to me. Later, there would come written documents, describing them in more detail (some techniques would be added and some would be subtracted from this list). But this is what I recall being told at the very beginning, on this day in my office in early April 2002, about the proposed EITs. It’s not easy to forget.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/waterboarding-cia-lawyer-john-rizzo-torture-101758.html#ixzz2pmFLbUqk

January 8, 2014

Jim Garrow & Pete Santilli Now Openly Calling For Military Coup Against Obama

SUBMITTED BY Brian Tashman on Tuesday, 1/7/2014 1:30 pm

Jim Garrow brought his tall tale about President Obama trying to murder him to The Pete Santilli Show on Friday, where he also plugged the anti-Obama Operation American Spring. Santilli, the radio host who called for the murder of Obama and for Hillary Clinton to be “shot in the vagina” and has advocated for violence against the government, said that a national strike and even a military coup is necessary to bring down the Obama administration.

“I’m not calling for — well, yes I’m calling for the military to restore our Republic. Is it a military coup? I would say that it’s probably the most orderly fashion to do this,” Santilli told Garrow, who responded that it would take just “three percent of the population to rise up” and “control the country.”

Santilli: That change that we’re referring to, and I do have hope that it could be done if we have the numbers and we do have the numbers, if 300 million people who we could potentially get to rise up and if we had them all standing in the streets, standing still with a national strike and shut the economic system down, it cuts off the lifeblood of the elite, they no longer have that wealth flow. But that change, because we’ve spent decades ignoring this, they’ve been preparing for this for tens of years, for the past thirty or forty years internally to use all of these tactics that we’ve used to save the entire world, to police the world, to spread freedom throughout the world, now all of these tactics are being used against us by domestic enemies. But I think that that change must come forcefully, it has to happen in a short period of time. I say forcefully in that we need to abruptly let Obama know, it is time for you to go, you need to resign, you need to leave.

We have an opportunity here where our military commanders can affect arrests on these criminals. Do we not? Do you think that’s going to happen? I’m not calling for — well, yes I’m calling for the military to restore our Republic. Is it a military coup? I would say that it’s probably the most orderly fashion to do this. But don’t you agree that it must be a forceful, abrupt change. It can be peaceful but it has to happen in a short period of time, doesn’t it?

- See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/jim-garrow-pete-santilli-now-openly-calling-military-coup-against-obama#sthash.RDUOkr5e.dpuf

January 7, 2014

GOP is losing on unemployment insurance — and running scared

Newly assertive Democrats force Republicans to scramble to defend their insurance-cutting cruelty to the unemployed

JOAN WALSH

It’s way too early to declare victory on extending unemployment insurance benefits to the long-term jobless. Yes, six Republicans joined Democrats to let the measure come up for debate and a vote. That shouldn’t even make headlines, but given the filibuster-happy GOP Senate minority in the age of Barack Obama, it’s news. Still, not all of the six are likely to support the bill, though it will almost certainly pass the Senate. It faces real trouble in John Boehner’s House, where the tanned and rested speaker returned from his long vacation telling Democrats they’ll have to cut other safety-net programs to pay for it.

But it’s worth noting how much Democrats have already changed the UI debate. Republicans have gone from flat refusals to extend long-term unemployment to insisting they’ll consider an extension, as long as it’s paid for. That’s progress worth acknowledging.

Sure, Congress extended UI 14 of 17 times without finding funds to pay for it, including five times under George W. Bush. The party’s recent extremism on unemployment insurance is just another measure of how far it has shifted right in the last five years. But Democrats’ new boldness on issues of economic populism and income inequality has Republicans scrambling for a politically palatable reply – on UI as well as the larger issue of poverty and opportunity.

Sen. Rand Paul is the poster boy for the GOP’s ideological scramble. In early December he flatly dismissed a UI extension by saying it did a “disservice” to the unemployed. Four weeks later, after spending some of his winter break back in Kentucky, where unemployment remains high and 38,000 jobless people lost benefits Dec. 28, Paul shifted a little, agreeing to consider an extension as long as it’s paid for.

more
http://www.salon.com/2014/01/07/gop_is_losing_on_unemployment_insurance_and_running_scared/

January 7, 2014

Mazel tov, Lily Tomlin!

The newly married 74-year-old has a new role -- Jane Wagner's wife

MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS

It took over four decades, but Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner have put a ring on it. Columnist Liz Smith quietly dropped the news of the nuptials in a column Friday, noting, “My longtime friends, Lily Tomlin and her love, the writer Jane Wagner, got married on the eve of 2014 … My wish is that their happiness will be as great as their combined talents.”

The 74-year-old Tomlin, who will be a headliner at Michigan’s LaughFest 2014 in March, has spent much of her public life avoiding the image of poster girl for marriage equality. Four years ago, she revealed that when Time magazine offered her the opportunity to come out on its cover, “I was more insulted than anything. I felt it was a bribe: ‘We need a gay person, and we’ll take anybody!’” Even when she semi-officially came out in 2000, she insisted, “I never wanted to be anybody’s spokesperson or poster person. You know, I see what happens to too many people.” And for her decades-long circumspect approach to her private life, she’s faced criticism from other, more outspoken figures.

Yet even as she flew under the political radar, she has subversively used her comedy to make a statement. On her third album, “Modern Scream,” she included a bit about an interviewer asking an actress what it’s like “to see yourself on the big screen, playing a heterosexual woman.” “I’ve seen these women all my life,” she replied. “I know how they walk, I know how they talk.” She narrated the 1995 film “The Celluloid Closet.” In recent years she’s spoken more openly about her experiences in show business and her admiration for how “remarkably wonderful” it is that there’s more acceptance now for celebrities who come out.

Yet her approach to officially tying the knot with the woman she’s spent most of her adult life with remained openly ambivalent. In 2006, Tomlin spoke out against international opposition to marriage equality by saying, “I am happy for anybody who wants to get married and I think they should have every right to. It is an aggressively negative rejection.” But she added, “I am not a religious person and to me it is a kind of imitation of straight society. If anything, we could be more forward thinking and we could maybe create something different.” And just last March, during an appearance on “The View,” she admitted, “I’m not against it, I support same-sex marriage and I raise money for it and everything else, but I used to facetiously say I don’t even want to get into the wardrobe … We’d like to, but honestly it’s a lot to plan. And you got to make hors d’oeuvres and things like that.”

MORE
http://www.salon.com/2014/01/07/mazel_tov_lily_tomlin/

January 7, 2014

UPDATED 2 x: Gates issues harsh critique of Obama in memoir

Source: Washington Post



In a new memoir, former defense secretary Robert Gates unleashes harsh judgments about President Obama’s leadership and his commitment to the Afghanistan war, writing that by early 2010 he had concluded the president “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” Gates writes in “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.”

:::snip:::





Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/robert-gates-former-defense-secretary-offers-harsh-critique-of-obamas-leadership-in-duty/2014/01/07/6a6915b2-77cb-11e3-b1c5-739e63e9c9a7_story.html

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UPDATE;






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Update 2

White House disputes Biden criticism in Gates book
ASSOCIATED PRESS, ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is pushing back against criticism that former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has leveled against Vice President Joe Biden in a new book.

Gates’ memoir is titled “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.” He’s quoted as saying Biden has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue of the last four decades.

White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden says President Barack Obama disagrees. She says Biden has been a leading statesman and has advanced U.S. leadership abroad. Hayden says Obama relies on Biden’s good counsel every day.

Responding to another Gates claim, that Obama lost confidence in the Afghanistan surge, Hayden says the president has always welcomed different views within his team. Gates served under Obama and former President George W. Bush.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/01/07/white_house_disputes_biden_criticism_in_gates_book/