Welcome to DU! The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards. Join the community: Create a free account Support DU (and get rid of ads!): Become a Star Member Latest Breaking News General Discussion The DU Lounge All Forums Issue Forums Culture Forums Alliance Forums Region Forums Support Forums Help & Search

kpete

kpete's Journal
kpete's Journal
May 20, 2015

McCain: Let me tell you about the one that got away

“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick




http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/national/heres-why-john-mccain-brought-photo-giant-catfish-/nmKGJ/
May 20, 2015

Wow, this is quite a speech from Obama's top civil rights person at the Department of Justice.

The White HouseVerified account
?@WhiteHouse
"Kids who grow up here—they're America’s children. Just like children everyplace else" —Obama: http://go.wh.gov/G2vAMy
https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/600686844112740352




Let’s start with the first question and consider the source of the mistrust. Mistrust can’t be explained away as the kneejerk reaction of the ill-informed or the hyperbolic. It’s in part the product of historical awareness about the role that police have played in enforcing and perpetuating slavery, the Black Codes, lynchings and Jim Crow segregation. As FBI Director James Comey noted, “At many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo, a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups.”

It is also the product of lived experience, of negative interactions that individuals — or their family members, friends, or neighbors — have had with law enforcement. Something as quietly humiliating as being mistreated during a traffic stop, or being followed in a retail store. These stories can circulate through a neighborhood — or these days, across the nation via the web and social media — and they can build up over time into a painful narrative that divides community members and police.

The lack of trust also undeniably results from our criminal justice policies over the last few decades, and the concentrated impact they have had on communities of color and people living in poverty. Law enforcement practices such as the stopping and frisking of young black men based on stereotypes. Sentencing policies that result in mass incarceration, particularly of people of color. And the devastating consequences that convictions have had on individuals’ ability to find work, secure stable housing and reintegrate as full members of society. These are deliberate policy choices that we made over the last several decades. We bear the responsibility to confront their consequences.



MORE:
http://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/principal-deputy-assistant-attorney-general-vanita-gupta-delivers-remarks-colorado
http://theobamadiary.com/

May 19, 2015

Metaphor For Sexism? Cannes Film Festival Event Won't Admit Women Wearing Flat Shoes

The Cannes Film Festival is reportedly not allowing women into screenings if they’re wearing flat shoes. I’m not sure I could’ve come up with a better metaphor for sexism in the film industry if I was really, really trying. If you wrote this into a novel about sexism in the film industry, it would seem heavy-handed. “Too much,” your editor would say. “Tone it down.”

Flatgate erupted on Twitter this week after several women were apparently turned away from a red carpet screening of Cate Blanchett’s new movie Carol because they were in the demon flats. According to Screen Daily, the screening was on a Sunday night and the women weren’t exactly wearing Keds:

Multiple guests, some older with medical conditions, were denied access to the anticipated world-premiere screening for wearing rhinestone flats.

The festival declined to comment on the matter, but did confirm that it is obligatory for all women to wear high-heels to red-carpet screenings.


Obligatory, huh. Asif Kapadia, director of the new Amy Winehouse documentary Amy, confirmed that his wife, too, nearly missed a screening because of her shockingly non-vertical footwear:


http://www.screendaily.com/festivals/cannes/cannes-women-denied-palais-entry-for-wearing-flats/5088395.article
http://jezebel.com/cannes-film-festival-wont-admit-women-wearing-flat-shoe-1705462774
May 19, 2015

Knowing what we've known all along...

Knowing what we've known all along...
by One Pissed Off Liberal



QUESTION TO ALL PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES:

Would you lie the country into war? Order people tortured to death? Start wars while cutting taxes to the shamefully rich? Continue to trash the planet and fuck over its people? Push policies based on greed and corruption while lying about everything under the sun? Ignore war crimes and economic depravity at the highest levels of society? Favor corporations over humanity? Neglect the national infrastructure? Ignore the climate CRISIS? Ignore racism? Ignore poverty? Ignore homelessness, veterans, regular people? Crap on all the good people of the earth who desire PEACE? Shit on your oath of office and wipe your ass with the Constitution? Laugh behind your hand at the gullible idiots who vote for your soulless ass?


Come on, we're dying to know.


from:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/19/1385985/-Knowing-what-we-ve-known-all-along
May 19, 2015

Knowing what we've known all along...

Knowing what we've known all along...
by One Pissed Off Liberal

Would you lie the country into war? Order people tortured to death? Start wars while cutting taxes to the shamefully rich? Continue to trash the planet and fuck over its people? Push policies based on greed and corruption while lying about everything under the sun? Ignore war crimes and economic depravity at the highest levels of society? Favor corporations over humanity? Neglect the national infrastructure? Ignore the climate CRISIS? Ignore racism? Ignore poverty? Ignore homelessness, veterans, regular people? Crap on all the good people of the earth who desire PEACE? Shit on your oath of office and wipe your ass with the Constitution? Laugh behind your hand at the gullible idiots who vote for your soulless ass?


Come on, we're dying to know.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/19/1385985/-Knowing-what-we-ve-known-all-along
May 19, 2015

In case you didn't yet know Cheney was recklessly incompetent: Cheney Thought Al Qaeda Was Bluffing.



Dick Cheney would like you to believe that he knows more about protecting the nation from terrorism than anyone else. But he actually knows less.

When presented with an actual terror threat — the one that turned into the 9/11 attacks — Cheney thought al Qaeda was bluffing.


No kidding. This is from The Great War Of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism, a new book by former acting CIA director Mike Morell:


The threat reporting continued (in the spring and summer of 2001)— other pieces were titled “Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent” and “Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks” — but I sensed some skepticism about it. The vice president one morning asked me whether all this threat reporting might not be deception on the part of al Qa‘ida — purposely designed to get our attention and to get us to needlessly expend resources in response.



According to Morell, who was then in charge of the daily presidential intelligence briefing, the CIA felt they then needed to produce a report titled “UBL (Usama bin Laden) Threats Are Real.”

......................

UBL Threats Are Real. Take a minute and think about that. Think about what would have happened on the afternoon of September 11, 2001 if Americans had known that had been Cheney’s attitude just a few months before. Think about how, if he’d been a Democrat, that would have defined liberals as weak, cowardly children for the next 50 years.

..........

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/19/cia-tell-bush-cheney-al-qaeda-threats-real/
http://thegreatwarofourtime.com/
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/19/1385971/-Cheney-Thought-Al-Qaeda-Was-Bluffing
May 19, 2015

A 2.0 student can know more than a 4.0 student.

Grades don't determine intelligence, they test obedience.
https://twitter.com/thereaIbanksy/status/600115455571824640


Thank god I am an art teacher (no such thing as a "wrong" answer),
kp







May 19, 2015

Mr. Pierce Mercilessly Takes Down Mr. Brooks (et al): How Humility Insists On Deceit

Our Mr. Brooks:
In which we learn one can teach humility without having any.


Prologue: This weekend, at a graduation ceremony, I heard David Gergen quote David Brooks. At which moment, I believe, human existence passed over the event horizon of white-guy faux-wisdom. Everything went beige and I woke up in the middle of a road.

Present Day:

..................

"Listen," his note said, "This is horrible. It's like I never left. In fact, it's like it's 2002 all over again, and that was a nightmare. Everybody, dressed up in toglike Vikings, eating with their hands, screaming imprecations to Jupiter and mumbling in Latin about Carthage. I thought we were done with that. I thought that was part of Master's going off to teach Humility to undergraduates. What a nightmare. I'm going out on the fire escape and lick my balls for an hour. MH"

It seems that Brooks has noticed that people are talking again about the war for which he so enthusiastically shook his moneymaker back during the Avignon Presidency. So, naturally, it's time for a Professor of Humbleology to cover his own sad-sack ass. (Especially since Paul Krugman kicked said ass pre-emptively yesterday.) Mistakes, it seems, were made. The spectacle is ungainly and obscene.

There's a fable going around now that the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war. That doesn't gibe with the facts. Anybody conversant with the Robb-Silberman report from 2005 knows that this was a case of human fallibility. This exhaustive, bipartisan commission found "a major intelligence failure": "The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community's assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policy makers."


This is a dodge unworthy of a grounded eighth-grader. Nobody ever said all the intelligence was faked or stovepiped. (Also, the Robb-Silberman Report was specifically designed not to explore the question of ginned-up intel: Silberman does not mention that the commission he chaired did not even investigate whether the Bush administration manipulated intelligence: Senate Republicans refused to allow the commission to investigate this matter, fearing it would harm Bush's reelection prospects. Indeed, Silberman himself wrote in the report at the time, "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry.&quot The fraud and deception was baked into the whole process, and the fraud and deception was deployed only in specific instances when it was most dearly required. And what Brooks utterly fails to confront is the contempt for actual expertise played into the rosy scenarios promulgated by know-nothings like David Brooks. The whole enterprise was an exercise in deceit and unreality. He ate it up with a spoon. It is time for Brooks and for people like him to shut up about it. Rand Paul, god help us, is right about this.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35092/david-brooks-and-history-have-a-disagreement/?click=welcome-ad

Profile Information

Member since: Fri Sep 17, 2004, 03:59 PM
Number of posts: 71,982
Latest Discussions»kpete's Journal