the citizen-viewer

…lazy citizen-viewer lets Mitch Benn do the work.

Sue Gazdo, director of the Republican National Committee’s Membership Service, writes to offer citizen-viewers the priceless opportunity to buy this:

It’s Paddy, “the newest member of the Republican National Committee’s family of elephants.” He “proudly sports his Republican colors with the official Republican National Committee logo.”

She further urges us to “Bring Paddy home as a gift for your favorite Republican, child or grandchild, or to display in your own office.”

For real.

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

From the New York Times article on the U.S. Senate vote to expand government spying powers and give telecoms companies immunity for helping the government illegally listen in on the citizen-viewers:

There was a measure of frustration in the voice of Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, as he told reporters during a break in the daylong debate, “Holding all the Democrats together on this, we’ve learned a long time ago, is not something that’s doable.” (full article)

Joining the Republicans in abandoning the rule of law were the following Democrats and alleged Democrats:

Baucus (D-MT)
Bayh (D-IN)
Carper (D-DE)
Casey (D-PA)
Inouye (D-HI)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kohl (D-WI)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Lieberman (ID-CT)
Lincoln (D-AR)
McCaskill (D-MO)
Mikulski (D-MD)
Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Pryor (D-AR)
Rockefeller (D-WV)
Salazar (D-CO)
Webb (D-VA)
Whitehouse (D-RI)(but see this)

Helpful hint to the Dems: Find someone who can do the job.

In case the citizen-viewers have been inattentive today, the CIA has admitted (ahead of a New York Times article) destroying hundreds of hours of tapes of their interrogation of suspected Al Qaeda operatives they held.

The CIA’s defenders are claiming that the tapes were destroyed to protect the identities — and the safety — of the interrogators. If the CIA is incapable of blurring the perpetrator’s faces on the tape, then we’re paying them way too much.

No, the real reason is pretty obvious. They didn’t want somebody to see the ugly, illegal, inhuman acts they were committing. Because even the ravening mobs out there, the listeners to Bill O’Reilly, the watchers of Rush Limbaugh, might be disgusted — many of them anyway — by the actual sight of a human being jerking helplessly as he feels himself drowning, helpless in the grip of his torturers. His American torturers.

So they destroyed the tapes.

The operative concept here is a legal one, omnia praesumuntur contra spoliatorem. It means “all things are presumed against the wrongdoer,” and is applied in cases where evidence is destroyed. It is assumed that those destroy evidence are those who know that the evidence would incriminate them.

President Bush’s spokesperson says that Bush can’t recall if he was told that the tapes would be destroyed and doesn’t remember if he saw them. If he had any interest in the question, he would find out, and if someone failed to tell him, he would have their head.

But that kind of accountability has never been demonstrated by this administration. Instead, they have the heads of people like acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin, who had himself waterboarded to see whether it was torture or not — and the law into the hands of people like Michael Mukasey, who said he didn’t know if it was or not.

Now he will never see those tapes. For him, and for the mobs, the torture we are guilty of committing will remain an abstraction. The screams will echo only within the walls of the CIA’s torture chambers, and in the broken psyches of the human beings that suffer by our hand.

At 10:44 AM 9/11/01 -0400, Rich wrote:

I saw both towers collapse from my rooftop, the second one just a few minutes ago. Battery Park is all dust and smoke and I could see the cloud spread along the ground and puff up between buildings a mile away. I’m afraid this will change a lot of things. There must have been tens of thousands of people in those buildings. It’s beyond belief. I have to get to work right away. Don’t try to call for now because all the circuits are busy.
love to all of you,
Rich

The second building was hit 18 minutes after the first, but the second collapsed first, maybe 30-40 minutes after it was hit. The first one took more than an hour to collapse. There hasn’t been much information, but I’m afraid that a lot of people didn’t make it out. From my view, hundreds of people must have been killed immediately, and then the fire and smoke filled large parts of the tops of the buildings. Maybe people below that were able to get out, but people above would have had a hard time. The damage was tremendous. When the second one collapsed, the top just fell straight down and crushed the rest of the building at least down to the 30th floor or so. And then there were all the people on the planes, and the other planes like the one that crashed in Pennsylvania and the one that hit the Pentagon. One of the art directors here was on the Boston plane that hit the WTC.

I was on my rooftop because after I heard the second crash, I turned on the radio and they said the towers were hit. So I went up to see it. What an awful thing.

“Public service is honorable and noble.”
— Alberto Gonzales, announcing his resignation.

If there were any doubts where Senator Joe Lieberman stands politically, here he is at a the Washington Israel Summit of Christians United For Israel.

After an extended panegyric to CUFI’s founder, Texan pastor John Hagee (“like Moses”), Lieberman welcomes the next speaker:

“My dear friend, former colleague, always gonna be my colleague, always gonna be a worker for what is good in our society, Senator Rick Santorum, great to be with you again…” (Note: Link not actually spoken by Senator Lieberman)

Watch Max Blumenthal’s amusing visit to the CUFI conference.

The citizen-viewer enjoys these video intrusions, by the way, but wishes Max wouldn’t feign puzzlement when he inevitably is kicked out. They’re well within their rights to eject him.

From Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane, June 28.

Marty Moss-Coane: Do you think though that there’s anything that can be done to promote unity in Iraq, or is it frankly too late?

Ambassador Michael Bell: It’s too late. And I know that that’s difficult for us in the West to accept, because we were brought up with an—I think particularly in the United States—with a belief system that says, you know we can solve it, there’s got to be a way, somehow we will find that way, we just have to to think better, we just have to coordinate better and we will find it. I think, you know I’ve spent thirty-plus years dealing with the Middle East and sometimes there just is no solution. And it’s hard to accept, but that’s the reality.

He’s captured something that the citizen-viewers have been slowly coming to grips with.

Bell has served as Canada’s ambassador to Egypt, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and he chaired the donor committee of the International Reconstruction Fund Facility for Iraq.

Listen to the interview on WHYY’s Radio Times

Read Bell’s opinion piece from the Toronto Globe & Mail

Responding to subpoenas from Congressional committees investigating the firings of nine federal prosecutors, the White House asserted executive privilege today. And not for the first time.

The White House “will not be making any production in response to these subpoenas for documents,” the President’s Counsel wrote.

So that’s it. Something about the firing of these prosecutors is just too secret for Congress and the rest of the citizen-viewers to know. So secret that the President is ready to have the much-feared “constitutional confrontation” over it. Oooh.

President Bush is in a fix, but the citizen-viewer is ready as always to offer a solution.

Just clap those former prosecutors in manacles and send them to Guantanamo. That’ll put an end to these insolent questions.