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wretchard the cat

How Rahm Is Reviving the GOP - Page 1 - The Daily Beast - 0 views

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    This is an article I read last week ... I do however, think the Republicans are clueless ... Rahm is not reviving the GOP, he is reviving citizen involvement, especially as the Tea Party movement. However, the Tea Party Movement is actually probably more of a threat to Republicans than to Democrats, at this point. Therefore, the reality is, that Rahm is splitting up the Republican Coalition...
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    This turned into a posting at Belmont Club: Rahming things through
Amit Green

Belmont Club » The last brother - 0 views

  • Torture is an emotionally charged word, especially when it is used to further one’s political ends. One person’s torture is another person’s useful tool. What we are talking about is how far we are willing to go and with what tools available in our kit are we willing to use on hard cases to obtain vital information for our survival. Therefore, the end result is intelligence of reliable quality to act upon. Tools used in a battlefield situation will be different than tools used to obtain intelligence of a strategic value. It has been shown that use of sadistic torture, like pulling nails, electric shock, and other means of causing pain is counterproductive and will produce information that may be useless. The subject will say anything to get the pain to stop. So the interrogator is going to have to to get inside the head of the subject and take the subject on a psychological journey that will strip away the subject’s defenses. How deep one has to go depends on the subject and the value placed on the intelligence. The islamic hardcases, by nature of their beliefs and their training, can be very tough nuts to crack. So the interrogator has to look into his toolkit and see what would be an APPROPRIATE method to use, and put it to work. The stakes are high. Our survival as a nation and civilization are what’s on the line. We are at war, and we need the intelligence. People who use interrogation techniques and the T word to beat govt agencies on the head are not talking about humane behavior. They are playing politics. War is settling disputes when everything else has failed. War is about breaking things and killing people. And the gathering of intelligence by interrogation, using appropriate techniques, is part of war.
    • Amit Green
       
      This comment is from Alaska Paul
  • Those who choose to terrorise in a no-rules fashion should expect no rules to gallop over the horizon to rescue them. That this does happen can be seen as either (a) a manifestation of our ethical standards, or (b) a product of politically correct obfuscation, since those rules that exist were framed (quite some time ago)for the regulation of state-sponsored armies, not stateless actors. It depends on your point of view. In my opinion, once confronted by terrorism of the Al-quaeda variety, all bets are off and you do what has to be done, with extreme prejudice.
    • Amit Green
       
      This comment is from blogstrop
  • The problem with McCain’s acceptance speech was that there was no follow-through on how he wrapped it up. “Stand up and Fight!” he said. That was the closing refrain, repeated several times for emphasis. It was the most powerful part of the speech. Standing up and fighting against all the things that had been dragging down our society for so long was what we needed. But he never did that. He didn’t fight. He tip-toed through the rest of the campaign, pulling his punches and insisting the rest of the GOP pull theirs.
    • Amit Green
       
      This comment is from JMH
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    The two comments by Wretchard are actually not by Wretchard, but highlights from the post using the Diigo tool. So the Diigo interface is a bit confusing. The first comment is from Alaska Paul and the second from blogstrop.
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    The comment I highlighted about McCain is not from me but from JMH
Amit Green

Purpose: Explore Diigo software, meet a few people, then move on to next social website - 4 views

The purpose of this forum is to conduct an experiment for one week of how a social website works. After the experiment is done, this group will be clos...

Purpose Diigo

started by Amit Green on 30 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
wretchard the cat

Obama White House Has Secret Plan To Harvest Personal Data From Social Networking Websi... - 0 views

  • The information to be captured includes comments, tag lines, emails, audio, and video. The targeted sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and others – any space where the White House “maintains a presence.”
    • Amit Green
       
      Above is a quote from the original article (Diigo really needs to indicate that better)
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    I'm predicting ... the white house will have to reverse itself on this.
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    A good response to this is at Does Obama plan to spy on social-networking sites?. "I'm not sure that highlighting a public contract offer amounts to "uncovering" a conspiracy, especially since their analysis turns out to be faulty. Contrary to NLPC's take, the contractor would be collecting data required to be kept by the White House - by law ... The Presidential Records Act (PRA) essentially requires each administration to keep every pixel and keystroke ever published for later review by Congress or investigators, in case illegal activity takes place. We have seen this invoked ex post facto to the Clinton and Bush administrations, in the latter over e-mails sent and received outside the White House mail system. At that time, legal experts and investigators insisted that everything produced by an administration for anything remotely concerning official business had to be archived within the EOP. A more careful reading of this RFP shows that to be the project. The contract directs the contractor to archive the "information posted on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP maintains a presence", including social networking sites like MySpace, Twitter, and so on. It doesn't call for everything on those networks to be archived, but only "information posted by non-EOP persons on publicly-accessible web sites where the EOP maintains a presence[,] both comments posted on pages created by EOP and messages sent to EOP accounts on those web sites." In other words, the archiving will include interaction on EOP websites and pages, but not anything else."
wretchard the cat

Obama ends frenetic vacation - 0 views

  • On Wednesday, the president will head off to his official Camp David retreat in Maryland for a four-day break -- seeking the quiet that evaded him in the millionaires playground on the US east coast. "He is looking to get a break from his vacation," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said. "I don't think you can replicate such a terrific place as Martha's Vineyard, but I do think that he's looking to get some more rest and relaxation when he goes up there," Burton said. The Camp David trip, over the Labor Day weekend, had been tentatively planned before Obama headed on vacation.
    • Amit Green
       
      This is a highlight from the original article
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    Obama: Trapped in the Dimension of the Presidency ... Can't even take a vacation & relax properly from it. And he really does need a vacation, the Presidency will wear anyone & everyone out. No one can handle such a stressfull job.
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    I posted my thoughts on Obama needing a vacation: I like how the talk by Azides ends, the goal of a Prime Minister or a President is to buld "Mutual Trust & Respect" in a country. May Obama succeed in this, this is why the American people got excited in him from his 1994 speech at the Democratic convention, and a lot of what he ran his campaign for President on. This is why America trusted him with the Presidency … I hope he returns to this theme of his & starts to govern that way. Hopefully a vacation can give him the perspective he needs.
Amit Green

Diigo Interface, RE: The last brother - 8 views

Trying to highlight this article: The Last Brother has run into a few issues: (1) I tried to share this url: http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/08/30/the-last-brother/ (2) Richard...

Diigo Belmont Annotations

started by Amit Green on 31 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
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