Daily Archives: April 22, 2014

Elizabeth Warren Is the Teacher

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Esquire has the article Elizabeth Warren Is the Teacher.

There already are forces, even within the Democratic party, gathering themselves to squash that debate. Larry Summers, her old bête noire, whose hands Warren was instrumental in keeping off the Federal Reserve system last year, already is giving interviews about “setting class against class” in anticipation of Democratic losses in this fall’s midterm elections. If those losses occur, there will be a fearsome momentum for the party to move back toward the more corporate-friendly Democratic party that elected Bill Clinton, who repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted credit-default swaps from regulation and generally set the tone for the Democratic complicity in the economic catastrophe that hit in 2008. And Elizabeth Warren has come to teach us the greatest lesson the country needs to learn: who we are. Or at least who we once were.

Self-government must be an educational enterprise, with lessons learned over and over again, and that is what Elizabeth Warren is about these days. She is still teaching. She teaches because she has learned, and she has learned because she teaches. The great teachers are the ones who remain students at heart, who keep learning from their students, and from the world around them, and from their own drive to know even more about even more things, and who then are able to transmit that knowledge—and more important, the drive to know more—to their students. That is how teachers become immortal.

It is beyond my ability to understand how anyone could read this article and not want Elizabeth Warren to be President.  As for thinking about Hillary Clinton as President, oh please!  Not even in the same league let alone same ballpark.

If you can read this article and come away with a different conclusion, please explain it in the comments here, if you have a login, or on Facebook, Google+, or Twitter if you can’t do it here.

 

Important Revelations In New Leaks of CIA Torture Report

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The Real News Network has the video Important Revelations In New Leaks of CIA Torture Report.

On top of all of that, you have all these investigations now going on of everyone except a criminal investigation of the people involved in the torture. So CIA has referred the staffers, the people who work for Senator Feinstein and the committee, to the Department of Justice for investigation under the CIA’s what apparently is a [completely] bogus claim, that the staffers somehow took material off of a computer that they were authorized to use for the purposes of this preparation of the report. But the CIA, really as a way of intimidating the committee and Senator Feinstein, has said, we want the Senate staffers investigated. One investigation.

So now we know what the argument between the CIA and Senator Dianne Feinstein is all about.

So let’s talk about some of the findings that have come out. One–and these are from Al Jazeera that I’ve taken these, as well as some other sources. The CIA lied to Congress and to journalists about the results of the torture they carried out on over 100 of these what they called high-value detainees but were not that in fact in many cases. They claimed that the torture resulted in plots being broken up. In other words, the torture works narrative, and it’s completely false. And then they then solve the plots with torture, supposedly. Of course, that’s the story of the film about how they got bin Laden, and part through torture, Zero Dark Thirty, all apparently a pack of lies. So that’s one thing that will be in this report. The CIA apparently took on–I mean, he Senate committee took on these narratives and prove them to be false.

So now we know how much credence Dick Cheney has when he says how useful the torture was.



Perhaps other revelations in the video explain why George W. Bush is staying out of the limelight and has  take up painting.  He’s hoping he can avoid prosecution for his war crimes.


Perhaps Obama’s deference to the CIA is consistent with his warlike foreign policy. Is the CIA in complete control of foreign policy?  If they start a war, the President is obligated to see it through.  It has nothing to do with proving “manhood” and everything to do with protecting his family from the CIA. See my previous post Foreign policy and the definition of ‘manhood’.