Prose Before Hos

Michele Bachmann Says The CIA Is Run By The ACLU

Posted on November 14, 2011 in Quotes

Oh Michele, you are a fucking idiot:

The American Civil Liberties Union is running the Central Intelligence Agency, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) told the CBS GOP primary debate audience Saturday night.

“[Obama] is allowing the ACLU to run the CIA” Bachmann asserted. “We have decided we are going to lose the war on terror under Obama.”

But wait, there’s more! She actually stuck to her guns about this theory after the fact:

We all know that that isn’t a long-term solution to this problem. We aren’t adding any new terrorists to Guantanamo Bay. We only have Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted mastermind of 9/11, who is at Guantanamo Bay, and others as well. But we don’t have a place to put al-Qaeda when we pick them up. It’s either catch and release, which is a terrible idea, or we have to kill them. What we need to win this war on terror is interrogation. This is where my comment about the ACLU comes in because today the CIA is no longer able to go through the interrogation that yielded such profitable information that saved American lives. That’s what I’m interested in, David…The, the, the only thing that we have available to us today is the Army field manual. That’s online. So terrorists can go ahead and read ahead of time what will happen to them when we capture them, and it’s really, effectively, when we capture them today, it’s a slap on the wrist.

A New Movement In America

Posted on November 14, 2011 in Articles

The Article: The New Progressive Movement by Jeffrey Sachs in the New York Times.

The Text: Occupy Wall Street and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.

Thirty years ago, a newly elected Ronald Reagan made a fateful judgment: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Taxes for the rich were slashed, as were outlays on public services and investments as a share of national income. Only the military and a few big transfer programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans’ benefits were exempted from the squeeze.

Reagan’s was a fateful misdiagnosis. He completely overlooked the real issue — the rise of global competition in the information age — and fought a bogeyman, the government. Decades on, America pays the price of that misdiagnosis, with a nation singularly unprepared to face the global economic, energy and environmental challenges of our time.