The Distress Signal

Senator Bernie Sanders

Thanks, Bernie.

Now one of the things that we’re going to see going on is that while we struggle with a record breaking deficit and a large national debt; caused by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, caused by tax breaks for the wealthy, caused by an unpaid for medicare part D prescription drug program, caused by the wall-street bailout; driving up the deficit, driving up the national debt.

Then some people can say, Oh my goodness, we got all of those expenses, and then we got to give tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires, but we want to balance the budget. Ghee, how are we going to do that?

Well obviously we know how they are going to do that. We’re going to cut back on healthcare, we’re going to cut back on education, we’re going to cut back on childcare, we’re going to cut back on pelt programs. We just don’t have enough money for working families and their needs. We’re going to cut back on food stamps, we surly are not going to expand unemployment compensation. We got a higher priority, Mr. President, we have got to, got to, got to, give tax breaks to billionaires. That’s what this whole place is about isn’t it? They fund the campaigns they get what’s due them.

Lieberman for President

I feel bad for all our friends at the State Department and USAID who have been “banned” by their employers from accessing the WikiLeaks site, both at work and on their own home computers.

Essentially, the Federal Government’s logic is that because these cables haven’t officially been declassified, reading them would be breaking the law.

OK

Well, I guess that’s that. I’m glad the Government is looking out for us. I especially appreciate the efforts by our leaders, like Senator Joseph Lieberman, who feel that the nations best interests are served by essentially covering our ears and singing the national anthem really loud so we can’t hear anything. Just pretend like it didn’t happen, that’ll work.

I appreciate Lieberman so much that I think he should have another go at running for the White House. In fact, I’d like to help him get started. So here you go Joe, see ya in 2012: http://liebermanforpresident.org

Executed as Spies

WikiLeaks has been taking a bit of a pounding from the right since it began the release of 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables last week. Sarah Palin called for the organization’s founder Julian Assange to be treated as a terrorist and described him as an “anti-American operative with blood on his hands”. Mike Huckabee, and others in the right wing press, went further and suggested that those involved in the leak should be executed as spies.

From Red State:

..my preferred course of action would for Assange to find a small caliber round in the back of his head.

Meanwhile, Senator Liberman and members of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee managed to bully Amazon into dropping WikiLeaks from it’s EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) service. The site had earlier moved to EC2 following several DDOS attacks on it’s servers in Sweden.

While the right indulges in its usual vim and verve about how far they’re willing to go to “protect” the American Way, far enough to trample all over it, I thought it might be helpful to keep in mind a few points about what WikiLeaks has really been trying to accomplish:

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Exactly

Nice job boss:

“As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers … faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.”

Finally

According to our new (if all goes as planned) CIA Director and former White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta:

“We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don’t. There is no middle ground.”

Maybe it’s just me but it almost feels like the last 8 years were just one long blurry night of binge drinking. The country did things that it would have never done when it was sober – Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Warrantless Wiretapping, Preemptive Invasions, the list goes on and on.

Seeing this quote from the new head of the CIA though makes me think we are finally starting to come out of it. We’re bleary eyed with a hell of a hangover, but at least we’re alive.