Selective honesty in action
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"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax-- Of cabbages--and kings-- And why the sea is boiling hot-- And whether pigs have wings."
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
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Labels: Ida; Storm; Rain event

Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs (GS), has put an unusual spin on the bank's activities. He says his firm is doing "God's work." This may seem like an audacious statement coming from a man whose company has been harshly criticized for planning to give many of its employees multi-million pay packages just a bit more than a year after the collapse of the credit markets.
Blankfein told The Times of London, "We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. We have a social purpose." That is, of course, a social purpose that comes at a very steep price; it charges huge fees for raising money and handling M&A transactions, even if they eventually fail.
Goldman may be trying to publicize its role as a firm that finances the American economy and to hide its role in helping to create and market exotic money instruments like mortgage-backed securities. It wants the public to forget the money it made on the capital that the government gave it under the TARP program, and forget that it is not willing to reign in pay for even a year as a sort of penance for the financial community's and its own contributions to the collapse of the financial markets -- a collapse which has helped put millions of people out of jobs
Labels: Sachs; Jesus; God's Work; Blankfein; Hypocrits; Criminals
Labels: Lieberman; Graham; Kucinich; Health Care; filibuster; obstructionists
This was a slightly garbled reference to Tancredo's having obtained 1-Y status in 1970, after his student deferments ran out, on the grounds that he had been "diagnosed with depression when he was 16 or 17 and received medication for five years for panic attacks and bouts of anxiety and depression." Tancredo was 24 at the time.
Truth fucking hurts sometimes.

Labels: crazy Bachmann; president; nomination; 2012; baggers; dumbers
Labels: Al Gore, Charlie Crist, FL Senate race, GOP leadership, Rachel Maddow; Excellent show; Tune-in, Rush Limbaugh
The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK's ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.
"I'm talking of people being raped with broken bottles," he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. "I'm talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I'm talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on."
Human rights groups have long been raising the alarm about the legal system in Uzbekistan. In 2007, Human Rights Watch declared that torture is "endemic" to the country's justice system.
Murray said he only realized after his stint as ambassador that the CIA was sending people to be tortured in Uzbekistan, country he describes as a "totalitarian" state that has never moved on from its communist era, when it was a part of the Soviet Union.
The following videos were posted to YouTube by the Real News Network on Oct. 26 and Nov. 4, 2009.