Captain Phillips’ Second-In-Command Upset With Limbaugh

Shane Murphy, who was second-in-command on the ship seized by Somali pirates, says comments made by Rush Limbaugh after the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips constitute hate speech.

“There you have it, three teenagers shot on the high seas at the order of President Obama,” said Limbaugh according to a transcript of an April 14 broadcast on his Web site.

“Just imagine the hue and cry had a Republican president ordered the shooting of black teenagers on the high seas,” Limbaugh said.

Murphy says he and his family are strugging with the adjustment back to everyday life.

“It feels great …

Oklahoma Teabagger Arrested For Twitter Threats

h/t Hoffmania

In what is probably the first arrest based on microblogging, 52-year-0ld Daniel Knight Hayden was taken into custody for making threats on Twitter.  Hayden threatenened to turn the April 15 demonstrations into a bloodbath.  On April 11 he tweeted that we was going to start a “war” against the government.

“START THE KILLING NOW! I am willing to be the FIRST DEATH!,” read a tweet at 8:01 PM that day. “After I am killed on the Capitol Steps, like a REAL man, the rest of you will REMEMBER ME!!!,” he added five minutes later. Then: “Send the cops …

Democracy Is A Harsh Mistress

Bill Maher’s excellent op-ed in Friday’s Los Angles Times reminds me of the Robert Heinlein novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and that phrase’s immortilization in song by Jimmy Webb.

Due to the low surface gravity of the Moon, anyone (including transportees from Earth) who stays longer than a few months undergoes (according to one of the characters) “irreversible physiological changes and can never again live in comfort and health in a gravitational field six times greater than that to which their bodies have become adjusted.”

This seems to be the malady suffered by today’s GOP.  They are having …

The Friday Night Free-For-All

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Yes, It’s Torture; Yes, It’s Ineffective. The Pentagon Says So

The military agency that advises the Pentagon on the use of harsh interrogation techniques warned the CIA and the Department of Justice in 2002 that the US policy on torture was ineffective, and it’s clear that they were defining harsh techniques as “torture.”

“The unintended consequence of a U.S. policy that provides for the torture of prisoners is that it could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured U.S. personnel,” says the document, an unsigned two-page attachment to a memo by the military’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency.

Although the document refused to categorize waterboarding …

Michele Bachmann: It Just Keeps Getting Better

Minnesota congressloon Michele Bachmann loves carbon dioxide.  It’s a natural recurring substance, so how can it be harmful?

Carbon dioxide, Mister Speaker, is a natural byproduct of nature. Carbon dioxide is natural. It occurs in Earth. It is a part of the regular lifecycle of Earth. In fact, life on planet Earth can’t even exist without carbon dioxide. So necessary is it to human life, to animal life, to plant life, to the oceans, to the vegetation that’s on the Earth, to the, to the fowl that — that flies in the air, we need to have carbon …

On Friday’s Radio Show…

• Gitmo is closing, but where will the detainees go? Leaders of the small town of Hardin, Montana are offering a solution. Greg Smith, Executive Director of Hardin’s Two Rivers Authority, explains why he wants to house terror suspects at his local prison.

• Kevin Roose, author of The Unlikely Disciple, reveals what he learned when he went undercover for a semester at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.

• It’s the Friday Night Free-For-All!…

It Depends On What The Meaning Of “Torture” Is

As long as they can claim that waterboarding isn’t torture, as long as they can say other techniques outlined in the released memos are not torture, they can claim we don’t torture.  And the former RNC spokesman Cliff May has decided that “all forms of stress and duress utilized to elicit cooperation from a terrorist in possession of life-saving information are not torture.” Well, isn’t that nice.  That lets them off the hook. Now they can aver what a fine, upright, moral nation we are because we don’t do those horrible, nasty things like our enemies do.  Just ignore that …

Meghan McCain to Rove And Cheney: “You Had Your 8 Years; Go Away”

How happy can the right-wing establishment be with the McCain progeny?

On The View:

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The GOP’s Tortured Explanations

Liz Cheney, the daughter of you-know-who, says waterboarding isn’t torture because our military used it for training.  Of course, it’s used in training for one very important reason: because it alerts our military about what our enemies might do to us, not an approval of what we do to them.  Furthermore, the recipients of these techniques in training know it’s not for real, and it can stop at any time.  Detainees don’t have that luxury.

And while we’re on the subject of torture, House Minority Leader John Boehner, while discussing the release of the memos, used the “t” word, …

GOP Upset Michael Steele Isn’t Name-Calling

Republicans are angry at RNC Chair Michael Steele for failing to call President Obama and Democrats socialists. Leaders from 16 states want a debate and vote by the entire 168 member Republican National Committee.

“The threat to our country from the Obama administration cannot be underestimated,” Indiana RNC member James Bopp Jr. (right), wrote Wednesday in an e-mail to the full RNC membership. “They are proceeding pell-mell to nationalize major industries, to exponentially increase the size, power and intrusiveness of the federal government, to undermine free enterprise and free markets, to raise taxes to a confiscatory level.”

How …