The problem, yet again, isn't with Obama, it's with the fucking Democrats. Like someone much smarter than I said, the Democrats will always find a way to lose even when they win. Fucking morons. Pelosi, Reed, Dodd, et all need to be strung up.

one thing about Congress taxing the bonuses these people at AIG got at a ridiculous 90% - it's bullshit and incredibly knee jerk. Like Andrew Ross Sorkin said on Bill Maher last Friday what sort of message does that send to people? The Congress just nullified legally binding contracts!!! All because they didn't have the balls or the moral certitude to stop this shit before it got out of control. It's obvious and shameful.

now if AIG wants to give a milliion dollor bonus to an employee, they have to give ten million

bananas

I ain't defending the bonuses, btw. But god damn, answering madness with more madness is not a good idea.

Just don't allow them any more bailout money and demand a real share in the company for the money invested. What the congress is doing is sideshow bullshit.

hickman OTM

Thought it was a very wise move actually, you can't go around ripping up contracts of private businesses because of the public mood. As annoyed as it makes us all it's not something that you want to set the ball rolling on.

The board of AIG and others should be held to account for signing off bonuses to directors, management who had knowledge of the role that the company was playing in the sub prime market / Credit default swaps / Toxic assets etc etc

Obama has the navy killing pirates. This is way more fun than talking about the economy.

That's got to be a tough shot. You are on a boat aiming at a target on a much smaller boat that's bobbing in the water. Nice shooting! Go navy!

The pirate they captured (Lucky for him he didn't slip and fall over board after his buddies got capped. Obviously no Chicago cops on that boat).... what is worse, life as a free man in Somolia or life in an American prison?

"Jamac Habeb, a 30 year-old- self-proclaimed pirate, told a reporter in Somailia that, 'our friends should have done more to kill the captain before they were killed. This will be a good lesson for us. From now on, if we capture foreign ships and their respective countries try to attack us, we will kill the hostages,' he said."

this just made the whole being a pirate thing a bit less desirable for me

i wonder if they had more than three snipers firing similtaneously. so cool

I love how these guys are trying to turn the tables and make themselves the sympathetic characters here. Just because your country doesn't do anything about the fact that you're motherfucking thieves doesn't mean the rest of us are going to follow suit, dipshits!

pic would be great without the leash dragging behind. let the dog run unimpeded!

three seals fired simultaneous head shots, instantly killing the pirates (who made the mistake of leaving themselves exposed shoulders-up). those shots were fired from the deck of a bobbing navy vessel at targets some distance away in a bobbing lifeboat.

navy seals are badasses.

There was a piece in the paper the other day about their training - something to do with SEAL training involving having their hands & feet bound then being tossed in the pool. Gotta' be able to swim 1,000 yds or something to pass. To be a lifeguard, I remember treading water with a brick over my head & doing the bob-&-rise breathing technique but swimming with your hands & feet bound?! No doubt about it: Navy SEALs are fucking badasses.

You are being lied to about pirates

Some are clearly just gangsters. But others are trying to stop illegal dumping and trawling

Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labelling as "one of the great menaces of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell – and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" – from 1650 to 1730 – the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage Bluebeard that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often saved from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains Of All Nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence.

If you became a merchant or navy sailor then – plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry – you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked often, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied – and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively, without torture. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century".

They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly – and subversively – that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal Navy." This is why they were romantic heroes, despite being unproductive thieves.

The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young British man called William Scott, should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirateing to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the "pirates" have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a "tax" on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence".

No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters – especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But in a telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali: "We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas." William Scott would understand.

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We won't act on those crimes – the only sane solution to this problem – but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 per cent of the world's oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail – but who is the robber?

yeah. i've seen the simulation on tv. gotta think with all the factors involved there was some sort of impressive technical assistance. i mean, more than just men with guns

the fact that they were parachuted in in the middle of the night and then did the killing from the ship that was hijacked is like something out of a movie

i don't see why they didn't have multiple snipers per target though in case of misfire. couldn't have hurt. maybe it was just a question of resources

interesting article above

Been thinking a lot about this kinda stuff amid this coverage. Had no idea about the dumping and poaching, but just hearing all four of captors were teenagers made the whole thing seem a little less heroic.

Not that I expect anyone to just lie down for these guys or anything.

if you're interested in the seals, discovery channel usually runs a documentary chronicling their 'hell week', which lives up to the reputation. tough tough guys.

water boarding isn't torture because America doesn't torture
it's just that simple.

You guys just don't understand, the terrorists want us to torture them! It helps them avoid betraying their God while allowing all that "enhanced interrogation" to stop.

I'm not making this up. That is actually the way some people are justifying tortue. See?

I moved into an office that has CNBC on a TV about 2 weeks ago. It's odd how a network owned by GE with so much to gain in the stimulus with regard to wind and solar energy has lets these yelling dolts make an enemy out of Obama. Everyday their introductory lead ins at the top of the hour say something to the effect of, 'And, HEADLINE X. Does this mean another step closer to socialism with the Obama Administration?'

If conservatives are within earshot, I've been calling him Comrade Obama since the election.

no you haven't

These pictures must show some pretty bad stuff.

Agreed. Shitstorm approaching in 5, 4...

Getting really tired of Obama protecting the Bush administration (and more likely: the spineless Dems that let it all happen)

I think it's more a leadership move to remind the military that aside from the waterboarding stuff he's got their back.

Except he already "has their back" on the waterboarding issue too. And what does that even mean? There are plenty in the military, CIA, FBI, etc who are and were against the "tactics" that were used. Does Obama have their back too? What about the law? Does he have the law's back?

What law? The laws that the soldiers were following by carrying out these orders?

Nuremberg Principle IV: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."

You're right though, this isn't really about the individuals who actually committed the crimes, it's about the people in power who gave the orders and the others in power who were complicit.

Cheney was on Face the Nation on Sunday. I just wanted to throw a brick at my TV, that smug SOB.
He said something to the effect that it's more important to protect American lives than to try and live up to ideals about liberty.
I couldn't have disagreed more with that premise.

clearly the worst VICE-president in history

Kinda confused on why the GOP lets him talk.

How can you stop a guy that was the 4th branch of the government?

Heh...made me chuckle. He may be slimy, he may have a cold, dark heart incapable of love, he might have cloven hooves for feet and he may have shot his good friend in the face with a shotgun but you've got to admire the dude's moxy. He took Nixon's definition of legal & ran for 300 yds with it.

it's not like his approval numbers are going anywhere.

i don't understand how someone who is as intelligent as Dick Cheney is such a fucking idiot

i like listening to him talk because the way he speaks makes him appear genius

It really is incredible that he can just shrug off voting against Nelson Mandela's release with basically a sneer and a protracted sigh.

What makes you think Dick Cheney is intelligent? One of the biggest problems in this country is this notion that people in power are really smart and should therefore be trusted.

his deliberate pauses, his cadence, his attention to detail when he speaks. he is very intelligent. he simply has a filter that takes in factual evidence and distorts it for evil purposes. whether he does this knowingly or he's just insane is up for debate.

Dick Cheney is one of the few Washington politicians that i would consider an intellectual equal based on what i know about him. 75% of the Senate is dumb as fuck.

Dick Cheney is an evil genius.

In the 200+ year history of this nation, he is the first guy to run the country from the vice president's office. Sure it helped that the president was a dolt.

I like listening to him talk and pretending he's Jeffrey "The Big" Lebowski.

According to govtrack.us
The bill had 30 co-sponsers.
I don't have the time or energy to do more research on the subject.

This is over a year old. In the Senate, this never got out of committee.

Reason #7427865 why I HATE Dick Cheney. I try not to hate people or wish death on anyone but damn he makes me reconsider.

Seriously - no idea why this is even being brought up. This is the type of batshit stuff that gets knocked around with the talk radio crowd.

try the House

didn't even wanna go there

WTF Obama, nice way to stand up for your principles. Obama has changed his stance yet again, this time saying that terrorist detainees can be tortured. It's time to quit fellating Obama and start giving him hell for appeasing the conservatives' every whim. It's time for change my ass, more like business as usual.

The only thing Obama's done that is substantially different from what Bush would have done is the stimulus. And even it is some pretty thin gruel.

really?