Levin: CIA Torture Documents Cheney Wants Don’t Prove Squat

Well, well, well. The plot thickens, doesn't it Mr. Cheney?
via The Plum Line

There’s some important news about Dick Cheney and torture in a speech that Senator Carl Levin gave before the Foreign Policy Association this week.

Specifically: Levin confirmed that he’d seen the classified CIA documents that Cheney has been asking the CIA to declassify and release — and said that they don’t prove Cheney’s claim that torture worked by any stretch.

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"I think we need to talk..."

Yeah, those fateful words. I'm sorry Facebook, but we need to sit down and talk about where we're going. You see, when we first met, I thought you were pretty hot. I could see potential in you, and I really thought maybe we had a long term relationship in us. You were smarter than MySpace. You "got" me, and my friends really, really liked you. A lot. I'd talk you up in conversations and I thought I had really found a soulmate.

Then the honeymoon wore off. I started to see cracks in your armor. I always enjoyed Twitter's company a lot more, even though, on the surface, she seemed much more shallow than you. "You have depth," I used to say to myself, "Twitter is the blonde, Facebook is the brunette and everyone knows you date the blonde, but you marry the brunette." But then a strange thing began happening. I started to USE Twitter. You know, actually USE it. For work. For development resources. I started noticing that all of my peers who mattered were simply Tweeting and passing their Tweets over to Facebook as status messages. Apparently everything was actually *happening* over on Twitter. I found MUCH more relevant articles and content that actually helped me in my day to day work over on Twitter through the natural process of discovery and digging. I'd see a reTweet of a blog post, then I'd click on that guy/gal, and I'd discover someone new who did what I did and wrote a lot about it, then I'd follow them, and my knowledge universe would grow. I found myself poring over articles on Symmetrical versus Asymmetrical social networks and going, "holy shit, they're right! Facebook DOES suck!"

Then I started taking a close look at you, Facebook. I started to ask myself hard questions like, "what do I actually DO here?" and "Am I actually *building* relationships?" and I realized, I don't actually BUILD anything on Facebook. I just perform a sort of "friendship maintenance" with you. I'm not discovering anything with you. I'm not tapping into any sort of zeitgeist with you. I only know what my little bubble is talking about, and if I don't have a decent bubble, then I don't know anything that's going on. There are no "trends" on Facebook. There's just a bunch of useless crap cleverly disguised as half-baked quizes that can tell me what 80s cartoon character I am, and what a person who I really don't care about is doing right now. 

So I look at you differently now. I see that YOU'RE the shallow one. YOU'RE the one who offers me nothing in terms of personal or professional growth. I see how my good friend Twitter, who's been there the whole time nudging me along and exposing me to all that's new and good for my personal and professional life is REALLY my true love. 

And I don't have to use a browser to visit her. That's the beauty of her. I use Tweetdeck and Twhirl, and a host of other useful, UNOBTRUSIVE Adobe AIR applications to make my twitter use as carefree and easy as using my phone, which I also use to great effect. In short, you're hard and force me to use a clunky browser interface that just SCREAMS "2001" and Twitter has left you in the dust by using 2009 technology, making my Twitter experiences richer and deeper and much more meaningful.

And don't even get me started on useful applications. Ugomo.com and a host of other twitter based applications make "Guess which Top Gun Character You Are" like comparing MEGA BLOCKS to Legos. I mean, come on, everyone knows Legos stomp MEGA BLOCKS in the dust. Your applications are a waste of time. They're silly, they do nothing to enrich my life, and worst of all, they're transparently marketing wonkness. Everyone I know avoids them like the plague because they know all you're doing is harvesting personal information for later douchey use. They know you're just going to offer them an Orange MacBook, or a Free Cannondale with some lame ass obtrusive old-school banner ad.

Face it Facebook. You're stuck in a rut and it's obvious that the facade of "Next Great Thing" was simply that, a facade, made out of so much painted styrofoam.

I'm afraid it's time we called it a day and parted company. If you need me, I'll be over on Twitter. You can follow me... I'm just not sure I'll follow you back.

Obama Can’t Turn the Page on Bush - New Revelations about Lies, Propaganda and a Bush Defense Department White Wash (Shocking, I know...)

TO paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.

Just two weeks ago, the Obama Pentagon revealed that a major cover-up of corruption had taken place at the Bush Pentagon on Jan. 14 of this year — just six days before Bush left office. This strange incident — reported in The Times but largely ignored by Washington correspondents preparing for their annual dinner — deserves far more attention and follow-up.

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"An Affordable Salvation" - Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize Winner, Economics

"The opponents of action claim that limiting emissions would have devastating effects on the U.S. economy. So it’s important to understand that just as denials that climate change is happening are junk science, predictions of economic disaster if we try to do anything about climate change are junk economics. Gradually implementing an emissions-limitation program now might actually help the economy recover from its current slump."

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Overeating to blame for U.S. obesity epidemic

The major reason for the obesity epidemic that has gripped the United States in the past three decades is increased food intake, not reduced physical activity, according to a new study.

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Training with Heart Rate Monitors

Why train with a heart rate monitor?

Training with heart rate monitors is a scientifically supported method to maiximize your traning time. Regardless of your level of fitness, a heart rate monitor gives you a glimpse into how hard you are working and how much energy you are using in your exercising and recovery activities.

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Facebook Connect Launches Today!

"Today we’re rolling out the long-awaited release of Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect allows Facebook’s 200+ million members to login and start Digging and commenting right away."-Kevin

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Apple In Talks With Twitter To Buy It For $700m

Apple and Twitter are in serious negotiations over a possible $700 million sale of the social networking site, with the deal set to be announced in June if successful.

The only question is: would it be called Twapple?

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Falling Wage Syndrome

Thought this was pretty cool:

Even if the recession is declared over, there still are not enough jobs — which is a recipe for continuing wage cuts, which will in turn keep the economy weak.

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4th-Grader Questions Rice on Waterboarding

"And so, by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture."

- Condoleezza Rice

Sound familiar?

"When the President does it, that means that it's not illegal."

- Richard M. Nixon 

Days after telling students at Stanford University that waterboarding was legal "by definition if it was authorized by the president," former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice was pressed again on the subject yesterday by a fourth-grader at a Washington school.

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Fair & Balanced? More like "100 days of Fox attacks Obama"

Media Matters runs through an amazing litany of Fox's nonstop hatred and attacks targeting President Obama: