I thought, 2008, that’s it, that is the watershed moment,” Warren says. “We put sensible people in the House, in the Senate and in the White House.” But even with the new leadership, Warren said, “the people who broke the market doubled down on the failed policies. This was not supposed to happen. But it did happen.Massachusetts Senatorial candidate, Elizabeth Warren, discussing “the dissonance of what happened when the last change-peddlers hit Washington,” in a great New York Times Magazine profile. (via joshsternberg)
I have sought further information from the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and they confirm for me that, in fact, the best intelligence gained from a CIA detainee… was obtained through standard, non-coercive means. … it was not torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees that got us the major leads that ultimately enabled our intelligence community to find Osama bin Laden. I hope former Attorney General Mukasey will correct his misstatement.Senator John McCain • Speaking on the effort made by some — former Bush administration Attorney General Michael Mukasey among them — to claim that “enhanced interrogation” (or torture, as it was unabashedly known and is in many quarters still known today) was vital to gaining knowledge of Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts. This is the sort of non-partisan candor that made him popular from the start, and it’s well-founded; the effort by some to cast torture as key to the bin Laden raid, a claim made absurdly quickly after his death, when reports of what had happened in the compound were changing by the moment, was as clear and crass an attempt at hijacking a national narrative as you can get. (note: Mukasey has responded) source (via • follow)
Tense times call for Kerry: The Massachusetts Senator, also head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, will be traveling to Pakistan this week, likely to try to smooth things over after what’s been a very rocky stretch for American/Pakistani relations. Kerry has long been a supporter of the aid the U.S. has been providing Pakistan — as we mentioned yesterday, it totals $18 billion over the last nine years — so one might expect a pacifying tact on this visit. Also, in your alternate political history update, we could be halfway through President Kerry’s second term right now. source
Hats off to Scott Brown: Discussing traumatic events from one’s life is never easy, especially to a large, disparate public. Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown is doing just that. An upcoming 60 Minutes interview will touch on his sexual abuse at the hands of a camp counselor when he was ten, as well as physical abuse by multiple stepfathers. Brown, a moderate GOP senator who has earned much respect during his year in office, deserves an immense amount of credit for this, hopefully giving an example to youth in the same position to report abuse. source
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