Day: December 18, 2014

Obama Approval Among Latinos Is Up

Buck Banks

10 points

Amount President Obama’s approval rating with Latinos has jumped since he announced a new policy of deportation relief for millions of undocumented immigrants, a new NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll finds. The new survey of Latino adults shows that 57% now say they approve of the job that Obama is doing, compared with 47% of Latino voters who said the same in September, before the immigration announcement.

Obama’s Checking His List and Checking Things Off

Buck Banks

He’s going down a checklist of thorny, longstanding problems, and he’s doing whatever he can to tackle them. These are things that have been tearing at us for decades and generations. My sense is his feeling is, I’m not going to leave office without doing everything I can to stop them.

— David Axelrod, quoted by the New York Times, on President Obama’s recent actions.

Memo to Dick Cheney: George Washington Ordered Execution As Penalty for Torturing Prisoners

Jon Ponder
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During a recent interview, former Vice Pres. Dick Cheney proudly assumed responsibility for the U.S. government’s program of torturing prisoners in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. “I’d do it again in a minute,” Cheney asserted.

Cheney is undoubtedly emboldened by the fact that there is no chance that he, the president he served or their minions will ever face justice for ordering the torture of prisoners, actions that were, by even the lowest standards of decency, war crimes.

Cheney and the others will escape justice, largely because the current president chooses to allow it, despite the fact that torture is illegal in this country and worldwide, under provisions of an anti-torture treaty signed by Pres. Ronald Reagan in 1984. There is also precedent for trying officials accused of torture. As was noted earlier, in 1946, the United States and its allies executed Japanese officials who ordered waterboarding of prisoners during World War II.

But the roots of America’s abhorrence to torture go back even farther, all the way to the founding. In fact, during the Revolutionary War, George Washington ordered that soldiers under his command who were found to have tortured prisoners could face execution.

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