At Hullabaloo, digby writes, Torture Zombie:
Wow. If I didn't know better I would think that this man was in the employ of America's most hated enemies. It's hard to think of a more destructive person:
[T]he debate doesn’t simply involve warring economists. Instead, one of the louder voices belongs to David Addington, the architect of the George W. Bush administration’s harsh interrogation policies and a former chief of staff for then-Vice President Dick Cheney.
Addington has taken on a new role as enforcer of tea party dogma during the intensifying partisan bickering over the debt ceiling. From his perch as the Heritage Foundation’s vice president for domestic and economic policy, Addington is throwing verbal thunderbolts at House Speaker John Boehner’s current debt-ceiling proposal, which he argues will pave the way to tax increases...
Addington kept a low profile during the Bush years, granting no interviews and largely shunning lawmakers from either party. But he wielded enormous power behind the scenes, helping Cheney craft the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping program and most of its detention initiatives.
Critics of those policies say they’re horrified by Addington’s reemergence onto the public stage.
“To see this person who led the country into legal and moral disaster resurface as a respected commentator is somewhat galling,” said Ben Wizner, the litigation director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “Addington was as responsible as anyone else for the U.S. becoming a torturing nation. He has done damage to the U.S. that will take decades to reverse.”
Addington didn’t respond to e-mails seeking comment, but Heritage Foundation spokesman James Weidman noted that Addington had handled domestic issues for Cheney as well as national-security ones.
This would be the problem with not playing the blame game or looking in the rear view mirror. If you don't destroy these zombies' ability to wield their malevolent influence, they just keep coming back. Some day people will realize that they are dangerous, even when they're out of office. ...
At Daily Kos on this date in 2009:
A July study by the 8-year-old Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, has found that election-day registration was the most effective state legal reform for raising turnout among youth voters in 2008.
Last November, the youth vote matched the record turnout of the 1972 election, the first year Americans aged 18-to-20 were allowed to cast ballots in presidential elections.
CIRCLE found that, after controlling for education, gender, age, race/ethnicity and marital status, "young Americans in the nine states with Election Day registration laws (EDR) were 41% more likely to vote than those living in states without EDR. ... Before implementing EDR, Idaho, New Hampshire and Wyoming were amongst the worst states in terms of turnout inequality between young and older Americans. This gap has closed in all three states since EDR was implemented."
Overall the youth voter turnout was 51.1% last November. But that greatly differed depending on locale. The highest was Washington, D.C., at 76%, while only 31% of youths voted in Hawaii.
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