I had some trouble downloading it from the site so I went  straight to YouTube and it worked much better.

But with that embarrassing admission out of the way, you never met one of my best friends in high school, a teammate from my baseball team. He was such a notoriously terrible driver in those parts that my mother would actually let us have the car in order to ensure that I'd drive, whenever the two of us decided to go out together.

My buddy once insisted to Mom that he "never hit anyone." She agreed, but noted that he hit things instead, such as light poles, trees, curbs, garage doors, etc. He even took down an entire retaining wall in the back of his parents' house -- just backed right out of the garage and into it, burying rear half of the car with bricks and dirt in the process. Needless to say, they were not amused.

For the longest time he was the worst driver I'd ever seen personally, that is, until recently. That dubious accolade now belongs to my elderly Chinese-American neighbor, a woman in her late 60s who's a leadfoot and likes to drive like a bat out of hell. She garnered the prize earlier this year when she hit her own teenaged grandson late last year as he was walking up our townhouse complex road, and broke his leg.

Some arsehole drops a dime that there are 3 white prosititutes soliciting in the area...but the 12 year old girl was not white, nor soliciting.  

SF is out, so a win at Seattle would be this years spoiler, they could essentially knock them out of the playoffs, they're in a four way tie for the wildcard and any loss could ensure they don't make the playoffs, even with 10, maybe 11 wins.

There is a small chance, a 6-10 team will host a 10-6, maybe 11-5 team, which is absurd, but if Julio Jones is on that team, that is not going to be an cake walk.

No, Jim. The American people country deserve to hear and know the truth regarding what's been done -- and what you supported -- in our name.

You don't get to move the goalposts on this one and shift blame, dude. It's all on you, and on your sniveling and cowardly friends on the right -- you know, the ones who were all gung ho for war provided, of course, that someone else did all the dirty work.

You tighty-whitey-righties created this entire mess, and you need to be a mensch, admit your mistake(s), accept responsibility for what you wrought, and apologize to the nation and the world.

But you won't accept responsibility, and you won't apologize. Your kind never do. And that's because by attempting to shift blame here, as you did above, you've proved that you're not a mensch.

We have a real opportunity here to engage Cuba as it transitions to a post-Castro era,

Per Slado any money we spend props up the existing government.  That doesn't seem to be the way to induce a transition to a new government, either with or without Castro.

Mordiggian writes:

The embargo is only in the best interests of the Castro regime, not the Cuban people.

Per Slado:

So even if you get paid by another country for a service the government collects the money for your services and then pays you a small amount that is limited by their national limit on yearly earnings.

So essentialy any money that goes into Cuba that isn't on the black market goes through the governent and they keep it and control it.

I fail to see how giving money to the regime, who keeps what they want, doesn't help the regime.

fishcamp - You don't have to be a fan of the Miami politicians to believe that the regime should fall. When it does is when we should help.

BTW - Your description of the coloring book is touching. You can see much the same thing by going to Tijuana. The children, and their mothers, will tear your heart out.

Ga - See what I wrote to Mordiggian. Giving money to the regime will only help the regime.

Of course the Cubans only threatened to launch missiles. Perhaps if they, like the Palestinians, actually did we would be sending them foreign aid.

But don't forget I am only posting stuff other cruisers have told me, and many of the cruisers are sailing their boats in what I will call out of the way places.  While most of us have a reasonably accurate idea about the state of cars in Cuba (they are expensive, old, and not always reliable) the other side of this coin is that the roads are often in worse shape than the cars.  It is common to go ashore and see roads washed out, or they simply turn into an impassable (for cars, or bikes) bolder field one would not like to walk on.

Why should they change now?   More money less money the goal is to stay in power.

That's what my take away is.   We argue over our policy but it's basically irrelevant.   The regime will do whatever it can to hold on and that is its only goal.  

The government exist to sustain itself. It does not exist to help the people it does not exist to hurt the people. It exists to maintain its control over what resources are left in Cuba and to sustain the high quality of life for the few.

As for the Embargo there has been for an investment in Cuba for years by other countries yet nothing has changed. In fact it's gotten worse even as other nations travel to the country and do business with the country.   So what's a little more money going to do?

Unfortunately in my opinion I think they will only use it as a way to prolong their stranglehold over the nation.

In fairness however the embargo is obviously a failure. It did not achieve our objective. The regime has held on.   But for me that's not our fault. It is the fault of the government that chooses to operate the country as a communist state slash dictatorship.  The regime is the issue. More money less money doesn't affect how the government operates the country.

Much like North Korea there is not much we can do from the outside when a nation is so isolated and completely controlled.

All we can do is make an honest attempt to offer something in return for a change in their political structure but that has been the issue for 50 years and so we have the status quo.  

Nothing we do will have any real affect without Cuba changing the way it does business.  Until the regime feels threatened by the way it's own actions endanger itself there is no way it will change and there is nothing we can do about it.

With apologies to Shakespeare.....otherwise known as that dude who caused us much misery in Senior lit, the question has become..... To torture or not to torture? That is the question. I mean we all know that only the evil ones of the world torture. And torture is immoral. Right?

Oh, really?? Let me pose a scenario to you. This afternoon you drive over to your local shopping center to shop. As you get out of your car you see an elderly lady walking towards her car one row over. You can also see two young thugs semi crouched between two cars, obviously waiting to mug her. As you start to move, one of the thugs sees you and makes a threatening gesture. Do you yell at her? Run at the thugs? Honk your horn? Dial 911? Or stand frozen in place, watching them jump out, grab her purse, knock her down and dash off?

If you chose to do nothing, I submit that you have just committed an immoral act. You have committed a sin of omission. We are our brother's keeper.

The Left in particular, and some fuzzy headed Republicans are currently bent out of shape over waterboarding. I'm not.

Everyone knew except the American people who were repeatedly assured by that scoundrel Bush that we do not torture.  Now, I read that the meme is that Bush was not being informed about what the CIA was doing. Yeah. Right...
Well, if he didn't really know, and vampire Cheney didn't tell him what everybody else in the world knew, now he knows. He should say thank you.

So, yes. We do need this report to prove something - to the American people.

It is good for the American people to have access to the truth that, like the Germans in WW2, they could have known but didn't.

As the Senate Armed Services Committee Report on torture (released over 5 years ago, in far less redacted form than tomorrow's summary will be) makes clear, the Bush regime embraced torture not for "intelligence" but for "exploitation." In December 2001, when DOD first started searching for what would become torture, it was explicitly looking for "exploitation."

   As Administration lawyers began to reconsider U.S. adherence to the Geneva Conventions, the DoD Office of the General Counsel also began seeking information on detention and interrogation. In December 2001, the DoD General Counsel's office contacted the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), headquartered at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, for information about detainee "exploitation.

[...]

Some other things exploitation is used for -- indeed the very things the torture we reverse-engineered for our own torture program was used for -- are to help recruit double agents and to produce propaganda.

And we have every reason to believe those were among the things all incarnations of our torture were used for. We tortured in Abu Ghraib because we had no sources in the Iraqi resistance and for some reason we believed sexually humiliating men would shame them into turning narcs for the US.

Sami al-Hajj, the Al-Jazeera journalist held at Gitmo for 6 years, says the US wanted him to spy on ties between that outlet and al Qaeda for them.

 [...]

It's not just a question of whether torture is "effective" at obtaining intelligence. It's also whether the entire point of it was to produce spies and propaganda.

A couple of things:

(1) you keep bringing up Pelosi.  Do you see anyone here defending or excusing her?  I can recall many comments - some of them mine - positing that one of the reasons there wasn't going to be serious accountability was because too many Dems were in this thing up to their necks.

(2) that we tortured, that no one has been held accountable for it, is not a secret, jim.  Not here, and not anywhere in the rest of the world.  It has no doubt already been used to recruit and fan the flames of terrorism. What's being fanned now, here, are the flames of fear.  The powers that be are working very hard to scare people - again - into retreating to their corners out of fear.  It's the Giuliani Protocol: " a noun, a verb and 911."

The only clip I have seen of his is the one where he says that we "don't torture"... with that weird freaky smile of his.

In any case, everybody in the world knows that we tortured, and, I'll wager, still torture... judging by the zeal with which the Obama administration has been siding with those who would suppress the release of the report.

By the way, the Guardian is writing that the report will in fact be released - maybe by tomorrow...

White House spokesman Josh Earnest ... warned US interests overseas were at risk of potentially violent reactions to its contents.