"We tortured some folks"

++Said President Obama in a long-ranging press conference. The Torture report's summary has been declassified and gone to the Senate intelligence committee, which will decide when to release to the public. The report however doesn't not use the word torture for the abuse uncovered in the four year review of the CIA's program of torture and rendition.

++The State Department has been crafting talking points to explain the US's actions for the audience overseas.

++Meanwhile the report will have a Republican rebuttal and a CIA response. No one knows as yet how much of the report will be redacted. 

++The pro-torture crowd is already lining up the defense of the CIA and blame the report on the Democrats, who apparently didn't torture anyone.

++Lost in the flap is that under the Torture Convention these acts should be prosecuted under the law as is obligatory under the conditions of the treaty. Eric Holder had investigated these cases and opted not to prosecute.

++The issue will be spun by the torture crowd such as the Washington Post's Marc Theissen who is a torture enthusiast. This should not come as a surprise because a plurality in any culture favors torture.

++President Obama also defended John Brenner for calling for the Inspector General Report that concluded that indeed the CIA spied on Democratic Senators. Senator Mark Udall demanded that Brenner be fired

++In other news, the Senate went home yesterday and the House will meet again tonight to vote on an extreme right border bill supported by Michelle Bachmann and Steven King, which would reverse the Dream Act making those 550,000 Latino kids vulnerable to deportation, modify the 2008 law that forbids the deportation of minors without due process, and would only provide a couple of a million for the border crisis itself. The House is now saying that the Senate should come back from recess to act on their bill, which is going nowhere. The whole point was to make a statement against President Obama and do nothing constructive about the crisis.

++As a warm-up to the Bachmann-King act,Michelle Bachmann charged the Obama administration with designing  medical experiments to be conducted on the kids. Steve King said they were all potential rapists. I guess they were't old enough to get calves as big as cantaloupes from smuggling drugs.

++In his press conference, President Obama said that funds to deal with the border crisis are running out and he would have to make decisions on immigration himself. He hinted that he would during the congressional recess.