GOP Rep. Steve King wants hearings on Obama’s ‘drunken uncle’
“I watched as President Obama’s aunt, Zeituni Onyango, also evaded [Immigration and Customs Enforcement],” King added. “The sympathy, the bleeding heart, of [Department of Homeland Security Director] Janet Napolitano decided to use an administrative authority to grant President Obama’s aunt asylum.”
Is that what really happened on that awful day? September 11 will forever represent an attack on our borders, on our financial and governmental infrastructure, perhaps even on our way of life. But an attack on our democracy, on the ideals that form the underpinnings of our society? That can only come from within. Such an attack started well before 9/11, and it has continued to this day.
George W. Bush and other like-minded elites want to make sure regular folks never grasp the nature of an insider attack that could bring America to her knees.
Of all the people who have been quoted about the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I suspect no one gets it quite like Valerie Plame Wilson, the former covert CIA officer who was outed as part of the Bush administration's effort to deceive the public about the war in Iraq.
Wilson is featured in Time magazine's commemorative "Beyond 9/11" issue that is on newsstands now. In it, Wilson utters perhaps the most profound words I've seen so far related to 9/11:
We live in what I believe to be the greatest democracy in the world. With all its failings, it's still the best model that we've come up with, and it is really imperative that people take the last decade and the lessons learned and make sure that you apply them and hold your public officials to account.
George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and their brethren are desperate to make sure that doesn't happen. They want Americans to believe that airplanes and men with box cutters and funny sounding names can bring down our democracy.
Valerie Plame Wilson is too smart to fall for that rubbish. Let's hope that millions of Americans will eventually take her words to heart.
...if we are to understand how the right became so unmoored from prudence, moderation and tradition and became so infatuated with recklessness, extremism and revolution, we need to understand how it happened.
It is, of course, as my shrink never fails to point out, multi-determined. But here is Lofgren's attempt at a Rosebud:
How did the whole toxic stew of GOP beliefs - economic royalism, militarism and culture wars cum fundamentalism - come completely to displace an erstwhile civilized Eisenhower Republicanism?
It is my view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism (which is a subset of the decline of rational problem solving in America) may have been the key ingredient of the takeover of the Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes - at least in the minds of followers - all three of the GOP's main tenets.
That's how I explain the current GOP. It can only think in doctrines, because the alternative is living in a complicated, global, modern world they both do not understand and also despise. Taxes are therefore always bad. Government is never good. Foreign enemies must be pre-emptively attacked. Islam is not a religion. Climate change is an elite conspiracy to impoverish America. Terror suspects are terrorists. When Americans torture, it is not torture. When Christians murder, they are not Christians. And if you change your mind on any of these issues, you are a liberal, an apostate, and will be attacked.
If you ask why I remain such a strong Obama supporter, it is because I see him as that rare individual able to withstand the zeal without becoming a zealot in response, and to overcome the recklessness of pure religious ideology with pragmatism, civility and reason. That's why they fear and loathe him. Not because his policies are not theirs'. But because his temperament is their nemesis. If he defeats them next year, they will break, because their beliefs are so brittle, but will then reform, along Huntsman-style lines. If they defeat him, I fear we will no longer be participating in a civil conversation, however fraught, but in a civil war.
Kyrgyzstan: 83 Candidates Register for Presidential Elections
Bin Laden hoped to provoke a civilizational war between Islam and the West. And we took the bait.
We need to understand that 9/11 worked. It worked as a tactic to induce American self-destruction, even if it failed spectacularly as a strategy to advance Al Qaeda—and its heretical message of suicidal warfare—across the globe. [...]
[...] This handful of fanatics was supposedly a greater threat than the Nazis and the Soviets. And so much of our inherited moral wisdom—such as the absolute stricture against torture and the ideal of habeas corpus—were tossed aside. Dick Cheney, the man elected vice president as a calming father figure, became the most terrified of them all. And so we joined him in fearing that Al Qaeda was on the cusp of arming itself with WMDs that could be used to end our civilization.
Bin Laden and his henchmen failed, in other words. But our own fear won. Fear stopped us, overwhelmed us, as our ra-tion-al-ity deserted us. Yes, it was understandable, given what we endured that September morning. But we need to admit that our response was close to fatal. A bankrupted America that tortured innocents and disregarded its own Constitution is barely recognizable as America.
Rockets are being fired at the US embassy in Kabul, say police in Afghanistan. The Taliban has claimed responsibliity and says the attackers are armed with rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47s and suicide vests.
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Late in the morning of the Tuesday that changed everything, Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney was on a runway at Andrews Air Force Base and ready to fly. She had her hand on the throttle of an F-16 and she had her orders: Bring down United Airlines Flight 93. The day’s fourth hijacked airliner seemed to be hurtling toward Washington. Penney, one of the first two combat pilots in the air that morning, was told to stop it.
The one thing she didn’t have as she roared into the crystalline sky was live ammunition. Or missiles. Or anything at all to throw at a hostile aircraft.
Except her own plane. So that was the plan.
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“We wouldn’t be shooting it down. We’d be ramming the aircraft,” Penney recalls of her charge that day. “I would essentially be a kamikaze pilot.”
When I saw Dick Cheney dressed as Darth Vader to promote his new memoir, making a joke of his horrific behavior as vice president, all I could think about was how that video might play at his war crimes trial, if he ever were to undergo one. The prospect is not as farfetched as it might seem, particularly in light of his latest round of boasting about approving the use of “water-boarding” and other so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” From time to time I check in with acquaintances who are experts in international law and war crimes. They have long told me that Dick Cheney cannot risk leaving the United States, for there are a number of highly respected prosecutors in other countries who will not hesitate to charge him for his war crimes if they get the opportunity.
[...] Thus, nowhere does he acknowledge, not to mention provide any arguments to counter, the fact that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida’s goal had been to bleed and bankrupt the United States. Reading this memoir, I had the feeling that Cheney has been sucker-punched by our enemy, but has yet to realize it. Money never seems a problem to the writer of this book; rather, he takes it for granted. He is simply blinded by his arrogance and worldview.
If you came up with a bumper sticker that pulls together the platform of this year’s crop of Republican presidential candidates, it would have to be:
Repeal the 20th century. Vote GOP.
It’s not just the 21st century they want to turn the clock back on — health-care reform, global warming and the financial regulations passed in the wake of the recent financial crises and accounting scandals.
These folks are actually talking about repealing the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency, created in 1970s.
What’s next — repeal of quantum physics?
9/11 Tapes Reveal Military Ignored Cheney’s Order to Shoot Down All Civilian Planes
And throw all Democrats in internment camps.
U.S. Has Lost $60 Billion to Waste, Fraud in Iraq, Afghanistan
School Lunch Program will be defunded to make up those losses.
Perry: No Remorse for Executing Innocent Man
Says it will deter other innocent people.
Research: Conservatives Have Larger Fear Center in Brains, Liberals Larger Decision-Making Center
Unfortunately, decisions liberals make are to compromise with hysterical conservatives.
Vocabulary Builders
chutzpah n., when the Governor of Texas cuts funding 75% for volunteer fire departments, then demands federal disaster relief to fight wildfires, while calling for cuts in government spending.
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This Sunday, the NFL season opens in earnest on the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks and the league, like John Boehner finding an abandoned pack of unfiltered smokes, just can’t control itself. Teams will be going all out to commemorate that horrific day ten years ago when nearly 3,000 people were killed in DC, Pennsylvania and New York City. If you think this anniversary should be remembered with somber soft voices and an air of dignity, you are going to want to keep your distance from NFL Sunday or you will lose your lunch.
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In all the scurrying to make sure “9/11 NFL Sunday” is a day to remember, one name is strikingly absent from the press release trumpeting the day’s events: Pat Tillman. After 9/11, Tillman took the extraordinary step of leaving the NFL to join the Army Rangers. His experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan pushed him to question the official rational for the “Global War on Terror.” He read antiwar authors. He told friends that he felt the war in Iraq was “f—in’ illegal.” Then he died at the hands of his fellow Rangers in an instance of what was deemed “friendly fire.” The Pentagon and the Bush administration hid this reality from Pat Tillman’s family. The NFL, for its part, inaugurated a USO center at Bagram Airfield in Pat Tillman’s name without hinting at the complicated realities of either Tillman’s service or his betrayal at the hands of those he trusted. The NFL’s failure to highlight Tillman in this Sunday’s 9/11 tributes is in some ways a relief, but it also reads like an act of cowardice. His story is a polarizing one that Roger Goodell wants to avoid on this day of “unity.”
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Marines from Bravo Company 1/6 Marines move to ambush a group of retreating Taliban fighters as their previous request for an air strike was denied.
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Marines are from B Co., 1st Bn, 6th Mar. Rgt, 2nd Mar. Div., 2nd MEF.
A full complement of Republican presidential candidates gathered for the battle royale at the Ronald Reagan Library in Seamy (Simi) Valley, California. And though he was only there in spirit, the Great Communicator could easily have supplied the power for the entire proceedings had the networks harnessed him spinning in his grave like a rotisserie chicken in the middle of a power surge.
The 8 challengers for his mantle didn't just break the Gipper's 11th Commandment, "Thou shall not speak ill of other Republicans," they stomped on it with football cleats and shoved it down a sewer grate with a broken rake handle. It was a red meat, power-tie slam dance with operatic overtones.
Eyes on the prize, Newt Gingrich cautioned panel mates to keep the attacks focused on Obama, while castigating the media for trapping them in this internecine warfare. The rest of the contingent affectionately dismissed his admonition the way a group of Oakland Raider tailgaters would an elderly aunt wandering into a discussion on blitz protection. Newt Gingrich - the soul of reason. Something has gone horribly awry.
But there's plenty of time. This was just the premier stop for the traveling abattoir. There are dozens of chances for continued bloodletting until either Perry or Romney drops from the death of 1000 cuts, or they take each other out in a murder- suicide pact. While Team Obama roots for Perry from the sidelines the same way Jimmy Carter cheered on Bonzo's sidekick back in 80. Be careful what you wish for.
It's a situation many can sympathise with - having one too many and attempting physical feats you'd never consider while sober.
But in this case the shamed boozy culprit was not human, but a moose who had become stuck several feet off the ground in an apple tree.
The inebriated creature managed to trap itself amongst the branches of the tree in Gothenburg after apparently becoming drunk while eating fermented apples.
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Boozing mooses are not uncommon in Scandinavia...
What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.
A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?
The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.
Jesus Christ filed a lawsuit today in the New York Supreme Court against the Republican National Committee for what he is calling "egregious misrepresentation of his statements and image."
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[Mr. Christ's attorney:] Our client isn’t telling the GOP what their agenda should be, he simply wants them to stop using his name when their actions contradict everything he stood for.
If the GOP would like to continue using his name they have to start making a significant effort to help the poor and the sick, instead of the rich, and start promoting a more peaceful agenda."
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