GAZA (Reuters) - Hamas promised on Saturday to maintain a de facto truce and, in a major policy change, not to retaliate immediately for any Israeli violence while it weighs Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas's ceasefire with Israel.
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Dean's In
If you're happy with that choice, reward good behavior.
For the record: I'm happy with the choice. We've set up a blogosphere-wide donation page, so show your support.
Looks like you have the right to worship as you choose...as long as it's "Almighty God". I wonder if North Carolina really considers Buhiddism unconstitutional?
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The number two Pentagon official said reducing American casualties in Iraq was more important than bringing US troops back home -- and pointed to the rising Iraqi death toll as evidence this strategy was working.
"I'm more concerned about bringing down our casualties than bringing down our numbers," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said in an interview with PBS television's "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" program. "And it is worth saying that since June 1, there have been more Iraqi police and military killed in action than Americans." [my emphasis]
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. . .See, there's a double standard here: anything the little racists say is cool. Jonah Goldberg and Rich Lowry can run the upscale race and reason rag known as the NRO and no one will ask if they go too far.
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I'm a Jew, I'll hire good people.
“If elected, I would ask Willie Nelson to be the head of the Texas Rangers and Laura Bush to take charge of education in the state. I'd ask my Palestinian hairdresser, Farouk Shami, to be Texas ' ambassador to Israel . We've worked together to create Farouk & Friedman olive oil. The oil comes from the Holy land and all of the profits go to benefit Israeli and Palestinian children.”
Republicans, in contrast to the Nazis, who actually trained the Hitler Jugend in military skills, appear to be interested only in teaching the “Red” Jugend how to exploit the serving men and women of the U.S. military.
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This diary condenses the huge and detailed timeline laid out in the previous diary "Plame leak timeline II".
It lays the case for the leak of the classified 2002 CIA memo to Gannon.
In conclusion:
Jeff Gannon was planted by the administration to disseminate their talking points unfettered by any journalism ethics or investigation shortly after the Iraq war, when the failure to find WMDs was becoming apparent. He became incredibly useful in L'Affaire Plame to continue to push the dual stories that a) Plame's name was already common knowledge and therefore `outing' her was not a crime and b) to continue to help discredit the CIA and Wilson.
Based on the evidence, I believe the 2002 CIA memo was leaked to Gannon when Novak became unusable and when the `mainstream' reporters with CIA contacts were not pushing the WH's preferred story line. They needed cover, and they got it.
The Democrats, Representatives John Conyers Jr. of Michigan and Louise M. Slaughter from Rochester, wrote yesterday to Patrick Fitzgerald, the independent prosecutor appointed in the Plame case, seeking an investigation into how the reporter, James D. Guckert, who used the name Jeff Gannon, had access to classified documents that revealed the identity of Ms. Plame.
Karl Frisch, a spokesman for Ms. Slaughter, said: "This is a guy who could not get credentialed by the House or the Senate press galleries, and yet managed to get into the White House and question the president" and have access to a top-secret document.
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Guess what? When Democrats threaten their members to keep them in line, they're doing what they need to do to push forward their ideas. If Arlen Specter hadn't been threatened with what was essentially career destruction; if Tom DeLay wasn't called "The Hammer"; if Republicans didn't break Congressional rules left and right to make sure Democrats never ever win; if Social Security privatization wasn't a combination of some of the worst policy ideas ever proposed; if the Republican leadership wasn't a series of increasingly incompetent tyrants who would just as soon declare you a traitor as use you for a photo-op, then maybe this wouldn't be necessary.
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The United States government is currently run by a group of people for whom verifiable truth holds no particular privilege over ideologically inspired nonsense. For members of the mainstream media, trying to maintain a sense of self-importance and solemnity and to keep the wing nuts from crowing for more scalps, this requires a series of stratagems to keep up the scripted charade, no matter how foolish it makes them look or feel while doing so.
The easiest of these stratagems is simply to stack the coverage with political partisans and give them free rein to spout GOP propaganda. That's what the cable news networks do, as Media Matters for America demonstrated. Consistent with cable inauguration coverage, for example, MSNBC offered viewers of its State of the Union commentary eleven right-wing pundits and just two Democrats or liberals in response.
The standard for this kind of contentless coverage is set, per usual, by the reporting of the New York Times. If the lead reporter of the newspaper of record can ditch the substance part, well then, so can everybody else. Reporter Todd Purdum marveled at Bush's "penchant for thinking big, or speaking grandly." He then referred to Bush's "first State of the Union address three years ago...he stunned the world with his denunciation of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an 'axis of evil,' and his warning that he would 'not wait on events while dangers gather.'" Purdum failed to note what was obvious to any "reality based" observer: that the "axis" idea was logically incoherent, and the arguments vis-à-vis Iraq were based on evidence later deemed imaginary. Instead, Purdum explained that Bush "has long since proved both the extent, and the limits, of his ability to match his actions to his words," which is an awfully nice way of saying that the man is full of it.
It's hard to know in a post-truth society what anything means anymore, except more nonsense and lies, dutifully reported.
Let us consider the Rapture Index. This is a real thing prepared by serious people. If it makes you laugh, you have not gotten the memo. You probably have not read any of the 12 volumes of the "Left Behind" series, the best-selling books in America today.
Those Left Behind are those who did not experience the Rapture, which is an instant in time when all the truly holy people are taken directly to heaven, leaving their clothes in small neat piles behind them. The rest of the ungodly losers are left to deal with natural disasters and wars and the armies of the Antichrist, after which they die in various colorful ways while the ranks of the saved watch with compassion tempered with an understandable sense of satisfaction.
EIGHT months before the September 11 attacks the White House's then counterterrorism adviser urged then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to hold a high-level meeting on the al-Qaeda network, according to a memo made public today.
"We urgently need such a principals-level review on the al-Qaeda network," then White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke wrote in the January 25, 2001 memo.
Mr Clarke, who left the White House in 2003, made headlines in the heat of the US presidential campaign last year when he accused the Bush White House of having ignored al-Qaeda's threats before September 11.
Mr Clarke testified before inquiry panels and in a book that Rice, his boss at the time, had been warned of the threat. Rice is now US Secretary of State.
However, Ms Rice wrote in a March 22, 2004 column in The Washington Post that "No al-Qaeda threat was turned over to the new administration".
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The report by the 9/11 commission that investigated the suicide airliner attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon detailed 52 such warnings given to FAA leaders from April to Sept. 10, 2001, about the radical Islamic terrorist group and its leader, Osama bin Laden. [my emphasis]
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A comfortable middle-class lifestyle? Good education? Decent job? No safeguards there. Most of the medically bankrupt were middle-class homeowners who had been to college and had responsible jobs -- until illness struck.
As part of a research study at Harvard University, our researchers interviewed 1,771 Americans in bankruptcy courts across the country. To our surprise, half said that illness or medical bills drove them to bankruptcy. So each year, 2 million Americans -- those who file and their dependents -- face the double disaster of illness and bankruptcy.
But the bigger surprise was that three-quarters of the medically bankrupt had health insurance.
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Popeye is one of the world's most well-known and beloved animated characters. Since his creation, the pipe-puffing Popeye has become a global phenomenon, with millions of kids heartily munching on spinach in the hopes that it will make them as strong as the legendary sailor-man.
Yet is the spinach which gives Popeye his super-strength really a metaphor for another magical herb? Have children around the world been adoring a hero who is really a heavy consumer of the forbidden weed – marijuana?
SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Nestled in a quiet Sacramento neighborhood is a very loud political statement that is testing the very foundation of the right to free speech.
Hanging from a house in Land Park, a soldier's uniform in a noose dangles from a rooftop. The words "your tax dollars at work" are scrolled across the chest.
In a community full of patriotism, this view of the war in Iraq has not gone unnoticed.
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White men should "run, not walk" to wed "racially conscious" white women and avoid being out-bred by non-whites. Latinos are "rising to take this country away from those who made it," the "Euroamericans." Muslims are "human hyenas" who "smell blood" and are "closing in" on their "weakened prey," meaning "the white race." Blacks, Coombs sneers, are "saintly victims who can do no wrong." Black solidarity and non-white immigration are imposing "racial revolution and decomposition" in America.
Coombs describes herself as just "a freelance writer in Crofton, Maryland." But this is one writer who's a bit more well-positioned than she lets on.
Marian Kester Coombs is married to Francis Booth Coombs, managing editor of the hard-right newspaper The Washington Times. Fran Coombs has published at least 35 of his wife's news and opinion pieces for his paper, although his relationship to her is not acknowledged in her Times bylines.
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Most of Marian Coombs' especially inflammatory writings have appeared in white supremacist venues such as The Occidental Quarterly, which ran her glowing review of a book on "racially conscious" whites by Robert S. Griffin, a member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance. But the Times has published its share. [my emphasis]
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For might makes right,
And till they've seen the light,
They've got to be protected,
All their rights respected,
Till somebody we like can be elected.
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MSNBC Breaking News
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North Korea acknowledges it has nuclear weapons -
North Korea's government publicly acknowledged for the first time Thursday that it has nuclear arms, and said it is suspending participation in six-country talks aimed at getting it to abandon its nuclear ambitions.
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“We have wanted the six-party talks but we are compelled to suspend our participation in the talks for an indefinite period till we have recognized that there is justification for us to attend the talks,” the North said Thursday.
North Korea said it came to its decision because “the U.S. disclosed its attempt to topple the political system in (North Korea) at any cost, threatening it with a nuclear stick.”
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Gordon of The Alternate Brain is the auspicious protege of an extremely demented muse -- I can prove it...
Good Lord, why can't I write like that?!
"READ THIS, TOO" UPDATE: I finally gathered enough courage to post my first entry under skippy. Can't seem to get a handle on that blockquote thing, though (like I said a few days ago, I hate blockquote -- hate it!)...
posted by Mimus Pauly
Oh, Lordy, me too. Whenever I see a picture of his fat Irish head, I just want to whack it with a shovel.
Figuratively, of course.
I'll leave the literal ass-whuppin' to Gordon and The Fixer. They'd no doubt be happy to alternate his brain for him.
Shakespeare's Sister
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It assumes that all discretionary spending outside of military and domestic security - everything from paperclips to space shuttles - will be frozen for the next five years.
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It includes no spending for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2006. Those costs are now running about $5 billion a month and are likely to continue at some level in the 2006 fiscal year and beyond.
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SHARM EL SHEIK, Egypt - In a crucial step heralded as a fresh start to peacemaking, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas promised Tuesday to halt all acts of violence and agreed to meet again soon to tackle the tougher issues that for decades have blocked the road to peace.
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…The question for the citizen is simply this; when is it no longer acceptable to “do nothing”?
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The calculated savaging of civil liberties and the stunning assault on human rights proves without any doubt the President has abandoned any pretense of honoring his sworn obligation to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”. . . [my emphasis]
Dear Mr. Goldberg,
Here's a compromise to your dilemma as to whether to get your ass into the killing zone (more accurately, the be killed, be shot, or be blown up zone). Go to the nearest Veterans Hospital you can find, go up to some soldier or Marine who lost a limb in Iraq because his reserve or National Guard unit wasn't equipped with body armor or armored vehicles, and explain to him why we had to go to war in Iraq on March 20, 2003, and why we couldn't (a) wait to see if actual evidence of WMD's ever surfaced, and (b) wait until our military was properly equipped for the war.
By the way, I'm one of those parents who had to go shopping at home to send essential items to my son's Marine Corps Reserve Unit. And I, like most intelligent people with more than an ounce of common sense, knew without a shadow of a doubt that there was no military threat to the U.S. from Iraq, imminent or otherwise, when this war was launched.
Jim Finkelstein
While its previous owners considered adult entertainment "immoral," Adelphia Communications Corp., the country's fifth-largest cable television provider, last week became the first to offer hard-core adult films on pay-per-view to its subscribers.
While the corporations generate millions in profits from providing adult content, their political contributions are often given to those elected, in no small part, because of their stance on "moral values."
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Comcast Cable has given millions in political donations since 1998. The national Republican Party committees are its biggest organizational recipient, with donations totaling $851,000. President Bush is its biggest individual recipient with $109,000 in donations (my emphasis).
Adelphia has given $166,000 to Republican committees, $17,000 to conservative Rep. John Peterson, R-Pa., and $12,000 to Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., one of the most conservative members of the Senate.
Conservative activist Donna Rice Hughes, president of the anti-porn group Enough Is Enough, calls these corporations "white-collar pornographers." She says politicians who espouse "family values" should refuse their donations.
The corporate-Republican onslaught against the Black Political Consensus, conceived in the war rooms of rightwing think tanks a decade ago, is in full fury. Massively financed by, first private, and now public dollars, the campaign to create the perception of an alternative, conservative Black “leadership” is on the march in all regions of the nation, sowing confusion and alarm among authentic African American political formations. As expected, the corporate media certified that the 22 bought-and-paid-for ministers and corporate front persons showcased at the White House last week were, indeed, “Black leaders.”
Today, Republicans offer corrupt ministers billions on condition that they dramatically break from the historical Black Political Consensus and, hopefully, crack the fragile Democratic coalition. The homosexual “threat” is a smokescreen for treachery. For every outraged Black preacher howling that he’s giving up on the Democrats because of the gays, there is a check or the promise of a check.
And maybe a visit to the White House.
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I don't think there is anything at all unpatriotic about a young man opposing a war and declining to enlist. But a young man (and this applies to W. and Cheney too) who mouths off strongly about the desirability of a war is a coward and a hypocrite if he does not go to fight it.
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As good liberals, we want to believe in human perfectibility; sometimes, I think, because we want so much to make things right, we believe that anything can be made right. But I'm afraid human nature, as revealed through history, is against us (the Holocaust; Pol Pot; the Irish potato famine, "Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees"). That's our problem of evil: we want to believe that evil is not real.
But conservatives—or should I say "conservatives"—believe so strongly that they are good, that they fall into the trap of believing that only others can be evil ("evil doers"). In fact, Christianity teaches that evil is an inherent part of the human condition; all of us are capable of; this is called original sin. That is the conservative's problem of evil: They want to believe that evil is only real in others (compare Winger Projection Syndrome.)
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SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) - Israel and the Palestinians will announce a formal cease-fire to halt four years of bloodshed when their leaders meet for a landmark summit in Egypt on Tuesday, both sides said on Monday.
Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas are to meet in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh for the highest-level meeting between the sides since a Palestinian uprising broke out in 2000.
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Yet another in a depressing continuing series. Josh Marshall notes that the Republican National Committee is now threatening legal action against media outlets and independent advocacy groups who criticize the president. The RNC, as I trust I needn't point out, is, at this point, rather intimately connected to the state apparatus of this fine nation of ours. Now to be fair, in Russia they prefer to silence critics with legal action unrelated to the substance of the criticism. Trying to make use of libel and slander laws to shield political leaders from criticism is more the sort of thing you see in Singapore or Jordan. Still, the basic point should, I think, be clear. But libertarians need no longer worry about President Bush -- after all, all of this is being done for the sake of gutting Social Security!
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WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 - President Bush's budget would more than double the co-payment charged to many veterans for prescription drugs and would require some to pay a new fee of $250 a year for the privilege of using government health care, administration officials said Sunday.
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Veterans groups attacked the proposals. Richard B. Fuller, legislative director of the Paralyzed Veterans of America, said: "The proposed increase in health spending is not sufficient at a time when the number of patients is increasing and there has been a huge increase in health care costs. It will not cover the need. The enrollment fee is a health care tax, designed to raise revenue and to discourage people from enrolling."
Mr. Fuller added that the budget would force veterans hospitals and clinics to limit services. "We are already seeing an increase in waiting lists, even for some Iraq veterans," he said.
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In front of a cheering male audience, two young women wearing only bras and panties throw themselves into a mud-filled plastic kiddie pool and roll around in a wild wrestling match.
A young blond lifts her T-shirt to expose her breasts. A brunette turns her back to the camera and exposes her thong undies.
Photos of a wild Oct. 30 party at the camp show women soldiers baring their breasts to male onlookers, and other female G.I.s clad only in bras and panties wrestling and cavorting in a mud-filled plastic pool as men cheer, leer and snap pictures.
THE SOCIAL SECURITY CON GAME....If there's any single area where conservatives have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, it's in convincing the populace that government sucks. Sure, they got a great kickstart from Vietnam and Watergate, but it was decades of railing against waste and fraud and incompetence that finally won the day for them. [my emphasis]
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In a little-noticed move this week, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted, by a 13-5 margin, to approve the purposefully mis-named "Class Action Fairness Act" (PDF). (Three Democrats joined all ten Republicans.) What does this bill do, and why is it so harmful?
The CAFA requires that most class-action lawsuits be brought in federal, rather than state, court. On first blush, this might sound like a good idea: If you've got a truly national case with lots of plaintiffs from around the country, then your intuition might tell you the suit should proceed in federal court. And that's precisely what the bill's sponsors want you to believe.
The problem is this: The federal courts are already over-burdened and under-funded. This bill would force cases from fifty different state systems - which can better share the burden - into one jammed-up federal system. The delays for class actions would be enormous - long enough, quite probably, to serve as a deterrent to bringing worthy claims.
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It's amazing how much things have changed. Four years ago, a man couldn't admit to his love for violence. Now, we have pastors who tell us to watch gladiator movies because "God designed men to be dangerous," Marine generals who joyfully proclaim their love for shooting brown people, and sixteen-year old Christian columnists who defend them.
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