America Getting Results The Easy Way

Some good points have been made regarding two recent "wins" against terrorism that made me stop and think.

First, the "death by drone" of this American guy, Al-Awlaki, in Yemen: What we DO know is that the guy was very vocal about fighting against America, hating America, jihad, and all that stuff. What we do NOT know is whether he ever got involved in what the intelligence community calls "operational actions" (e.g. plots, attacks, material aid) against America. What we may have witnessed was the American government assassinating an American citizen (no trial) for rhetoric that was, more or less, on the same level as the "God Hates Fags" people out of Kansas.

Glen Greenwald:

What's most striking about this is not that the U.S. Government has seized and exercised exactly the power the Fifth Amendment was designed to bar ("No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law"), and did so in a way that almost certainly violates core First Amendment protections (questions that will now never be decided in a court of law). What's most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government's new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government.

Remember: Before you say "he had it coming", "he was a traitor", or he was "helping the terrorists with his words", consider the following scenario: A white supremecist leader in Appalachia is saying the same anti-American, take-up-arms, kill-kill-kill things to a crowd of angry white hillbillies as Al-Awlaki was saying to Muslims in Yemen. As the white supremecist finishes speaking, an army sniper from a building across the street shoots him through the head. That is the same thing — an assassination by the government of an American — with only a degree of jurisdiction as the difference.

Second, the arrest of the guy with the model airplanes wanting to load them with explosives and crash them into the capitol building. What we DO know is that pretty much every step the guy took was on a paving stone laid down by the FBI. What we do NOT know is whether this "would be terrorist" would have ever made it past the "contemplative" stage without FBI guidance.

"All for the best," is my thought: Anybody who will "step that far down the road" — whether that road is paved by the FBI or not — is, in my mind, a potential terrorist and a threat. But here is something I had not considered:

Julian Sanchez:

One possible motive for these elaborate and highly publicized stings is that, whether or not the particular people they indict would have moved from rage to action without prompting, the steady stream of news reports will eventually force any candidate for jihad to assume that an “Al Qaeda recruiter” who approaches them is much more likely to be an FBI informant or undercover agent than a genuine operative. That’s likely to make it much harder for any real recruiters who’ve gone undetected to rope in anyone savvy enough to be truly dangerous. In a haystack of 300 million people—or even 2.5 million Muslims—the government can’t possibly be confident it will be able to identify in advance all the particular needles who are really prepared to carry out an attack, rather than simply ranting online. They may have concluded that the next best thing is to create a climate of suspicion in which such people are unwilling to risk collaborating with others. That means that the scale and destructiveness of any attacks that do occur are more likely to be limited to what a lone individual can achieve.

Indeed. The FBI goes fishing for gullible-but-earnest zealots, lures them in, then splashes their spoiled "evil-genius plot" all over the news, and the really dangerous people who are smart enough not to talk to FBI agents about their plans, may slink back down under their rocks and stay there.

An Interesting Chart

Define Irony

How about the man who literally defines himself by his take-no-prisoners, budge-not-an-inch, stick-to-the-guns approach to policy making writing this?

Republicans Corner "Creepy Political Party" Vibe

It's true, ya know.

In the first September 6th Republican Presidential Primary Debate, the crowd of Republican supporters gave the biggest cheers of the night (the biggest cheers, not just "cheers", but the biggest cheers of the night) with regard to the fact that Candidate Governor Rick Perry had "executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times."

I support the death penalty, but I certainly do not get politically orgasmic over it, and it just surprises me that there are people who not just DO get politically orgasmic over it, but it is literally their biggest political erogenous zone.

In the second September 12th Republican Presidential Primary Debate, the crowd of Republican supporters gave further cheers for the concept of letting people without health insurance die.

While I don't believe that people with emergency medical situations should be refused care because of inability to pay "up front", I do believe that people with chronic medical conditions who do not have insurance should not be treated until they get insurance (yes: even government-provided insurance if/when possible). But again: Cheering and clapping about the prospect of somebody dying in America due to being denied medical assistance? Again: What kind of angry, heartless people do that?

I just could not be a part of a political organization that thinks in those terms. I fully condone the necessary evils that the American version of freedom, responsibility, and citizenship require, but I sure as shit don't clap about those necessary evils and I sure as shit wouldn't support any political movement that actually celebrates them... especially when they think they are God's Greatest Christians (cheer for killing, clap for death) at the same time.

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UPDATE:

Andrew Sullivan says more or less the same thing:

Of course, even if such libertarian purity does make sense, that cannot excuse the emotional response to the issue in the crowd last night. Maybe a tragedy like the death of a feckless twentysomething is inevitable if we are to restrain healthcare costs. But it is still a tragedy. It is not something a decent person cheers. Similarly the execution of hundreds, while perhaps defensible politically and even morally (although I differ), is nonetheless a brutal, awful business. You don't delight in it. And the same is true of torture. Even if you want to defend its use in limited circumstances, it remains an absolute evil, no humane person would want to do it, and no civilized person would brag of it or dismiss any moral issue with it at all. And yet that is what Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney have repeatedly done. They are positively proud of their torture record. The fish rotted from the head down. Last night, we got a whiff of the smell.

"The Self-Fulfilling Crisis Is On"

When a nobel-prize winning economist comes on and says, in effect, "There it is. That was the bad sign that we've been waiting for. It just happened today." Then you know we're in deep.

Did the euro just enter its death throes?

By resigning from the ECB, Juergen Stark has conveyed, deliberately or not, the message that there will be no ... lender of last resort, that there isn’t enough political cohesion in the eurozone to stand behind countries under market attack. And this translates directly into soaring spreads for Spain and Italy; the self-fulfilling crisis is on.

Another Anti-Gay Gay Republican

The vocally anti-gay Republican Senator from Puerto Rico just resigned from office after he put a photo of his culo (his actual culo... not his culo generally, but his culo proctologically) on a gay dating website.

As Dan Savage said, "Shouldn't homophobic politicians and anti-gay bullies be presumed to be gay until they get caught up in a straight sex scandal?"

So true: As I've documented before, the louder a politician/preacher speaks out against homosexuality, the more likely it is that he is secretly speaking out against his own personal demons.

And just because it bears repeating: I don't have a problem with closeted gay politicians/preachers, only the hypocritical anti-gay closeted gay politicians/preachers.

Food For Thought

For some reason, this chart does not include the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit that President Bush added on as well, which was $1.2 trillion.

An Idea I Can Get Behind

About time:

If you publish a blatant lie about a candidate during a political campaign, that candidate should be able to sue you for slander and defamation.

This should happen far more often:

A federal judge in Ohio said Monday that the Affordable Care Act does not provide for taxpayer funding for abortion. The statement was the cornerstone of the judge’s ruling to allow a defamation lawsuit brought against the Susan B. Anthony List by a former congressman to move forward.

Former Ohio Representative Steve Driehaus sued the SBA List for defamation of character during the 2010 election cycle, when the anti-abortion group ran an ad campaign on the premise that Driehaus had voted for a bill "that includes taxpayer funding for abortion," in reference to Driehaus’s vote in favor of the ACA.

Dreihaus, an anti-abortion Democrat, had initially filed a complaint with the Ohio Election Commission over a billboard that said he’d voted for "taxpayer funding for abortion." The OEC found probable cause that the statement was false, and the SBA List filed a complaint in federal court that its ads were based on the group's own interpretation of the law. The billboard was taken down but radio ads and flyers against Driehaus continued, according to court documents. Driehaus then countersued SBA List for defamation.

SBA List is ready to go to trial, stands by its statements and said the ruling "chills free speech."

Driehaus lost the election but Judge Timothy Black stated in a decision that the defamation lawsuit could move forward because "the express language of the PPACA does not provide for taxpayer funded abortion. That is a fact and it is clear on its face." SBA List’s request for summary judgment on the case was denied.

"It is a very big deal when a court says you can move forward against the 'malice' standard," said Paul DeMarco, Driehaus’s attoney. “This ruling allows us to go ahead with the next phase — discovery — where we believe we will find the SBA List either ignored the truth or purposely did not seek it out when making these claims."

"Free speech," my ass. The average person is not allowed to go around publishing blatant lies about other average people in this country; I hardly see how or why that rule should change when applied to political candidates.

You Can't Have Democracy And Freedom...

... if you don't yet have a mastery of how to be human:

This month, a group of men spotted the couple riding together in a car, yanked them into the road and began to interrogate the boy and girl. Why were they together? What right had they? An angry crowd of 300 surged around them, calling them adulterers and demanding that they be stoned to death or hanged.

When security forces swooped in and rescued the couple, the mob’s anger exploded. They overwhelmed the local police, set fire to cars and stormed a police station six miles from the center of Herat, raising questions about the strength of law in a corner of western Afghanistan and in one of the first cities that has made the formal transition to Afghan-led security.

The riot, which lasted for hours, ended with one man dead, a police station charred and the two teenagers, Halima Mohammedi and her boyfriend, Rafi Mohammed, confined to juvenile prison. Officially, their fates lie in the hands of an unsteady legal system. But they face harsher judgments of family and community.

Ms. Mohammedi’s uncle visited her in jail to say she had shamed the family, and promised that they would kill her once she was released. Her father, an illiterate laborer who works in Iran, sorrowfully concurred. He cried during two visits to the jail, saying almost nothing to his daughter. Blood, he said, was perhaps the only way out.

“What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them,” said the father, Kher Mohammed.

Too many places in this world are not populated by people whose values qualify them for membership in humanity; why are we even wasting our time and resources trying?

Deal

It looks as if the Congress may have finally reached a deal with the White House (I knew that Biden would be a good Vice President, as long as he didn't go out in public) to raise the debt limit and cut the budget.

I'm not happy with the precedent it set: The Republicans acted like a spoiled toddler, and treated this legislation like a bucket of toy blocks, grabbed it, and walked over to their side of the room and wouldn't consider letting anybody else play. Then the Democrats, playing the part of the wimpy kid, managed to cajole two or three single blocks from the Republicans to play with and somehow think to themselves... what?; that this is compromise?; reasonable?; success?; a recipe for future negotiations?

I'll be happy to tell the Democrats what this was: a tiny handful of hidebound Tea Party Republicans managing to strong-arm the rest of the federal government over a hugely important piece of legislation. Terrible.

Having said that, I'm generally happy with the spending cuts: Only $900 billion cut now (which hopefully will be of a sensible nature), then the next $1.5 trillion will be worked out carefully with a bit of study in a bipartisan congressional panel (snort!). As I said yesterday: careful and studious cuts are the more important thing. I also like the built-in concept of "if you don't make the cuts, the cuts will make themselves" included in the draft as well. I finally like the concept that raising taxes in the future is considered to be possible as well.

Now all we have to do is get the Democrats out of their diapers for the next round of debt-reduction negotiations, and hopefully a little bit more moderate cutting of the federal bloat can take place soon.

Food For Thought

Perfect Paragraphs

Andrew Sullivan strings a bunch of them together:

The Republican refusal to countenance any way to raise revenues to tackle the massive debt incurred largely on their watch and from a recession which started under Obama's predecessor makes one thing clear. They are not a political party in government; they are a radical faction that refuses to participate meaningfully in the give and take the Founders firmly believed should be at the center of American government. They are not conservatives in this sense. They are anarchists.

Their fiscal anarchism has now led to their threat to destabilize and possibly upend the American and global economy because they refuse to compromise an inch. They control only one part of the government, and yet they hold all of it hostage. I cannot believe they are prepared to allow the US to default rather than give an inch toward responsibility. Except I should believe it by now. Everything I have written about them leads inexorably to this moment. Opposing overwhelming public opinion on the need for a mixed package of tax hikes and spending cuts, drawing the president into a position far to the right of the right of his party, and posturing absurdly as fiscal conservatives, they are in fact anti-tax and anti-government fanatics, and this is their moment of maximal destruction.

Boehner and McConnell have one goal and it is has nothing to do with the economy. It is destroying this president and this presidency. They are clearly calculating that the economic devastation their vandalism could create will so hurt the economy that it could bring them back to power through the wreckage. And they will use every smear, every lie, every canard possible to advance this goal.

In New York State Gay Marriage Now Legal

Congratulations to all a major portion of my old friends in New York.

Real gay marriage, passed into law by a Republican congress in one of the nation's largest states: that's the writing on the wall for the anti-gay brigade that even they can't fail to misinterpret.

Quelle Surprise: No Illegal Immigrants = No Harvest

Georgia passed a "no-illegal-immigrants-in-our-state" law right before harvest. Illegal farm workers got the hint and took off. Now farmers are royally screwed as crops are not getting harvested.

Georgia, which passed an Arizona-style immigration bill in April that is due to take effect next month, has seen thousands of undocumented immigrants flee the state. A state survey released last week found 11,080 vacant positions on state farms that needed to be filled to avoid losing crops.

The solution? Not working out so well either:

For more than a week, the state’s probation officers have encouraged their unemployed offenders to consider taking field jobs. ... On the first two days, all the probationers quit by mid-afternoon, said Mendez, one of two crew leaders at Minor’s farm. Mendez put the probationers to the test last Wednesday, assigning them to fill one truck and a Latino crew to a second truck. The Latinos picked six truckloads of cucumbers compared to one truckload and four bins for the probationers. "It's not going to work," Mendez said. "No way. If I'm going to depend on the probation people, I'm never going to get the crops up."

Gee... Remember when people warned against deporting all the illegal immigrants because they do the jobs that Americans won't do? Who could have guessed that they would be right?

Just A Thought On That Weiner Guy

The CNN headline read, in part, that Representative Weiner was "sending lewd photos to women online."

Not really accurate: At this point in time, it would be more accurate to say he was "exchanging some sexy photos with his friends online." That's it.

I don't care how somebody gets their (legal) kicks in their spare time. It's not my business... even if it is my own Congressman. The only people who should have an opinion about a person's (legal) sexual behavior are the people directly involved in that person's (legal) sexual behavior. I only consider it my business when a public official offers, either directly or indirectly, an opinion or regulation or condemnation regarding other people's behavior, and then ignores those opinions or regulations or condemnations in his or her own personal life: Hypocrisy.

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UPDATE:

Andrew Sullivan makes a good point: Sending pictures isn't the problem; lying about it after getting caught is. I'll agree with that.

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UPDATE II:

In the speed-of-light news cycles these stories tend to have, I will correct myself: (1) The pictures might not have been "sexy"; although unconfirmed, they might have been lewd indeed as Salon says Brietbart has a photo of a disembodied cock that may or may not belong to the Congressman; (2) the photos may not have been "exchanged... with his friends" as one person has stepped forward to say the pictures were unsolicited and unexpected.

I call it as I see it: The disembodied cock photo doesn't sway me much, as it could belong to anybody, but one of the people that Congressman Weiner sent the photo to stepping forward and stating that the "bulge photo", appearing in the middle of a political discussion she was having with the man, "It didn’t make any sense... I figured it must have been a fake." Well that's just a bit slimy.

Like I said: Get your (legal) kicks where you will. But when you randomly interject sexual (or, possibly pornographic) images into somebody's political conversation with you as an elected official, that's sexual harassment... entry level sexual harassment, but still sexual harassment coming from a U.S. Congressman.

My support for the guy is fading fast.

1984 Is Palin's Favorite Book

The other day, Palin gave a mangled and confabulated version of Paul Revere's ride, claiming that the purpose of the ride was some sort of symbolic gesture to demonstrate to the British soldiers that American's wouldn't let them take their weapons, and to warn Americans to hide their weapons so that the British wouldn't confiscate them.

Or something like that — when you're making it up out of whole cloth, the stuff doesn't tend to be massively coherent.

So is that the end of it? Of course not: Palin supporters are now going through various websites like Wikipedia and trying to edit history to fit Palin's version.

On the Conservative version of Wikipedia, Conservapedia, Paul Revere's ride now has this tidbit added to it:

Part of the purpose of Revere's ride was to warn the British that colonists would exercise their natural right to bear arms.

We've always been at war with Eastasia.

She Really Knows Nothing

Sarah Palin tries to explain why Paul Revere made his midnight ride.



You can hear it in her voice, about halfway through, where she realizes that it was a dreadful mistake to confabulate details of Paul Revere's ride, and everything she is saying is going to be used as an example of her stunning general-knowledge ignorance.

Woman Charged With Illegal Abortion In Idaho

My opinion about abortion has always been the same: Abortion should always be an option, and it should always be the last and worst option.

Why? Because there is always a last and worst option for a woman wanting desperately to end a pregnancy, and without the option for an abortion that woman will quickly discover that there are many options equally effective but far more awful than going to a doctor to end a pregnancy... and she will choose one.

An eastern Idaho woman faces a felony after she told authorities she took pills to terminate her pregnancy on Christmas Eve and kept the fetus in a box on her back porch for several days, according to a police report that was unsealed Tuesday.

Jennie L. McCormack, a 32-year-old Pocatello woman and mother of three, will be arraigned next Friday in Idaho's 6th District Court. She is accused of having an unlawful abortion on Christmas Eve last year after police say they found the fetus at her home on Jan. 9.

Did Sarah Palin Fake Her Pregnancy?

Andrew Sullivan has maintained ever since Sarah Palin was selected to be the Vice Presidential candidate in 2008 with John McCain that the retarded child whom she gave birth to only weeks before the campaign started (named "Trig") was not her own child, but that of her daughter.

It was kind of the liberal version of "show us the birth certificate", but with surprisingly more evidence than what the right wing claimed to have against Obama: Apparently the day that Sarah Palin gave birth, she was on a plane flying from Texas to Alaska. She even admitted that her water broke (4 weeks prematurely) in Texas, and then she gave a speech, flew 12 hours to Alaska, and then went to the hospital there to give birth.

Then there's the photos:



March 14: 6½ months pregnant, 1½ months before giving birth.
March 27: 7 months pregnant, 3½ weeks before giving birth.
April 8/9: 7½ months pregnant, 2 weeks before giving birth.
April 13: 5 days after the previous picture, 5 days before giving birth.

Show us the birth certificate!

Filed Under WTF: IMF Director Tries To Rape Maid

The director of the International Monetary Fund allegedly/apparently tried to rape a maid in his hotel room in New York City.

Now, I have an imagination. I can generally imagine what it must be like to be any number of powerful people on this planet: what it must feel like, what it must make you realize about yourself. But I really just do not have (thankfully, obviously) a part of my mind that can imagine how being the head of the IMF could allow me think to myself (let alone act upon the thought): "I can just grab some innocent lady and force her to have sex with me. No problem." I imagine most everybody else on this planet probably shares that same imaginative limitation though; I doubt I'm special in that respect.

The one thing I will never grasp about these stories: How is it that certain men can achieve such success and such power and such influence, and then throw it all away over a boner? Really: The head of the god-damn IMF... one of the most powerful bankers on the planet simply ruined his life over a boner.

It just doesn't surprise me anymore, but it is always puzzling.

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Well, I suppose when you've attacked untold numbers of women in the past and gotten away with it, you might get a distorted sense of possibility: What the hell is up with the French authorities to be this aware of this man's proclivities to sexually assault people and never did anything about it?