I'm sure you all recall the early days of the NSA Hoovering up all domestic data warrantless wiretapping scandal, when they referred to it as the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and assured us that they were only targeting Al-Qaeda operatives.

Naturally, this turned out to be a lie enhanced duplicity technique, because it turns out they were spying on all of us everyday American citizens. Nobody was off the target list, and we were all potential Al-Qaeda operatives.

Now, there's a big hubbub about some sketchy CIA assassination ring, apparently answering to Cheney himself. Nobody's willing to talk about the nitty-gritty details, but it's enough to have even Nancy "off the table" Pelosi spooked or pissed off enough to start publicly discussing how fucked-up it was, whatever "it" was.

The public justification for this shadowy, super-classified, apparently reprehensible death squad?

They were only targeting Al-Qaeda operatives.

Yeah, okay, I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit. Does anyone seriously doubt that what we'll eventually learn is that they formed a group to assassinate American citizens in the National Interest? Consider this, via TPM:

Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, told TPMmuckraker that because we've been in a state of war against al Qaeda since just after September 11, there would have been no need for a secret CIA program that received special legal authorization...

As for what the program did involve, Cannistraro suggested that it involved Americans as targets, and that it went beyond surveillance, but declined to elaborate. He added that, though Cheney may have directly ordered the CIA to keep Congress in the dark, the veep wasn't acting alone. "The approval was from the president," said Cannistraro.

Hmm, I wonder...

I am, at this moment, so damn glad I am not represented at the state or national level by the subject of the video below that you're glad of it too. This ... nasty-nice Republican Representative stood up to speak on a hate crimes bill, and announced to the world that Matthew Shepard's death had nothing to do with his sexuality.

What you need to do   Read more…

Interesting times:

(TPM link)

So, as far as I can tell, Rep. Jane Harman [D-Ca] was conspiring with the Israelis to drop some spy charges in exchange for some lobbying on her behalf, and Alberto Gonzales had an NSA warrantless wiretap™ (wait for it) on her phone and overheard the deal.

In exchange for not investigating, Gonzales asked her to attack the NYT's exposé on (wait for it) NSA warrantless wiretapping. The one she had personally requested be held back until before after the 2004 election (Department of With Democrats Like These, anyone?)

And so she goes free, although the Israelis didn't get her that committee chair she wanted in the first place.

One has to wonder just how much dirt Hoover Gonzales and Rove had on everyone in Washington, and more importantly, how many other favors they blackmailed out of people. And it certainly explains some of those bizarre, neo-Maoist ritual apologies.

Trawling through the Pravda web site reveals more juicy amusingness. Yes, I know, it is not news that it is a buffet of nuttiness. This time it is Sir Cabbagemallet, keeping the dream alive:

Having thus bravely rallied the international community and summoned the United Nations -- a fiction and a farce, respectively -- what was Obama's further response? The very next day, his defense secretary announced drastic cuts in missile defense, including halting further deployment of Alaska-based interceptors designed precisely to shoot down North Korean ICBMs. Such is the "realism" Obama promised to restore to U.S. foreign policy.

As discussed below, and especially considering Lambert's comment here regarding "hooked noses".

How about this recent one from Switzerland?

From Macro-Man (Feb. 4th):
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Dear Mr. President,

What Sara said.

This is a life or death situation and it is deteriorating. The history and the pathologies that got us to this point are well-documented by organizations like SPLC and by independent scholars. Some of us are trying to understand and deal with the situation in a sane and appropriate manner. We could use some support from our government and some leadership from you right now.

Until 1947, the United States habitually told the truth about at least one thing. The job title of the Pentagon's highest ranking civilian was the Secretary of War. But the recent slaughter of tens of millions in the Second World War had given the Pentagon's real function a bad name. So Democrat Harry Truman rebranded the Department of War, naming it the Department of Defense. From that day, the Secretary of War became the Secretary of Defense. War plants, war expenditures and bloodthirsty war industries became more benign-sounding defense plants, the defense expenditures and the patriotic defense industry.

Here is the second part of my review of Manfred Steger's The Rise of the Global Imaginary (part 1 here). In the last part of the book, Steger focuses on the sometimes conflicting ideologies derived from the global imaginaries.

Starting from the collapse of the USSR, Steger argues (correctly, I think) that the first winning ideology in the decontestation game was market globalism, the ideology that managed to decontest "globalization" in the limited sense of deregulated markets on a global scale.

To explore the tenets of market globalism, Steger reviews the writings of one of its main proponents and popularizers: Thomas Friedman. Needless to say, this is painful to read as is anything related to Thomas Friedman (hence no links), however he is indeed a central figure in the promotion of market globalism. He is also a good representative of the way this ideology was promoted by the political, economic and corporate elites in the 1990s (or the transnational capitalist class as Leslie Sklair calls this group, Friedman belongs to the ideological sub-group of the TCC).

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So I saw The Dark Knight, and I liked it. I admired its seriousness among the bombast, but did not love it. I had bones to pick about its plot --

A DA is the salvation of his city?
And he uses RICO, a Federal instrument? Without Federal intervention?
And offers himself up as bait, endangering the prosecution of hundreds of criminals to catch one psycho?
And houses his star witness with the psycho in a corrupt precinct house? And orders no metal wanding of the psycho's henchmen with cellphones visibly sewn into their flesh?
Really?

I know, I know, Susie's good people, and she's been patient with one very persistent troll. (She's also got car trouble, so she has more important things on her mind.) But when I read this post and saw the exact same paragraphs quoted by two different trolls -- one full force nasty, one concern-like -- I lost my sense of decorum and good taste.

Troll A:

I suppose you could follow the lead of historiann, anglachel, riverdaughter, and the rest of the PUMA dead enders and claim that obama is really another hitler, worse than bush, planning a totalitarian takeover of the US of A, etc. etc.

or, if you read the original article you find this:

It has been kindly pointed out to me that there is an error (in good faith, based on not checking the facts on another post and/or misreading the post) in my last post on flags. I feel obliged to correct this with another post, because I feel the content of my post still stands even after the factual error has been corrected.

Hillary Clinton did not participate in the attempt at adding a flag-burning amendment to the Constitution. She instead attempted to defuse it by proposing a non-amendment that very narrowly fit the Constitution as interpreted generally by the courts. Consequently, this paragraph,

There are reasons to prefer Clinton to Obama. There are easily arguable reasons to be angry that Clinton is not presently likely to be a Presidential candidate in the general election. You can even make a case for not voting for Barack Obama. You can make an even better case for not voting at all.

But there are a few moderately popular reasons for preferring Clinton to Obama that disturb me. A variant of one of these is present in this post at The Confluence.

Wow. Graves goes even lower. If you listen closely, the ad does refer to her as "Gay Barnes." I bet they thought that was funny -- and you know the folks in Graves's office say that to each other several times per day.

Wow.

Of course, the mastermind behind all this is "media consultant" Jeff Roe, who is about as reprehensible a campaigner as I'm aware of at any level of politics -- and I'm including Karl Rove. He's one of the major reasons that Missouri politics is rapidly becoming a cesspool.

Ok, yes I saw the Wright speech on CNN tonight. I know I saw it because I just saw another thread on corrente where Wright talked about the right-brained creative black child vs the wrong brained who-gives-a-damn white child. I thought that I had fallen asleep on the couch and dreamed that. Now I have to reconcile reality with um reality. Yes, Virginia this is 2008 not 1846.
Letting that sink in.
Wright went on to say in a tone that was as if all whites during desegregation ran and met in a big assembly room and said "we know what to do, they are right-brained creative AFRICAN children, we will desegregate thus keeping them down forever and ever!"

I'm sure this may come as a shock to you, but military is hiring bloggers to work as moles, "verbally attack[ing] specific person[s] or promot[ing] a specific message."

Wait, sorry, wrong link.

Here's the article.

Bill-O writes:
The American people need to wise up. Yeah, the presidential horse race is fun and interesting. But on vital questions of the day, the candidates spit out flimsy general rhetoric and walk away. To protect my family, I want the “waterboarding” option included among presidential powers. As for Musharraf, I want this guy held accountable. Sorry if that interrupts the hope train.

Bill O'Reilly is scared again. This fear-mongerer -- a witless moran with Faux Noise's biggest microphone -- wets his bed, afraid the US government might stop torturing (brown) people to make his (wealthy WASP) "family safer". Where do they find these notions? And since he's painting GOP front-runner John McCain (whose shoes O'Reilly is, truly, not worthy to tie) with the same panic-stricken

My niece gave me a cold yesterday while we were playing with stuffed animals and numbered legos, and I'm so sorry as I meant to blog heavily today and just don't have the energy. But I was thinking of writing more about "why we fail," or perhaps better put, "how we can win" or even "learn from your enemies/those who have beaten you/to fight again another day and win this time." Joe noticed a good one.

The telemarketing campaign, run by a nonprofit organization called "Faith, Family and Freedom" begins its pitch by asking the callee if they were opposed to same sex marriage. If the callee responds positively, they are then transferred to a United American Technologies representative who will explain to them how the more common telephone service providers, such as AT&T, MCI and Verizon are supporters of gay marriage and child pornography, and that United American Technologies is "the only carrier that is taking an active stand against same sex marriages and hardcore child pornography".

Wow. This is just uneffing believable.

I don't really even know what to say. As one of the commenters so aptly put it:

It's good to know that not all Republicans are crooks. Some are just assholes.

Indeed.

From Think Progress, who are astonished that the right-wing Reaganites (remember, Reagan fought his own Surgeon General regarding HIV and AIDS, and whether the public health threat the virus and diseases posed should receive federal funding to identify and treat and prevent):

In a column titled “Callous Conservative” in today’s Washington Post, former Bush White House aide Michael Gerson criticizes Fred Thompson’s stance on international AIDS funding.

At a campaign stop last week, Thompson was asked if he, “as a Christian, as a conservative,” supported President Bush’s global AIDS initiative.Thompson said there are larger “problems” at home and that it was not his “priority” to fund HIV/AIDS efforts in Africa:

“Christ didn’t tell us to go to the government and pass a bill to get some of these social problems dealt with. He told us to do it,” Thompson responded. “The government has its role, but we need to keep firmly in mind the role of the government, and the role of us as individuals and as Christians on the other.”

“I’m not going to go around the state and the country with regards to a serious problem and say that I’m going to prioritize that. With people dying of cancer, and heart disease, and children dying of leukemia still, I got to tell you — we’ve got a lot of problems here…”

But the right wing is outraged at Gerson, rather than Thompson.

The right wing wants people who are brown to die.
They don't care how it happens or why it happens.
They don't care whether bullets, bombs, or bugs kill brown people, just as long as none of those things threaten their shiny white fannies.

AIDS has taken a devastating toll around the world, but in Africa it has done perhaps its cruelest damage, because it has laid waste young adults -- leaving children without parents; leaving elderly people without children; leaving whole nations without a workforce aged 25-60, on a continent where the ravages of

It's all lies. Or distortion. Or confabulation. Or misdirection. But I found this example rather egregious. I bet you DFHs remember this sort of thing from back in the day:

Radio Sawa broadcast on December 11 the good news from the American forces that the regions of Arab Jabour and Al-Buaitha had been definitively cleared of the last vestiges of AlQaeda. Here's what their website reported that day

Joseph Inge, fourth brigade, third American infantry division, said his forces with the aid of the Awakening forces had been able to clear out the last strongholds of AlQaeda in the regions of Arab Jabour and Al-Buaitha south of Baghdad. He told Radio Sawa: "We have secured the area by freeing it from the threat of AlQaeda, with the assistance of local citizens". And Captain Inge called on the families that had fled to return to their homes in those areas, promising every type of support and assistance to those families.

On Thursday 40 "targets"--described by the miitary as "reported AlQaeda safe-havens"--were hit by a total of 40,000 pounds of bombs dropped on Arab Jabour in a 10-minute raid by the American Air Force assisted by another brigade, the second, of the same third American infantry division that had invited families back into the area only three weeks ago. The military had no information on how many people it killed.

Welcome to the first episode of "The Sorry News," a series of occasional commentaries about false narratives in today's America.

Suggestions for future topics are most welcome! What dubious memes, truisms, and such get your goat???

Today's topic is the oft-praised quality of "Bipartisanship."

Transcript:   Read more…

A few years back Benedictus noted and pulled together a number of posts from a number of people I respect on the increasing acceptibility of violence in society related to the mindless response to the War on Terror.

The Federalist Society congratulates itself at Union Station, and torture fan Fat Tony has the quote of the day. WaPo teabags them with A03 placement**:

Federalists Relish Well-Placed Friends

Funny, if they were so important, you'd think that Justice Roberts wouldn't have "forgotten" he was a member during his confirmation hearings. But let that pass. Fat Tony's quote:

Scalia said courts and law schools embrace the alternate view of a "living Constitution" and so too does the ordinary citizen, "who has come to believe that what he violently abhors must be unconstitutional."

"It is no easy task to wean the public, the professoriate and (especially) the judiciary away from such a seductive and judge-empowering philosophy," he said.

"Seductive and judge-empowering philosophy"?!

You mean like the kind of philosophy that allows judges to select a President with a "good for one time only" case like Bush v. Gore?

Rudy Giuliani stands an excellent chance of becoming our next president. In fact, I think it's gonna an inevitability, especially in light of the intense self-delusion we liberals are engaging in regarding his electability.  Read more…