Showing posts with label terrorism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label terrorism. Show all posts

Thursday, June 18, 2015

This time . . . Charleston


Another day, another act of domestic terrorism committed by a man with a hate-filled heart and a bullet-filled gun.

I don't know what is more remarkable and terrifying, that so many Americans harbor murderous hate in their hearts or that these sick souls find it so easy to acquire arsenals, both large and small. And a small arsenal was all it took to all but erase from this mortal coil African-American congregants gathered for prayer and Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.
 

Nine dead. 

Among the first to be gunned down was the pastor, state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, "the moral conscience of the General Assembly” in the words of one Senate colleague.

Who would do this? According to police, just another violent and troubled young person -- one possessing the ballistic means to kill in person those he had already slain in his heart of darkness.

It appears that 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof was a white supremacist. A Facebook photo showed him wearing a jacked adorned with patches of the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. His car's front plate depicted the flags of the Confederate States of America.



AND THERE'S this account from NBC News:
"At the conclusion of the Bible study, from what I understand, they just start hearing loud noises ringing out," cousin Sylvia Johnson told NBC affiliate WIS-TV, "and he had already wounded — the suspect already wounded a couple of individuals."

She said one of those people was Pinckney, a 41-year-old married father of two and Democratic member of the state Senate.

The female survivor told Johnson that the gunman reloaded five different times and that her son was trying to "talk him out of doing the act of killing people."

But he wouldn't listen, she said.

"You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go," the shooter told the group, according to the survivor's account to Johnson.

TODAY of all days, the Confederate battle flag still flies at the state capitol in Columbia. At full staff. What could people possibly be thinking?

Don't answer that.

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Bobby Jindal and the purity of essence


It's getting to be that time again.

The presidential election is a little more than a year and a half away, so that means it's time for us to stop worrying and learn to love the bomb-throwers.

In brief, we must take the following seriously. Here's the jist of the latest political news (and remember that you heard it here first):

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal can no longer sit back and allow Obama infiltration, Obama indoctrination, Obama subversion and the international Muslim conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

And, by God, he wants to do to the Islamic State terrorists what he's done to LSU.
Gov. Bobby Jindal continued his attacks on President Barack Obama, proclaiming just outside the White House Monday (Februrary 23) that Obama is "unfit to be commander in chief" based on his refusal to commit resources needed to defeat and kill radical Islamic terrorists.

"I take no joy in saying that," Jindal said after he and other governors met with the president for nearly 90 minutes. "I don't say so for partisan or ideological reasons."

But he said a president who cannot call the enemy "radical Islamic terrorists," or is willing to rule out ground troops, except for very limited missions, isn't leading the United States to victory over a brutal enemy that he says only can be stopped by killing them.

Jindal,who is expected to seek the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, had expressed the same sentiments in a column that appeared Monday on www.foxnews.com.

Wrote Jindal: "Let's review some of what these radical Islamic terrorists have done recently in broad daylight: beheaded American captives and filmed it; beheaded 21 Christians in Libya and filmed it; burned a Jordanian pilot alive in a cage and filmed it; and attacked a school in Pakistan, killing over a hundred children and teachers."
LOUISIANA'S gallivanting governor also outlined in the Fox opinion piece what he expected the president to do when dealing with Islamic terrorists:
Radical Islamic terrorists are cutting off people’s heads, killing children, crucifying people, and burning people alive, and we need to find jobs for them? An international jobs program is not a strategy to defeat terrorists.

Perhaps the most incredible statement yet from this administration came from our State Department, which said, “we cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war.”

This is madness. Killing the enemy is exactly the way you win a war. More than any other statement, this one demonstrates in broad daylight that the president is not up to the job.
PERHAPS Obama should listen to Jindal, who knows a thing or two about killing -- killing his state's health-care system, killing his state's university system, killing his state's ethics-enforcement system. . . . 

Verily, LSU never knew what hit it. Neither did he rest of a state laid waste by its governor, who now stands ready to bomb the rubble.

ISIS militants, I suspect, are somewhat amused by the possibility Jindal might be president someday. American voters, meantime, ought to be underwear-soiling terrified by that same prospect.

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

The Old Testament is a bitch


Stay classy, Israel.

This "protest" in Tel Aviv begins with the crowd chanting their hatred for Ahmad Tibi, an Israeli Arab politician and physician . . . and member of the Knesset. In fact, he's deputy speaker of the Israeli legislative body.

"I wanted you to know the next child to get hit is yours. . . . I hate Tibi the Terrorist!" the protesters chant. "Tibi! Dead! Tibi! Dead!"

Then after calling for all Arab Israelis to be stripped of their citizenship, the crowd unveils another pithy chant about the military strike against Gaza:

"There's no school tomorrow. There are no children left there!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Israel#mediaviewer/File:Gas_the_arabs_painted_in_Hebron.JPG
AND THEN you have the ongoing vigilante attacks against Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. . . .

For the life of me, I can't imagine why Palestinians would want to fire rockets at a country where this is just another "slice of life." Funded in large part, by the way, by American tax dollars.

What could go wrong?

IN A LAND where the bloodiest parts of the Old Testament are never forgotten -- and, indeed, are still as new as tomorrow's sunrise -- it's always Mississippi 1959. With Palestinian suicide bombers and rockets and Israeli bombs and missiles.

For all this country's faults and sins, at least the U.S. government never bankrolled the Ku Klux Klan or the Black Panthers. At least not in this country.

Friday, October 11, 2013

Let them eat squat


Marie Antoinette infamously said "Let them eat cake" when the French people had no bread, and then she lost her head.

Now, in the third year of America's tea-party hostage crisis, the guillotined queen of France ain't looking so bad. At least she didn't personally thrust the hungry masses into pauperism, and at least she offered them cake as an option.

For the Republicans' whack-job wing, otherwise known as the tea party, that's not nearly Darwinian enough. With the ongoing government shutdown it brought upon us -- not to mention the sovereign default and resulting financial carnage it would like to serve for the next course -- tea partiers in Congress seek to create the poor whom they would sacrifice to the god of natural selection.

This brings us to the plight of rangers and civilian workers at Grand Canyon National Park, as reported by The Los Angeles Times:
Patrick Dotson was in crisis mode. The Grand Canyon Community Church pastor had just emailed a state food bank with an unlikely request: Rush food to one of the world's seven natural wonders.

Then came the knock on the door. A U.S. Park Service ranger asked whether Dotson could expand the small food pantry that was being run out of the church's garage. "He said, 'We've got families struggling here. How can we make this bigger?'" Dotson said.

The U.S. government shutdown has turned a prestigious national park where millions come each year to relax and recreate into a realm of high anxiety. Hundreds of employees are stranded without work or pay, prompting the donation of hundreds of boxes of food for families that have nowhere else to turn.

About 2,200 people remain inside the isolated Arizona park, 1,800 of them employees of private concessions that make the place run — the people who change the hotel room sheets, serve the meals, sell the gift shop mementos. Many are entry-level, minimum-wage workers with families who live paycheck to paycheck.

And while concessionaires are offering free rent and meals to those out of work, dependents often do not qualify. Families who rent apartments and send their children to a school near the park's famous South Rim have been left to their own devices, forced to rely on savings and fast-emptying supplies.

The result: Dotson's food pantry, which normally serves a dozen families a year, now has its hands full. The impromptu pantry has been moved to a community hall, where volunteers distribute boxes containing rice, beans, peanut butter and tuna.

Dotson requested the assistance of Phoenix-based St. Mary's Food Bank last week when he noticed that donated food at the church was quickly disappearing. He knew things would worsen as Washington's standoff dragged on.

Wednesday brought news that future handouts would contain perishable items such as lettuce and other vegetables, sending a buzz through the park, said Sarah Stuckey, a spokeswoman for St. Mary's.

"It's just a very strange situation for all of us inside the park," Dotson said. "There's a lot of nervousness here. People are worried. They're asking, 'How long is this going to last?'"
HOW LONG is this going to last -- this reign of congressional terrorists? How long will we live with the threat of "Give us what we demand, or we'll wreck the government, victimize the marginalized and blow up the economy"?

My fear is that the U.S. Constitution is unequal to the task of excising a fairly elected cancer from our body politic. That was John Adams' fear, too:
But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world. Because we have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
MORALITY and religion are passé in postmodern America, some of the still-religious are bat-shit crazy for the tea-party terrorists, and "avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness" have become the ultimate public-private partnership today.

We're drowning in all that and Honey Boo Boo, too. We elected the bat-shit bastards who threaten to be the end of us. And short of a Latin American-style military coup, it beats me how we get out of the fine political mess we've fashioned for ourselves.

It just may be that we have to lie -- fitfully and uncomfortably -- in the bed we've made.

The good news, however, is that the United States has been this divided before -- faced down an existential threat from radicalized, extortionist lawmakers before -- and we're still here. We found a way to remove the malignant tumor from the heart of our national fabric.

The bad news is that about 625,000 Americans died in the process.

Tuesday, October 01, 2013

Looking in the mirror and seeing Congress


Charles P. Pierce cuts loose on Congress on The Politics Blog in Esquire today.

Why? Because somebody had to.
In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress -- or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress -- a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party's 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.

We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.

We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.
THIS IS WHAT we've come to. Government by terrorism -- or extortion, if you want to be polite about it. I don't.

Right now, the Republicans are applying the tactics of your average al-Qaida cell, blackmailer, extortionist or neighborhood thug to the art (and I use that word loosely) of governance, such as it is today. The difference is in degree, not principle.

If they don't get their way -- if Obamacare isn't done away with -- somebody's gonna get hurt. Better yet, everybody's gonna get hurt.

When I was in college, America was enraged and frustrated by a hostage crisis that lasted 444 days. Now we have government by hostage crisis, and it's been going on for almost three years. It has become "the new normal."

Worse, we did this. We. Did. This. We elected these ayatollahs in blue suits. They do exactly what their pollsters tell them we want them to do.

We have exactly the government we deserve.

Half of us want to sacrifice the concept of a sustainable society to whatever the hell our inner spoiled, horny brat tells us is hip and happenin' at the moment. We've decided that we're cooler and smarter than the fossils who preceded us, and we're going to do what we want, when we want, and the future can go to hell.

Consequences are for squares. Or bigots. Whatever.

MEANTIME, half of us have decided that the entire concept of commonweal is a communist plot. We ask the question that Cain asked of the Almighty in Genesis -- "Am I my brother's keeper?" -- then unhesitatingly answer it ourselves with a resounding "Hell, no!"

Abel was a loser anyway.

This half of us is smarter and better than Those People, and we're going to do what we want, when we want, and our neighbor can go to hell.

This is the country that elected this bunch. One party is as bad as the other, in general, but today is the jihadis . . . er, the GOP's . . . day.

Both approaches to civic deviance have left us where we stand today, which is on the edge of the abyss, stomping the precipice with one foot as we dangle the other over oblivion. I wonder how that will work out for us.

Maybe we'd just as well live for today . . . because tomorrow is going to be a real bitch.

Monday, August 26, 2013

Calling Jim McKay


Put a tea-party lovin', gun-totin' Republican hack in the mayor's office one minute, find yourself in the bizarro world the next.

Wait, that was last month. The embarrassment du jour would be Omaha budgetary politics right out of the Black September playbook -- the municipal policymaking version of Munich 1972. All we needed on the news tonight -- and there's still a bit of time as I type this -- is an undead Jim McKay at the anchor desk and a military operation gone horribly bad at Eppley Airfield.

First, the setup: Omaha's former mayor, Jim Suttle, negotiates a new contract with the firefighters union aimed at ending the practice of pension-spiking, where you can work a bunch of overtime, get your salary as high as you can, and then retire with astronomical benefits pegged to that astronomical salary. That's the quick-and-dirty version, granted, but that's basically it.

The practice was fast sinking the city's pension fund, and it had to stop before the city quite literally ended up bankrupt -- and relatively soon, at that.

So, Suttle -- defeated by then-councilwoman Jean Stothert in this spring's mayoral election -- pretty much put an end to that, as had been done when the police contract came up for renewal previously. But the city council, with Stothert leading the charge, rejected that deal as too costly.

Then the council, with Stothert again leading the charge, strips Suttle of his contract-negotiating authority and reserves that job for itself. And then the council, again with Stothert in a leadership role, negotiates a new deal that Suttle warns really will bust the budget before signing the ratified deal in a total "I give up" moment.

Fast forward to this summer and the start of the budget process. The city is facing a sizable deficit -- mainly due to big projected overruns in the fire department budget. The fire chief, Mike McDonnell, says it's due to costs locked in by the new labor contract but Stothert, in effect, says it's because McDonnell is a twit and, furthermore, I'm going to cut the crap out of your budget, lay off all the new recruits and take an ambulance and some rigs out of service . . . and, by the way, why haven't you quit yet?

OH . . . this may have had something to do with Her Honor's attitude toward the chief and the fired, er, fire department:
McDonnell has sought a roughly $94 million budget, which he said was necessary to avoid cuts. That included a $150,000 to pay University of Nebraska Medical Center consultants who supervise the department's emergency medical service. Those consultants replaced Stothert's husband, Dr. Joe Stothert after he was dismissed by McDonnell and Mayor Jim Suttle's administration.
HERE'S some more of how the Omaha World-Herald is reporting the story tonight:
An exit package brokered Monday between Mayor Jean Stothert's administration and the embattled fire chief carries considerable financial implications.

The agreement protects current department staff from layoffs through next July 1 and gives McDonnell a full pension, more than a year before he qualifies for it.

The agreement also keeps all existing fire equipment in service through next July 1, with the exception of a medic unit based in South Omaha. .

McDonnell said the deal means Stothert needs to add about $2 million to the Fire Department budget. The mayor, however, said no additional funds were needed. Stothert said she expected the department budget to pass Tuesday.

McDonnell will receive a $10,900 monthly pension. He said that is about $900 more than he qualifies for with his 23 years and 10 months of service.

“These changes are in the best interest of the City of Omaha and will move the Fire Department ahead in a positive manner,” Stothert said in a statement.

Said McDonnell: “It was an honor to serve the city.”
(snip)

McDonnell's departure comes as the City Council prepares to vote Tuesday on Stothert's proposed 2014 budget.

The exit agreement, signed by Stothert and McDonnell, must be codified into a legally binding contract by Friday or else it is void.

The chief gets credit for 25 years of service and a retirement ceremony. The city will pay his share of his pension contribution through October 2014.

The agreement includes a “joint non-disparagement” clause until next July 1.

The city will maintain three of its four assistant chief positions through 2014. A fourth chief will retire this October.

McDonnell held a small press conference just before 7 p.m. Monday at headquarters in front of a city fire engine. He had already packed his city-issued SUV with personal effects and memorabilia.

He will be placed on paid administrative leave for the immediate future.

Stothert has made it clear since her mayoral campaign that she wanted McDonnell out.

Efforts to negotiate his future have been discussed intermittently for several weeks.

The two have been at odds over the mayor's proposed $90.6 million Fire Department budget, which could have forced layoffs, demotions and pulling firetrucks and ambulances from service. 
AND HERE'S the kicker: Stothert is refusing to apply for federal grant money specifically made available to fire departments for maintaining present staffing or even increasing it to better meet National Fire Protection Association standards.

Refusing to apply. Refusing to even try to avoid layoffs, unless. . . .

Hardball negotiating is one thing. Holding firefighters hostage to get the chief to retire is the stuff of political terrorism. Obviously, Omaha's new mayor has been taking pointers from congressional Republicans.


The only difference between Abu Packin' and Palestinian terrorists from back in the day is in the degree of her actions, not the principle behind them. It's just a matter of firing a hostage an hour until you meet my demands instead of killing an Israeli an hour until you meet my demands.


What matters to Stothert isn't the firefighters -- or public safety. What matters to Stothert isn't even balancing the budget in a sensible way. What matters to this doctrinaire GOP hack is ideology, sucking up to her right flank . . . and revenge.

How very Black September of her. Right down to this expertly placed shiv in the back, as reported by KETV television:
McDonnell said in order to fund those positions, the City Council would have to add $2 million to the fire department's budget, but the mayor's office said the budget will go before the council Tuesday at the proposed $90.6 million.

The mayor expects the new chief to achieve both the saving and the job protection within the proposed budget.
WOW. Stothert even worked in some Republican magical mathematics. Is there anything our pistol packin' mama can't do?

Except for running a city in an adult, competent manner, I mean.

Thursday, May 09, 2013

Time to publicly stick a sock in Ted's mouth

 
Ted Nugent is a taco shy of a combination plate.

This follows his being more than a generation shy of a hit record.

In light of this, I call for the public stuffing of a sock into the mouth of the has-been rock 'n' roll guitarist, sealing it with tar and smashing his computer and any other communications devices he may possess.


Because what's good for the goose is good for the verbally incontinent Motor City Madman, as demonstrated by this article on the Radio.com website:
Right-wing rocker Ted Nugent has taken to his column to call for the public hanging of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the now-charged Boston Marathon bombers.

The column, titled “Time To Stretch Neck Of Jihadist Punk,” was posted on the right wing website WND over the weekend. Stressing the need for quick justice, he (mostly) avoided his frequent talking points (fighting against gun control, criticizing Democrats and President Obama).

Using his usual colorful language, Nugent refers to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his now-killed brother Tamerlan using the term “voodoo” 13 times in his article, and calls for “stretching their necks” three times.

In the piece, he laments that Tsarnaev will likely spent years in custody before being sentenced: “Justice is supposed to be swift. At least that’s how our Founding Fathers thought it should be,” speculating that, 150 years ago “he would have been swinging from an oak tree in Boston Common no longer than 60 days from the date of his arrest. That would be justice.”

Nugent predicts: “He probably won’t go to trial for more than a year due to court-sanctioned delays. Once he’s found guilty, he will be afforded any number of appeals that will take more years, possibly more than a decade. The young voodoo nut has got a long life in front of him, thanks to America’s screwed-up justice system.”

He cites the trial of Nidal Malik Hasan, set to start May 29 (Hasan is accused of killing 13 soldiers and wounding 32 others at Fort Hood in 2009), as an example of crimes against Americans taking a long time to reach the court.

While “The Nuge” didn’t bring up gun control specifically (though he had a bit to say about it last week), he did note that Hasan’s “voodoo-inspired rampage” took place “in yet another gun-free zone.” Nugent added, “I would have supplied the rope, the lumber for the gallows and gladly pulled the hatch on this soulless rabid dog.”
TED NUGENT -- and this is the kindest thing you can say about the man after his repeated whacked-out, incendiary outbursts about, well, everything . . . particularly all things political -- is a thought-challenged hothead. This is reason enough not to take him seriously, much less not give him a column.

It's also plenty reason enough to just shake your head and say "There goes ol' Crazy Ted again. That ol' boy just ain't been right after he slipped into irrelevance after "Cat Scratch Fever." But that's not who we are today. Today, we take our nuts seriously, giving them all the more opportunity to act bat-s*** crazy.

That would make a large chunk of America almost as cat-scratch crazy as ol' Ted.

Of course, when you're cat-scratch crazy, you don't think of things like subverting due-process to get quicker vengeance (and it is vengeance Nugent desires, which is quite a different thing than justice) against a suspect in a terrorist bombing ultimately would pave the way for subverting due-process and other constitutional guarantees to get at you and me should we fall in disfavor with the government.

No, you don't think about such things when you're ol' Crazy Ted . . . or the people who still take him seriously.

By Nugentian standards of justice, ol' Crazy Ted would be playing air guitar in a cage at Guantanamo after saying this at last year's National Rifle Association convention in support of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.



BUT NO. After having a little heart-to-heart with arguably America's nuttiest musical has-been, the Secret Service thought about it and figured "That's just ol' Crazy Ted being ol' Crazy Ted." Thus, ol' Crazy Ted gets to go on saying patently nutty things to a national audience, thanks to the constitution Nugent says he reveres but seeks to subvert in the name of "patriotism."

If Dzhokhar Tsarnayev is found guilty in the terrorist bombing at the Boston Marathon, the killing of one Massachusetts policeman and wounding of another, as well as the carjacking of a civilian, he will -- in due time and after due process -- get what's coming to him. That would be thanks to our constitution, our system of criminal justice . . . and to due process.

It will be no thanks at all to hotheaded nutjobs like Ted Nugent, or to Americans who think the man has anything to say that's worth hearing.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Elvis has left the cellblock

Facebook
 
Spider Murphy's still playin' the tenor saxophone, and Little Joe's still blowin' on the slide trombone. 

Except now, the jailhouse is rockin' to an instrumental.

Elvis has left maximum security. Rather, a reasonable facsimile of the king of rock 'n' roll has been sprung from the Lafayette County Jail in Mississippi.

The lawyer for Paul Kevin Curtis says he was caught in a trap -- framed amid a slew of suspicious minds. But now he can walk out after the feds dropped charges against him, because there's no proof Curtis gave any poison-pen letters to the postman, or that he put them in his sack, says Reuters:

Prosecutors dropped charges on Tuesday against a Mississippi man accused of sending ricin-laced letters to President Barack Obama, a senator and a state judge, according to court documents.

The surprise decision came hours after Paul Kevin Curtis was released from a Mississippi jail on bond.
Prosecutors said the "ongoing investigation has revealed new information," but provided no additional details, according to the court order dismissing the charges.

Curtis told reporters he respected Obama. "I would never do anything to pose a threat to him or any other U.S. official," he said. "I love this country."

He said he had no idea what ricin was. "I thought they said 'rice,' I told them I don't eat rice," he said.

Curtis, who is 45 and known in Mississippi as an Elvis impersonator, had been released from jail on bond earlier on Tuesday after a judge indefinitely postponed a court hearing on his detention. The case was later dismissed "without prejudice," meaning the charges could be potentially reinstated if warranted.

Later on Tuesday federal law enforcement officials searched the house of a second Mississippi man, Everett Dutschke, Lee County Sheriff Jim Johnson told Reuters.

It was not clear if the search was related to the ricin case.

A representative for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Oxford, Mississippi, did not return calls for comment.

Dutschke is "cooperating fully" with the FBI, his attorney Lori Nail Basham told the Northeastern Mississippi Daily Journal. Dutschke has not been charged in the ricin case, she said.

(snip) 
Christi McCoy, Curtis's attorney, told CNN she believed her client had been framed.

"I do believe that someone who was familiar and is familiar with Kevin just simply took his personal information and did this to him," McCoy told CNN. "It is absolutely horrific that someone would do this."

Curtis was arrested on April 17 at his home in Corinth, Mississippi. He was charged with mailing letters to Obama, Republican U.S. Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Sadie Holland containing a substance that preliminarily tested positive for ricin, a highly lethal poison made from castor beans.
BACK at the jailhouse, Nos. 47 and 3 couldn't be reached for comment on the Man Who Would Be the King's sudden release. According to fellow inmates Shifty Henry and Bugs, they were otherwise occupied.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Obama the appeaser: Soft on seagulls


What you see here is the global seagull menace, caught in shocking detail in videos shot by ordinary folk . . . and in a couple of instances by the winged terrorists themselves.

Above, we see how a participant in a brazen San Francisco radical-seagull theft ring swipes a GoPro video camera from a French tourist as she photographs the setting sun behind the Golden Gate Bridge. Note how the felonious fowl, unmolested by the law under the Obama Administration, has no fear whatsoever of apprehension or of legal repercussions.

And note well what we've heard from the administration concerning such organized crime against unarmed, innocent individuals on American soil -- nothing. It is difficult to understand such indifference from the president or any of his Washington "comrades" in the face of this wave of terror taking flight across the homeland.

One supposes right-thinking Americans might be grateful that Barack Obama at least hasn't issued politically correct statements expressing sympathy with the "oppressed" gull community, caught no doubt in the maw of "parasitic" humanity. Yes, me must count our blessings, no matter how meager . . . assuming, of course, that the Obama Administration isn't at this very moment preparing to extend sympathy toward avian extremists.



BUT THE REACH of organized terror so fowl extends far beyond American shores. Europe is in seagull crosshairs, also.

Watch this from Cannes, France (above).

Not only does the gull extremist openly strike against the video camera of yet another hapless victim, it uses its purloined prize to record some sort of manifesto for fundamentalist seagullism. AAWWWWK, indeed.

And the response from the appeaser-in-chief to this seagull attack upon a close, still-capitalist European ally -- note that this happened last year, when the pinkos had yet to seize the reins of French power -- was again nonexistent. Birds of an ideological feather, perhaps?

We report. You decide.


IT IS AMERICA, though, that is the epicenter of terror attacks by fundamentalist seagullism. And it is here that the Obama indifference (or worse) most enables the destruction of American property . . . and American values.

Listen to these young Americans (above) -- brainwashed by this Obamanation against our fair land
-- laugh at the terrible sight of criminal seagull anarchy. Words fail. Tolerance of airborne terror, corruption of America's youth . . . when, pray tell, will enough be enough?


AND WHERE is the ultraliberal Humane Society of the United States when even house pets are victimized by global gull terrorism? And for the record, at least dogs tied to the roofs of family station wagons are able to eat unhindered by the criminal plague of avian extremism.


IS WHAT we're saying.


WHEN will the madness stop?

It will stop when Americans stop it. But the necessary War on Seagulls cannot commence until we
first achieve a different sort of victory.

Our first blow against this extremist enemy so fowl will be to give Barack Hussein Obama, appeaser of fundamentalist seagulls, a one-way Greyhound ticket back to Chicago. But not a plane ticket -- that would be the height of budgetary imprudence.

Freedom from seagulls: It's fundamental, and Mitt Romney will not rest until Americans, from sea to shining sea, once again can look to the sky without fear.

May Our Heavenly Father continue to bless the United States of America.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

No good speech goes unpunished

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy


Never are we humans -- stupid, sorry wretches that we are -- so contemptible as we are when wholly convinced that we're as moral and worthy as the other guy is depraved and unfit.

No one likes a self-righteous jerk, and for good reason. So I guess we can start right there when pondering why everybody hates America today.

Today is the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. In what may be a reasonably reliable sign of al Qaida's ultimate victory in the resulting War on Terror, many Americans have spent this Patriot Day -- today of all days -- trashing Vice President Joe Biden for referring to the anniversary as a "bittersweet moment."

Unsurprisingly, talk-radio blowhards Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have been leading the charge. From Politico:

Hannity blasted Biden as either “callous” or “ignorant beyond belief” for using the word “bittersweet” to discuss the 9/11 anniversary, and Limbaugh told his listeners that “with 9/11, it’s all bitter.”

Earlier on Tuesday, Biden addressed a crowd at the United Airlines Flight 93 memorial and said it was a “genuine honor” to be there.

“But like all of the families, we wish we weren’t here. We wish we didn’t have to be here. We wish we didn’t have to commemorate any of this. And it’s a bittersweet moment for the entire nation, for all of the country, but particularly for those family members gathered here today,” Biden said in Shanksville, Pa.

With the “bittersweet” remark, Hannity said that the “vice president buffoon is at it again.”

“Does he even know what the word bittersweet means? What on earth is bittersweet about what happened on 9/11? Explain the sweet part, Mr. Vice President,” Hannity said.

“What happened on 9/11 was unmitigated evil,” he added after playing a clip from Biden’s 9/11 speech. “I don’t see describing it bittersweet. It either means you’re just callous or you’re just ignorant beyond belief and don’t know the meaning of what the term bittersweet is.”

Biden wasn’t the only one to use the word “bittersweet” in his remarks on Tuesday. National Park Service Flight 93 National Memorial superintendent Jeff Reinhold used the term “bittersweet” in his Tuesday address before Biden spoke to the gathering. In a transcript of his prepared remarks, Reinhold said, “and a very special welcome to the families of the 40 passengers and crew of Flight 93. As always, it is bittersweet to have you with us again.”

“As you can imagine, it’s been an incredibly personal and emotional journey,” Reinhold wrote in an email to POLITICO. “The families have been involved in every aspect of the process and I — and our entire staff — have developed wonderful friendships and very close bonds with many of them. We look forward to their visits in September and throughout the year, but always with a tinge of regret as we know it is a tragedy that brought us together. ‘Bittersweet’ seemed very appropriate and is a term that I think many of the families would use to describe their relationship with the staff at the Memorial.”

Hannity also slammed the media’s response to Biden’s “bittersweet” comment.
“And I can say this — and I’m trying to stay away from politics — if a Republican vice president had said this, the criticism, the ridicule, would come on like an avalanche,” he said.
PERHAPS IT'S merely that Hannity's and Limbaugh's minds cannot deal with complexity. Maybe it's that these gentlemen have an insufficient understanding of grace, particularly that which arises from great tragedy or evil, confirming for our hearts that "the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not."

Then again, maybe it's something else entirely with Hannity and Limbaugh. (See Paragraph 2.)

Whatever the reason for a really, really pointless and deeply, deeply idiotic attack on the vice president on this day -- Really? REALLY??? -- that it could be made and taken seriously at all should be a sign of how very sick we have become as a country . . . and as a people. As a fever is sign of an infection, this kind of mindless, hyperpartisan and wildly popular spleen-venting is a sign of a nation deathly ill from a poison that has overtaken the heart and has spread to the brain.

Look around you today. Watch the TV news or pick up a newspaper -- if you dare. For God's sake, spend even 10 minutes on Facebook. If Osama bin Laden was responsible 11 years ago for setting in motion even 15 percent of what we Americans now freely and lustily do unto each other, history will award him an honored place in the Pantheon of Evil Genius.

That we are talking about this today, 11 years after witnessing unspeakable horror unfold on our television screens, says much about us, none of it good.

We have become so practiced at blithely dehumanizing our ideological opponents that our own humanity now comes into question. Are we still human? Or, perhaps, have we become some new thing -- some sort of antihuman being.

Then again, it's a story that's as old as Rome and as sick as Hitler. We just can't help ourselves.

BUT AS we take to Facebook, Twitter and talk radio to call the vice president callous, a dumbass or worse as we peer down upon him from our high horse, it might be worth it to consider that he just might know a lot more about the subject of suffering -- not to mention what is and isn't "bittersweet" -- than the vast majority of us ever will. Actually, TPM's editor, David Kurtz, did consider just that:
Rarely do I watch Joe Biden give a speech or an interview without looking for some evidence, in his eyes or the lines of his face, of the fact that he lost half of his young family when he was 30 years old. It is inconceivable to me, always has been, but especially in the years since I became a father. For all his goofballism, Biden has gone through a crucible that I cannot imagine. And he did so when he was 30, an adult, already deeply invested in the life he was building.

That’s not to diminish the tragedies that children endure. But at 30 years old to lose your wife and baby daughter, to almost lose your two toddler sons, and to somehow carry on? It truly baffles me. I know everyone says you do what you have to do. But that’s not really true. You don’t. You could curl up in the fetal position, if not literally then emotionally, and shrivel up. I’m more certain that that’s what I would do than I am confident I would find a way to persevere. But Biden has been through it. He’s seen hell and been back.

That he served his entire 36-year Senate career after that searing experience in December 1972, shortly after winning election, and then went on to become vice president, adds some drama to the story, I suppose. But for me the emotional highlight is just him getting out of bed the next day, and the day after that, and the one after that.

Which brings me to Joe Biden’s speech today in Shanksville, Penn., commemorating the victims of Sept. 11, 2001. The speech is marvelously and sensitively written. But rendered by Biden, drawing on his own life experience, in rhetorical ways that are not ostentatious and which don’t try to elevate his own story above those of the victims’ families, it packs a wallop that still makes me cut him a lot of slack for his sometime inexplicable goofiness.
I DISAGREE with the vice president on many things, particularly social issues. But I do well to remember that God loves him just like He does me . . . and that Joe Biden has guts. It takes guts -- and more than a little strength of character -- to survive, as he has, not only shattering grief but the shattering of one's whole world.

The way I figure it, if Rush, Sean and all the angry birds on Twitter actually had to walk a mile in the vice president's shoes, we might find out who the real "dumbass" and "buffoon" is. (ANSWER: Not Joe Biden.)

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Whack-a-mole in the name of 9/11


In blessed memory of the thousands killed Sept. 11, 2001, the United States government cooks up an award-winning recipe for war without end, forever and ever, amen.

I have become used to the memory of that horrible day being profaned in the name of twisted agendas, but this one stands out for its inanity.

"Some back home have asked why we are still here," U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said at a 9/11 memorial at the embassy in Kabul. "It's been a long fight and people are tired. The reason is simple. Al-Qaida is not here in Afghanistan, and that is because we are. "

"We're here so that there is never again another 9/11 coming from Afghan soil. We, with our Afghan partners, figured out that the best way to ensure that is to work together and with the international community for a stable, secure, democratic Afghanistan."

BY THE twisted Crockerian logic on display in Sunday's MSNBC.com story, we ought to invade the whole of the Middle East and southwest Asia . . . starting with Pakistan, moving on to Yemen and Somalia, and then on and on and on . . . whacking wherever the mole leads us, then staying forever.

By Crockerian logic, which is the logic of American geopolitical orthodoxy, al-Qaida is no longer in Iraq
(so we'd love to believe) because we are. Even though al-Qaida only went to Iraq after the United States invaded in 2003.

By Crockerian logic, we ultimately should "clear and hold" the whole of the earth -- expending what's left of the tattered American empire's human and financial treasure.

By real logic, we know this, of course, will not happen. We will have bled out -- both in metaphor and in fact -- long before that. We're bleeding out now.

And the "moles" laugh. And kill.

Monday, June 20, 2011

Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and gamma rays


The missus and I spent a wonderful Sunday night with friends at the College World Series.

The series' new home, TD Ameritrade Park, is beautiful. Awesome, even. And the downtown Omaha setting is a grand slam.

The night was wonderful, the company better, and the game between South Carolina and Texas A&M was a nail-biter. A late-spring night at the CWS always has a little bit of everything -- like the game itself (above).
And daddies and their babies.

And wacky team mascots. This is Cocky from South Carolina.

And, of course, wireless combination radiation and multigas detectors. Because it's dangerous out there.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

1973 down, 1968 to go

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy


It's over. Or is it?

At least when I was a kid, we only had one of these damn things to worry about at a time. As NBC's Richard Engel said about the Iraqis, my celebration also will be restrained.

We now return you to our quagmire in Afghanistan and political strife at home.

Friday, August 13, 2010

Why did Santa Anna bother?




Mis amigos en México,

We are
sooooo, soooooooooo sorry about the late unpleasantness of that whole Mexican-American War thing. We are also soooo, soooooooo sorry that, previously, American settlers moved into Tejas and caused so much trouble for you with that most unfortunate war of independence.

We'll forget the Alamo if you will.

I'll tell you what. Take Tejas back, with our deepest apologies. Really, it's yours.
No, go ahead. We were wrong to have annexed it in the first place.

Nuestras mas sinceras disculpas.

Somos lo siento.
Realmente.