Hey, the Israelis were the Victims Here!

I heard today that one of the dead from the botched flotilla attack had been shot in the chest once and five times in the head at close range. He was an American citizen and only 19 years old. The conservative blogs are still assuring us that the Israelis were the victims and merely defending themselves. In one report the people on the boat were called “rioters.” George Orwell, call your office.

9 Dead? No Big.

This has got to be one of the most morally vile things I’ve read … in at least a week.

A Question of Proportionality   [Michael Rubin]

A lot of the criticism surrounding Israel’s actions against the Free Gaza flotilla center on proportionality. Did Israel apply disproportionate force? The same charges form the basis of the criticism leveled by the Goldstone Report and, indeed, also were leveled against Israel following the 2006 Hezbollah War and, before that, Operation Defensive Shield in 2002.

But why should any democratic government empowered to defend its citizenry accept Europe’s idea of proportion? When attacked, why should not a stronger nation or its representatives try to both protects its own personnel at all costs and, in the wider scheme of things, defeat its adversaries?

Likewise, when terrorists seek to strike at the United States, why should we find ourselves constrained by an artificial notion of proportionality when responding to those terrorists or their state sponsors?

Ultimately, it may be time to recognize that, in the face of growing threats to Western liberalism, strength and disproportionality matter more to security and the protection of democracy than the approval of the chattering class of Europe or the U.N. secretary general, a man whose conciliatory policies as foreign minister of South Korea proved to be a strategic disaster.

One final note on proportionality: Fifteen “peace” activists dead is a tragedy, but they represent only one one-thousandth of the death toll of a French heatwave.

Apparently it’s perfectly ok to slaughter a dozen or so unarmed civilians in the name of, well, whatever. Because you can, that’s why. Only weak Commies like Europe or the UN could possibly think what Israel did was unjustified.

The degeneracy of the far right wing doesn’t seem to have a bottom.

[Edited June 3, 2010: Though the quoted text put the dead at 15, only 9 were killed. The post title is edited to reflect that.]

Boehner says Obama “Tries” to be soft on terror

Today on thehill.com

“I don’t know why the administration continues to change the terms of the debate. Why they refuse to say that this is a war against terrorism or a war against terrorists,” Boehner said in an appearance on the conservative Mike Gallagher radio show.

“I guess they are trying to be soft,” Boehner said. “They are trying to be kind and considerate.”

Boehner is, of course, lying.

Obama frequently uses the words “terrorist” and “war on terror.”

Boehner is safe in his lies because nobody on the right will question them. Almost all Obama’s speeches are on line but nobody on the right is going to look to see if it’s true or not.

This is from Obama’s 2009 State of the Union address:

We are now carefully reviewing our policies in both wars, and I will soon announce a way forward in Iraq that leaves Iraq to its people and responsibly ends this war. And with our friends and allies, we will forge a new and comprehensive strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan to defeat al Qaeda and combat extremism. Because I will not allow terrorists to plot against the American people from safe havens half a world away.

In Obama’s speech on national security in May 2009, he used the word “terror” or “terrorist” 27 times.

During his recent speech to West Point he used the word “terror” or “terrorist 5 times including this:

Al Qaeda and its affiliates are small men on the wrong side of history.  They lead no nation.  They lead no religion.  We need not give in to fear every time a terrorist tries to scare us.  We should not discard our freedoms because extremists try to exploit them.  We cannot succumb to division because others try to drive us apart.   We are the United States of America, and we have repaired our union, and faced down fascism, and outlasted communism.  We’ve gone through turmoil, we’ve gone through Civil War, and we have come out stronger — and we will do so once more.

The 90,000 troops in Afghanistan and more than 100 drone attacks prove Obama isn’t soft on anything. He’s done WAY more than Bush did to combat terrorism and the right wing is struggling hard to make that somehow not be true.

Good luck with that.

Obama’s a Citizen. Get Over It.

Why do the wingnuts still claim Obama isn’t a citizen?

I discovered recently that the FBI does a deep background check on all presidential candidates. It only makes sense. If someone is going to be privy to the highest level secrets in the country, we need to know if they are a convicted felon or a citizen of another country.  For me, this is the knock-down argument but then I believed Obama was a citizen all along.

It’s astounding to me that the birthers didn’t think the Secret Service, the FBI and the CIA would be the slightest bit interested in this issue. They didn’t imagine those agencies would have slightly more access to the original birth records than the average redneck. In addition to that don’t you think every single news organization from the Zimbabwe Daily Mail to the Bombay Times Herald would have fleets of investigators out there trying to get the biggest scoop of the century? Don’t you think Hillary Freekin’ Clinton would have clawed down the Honolulu Hall of Records with her own hands if there was the slightest hope that Obama was unqualified to be president?

The Tea Baggies don’t like him. I get that. If he’s not a citizen then not only is he not president, he’s never BEEN president. It can all just be erased like it never happened. I can see why that’s an attractive (to them) idea.

But it’s  nuts. He produced his birth certificate, it’s on line in several places, the State of Hawaii says it’s valid, the FBI has verified it. That’s the end of it. He simply can’t be removed from office that way.

Drachonian Arizona Immigration Law

The problem with the new Arizona law is that anybody can be stopped anytime for any reason or no reason and asked for an ID. If you can’t produce an ID they can arrest you. It matters not one tiny bit that you are an American citizen. If you happen to leave your house without your driver’s license (and I do all the time, why not? it’s a free country) then you are screwed. They handcuff you and drag you off to jail. If you are a LEGAL alien and you happen to leave the house without your ID you can go to jail for six months.

Yeah, I’m sure they’ll catch some illegals. Meanwhile all the Americans in Arizona are living in a police state. I’ve read that they don’t pull people over at random in Red China, though I understand it was very popular in Soviet Russia.

It’s astounding that people are so filled with hate and vindictiveness that they are perfectly willing to throw away their freedom to hurt a minority.

Portugal’s Drug Decriminalization Policy Shows Positive Results

In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections.

Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C, libertarian think tank.

read the whole thing here:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-drug-decriminalization

The Effectiveness of Waterboarding

Waterboarding is a crime. All of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” are illegal as well as immoral. Cheney is repeatedly confessing to a crime on national television and basically daring anybody to do anything about it.

Jesse Ventura is a nutjob on some issues (the ones where we disagree) and brilliant on others (the ones where we agree).

Here he is at his most brilliant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoqmH49VBC0

The Effectiveness of Teabagging

On April 14 Obama’s job approval rating was 62%
On April 18 Obama’s job approval rating had risen to 63%
Now, 3 weeks later Obama’s approval rating is 67%

I hear more Tea Parties are scheduled for July 4th. I’m excited. They might even push Obama’s approval rating up past 70%!!!

Worldnut Daily Overheats

“Worldnutdaily Overheats” is really like saying “Stop the presses! The sky is blue!”

Joseph Farrah (founder, editor and CEO of Worldnetdaily.com) thinks Obama has done something radical, crazy and totalitarian. Srsly! President Obama fired (actually asked for the resignation) of an extremely lousy CEO who was sucking up taxpayer money like a Hoover. Farah is prepared, though, he won’t be pushed around!

I have news for you, though: If Obama calls for my resignation as CEO of WND, he needs to know he can have my business when he pries it from my cold, dead fingers.

Of course WND isn’t taking any government money that I know of, nor will it any time in the future. But who cares about a little detail like that?

Then he gets unintentionally (more) funny:

What’s going on in this country? Has everyone gone mad? Are we all suffering from a new form of collective Alzheimer’s disease? Have we forgotten our roots, our heritage of freedom, our constitutional foundations?

This is from someone who cheered while Bush wiped his butt with the US Constitution and was snatching American citizens off the streets and disappearing them into torture and permanent detention without trial or charges.

But asking some incompetent CEO to go ruin someone else’s company is soooo horrible. How horrible is it?

It’s like directed chaos – which is why I say it is becoming more obvious all the time that the goal is to destroy rather than save or build a viable economy.

Farrah needs to lie down and take smelling salts. Maybe loosen his corset strings a little.

No New Deal on Drug War

The drug “war” pours billions of dollars a year down a bottomless rat hole. But who cares? It’s only money. The problem is, it pours millions of human lives down the same rat hole. All for nothing. Nothing at all. They do it to save us from a harmless drug that grows naturally along the roadways. A toxic dose of it has never been discovered. A McDonald’s Happy Meal will kill you quicker.

But the very suggestion that anti marijuana laws be repealed was laughed off by Obama. He’s not alone in that reaction. It’s a joke. It’s laughed off by everybody.

The next time a child is killed in a drive by shooting or a little old lady is murdered because the police had the wrong address, I’ll try to remember to laugh my ass off.