Yes! Justice is Served

The Westboro Baptist "Church" has been hit with a $10.9 million judgment for its despicable and atrocious behavior at a Marine funeral. The details can be found here.

I hope these assholes lose on appeal and have to pay every g-d damned dime. Couldn't happen to a nicer group of scum.

Don't Kid Yourself: Giuliani is a Right Winger

This article in The Washington Post lays it out clearly: the idea that Rudolph Giuliani is a liberal is a fundamental misconception based on a handful of issues. In most respects, Giuliani combines all the worst aspects of Bush and Cheney within himself. Excerpt:

You wouldn't know it from reading the papers, but the favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination is a confirmed right-winger. On issues such as free speech and religion, secrecy and due process, civil rights and civil liberties, pornography and democracy, this moralist and self-styled lawman has exhibited all the key hallmarks of Bush-era conservatism.

That candidate is Rudolph W. Giuliani.

As any New Yorker can tell you, the last word anyone in the 1990s would have attached to the brash, furniture- breaking mayor was "liberal" -- and the second-to-last was "moderate." With his take-many-prisoners approach to crime and his unerring pro-police instincts, the prosecutor-turned-proconsul made his mark on the city not by embracing its social liberalism but by trying to crush it.

To a New Yorker, the idea of Rudy as a liberal or even a moderate is unreal, topsy-turvy -- like describing George McGovern as a hawk or Pat Buchanan as a Zionist. The case for Giuliani's moderation rests mainly on three overblown issues -- guns, gay rights and abortion -- and even in those cases, his deviation from conservative orthodoxy is far milder than is usually suggested.

The "social" and "cultural" issues that divide Americans encompass much more than guns, gay rights and abortion. They include state support of religion; the legitimacy of dissenting speech; the president's right to keep information secret; the place of fair procedures in dispensing justice. The Bush administration's hard-line stands on these matters have polarized the nation as much as the Iraq war has. And on these issues, Giuliani is just as hard-line as the man he'd like to succeed.

Face it, folks--he's Rudolph W. Mussolini. He has nothing but contempt for this country's democratic institutions. He has a disturbing streak of megalomania. And he is willing to say or do anything to win, however dishonest or unethical. Stopping Giuliani from acquiring the presidency is fundamental to the survival of our nation. Don't let him get away with trying to sell himself as a moderate. He's about as "moderate" as Dubya--and even more ruthless.

Giuliani Lying Through His Teeth About His Terrorism "Expertise"

If there is a more dangerous, more dishonest fraud than Rudolph Giuliani running for president, I don't know of him or her. Yes, Romney is a flip-flopping, lying hack, but even he doesn't have the instinct for authoritarianism and double-talk that "Rudy" has. Testimony that Giuliani gave to the 9/11 Commission (You remember that one, don't you? The one Bush tried to kill?) reveals a far different picture than the false one that Giuliani and his toads have been trying to sell the American people. Giuliani has tried to push the fiction that he was aware of the threat long before it materialized. The record says otherwise. Details can be found here:

A 15-page "memorandum for the record," prepared by a commission counsel and dated April 20, 2004, quotes Giuliani conceding that it wasn't until "after 9/11" that "we brought in people to brief us on al Qaeda." According to the memorandum, Giuliani told two commission members and five staffers: "But we had nothing like this pre 9/11, which was a mistake, because if experts share a lot of info," there would be a "better chance of someone making heads and tails" of the "situation." (Such memoranda are not verbatim transcripts of the confidential commission interviews, but are described on the cover page as "100 percent accurate" notes taken by staffers, stamped "commission sensitive/unclassified" on the top of each page.)

Asked about the “flow of information about al Qaeda threats from 1998-2001,” Giuliani said: “At the time, I wasn’t told it was al Qaeda, but now that I look back at it, I think it was al Qaeda.” He also said that as part of one of his post-9/11 briefings, “we had in Bodansky, who had written a book on bin Laden.” Giuliani was referring to Yossef Bodanksy, the author of Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America, which was published in 1999 and predicted “spectacular terrorist strikes in Washington and/or New York.” Giuliani wrote in his own book, Leadership, that Judi Nathan got him a copy of Bodansky’s prophetic work “shortly after 9/11,” and that he covered it in “highlighter and notes,” citing his study of it as an example of how he “mastered a subject.” Apparently, he also invited Bodansky to address key members of his staff.

Giuliani attributed his pre-9/11 shortcomings in part to the FBI, which was run by his close friend (and current endorser) Louis Freeh, and to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, an FBI-directed partnership with the NYPD. "We already had JTTF, and got flow information no one else got," he explained. "But did we get the flow of information we wanted? No. We would be told about a threat, but not about the underlying nature of the threat. I wanted all the same information the FBI had, and we didn't get that until after 9/11. Immediately after 9/11, we were made a complete partner." He added: "Without 9/11, I never would have been able to send an adviser to FBI briefings."

Hmmm. An FBI run by close friend and endorser Louis Freeh, who was wasting FBI resources on investigating the Clintons instead of devoting his manpower to fighting terrorism. Here, from Salon in 2002, is an interesting portrait of Freeh, from which I will quote at length:

Freeh was expert in political survival, some say, forging an alliance with top Republicans after he'd turned against the president who appointed him. And though he still wins strong grades from some lawmakers and analysts, the critics say his eight years on the job may have left the agency -- and the nation -- vulnerable.

"If people are looking for a scapegoat, I'd nominate Louis Freeh," says Ronald Kessler, author of "The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI."

It's no secret the FBI suffered a series of embarrassments during Freeh's tenure, some of them deadly. They include the botched handling of the investigations into Waco and Ruby Ridge; the bombing at the Atlanta Olympic Village and the heavy-handed tactics used against Richard Jewell; the breakdown of the FBI crime labs; the inept pursuit of suspected atomic spy Wen Ho Lee; the belated discovery of turncoat agent Richard Hanssen; and the failure to deliver thousands of documents to defense attorneys during the trial of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

The FBI fiascoes seemed to come like clockwork under Freeh, and they continue to roll out to this day. A recently uncovered March 2000 memo reveals that agents mistakenly destroyed evidence gathered in an investigation involving Osama bin Laden.

Yet Freeh has remained largely unscathed.

An episode just last summer showed the continuing esteem he enjoyed on Capitol Hill. During confirmation hearings for Mueller, Sen. Orin Hatch, R-Utah, continued to heap praise upon Freeh, "an extraordinary public servant" who, he said, "accomplished a great deal during his tenure to modernize and restructure the FBI so it can handle the challenges of the future."

And while Mueller took over as director only a week before Sept. 11, critics and press accounts have focused on his role. Freeh has managed to avoid the spotlight. Currently a senior vice chairman for credit card giant MBNA Bank, he has stayed away from the press since September, and he did not return calls seeking comment. Nor did three of his former deputies.

"Freeh is being smart by keeping a low profile. He doesn't want to get involved," says Kessler. "But people who follow the bureau know Mueller is trying to rectify his [Freeh's] problems."

*********

"He should be asked to testify as well as the rest of the ranking officers," adds I.C. Smith, a retired FBI special agent in charge and 25-year veteran of the bureau. "I'm not a Mueller and Ashcroft fan, but this didn't happen on their watch. It was Louis Freeh's team in place when the [9/11] terrorists were setting up their infrastructure and exploiting the system. He can't avoid that."

Detractors blame Freeh for a leadership style that featured arrogance, cronyism and micromanagement. Since 1994, all new FBI agents have to take a polygraph test, but Smith says Freeh left office without ever submitting to one. He tried to promote to deputy a friend implicated in the Ruby Ridge killing. And he personally approved the use of photographic suspect lineups during the Oklahoma City bombing investigation, a decision usually left to field agents.

Yet thanks in part to his high-profile fights with Clinton, Freeh managed to skate by as director and was never held accountable by the Republican Congress or the Beltway press, two influential groups that today seem indifferent to revisiting Freeh's troubled reign in search for clues to what's gone wrong at the FBI.

Former Clinton administration officials say they recognized the problem. But Clinton, crippled by the self-inflicted wounds of a sex scandal, refused to take action against the FBI director.

"We viewed Freeh as a guy who was wholly incompetent but who held on to power by making himself useful to the press and Republicans on the Hill," says one Clinton White House aide. "He was a political opportunist who played Clinton, and he's managed to escape the judgment of history for his mismanagement of the FBI."

Freeh: an incompetent, arrogant liar. It figures that he and Giuliani would form an alliance. Like attracts like, after all.

Yes, these are the people who will "keep America safe", the people who "understand terrorism", the people who are the only hope for our country. I've said it repeatedly and I'll say it again: Giuliani and his henchmen are downright dangerous to the survival of this country as a democratic republic. Giuliani is a liar and a bungler of the first order. He has consistently run on the mangled and burned corpses of the 9/11 dead, using their deaths in a disgusting, self-serving manner to advance his personal ambitions. He MUST BE STOPPED. We cannot allow four more years of Republican executive branch dictatorship in this country. I will continue to pepper away at this "Little man in search of a balcony" to use Jimmy Breslin's wonderful phrase. How about you?

The Giuliani Video You Need to Help Go Viral

It's a damning expose of the fraudulent "hero" of 9/11, Rudolph Giuliani. You can find it here.

I hope if Giuliani is the Republican nominee in 2008 that every American 18 and older sees this.

Help it spread!!

The Absurdity of Thinking Iran is a "Threat to the World"

Fareed Zakaria is the voice of reason in this insightful Newsweek article on the ludicrous notion that Iran represents a more dangerous threat to the world than did Stalin and Mao (!). Excerpts:

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism." For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?...

In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can't be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a "residual rationality," he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers.

Naturally, Giuliani is cheerleading the loudest for an unprovoked attack on Iran. It appeals to his recklessness, his violence, and his megalomania. I've been pleading with anyone who reads my tiny little blog to do what they can to help stop this madness from happening, but at this point Bush and Cheney may be completely beyond reason.

And that scares the hell out of me.

The Most Dangerous Candidate: Giuliani

He lies in debates constantly, simply pulling "facts" from the air. He has grossly distorted his role in 9/11 to make himself look like a hero, when in fact his bungling cost the lives of countless rescuers. And he has an appetite for power and an intolerance of dissent. Kevin Drum notes this authoritarian streak here:

Choosing the best presidential candidate among the 2008 contenders is a tough job. Picking the worst is easy. Rudy Giuliani is the guy you'd get if you put George Bush and Dick Cheney into a wine press and squeezed out their pure combined essence: unbounded arrogance and self-righteousness, a chip on his shoulder the size of a redwood, a studied contempt for anybody's opinion but his own, a vindictive streak a mile wide, and a devotion to secrecy and executive power unmatched in presidential history. He is a disaster waiting to happen.

Amen to that! Giuliani must be stopped before he causes irreversible damage to our country. I'll do my part. How about you?

Why is the Repulsive Idiot Glenn Beck Still on CNN??

If this doesn't piss you, I'm not sure what would.

Beck has this disgusting habit of attacking and smearing the victims of disasters, as if their suffering were their own fault. He's also the lowest rated of all the cable ranters. And yet, CNN and ABC still keep him on. Why?

"Liberal media" my ass.

The Most Recent Republican Debate

Wonderfully summarized here. Thank God, 'cause I can't look at these idiots.

What a bunch of wankers. There's only one group worse. And that's the hardcore right wing fanatics and haters that make up the Republican "base". Talk about scary...

Random Thoughts on a Saturday

--Al Gore deserves to be re-elected as president of the United States. Although I will support ANY Democratic presidential candidate against ANY Republican candidate in 2008, Gore stands head and shoulders above all of them. His qualifications are immense. He would be one of the great presidents, in my view. Additionally, no man in recent American history has been lied about and smeared more relentlessly. (Read Bob Somerby's obsessively comprehensive archives in The Daily Howler if you doubt me.) His elevation to the presidency would be an act, therefore, of cosmic justice and a repudiation of every lying bastard in the press corps who helped make the 2000 election close enough for Bush's mafia to steal. I hope that if Gore does not actively pursue the presidency that caucus goers and voters in Iowa, Nevada, and New Hampshire write him in in overwhelming numbers.

--Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid should be removed as Democratic leaders in Congress. They continue to buckle under to the least popular, most widely loathed president in modern history. They continue to let the Radical Right frame the agenda. They have failed miserably. They have allowed the dishonest Republican crooks to make mountains out of molehills (MoveOn) and have failed to take any meaningful action to slow down Bush's slide toward the Apocalypse. The last straw for me was Pelosi saying that Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) who uttered the following words in the debate on the SCHIP override, needs to apologize:

You [the Republicans] don’t have money to fund the war or children, but you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement.

I'd just like to point out, under the Republican's plan, by 2017, we probably will have killed 20,000 soldiers in Iraq, spending $200 billion a year --

Apologize?? For what?!? Telling the G-d damned truth?? Nancy, you and Harry need to both hit the bricks. NOW. I want someone who knows how to FIGHT BACK in the congressional leadership.

--Rudolph Giuliani would be a terrifyingly dangerous president, and must be stopped at all costs. He has recruited ALL of the most insanely radical of the neoconservative war advocates as his foreign policy advisers. (Check it out here.) He has to be stopped before he blunders the world in a third world war.

--Is there ANYTHING Mitt Romney won't say to win support? Check out his amazing duplicity here.

--How is a president with a 24% approval rating dragging us toward war with Iran? And why can't anyone stop him?

I think I'll take a shower now.

Heh! Chris Kelly Destroys the Phony Mitt Romney

Of course, by saying "Phony Mitt Romney" I'm being redundant. See the column here.

And never forget what a two-faced con artist Romney really is. He'll say anything, twist any fact, tell any lie, change any position, to get elected. I'd say he was a whore, but I don't want to insult prostitutes everywhere.

The Anti-Semitic Filth of Ann Coulter

Having taught European history for many, many years, I am broadly familiar with the terrible story of European anti-Semitism, which came to its horrible culmination in the last century. In order to lay the foundations that make mass murder of the kind we saw in the 1940s possible, people's minds have to be infected with false, vicious ideas. One of the worst of these ideas is that Jews are "imperfect" people who will only be "perfected" by converting to Christianity. In other words, if Jews reject Christianity they are, in a sense, responsible for whatever disasters befall them. Well, this past week, my least favorite right wing scum, Ann Coulter, again revealed her true colors, telling a Jewish talk show host that Jews need to be "perfected". Here are some of the relevant details:

Earlier this week, Coulter went on "The Big Idea," a talk show aired on CNBC, the cable channel devoted to business news. Its host, Donny Deutsch, is a preternaturally affable businessman who invites successful people on to talk about how they turn their ideas into money. Coulter was there to describe how she had -- in our vulgar commercial argot --"branded" herself. At one point, Deutsch asked her what an ideal country would be like, and she replied that it would be one in which everyone was "a Christian." Deutsch, who happens to be Jewish, protested that Coulter was advocating his people's elimination. She responded that she simply hoped to see Jews "perfected" through conversion to Christianity.

Deutsch, to his everlasting credit, wasn't having any of it, and the full transcript of their extended and -- on Coulter's side -- vilely offensive exchange on the matter is widely available online. Reaction over the last couple of days has been swift...

Perhaps the best response came from the Anti-Defamation League, which called Coulter's comments "outrageous, offensive and a throwback to the centuries-old teaching of contempt for Jews and Judaism. The notion that Jews are religiously inferior or imperfect because they do not accept Christian beliefs was the basis for 2,000 years of church-based anti-Semitism. While she is entitled to her beliefs, using mainstream media to espouse the idea that Judaism needs to be replaced with Christianity and that each individual Jew is somehow deficient and needs to be "perfected" is rank Christian supersessionism and has been rejected by the Catholic Church and the vast majority of mainstream Christian denominations. Clearly, Ann Coulter needs a wake-up call about the power of words to injure others and fuel hatred. She needs an education, too, about the roots of anti-Semitism."

That she does. As the league points out, "supersessionism," the theological notion that Christianity "completes" or "perfects" Judaism is, along with the deicide libel, anti-Semitism's major theological underpinning. Indeed, in Central and Western Europe between the world wars, there was a substantial body of purportedly "respectable" intellectual opinion that held "supersessionism" made possible a "reasonable" theological anti-Semitism that was entirely licit, as opposed to the Nazis' and fascists' illicit, "racially based" anti-Semitism. It is fair to say that the rails leading to Auschwitz were greased by precisely the opinion Coulter expressed on American television this week.

Yes, the road to Auschwitz. Some people, I guess, still don't understand how it got built.

By the way, NBC affiliates have had Coulter on more than 195 times.

The Rejects

The new Harris poll out today paints a stark picture: Bush and Cheney have now been utterly repudiated by the vast majority of the American people:

After a small rise in September, President George W. Bush’s job performance numbers have dropped to right above his lowest ever. Currently, just over one-quarter (27%) of U.S. adults view his job performance positively. The lowest recorded in The Harris Poll® was 26 percent in July of this year. Almost three-quarter of adults (72%) view the president’s job performance in a negative light. In September 2007, three in ten (31%) viewed his job performance positively and two-thirds (67%) negatively.

Vice President Dick Cheney also continues to see near record low job approval – just less than one quarter (23%) of adults view him in a positive light. Like the president, almost three-quarters (72%) view his job performance negatively.

The Republican Party tied itself like a leech to Bush and Cheney when the two Immortal Leaders were reasonably popular. Now they're stuck with them. Democrats, tie these two rejects around the throat of every Republican candidate in America in 2008. Make it clear that EVERY REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE IS PROMISING, IN EFFECT, A THIRD BUSH ADMINISTRATION.

And then watch the damned Republican Party crash and burn like never before.

For Anonymous, Re Climate Change

I hope you will check this out.

Peace out.

Down to One State Net Approval

And even that ain't by much. Gee, that's too bad, isn't it?

"Have You Forgotten?"

Check it out here.

Useless slime weasels, all of them.

OUTRAGE: White House and Fox "News" Destroy Anti-Al Qaeda Operation

Unbelievable. Simply unbelievable. If this isn't treason, then tell me what the hell is:

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news [It was Fox "News"--read the whole article--JM] and broadcast worldwide

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.

"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE's methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

Incredible. This is a SCANDAL. Why in the hell isn't anyone DOING anything about this G-d damned Republican INCOMPETENCE AND TREASON??

The Bush Tax Cuts: Welfare for the Richest

[Click on the image to enlarge.]