"Aqua Teens". They're gonna get you in your sleep!

 "It's almost too easy to be a terrorist these days," said Jennifer Mason, 26. "You stick a box on a corner and you can shut down a city."

O'Connor said there's nothing wrong with being vigilant, but said she said it was ridiculous to shut down a city "when anyone under the age of 35 knew this was a joke the second they saw it."

I mean, Obama's decision is totally anecdotal, and therefore carries very little intellectual or moral heft: once somebody screws you over like Fox screwed him, after all, its no biggy to freeze them out.  

It's now even more difficult for law enforcement agencies to investigate their own.  Of course this case centers around a public defender, which should interest some of you, it also effects compelling testimony from Police Offcers.  Before this decision an agency could terminate, for insubordination, a peace officer who refused to answer questions during an administrative investigation where there was a potential for criminal charges.  Now they have to be offered immunity.  Nice eh?

I supposed their furious indifference was reasonable. They had many good arguments that I would have agreed with in other circumstances. I assumed that once the war was over they would back Iraqis trying to build a democracy, while continuing to pursue Bush and Blair to their graves for what they had done. I waited for a majority of the liberal left to off er qualified support for a new Iraq, and I kept on waiting, because it never happened - not just in Britain, but also in the United States, in Europe, in India, in South America, in South Africa ... in every part of the world where there was a recognisable liberal left. They didn't think again when thousands of Iraqis were slaughtered by 'insurgents' from the Baath party, which wanted to re-establish the dictatorship, and from al-Qaeda, which wanted a godly global empire to repress the rights of democrats, the independent-minded, women and homosexuals. They didn't think again when Iraqis defi ed the death threats and went to vote on new constitutions and governments. Eventually, I grew tired of waiting for a change that was never going to come and resolved to find out what had happened to a left whose benevolence I had taken for granted.

I didn't have to wait. I knew what was coming, After losing the election and allowing Bush to have a successful invasion there was no way the Left was going to let him have an easy and successful ending to the war.

The Irony Is That If Franken Gets Elected...

there'll be one less joker in the Senate.

by tristero

News breaking out of the Congressional Budget Office: While the president has been saying the 'surge' will be 21,500 troops. Actually it will be between 35,000 and 48,000. More momentarily.

It is also turning out to be a massacre of the Bush Administration and the Iraqi Government's credibility, and of any remaining doubt of the lies and propaganda spewed by both.

All the spinning in the world of this is only going to cause the spinners to fly apart from the centrifugal force. Watch out for flying bullsh*t.

The corporate media cover-up of the Najaf massacre
By Mike Whitney
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Feb 1, 2007, 00:52

There is no filter between the military and the media; it's a direct channel. In fact, all of the traditional obstacles have been meticulously swept away so the fairy tales that originate in the Pentagon end up on America's front pages, TV screens and airwaves with as little interference as possible.

In the present case, we were told that "hundreds of gunmen from a `messianic cult' (Soldiers of Heaven) planned to disguise themselves as pilgrims and kill clerics on the holiest day of the Shiite calendar." We are expected to believe that they put their wives and children in the line of fire so they could conceal their real intention to lay siege to the city.

How many men would willingly drag their families into battle?

According to the Associated Press: "Their aim was to kill as many leading clerics as possible, including the main ayatollahs, which would include Iraq's main spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. . . . Najaf government officials indicated that the militants included both Shiite and Sunni extremists, as well as foreign fighters."

Horsesh*t.

What we know now is that there were no foreign fighters (or al Qaida, as was originally stated), nor were there any Sunni militants. It was a group of Shiites who were rivals of the Shiite-led government (the SCIRI and Da'wa parties which represent Muqtada al Sadr and Abdel Aziz al-Hakim).

So what really happened?
...
Hoorah! More innocent people butchered!

Say what you will about the corporate media; they still haven't lost their appetite for carnage.

Neither has the decider-in-chief who, when asked about the attack, answered, "My first reaction on this report from the battlefield is that the Iraqis are beginning to show me something."

What the Iraqis "showed" Bush was how easy it is to dupe the US military into carrying out their genocidal reprisals against rival groups. Just as the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias are "laying low" while the US military ethnically cleanses Sunni neighborhoods throughout Baghdad, so too, the Shiite-led Iraqi government is now using American firepower to eliminate their potential Shiite enemies.

Apparently, Bush is as happy with this new arrangement as the Shiite warlords who now run the country.

Anyway, Obabma's comment was "[global warming will cause] drought, famine, storms and floods to take over our planet."

Turns out that most, if not all the administration's claims regarding terror threats have been shown to be untrue.

A basic tenet of the neocon philosophy, derived from Strauss, is that in order to maintain control over the population an elite group of leaders must lie and instill fear in the population at large.  

Looks like the plan of creating a nation of bedwetters worked for a while but the nation has caught on to the WH lies. Mostly they are not working any more.

On the other hand global warming has been proven to exist, even the president has admitted as such.

There is little debate amongst scientists, save for those hired by big oil, that global warming is a problem that must be solved. Most people are still driving SUV's as this administration has told the public not to worry.

Not too much bedwetting going on. If you are still confused you may want to look at how the current usage of bedwetter came into being. Being concerned about something that can be turned around is a far cry from bedwetting. Bedwetters believe that terrorists are going to take over America and force them to practice Sharia law.

Terrorists and freedom fighters will always exist. The WOT is not something that can ever be won. In otherwords the whole premise of bedwetting is that is is a self perpetuating never ending problem much like the WOD.

Stanching or slowing down global warming is not a never ending problem. Scientists do not work that way. Usually they, as opposed to politicians, are interested in solving problems not perpetuating them.

Their fear and cowardice is exposed when they patently refuse to put on some combat boots and head to the theater of war to fight their boogeymen.

The first is a bedwetter, in your view, and the second is not.

The oil lobby is so desperate to push back on the new climate change report [out tomorrow] that they have been offering to pay global warming skeptics to speak out:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded [1.6mil) thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

A few of the more notorious AEI members:

John R. Bolton
Lynne V. Cheney
David Frum
Newt Gingrich
Irving Kristol
Michael A. Ledeen
Richard Perle
John Yoo

If you can read, which I am truly beginning to believe that you can not, you will note that I bever said he attended a religious moslem school.

I quoted Obama who himself wrote that that he attended religious training.

I quoted the schools manager (?) that said religious training was available for those who wanted it.

Here's a question: if it turns out the culprits behind the Karbala raid were not Iranian-trained but US-trained, should we attack ourselves?  This just out from Fox of all places: "Several Iraqis have been detained for questioning in the ongoing investigation of at least two senior Iraqi generals suspected of involvement in an insurgent attack that killed five American soldiers on Jan. 20, U.S. officials told FOX News on Thursday."

The New York Times reported today that the Pentagon has altered how nonfatal casualties are tallied on its website, thus resulting in lower casualty totals.

Link

As a race of beings we certainly have some serious issues..... inside us. One of which is that we are incredibly willing to allow ourselves to be spun. Another is our unbelievable willingness to sit back and just take it, over and over and over, even when we know it is being done.

If we are willing to treat ourselves and our families this way, what kind of response should we expect from the rest of the world when America pre-emptively invades and kills them to bring them the wonders of western civilization?

Link

Iran introduces new AIDS treatment

TEHRAN, Feb. 3 (MNA) -- Health Minister Kamran Baqeri Lankarani announced here on Saturday that Iran's scientists have produced a herbal medicine that helps control the HIV/AIDS virus.

The drug improves the immunity system against the HIV/AIDS virus and can be used besides other anti-retroviral drugs, Baqeri Lankarani said at a ceremony held to introduce the AIDS control medicine and appreciate the medical achievements by Iranian researchers.

The herbal drug called IMOD, is the result of five years of research and has been tested on 200 patients. It boosts the human body's immunity system in a 90-day treatment course and a 2-year follow up.

"Deficiency of the body's immune system reflects a decrease in CD4 cells that lead to appearance of AIDS symptoms," he said, adding that the new drug controls the multiplication of HIV virus and thus helps increasing the CD4 cells.

The herbs used in production of IMOD are completely Iranian native plants, he noted.

Iran is the only country in the region that provides free HIV drugs to the patients, Baqeri Lankarani said.

Yes, it is not a misprint: $20 a month to own a house. The City Council of Marinaleda, a small town on the Spanish province of Seville gives away the land to anyone who needs a house, together with a grant, and in exchange requires that the new owner help work on its construction or pay for someone to do so. Marinaleda's mayor explains the miracle.
...
While most Spaniards are wondering if apartments could be made of gold ingot instead of bricks, as the average price of a second-hand house is $282,000 - equal to nine years' salary - and politicians try to fight the problem by adopting measures as polemic as temporary expropriation of any empty apartment in order to rent it out - such a Bill will soon be approved in Catalonia, in Marinaleda it only costs $20 a month to buy a house. This is not a misprint: exactly 15.52 European Euros including the 50 cents charged by the bank to leave the receipt.

That is to say that the monthly payment of those attached cottages the mayor shows us - 880 square feet distributed in two floors with three rooms, living room, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and a small terrace plus 980 square feet of courtyard - costs the same price as two movie tickets with its corresponding serving of popcorn, as a one hour singing lesson or a one-way bus trip from Madrid to Salamanca. The same house, but with a courtyard half the size in Villaverde, the cheapest neighbourhood in Madrid, would cost $557,000 and would take a monthly mortgage of about $2,688 lasting 30 years.