So I celebrate this day every year, as millions of women have been doing for more than 150 years in honor of another great American.  And we don't need no stinkin' declaration from Congress to do so.  

Nor do we take off the day for play.  We do what Susan B. and all those millions of women before us did on this day; we get right back to work.

Oh, and by the way, millions of us celebrated yesterday, too -- not Valentine's Day but the 90th anniversary of the founding of the League of Women Voters . . . or really, the renaming of that organization actually founded in 1869 by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others.  But more than a century ago, the group under its previous guise, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which opted to meet to change its name in 1920 on the eve of this day when women across the country already were accustomed to celebrating Susan B., anyway.

No offense to Washington and Lincoln, but the celebrations of their birth have set advertising back like nothing else.

Ian Welsh directs his readers to Paul Craig Roberts' piece showing how this case indicates the US is already a police state.

I was a bit put off by the title -- until I read the incredible paucity of evidence that this 100 pound woman grabbed a rifle from a US soldier in a Baghram interrogation room and shot twice (none of which hit any US personnel); she was shot twice in the stomach.

On reading this piece I am, well, stunned.  And not only bcz the MCM did not bother to report any of the discrepancies noted in the article.  Yikes!

I am also becoming convinced that US citizens have been so made so frightened and  propagandized that any Muslim accused of anything remotely linked to terrorism cannot get a fair trial. Altho it did take the Bushies several trials and a move of venue from FL to the Midwest to nail those poor, deluded guys in Miami.

Dr. Siddiqui, a scientist educated at MIT and Brandeis University, was seized in Pakistan for no known reason, sent to Afghanistan, and was held secretly for five years in the U.S. military's notorious Bagram prison in Afghanistan. Her three young children, one an 8-month-old baby, were with her at the time she was abducted. She has no idea what has become of her two youngest children. Her oldest child, 7 years old, was also incarcerated in Bagram and subjected to similar abuse and horrors.

Siddiqui has never been charged with any terrorism-related offense. A British journalist, hearing her piercing screams as she was being tortured, disclosed her presence. An embarrassed U.S. government responded to the disclosure by sending Siddiqui to the U.S. for trial on the trumped-up charge that while a captive, she grabbed a U.S. soldier's rifle and fired two shots attempting to shoot him. The charge apparently originated as a U.S. soldier's excuse for shooting Dr. Siddiqui twice in the stomach, resulting in her near death.

On Feb. 4, Dr. Siddiqui was convicted by a New York jury for attempted murder. The only evidence presented against her was the charge itself and an unsubstantiated claim that she had once taken a pistol-firing course at an American firing range. No evidence was presented of her fingerprints on the rifle that this frail and broken 100-pound woman had allegedly seized from an American soldier. No evidence was presented that a weapon was fired, no bullets, no shell casings, no bullet holes. Just an accusation.

Wikipedia has this to say about the trial: "The trial took an unusual turn when an FBI official asserted that the fingerprints taken from the rifle, which was purportedly used by Aafia to shoot at the U.S. interrogators, did not match hers."

SNIP

This is the unmistakable hallmark of a police state. And this victim is an American citizen.

Anyone can be next. Indeed, on Feb. 3 Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee that it was now "defined policy" that the U.S. government can murder its own citizens on the sole basis of someone in the government's judgment that an American is a threat. No arrest, no trial, no conviction, just execution on suspicion of being a threat.

This shows how far the police state has advanced. A presidential appointee in the Obama administration tells an important committee of Congress that the executive branch has decided that it can murder American citizens abroad if it thinks they are a threat.

I can hear readers saying the government might as well kill Americans abroad as it kills them at home - Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Black Panthers.

Yes, the U.S. government has murdered its citizens, but Dennis Blair's "defined policy" is a bold new development. ....

You don't get treated in the US if you are poor or marginal

I take it you have never heard of Medicaid and have video of people being tossed out of ER's.

Look. We need reform to a single payer system but comments like the above don't help.

And yes, England's NHS paying employees health insurance is an admission that they have problems. Real problems.

If you did a Jay Leno J walk and asked people what is the significance of President's day 90 percent would not know or give a dumb answer.  Always liked that segment of Leno it showed just how dumb some people really are.  

Seems a chicken way to go out to me.  

Won't be long before Obama loses control of the both house at this rate.