Open Thread

Jon Stewart is giving major coverage to the Macaca incident. Rob Corddry claimed he's a Macacan... Read More......

Clinton blasts GOP for politicizing terror

Bill Clinton weighs in:

Clinton, who generally refrains from criticizing Bush by name, said Republicans have been "trying to play politics" with the London arrests. "They seem to be anxious to tie it to al-Qaeda," he told ABC News. "If that's true, how come we've got seven times as many troops in Iraq as in Afghanistan? Why has the administration and congressional leadership consistently opposed adequate checks on cargo containers at ports and airports?"

He's get it right, as usual.

One more thing. This Washington Post article, like almost every other article and t.v. report dealing with terror, cites one statistic from recent polling: the Newsweek poll finding that 55% of Americans approve of Bush's handling of terrorism. Clearly, the GOP is pushing that statistic. Granted, it's the only relatively decent poll number Bush has had on anything in a long time. But come on media. His overall approval rating in numerous polls lately is mired in the 30s. His numbers on Iraq are abyssmal. And, Iraq remains the top voting issue. Bush and the GOP desperately want to change that. Once again, the media is playing right in to their hands. Read More......

Gay storks in Holland raising stork children

Damn you all to hell, Massachusetts! The religious right predicted this would happen, the downfall of all creation if gays were given equal rights. Oh the horror. Read More......

A little uplifting music courtesy of the French metro

I came upon this musical troupe in the Chatelet metro station in Paris. They pretty much had the prime spot in Paris' busiest station. Many of the "buskers," as the musicians on the metro are called (well, maybe they're called that in England, I don't know, it's what we used to call them when I lived here), are annoying as hell, the ones who come into the metro cars and stand in front of you singing "I love Paris in the springtime" - or worse, some Jim Morrison song that they can't quite figure out all the lyrics to, so they go phonetic. But this group was just wonderful (they were even selling CDs), so I had to pull out the camera. Enjoy.

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I've just confirmed that "macaque" is a French slur for black people - this is a variation of the word Senator George Allen used

It's confirmed. "Macaque" is a word that French soccer fans have used in the past as a slur against black players (often of North African descent) on opposing teams, they'd yell it at the opposing players. George Allen's mother was a French-speaking French citizen who lived in North Africa. You do the math.

And now George Allen is giving the standard non-apology apology. He's sorry if the other guy was offended

No, Senator Allen. The proper response is "I'm sorry," period. Or even better, "I'm sorry I called you the French word for 'nigger.'"

Worse yet, Allen didn't even bother apologizing to the guy he slurred. He gave his apology to a reporter. Classy.

Not surprisingly, the Washington Post hasn't caught up to the fact yet that the word Allen used is a variation on a French racial slur.

More from SusanG at DKos. Read More......

9/11 detainee released after 5 years, no charges

Oops. Read More......

July was most violent month yet in Iraq

While the American media was consumed with the conflict in Lebanon, Iraqis were dying in record numbers:

More Iraqi civilians were killed in July than in apparently any other month of the war, according to Iraqi Health Ministry and morgue statistics, despite a security plan begun by the new government in June.

An average of more than 110 Iraqis were killed per day in July, according to figures from the Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue. At least 3,438 civilians died violently that month, a 9 percent increase over the tally in June and nearly twice as many as in January.

So much for that much-touted security plan. There is no plan for Iraq. There never was a plan for Iraq. Read More......

Open Thread

Couple things: CNN's Chuck Roberts apologized for the stupid remark he made about Ned Lamont last week.

The U.S. military conceded that bombs, not a gas leak, killed 63 Iraqis earlier this week.

The President is talking terror, terror, terror. But his poll numbers aren't bouncing like the pundits thought they would.

What else do we need to know. Read More......

CREW named counsel for the Plame Wilson case

Big news from our friends at CREW:

Former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband former Ambassador Joseph Wilson announced today that they have engaged the non-profit, public interest organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) as successor counsel and Joseph Cotchett and Frank Pitre with the law firm of Cotchett, Pitre, Simon & McCarthy as trial counsel in their case against Vice President Dick Cheney, his former Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, top Presidential advisor Karl Rove and other unnamed current and former administration officials. Erwin Chemerinsky, Professor at Duke University School Of Law, will continue to serve in the case as co-counsel.

The Wilsons have filed a sweeping federal civil lawsuit against the defendants for their involvement in intentionally exposing Valerie Wilson’s classified CIA status to reporters in order to punish and seek revenge against Joseph Wilson for publicly disputing statements made by President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address justifying the war in Iraq.

If I was tangling with Cheney and Rove, I'd want Melanie Sloan and CREW in my corner, too.

UPDATE: TPM Muckraker reports that Cheney got himself a lawyer for this case. Read More......

No hearing today on Patricia Todd's race in Alabama

The hearing was postponed. Kathy from Birmingham Blues was on the scene and sent us the link to her post. Next week, apparently. So we still don't know if Patricia Todd, who won the primary runoff by 59 votes, will be declared the winner and become the first openly GLBT member of the Alabama legislature. Read More......

Wisconsin anti-gay crowd goes too far in anti-marriage amendment

And this is from a conservative radio show host in the state:

Legislative Republicans thought they had an electoral magic bullet when they voted to put an amendment banning gay marriage on the November general election ballot. The constitutional amendment would allow them to highlight a popular issue, motivate a big conservative turnout, and help Republicans up and down the ballot stem what appears to be a Democratic tide in 2006.

But it increasingly looks as if the GOP miscalculated: making at least three major strategic errors:

First, they overreached, by making the amendment far broader than it had to be, including a ban on civil unions and perhaps on an array of other domestic benefits.

But this is what the mean-spirited right is all about. It's not about marriage. It's about actively trying to hurt gay people. And they finally got caught. Read More......

Word Senator George Allen (R-VA) used for Indian-American is an established racial slur

UPDATE: Scathing Washington Post editorial about George Allen's racism today.

It seems George Allen didn't just pull the word "macaca" out of nowhere. It's a French slur, derived from the word macaque, as in monkey, used against the dark-skinned people of North Africa. And guess what? George Allen's mother was a French national (one presumes she was not a black woman) who lived in North Africa before coming to the US (she was in the US at least by the late 50s). And judging by the rather terrible French relations with North Africa during the era, it's likely that a white French woman living in the area might know a few nasty words for dark people, and use them around her children.

Atrios has more. Additional hat tip (hate tip?) to DKos. Read More......

Bush and GOP Congress underfunded Transportation Security Agency - more than $55 million taken from R&D;, delaying research on liquid explosives

Feel any safer?

NYT:

Cathleen A. Berrick, director of the Government Accountability Office’s homeland security and justice division, told a Senate committee in February 2005 that the Transportation Security Administration, part of the federal Department of Homeland Security, redirected more than half of the $110 million it had for research and development in 2003 to pay for the personnel costs of screeners, delaying research in areas including detecting liquid explosives. It has continued to redirect some research and development money, she said today.

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Alleged Democratic unseriousness

As you know, it makes me crazy when Democrats are labeled "unserious" on foreign policy or defense, and Sullivan is a repeat offender with this kind of nonsense. The Poorman has a hilarious (if cringe-inducing) riposte, and I just want to briefly pile on as well.

First of all, Sullivan seems to think it's the responsibility of bloggers to articulate specific foreign policy strategy: "I have yet to hear anti-war voices on the left propose a positive strategy for defeating Islamist terror at its roots, or call for democratization of the Arab Muslim world . . . Certainly, the Kossites seem utterly uninterested in any of these subjects." This is absurd. Among virtually all Dems, the "positive strategy" starts with Don't Impose Democracy Through Warfare Because That's Ineffective And Counterproductive, and goes on from there into the realms of soft power, including diplomacy, economic carrots and sticks, and, especially, leading by example, something that used to be a bipartisan virtue. Also, there's tons of foreign policy discussion on a variety of leading lefty blogs, including innumerable diaries on these subjects at Kos. I don't see right-wing bloggers articulating intricate new policy positions any more than liberals, and "stay the course" doesn't count as a strategy. Virtually all lefties are pro-democracy, of course, and we do a better job of promoting it.

But he doesn't stop there: "The same goes for the Dems as a whole. Until the opposition party presents a progressive, democratic agenda to reform the Middle East . . . there's no reason to take them seriously on national security." Let's imagine, for a moment, a party that claimed to support democracy. Imagine that party supported a democratic revolution against an occupying nation that claimed it granted sovereignty to its client state but really controlled everything through exclusive power over military and intelligence operations, saying that such control was necessary to maintain security and stability in a nation racked with internal religious and ethnic tensions. Let's say that unstable country managed to throw off the bonds of its oppressor, have elections, and begin the long road towards liberalism, but on that road, a militant group messed things up by commiting terrorist acts. The party that so strongly supported the democratic movement now gives a green light to total destruction of the nation's infrastructure and economy in retaliation. Now what if we called the country "Lebanon" and the party "Republicans." Is that a serious -- or even consistent -- approach to policy?

The Middle East is, prepared to be shocked, a complicated region and set of issues. But Democrats have a virtual shadow government of foreign policy folks churning out papers and positions and proposals at Center for American Progress, Brookings, New America Foundation, National Security Framework, etc. Plenty of serious people thinking serious thoughts, none of which will ever be implemented as long as the decidedly unserious Bush administration continues to muck up everything it touches.

It would be great if everybody could stop pretending that foreign policy is run by anyone other than the executive branch, and, occasionally, the Senate. I'd really like to know exactly which crazy Dems are going to personally torpedo U.S. foreign policy. Who? Most Democratic foreign policy experts aren't bloggers, and they're not even in government right now (again, they're waiting in the wings, as foreign policy is generally executive-driven), but we have plenty of smart, serious people who will do counter-terrorism better, nonproliferation better, trade agreements better, and national defense better. A Democratic Congress would be a good start, a Democratic President could really start to repair the damage. Read More......

READ THIS: Govt Report says X-Ray machines at airports can't detect explosives

UPDATE: The article is written a little unclear. It begins by saying the X-rays won't detect liquid/gel explosives, then later on says categorically that the X-rays won't detect ANY explosives. AP needs to clarify this. Either way, the story at least makes clear that the liquid/gel explosives can't be picked up, so that still begs the question of why Bush and Co. has us giving up our shoes when the X-rays won't see the explosives?
_________

So, that would mean we're pretty much screwed.

What the hell has George Bush been doing the past six years? Now we suddenly find out that x-ray machines at airports can't detect explosives? Then why did the government suddenly decide to make it mandatory to put your shoes through the x-ray if it won't show anything? To make us feel better right before we all die?

The government's new order that all airline passengers put their shoes through X-ray machines won't help screeners find a liquid or gel that can be used as a bomb.

The machines are unable to detect explosives, according to a Homeland Security report on aviation screening recently obtained by The Associated Press....

In its April 2005 report, "Systems Engineering Study of Civil Aviation Security - Phase I," the Homeland Security Department concluded that images on X-ray machines don't provide the information necessary to detect explosives.

Machines used at most airports to scan hand-held luggage, purses, briefcases and shoes have not been upgraded to detect explosives since the report was issued.

Did you get that? It's been almost a year and a half, and the machines haven't been upgraded.

So, basically, if you want to blow up a US airplane, simply bring the bomb in your carry-on luggage, your shoes, or your person and the x-ray won't detect it. That's nice to know. So, if this article is correct, US aviation is totally unsafe at the moment.

That's just swell. And we're finding this out now. Read More......

Will Joe Lieberman throw a third national election for the Dems?

Political Wire has Joe's statement where he seems downright giddy that Bush isn't supporting the Republican Senate candidate (wink, wink). You can read his words there.... I'm sick of his pompous, sanctimonious -- and Cheneyesque -- statements.

Lieberman has the potential to play a role in his third major defeat for Democrats at the national level. We all know the horrible job he did in 2000 before and after the election. In 2002, he played right in to the hands of Bush and Rove on the creation of the Department of Homeland Security -- which helped undermine the campaigns of a couple of his Democratic colleagues.

Bush and Rove call Lieberman their friend... but, face it, they don't have friends. The Republicans must just laugh at what a sap he is. They're using him for their own partisan purposes. And, of course, Joe's playing right in to the hands of Bush and Rove AGAIN.

Joe's actions on behalf of the GOP (whether unwitting or purposeful) could undermine the effort to pick up the House and the Senate. Those three House seats in Connecticut are critical... yesterday, the Washington Post analyzed how winnable the northeast seats are for Democrats. Leave it to Joe to help screw it up.

Question for the Lieberman campaign: Since Joe seems giddy about the support he's getting from the GOP, when will Bush and Cheney be coming to Connecticut to campaign for Joe? Read More......

Communist Party newspaper of Delaware County PA, DelcoTimes, calls me an "anti-war blogger"

Hey, if they can label me an anti-war blogger, I can label them a Communist Party front. Both are equally true.

(Though, to be fair, I don't know for a fact that the Delco Times is not a Communist Party front. Especially since the kind of unthinking knee-jerk propaganda they write sure sounds like the kind of thing the Soviets would welcome.) Read More......

Open thread

Off in search of milk. Read More......

The Freeway Blogger, the video

Great video of Freeway in action. Apparently this video won some prize over at HuffPost. Read More......