BREAKING: Three college teammates say George Allen used the N-word frequently, wanted to go to a college where blacks knew their place

From Salon:

Three former college football teammates of Sen. George Allen say that the Virginia Republican repeatedly used an inflammatory racial epithet and demonstrated racist attitudes toward blacks during the early 1970s.

"Allen said he came to Virginia because he wanted to play football in a place where 'blacks knew their place,'" said Dr. Ken Shelton, a white radiologist in North Carolina who played tight end for the University of Virginia football team when Allen was quarterback. "He used the N-word on a regular basis back then."

A second white teammate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retribution from the Allen campaign, separately claimed that Allen used the word "nigger" to describe blacks. "It was so common with George when he was among his white friends. This is the terminology he used," the teammate said.

A third white teammate contacted separately, who also spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of being attacked by the Virginia senator, said he too remembers Allen using the word "nigger," though he said he could not recall a specific conversation in which Allen used the term. "My impression of him was that he was a racist," the third teammate said.

Shelton also told Salon that the future senator gave him the nickname "Wizard," because he shared a last name with Robert Shelton, who served in the 1960s as the imperial wizard of the United Klans of America, a group affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. The radiologist said he decided earlier this year that he would go public with his concerns about Allen if a reporter ever called. About four months ago, when he heard that Allen was a possible candidate for president in 2008, Shelton began to write down some of the negative memories of his former teammate. He provided Salon excerpts of those notes last week....

Shelton said he also remembers a disturbing deer hunting trip with Allen on land that was owned by the family of Billy Lanahan, a wide receiver on the team. After they had killed a deer, Shelton said he remembers Allen asking Lanahan where the local black residents lived. Shelton said Allen then drove the three of them to that neighborhood with the severed head of the deer. "He proceeded to take the doe's head and stuff it into a mailbox," Shelton said.

Read the rest of this post...

Open thread

Well that was a long dinner. Are we any safer now than we were when I left? Read the rest of this post...

Bush didn't try to stop Bin Laden in 2001, now he's made terrorism worse

The White House is in a panic mode. They're trying to rebut the one-two punch thrown at them by Bill Clinton and the US intelligence community showing Bush is a complete failure at fighting terror:

Mr. Clinton noted that he rarely criticized Mr. Bush on the battle against terrorism, but then asserted that the Bush administration had done too little to fight Al Qaeda in its time in office before the Sept. 11 attacks.

“They had eight months to try,” Mr. Clinton said. “They did not try.”

The new intelligence report, the National Intelligence Estimate, implicitly questioned assertions from Bush administration officials that the United States is now safer from terrorism than it was before Sept. 11, 2001, if not yet entirely safe, and that it would be less so under Democratic leadership.

Bush has failed on national security since he took office.

Bush intends to campaign for Republicans this year on his alleged anti-terror credentials. Every time he speaks about terror, the media better cover the truth: Bush has made the terror problem in the world worse because of Iraq. Instead of going after the real terror threat, he went to war against Saddam Hussein who had nothing to do with 9/11. Bush never goes after the real terror threat.

And, it's not like he wasn't warned. Clinton mentioned Richard Clarke's book, Against All Enemies, during his interview on FOX. Read that book and you realize that Bush was warned that invading Iraq would incite the jihadists. This passage from Clarke on page 246 comports with the new intelligence report:

Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda and its new generation of of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country. Nothing else could have so well negated all our other positive acts and so closed Muslim eyes and ears to our subsequent calls for reform in their region. It was as if Usama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting "invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq."

Frightening words from the former terror czar that have proven to be true. Read the rest of this post...

George Bush knew Al Qaeda was a problem for just as long as Bill Clinton did. So why didn't Bush take Osama on before September 11?

It's a cute game the Republicans like to play, claiming that George Bush didn't have enough time to take on Osama before September 11. But that's bull.

Bush and his neo-con cronies would like you to believe that somehow history started fresh on the day Bush took office in January of 2001. But it didn't. Bush knew, just like all the rest of us knew, that the World Trade Center was attacked in February of 1993 and that the threat to the Trade Center continued unabated. Bush knew that our embassies were attacked in Africa in 1998. And Bush knew that the USS Cole was bombed on October 12, 2000.

None of this was "news" when the Bush team came into office just three months after the Cole attack, and a good eight years after the first WTC attack. George Bush didn't have 8 months warning that terrorists were trying to get us. He had eight years warning.

So why didn't Bush do anything? Especially in view of all the criticism the Republicans like to heap on Clinton, claiming he didn't do enough to respond after the first WTC (uh, yeah, he only captured the guys who did it).

The Republicans also criticize Clinton for not invading Afghanistan after the attack on the USS Cole. Of course, the attack was 3 weeks before the US presidential election of 2000 - no president starts a major war with that little time left in his term, only to saddle the next president with the military mess he's just created. Oh, I stand corrected - George Bush senior invaded Somalia right before leaving office and handed the mess to Clinton - yes, Somalia was the failure of yet another Bush.

But putting all of that aside, George Bush entered office in January of 2001 "knowing" (per the neo-cons) that Clinton supposedly didn't do enough after the WTC attacks in 1993, eight years berfore, so why didn't Bush do something?

But "knew" in January of 2001 that supposedly Bill Clinton didn't do enough following the embassy attacks in 1998, 3 years before, so why didn't Bush do something?

And Bush "knew" in January of 2001 that supposedly Bill Clinton didn't act quickly enough in declaring war on Afghanistan following the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole. So why didn't Bush attack Afghanistan? Clinton had 3 months in office following the attack on the Cole and he didn't invade Afghanistan. Yet Bush had nearly nine months in office before September 11 and he didn't invade Afghanistan either. Why is that?

The simple fact is that George Bush and the Republicans did nothing to "fix" Bill Clinton's alleged "errors" in dealing with Al Qaeda and the war on terror. George Bush sat on his ass (and spent 40% of his time on vacation, true fact) while Osama was preparing to kill 3,000 Americans, just as he promised to do. (Osama bin Laden determined to strike in the US, ring a bell?)

So FOX News wants to have this debate, let's have it.

Why didn't George Bush do everything he could to stop Al Qaeda before 9/11? Read the rest of this post...

VIDEO: Clinton slaps FOX News

Democrats who fight back. See the video of today's Clinton interview on FOX, via ThinkProgress. Joe just saw it and called me, he was laughing, it was that good :-) Read the rest of this post...

Bush is blatantly misleading the American people about the war on terror

The Washington Post weighs in on the NIE report with an article headlined "Spy Agencies Say War in Iraq Spread Terrorism Globally." The Post article points out that the NIE was completed in April. Yet, last month, as part of his political offensive, Bush was spinning a different story:

"Together with our coalition partners," Bush said in an address earlier this month to the Military Officers Association of America, "we've removed terrorist sanctuaries, disrupted their finances, killed and captured key operatives, broken up terrorist cells in America and other nations, and stopped new attacks before they're carried out. We're on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront, and we'll accept nothing less than complete victory."

But the battlefronts intelligence analysts depict (sic) are far more impenetrable and difficult, if not impossible, to combat with the standard tools of warfare.

Read the rest of this post...

I'm off to CNN

Should be on around 1030am EST, discussing the blogger meeting with Clinton, Clinton's Global Initiative, and of all things, the gay governor McGreevey. Read the rest of this post...

NY Times: "Clinton Faults Bush Team Efforts to Get bin Laden Before Sept. 11."

This headline probably isn't what FOX News and Chris Wallace had in mind from their Clinton interview. But, FOX provided the forum and asked the questions. Clinton told them the facts that have been ignored by the media for the past 5 years:

In the interview for “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Clinton defended the steps he took after the bombing of the destroyer Cole in 2000 and faulted “right-wingers” for their criticism of his efforts to capture Mr. bin Laden, the Qaeda leader.

“But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now,” Mr. Clinton said when asked whether he had failed to anticipate the full threat from Mr. bin Laden. “They had eight months to try; they did not try. I tried. So I tried and failed.”

The Sept. 11 attacks occurred almost eight months after President Bush succeeded Mr. Clinton in January 2001.

Bush ignored the terrorism issue when he became President. That's well documented. He was warned about the threat from Al Qaeda repeatedly. He was told there were probably sleeper cells in the United States, but stayed on vacation after he got the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing that warned "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S."

Now, we've learned from the US Intelligence community that Bush's war in Iraq has made terrorism worse around the world:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Clinton's right. But, there's more to it. Not only did Bush fail to get Bin Laden before 9/11. Since then, Bush has made the terrorism situation worse. He's a complete failure when it comes to national security. Read the rest of this post...

Sunday Talk Shows Open Thread

Today's the broadcast of Clinton's interview on FOX. Chris Wallace was out-smarted and out-witted, so FOX is been in anti-Clinton spin mode all weekend. Who knew FOX would provide the forum to finally blame Bush for his 9/11 failures?

Also, don't forget, Aravosis on Relibable Sources on CNN which airs at 10:00 am EST (his segment should be at 1030 or so). Here's today's lineup:

FOX NEWS SUNDAY....: Former president Bill Clinton and JoGayle Howard of the National Zoo.

THIS WEEK (ABC...: Sens. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), New Jersey Senate candidate Thomas H. Kean Jr. (R), and comedian Bob Newhart .

FACE THE NATION (CBS....: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

LATE EDITION (CNN), 11 a.m.: Afghan President Hamid Karzai , Iraqi President Jalal Talibani , Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), Republican strategist Matthew Dowd , Democratic strategist Stan Greenberg , former secretary of state Alexander M. Haig Jr. and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Richard C. Holbrooke .

MEET THE PRESS (NBC....: Clinton , Karzai and former senator John C. Danforth (R-Mo.).

Commentary please. Read the rest of this post...

Intelligence? What intelligence? I never heard of any intelligence.

When information doesn't fit with the lies , just pretend like you never even heard of it. That way, George will give you a nice treat. Woof, woof.

A note of a private meeting between Mr Blair and President Bush in January 2003 shows that Tony Blair failed to confront Mr Bush when he claimed Saddam Hussein had tried to buy aluminium tubes for nuclear weapons production.

Mr Blair did not contradict the President despite having received "private briefings" which indicated that the aluminium tubes were more likely to be for conventional weapons, according to the new edition of a book by the international lawyer Philippe Sands published tomorrow.

Read the rest of this post...