Three prominent West Virginia Democrats said Monday that they would skip the party's national convention in Charlotte, N.C., this September over concerns that links to the party could hurt their re-election chances.It's gotta be racism. There's no other possible explanation.
Nato has said it would meet to discuss member state Turkey's accusation that Syria shot down one of its warplanes in international airspace and not inside its own territory, as Damascus claims.
NATO said it would hold an emergency meeting on Tuesday following a request from Turkey that invoked Article Four of the alliance's founding treaty, which covers threats to member states' security.Looks like Turkeys torn between East and West, or the Middle East and the Western alliance.
Turkey has already acknowledged that its fighter jet might at some point have entered Syrian airspace. But after an initially cautious response, Ankara toughened its rhetoric on Sunday.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told Turkey's TRT television that at the time it was shot down, their plane was in international airspace, 13 nautical miles from Syria.
Syria had given no warning before opening fire, he added.
The fighter had been on an unarmed training mission to carry out a radar system test, and both pilots are still missing.
I’d understand publishing this if there was some plausible way to paint Campbell Brown as a nonpartisan moderate or whatever, but there’s not. She’s Dan Senor’s fucking wife. If you want to call me sexist, I’d say the same thing if the Times published something like this from Todd Palin.Well, yeah, that's just a little bit sexist, you think?
PLANNED PARENTHOOD has a large target on its back. At no time in the organization’s history has it faced such a concerted Congressional challenge to its agenda. But most worrisome is the organization’s shrinking number of defenders, and Planned Parenthood has only itself to blame. It has adopted a strategy driven by blind partisanship, electing to burn bridges instead of building them. That strategy is damaging, and possibly imperiling, its mission.Fuck you, New York Times. You stay afloat because hippies like me pay for a subscription even though we could read you for free. And then you throw this shit in our faces as if it was the height of seriousness. Fuck you.
The drama and romance of "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World," starring Steve Carell and Keira Knightley, starts imploding long before the massive asteroid hurtling toward Earth is due to deliver annihilation.Actually, that "fit" thingy did cross my mind. Perhaps Knightly might stick to pirate movies.
At least it's an ambitious misfire from the filmmaker, screenwriter Lorene Scafaria making a rocky directing debut. The movie ponders what people would do with their final days if the end were a fait accompli. Will anarchy reign or will humanity win out? Will Dodge (Carell) and Penny (Knightley), relative strangers living in the same apartment building, find each other, and love, before the planet and the asteroid collide? Or will they die alone? Lots of potential for a really tragic love story — from here to eternity, literally.
But by the time the answers come around, so much has gone wrong — with the film as well as the world — it's hard to care. Scafaria, who made such a splash with her cheeky screenplay adaptation of "Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist" in 2008, is simply over her head here.
The troubles begin with the casting choices. What must have seemed like a perfect fit in Carell — those doleful eyes and a slight smile — is not even close. This already restrained actor is completely shut down as Dodge, the resigned-to-his-fate man in the spotlight. For the versatile Knightley, usually so at home in whatever she's handed — from "Pride & Prejudice" to "Pirates of the Caribbean" — the fit has perhaps never been worse. As Penny, a funky artist type who collects vinyl records and dresses in thrift-store chic, she is either nodding off (there's some sort of loose explanation of the medical condition early on) or flailing around, and neither suits her.
Two wildfires ravaging Colorado have forced 11,000 evacuations and destroyed more than 200 homes.The Colorado Springs Gazette has huge coverage. See: "WALDO CANYON FIRE: Fire at 3,600 acres -- and growing."
The Waldo Canyon fire forced the complete evacuation of Manitou Springs over the weekend and evacuations from nearby Colorado Springs and a number of small communities along Highway 24, according to Rob Deyerberg, a spokesman for the firefighters battling the blaze.
"We're used to flooding and tornadoes, nothing like this," Amanda Rice of Rock Falls, Ill., told the Associated Press.
She left a Manitou Springs hotel late Saturday with her husband, four children and dog, according to the AP, and took her family to an evacuation center before she got an order to leave. Others were awakened by evacuation orders in the middle of the night.
"It was just this God-awful orange glow,” Rice said of the flames. “It was surreal. It honestly looked like hell was opening up.”
Our family is among the 11,000 residents of Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs who have been evacuated in the wake of the Waldo Canyon Fire. We’re homeless, but safe for now — though the kids are devastated we couldn’t get their parakeets, Keets and Tweety, out of the house before security/emergency personnel cleared out our neighborhood.More at the link.
We are so thankful for our many friends here and especially the heroic firefighters, police, and disaster relief officials and volunteers who have worked tirelessly to contain the fire and protect our homes.
White House spokesman Jay Carney issued the following statement in response to the Egyptian presidential election:I guess that's a prototypical formal statement of diplomatic recognition, but still, given this White House's utter amateurism on Egypt over the last 18 months, such breezy statements are literally frightening.
"The United States congratulates Dr. Mohamed Morsi on his victory in Egypt’s Presidential election, and we congratulate the Egyptian people for this milestone in their transition to democracy.
"We look forward to working together with President-elect Morsi and the government he forms, on the basis of mutual respect, to advance the many shared interests between Egypt and the United States. We believe that it is important for President-elect Morsi to take steps at this historic time to advance national unity by reaching out to all parties and constituencies in consultations about the formation of a new government. We believe in the importance of the new Egyptian government upholding universal values, and respecting the rights of all Egyptian citizens – including women and religious minorities such as Coptic Christians. Millions of Egyptians voted in the election, and President-elect Morsi and the new Egyptian government have both the legitimacy and responsibility of representing a diverse and courageous citizenry.
"The United States intends to work with all parties within Egypt to sustain our long-standing partnership as it consolidates its democracy. We commend the Presidential Election Commission and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) for their role in supporting a free and fair election, and look forward to the completion of a transition to a democratically-elected government. We believe it is essential for the Egyptian government to continue to fulfill Egypt’s role as a pillar of regional peace, security and stability. And we will stand with the Egyptian people as they pursue their aspirations for democracy, dignity, and opportunity, and fulfill the promise of their revolution."
A year ago there were those of us who warned the Obama Administration of a Muslim Brotherhood takeover in Egypt. We were castigated as alarmists and loose cannons. Today our predictions have come to reality and the ominous specter reminding us of the Iranian revolution is evident. The Muslim Brotherhood claimed they would not run a presidential candidate. Clearly the Arab Spring is nothing more than a radical Islamic nightmare. Now we need to unequivocally reiterate our support to the Coptic Christians and Israel. What an incredible foreign policy faux pas by the second coming of President Jimmy Carter, the Obama Administration. I call upon President Barack Obama to cut off American foreign aid to Egypt, denounce the results of this election, repudiate the Muslim Brotherhood, and all radical Islamist political entities.Boy, that's a tough set of recommendations!
Paraguay's ousted President Fernando Lugo has broken cover to accuse the country's Congress of carrying out a "parliamentary coup d'etat" to force him from power.
As previously posted, Fernando Lugo, the Catholic bishop who’s sired at least a dozen children by several women (at least one of which was underage at the time), has crowned his political career by getting himself impeached.Well, that adds an interesting twist to the story. I'm sure Lugo and his dozen kids will great ample support from the Obama White House. 3, 2, 1...
If Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Mursi were to become president, Egypt’s capital would no longer be Cairo, but would be Jerusalem, a prominent Egyptian cleric said at a presidential campaign rally, which was aired by an Egyptian private television channel.More at the link.
“Our capital shall not be Cairo, Mecca or Medina. It shall be Jerusalem with God’s will. Our chants shall be: ‘millions of martyrs will march towards Jerusalem,’” Safwat Hagazy said, according to the video aired by Egypt’s religious Annas TV.
The video, which went viral after being posted on YouTube, was translated into English by The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
“The United States of the Arabs will be restored on the hands of that man [Mursi] and his supporters. The capital of the [Muslim] Caliphate will be Jerusalem with God’s will,” Hegazy said, as the crowds cheered, waving Egyptian and Hamas flags.
“Tomorrow Mursi will liberate Gaza,” the crowds chanted.
“Yes, we will either pray in Jerusalem or we will be martyred there,” Hegazy said.
Hegazy’s speech came during a presidential campaign rally at the Egyptian Delta city of Mahalla, where Mursi attended along with the Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mohammed Badei and members of the group and its political wing the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), Al Arabiya reported.
Mursi will challenge Egypt’s former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq in the upcoming runoff elections, scheduled to take place June 16 and 17. Shafiq, an air force general, was the country’s last prime minister before former president Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down by a popular uprising in February 2011.
Many in the Obama administration may have heaved a sigh of relief this morning when Egypt’s election commission declared Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi the winner of the country’s presidential election. There were justifiable fears that the Egyptian military would complete the coup d’état it began when the country’s high court tossed the Islamist-controlled parliament out of office by stealing the presidential contest for its preferred candidate. By choosing to attempt to live with the Brotherhood rather than attempt to destroy it, the army may have avoided a bloody civil war that would have drowned Egypt in blood and destabilized the region even further.There's more at the link.
But as much as Washington is relieved that the next stage of life in post-Mubarak Egypt will not be one in which the military rules alone, President Obama must resist the impulse to embrace Morsi or to behave in any manner that might lend support to the Brotherhood leader in the power struggle in Cairo that will undoubtedly ensue. As much as the United States should support the principle of democracy, Morsi and his party are no apostles of freedom. Though worries about the U.S. being tainted by association with a military that wishes to perpetuate authoritarian rule are well founded, the danger from a rising tide of Islamism in the wake of the Arab Spring is far more dangerous to American interests.
Many of today’s peer-reviewed studies offer trivial confirmations of the obvious and policy documents filled with egregious, dangerous errors. My colleagues now point to research by the political scientists and N.S.F. grant recipients James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin that claims that civil wars result from weak states, and are not caused by ethnic grievances. Numerous scholars have, however, convincingly criticized Professors Fearon and Laitin’s work. In 2011 Lars-Erik Cederman, Nils B. Weidmann and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch wrote in the American Political Science Review that “rejecting ‘messy’ factors, like grievances and inequalities,” which are hard to quantify, “may lead to more elegant models that can be more easily tested, but the fact remains that some of the most intractable and damaging conflict processes in the contemporary world, including Sudan and the former Yugoslavia, are largely about political and economic injustice,” an observation that policy makers could glean from a subscription to this newspaper and that nonetheless is more astute than the insights offered by Professors Fearon and Laitin.Critiques like this were kicking up pretty hard at the end of the 1990s, and things really came to a head with the "Perestroika Movement" in political science around 2000.
BELLEFONTE, Pa. — Closing a chapter in a scandal that shocked the nation and tarnished a prestigious university, a jury convicted Jerry Sandusky on 45 counts of sexual abuse Friday night, believing the graphic testimony of young men over a defense team that portrayed the celebrated former Penn State assistant football coach as devoted mentor.And at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "Guilty: Ex-Penn State coach Sandusky could spend the rest of his life in prison."
Moments after the verdict was read in the courtroom, Sandusky, 68, rose from his seat with tears in his eyes, one of his lawyers said. When his bail of $250,000 was revoked, Sandusky gave a small wave to his family and was led away in handcuffs to a waiting sheriff's car to be taken to the Centre County jail.
Jurors convicted Sandusky on all but three of 48 charges that he sexually abused 10 boys over a period of 15 years. He could be ordered to spend the rest of his life in prison when he is sentenced in three months.
"From the beginning, we knew what we were facing, so the surprise would have been the opposite," lead defense lawyer Joe Amendola told reporters on the steps of the courthouse, just miles away from the Penn State campus.
"Sandusky said nothing after the verdict was delivered," said Amendola, who promised an appeal. "I think Jerry was prepared for this."
In a ten-minute rant on her show Thursday night, Rachel Maddow tried to explain the long NBC and ABC blackout of “Fast and Furious” scandal news by somehow tying it to the Shirley Sherrod controversy. The American people should move along, since this scandal is only a “paranoid delusion” and shouldn’t be covered by anyone other than Fox News. It should be carefully quarantined.
The graphic behind Maddow read “WHAT YOUR UNCLE WHO WATCHES FOX NEWS ALL DAY IS ALL WORKED UP ABOUT.”
Maddow began: “The great Fox News conspiracy about Shirley Sherrod, the racist, that nobody else was covering, was, in fact, a paranoid delusion of the conservative movement and the conservative media machine. And so now, we find ourselves, a couple years later, facing another test for the news media. Do you take the bait again? Do you follow the latest Fox News conspiracy theory?”
We're going to start tracing these guns, we're going to start cracking down on illegal gun sales, and we're going to go after the straw men and women who go in and buy these guns. ... We're going to use every tool at our disposal...That exchange is at the clip, at 4:00 minutes:
Regardless of the actual facts, it was clear the Obama administration was united in its enmity toward American gun shop owners. Close them down, as NRA President David Keane says, and you close down the Second Amendment. After all, he maintained, what good is the right to own firearms if there is no place to purchase them?See also last night's bombshell report, "The Fast and Furious Coverup."
"BWAHAHA!!!
@AmPowerBlog Glad you wrote about this. Been telling some folks about your own harassment experience, trying to get ppl to see all sides :)Mandy wrote a blockbuster piece on the Kimberlin network in 2010: "Flashback: Progressives Embrace Convicted Terrorist." Since that time Mandy's life has been a never-ending nightmare of intimidation, harassment, and threats to her safety. And over the last year, Mandy's been a source of encouragement for me in standing my ground against the left, as has Robert Stacy McCain, who wrote about the left's attacks on Amy Alkon early last year: "Carl Salonen & the Left-Wing Trolls Who Smeared ‘Advice Goddess’ Amy Alkon."
— Mandy Nagy (@Liberty_Chick) June 22, 2012
DB Capitol Strategies, in partnership with Right Solutions, a 501c3 public charity, is building a nationwide team of lawyers to defend the victims and taking the fight to Kimberlin. To win this battle in courtrooms around the country, we need your support. We’ve fired the first salvo in defense of Aaron Walker by filing a federal lawsuit against Kimberlin and seeking an injunction to prevent the state from arresting an American exercising his right to free speech. This is only the first step. We are committed to helping Aaron Walker and others expose Kimberlin and his well-funded allies in their efforts to silence their foes.There's a Paypal link at the post, which folks might want to make note of, as many are suspicious of the motives of Ali Akbar and the National Bloggers Club.
JOIN US in this fight!
I am fight back against an unconstitutional restraint on my freedom of speech. If you'd like to help go here: allergic2bull.blogspot.comThe full post is here: "A Victory For the Free Expression Coming?"
— Aaron Worthing (@AaronWorthing) June 22, 2012
Mr. Issa has relished making this investigation a political fight. Last week, he seemed to bait Mr. Holder when he said in a statement, “the Obama administration has not asserted executive privilege or any other valid privilege,” so it could not refuse to produce the materials.Actually, Obama's invocation of executive privilege is clearly an obstruction of justice.
On Wednesday, for the first time since he was elected, President Obama invoked executive privilege on the disputed documents. Doing so now bars prosecution of Mr. Holder in federal court should the full House vote to hold him in contempt of Congress.
Executive privilege cannot and should not be allowed to shield the executive branch from regular, valuable Congressional oversight. There was no reason the House committee and the Justice Department could not work out a deal to produce the documents requested, or some form of them. Instead, they show again that every issue, large or small, can be turned into ammunition for political combat.
From a snow-crested corner of Alberta, Canada, Kelly Oxford made her Hollywood screenwriting dream come true. She did it without leaving her close-knit family or giving up her free nationalized healthcare. She did it without toiling in Westside coffee shops or confronting painful rejections.Continue reading.
She did it 140 characters at a time.
Oxford, a suburban housewife and mother of three, is a Twitter superstar (@kellyoxford), with more than 350,000 followers. Oscar winners, late-night talk show hosts, even film critic Roger Ebert follow her on the social media service, eager to read wry observations about daily life and celebrity culture.
The worst part about having kids is that they magnify every single thing that's wrong with you. And they wake up early.
If you have a taxidermy marlin and you've never tried to joust someone with it, you're wasting everyone's time.
If the majority of your followers are idiots and you like wine, you're probably more like Jesus than you think.
Those are a few of the 2,900 tweets she's sent since she discovered the medium three years ago.
NBC hired Oxford to write a pilot last fall, Harper Collins will release her first book of essays ("Everything's Perfect When You're a Liar") next April, and in April she sold her first movie script to Warner Bros. It's about a pot-smoking young woman suddenly confronted with the prospect of motherhood.
Her success points to an appetite for humor from a female point of view. But unlike stars such as Tina Fey and Kristen Wiig, who honed their craft in the"Saturday Night Live" writers' room, Oxford found and shaped her comedic voice in online chat rooms and blogs and on Twitter.
"Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them."Last year, when I was defending myself against Carl Salonen's sick campaign of workplace harassment, I was also defending against an almost identical campaign of allegations launched by progressive douchebag Scott Eric Kaufman at Lawyers, Guns and Money. I have blogged very little concerning Kaufman's allegations because my attorney negotiated an agreement between the parties not to contact each other, or in Kaufman's words, not to "engage each other online" in any way whatsoever. I thought that meant not blog about each other, but SEK complained to my attorney after I left a comment at his blog, Acephalous. He then claimed the rule meant no blogging, commenting, or anything at all related to each other. Well, maybe not after all. It turns out that SEK's got a new post at LGM, at the screencap, which clearly constitutes a willful abrogation of any previous legal arrangements (and SEK's own interpretation of those). See: "Because really important news always involves bikinis."
— Matthew 7:20
I was certainly threatening his job, just as as someone’s threatened mine in the past. I know, but can’t reveal, who wrote those anonymous letters to the chair of my former department because this person used the word “demonology” in a familiar way, and quite possibly quoted a post of a familiar someone, and used an easily identified address in an email sent from an IP address already identified with blah blah blah.A screencap of that quote is here, for the record. And the original post is here.
I’m not actually petty enough to go after his job, because I’m sure the chair of this person’s department — unlike the person who received this person’s emails, who was the chair of a department that wasn’t mine — but I’m sure this person’s chair has heard all these complaints before, from students and outsiders, and sincerely wishes this person was never granted tenure. I can’t prove that I’ve heard words to that effect … but keep in mind that I’m being advised by a lawyer about how to deal with this person’s actions, and he’s advising me write about this, and I quote, “in a way that makes it public knowledge, for the record, but without saying anything definitive.”
The past several months have witnessed a heated debate over the best way for America and Israel to respond to Iran's nuclear activities. Although the U.S., the European Union and Iran have recently returned to the negotiating table, a palpable sense of crisis still looms.Continue reading.
It should not. In fact, a nuclear-armed Iran would probably be the best possible result of the standoff and the one most likely to restore stability to the Middle East.
The crisis over Iran's nuclear program could end in three ways. First, diplomacy coupled with sanctions could persuade Iran to abandon pursuit of a nuclear weapon. But that's unlikely: The historical record indicates that a country bent on acquiring nuclear weapons can rarely be dissuaded. Take North Korea, which succeeded in building its weapons despite countless rounds of sanctions and U.N. Security Council resolutions. If Tehran decides that its security depends on possessing nuclear weapons, sanctions are unlikely to change its mind.
The second possible outcome is that Iran stops short of testing a nuclear weapon but develops a breakout capability, the capacity to build and test one quite quickly. Such a capability might satisfy the domestic political needs of Iran's rulers by assuring hard-liners that they can enjoy all the benefits of having a bomb (such as greater security) without the downsides (such as international isolation and condemnation).
Reconsider Israel
Israel, however, has made it clear that it views a significant Iranian enrichment capacity alone as an unacceptable threat. It would likely continue its risky efforts at subverting Iran's nuclear program through sabotage and assassination— which could lead Iran to conclude that a breakout capability is an insufficient deterrent, after all, and that only weaponization can provide it with the security it seeks.
The third possible outcome of the standoff is that Iran continues its course and publicly goes nuclear by testing a weapon. U.S. and Israeli officials have declared that outcome unacceptable, arguing that a nuclear Iran is an existential threat to Israel. Such language is typical of major powers, which have historically gotten riled up whenever another country begins to develop a nuclear weapon. Yet every time another country has managed to shoulder its way into the nuclear club, the other members have always changed tack and decided to live with it. In fact, by reducing imbalances in military power, new nuclear states generally produce more regional and international stability, not less.
The problem with structural realism – its limited analytic value notwithstanding – (as with all structural theories) is that it largely evacuates notions of ideas and agency from world affairs: facts such as Israel’s democratic politics as compared with Iranian theocracy, or the caprices of dictators, or domestic politics, and so forth, do not drastically change a state’s aspirations and behavior. Yet these facts are so critical to any reasonable observer – and, in the case of the Middle East, that includes all the Arab regimes, who have never shown the sort of alarm toward Israel’s supposed nuclear capability that they have toward Iran’s. This reality fatally undermines Waltz’s thesis.Exactly.
Incidentally, the case of Israel has also undermined the approach of another structural realist, John Mearsheimer. Though his perspective differs slightly from Waltz’s, his obsession with the power of the ‘‘Israel lobby’’ in the United States is inconsistent with his theory that domestic politics are largely irrelevant to the actions of states.
The Attorney General is supposed to protect a President from legal and political snares, a part of his job description that Eric Holder seems to have missed. He's now succeeded in drawing President Obama into a brawl with Congress by invoking "executive privilege" to withhold documents.Yeah, keep in mind.
For weeks, Mr. Holder has resisted Congress's subpoena for documents investigating the botched drug-war operation Fast and Furious. But he expressly stopped short of claiming executive privilege, a power invoked only 24 times since the Reagan era that typically protects communications directly with the President or his senior aides. Mr. Holder instead claimed "deliberative privilege" within a Cabinet Department, a vague and much weaker claim that neither courts nor Congress have honored.
But suddenly on Wednesday, facing the threat of a criminal contempt vote in the House, Mr. Holder asked the President to invoke executive privilege after all. This is no small claim, and it raises a few new questions. Such as:
Did White House officials know and approve Fast and Furious before it went awry, and did they advise the Justice Department on how to respond to Congress's investigation into the operation's failure?
How can the President invoke a privilege to protect documents he and the White House are supposed to have had nothing to do with?
And what is so damaging or embarrassing in those documents that Mr. Obama is now willing to invest his own political capital to protect it from disclosure—at least until after the election?
Keep in mind that this uproar began over an obscure 2009 operation of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) to let some 2,000 illegal weapons get into the hands of a Mexican drug cartel in an effort to track the guns to other traffickers and kingpins. In December 2010, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed during a gunfight, and two of the operation's illegal weapons were linked to the crime.
Congress decided to investigate, and in a February 4, 2011 letter to Congress, the Justice Department flatly denied that the operation existed. Ten months later it admitted that wasn't true and retracted the letter.
Since that modified, limited mea culpa, Mr. Holder has acknowledged that the program was fatally flawed and said he was the one who ended it. But rather than cooperate fully with the investigation, Mr. Holder's department began an epic stonewall to block Congressional attempts to find out what really transpired.
