SEATTLE — Early on the morning of July 25, residents of a neighborhood in northeast Portland, Ore., were awakened by the sound of a battering ram plowing through the front door of a small house. Inside, the sleepy young occupants stumbled out of bed as FBI agents rushed in with assault rifles.Oh, civil rights advocates are worried! It's the end of the republic! Bwhahahaha!!
Leah-Lynn Plante, a thin, tattooed woman who volunteers at a bookstore that specializes in anarchist literature, shivered in her underwear in the backyard as a SWAT team hauled
out computers, clothing, books and artwork — looking, the agents said, for evidence of who participated in this year's May Day demonstrations in Seattle that saw smashed windows at banks and clashes with the police.
What bothered Plante was that they weren't just looking for sticks and black masks. The FBI search warrant also listed "anarchist" and "anti-government" literature and material among items to be seized.
"It was like something out of George Orwell's '1984.' It was absolutely horrendous," Plante, 24, said shortly before she was taken into custody Oct. 10 for failing to testify before a federal grand jury in Seattle about her friends in the anarchist movement.
Plante is one of three activists being held at the Federal Detention Center near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in an investigation of anarchists in the Pacific Northwest that has led to subpoenas in Seattle, Olympia and Portland. The secretive probe has raised alarm among civil rights advocates who say witnesses are being asked to answer questions not only about their own activities May 1 — Plante says she wasn't even in Seattle — but what they know about certain groups or organizations.
The investigation in Seattle is one of several across the U.S. targeting anarchists. Last month, three self-described anarchists pleaded guilty to plotting to blow up a bridge south of Cleveland. Three purported anarchists were arrested in Chicago in May and accused of conspiring to burn down buildings with Molotov cocktails during the NATO summit there.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — A powerful bomb devastated a Christian neighborhood of this capital city of Lebanon on Friday, killing an intelligence official long viewed as an enemy by neighboring Syria and unnerving a nation as Syria’s sectarian-fueled civil war spills beyond its borders and threatens to engulf the region.More at the link.
The blast, which sheared the faces off buildings, killed at least eight people, wounded 80 and transformed a quiet tree-lined street into a scene reminiscent of Lebanon’s long civil war, threatened to worsen sectarian tensions. By nightfall, black smoke from burning tires ignited by angry men choked the streets of a few neighborhoods in the city, which has struggled to preserve a peace between its many sects, including Sunni, Shiite, Christian and Druse.
Within hours of the attack, the Lebanese authorities announced that the dead included the intelligence chief of the country’s internal security service, Brig. Gen. Wissam al-Hassan, instantly spurring accusations that the Syrian government had assassinated him for recently uncovering what the authorities said was a Syrian plot to provoke unrest in Lebanon.
“They wanted to get him, and they got him,” said Paul Salem, a regional analyst with the Carnegie Middle East Center.
But if the attack was targeted, the blast was most certainly not. The force of the explosion left elderly residents fleeing their wrecked homes in bloodied pajamas and spewed charred metal as far as two blocks. Residents rushed to help each other amid the debris, burning car wreckage and a macabre scene of victims in blood-soaked shirts.
It was the first large-scale bombing in the country since 2008 and was the most provocative violence here linked to the Syrian conflict since it began 19 months ago.
The attack struck a heavy blow to a security service that had asserted Lebanon’s fragile sovereignty by claiming to catch Syria red-handed in a plan to destabilize its neighbor, which Syria has long dominated. It threatened to inflame sectarian tensions by eliminating General Hassan, a Sunni Muslim known for his close ties to fellow Sunni politicians who support the Syrian uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. General Hassan was viewed by Syrian opposition activists as an ally and protector.
Liberal celebrities want all of the adoration that social media engagement has to offer — but none of the accountability that actual engagement requires. For the Hollywood elite, it’s “do as they say, not as they tweet.” But actress and outspoken Obama campaign co-chair Eva Longoria learned a hard lesson this week on Twitter:More at that top link.
Conservatives online are mad as hell and aren’t taking it anymore.
On Tuesday night after the second presidential debate, Longoria shared a “retweet” from one of her 4.4-plus million followers on the micro-blogging network. “I have no idea why any woman/minority can vote for Romney,” the message read. “You have to be stupid to vote for such a racist/misogynistic tw*t.” (I’m editing the vulgarity for family newspapers, but the tweet’s foul reference to a woman’s reproductive organs was neither censored nor disavowed by Longoria on her Twitter timeline.)
On Wednesday morning, the editors at Twitchy.com, my Twitter curation/aggregation site, captured and saved Longoria’s retweet for posterity. Conservative minorities and women raised their voices. A representative sample...
According to a report published by the Washington Free Beacon in April, the 2011 annual report on White House staffers revealed that the median annual salary for female White House employees was 18% less than male employees — $60,000 compared with $71,000.All hypocrisy, all the way down.
During the 2008 campaign, columnist Deroy Murdock wrote that female staffers in Obama's U.S. Senate office were also shortchanged. "Obama's average male employee earned $54,397," Murdock inferred from Senate salary records. But the future president's "30 female employees (earned) $45,152, on average."
Defining what constitutes "equal work" is subjective, and part of the difference above may be explained by the fact that only one of Sen. Obama's top five staffers was a woman and only seven among his top 20.
Which raises another question for the champion of women's rights.
Journalist Ron Suskind, author of "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington and the Education of a President," has a recorded interview with former White House communications director and Mao Tse-tung fan Anita Dunn in which she complained Obama's White House was a hostile work environment for women.
"I remember once I told Valerie (Jarrett) that, I said if it weren't for the president, this place would be in court for a hostile workplace," Dunn told Suskind. "Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women."
While President Obama champions women's rights to which Republicans are supposedly hostile, Lilly Ledbetter herself might have found his White House an unfair and hostile work environment where the boss needs to practice what he preaches.
Across 166 pages of internal State Department documents -- released Friday by a pair of Republican congressmen pressing the Obama administration for more answers on the Benghazi terrorist attack -- slain U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and the security officers assigned to protect him repeatedly sounded alarms to their superiors in Washington about the intensifying lawlessness and violence in Eastern Libya, where Stevens ultimately died.More at the link.
On Sept. 11 -- the day Stevens and three other Americans were killed -- the ambassador signed a three-page cable, labeled "sensitive," in which he noted "growing problems with security" in Benghazi and "growing frustration" on the part of local residents with Libyan police and security forces. These forces the ambassador characterized as "too weak to keep the country secure."
In the document, Stevens also cited a meeting he had held two days earlier with local militia commanders. These men boasted to Stevens of exercising "control" over the Libyan Armed Forces, and threatened that if the U.S.-backed candidate for prime minister were to prevail in Libya's internal political jockeying, "they would not continue to guarantee security in Benghazi."
Roughly a month earlier, Stevens had signed a two-page cable, also labeled "sensitive," that he entitled "The Guns of August: Security in Eastern Libya." Writing on Aug. 8, the ambassador noted that in just a few months' time, "Benghazi has moved from trepidation to euphoria and back as a series of violent incidents has dominated the political landscape." He added, "The individual incidents have been organized," a function of "the security vacuum that a diverse group of independent actors are exploiting for their own purposes."
"Islamist extremists are able to attack the Red Cross with relative impunity," Stevens cabled. "What we have seen are not random crimes of opportunity, but rather targeted and discriminate attacks." His final comment on the two-page document was: "Attackers are unlikely to be deterred until authorities are at least as capable." By Sept. 4, Stevens' aides were reporting back to Washington on the "strong Revolutionary and Islamist sentiment" in the city.
Scarcely more than two months had passed since Stevens had notified the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and other agencies about a "recent increase in violent incidents," including "attacks against western interests." "Until the GOL (Government of Libya) is able to effectively deal with these key issues," Stevens wrote on June 25, "the violence is likely to continue and worsen."
After the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi had been damaged by an improvised explosive device, earlier that month, Stevens had reported to his superiors that an Islamist group had claimed credit for the attack, and in so doing, had "described the attack as targeting the Christians supervising the management of the consulate."
"Islamic extremism appears to be on the rise in eastern Libya," the ambassador wrote, adding that "the Al-Qaeda flag has been spotted several times flying over government buildings and training facilities ..."
BENGHAZI, Libya — Witnesses and the authorities have called Ahmed Abu Khattala one of the ringleaders of the Sept. 11 attack on the American diplomatic mission here. But just days after President Obama reasserted his vow to bring those responsible to justice, Mr. Abu Khattala spent two leisurely hours on Thursday evening at a crowded luxury hotel, sipping a strawberry frappe on a patio and scoffing at the threats coming from the American and Libyan governments.It's not looking good from President Eye Candy. Not looking good at all.
Libya’s fledgling national army is a “national chicken,” Mr. Abu Khattala said, using an Arabic rhyme. Asked who should take responsibility for apprehending the mission’s attackers, he smirked at the idea that the weak Libyan government could possibly do it. And he accused the leaders of the United States of “playing with the emotions of the American people” and “using the consulate attack just to gather votes for their elections.”
Mr. Abu Khattala’s defiance — no authority has even questioned him about the attack, he said, and he has no plans to go into hiding — offered insight into the shadowy landscape of the self-formed militias that have come to constitute the only source of social order in Libya since the fall of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
“And the suggestion that anybody in my team, whether the secretary of state, our U.N. ambassador, anybody on my team would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, governor, is offensive.”He will be.
— Barack Obama,
second debate, Oct. 16....
The rub for Obama comes, ironically enough, out of Romney’s biggest flub in the debate, the Libya question. That flub kept Romney from winning the evening outright. But Obama’s answer has left him a hostage to fortune. Missed by Romney, missed by the audience, missed by most of the commentariat, it was the biggest gaffe of the entire debate cycle: Substituting unctuousness for argument, Obama declared himself offended by the suggestion that anyone in his administration, including the U.N. ambassador, would “mislead” the country on Libya.
This bluster — unchallenged by Romney — helped Obama slither out of the Libya question unscathed. Unfortunately for Obama, there is one more debate — next week, entirely on foreign policy. The burning issue will be Libya and the scandalous parade of fictions told by this administration to explain away the debacle.
No one misled? His U.N. ambassador went on not one but five morning shows to spin a confection that the sacking of the consulate and the murder of four Americans came from a video-motivated demonstration turned ugly: “People gathered outside the embassy and then it grew very violent and those with extremist ties joined the fray and came with heavy weapons.”
But there was no gathering. There were no people. There was no fray. It was totally quiet outside the facility until terrorists stormed the compound and killed our ambassador and three others.
The video? A complete irrelevance. It was a coordinated, sophisticated terror attack, encouraged, if anything, by Osama bin Laden’s successor, giving orders from Pakistan to avenge the death of a Libyan jihadist.
Not wishing to admit that we had just been attacked by al-Qaeda affiliates, perhaps answering to the successor of a man on whose grave Obama and the Democrats have been dancing for months, the administration relentlessly advanced the mob/video tale to distract from the truth.
And it wasn’t just his minions who misled the nation. A week after the attack, the president himself, asked by David Letterman about the ambassador’s murder, said it started with a video. False again.
Romney will be ready Monday.
President Obama is losing. So says the latest Gallup poll, and so do those swelling numbers in key states like Wisconsin, Florida, Virginia and Ohio.
Democrats say wait, he won the second debate. They are holding their breath, hoping polls next week will show that this week's debate brought the herky-jerk of the campaign back full swing, with Obama back to his September lead in the swing states and poised to win. But with two weeks to go, a sudden surge in voter support for a president as unpopular as this one, in an economy this weak, is simply hard to believe. Conservatives like Karl Rove note that this late in October, no candidate with support higher than 50 percent (see Mitt Romney: Gallup) has ever gone on to lose.
Perhaps Obama lost the presidency weeks ago, on Oct. 3, when he sleepwalked and scribbled through the first debate and helped make Romney a new candidate overnight. It was Obama's night to finish Romney off; behind in the polls, even Romney likely woke up that morning thinking it was over. But Obama underestimated the task, the challenger and the electorate — all in 90 minutes. So a win this week was critical but perhaps not decisive. There is no obvious reason for Obama's performance to reverse the course of the campaign and blunt Romney now. And though there is one final debate next week, a back-and-forth on national security and foreign policy isn't likely to make the sale for anyone who still cannot make up his or her mind.
ROME -- Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi told a Milan court Friday that he had never had sex with an underage Moroccan girl and that the so-called "bunga bunga" parties with sexy games and stripteases at his home were instead lively dinners followed by amusing shows in his private theater.Continue reading.
Berlusconi, 76, also told the court that he had never pressured police to release Karima el-Marough, the Moroccan teenager also known as “Ruby Heart-Stealer,” when she was arrested in May 2010 on suspicion of theft.
The former leader is accused of paying for sex with el-Mahroug, a sometime nightclub dancer, when she was 17, and of abuse of power for allegedly asking police to release her to one of his aides rather than to foster care where she might divulge details about his parties. El-Mahroug has also denied having sex with Berlusconi.
In what the Italian trial system allows as “spontaneous” remarks, Berlusconi spoke uninterrupted for more than an hour to say that his dinner parties were convivial occasions where guests spoke about politics, sports, told some jokes and listened to music.
“I can say with absolute tranquillity that there was never anything of a sexual nature” during the now-legendary evenings, he said, which often ended with entertainment that was “never vulgar or scandalous.”
The mother of an American diplomat killed during a terrorist raid on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi has hit out at Barack Obama for describing the attack as 'not optimal', saying: 'My son is not very optimal - he is also very dead.'Well, like I said, Obama's an epic asshole. A callous motherf-king asshole.
During an interview shown on Comedy Central, Obama responded to a question about his administration's confused communication after the assault by saying: 'If four Americans get killed, it’s not optimal.'
Speaking exclusively to MailOnline today, Pat Smith, whose son Sean died in the raid, said: 'It was a disrespectful thing to say and I don't think it's right.
'How can you say somebody being killed is not very optimal? I don't think the President has the right idea of the English language.'
Nevada has just 2.7 million residents and only six of the 270 electoral votes needed to win presidency. But Obama, Romney and their allies are fighting hard for each vote in a state that has sided with the White House victor in every election since 1980.And note that Survey USA has Romney leading among independents by 18 points, 52 percent to 34 percent.
"When you are in a presidential race potentially decided by one or two electoral votes, six is a lot," says Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the non-partisan Rothenberg Political Report. "This election could come down to one state."
Obama spent three days in the state preparing for the first presidential debate. Romney has visited six times. Former president Bill Clinton stumped for Obama in Las Vegas this month, and Vice President Biden was in Reno on Wednesday.
Celebrities pop up, too. Grey's Anatomy star Jesse Williams makes a surprise visit to an Obama campaign office one morning to rally volunteers. He was filming in neighboring California until 2 a.m. and hopped a flight at 5 a.m., he told USA TODAY. "I try to get to battleground states whenever I can."
The state also offers a test of the candidates' ability to recruit volunteers, register voters and get them to the polls in an election so close that turnout could well determine the winner. Obama, who won Nevada by a landslide four years ago, has held a narrow lead in recent polls — as his campaign capitalized on his early fundraising advantage to build a substantial ground organization in the state. The president swamped the GOP nominee on the airwaves by more than 2 to 1 between April 1 and the first week of September, according to SMG/Delta, a Republican media-buying firm.
Romney has ramped up his TV advertising in the state, and last week outspent Obama in Nevada, according to National Journal.
Obama also has opened 27 offices in the state to Romney's 12. Obama's campaign has tapped into an experienced Democratic political operation that helped Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid win easy re-election in 2010 — a year when Republicans made big gains in Congress. And Obama has the backing of labor unions, who have unleashed their workers to turn out the vote for him and other Democrats in Clark County, where most Nevadans live.
For their part, Republicans say they have launched an ambitious election effort to catch up to Obama. Republicans have knocked on nearly 370,000 doors and made more than 1.3 million calls to Nevada voters. A key goal: persuading non-partisan voters, who make up roughly 17% of the electorate, to go with Romney.
Romney, aided by the cash-flush Republican National Committee, "has a better ground game than the state party ever has," says Bob List, a former Nevada governor and ex-RNC national committeeman.
