Even CBS News can’t believe it; they titled their article “Glenn Beck University? Yes. Glenn Beck University.”
Yes. Glenn Beck University. For all your lunatic revisionist educational needs. Mother Jones has already speculated on the course offerings.
In the end, Storm DiCostanzo gets the last word.
NO SERIOUSLY
Check out the results from this poll.
I… I am speechless. I can’t even summarize it.
Okay, let me try. 2000 Republicans surveyed, and the results include
Should contraceptive use be outlawed?
Yes 31
No 56
Not Sure 13
THIRTY ONE PERCENT
SOMEWHERE, MARGARET ATWOOD IS PULLING OUT HER HAIR
When a lawyer files complaints and motions without a reasonable basis for believing that they are supported by existing law or a modification or extension of existing law, that lawyer abuses her privilege to practice law. When a lawyer uses the courts as a platform for a political agenda disconnected from any legitimate legal cause of action, that lawyer abuses her privilege to practice law. When a lawyer personally attacks opposing parties and disrespects the integrity of the judiciary, that lawyer abuses her privilege to practice law. When a lawyer recklessly accuses a judge of violating the Judicial Code of Conduct with no supporting evidence beyond her dissatisfaction with the judge’s rulings, that lawyer abuses her privilege to practice law. When a lawyer abuses her privilege to practice law, that lawyer ceases to advance her cause or the ends of justice.
…Her response to the Court’s show cause order is breathtaking in its arrogance and borders on delusional. She expresses no contrition or regret regarding her misconduct …. Counsel’s bad faith warrants a substantial sanction.
In a harsh and yet at the same time hilarious 43-page smackdown, U.S. District Judge Clay D. Land (a Bush appointee, I note) fined Orly Taitz $20,000 for her repeated frivolous actions and motions.
Like what? Well, if you didn’t know, Taitz is the leader of the “Birther” movement. The ones demanding that Obama provide evidence he wasn’t born in Kenya. She’s also a dentist and a real estate agent, which really says a lot about the woman’s level of focus.
Read on at the War Room, which has a link to a PDF of the order.
Many people, including Keith Olbermann (as we blogged here) noted the all-too-coincidental timing between Bush’s falling poll numbers and Homeland Security terror alerts. Turns out, yeah, it wasn’t coincidence.
In a new book, former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge reveals new details on politicization under President Bush, reports US News & World Report’s Paul Bedard. Among other things, Ridge admits that he was pressured to raise the terror alert to help Bush win re-election in 2004.
“Birther” wingnuts have been circulating a document “proving” that Obama was born in Kenya. Of course, it has been proven a fake.
Perhaps they even used this awesome Web site to make it.
Over at the Huffington Post, Chris Kelly has shown that if Obama isn’t eligible to be President, neither was Reagan. Or, for that matter, Abraham Lincoln.
Ann Coulter says it’s a non-issue and that the birthers are a bunch of cranks.
Since everything Coulter says is either wrong and/or a lie, clearly the birthers are right, and my entire worldview has just inverted.
TPM has this terrifying report that
The U.S. military could have kicked in doors to raid a suspected terrorist cell in the United States without a warrant under a Bush-era legal memo the Justice Department made public Monday.
The memo, from Oct. 23, 2001, also said constitutional free-speech protections and a prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure could take a back seat to military needs in fighting terrorism inside the country.
ABC News reports:
Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.
…”These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones,” said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA’s Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.
Kinne described the contents of the calls as “personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism.”
‘If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large,’ said Pugh. ‘You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won’t. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society.’
Read on at the Guardian.
Thanks to Anise for the link.
The uncontroversial contention that Osama Bin Laden and a handful of other known terrorists should not be allowed on an aircraft is being used to create a monster that goes far beyond what ordinary Americans think of when they think about a “terrorist watch list.”
So notes the ACLU on their Watch List Counter. How big is this list now?
Last fall it was at 700,000 names, and growing by 20,000 a month. That means it’s now estimated at over 900,000 names.
As the ACLU puts it:
At that rate, our list will have a million names on it by July. If there were really that many terrorists running around, we’d all be dead…
The numbers are merely a symptom. What’s needed is fairness. If the government is going to rely on these kinds of lists, they need checks and balances to ensure that innocent people are protected.
Not to sound all tinfoil-hat here, but when other countries show big differences between polls and results, we use that as grounds for declaring election fraud. When it happens in NH, well…
Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich… has sent a letter to the New Hampshire Secretary of State asking for a recount of Tuesday’s election because of “unexplained disparities between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted ballots.”
“I am not making this request in the expectation that a recount will significantly affect the number of votes that were cast on my behalf,” Kucinich stressed in a letter to Secretary of State William M. Gardner. But, “Serious and credible reports, allegations, and rumors have surfaced in the past few days…It is imperative that these questions be addressed in the interest of public confidence in the integrity of the election process and the election machinery – not just in New Hampshire, but in every other state that conducts a primary election.”
Also, the reports, allegations, and rumors regarding possible vote-count irregularities have been further fueled by the stunning disparities between various “independent” pre-election polls and the actual election results,” Kucinich wrote.
There’s more at Kucinich’s site.
In the words of Milo Bloom, “No matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney.”
After a year and a half of conversely trying to dump their failed voting unit and/or lying to customers about the reliability and security of their voting systems, corporate parent Diebold is giving up the ghost of its election business which, according to an analyst in a Reuters report, was “responsible for less than 10 percent of Diebold’s revenue, and 100 percent of its bad publicity.”
According to a company statement [PDF] just released, Diebold Elections Systems, Inc., will become Premier Election Solutions as of today.
The cigarette companies have tried giving themselves new corporate names to avoid bad publicity, as did WorldCom. Don’t let Diebold fool you, and don’t let “Premier Election Solutions” sell you any snake-oil voting machines.
Read on at the Brad Blog.
(link via Metafilter)
…or, “Why the Dems are running around with their pants around their ankles”. You see…
President Bush signed a controversial bill Sunday that temporarily revises federal electronic surveillance laws.
…Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the third most powerful Democrat in the House, said lawmakers “are not going to leave Alberto Gonzales as the gatekeeper on American civil liberties.”
“That’s the fundamental problem, and we’re going to fix it when we come back,” Emanuel told reporters Sunday.
Hey, Rahm? Here’s an idea. Why not first fix it, then pass it?
Two-thirds of Ohio counties have destroyed or lost their 2004 presidential ballots and related election records, according to letters from county election officials to the Ohio Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner.
The lost records violate Ohio law, which states federal election records must be kept for 22 months after Election Day, and a U.S. District Court order issued last September that the 2004 ballots be preserved while the court hears a civil rights lawsuit alleging voter suppression of African-American voters in Columbus.
The destruction of the election records also frustrates efforts by the media and historians to determine the accuracy of Ohio’s 2004 vote count, because in county after county the key evidence needed to understand vote count anomalies apparently no longer exists.
“The extent of the destruction of records is consistent with the covering up of the fraud that we believe occurred in the presidential election,” said Cliff Arnebeck, a Columbus attorney representing the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association, which filed voter suppression suit. “We’re in the process of addressing where to go from here with the Ohio Attorney General’s office.”
“On the one hand, people will now say you can’t prove the fraud,” he said, “but the rule of law says that when evidence is destroyed it creates a presumption that the people who destroyed evidence did so because it would have proved the contention of the other side.”
Read on at AlterNet.
(link via Metafilter)
With scarcely a mention in the mainstream media, President Bush has ordered up a plan for responding to a catastrophic attack.
In a new National Security Presidential Directive, Bush lays out his plans for dealing with a “catastrophic emergency.”
Under that plan, he entrusts himself with leading the entire federal government, not just the Executive Branch. And he gives himself the responsibility “for ensuring constitutional government.”
He laid this all out in a document entitled “National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51″ and “Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20.”
The White House released it on May 9.
Other than a discussion on Daily Kos led off by a posting by Leo Fender, and a pro-forma notice in a couple of mainstream newspapers, this document has gone unremarked upon.
The subject of the document is entitled “National Continuity Policy.”
It defines a “catastrophic emergency” as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function.”
This could mean another 9/11, or another Katrina, or a major earthquake in California, I imagine, since it says it would include “localized acts of nature, accidents, and technological or attack-related emergencies.”
The document emphasizes the need to ensure “the continued function of our form of government under the Constitution, including the functioning of the three separate branches of government,” it states.
But it says flat out: “The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government.”
The document waves at the need to work closely with the other two branches, saying there will be “a cooperative effort among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Federal Government.” But this effort will be “coordinated by the President, as a matter of comity with respect to the legislative and judicial branches and with proper respect for the constitutional separation of powers.”
(link via Metafilter)
Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann wrote an Op-Ed about US-Iran relations, one that (as per normal) gets prepublication review to make sure it contains no state secrets. The CIA review board said that they found the article contained no classified information – but that the White House had intervened and demanded certain sections be blacked out.
The NY Times has run the editorial… leaving the blacked-out boxes in place.
And then, to prove their point, the authors have provided a list of citations to other articles, all of which repeat the information the White House claimed couldn’t be shared because they were “secret”.
Henry Rollins has never been one for understatement, and this video is no exception:
But he’s also dead on target.
(audio very NSFW)
Apparently, them electronic voting machines may not be 100% accurate:
Randy Wooten figured he would get at least one vote in his bid for mayor of this town of 80 people — even if it was just his own.
He did not. Now he has to decide whether to file a formal protest.
Read on at CNN.
Keith Olbermann examines the top 10 “coincidences” of terror warnings happening the same times as political troubles for the Bush administration – concluding with “you be the judge”.
(For instance, just as the 9/11 Commission found evidence suggesting the government missed the chance to foil the 9/11 plot, Ashcroft announced the disrupting of a terrorist plot and the arrest of Jose Padilla… who had already been in custody for over a month.)
The video requires IE, but hey, there’s a reason why “MSNBC” begins with “MS”.