Tag: Swiftboating

‘God Hates Fags’ Church to Protest Funeral of Murdered UNC Student President Tomorrow

Jon Ponder

Eve Carson and Lauren Burk

Members of the Westboro Baptist Church, a Christianist hate group whose members are mostly members of the family of Fred Phelps, a disbarred attorney, are at it again, feeding off the misery of innocent, grieving families:
Chapel Hill police have a photo of a suspect who used Eve Carson’s ATM card – Auburn police have arrested a suspect in the murder of Lauren Burk

Westboro Baptist Church, a group known for protesting and picketing funerals and memorials of fallen soldiers, is planning to picket at the Sunday afternoon funeral of 18-year-old Auburn freshman Lauren Burk, according to the group’s Web site. Burk was killed Tuesday night. Police are investigating her death as a murder…

The group is also planning to picket the funeral of Eve Carson, UNC student body president who was killed Wednesday morning.

Both funerals are listed on the WBC site’s online picket schedule for Sunday.

Eve Carson, 22, of Athens, Ga., was murdered on March 5:

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Bush to Meet with Son of Hussein in Oval Office Today

Jon Ponder

Not Uday or Qusay, sons of Saddam Hussein. They’re dead. George Bush is meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan, the son of the late U.S. ally, King Hussein of Jordan.

Sorry for the chicanery but the headline of this story is meant to illustrate the point that “Hussein” is as common a name in the Middle East is “Henry” is in the West.

Because Barack Obama’s middle name is Hussein, Republicans have been trying their best to associate the name Hussein with Saddam Hussein in order to ramp up fear that Obama is a Muslim.

Obama is Christian.

The topic of the meeting between King Abdullah and Bush will be Bush’s last-minute efforts to bring peace to the Middle East, which Middle East experts see as all futile:

Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, said that key players in the region are moving beyond the Bush administration. “The feeling is that if you keep the flash points on a lower or somewhat higher flame, it will give you more cards when a new administration comes in,” he said, speaking in a phone interview from Israel. “Everyone is sucking up to the Iranians,” he added.

The signs of American irrelevance are apparent throughout the region. Even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, hailed as a potential peacemaker by the Bush administration, mused last week to the Jordanian newspaper al-Dustour that in the future it might be necessary to return to armed struggle against Israel. And Syria, which received an unexpected invitation to Annapolis, believes that the peace summit was “an exercise in public relations” and that Bush has no interest in peace, as Syria’s ambassador to Washington, Imad Moustapha put it last week.

Ironically, Bush and his top officials heaped scorn on Pres. Bill Clinton for trying to bring about a peaceful resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict in his last days in office.

Campaigning on Fear in East Texas

Trish

The Houston Chronicle claims that the Democratic race could be decided by East Texas, where early voting makes traditional polling difficult. For the actual results we might have to wait until the votes are counted, something news outlets hate.

Republican candidate for Tom DeLay’s old seat: “What we wanted to do is project mayhem.”

65 percent of the early voting turnout in Houston through Thursday included people who had not cast a ballot in the past three Democratic primaries. At least a quarter of the turnout is black…

And 11,213 — 8.2 percent — were people who previously had voted in the Republican primary…

Clinton has held a lead among white voters of about 7 percentage points and a lead of at least 20 percentage points over Obama among Hispanics. But more than 75 percent of the blacks surveyed supported Obama.

Clinton had more than 60 percent support in traditionally Hispanic South Texas.

Leaving it up to East Texas is an especially disquieting thought, if one of the ten Republicans running against U.S. Rep. Nick Lampson (D-Houston) is any indication. Lampson, you might recall, lost his 9th Congressional District seat after Tom DeLay succeeded in redrawing his district to make it majority Republican. Then in a triumph of irony, DeLay’s ethical challenges forced him to withdraw from his re-election bid in 2006, and Lampson won DeLay’s own neighboring District 22 seat.

Which brings us to challenger Brian Klock. Klock must have decided that the 2004 failed strategy of scaring people into voting Republican didn’t work because it didn’t go far enough. On his web site, he puts the tactic on steroids.

“Showing Houston in flames is reminding them there is a threat,” he added. “What we wanted to do is project mayhem.”

Well good job, Brian. In addition to showing Houston engulfed in a hellish inferno, Klock, who is supported by Houston-based homebuilder and $3 million Swift Boat Veteran for Truth funder Bob Perry, enumerates all the reasons why the area is the country’s premier terrorist target.

• Economic Engine of the Gulf and the entire region
• Home of America’s energy industry and independence
• Headquarters of world-famous pioneering NASA
• City of world’s largest medical and research center
• Gateway to five-and-a-half million people & door to the USA

I’ll concede the NASA link, although that would mean my nearby Cape Canaveral would also be a main target, and I’m doubting that. But I can’t see why having the Texas Medical Center, which is only “largest” by affiliation with 23 government agencies and 23 public and private institutions located throughout Texas and the world, puts Houston at particular risk.

But my doubts are erased by Klock’s urgent reasoning.

The Department of Homeland Security says Houston is one of the highest risk cities in the country, in the same category as New York and Washington…

A strike to the Port of Houston would paralyze commerce and industry throughout the nation — and dramatically increase gas prices and send the national economy into a tailspin.

Similarly, a terrorist attack on Downtown, the Galleria, Sugar Land, or NASA would seriously damage our local economy, destroy jobs, and worsen the recession we are now facing. And, worse of all, we’d lose family and friends, our homes, and our way of life.

Can’t argue with that. Just ask folks from New Orleans, many of whom moved to Houston after losing their “way of life” in a hurricane, a much more likely threat. But it’s not fun to run a campaign against climate disasters, which would probably “paralyze commerce and industry” in the Port of Houston just as effectively as a dirty bomb or plane flown into a skyscraper. Which, by the way, Klock’s web site keeps a news reel of running at all times. You can watch that second plane fly into the World Trade Center as often as you like, and hear the eyewitnesses scream in horror and disbelief as many times as it takes for you to be scared enough to vote for Klock.

I’m betting that Democratic voters in East Texas, including the 8.2 percent who just deserted the Republican party, won’t be swayed by such tactics. On the other hand Hillary Clinton, whose newest ad tells you the phone could ring in the White House at 3 a.m. and it could be very bad news, seems to see it Klock’s way.

Was Rove Behind Trumped Up Charges That Sent a Dem Governor to Jail?

Jon Ponder

Part 1 of 2

Part 2 of 2

A lot of people missed the “60 Minutes” report last week on allegations by a Republican political operative in Alabama named Dana Jill Simpson that Karl Rove and the Bush Justice Dept. rigged the charges against Alabama’s popular former Democratic governor, Don Siegelman, for which he is currently serving time in prison.

This segment of “60 Minutes” was literally blacked out in Alabama, a state that is under the grip of the GOP the way Stalinists once controlled Russia. But no one has asked why CBS chose to run this story against the Oscars, the most watched telecast of the year.

After the “60 Minutes” ran the segment last week, the House Democrats released the transcript of Simpson’s sworn testimony before the House Judiciary Committee:

1. Ms. Simpson stated under oath that she adheres to and stands by the statements in her May 21, 2007, affidavit. (Pages 85-86) She testified: “What I understood, or what I believed Mr. Canary to be saying, was that he had had this ongoing conversation with Karl Rove about Don Siegelman, and that Don Siegelman was a thorn to them and basically he was going to – he had been talking with Rove. Rove had been talking with the Justice Department, and they were pursuing Don Siegelman as a result of Rove talking to the Justice Department at the request of Bill Canary.”

2. Ms. Simpson described a 2005 conversation with Rob Riley in which Mr. Riley stated that, in late 2004, Karl Rove had contacted the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice to press for further prosecution of Don Siegelman, and had also stated that the case would be assigned to a federal judge who “hated” Mr. Siegelman and who would “hang Don Siegelman.”

Update: Just to prove that that one’s point of view depends on where one sits, Trish has rightly pointed out that “60 Minutes” only ran against the Oscars here on the West Coast.

MSM’s New Meme: Obama Supporters Are ‘Creepy’ And ‘Cult-Like’

Jon Ponder

Media Matters:

CNN’s Carol Costello said that audience response at a Barack Obama rally is “a scene some increasingly find not inspirational, but ‘creepy,’ ” quoting columnists who have likened Obama supporters to members of a cult or described their enthusiasm as “creepy.” On-screen text during Costello’s report read: “OBAMA-MANIA BACKLASH” and “PASSION ‘CULT-LIKE’ TO SOME.” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer similarly cited other writers to make the same assertion: “ABC’s Jake Tapper notes the ‘Helter-Skelter cult-ish qualities’ of ‘Obama worshipers,’ what Joel Stein of the Los Angeles Times calls ‘the Cult of Obama.’ ”

Senate Ethics: Weaseling out on Gay Stall Sex Charge ‘Improper’ – Hiring Call Girls a Non-Issue

Jon Ponder

Conservative moral relativism is on display once again.

After Sen. David Vitter, R-La., an unctuous spouter of family values, admitted last year that he’d consorted with call girls back when he served in the House, there were no calls for his resignation from his Senate colleagues and certainly no investigations launched by the Senate Ethics Committee.

Why? Not because these senators disapprove — or care — about Vitter’s predilection for paying for it (and reportedly wearing diapers when doing so). No, the issue is numbers. If Vitter had resigned, the governor of Louisiana, a Democrat at the time, would have replaced him with a Democrat, which would have tilted the already tight balance of power in the Senate one more seat to the left.

But when it comes to gay sex shenanigans, there’s no such reticence. Sen. Larry Craig, R-Id. — no less a family values spouter than Vitter — was not even seeking to pay for the sex he was after in an airport men’s room last summer. And yet, the Senate Ethics Committee is coming down hard:

The Senate Ethics Committee said Senator Larry Craig engaged in “improper conduct” during and after his arrest in a Minneapolis airport bathroom by seeking to withdraw his guilty plea and showing his business card to the arresting officer.

“We consider your attempt to withdraw your guilty plea to be an attempt to evade the legal consequences of an action freely undertaken by you — that is, pleading guilty,” the committee wrote, according to a letter posted on its Web site yesterday.

The panel said that Craig’s showing his Senate business card could be construed as an attempt to receive special treatment. The committee also criticized him for failing to secure its approval to use campaign funds to pay legal fees.

So Vitter did not expect, and receive, special treatment from the DC Madam because he was a member of Congress?

What Craig did was illegal. Having sex in a public bathroom is tacky, gross and a public nuisance. But what Vitter did was also illegal — and, yes, the statute of limitations had expired — but to ignore his shenanigans while pursuing Craig wreaks of homophobia.

Justice Scalia Is Latest Wingnut to Base Legality of ‘So-Called Torture’ on ’24’-Style Ticking Bomb

Jon Ponder

Nothing underscores the fantastical thinking of conservatives more than their propensity to justify torture based entirely on scenarios out of the television action drama, “24.”
If terrorist’s bomb was ticking, “it would be absurd to say you couldn’t, I don’t know, stick something under the fingernail, smack him in the face. It would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that.”
– Scalia
The show — which is produced by friends of Rush Limbaugh, including Joel Surnow and Howard Gordon, who accompanied him on a Viagra-fueled vacay on a Caribbean island in 2006 — features weekly potboilers with all the dramatic substance of “Perils of Pauline” and similar cliffhanger series from the classic movie era. The plots are beyond far-fetched, of the sort that could never happen in real life in a million years.

And yet the latest wingnut to base a legal interpretation of the legality of torture on the television show — although he never mentions the show by name — is no less an august personage than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said in a radio interview broadcast Tuesday that interrogators can inflict pain to obtain critical information, such as the location of a bomb about to explode or the plans or whereabouts of a terrorist group.

“It seems to me you have to say, as unlikely as that is, it would be absurd to say you couldn’t, I don’t know, stick something under the fingernail, smack him in the face. It would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that,” Scalia told the BBC’s “Law in Action” program.

Scalia said that determining when physical coercion could come into play was a difficult question. “How close does the threat have to be? And how severe can the infliction of pain be? I don’t think these are easy questions at all, in either direction,” he said.

And:

“I suppose it’s the same thing about so-called torture,” he said. “Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited by the Constitution?

“Is it obvious, that what can’t be done for punishment can’t be done to exact information that is crucial to the society? I think it’s not at all an easy question, to tell you the truth.”

Of course, the Islamic terrorists are in de facto suicide pacts when they launch attacks, so there is nothing that would prevent the tortured prisoner from lying and thus achieving two objectives: blowing up Los Angeles and punching his ticket for entry to heaven and the 90 virgins who await him.

In an unrelated but equally unbelievable statement, Scalia asserted that he is not the bad-tempered jerk he appears to be.

“I’m very tender,” he told an interviewer.

Why Are Obama Supporters Swiftboating Hillary Clinton?

Jon Ponder

The Shocking Video Swiftboating Hillary Obama Wants You To See!!

Maybe things aren’t as rosy at the Obama campaign as his team — and the completely smitten mainstream media — would have us believe. Other than desperation, what else would explain the waves of “Obamabots” spamming the comments boards of liberal websites with Clinton-hating screeds?

The most egregious of these was posted today in the comments for this site by a spammer using the handle “S Bison.” It is a link to a trailer for an anti-Clinton video that nonpartisan Factcheck.org compared with “‘The Mena Coverup,’ ‘The Clinton Chronicles’ and others accused Clinton of a range of illegal and unethical acts. Like many — we daresay most — of those, this video contains a lot of false, unproven and misleading material. And what it leaves out is often more important than what it tells us.”

Here’s Factcheck.org’s summary of its detailed analysis of the video:

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Vitter Challenges Media to Prove He Consorted with New Orleans Hooker

Jon Ponder

His number appeared five times in DC Madam’s call lists but now he says reports that he frequented a New Orleans brothel in the 1990s are “not true”

“Unfortunately, my admission has encouraged some longtime political enemies and those hoping to profit from the situation to spread falsehoods too, like those New Orleans stories in recent reporting.”
– Sen. David Vitter

In the spring of 1987, Colorado Sen. Gary Hart held a commanding lead in early polling in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. But two questions dogged the candidate: How would he deal with the large debt carried over from his 1984 run for the presidency — and what about the rumors that he was, as they said back then, a “womanizer.”

The debt quickly became a non-issue after Hart made a miscalculation in handling the second question that has become a classic “what not to do” in politics — he challenged the media to prove he was having an affair:

“Follow me around … I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’d be very bored.”

Reporters from the Miami Herald took Hart up on the challenge and quickly outed his extramarital relationship with an attractive young woman named Donna Rice. After photos surfaced of Hart and Rice looking both intimate and disheveled on the deck of a yacht called Monkey Business, he dropped out of the race.

Yesterday, Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican with a penchant for pompous moralizing, may have made the same mistake Hart did 20 years ago. After waiting a full week to address revelations that he used the services of the DC Madam five years ago, he appeared before the media and dropped the gauntlet, all but challenging reporters to prove he had relationships with other prostitutes:

Unfortunately, my admission has encouraged some longtime political enemies and those hoping to profit from the situation to spread falsehoods too, like those New Orleans stories in recent reporting. Those stories are not true. Now, having said all of this, I’m not going to answer endless questions about it all over again and again and again and again.

Vitter was referring to stories that surfaced in New Orleans last week that he had been in a relationship with a working girl in the 1990s:

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Video: Serial Adulterer Sen. Vitter Pontificates against Gay Marriage

Jon Ponder

“Marriage is the most fundamental social institution in human history,” Sen. David Vitter says in the video clip above. This statement came as part of the debate last summer over amending the U.S. Constitution to prevent gay people from marrying each other.

At the time, Vitter told CNN,”I don’t believe there’s any issue that’s more important than this one.”

Over the years, of course, Vitter has degraded and defiled his own marriage by hiring prostitutes, including at least one call girl from the D.C. Madam.

Prior to that, Wendy Cortez, a prostitute in New Orleans, claimed in 1999 that Vitter had an ongoing affair with her. Maybe he met her at this brothel:

In New Orleans, meanwhile, the madam of a high-priced brothel that was shut down by federal authorities in 2002 told a local television station, WDSU, that Mr. Vitter was one of her clients in the 1990s. The woman, Jeanette Maier, called him “one of the nicest and most honorable men I’ve ever met.” Mr. Vitter’s office did not immediately return a call for comment Tuesday night.