Month: May 2007
Stats Show DHS AWOL on Terror – Biggest Catch To Date Is the Guy Who Didn’t Kill JonBenet
Katrina-ization of terror: A report released on Monday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a thinktank based at Syracuse University in New York, details the types of immigration cases filed by the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) since 2004. The results are startling:
It shouldn’t be surprising that an administration that retooled the Dept. of Justice into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican National Committee would play politics with homeland security.
[Out] of [814,073] cases filed in federal courts by the Department of Homeland Security since 2004, only 12 were related to terrorism. Another 112 cases were filed using national security charges…
[The] report found that 86.5 percent of all cases involved some sort of immigration violation, such as entering the United States without inspection, not having a valid immigrant visa or overstaying a student visa.
If this is true, DHS officials and the Bush administration have been lying to Congress and the public about what DHS has been up to:
[TRAC co-director David Burnham] said the agency continually sells itself as a central player in the war on terrorism.
“Despite the repeated statement by the DHS that stopping terrorism and preventing serious crime are its core missions, the record shows that since the DHS was established in the wake of 9/11/2001, most of the agency’s actual work recorded in the Immigration Courts has focused on traditional immigration matters,” concluded the report.
According to calculations by another source, the 12 terror cases filed since 2004 show that only 0.0015 percent of DHS cases have been terror-related. Is it really the best use of precious resources to have routine immigration cases being filed by DHS?
This smacks of the sort of gross incompetence (and lying about it) we have come to expect from this administration, but much more alarming is the fact that DHS turned up missing in the investigations that thwarted a pair of high-profile terror attacks in this country over the past few weeks. The department’s glaring absence from these investigations appears to stem from the Bush administration’s other persistent bad habit: politicization.
In April, a rightwing terrorist was caught before he blew up a woman’s health clinic in Texas. Last week, a planned bomb attack on ultra-rightwing protesters at the funeral of Republican political agitator Rev. Jerry Falwell was uncovered and a militant rightwing student at Falwell’s Christian college was arrested. Both cases were handled primarily by local and state law enforcement, with minor assists by non-DHS feds.
What has politics got to do with DHS being AWOL in these investigations? It is in the interest of the Bush adminstration, whose base is dominated by Christian extremists, not to give the public the opportunity to connect the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists Bush uses as his bogeymen — and whom DHS was ostensibly set up to fight — with the domestic Christian fundamentalist terrorists in our midst, even though both Islamicists and Christianists have the same ultimate goal: the establishment of theocratic states.
In fact, the only high-profile arrest that has involved DHS to date was the capture last August in Thailand of John Mark Karr, the emotionally disturbed man who falsely claimed to have killed child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey. DNA tests later excluded Karr as a suspect in the murder.
Capturing child predators is important work, but it’s hard to see how it falls under the purview of the agency tasked with protecting U.S. terrority from terror attacks.
It isn’t surprising that an administration that retooled the Dept. of Justice into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican National Committee would also play politics with homeland security. After all, Bush appointed a prime political hack, Michael Chertoff — whose previous high-profile gig was as a Clinton-hating talking head in the 1990s — as its cabnet-level leader. So, unfortunately, it won’t be any less surprising if we find out the hard way that no one in the administration gave any thought to the downside of politicizing DHS.
If the unthinkable were to happen, and terrorists, foreign or domestic, successfully attacked the homeland while DHS was busy filing routine immigration cases or tracking pedophiles overseas, this situation could be transformed in an instant from a typical bureaucratic boondoggle into a tragedy of historic proportions.
Quote du Jour
“If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.”
— Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), author, Nobel laureate
Wolfie Says It Wasn’t His Fault
It’s not just George Bush who has never made a mistake.
Neocon Paul Wolfowitz has the same gift. You see, it wasn’t his fault that the World Bank wanted to can him as its president for promoting and upping the salary of his employee girlfriend. Whose fault is it then, you ask?
Give yourself a gold star if you answered, “the media.”
“I think it tells us more about the media than about the bank and I’ll leave it at that,” he told the British Broadcasting Corp…
“I accept the fact that by the time we got around to that, emotions here were so overheated that I don’t think I could have accomplished what I wanted to accomplish for the people I really care about,” he said.
It tells us more about the media than the bank? Nobody was asking about those two institutions, Wolfie. This is about you, you Iraq-losing, twisted, Dumbo-earred freak.
Good Lord. So he wanted to accomplish even more for the people he really cares about? Like what? Hummers and Rolexes on the house, everybody!
Rightwing to Give Rudy ‘Harriet Miers Treatment’
The trogs at the GOP are not happy that a liberal Republican is their party’s likely nominee. Now the long knives are out for Rudy Giuliani as rightwing groups plot to bring his presidential nomination down the way they did the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court:
[The] Right is facing what some of them see as an even more ominous threat: the prospect that Rudy Giuliani could win the GOP presidential nomination. And just as they did with Miers, right-wing activists – especially anti-choice Catholic ones – are gearing up to launch an all-out attack in an effort to deny Giuliani the nomination:
And Free Republic, the Internet locus for advocates of American authoritarianism and theocracy, has purged Rudy’s supporters from its ranks:
Over the past few weeks, chaos has reigned in the “Freeper” community as members sympathetic to the former mayor’s candidacy claim to have suffered banishment from the site. They were victimized, they say, by a wave of purges designed to weed out any remaining support for the Giuliani campaign on the popular conservative web forum. Another significant chunk of commenters have migrated away from the controversial site over the action, according to a number of former site members and conservative bloggers who have been tracking the situation.
In a plaintive post on the blog “Sweetness & Light,” exiled commenter Steve Gilbert, who says he does not support the former mayor’s campaign, blasted the site’s new “anti-Giuliani, anti-abortion jihad.” Since George W. Bush was elected president, he wrote, “there haven’t been any large scale [Free Republic] purges to speak of — until now.”
This is ironic, of course, because no candidate is more authoritarian than Giuliani, who once tried to forbid public criticism of him when he was mayor.
These same virtual goons purged supporters of George W. Bush from the site in 1999 but had to recant after it became clear Bush had been ordained as the party’s next Dear Leader.
Andy Card ‘Loudly Booed By Hundreds’ at UMass Commencement
Maybe there is hope for America yet:
President Bush’s former chief of staff Andrew Card was loudly booed by hundreds of students and faculty members as he rose to accept an honorary degree at the University of Massachusetts on Friday.
The boos and catcalls – including those from faculty members who stood onstage with Card – drowned out Provost Charlena Seymour’s remarks as she awarded the honorary doctorate in public service.
The AP report says one faculty member on the stage with Card held up a sign: “Card – no honor – no degree.” Grads held up yellow signs that read, “Honor Grads, Dis-Card.”
GOP Leader Boehner Sobs on House Floor – If Pelosi Cried, Her Career Would Be Over
“After 3,000 of our fellow citizens died at the hands of these terrorists, when are we going to stand up and take ’em on!? When are we going to defeat ’em?!”
— Boehner
— Boehner
Boehner’s Boo-Hoo: Is the standard of comportment for political leaders different for men and women? You bet. There was a prime example of the difference last week when Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) took to the floor during the debate on the war-funding bill to deliver a tearful (drunken?) non sequitor on 9/11, terrorism and the war in Iraq.
Watch the clip and ask yourself what would happen if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared to lose control of her emotions while addressing the House (or anywhere). Corporate media would be in full meltdown. Pols and pundits would be raising “serious” questions about her ability to lead. Rightwing radio would be telegraphing an unspoken message loud and clear: Told ya. Women are too unstable to lead. It’s doubtful she would survive the scandal.
What’s caught on tape here is not Boehner’s macaca moment, but you could make a case that is equivalently as cringe-making as Howard Dean’s scream. Lucky for Boehner, Big Media is ignoring his performance. Lucky for him, he’s a guy.
Transcript follows:
Deciphering Romney-Speak
Translating what Mitt Romney means — and when — is almost as challenging as parsing out a George W. Bush screed.
Listen to what America’s best-known Mormon said in a recent “Ask Mitt Anything” convocation in Florida.
Romney would not say whether he thought homosexuality was immoral.
Suffice it to say that Romney’s answer to the question of whether homosexuality is immoral was not a simple, “No.”“I don’t think that a person who’s running for a secular position as I am should talk about or engage in discussions of what they in their personal faith or their personal beliefs is immoral or not immoral.”
But suffice it to say the answer to the question was not a simple, “No.”
And here’s a clue why:
“What you look for in a leader is someone who will welcome and treat with respect people who made different choices and have different beliefs in their lives and have differences. I have nothing but respect and feelings of tolerance for people with differences from myself and feel that way with regards to those who are gay.”
Got it. Romney believes that being gay is a “choice” and a “belief,” not a physiological state.
His views on immigration are equally enlightening. Apparently, he thinks the only immigrants are Mexicans. And welfare-seeking, criminal Mexicans at that.
“I don’t think that we’re going to round up 11 or 12 or however many million people and bus them out of the country. That’s not what I’m talking about,” Romney said. “Those who committed felonies, of course, would be deported. Those who require government assistance to stay here would surely need to get off government assistance and ultimately could not remain here on government assistance.”
Put them on a bus, eh? I hope he wasn’t talking about the immigrants I see a lot of down this way: Haitians.
Romney’s little Mormon mind isn’t nearly as inscrutable as he would have us believe. Maybe the average Republican would miss these clues to his true world-view but those of us on this team just aren’t feeling him.
Gotta See This Video. Then Show It To Somebody Else
Outrage fatigue and Bush fatigue make us forget there are others like us out there. Watch this video and remember there is cause for hope as well as outrage. Then visit the web site to learn more.
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