HAPPY EASTER

Every year the Washington Post hosts a Peeps Diorama competition, where folks use the Peeps marshmallow bunnies to make artistic scenes. Here is the link to this year's show, they really are quite clever. Below are some peepshows from years past:

Happy Easter, see you tomorrow...

Defusing Gaza, Defriending Hamid

David Ignatius
Marwan Bishara
Reihan Salam

"This is my favorite story of the week. The Republican National Committee is in trouble after spending nearly $2,000 at a bondage club in Hollywood. You know what I call a Republican that spends a lot of money in a strip club? A Democrat." – Jay Leno

"In fact, one eyewitness said 'some of the things going on in the club were almost too masochistic for the Republicans to watch.' Like in one room, there was a video being played over and over of President Obama signing the healthcare bill." – Jay Leno

"President Obama announced this week that he is opening more sites for offshore oil drilling. Do you know what that means? If we find enough oil, we could one day invade ourselves." – Jay Leno

There is a good article in the Christian Science Monitor on Egypt's role in maintaining the blockade of Gaza. Like all things in the Middle East, the reasons are complex; "Egypt doesn’t want to take the pressure off Israel, which it holds responsible for running Gaza. At the same time, Egypt has an interest in weakening militant Islamist group Hamas, which rules the territory. And many suspect that US pressure plays into Egypt's participation in the blockade, though Egypt denies this.


Emad Gad, an analyst at the government-funded Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, boils the issue down to Egypt’s opposition to Hamas. “Hamas is part of another coalition in the region – the Iran, Syria, Hezbollah coalition,” he says. “Hamas is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. And Hamas is trying to minimize the Egyptian role in the Palestinian cause... Egypt’s main line of defense for closing the border is to pass responsibility to Israel. Egypt considers Gaza under Israeli occupation, and therefore under international law it is Israel’s duty to provide Gazans with their basic needs – not Egypt’s. Allowing goods through Rafah would take the pressure off Israel to end the blockade."

From the Jerusalem Post: "On Thursday night the IAF carried out several air strikes in the Gaza Strip, targeting four weapons factories and warehouses targets. The attacks were a response to the firing of a Kassam rocket earlier that evening, which fell near Ashkelon causing no casualties or damage." Hamas is having trouble stopping the Kassam missiles from being launched from within Gaza, and there are several newer groups within Gaza that are agitating for another violent intifada. I think they are tired of running a place that is so depressed, both economically and emotionally. Gaza is dependent on Israel for most of its food supply, and every time another rocket is fired, Israel retaliates by bombing some tunnel sites, causing less goods to be smuggled inside. Hamas has already determined that they don't need any more guns inside of Gaza, that building materials would now suit them better. And if Hamas is acting more reasonable and responsible, then the Palestinian Authority has to kick it up a notch and be the unreasonable one. The question is, who can keep a lid on this cauldron and how do you defuse the situation? Getting rid of the blockade would go a long way to help.

The US State Department is freaking out, seeing all of their good work during this last year come unraveling, and they are trying to cool both sides down and get their indirect peace talks restarted: "State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters there was no “military solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.


"The Israelis have a right to self-defense. At the same, as we've said many times, we don't ultimately think there is a military solution to this. Our message remains to the Israelis and Palestinians that we need to get the proximity talks going, focus on the substance, move to direct negotiations and ultimately arrive at a settlement that ends the conflict once and for all." Welcome to the Mid-East three-step, grab your partner, now take one step forward and two steps back...

Back in Afghanistan, poor Hamid Karzai got taped ranting about those damned Americans, then called Hillary Clinton afterwards to apologize, saying that he was ranting about the American press, who keeps on demonizing him. Its true that we have more reporters in Afghanistan than any other foreign country right now, and they have to report on something. And its true that Hamid is caught up between a rock and a hard place, trying to reconcilliate with the Taliban and have the American military swarming all over the place.

Half of the civilian deaths so far have come from night raids into private homes; "Since he took over as top commander in Afghanistan, McChrystal has not only refused to curb those raids but has increased them dramatically. Even after they triggered a new round of angry protests from villagers, students and Afghan President Hamid Karzai himself, he has given no signal of reducing his support for them. " Even General McChrystal has acknowledged that he is pissing off Afghan villagers:

"Nearly every Afghan I talk to mentions them as the single greatest irritant".

So why is the General continuing, and increasing the number of night raids? Gareth Porter thinks the reason is statistics, statistics, statistics: "McChrystal has only a brief period before President Barack Obama's exit strategy comes into play in mid-2011. He desperately needs to be able to convince the American public during that period that he is making progress.


Like General David Petraeus in Iraq in 2007-08, he needs to be able to cite statistical trends, such as a reduction in Taliban IED attacks, that would demonstrate such progress to congress and the news media.


He evidently hopes that night raids, by weakening the Taliban military organization, might influence those statistical trends. Reducing the level of Afghan hatred of Americans by eliminating night raids wouldn't figure in those statistics." Welcome to the modern military counterinsurgent policy, it's a brave new world...

Internet Suicide Bombers, Obama Hits New Low, Rush is bin Laden's Disciple

Paul Krugman
Dan Quayle
John Avlon

"A close look at the tea party membership will find many of those independents who went for Obama but now regret it." - Dan Quayle

“I used to get some pretty nasty hate mail from radical Islamists, but the stuff I’m getting right now from right wingers is an order of magnitude worse.” - Charles Johnson

I know that security experts have been saying how much the Internet has influenced people who are susceptible to terrorist ideology. We have some examples in America of two women who trolled Islamic sites for new boyfriends and ended up arrested in Ireland for plotting to kill a cartoonist. It seems comical only because they were caught before the plot could become successful.

More damaging and horrific is the fact that one of the women suicide bombers who attacked in the Moscow metro system is a seventeen year old widow named: "Dzhanet Abdullayeva, she was born in 1992 and lived in the Khasavyurtsky region of Dagestan... "Police said that they had identified an apartment building that had been rented out by two suspected accomplices of the female suicide bombers. They say these two men may have accompanied the woman to a metro station in the southwest of the city where they handed them the bomb belts.


The men are then believed to have gone back to the apartment building, as the female suicide bombers went on to their final destination. It was the men in the apartment building, at a distance, that then detonated the explosives by remote [control]"

Dzhanet met her husband when she was 16 and living in a small village. She had contacted him through the Internet, then married him after they had met in person. Her husband was: "Umalat Magomedov, a high-ranking Dagestani anti-government fighter, who was killed by Russian security forces last year." A few months later she volunteered to wear the suicide belt in Moscow, with devastating effect.

This girl, and the one who volunteered with her, were children, caught up in an ugly, violent, and cruel reality. Just like thug life is made out to be romantic and cool in music videos by poseur musicians, the world of jihad beckons to poor, bored, rural Islamic youth. The romantic fantasies come crashing down when someone you love dies, and you are left to grieve, despair, and angrily call out for justice. Even more unfortunate, there always will be someone willing to take advantage of your fragile emotional state, and voila - a Black Widow is born. Born to cause even more grieving and despair by killing more innocent people, the same way her innocence was lost.

Also unfortunate, is that there are many more like her in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, whose families have met up with CIA mercenaries, or the impersonal firebomb from a drone. President Medvedev channeled his inner Putin by saying that Russia will get tougher on these bombers, but how do you stop their grief or give them a future? How do you heal a person, a village, or a country that has seen such devastation? The Chechens say that if they had their own country they could heal...

The Palestinians are getting ready for the next intifada, claiming that it will be a non-violent one. If a Palestinian state were created right now, about 40-50,000 people would have to be evacuated from the West Bank. Instead of finding ways to sabotage negotiations, the Israeli government needs to do this in exchange for an armistice. This should be the beginning point of any further negotiations, and Israel is loath to do it, certainly will never happen as long as Benjamin Netanyahu and the right wing faction is in charge. After all, the Israelis were given their land, and their terrorists were forgiven, after WW11, and they had the opportunity to heal from the devastation visited on them. Now, its time to do the same for the Palestinian people, give them the same chance and break the cycle that will reverberate throughout the Middle East and throughout the world...

While Obama's approval rating hit a new low in a CBS poll, he also gave an interesting interview with Harry Smith this morning. Here is the link to the full video. During the interview, Harry told Obama that the kindest thing he had heard about him from the right was that he was a Socialist, and the worst that he was Hitler. Obama responded: "Well, I think that when you listen to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, it's pretty apparent, and it's troublesome, but keep in mind that there have been periods in American history where this kind of vitriol comes out," Obama said in an interview with CBS News that aired this morning. "It happens often when you've got an economy that is making people more anxious and people are feeling like there is a lot of change that needs to take place. But that's not the vast majority of Americans. I think the vast majority of Americans know that we're trying hard, that I want what's best for the country."

In an emailed response to Politico, Rush snarkily replied: "I have yet to have a down year at the EIB Network... I and most Americans do not believe President Obama is trying to do what's best for the country," he wrote. "Never in my life have I seen a regime like this, governing against the will of the people, purposely. I have never seen the media so supportive of a regime amassing so much power. And I have never known as many people who literally fear for the future of the country."


Rush is on the radio for three hours per day, five days per week, Glen Beck is also on the radio and on Fox News. There are no moderate or liberal equivalents, nobody willing to even go on the record to challenge the mean-spirited, vitriol-laden speech flowing from their mouths. I used to like listening to Rush, back when he had a sense of humor. But since he was addicted to pain medications, he has become more callous and arrogant. He is content to be a negative force in our society instead of a constructive one. Bored folks, depressed from having lost their jobs, senior citizens depressed from growing older and their bodies failing them, listen to Rush and Glenn and can give in to their frustrations and anger for a brief while. But it creates a knee-jerk, emotional response that becomes an all-day attitude, and soon you have some pretty pissed-off people who now listen in to feed their emotional addiction. This is how ex-addicts like Rush and Glenn spread their behavior without taking any responsibility.

I can sit here and laugh at them. I know that they are only trying to dish out the same kind of attitude they felt that George W Bush received, but these nattering nabobs of negativity are creating a dangerous situation. Doctors have been murdered, people are intimidating others by wearing guns openly, and wackos living comic book fantasies are creating militias, willing to die to bring on Armageddon. If it doesn't tone down, as Obama suggests, we will become what Rush describes us as, and I, too, will fear for our nation. Then, Osama bin Laden will have won, his disciples Glenn and Rush can sit at his right, while we tear each other apart in the streets.  Damn, that does sound Apocalyptic...

Pirate Season Beginning, Angry Arab, RNC and Phone Sex

Gail Collins
David Broder
John Avlon

"Did you hear about this? President Obama, big surprise visit to see the folks in Afghanistan. Did you read all about that? That's kind of exciting. It turns out he was shooting an episode of 'Undercover Boss.'" –David Letterman

"This was an important meeting. Both presidents agreed that we have to work to wipe out terror networks. Get rid of terror networks, like Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Fox News." –David Letterman

"Obama demanded more accountability. He said we got to have more accountability, we got to have a crackdown on corruption; we have to have a better government. And he said if it works in Afghanistan, we're going to try it back home in the United States." –David Letterman

Now that spring is here, it means good sailing in the waters of the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, which brings the dreaded Somali pirates out swarming the seas like a hive of infuriated wasps. Since January they already have attacked 37 ships and have hijacked 7 of them, and are holding 143 crewmen hostage. Recently, an American warship captured a pirate mothership and skiff in the Indian Ocean, and a Turkish Navy ship captured a skiff with 9 Somali pirates out on a raid.

One result of this very real paranoia is the drastic rise in expenditures on maritime security by the Arabic Gulf states. Added concerns over the future security of offshore oil platforms, especially by Saudi Arabia, is causing them to: "spend billions of dollars on naval equipment, ranging from ships to unmanned drones." Yes, the boys are shopping for new toys...

"In terms of percentage growth, the Middle East and North Africa actually leads the world naval market. The focus is on capabilities that can give you the anti-piracy, anti-terrorism sorts of missions."

In addition to buying up smaller, maneuverable Corvette type ships, as built by the British Navy. Many countries are now trying to manufacture their own, and we may soon see a spike in Arabic armaments beyond the infamous IED explosive devices. India has its own navy, and South Korea sees a market niche where they can excel. Of course, there is always the danger that some extremist groups will end up with their own manufacturing base and make their own arms like they do in other parts of the world, but then they would be in competition with Iran...

Congratulations to my friend the Angry Arab for being in the top twenty rated pro-Islamic sites by Britain's anti-terrorist service. The implication is that they are also pro-terrorism, anti-Western, jihad-promoting sites as well. I have linked to his site for over a year, and he is certainly not pro-terrorist at all. Like any secular Muslim who lives and teaches in the United States and once was married to a Jewish woman, his relationship with both the East and the West is complex. He is against corruption, politicians who lie and spread their own agenda no matter what country or religion they belong to. He angrily points out the hypocrisy in the news, and passionately cares what goes on in his native Lebanon and surrounding areas. To think that he is pro-terrorist is laughable, and this was pointed out in a blog published in al Jazeera:. "The third blog on the list also raised some eyebrows, if not led to laughter of irony. The Angry Arab blog is written by As'ad Abukhalil, a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus, and visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley.


According to statements he has made on his blog, he is a self-proclaimed atheist and secularist. Abukhalil, who has regularly written for Al Jazeera, said that the Ricu study "shows the ignorance of Western government and their media standards". "Arabs and Muslims are treated like a monolith with no distinctions and delineations permitted to categorise them," he said. Just as the colonial powers treated them as a lump of people, they are still seen that way."

"Designating Angry Arab as a leading Islamist site full of incitement to would-be jihadists would have been laughable had the subject not been one of life and death for so many of Britain's targets in this one-sided war,"

Personally, I love it that there are people out there who are grumpier than I am, and I value their differing opinions that make me think. Keep up the good work, As'ad...

phone sex with michael steele...

The Republican National Committee just can't get a break, they continue on making stupid. As related in Politico: "The Republican National Committee sent a fundraising mail piece earlier this month with a return number that leads to a phone-sex line offering "live, one-on-one talk with a nasty girl who will do anything you want for just $2.99 per minute." At the bottom of a piece designed to resemble a census form, a toll-free number is listed next to the national party's address.


A voter in Minnesota received the mailer and called the number intending to complain about the attempt to raise money with a form that looks like a government document.


But the Minnesotan was instead directed to a second toll-free number that greets callers as "sexy guy" before offering them the chance to talk with "real local students, housewives and working girls from all over the country."

Fallout from this and recent fiscal revelations that the RNC approved $2000 for a visit to an upscale bondage-themed strip club last month, has had Sarah Palin asking that they take her name off of an upcoming fund-raiser, and Tony Perkins, head of the anti-gay Family Research Council, telling its members not to donate any money to them. Bummer, dudes...

china, china...
China has a lot worse problems than fake bribery trials, recycled cooking oil in its restaurants, and illegal manufacturing short cuts. Recently, the bodies of 21 babies were found in bags labeled as medical waste and dumped into a river. From the NY Times: "The bodies of 21 babies were found in plastic bags in a river in northeast China, state media reported Tuesday. The bodies, some in bags marked “medical waste,” others with hospital identification tags on their toes, were recovered Sunday and Monday from a river in Jining, a city in Shandong Province. The authorities said at least 15 bodies appeared to be of aborted fetuses or infants who had died at Jining Medical College Hospital, state media said. Hospital officials could not be reached for comment."

I will also bet that that most of the aborted were girls, adhering to a long held tradition that girls are worthless to a family. In rural areas of China many families still will kill their firstborn if it is a girl... I remember a few years ago when it was a scandal in the US, finding medical waste bags with used syringes and actual medical waste that had washed up on the beach, and were traced back to individual doctors, but this kind of incident is obviously much worse, and will probably be buried by the Chinese government, even if an investigation is actively pursued... thank God I don't have any pictures for this, and yet it is stories like this that will be censored by the authorities if people try to look for it in their homegrown search engines...

Google Cyber-attacked From Vietnam, China Had More Executions Than Texas

Thomas Friedman
Howard Fineman

"Republican donors aren't happy about this. It's not fair that rich Republicans spend huge amounts of money at sex clubs and poor Republicans have to go to airport bathrooms." –Craig Ferguson

The Daily Beast has tallied the score to see which political party had the more sex scandals. Unfortunately, the numbers don't have the sordid details that we like, and send people flocking to buy magazines like the national Inquirer at the supermarket check-out lines.

"After studying the 58 scandals over the past 20 years involving all politicians or major candidates for city mayor and above—many involved crimes, others just allegations, but all wound up as tabloid fodder—some conclusions can be reached.
• The number sex scandals has increased dramatically over the past few decades, thanks to technology, new press standards and a post-Clinton belief that everything is fair game.
• Republicans have more scandals (32 to 26), but Democrats have bigger ones, based on our methodology (13 out of the top 20).
• Democrats tend to have more problems with harassment, staffers and underage girls; Republicans tend to have more problems with prostitutes, hypocrisy and underage boys."


It's not that there have been so many scandals, we know how those who seek out power and use it end up being corrupted by it. Add to the numbers all of the other scandals involving abuse of power, and we can see that there are very few responsible among us. We need to have a national debate on how to reform our Congressional system so that we can make it more play-safe and child-friendly. Because with the male species, we never grow-up emotionally past five years old, and that's why we will always succumb to shiny objects and the allure of women's breasts. Throw in a bottle and a comfy blanket, and you will have one satisfied Congressman...

David Letterman's Top Ten Republican National Committee Excuses

10. 'We're fat, dumb, rich guys, nuff said?'
9. 'Thought 'SM' door was Sen. McCain's office'
8. 'It wasn't a sex club, just a regular club where grown men tickle each other'
7. 'Scott Brown raved about the place'
6. 'The Sheraton's meeting rooms were already booked'
5. 'I'm sorry, Ricky Martin is gay?'
4. 'Abraham Lincoln routinely spent $2,000 a night in sex clubs'
3. 'We're fat, dumb, rich guys, nuff said?'
2. 'If we can't spend donor money at a sex club, the terrorists have won'
1. 'Research for pending legislation 'No Stripper Left Behind''


cyberwars...

It's been a busy couple of months for computer security analysts. The folks working at Google have had a time of it, having their email clients attacked by mysterious forces inside of China, leading to an argument with the Chinese government over them and the extent of censorship the government wants imposed on its users. Google withdrew its servers and put them in Hong Kong, and the government tried to limit access to them even more.

Now, it seems that the next victims are the email clients of Yahoo.: "In what appeared to be a coordinated assault, the e-mail accounts of more than a dozen rights advocates, academics and journalists who cover China have been compromised by unknown intruders. A Chinese human rights organization also said that hackers had disabled its Web site for five days in a row.


The infiltrations, which involved Yahoo e-mail accounts, appeared to be aimed at people who write about China and Taiwan, rendering their accounts inaccessible, according to those who were affected. In the case of this reporter, hackers altered e-mail settings so that all correspondence was surreptitiously forwarded to another e-mail address... The victims of the most recent intrusions included a law professor in the United States, a Uighur exile in Sweden, an analyst who writes about China’s security apparatus and several print journalists based in Beijing and Taipei."

“I’m 100 percent I’ve been hacked. I’m angry at the Chinese, but I blame Yahoo for allowing this to happen.”

Yahoo has about the worst customer service, they are arrogant and rude and hardly ever reply to you directly. If you are going to use a free email account from a large company like Yahoo or Microsoft or Google, don't use it for anything that you consider sensitive. Never use it for business.

And if headaches with China isn't enough for Google, it just had some more attacks aimed at all of its Vietnamese users, that seem politically motivated against critics of the Vietnamese government: "In attacks it described as similar to but less sophisticated than those at the core of its spat with China, Google said malicious software was used to infect “potentially tens of thousands of computers,” broadly targeting Vietnamese speaking computer users around the world.


Infected machines had been used to spy on their owners and to attack blogs containing messages of political dissent, wrote Neel Mehta of the company’s security team in a post late Tuesday on Google’s online security blog."

If you want to see what is daily being offered by Google and what is being blocked, Google has set up a web page which you can link to here.

All of this activity means that it will be a long, hot summer this year. It used to be that summer was hacking season, when all of the teenage boys were out of school and spent long, boring hours in front of their computers, from rural Michigan to New Delhi, India. With governments getting involved in promoting malicious behavior, the sheer volume of hackers trying to attack security networks may be overwhelming to our current systems, and we will see some pretty impressive crashes before Fall...


china at top of execution list...

Another feather that China can add to its cap, is that it has topped Amnesty International's list of countries that have carried out the most executions this last year. "Methods of execution included beheading, stoning, electrocution, hanging, firing squads and lethal injection." china topped the list, followed by Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the state of Texas.

China, of course, disputed the fact, but the number they execute is kept as a state secret. “The Chinese authorities claim that fewer executions are taking place,” said Claudio Cordone, Amnesty’s interim secretary general. “If this is true, why won’t they tell the world how many people the state put to death?”

The US can be proud of the fact that it alone, is the only country in the Americas that has executed anybody last year. That includes all of the small countries and islands that you love to hate, they behaved in a more civilized fashion. "Amnesty, which has long opposed the death penalty, said death sentences and executions continued to be used for political purposes, often after unfair trials, and were used “disproportionately against the poor, minorities and members of racial, ethnic and religious communities.” Perhaps it would be a blessing for us to let Texas secede from the US...

Militias - R - Us

Meghan McCain
Christopher Buckley
Eugene Robinson
Dana Milbank

"The most serious threat of domestic terrorism has come from the growing ranks of paranoid, anti-government hate groups that draw their inspiration, vocabulary and anger from the far right." - Eugene Robinson

I updated the link to David Frum's blog, which had changed from The New Majority to the Frum Forum. I find that former conservatives who have become moderates like David, Christopher Buckley, Bruce Barylett, and Meghan McCain are more fun to read, they have a sense of humor, and almost all of them were fired from their jobs in retaliation for expressing criticism of their conservative friends. In Chris Buckley's opinion piece we get a twofer, with him writing about the firing of David Frum.

Which one looks like a federal agent?

Back in the 1970's a popular recreation when among friends was to partake some LSD and to read the Bible. A few had spiritual conversions and joined churches where having visions and talking in tongues were a regular part of Sunday service. Those churches are still here today, having gone mainstream, with larger congregations, and different content that is preached.


Ed Sanders relates another tidbit about one of the New York freaks who had their life altered by LSD. "Over at the Psychedelicatessen they kept a chalk board with a running tally of customers who had come in announcing they were Jesus. It was up to sixty-five. This guy was one of them... at the time we all felt sorry for J - so lost, so eery, so utterly insane, wxcept that now, going on to forty years later, he owns his own Bible college in the South, and his revivals on cable TV pull in hundreds of millions of dollars each year."


Stepping into this great tradition of mixing drugs with religion, often with twisted and bizarre results, come the Hutaree, which is a made up name given the meaning of God's Warriors. Because it sounds so obvious, the founder of the Hutaree must have had a flashback to watching F Troop when he has a kid. Hutaree sounds too much like Fukawee, the Indian tribe on the series. Shows like F Troop and Get Smart were produced during a time when each network had their own censor, and each script had to be approved that it didn't contain anything sexual or obscene. It became a game that the comedy writers tried to put jokes in the scripts that went over the heads of the often illiterate censors. The Fukawee was the best joke, because it was used over and over during the life of the show.

Picture the two main heroes of the show, Union soldiers stationed in Indian territory, and they are out doing some reconnaissance. They are huddled down among some large rocks on a hillside, one is looking through binoculars. "I don't see them anywhere," he says. Suddenly, the other one stiffens, as if he senses something. "I think we may be surrounded," he says. "What? Fukawee? Where the Fukawee?" the first soldier would exclaim.

So the alliteration from a TV show watched when he was a kid became transformed into a made-up word that David Stone says means God's Warrior. Mix in alcohol and god knows what tainted drugs, and you begin to perceive the world of today's amateur militias. Further mix in a fervent, evangelical spirit, and you get on like the Hutaree, with their bizarre interpretations of the Bible. We're not dealing with scholarly interpretations here, more on the level of comic books and one's limited imaginings.

The Feds arrested nine members of the Hutaree: "... the Justice Department said they were part of a group of apocalyptic Christian militants who were plotting to kill law enforcement officers in hopes of inciting an antigovernment uprising, the latest in a recent surge in right-wing militia activity.


The court filing said the group, which called itself the Hutaree, planned to kill an unidentified law enforcement officer and then bomb the funeral caravan using improvised explosive devices based on designs used against American troops by insurgents in Iraq."

“The F.B.I. takes such extremist groups seriously, especially those who would target innocent citizens and the law enforcement officers who protect the citizens of the United States.” - the FBI

“In Michigan, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal to be in a militia,” - A Neighbor.

Of course, this brings up the paranoia of another Waco, where government forces surrounded and burnt down the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, prompting rallying cries of "fascist government takeovers" that has echoed through every fringe right wing evangelical group since, including our present day tea party rallies. Attention should also be focused that local militias and hate groups have been on an exponential rise over the last couple of years, and many of them spurred on by the fact that we have elected a Black man as President.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, who tracks such groups, Colorado has 17 radical groups:
        Name                                                 Type                                            

Aryan Nations Revival                          Christian Identity                  

Creativity Movement                            Neo-Nazi                              

Family Research Institute                     Anti-Gay                                

Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints        General Hate                          

Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints        General Hate                          

Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints        General Hate                        

Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints        General Hate                        
Knights of the Nordic Order                Neo-Nazi

MSR Productions                                Racist Music                          

Nation of Islam                                   Black Separatist                      

National Knights of the                                                                    
 Ku Klux Klan

National Socialist Movement              Neo-Nazi                                  

Nationalist Coalition                           Neo-Nazi                                

New Century Productions -               White Nationalist                        
Racist Music

Rescue Without Borders                   Anti-Immigrant                        

Scriptures for America                      Christian Identity                    
Ministries

United Northern and Southern                                                        
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan

"I want to just take a moment to thank the Teabaggers. Thank you so much for helping us pass health care, for resurrecting the Obama presidency. I know they're saying, 'Why are you thanking me? I was so against it, I marched on Washington with tea bags hanging off my Founding Fathers costume, with a gun on my hip and a picture of Obama dressed as Hitler, screaming about his birth certificate.' And America saw that and said, 'I think I'll go with the calm black man.'" –Bill Maher

As long as our economy remains as bad as it and people are still being laid off from their jobs (my brother-in-law's work laid off 41 people two days ago), folks are going to turn away from the government and towards alternative groups. Because we have been involved in wars for the past nine years and our military has grown, the fascination with guns will continue, and violent outbursts will only escalate. Who loses the most, besides those figure who will get shot at, will be our children, and in a few years they will pass judgement on us. Personally, I hoped to be judged lightly, but who knows? I promised to take one grand-daughter shooting and teach her how to use a gun, but I never did. Did I prevent the next Columbine-type incident, or have I become a pacifist in my old-age, who couldn't see the target, much less kill it...

RNC Voyeurism, Divesting Israeli Arms Maker, The Democracy-Builder Who Loved Me

Paul Krugman
Clarence Page
Michael Hastings

A few days ago I wrote about some of the strange perversions that conservatives use to become sexually aroused, things I could never make up if I was drunk, stoned, and tied to a bed on a Saturday night. Today there are financial reports from the Republican National Committee on the excesses of Chairman Michael Steele. Although he is claiming that it really is some other staffer who enjoys watching lesbian bondage an awful lot, it appears that the new must-have gear that one needs to hike along the Appalachian Trail are a pair of fur-lined handcuffs... From the Daily Beast: "More information please: Under chairman Michael Steele, the RNC spent $1,946.25 at Voyeur West Hollywood, “a bondage-themed nightclub featuring topless women dancers imitating lesbian sex,” says The Daily Caller. The RNC denies that Steele himself visited the club, saying that it was "a reimbursement made to a non-committee staffer." The RNC is also investigating the claim. It’s just one of several lavish expenses that the RNC has incurred under Steele. Others include a $43,828 trip to Hawaii, $17,514 on private jets in February alone, and stays at other hotels like the W, the Venetian, and the Four Seasons." If you could fly in private jets and stay in expensive hotels on someone else's dime, wouldn't you also take advantage? After all, affluent appearances must be kept up...

I remember back in the '60's when we were encouraged not to buy Gallo wine because of their position regarding the farmworker's union of Cesar Chavez. To this day I haven't bought another bottle, even though they since have improved their image and the quality of their wine. Then, students tried to get their universities not to invest in companies that did business with aparteid South Africa. Lately, we are trying to install sanctions on businesses that support Iran's Revolutionary Guard. Now, it looks like Norway and Sweden are boycotting an Israeli arms maker that also makes drones: "The biggest Swedish pension fund said Monday it had barred Israeli arms maker Elbit Systems from its investment portfolios on ethical grounds. Following the lead of Norway's state pension fund, Foersta AP-Fonden said it had banned investment in Elbit because it had built and was operating a surveillance system for a controversial barrier between Israel and the West Bank. Israel says the barrier -- a network of walls, fences and closed military roads -- is designed to prevent attacks. The Palestinians view it as an "apartheid wall" that carves off key parts of their future state." Drones are used to patrol along the barrier, I don't know if they have armaments installed or just use cameras. Yahoo is among the American companies that has expressed their concern to Elbit. I guess we will have to wait awhile until Microsoft gains a conscience or Google does something dramatic...

There was this article in the NY Times about if there is a future investing in Cuba, that had a really cool picture of a man driving a 1952 Cadillac along the malecon: "Although Cuba remains closed to American investment, dreamers in both countries are actively considering the money-making possibilities that the island might offer once the half-century-old travel and trade embargoes imposed by the United States become policies of the past."

The article touts that companies like McDonald's or Coca Cola would have no trouble setting up shop, but Americans would have to have an attitude adjustment: "... banish certain words from their minds — Bay of Pigs, dissidents, Elián González, hijackers and socialism, for instance — and to focus on the fact that the Cuban government had already joined more than 200 joint ventures with foreign corporations, none of them American." But currently, US officials cannot overlook the case of: "jailing an American government contractor, Alan P. Gross, whom the Cubans accuse of espionage but the State Department says was engaged in democracy-building."


Oh, this poor, innocent man, snapped up by the Cuban police for the crime of "democracy-building." So that's what we are calling it these days. He wasn't spying, no, he wasn't engaged in espionage, because that has such a negative connotation, and must be politically incorrect. I wonder if that is one of the progressive changes that Leon Panetta has instituted at the CIA, along with hiring more mercenary groups. Soon we will eradicate the word from our dictionaries, replaced by this more modern phrase that has less negative impact on our foreign neighbors. Perhaps there will be The Democracy Building Awards on MTV, or a rash of new campus groups The Young Democracy Builders. Sadly, we may have to go back and change the titles of some best-loved books and movies, for example, Ian Fleming's The Democracy-Builder Who Loved Me. or Anais Nin's A Democracy Builder in the House of Love... happy reading, oh politically correct ones...