“The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it’s Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don’t do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, “See, we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you Iran wasn’t getting nuclear weapons in order to use them immediately.”
Monthly Archives: December 2011
Obama Lawyers: Killing U.S. Citizens Allied With Al Qaeda is an Executive Decision
The U.S. may target and kill U.S. citizens when they take up arms with al-Qaeda, top lawyers in the Obama administration said Thursday.
CIA counsel Stephen Preston and Pentagon counsel Jeh Johnson were questioned at a national security conference about the drone strike that killed American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, but they would not comment on it specifically. They did say U.S. citizens don’t have legal rights when they side with al-Qaeda.
Johnson maintained that only the executive branch, not the courts, can decide who qualifies as an enemy on a battlefield. Unfortunately for U.S. citizens, the secret, peremptory nature of such executive decisions is not up to a review of any kind and do not require that any evidence be put forth proving the individual’s guilt or association with al-Qaeda.
(Read more)
***
Here is a list of who voted for this monstrosity in the Senate. The seven no votes came from:
Coburn (R-OK)
Harkin (D-IA)
Lee (R-UT)
Merkley (D-OR)
Paul (R-KY)
Sanders (I-VT)
Wyden (D-OR)
The 93 other senators voted for it. Terror! Terror! Terror! “War is the health of the state.”
Gingrich: Gov. Should Allow Terror Attacks To Remind People How Much We Need Them
psychopath.
I think all those “prevented” attacks he mentions were examples of the FBI thwarting their own terror plots.
SA@TheDC – The Terrorists Have Won
Gingrich Backed Everything the Right Hated About the Bush Years
Here’s a fun game. Let’s think of all the stuff conservatives say they hated about George W. Bush’s time in office.
No Child Left Behind? Newt Gingrich supported it.
Medicare Part D, the new prescription drug entitlement? Newt Gingrich favored it.
TARP? Newt Gingrich cheered for it.
The Harriet Miers nomination? Newt Gingrich predicted success.
Comprehensive immigration reform? Newt Gingrich endorsed it.
Then there’s “the surge,” Bush’s Iraq war turnaround strategy that conservatives love to laud. Gingrich opposed that.
So what gives?
The former House speaker’s surge makes no sense. The conservative base that was energized partly by fatigue at eight years of Bush missteps is rallying around the candidate who favored them all. What a bizarre turn. (Read more)
Newt to Pelosi: Better not tell on me!!!
How the hell is this guy the front runner?
Hey, Remember When Newt Gingrich Was Sponsored By a Human Chip-Implant Company?
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich once spoke at an Alzheimer’s conference sponsored by PositiveID (PSID), the human microchip implant company that came under fire for injecting 200 Alzheimer’s patients with wireless chips in Florida without properly obtaining their consent.
The issue of whether Americans should receive subcutaneous wireless RFID chip implants that can link to their electronic medical records emerged again in Wisconsin this week, where former governor and Bush Administration secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson is considering a run for Senate. Thompson was a former board member of VeriChip, the company that renamed itself PositiveID, and once appeared on CNBC with PositiveID CEO Scott Silverman to advocate that everyone receive a chip from birth: (Read more)
Print|Email Republican Jewish Coalition Bars Ron Paul From Presidential Debate, Saying He’s Too “misguided and extreme”
On Wednesday, Dec. 7, the Republican Jewish Coalition will host a presidential-candidates forum featuring Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum. Not invited is the GOP candidate currently polling around third in New Hampshire and second in Iowa: Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). The explanation:
Paul was not invited to attend the RJC’s candidates forum because the organization – as it has stated numerous times in the past – “rejects his misguided and extreme views,” said [RJC Executive Director Matt] Brooks.
“He’s just so far outside of the mainstream of the Republican party and this organization,” Brooks said. Inviting Paul to attend would be “like inviting Barack Obama to speak.”
. . . .
Anti Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman has a perhaps unintentionally interesting take about Paul, U.S. politics, and Israel:
with the exception of Ron Paul, there is not much difference between the parties
Peter Schiff: Krugman Reveals Krugmonomics Fails Even in Small Elite Liberal NYC Neighborhood
Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion in Profit Undisclosed to Congress
The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.
The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.
Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse. (Read more)
Change: whereas Bush fought his wars out in the open and with Congressional approval, Obama fights them covertly and with no public discussion, debate or accountability
today we have a column from The New York Times‘ Roger Cohen (presumably no relation) that accomplishes that task with even more stunning (though equally unintentional) brilliance.
Cohen observes, quite rightly, that President Obama — who repeatedly vowed to usher in The Most Transparent Administration Ever — has taken U.S. foreign policy almost completely underground and draped it in sweeping, anti-democratic secrecy:
The Obama administration has a doctrine. It’s called the doctrine of silence. A radical shift from President Bush’s war on terror, it has never been set out to the American people. There has seldom been so big a change in approach to U.S. strategic policy with so little explanation. . . . President Obama has gone undercover.
So finally, after a long search, we have discovered a “change” from Bush’s foreign policy: whereas Bush fought his wars out in the open and with Congressional approval, Obama fights them covertly and with no public discussion, debate or accountability: he’s “undercover.” Cohen lists the numerous covert wars the Obama administration is fighting — meaning wars fought without a whiff of public debate or even acknowledgement — including in Iran, Pakistan, and Yemen (he could have added Somalia). Referring to the numerous murders of Iran’s nuclear scientists (and sometimes wounding of their wives), Terrorist explosions routinely taking place in that country, and cyber attacks on their facilities, Cohen points out that it “would take tremendous naïveté to believe these events are not the result of a covert American-Israel” effort (Read more)
After Getting Groped By The TSA, I May Just Vote For Ron Paul
The U.S. is rapidly turning into a police state, as Canada’s Calgary Herald recently pointed out in an excellent op-ed penned by Kris Kotarski.
How dare we condemn human rights abuses in the Middle East when we treat productive members of our own society — frequent business travelers — like drug mules and felons.
The TSA is unconstitutional. Security at the expense of our most basic freedoms is not freedom at all.
I’ve disagreed with some of Ron Paul’s economic views . . . he is the ONLY CANDIDATE who seems to care that our civil rights have been egregiously rolled back over the past decade.
This alone makes him worth my vote. And I can’t in good conscience vote for President Obama’s re-election.
Netanyahu blasts Arab Spring
But time has proved him right, Netanyahu said. His forecast that the Arab Spring would turn into an “Islamic, anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli and anti-democratic wave” turned out to be true, he said.
Netanyahu also slammed Western leaders, and especially U.S. President Barak Obama, who had pushed Mubarak to resign from power. At the time this was happening Netanyahu said in closed talks that the American administration and many European leaders don’t understand reality. On Wednesday, he called them “naive.”
“I ask today, who here didn’t understand reality? Who here didn’t understand history?” he called from the Knesset podium. “Israel is facing a period of instability and uncertainty in the region. This is certainly not the time to listen to those who say follow your heart.”
Netanyahu used the upheaval in the Arab world to justify his government’s inaction vis-a-vis the peace process with the Palestinians. (Read more)
Iceland recognizes Palestinian Sovereignty
Translation here.
Nearly 100% of all military court cases in West Bank end in conviction, Haaretz learns
Kangaroo Court.
Virtually all – 99.74 percent, to be exact – of cases heard by the military courts in the territories end in a conviction, according to data in the military courts’ annual report, which has been obtained by Haaretz.
The report also shows that the military appeals courts decidedly favor the prosecution, with appeals court judges accepting 67 percent of appeals filed by the prosecution, as opposed to only 33 percent of appeals filed by the defense. (Read more)