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Help Haiti

My father-in-law felt tremors and was cleaning up broken dishes in his kitchen 300 miles away from Port-au-Prince in La Isabella.   Port-au-Prince is destroyed.

Postbourgie posted this via Ackerman.  It’s only $5, go do it now.

I don't feel terrorized con't

David Rothkopf thinks Obama might be the only person in the United States that got the tenor just right on Captain Underpants, Al-Qaeda and terrorism this holiday season.  Good thing he’s President huh?

“Obama's reaction to the junkbomber incident was precisely right and just what you want from a leader: Dispassionate, thoughtful, and calculated. He gave his team the time to assess the threat, the breaches and the right next steps to take. At least one person in the United States, Barack Obama, seemed to recognize that the objective of terrorism is to promote terror and sought to defuse that effort by handling the threat with the proportionality and common sense that has long been missing from U.S. counterterrorism strategy.”

He goes on to echo what I think was right about Fareed’s commentary on Sunday and how I generally feel about terrorism.  They can’t win unless I’m terrorized and I’m NOT terrorized.

“Fourth, terrorism by definition is only successful if it produces "terror" -- the kind of hysterical over-reaction we are once again seeing -- yet this fact does not seem to have resulted in very many critics toning down their hysteria or shrillness. (The Republican Party has the collective cool on these matters of Prissy helping to birth Melanie's baby in Gone With the Wind.”

It is worth an entire read.  He goes on to talk about what these petty distractions and petulant arm waving really cost our country.  It is significant.  For every moment the GOP and the MSM waste on the semantics of the word War or Terror is one moment that cannot be spent on fixing the real problems that face America.

Colbert brilliance

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War

I’ve seen some real things in my life.   Death, murder, drug addiction, violence, crime.  Growing up when and where I’m from was like watching a never-ending clip of Miami Vice and New Jack City.  We used to affectionately call our hood “Vietnam.” I’m not naïve, pampered or sheltered but looking back now, we had no fucking idea what we were talking about because none of that ghetto nonsense prepared me for the picture I saw out of Iraq, forwarded by Juan Cole on Facebook, from Chris Hedges' TruthDig column, yesterday.  Don’t click on the link to Chris’ article-which is a must read if you can handle it, or the fold below unless you are mentally prepared for a very haunting image.

There will be good news

Juan Cole does one of the few positive look backs on 2009 that I’ve read.  In general, I think we are taking this “if it bleeds, it leads” axiom a little too far lately.  There is such a thing as good news, even in the Middle East.

“Top Ten Good News Stories from the Muslim World in 2009 that You Never Heard About” which include:

10. Saudi Arabia opened its first coeducational college campus

4. Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world at about 230 mn., had successful parliamentary elections in 2009, further consolidating the country's decade-old democracy.

2. Stability returned to Lebanon.

Click through for #1.  It is, in my opinion, the top story to watch in the Middle East in 2010.

What a difference one year makes...

At Plunderbund, the impact and meaning of the “Captain Underpants” attack and President Obama’s change we can believe in.

There is no fear.  No panic.  No alarmism.  Not coming from this White House, not from any authorities, not from the passengers (who seem almost thrilled to be the heroes) and as a result, not even in the media.  Republicans started whining from minute one, and got more whiny the less the White House used their preferred language of belligerence.

Al Qaeda seems almost miffed that we aren’tpanicking.  I can’t really recall Al Qaeda so loudly and immediately claiming credit for any attack, not even 9/11.  And yet, they’ve done so here, praising testicle toaster as a failed martyr, making him a banner headline, because the American response isn’t giving them enough ink.

Anyone else noticing how closely aligned the American Neoconservative and Islamic extremist interests and responses are becoming?  The more Obama takes away both groups’ power of fear and hate over the American people the more apparent it becomes. Look no further than Pat Buchannan calling for the torture of the spoiled rich kid, testicle-less, failed underwear bomber.  He was telling us everything he knows before he got off the plane.  What is the use of torture at this point?  We know information obtained through torture is flawed and generally useless.  What Pat is really advocating for here is punishment.  The Neocons aren't interested in actionable intelligence, only the illusion of its possibility, what they really want is to hurt people, bad.

 

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Of course this humiliation of Al Qaeda will cause them to try even harder in the future and we should remain vigilant and expectant of additional attacks on American soil, but what a difference one year makes.  We’ve lost so much after being governed and controlled by the politics of hate and fear for 8 long years.  One year later, I like the look of the politics of hope and change so much better.

Death to the Dictator

With the death of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri the Iranian people have added another powerful martyr to their cause.  He was Iran’s most senior cleric and an outspoken anti-government voice who promoted the idea of normalized relations with the United States and that dismissed the reelection of Ahmadinejad and the Khamenei government as corrupt and illegitimate in support of the current Green Movement.

A few short months ago the favorite chant of the Iranian people was “Death to America.” That has been irreparably replaced by “Death to the Dictator.”  The government in Iran has beaten, raped and murdered their own people in a fight to keep the same tyrannical control they fought to be rid of in the 70s and the Iranian people are paying attention.

The Iranian government is hopelessly trying to downplay the significance of his death in the state controlled newspaper Kayhan via Enduring America:

"there were “a maximum of about 5000” in the crowd at the Montazeri ceremonies, as reformists “completely failed to create “a popular gathering”

As you can see in the video linked by Andrew Sullivan below the crowds were of course much larger. 

 

What we are witnessing first hand is a government unable and unwilling to adapt to the changing times.  A John McCain Presidency would have signaled a welcome continuation of Bush/Cheney policies for Iran.  America would be very near to or already at war with Iran and imposing strict sanctions that would harm the Iranian people directly giving the illegitimate government of Iran the distractions they so desperately need, in the form of a very familiar American devil, in order to slow the progress of the Green Movement.   

Instead we have President Obama who has inspired the great segments of the Middle East to move towards more mutual understanding and cohabitation, and who seems quite content with letting the Iran government rattle their sabers if it likes, without reaction.   The Iranian government does not know how to respond to this outreach and so it is behaving the same way it did, with great success, during the Bush/Cheney years.  They have test fired missiles, refused to curtail or have their nuclear program inspected, provoked Israel, and in the process of cementing their illegitimacy, committed hellacious human rights violations on its own people.  They are begging for a straw man.  Thankfully the Obama Administration so far has refused to give it to them.

Just a thought

Isn't this exactly why we want to move all GITMO detainees into the United States?

Twelve days ago, Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi was released by the Scottish government. His freedom came two decades after a bomb, which was smuggled on to Pan Am Flight 103, exploded over Lockerbie, killing 11 people on the ground and 259 people on the plane. The only man convicted of the crime, al-Megrahi spent just eight years in prison — less than a fortnight for each victim — and was welcomed back to Tripoli as a returning hero.

and the Earth is more than 6,000 years old.

The science behind Global Warming is irrefutable which I suppose explains why it comes as no surprise that the Bush Administration hid 1000s of satellite images that clearly show the tragic environmental impact.  No WMDs, Global Warming is real, you get the picture?

The Obama administration has released those photos which can be viewed here, you be the judge.

  

Environmental impact aside the social and political impact of Global Warming is already changing the face of our world and impacting its citizens, no matter how resistance the religious and uninterested right-wing of American politics is.

The fifth annual Failed States Index—a collaboration between The Fund for Peace, an independent research organization, and Foreign Policy Magazine details the specific impact in their last section, appropriately titled The Last Straw.  It is worth a complete read.

In 2007, the London-based NGO International Alert compiled a list of countries with a high risk of armed conflict due to climate change. They cited no fewer than 46 countries, or one in every four, including some of the world's most gravely unstable countries, such as Somalia, Nigeria, Iran, Colombia, Bolivia, Israel, Indonesia, Bosnia, Algeria, and Peru. Already, climate change might be behind the deep drought that contributed to the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan and hundreds of thousands of deaths.