Cantor Couldn’t Buy His Reelection

Buffalo

Supporting the troops is a nice mantra in Washington. But this past week has proved it’s all bunk.

Our View: Demonizing the Bergdahls
June 08, 2014 2:00 am • Times-News Editorial Board

The rush was on to blast the White House last week and congressional Republicans couldn’t care less who got hurt. But the fact that Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl and his parents, Bob and Jani, were the collateral damage in the GOP’s ruthless campaign to lampoon President Obama is vile.

For five years, lawmakers on the Hill blasted the Obama administration over the Hailey native’s continued Taliban confinement. It only took a few hours following his release last Saturday before Fox News talking heads had Bergdahl labeled a traitor or even a collaborator. Some literally called for blood.

Meanwhile, Republican powerhouses, such as Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, were lambasting the administration for swapping five Guantanamo Bay prisoners for Bergdahl. The five are the “Taliban Dream Team,” Graham said. McCain, only a few months before Bergdahl’s release, told CNN he would support a swap much like the one that got the only American prisoner of war out of captivity. His pivot, and the rest of his party’s, is about attacking the president. Bergdahls be damned. They’re expendable, says the national Republican machine.

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Bergdahl’s parents, too, are nothing but fodder for the 24-hour noise machine. Bob Bergdahl’s beard is too long, apparently, and his Twitter too “ethnic.” The Bergdahls don’t pass the litmus test for true “Americanism,” say the screechers. Sure, they haven’t suffered enough. Let’s torture them a little more. Hailey can’t even hold a celebration for Bergdahl’s release. The enraged zealots were going to crash the party.

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MORE:
http://magicvalley.com/news/opinion/editorial/article_8a5920ce-84a1-5d7a-8dda-1fb1ebafc115.html#.U5SyKgCKDIw.twitter

see, it's simple: "Good Beard or Bad Beard"?

CIA might try & LOL away its record-BUT-world STILL dealing with consequences of CIA's interventions

Owen Jones at The Guardian declares in The CIA's cute first tweet can't cover its bloody tracks:

In the latest CIA coup, America's leading spooks have sent the Twittersphere into a frenzy with their chucklesome debut on social media: "We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet." How droll! More than a quarter of a million people have retweeted what has been described as "the best first tweet possible". No wonder: it's one of the world's most secretive organisations being self-deprecating, light-hearted, even – dare I say it?—cute.

Here's a story that isn't quite so cute. My parents were among many South Yorkshire families who took in refugees fleeing Augusto Pinochet's Chile in the 1970s. Sylvia was a Chilean woman with two kids. Her husband had been murdered, she had been tortured and – traumatised – she would end her life by jumping from a Sheffield tower block.

Here was just one victim of a junta installed on 11 September 1973 with CIA support after Henry Kissinger declared: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a county go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people." Dissidents had electrodes attached to their genitals. Thousands were killed, including those crammed into Santiago's National Stadium; among then was Victor Jara – Latin America's answer to Bob Dylan. This was the other 9/11, and the CIA's fingerprints were all over it. [...]

The CIA might try and LOL away its record, but given the world is still dealing with the consequences of its many disastrous postwar interventions, it shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. "Terrorism" is normally used when referring to acts of violence committed by non-white people hostile to the west. But if we're understanding the term to mean acts of terror committed for political ends, then the CIA is surely the greatest terrorist organisation on earth.


the rest:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/08/cia-first-tweet-torture

NOT possible to imagine historians will look back at Obama’s presidency & conclude not much got done

… On January 20, 2009, when Obama delivered his inaugural address as president, he outlined his coming domestic agenda in two sentences summarizing the challenges he identified: “Homes have been lost, jobs shed, businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly, our schools fail too many, and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.” Those were the four major areas of domestic reform: economic recovery measures, health-care reform, a response to climate change, and education reform… With the announcement of the largest piece of his environmental program last Monday, Obama has now accomplished major policy responses on all these things. There is enormous room left to debate whether Obama’s agenda in all these areas qualifies as good or bad, but “ineffectual” seems as though it should be ruled out at this point…

All of Obama’s domestic reforms involved compromises and imperfections, a quality they have in common with every major accomplishment in history. Also like the major accomplishments of the past, Obama’s will undergo future revision. All will continue to generate some level of conservative recrimination — one can still find conservatives here and there determined to phase out Social Security or outlaw the U.S. income tax. Most of them will recede into the backdrop of the policy landscape and eventually serve as the baseline against which to portray future liberals as the true radicals, just as Republicans now embrace Medicare. It is also possible that the remaining two and a half years will envelop Obama in some kind of disaster, like Iran-Contra, Vietnam, or Watergate. What’s no longer possible is to imagine that historians will look back at Obama’s presidency and conclude not much got done.


MORE:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/06/obama-has-now-fulfilled-his-4-big-promises.html

Australian man arrested for driving drunk on beer cooler

Australian man arrested for driving drunk on beer cooler
22-year-old detained driving down middle of Perth street on a motorised ice box while under influence of alcohol




A 22-year-old man in Australia has been arrested for drunk driving after he was caught riding a motorised drink cooler in the middle of a suburban street.

Police spotted the man riding a motorised cooler – known in Australia as an esky – on a road in Perth about 8pm on Friday night. He was found to be under the influence of alcohol.

Police said the vehicle was potentially dangerous and that the cooler contained alcohol.

"This motor vehicle would only be able to travel at very low speeds, the lighting devices on said vehicle would be negligible and make it very difficult for other motorists to see," police said in a statement.


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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/10886137/Australian-man-arrested-for-driving-drunk-on-beer-cooler.html

KRUGMAN:...think about global warming from the point of view of someone who grew up taking Ayn Rand

Interests, Ideology And Climate
JUNE 8, 2014
Paul Krugman

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I’ve been looking into that issue and have come to the somewhat surprising conclusion that it’s not mainly about the vested interests. They do, of course, exist and play an important role; funding from fossil-fuel interests has played a crucial role in sustaining the illusion that climate science is less settled than it is. But the monetary stakes aren’t nearly as big as you might think. What makes rational action on climate so hard is something else — a toxic mix of ideology and anti-intellectualism.

.......................... think about global warming from the point of view of someone who grew up taking Ayn Rand seriously, believing that the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest is always good and that government is always the problem, never the solution. Along come some scientists declaring that unrestricted pursuit of self-interest will destroy the world, and that government intervention is the only answer. It doesn’t matter how market-friendly you make the proposed intervention; this is a direct challenge to the libertarian worldview.

And the natural reaction is denial — angry denial. Read or watch any extended debate over climate policy and you’ll be struck by the venom, the sheer rage, of the denialists.

The fact that climate concerns rest on scientific consensus makes things even worse, because it plays into the anti-intellectualism that has always been a powerful force in American life, mainly on the right. It’s not really surprising that so many right-wing politicians and pundits quickly turned to conspiracy theories, to accusations that thousands of researchers around the world were colluding in a gigantic hoax whose real purpose was to justify a big-government power grab. After all, right-wingers never liked or trusted scientists in the first place.

So the real obstacle, as we try to confront global warming, is economic ideology reinforced by hostility to science. In some ways this makes the task easier: we do not, in fact, have to force people to accept large monetary losses. But we do have to overcome pride and willful ignorance, which is hard indeed.


MORE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/opinion/krugman-interests-ideology-and-climate.html?emc=edit_th_20140609&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=10489823&_r=0



Updated to add toon:

Its about white supremacy, pure and simple.

SUN JUN 08, 2014 AT 09:29 AM PDT
Getting right down to the pure essence of the gun movement
bybrooklynbadboyFollow


Wonderful little quote in the Dallas Morning News about the latest iteration of gun freakdom:

OK DU - a MUST caption...