On the one hand, I am glad that Maurice Clemmons is no longer a threat to anyone, but I just wish he hadn’t been running away when he was shot.  But if I were a police officer in that position, I doubt I would have waited as long as that lone officer did to open fire.

While I worry often about how police may abuse their power and what that does to a free society, this isn’t one of those times.  Fine, so I’m not enlightened.

Mike Huckabee has been fingered as being responsible for Clemmons’ release, and many on the right are standing firmly behind Huckabee telling him that this was not his fault, and to a degree they are right.  And were it not for ads like this or this, I might not be so inclined to place blame on him.

But if conservatives are only OK with pointing these things out against Democrats, maybe they shouldn’t be shoveling so much sh*t all the time.

Compared to say, oh, invading Iraq, you might think that using a word too often really wouldn’t be that big of a deal.  But you’d be wrong then, wouldn’t you, as none other than the oh-so-fair and balanced team at Fox News has come out swinging at this obvious violation of…. something.

Of course if they want to go down this route, we could always ask George Bush to say the word “Nuclear.” 

But what did the last President sound like, it’s been so long now…

Good call Fox News, make fun of the President that can actually pronounce words.

The idea that corporations would not willingly and happily kill orphans and indeed anybody and grind them up if that would bring them more profits seems like something that no one on the Friedman side ever notices, but thankfully we have stories about grotesque violations that occur even now to rebut the moronic ideals of having completely free and unregulated markets like this little beauty.

From Courthouse News Service

by Melissa Thomas

CINCINNATI - An elementary school has been shut for 4 years because of carcinogenic fumes from a nearby plastics plant, and the lost classroom space is crowding other schools. The Three Rivers Board of Education says Ineos ABS and Lanxess Corp. polluted the air at Meredith Hitchens Elementary School so badly the Ohio EPA told the superintendent that rooftop monitors “revealed that two chemicals from the plastics plant across the street were drifting over the school at levels that made the risk of cancer 50 times higher than what the state considers acceptable.” 
     

Three Rivers says the situation is especially alarming because children are “especially susceptible to toxic chemicals. Long exposure to some chemicals can exacerbate asthma, trigger learning disabilities or lead to cancer years later.”

 

Link to full story

PDF of court filing

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 Only 50 times higher than safe levels?  Well that will just thin the heard, and the children that do manage to survive will be of stronger stock.  Why capitalism just makes us stronger as a species by killing off the weak.  That is why the health care industry is so vital – it is not there to help people, it is there to force people to help themselves (or die trying)!

And what could be better than that.

This interview sort of makes one wonder why we bothered to negotiate with North Korea, Iran, and Iraq with those worthless pieces of paper from the previous administration.

Talk about a softball interview, was Bolton paying for the damn thing?

You have to give the crazy reaction award to Iran though, they seemed a bit peeved by the latest IAEA report, and so naturally have announced that they will be building 10 new nuclear enrichment plants.  The announcement may be just bluster though, as Iran will later scale back their announcement, and then seek praise for “only” wanting to open up three more enrichment facilities.  Or maybe none at all, just think of all the credit they would be due then.

I guess most of us wouldn’t be quite so worried about what Iran planned on doing were it not for Iranian government rallies like this one.

A HUGE portion of the population of Afghanistan isn’t really all that happy that we are there, so this idiot’s idea is to never have an exit strategy?  Excuse me, but didn’t the Republicans keep saying that we should never announce our exit from Iraq, and now that we have, they seem happy that we are leaving them?  True, President Bush completely reversed himself by actually giving a timeline as to when we would leave Iraq, but that’s OK, he’s a conservative.

So good luck soldiers, you will no doubt be pawns in the 2010 election as both parties try and act tough, regardless of the results of such talk.  Sure, Iraq was a “huge success,” and all we had to do was pay protection money.  As long as we ignore the near daily bombings of political rivals, then everything is just peachy.  And we look to be trying to repeat at least some of that plan in Afghanistan.

From SwissInfo:
 

The Swiss have approved a ban on the construction of new minarets, according to incomplete results of voting on Sunday.

The gfs.bern polling institute said an estimated 59 per cent of voters had backed the initiative. A majority of cantons were also in support of a minaret ban.

The result, if confirmed, comes as a major surprise and a slap in the face of the government. Opinion polls ahead of the vote had predicted the ban would be rejected by 53 per cent of the electorate.

…Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf had argued strongly against a ban on minaret construction.

“The initiative is a kind of ‘proxy war’. Its supporters say they are against minarets. But they want to fight what they consider creeping Islamicisation and sharia law,” she said ahead of the vote.

Opponents warned that approval of the proposal would fuel Islamic extremism and damage Switzerland’s image abroad, particularly in the Muslim world.

Supporters of a ban argued minarets are a symbol of an Islamic claim to power.

“The Islamic religion is intolerant, but we do not want to limit freedom of religion, we want to outlaw the political symbol,” says Ulrich Schlüer, a member of the right-wing Swiss People’s party and one of the leading promoters of the anti-minaret initiative.

The group says it is time to act now before Christian values are undermined and violence flares in Muslim ghettos as in neighbouring European states.

Supporters claim there is public concern about the growing Muslim community in Switzerland, radical imams, the role of women, as well as head scarves and other dress codes.

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First (mini) riots in Geneva, and now this.  Do they still make chocolate there, or has that changed as well?  Well, at least we know now (now know?) that we are not the only country that can overreact to a perceived threat.  I mean if the Swiss can do it, anyone can.  Though come to think of it, I can’t ever remember seeing a minaret in our own borders, not even in the 20th century before everything went crazy.

Looking over at a crazy-ass Christian web site, it seems that there may indeed be minarets in the U.S., and they aim to stop them! 

Is it just me, or is no one thinking about the fact that the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists?  Maybe that fact slipped by them.  It slips by our news services and any politicians stoking the fires of fear often enough. 

And sometimes I suppose it slips by me too.

Back in July, even a dolt like myself went to the trouble of looking back at why the Spanish Flu of last century took such a heavy toll, and the answer was in plain sight.  Secondary infections were actually responsible for most of the deaths, after people had been weakened by the Spanish Flu itself.

So it is actually a bit worrying that only now am I seeing stories stating that pneumonia infections are also a problem for our latest pandemic, though as pandemics go this one seems thankfully not all that powerful.  The danger is real, and deaths will occur, but then people die of regular flu as well and no one really seems to bother so much with that.

While pneumonia is no longer as dreaded as it once was, the danger is the same- that people who have already been weakened by the swine flu will fall prey to a secondary infection.  And those without insurance will of course go to hospitals, wait for 12 hours, and be released most likely without being cured of anything.  But hey, who needs real health care reform, the richest country in the world that can buy all the weapons it wants without worrying about how to pay for them simply cannot afford to have a basic health care system, that would make us commies.

Sure, plenty of other countries have single-payer or even full on socialized medicine, and we of course despise those countries for being commie bastards.  You know, countries like England, Canada, etc.  Clearly those people do not know how bad they have it, they even seem to like their health care system, those poor beguiled fools.  They cannot see clearly and objectively like so many in the land of the free, whose citizens fight valiantly so that insurance companies can make a ton of money off of them, then point to the “profit ratio” of the insurance companies as proof that those corporations are already on thin ice as it is.  We seem to sort of ignore the part where 30% of every dollar goes to administrative costs (and so therefore is not a profit), but we like rewarding the CEO’s who work so hard to f**k us over.

Whatever health care ”reform” that is coming out will undoubtedly fill the coffers of many a happy CEO and staff, and hey, isn’t that what our legislature is for?  To ensure that we will be raped by profiteers that make nice commercials, and then this ensures that those same legislators will keep receiving the lobbying money that they so desperately need in order to win the next election and represent us.

The real infection is the amount of money being spent by the companies that hire every blood-sucking parasite of a lobbyist to control how bills will be written.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Iran really doesn’t have much of a history of cooperating when it didn’t want to.  Of course, neither do we. 

From PressTV Iran via China’s CCTV News. 

And Iran’s response

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One cannot help but get the feeling that no matter what the international community tries to do, it will only delay Iran getting their own nuclear device.  For Pete’s sake, they’re turning down offers from other countries willing to refine uranium for them, you would think that even if they had to pay for the service, that they would save a ton of money by not having to further develop and implement their own refining technology.

The report says it as plainly as can be; That our failure to capture of kill Bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora has been a f**k-up of the first magnitude.  And how the strategy of both Rumsfeld and General Franks risked far too much in order to keep a “light footprint” in a region where now our presence has been increased dramatically.  And Bin Laden was within our grasp, it seems that he just wasn’t important enough of a target to deviate from the strategy we had in place, yeah, good decision on that one.  I can’t believe that Republicans still run on the “strong defense” and “we’ll keep you safe” horse manure that they spread at election time.

No doubt this report will be dismissed by the conservatives, and they can whine about it all they want to.  They are the ones that decided to let Bin Laden escape, and there is no getting around that fact.

PDF of Senate Report

Excerpt from the summary

...Removing the Al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat. But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide.

The failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism, leaving the American people more vulnerable to terrorism, laying the foundation for today’s protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan. Al Qaeda shifted its locus across the border into Pakistan, where it has trained extremists linked to numerous plots, including the July 2005 transit bombings in London and two recent aborted attacks involving people living in the United States.

The terrorist group’s resurgence in Pakistan has coincided with the rising violence orchestrated in Afghanistan by the Taliban, whose leaders also escaped only to re-emerge to direct today’s increasingly lethal Afghan insurgency.

This failure and its enormous consequences were not inevitable.  By early December 2001, Bin Laden’s world had shrunk to a complex of caves and tunnels carved into a mountainous section of eastern Afghanistan known as Tora Bora. Cornered in some of the most forbidding terrain on earth, he and several hundred of his men, the largest concentration of Al Qaeda fighters of the war, endured relentless pounding by American aircraft, as many as 100 air strikes a day. One 15,000-pound bomb, so huge it had to be rolled out the back of a C-130 cargo plane, shook the mountains for miles.  It seemed only a matter of time before U.S. troops and their Afghan allies overran the remnants of Al Qaeda hunkered down in the thin, cold air at 14,000 feet.

Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Homepage

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Heck of a job, Rummy.

You never really think of Geneva as a rowdy, crazy place, but protesters have broken windows, and set cars on fire protesting the World Trade Organization meeting. 

As much as I am for the freedom to protest, rampant destruction of random targets is probably not the best path to change how things are.