PBS Newshour looks at the post 9/11 counter-terrorism efforts of businesses like Mall of America that are now constantly on the look out for “suspicious persons”…
Pretty scary thought that while innocently shopping, you could be buttonholed by a bunch of idiotic mall cops, interrogated for the better part of an hour and potentially wind up having your name entered into a police database as a “suspicious person” for no legitimate reason whatsoever.
And who knows what the ramifications that might be in terms of the information subsequently being passed on from there to other government agencies? Heck, you might even end up on the FBI’s dreaded “No Fly List” that is currently estimated to contain over one million names (i.e., 1 in every 300 people in America).
An irresistibly cute photo of a piglet wearing boots was forwarded millions of times by unwitting Americans, wreaking havoc on computer networks across the country and forcing the near collapse of Internet servers.
Just as ridiculous, insane Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi has resorted to blaming Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda operatives for helping foment the revolution in his country by spiking the rebels’ Nescafé with hallucinogenic drugs.
Following the backlash to his obviously false claim on Friday’s GMA that there were “no domestic attacks under Bush,” Rudy Giuliani issued a statement through a spokesbot saying that the remark “didn’t come across as it was intended” and that the former mayor was “clearly talking post-9/11 with regards to Islamic terrorist attacks on our soil.” Oh yes, clearly. The problem however, is that he’s still lying …
I’m not sure what’s worse, mendacious sacks of shit like Giuliani or the docile media slackers like George Stephanopoulos who freely allow them to dissemble and attempt to rewrite history on their broadcasts.
On Fox News yesterday, retired Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney advocated with dead seriousness that in order to prevent future terror attacks on commercial flights, all Muslim men between the ages of 18 to 28 years old be strip searched at airports. How exactly one determines the religious faith of passengers wasn’t revealed in McInerney’s cunning plan — it is conceivable, after all, that if asked, they could actually lie about this salient bit of profiling information… Also not made clear was how or why the suicidally terroristic effects of Islamic “radicalization” threatening the global air transportation system apparently disappear in young Muslim men upon their turning 29.
Even the Fox anchor was somewhat stunned by the catastrophic insanity of this ridiculous scheme, pointing out the likelihood of a hostile backlash of resentment from the widespread group of people McInerney proposes be routinely humiliated for probative scrutiny by airport security.
Aside from McInerney simply being completely mad, Chris in DC has a more intriguing theory about what may be motivating the general’s “new and exciting effort to ‘be very serious and harsh’ towards these well-tanned, exotic males.”
Rachel Maddow resoundingly demolishes the Republican’s lying, hypocritical douchebaggery in response to last week’s attempted terror attack.
As for Dick Cheney’s latest mendacious tirade, perhaps this recent piece from James Fallows says it best: “The former vice president, Dick Cheney, has brought dishonor to himself, his office, and his country. I am not aware of a case of a former President or Vice President behaving as despicably as Cheney has done in the ten months since leaving power…. Cheney has acted as if utterly unconcerned with the welfare of his country, its armed forces, or the people now trying to make difficult decisions. He has put narrow score-settling interest far, far above national interest.”
Why the right-wing continues to venerate this utterly disgraceful coward, completely escapes me.
Political Tourettes Update: On yesterday’s Ed Show Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) delivered a stinging rebuke and challenge to Cheney.
So come on Dick, man up and debate Massa on Fox or wherever. I’m sure lots of folks would pay to see that contest.
This clip spanning a mere 11 minutes of coverage from last night’s ABC World News broadcast is quite remarkable if for no other reason that it manages to seamlessly condense so many controversial and highly-charged memes into such a short space of time.
First up to bat was more information on the Obama administration’s evolving, tougher response to the foiled “Terror Plot” on Christmas, including speculation about possible head-rolling accountability to come following the inter-agency blame game and teasing suggestions of retaliatory cruise missile and/or drone strikes against “Al Queda” Monkey Bar 101 “training camps” that might soon be forthcoming in the failing and hitherto entirely obscure country of Yemen.
This was followed by a segment called “Show Me the Money” describing how the tens of billions of dollars spent since 9/11 to beef up aviation security is still woefully inadequate to the task for various reasons… Again, plenty of blame to spread around for the “business as usual” attitude; from profit-hungry, corner-cutting airlines and persnickety civil rights groups, to witless government agencies hopelessly enmeshed in bureaucratic red tape.
Finally, the Disney network’s ABC’s suave new anchor turned our attention to the purportedly mysterious and apparently vexing questions concerning the so-called “radicalization” of lonely, gullible youngsters that we’re told is becoming increasingly prevalent in this “new age of terror.” Here the coverage rapidly evolved from the provocative but unanswerable initial query as to why “a son of privilege and education” would become a terrorist into a nullifying discussion about the merits of racial profiling.
Phew! I’d remind you that this blizzard of terra-related stuff was all crammed into slightly more time than it takes to smoke a cigarette. Is it any wonder that people these days can’t really make sense of current events or sensibly put the news in any sort of meaningful context when so much superficial information, feckless opinion and elliptical speculation is packaged in such a useless, uninsightful, and ultimately agitating format?
Ever since the massacre at Fort Hood — within minutes of the shooter’s name being released, it seems — right-wing pundits (most notably those on Fox News, but also the usual suspects on the web and elsewhere) have been aggressively pushing the assertion that Major Nidal Hassan was a self-radicalized “terrorist” or “jihadist” and that the shootings constituted an act of “Islamic terrorism.” Anyone refusing to automatically endorse this viewpoint is regarded as being unutterably naïve or even worse, politically correct.
Appearing this morning on Fox & Friends, criminal profiler Pat Brown refutes this notion and makes a pretty compelling case that, in her opinion, Hassan was nothing more than “a psychopath who’s failed in his life” and who merely used religion to justify and validate his actions.
So, why does the right-wing find it so incredibly difficult to accept the possibility that Hassan may simply be a lone “nutcase” (to use Brown’s description)?
From the AP: “Trillions of dollars in government spending might stabilize the economy, but for now it may have weakened some U.S. Security interests abroad and hampered the nation’s ability to respond financially to an attack at home.”
Actually, I heard Bill Maher propose something similar on the Tavis Smiley program the other night. It sounds a little paranoid perhaps, but certainly not implausible.
John Yoo, a former member of the Justice Department who wrote the first rationalization that torture is legal, said in the Wall Street Journal that the United States must torture people and referred to it as the Bush system.
