AS THE WORLD TURNS

MOMENT OF SILENCE FOR LONGEST
UNDEFENDED BORDER
Americans will soon be patrolling the U.S.-Alberta border with two Black Hawk helicopters and planes equipped with radar units taken from F-16 fighter jets.

SCOUTS TRAIN TO FIGHT TERRORISTS
“This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl,” said A. J. Lowenthal, Imperial County deputy sheriff.

News of Note

Not sure if this is the launch - will try and keep editorial comments to the editorial page but this is the age of stupid... my word people, the inanity!

Canada gets serious about arctic claims of sovereignty

From the NYT's we have a story about Mahmoud Ahmadenejad having a confab with his good neighbors from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Not much word of the official American reaction to this summit.

Here are 2 points of view on the ongoing battles taking place in the Swat Valley from the NYT's and al Jazeera.

British CCTV being all the Big Brother it can be.

From a favourite lefty news blog a story about those mad crazed terrorists they just captured... (breathless) who were going to blow up synygogues and fire missiles at airplanes. Turns out they were stoned, deluded and schizophrenic and led by the nose by an all too willing informant.

China taking steps on eliminating plastic bags that critics said couldn't be done and wouldn't help. They were wrong.

In the holee crap category: Californiapocalypse!

Fareed Zakaria says there's lots you don't know about Iran. To be kind he is writing for Newsweak and his audience is primarily American.

And a story about someone keeping a lending library of "banned books" in his locker, that made me feel good.

Different Angles

Pakistani army closes in on Taliban bastion Mingora

McClatchy reporting a more conventional battle at hand for Taliban

Al Jazeera reporting Taliban firmly in control of Mingora

Cheney "tasked" interrogaters to find Iraq-al Qaida link

The Rocky Mountain News asked Cheney in a Jan. 9, 2004, interview if he stood by his claims that Saddam's regime had maintained a "relationship" with al Qaida, raising the danger that Iraq might give the group chemical, biological or nuclear weapons to attack the U.S.

"Absolutely. Absolutely," Cheney replied.

WORLD NEWS

US Fires Top General In Afghanistan As War Worsens
Iraq Insists On US Leaving Cities By June 30

Prime Minister Harper On Slow Boat To China

Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper may visit China this year to step up a "frank, friendly and forward-looking" relationship, Canadian Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon said in Beijing Tuesday."Canada shows its willingness to engage China in a closer manner in bilateral and multilateral relations so Sino-Canada relations will be promoted towards the right direction," Cannon said during his first visit to China in his current capacity.
In other news
SHANGHAI: A man pleaded guilty here Monday to the murder of Canadian model Diana O'Brien.Chen Jun, 18, said he murdered the 23-year-old in her apartment on the night of July 6, before robbing her of about 11,000 yuan ($1,600) worth of items, including a laptop computer, a camera and a cell phone, the Shanghai No 1 intermediate people's court heard. Chen, who moved to Shanghai from Anhui province in May, said in court that he did not know O'Brien, but chose her because security at her apartment building on Zhaohua Road in the Changning district of Shanghai, was lax.

Shooting Evil People in a Barrel!

Hello there to anyone who stumbles onto our site as we get it ready to launch. I'm making my 1st posts easy by shooting at the ridiculously cartoonish and evil people that made the last 8 years so disturbing. This is John Yoo. He wrote some of the memos used in the justification for bush/cheney to use torture. He is an extra-ordinairy asshole!

Glennzilla:

The fact that John Yoo is a Professor of Law at Berkeley and is treated as a
respectable, serious expert by our media institutions, reflects the complete
destruction over the last eight years of whatever moral authority the United
States possessed. Comporting with long-held stereotypes of two-bit tyrannies,
we’re now a country that literally exempts our highest political officials from
the rule of law, and have decided that there should be no consequences when they
commit serious felonies. John Yoo’s Memorandum, as intended, directly led to —
caused — a whole series of war crimes at both Guantanamo and in Iraq. The reason
such a relatively low-level DOJ official was able to issue such influential and
extraordinary opinions was because he was working directly with, and at the
behest of, the two most important legal officials in the administration: George
Bush’s White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and Dick Cheney’s counsel (and
current Chief of Staff) David Addington. Together, they deliberately created and
authorized a regime of torture and other brutal interrogation methods that are,
by all measures, very serious war crimes. If writing memoranda authorizing
torture — actions which then directly lead to the systematic commission of
torture — doesn’t make one a war criminal in the U.S., what does?

Good question!

Here are some questions and thoughts on the matter from Naomi Wolf. This bit is telling:

...of the recently departed bush administration: asserts Bush's right
to do whatever he wants to innocent US citizens in this kind of custody, and
rejects the notion that Congress would have any role in how US citizens are held
or treated -- say, by the hypothetically deployed military - on US soil. It
seems also to claim the right to hold innocent US citizens in domestic military
custody while Bush has the right to do anything he wants to them. Anything he
wants. Remember this is an administration in which Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld and
Cheney have now been proven by Jameel Jaffer's revelations in Administration of Torture to have known about
and okay'd not just waterboarding as a policy but ok'd the discretion for
interrogators to use tactics such as electrodes attached to genitals, sexual
assault, threats against family members, suffocation, the beating of prisoners'
legs to "pulp," and in some cases the covering up of their murders. This memo
gives Bush the authority to do those things if he wants to innocent US
citizens.

Back soon with more "Kicking evil people in the nads... because this is the intertubes and we can!

It's the age of stupid and Michelle Bachmann is its standard-bearer.

The face of the republican party!

"I believe that there is a very strong chance that we will see that young people will be put into mandatory service. And the real concerns is that there are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums."

“The big thing we are working on now is the global warming hoax. It’s all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax.” [3/15/08]

“[T]here isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas. There isn’t one such study because carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas, it is a harmless gas. Carbon dioxide is natural. It is not harmful. It is part of Earth’s life cycle.” [4/22/09]

“And the science indicates that human activity is not the cause of all this global warming. And that in fact, nature is the cause, with solar flares, etc.” [3/22/09]

“I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us, having a revolution every now and then is a good thing.” [3/22/09]

“I came away with the idea that [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] is the most perfect place on the planet to drill.” [8/13/08]

Rep Michelle Bachmann (R MN)

Welcome to the Grand Opening

Greetings one and all!
Be one of the first to visit the new blog for Karl Knox's radio show on CJLO radio 1690 on the am dial. Featuring a hard look at the media and commentary by Karl Knox, Panic, Rick and others to be roped in.
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New Media and Politics