No.[1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]
Source: IsBarackObamaMuslim.com
Just in case you get one of those emails….
The banana we eat today is not the one your grandparents ate. That one – known as the Gros Michel – was, by all accounts, bigger, tastier, and hardier than the variety we know and love, which is called the Cavendish. The unavailability of the Gros Michel is easily explained: it is virtually extinct.
Introduced to our hemisphere in the late 19th century, the Gros Michel was almost immediately hit by a blight that wiped it out by 1960. The Cavendish was adopted at the last minute by the big banana companies – Chiquita and Dole – because it was resistant to that blight, a fungus known as Panama disease. For the past fifty years, all has been quiet in the banana world. Until now.
Most people don’t realize that the banana (as we know and recognize) is, and always has been, a man-made fruit — the result of many, many generations of careful selective breeding. A real natural banana looks like this:
Don’t tell that to Kirk Cameron and friend, though, who think the banana (as we know it) was created by God:
So, as loyal readers know, a few weeks ago, I went to the SomethingStore, a website where you pay $10 and they send you something. You don’t know what it will be.
I blogged about it here.
So what did I get? This…
I got everything in the picture above, except the iPod. That’s right. I got a universal iPod charger.
Which is great, seeing as I have an iPod. I also already have, however, an iPod charger.
Cost of this ten-dollar treat? Well, prices vary, but you can get it at Amazon for $6.22, not including tax and shipping.
All I can say is this….
Apparently, Michelle Obama was at a forum where she made a reference to "whitey". Apparently, there is video, but it’s not been broadcast —
Let’s assume that the tape exists. Moreover, let’s assume that Michelle used the word "whitey". Does it matter what context? Was she being facitious?
UPDATE: Booman Tribune (who hasn’t seen the tape) has an interesting theory: that Michelle said "Why’d he…" instead of "Whitey":
From what I understand, it is a tape of Michelle Obama criticizing the Bush administration.
How you’d write it:
Why did Bush cut folks off medicaid?
Why did Bush let New Orleans drown?
Why did Bush do nothing about Jena?
Why did Bush put us in Iraq for no reason?How you’d say it:
Why’d he cut folks off medicaid?
Why’d he let New Orleans drown?
Why’d he do nothing about Jena?
Why’d he put us in Iraq for no reason?How Larry Johnson wants you to hear it:
Whitie cut folks off medicaid?
Whitie let New Orleans drown?
Whitie do nothing about Jena?
Whitie put us in Iraq for no reason?
Funny….
And moreover, does anyone thing that this has any bearing on Barack Obama’s views? The man is, after all, half-whitey himself.
More to come… I’m sure.
Looks like Hillary is going to throw in the towel tomorrow:
Members of Hillary Clinton’s advance staff received calls and emails this evening from headquarters summoning them to New York City Tuesday night, and telling them their roles on the campaign are ending, two Clinton staffers tell my colleague Amie Parnes.
The advance staffers — most of them now in Puerto Rico, South Dakota, and Montana — are being given the options of going to New York for a final day Tuesday, or going home, the aides said. The move is a sign that the campaign is beginning to shed — at least — some of its staff. The advance staff is responsible for arranging the candidate’s events around the country.
But maybe not:
I’m not quite convinced that this is indicative of anything significant. With the last of the primaries wrapping up tomorrow, the Clinton campaign’s focus will shift to either a) ending the campaign and stepping aside; or b) investing time and resources in convincing Obama delegates to switch their commitments.
Given this, it stands to reason that Clinton will need a much smaller advance staff. Whether she’s in the race for three more days or three more months, these aren’t the kind of staffers she’ll need. Just because she’s scaling back in this department doesn’t necessarily point to a pending withdrawal.
My guess? Probably just scaling back….
But still…. by most counts, Barack Obama is about 46 delegates shy of the threshold needed for the Democratic presidential nomination. After tomorrow’s contests in Montana and South Dakota, he’ll probably be around 20 or so delegates shy of the magic number. So, if 20 or so superdelegates endorse Obama once the final primaries are complete, he’ll have secured the party’s nomination and the fighting will finally be over. There won’t be any need to push the matter all the way to the convention; it’ll be over.
The folks over at McClatchy newspapers are trumpeting their own horn about their reportage in the run-up to the Iraq War. And well they should. Unlike the rest of the media, they actually questioned the Bush Administration’s "intelligence" and justification for an Iraq War. To them (and other astute political observers), Scott McLellan’s book is nothing new.
But the "crimes" of the Bush Adminsitration turns out to be quite the laundry list:
OK, Scott, What Happened?
Here’s what happened, based entirely on our own reporting and publicly available documents:
* The Bush administration was gunning for Iraq within days of the 9/11 attacks, dispatching a former CIA director, on a flight authorized by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to find evidence for a bizarre theory that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. (Note: See also Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill on this point).
* Bush decided by February 2002, at the latest, that he was going to remove Saddam by hook or by crook. (Yes, we reported that at the time).
* White House officials, led by Dick Cheney, began making the case for war in August 2002, in speeches and reports that not only were wrong, but also went well beyond what the available intelligence said at that time, and contained outright fantasies and falsehoods. Indeed, some of that material was never vetted with the intelligence agencies before it was peddled to the public.
* Dissenters, or even those who voiced worry about where the policy was going, were ignored, excluded or punished. (Note: See Gen. Eric Shinseki, Paul O’Neill, Joseph Wilson and all of the State Department ‘s Arab specialists and much of its intelligence bureau).
* The Bush administration didn’t even want to produce the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs that’s justly received so much criticism since. The White House thought it was unneeded. It actually was demanded by Congress and slapped together in a matter of weeks before the congressional votes to authorize war on Iraq.
* The October 2002 NIE was flawed, no doubt. But it contained dissents questioning the extent of Saddam’s WMD programs, dissents that were buried in the report. Doubts and dissents were then stripped from the publicly released, unclassified version of the NIE.
* The core of the administration’s case for war was not just that Saddam was developing WMDs, but also that, unchecked, he might give them to terrorists to attack the United States. Remember smoking guns and mushroom clouds? Inconveniently, the CIA had determined just the opposite: Saddam would attack the United States only if he concluded a U.S. attack on him was unavoidable. He’d give WMD to Islamist terrorists only "as a last chance to exact revenge."
* The Bush administration relied heavily on an Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, who had been found to be untrustworthy by the State Department and the CIA. Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress were given millions, and produced "defectors" whose tales of WMD sites and terrorist training were false, fanciful and bogus. But the information was fed directly to senior officials and included in official White House documents.
* The same INC-supplied "intelligence" used in the White House propaganda effort (you got that bit right, Scott) also was fed to dozens of U.S. and foreign news organizations.
* It all culminated in a speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 making the case against Saddam. Virtually every major allegation Powell made turned out later to be wrong. It would have been even worse had not Powell and his team thrown out even more shaky "intelligence" that Cheney’s office repeatedly tried to stuff into the speech.
* The Bush administration tried to link Saddam to al Qaida and, by implication, to the 9/11 attacks. Officials repeatedly pushed the CIA for information on such links, and a seperate intel shop was set up under Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith to find "proof" of such ties. Neither the CIA nor anyone else ever found anything resembling an operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.
* An exhaustive review of Saddam Hussein’s regime’s own documents, released in March 2008, found no operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.
* The Bush administration failed to plan for the rebuilding of postwar Iraq, as we were perhaps the first to report. The White House ignored stacks of intelligence reports, some now available in partially unclassified form, warning before the war about the possibilities for insurgency, ethnic warfare, social chaos and the like.
We could go on, but the rest, as they say, is history.
That’s what happened.
And that’s what history will record.
(1) Clay Aiken breeds.
(2) They’re making a sequel to Phantom of the Opera:
The sequel to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera is aiming for a bow in London’s West End in November 2009.
The Stage reports that the working title for Lloyd Webber’s new musical is Phantom: Once Upon Another Time. The celebrated composer told BBC, "I have got my own new show coming on next year, which is my sequel to The Phantom of the Opera, which I think is going to be called Phantom: Once Upon Another Time. But that will come on in November next year, probably, if everything goes well."
You know, it doesn’t say anything that many of us didn’t already know. It’s just nice to see someone on the inside of the Bush Administration admit that these things went on:
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The incidents that first left then-White House press secretary Scott McClellan "dismayed and disillusioned" about Washington involved the surreptitious release of classified information, McClellan said Thursday.
The first of the "defining moments," McClellan told NBC’s "Today" show, was when CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name was leaked to the media.
The second, he said, was when he learned that President Bush had secretly declassified a report on Iraq so Vice President Dick Cheney and Cheney aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby could disclose it to reporters.
"We had been out there talking about how seriously the president took the leaking of classified information, and here we were learning that the president had authorized the very same that we were criticizing," McClellan said, the day after his controversial memoir hit bookstore shelves.
***
As White House spokesman, McClellan defended Bush’s policies during much of the Iraq war, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the scandal that followed the leak of Plame’s identity.
But he now says the administration was mired in propaganda and political spin and played loose with the truth at times.
In March 2007, Libby was found guilty of perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements for lying about what he said to reporters about Plame. Bush later commuted Libby’s 2½-year sentence prison sentence, but left in place Libby’s fine and probation.
McClellan told "Today" on Thursday, "I had been assured — and [then-senior adviser] Karl Rove and ‘Scooter’ Libby both — I asked them point-blank, ‘Were you involved in this in any way?’ And both assured me in unequivocal terms, ‘No, we were not involved.’ "
"And Rove even told the president, and the president and VP directed me to go out and exonerate ‘Scooter’ Libby on this, and that’s when I went to ‘Scooter’ and asked him the question," McClellan said.
***
McClellan also discussed how, he said, Bush decided to go to war against Iraq soon after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. The president ordered aides to make arrangements for it, McClellan told "Today."
"I think very early on, a few months after September 11, he made a decision that we’re going to confront Saddam Hussein, and if Hussein doesn’t come fully clean, then we’re going to go to war. There was really no flexibility in his approach," McClellan said. "Then it was put on the advisers: How do we go about implementing this? How do we go about doing this?"
So, there you have it. From someone on the inside. They lied. They leaked. They manipulated.
Also:
In hindsight, McClellan views the war as a mistake by a president swept up by his own propaganda and a grand plan of seeding democracy in the Middle East by overturning Saddam Hussein‘s regime.
McClellan says Bush and his aides became so wrapped up in trying to shape the story to their political advantage that they ignored facts that didn’t fit the picture. He blames it on a "permanent campaign culture" that pervades Washington.
Over 4,000 U.S. soldiers dead. Because the Bush Administration was obsessed with a second term and engaged in groupthink.
What is "groupthink"? It plagued the Johnson administration, too. It is a term coined by social psychologist Irving Janis. In order to make groupthink testable, Irving Janis devised eight symptoms that are indicative of groupthink. They are:
1. Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking.
2. Rationalising warnings that might challenge the group’s assumptions.
3. Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions.
4. Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, disfigured, impotent, or stupid.
5. Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of “disloyalty”.
6. Self censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus.
7. Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.
8. Mindguards — self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information.
So, future presidents, what have we learned?
The wingnut blogosphere is blaming the messenger as they always do, attacking McClellan as a liberal, a liar, a charlatan trying to sell books, and claiming they never liked him anyway.
The White House is perhaps even more spittle-flecked than the bloggers, calling McClellan "disgruntled" and even a traitor.
And so it shall always be.
Al Gore’s "Inconvenient Truth" Becoming An Opera
First it was the film and the book. Now the next stop for Al Gore’s "An Inconvenient Truth" is opera.
La Scala officials say the Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli has been commissioned to produce an opera on the international multiformat hit for the 2011 season at the Milan opera house.
McClatchy says the U.S. military is investigating reports that Marines have been handing out religious material at checkpoints in Fallujah, Iraq.
"Multi-National Force-Iraq is investigating a report that U.S. military personnel in Fallujah handed-out material that is religious and evangelical in nature," spokesman Rear Adm. Patrick Driscoll says in a statement to the news organization. "Local commanders are investigating since the military prohibits proselytizing any religion, faith or practices."
Local residents say the Americans distributed coins inscribed with a verse from the Bible.
"We say to the occupiers to stop this," Sheikh Mohammed Amin Abdel Hadi says, according to McClatchy. "This can cause strife between the Iraqis and especially between Muslim and Christians . … Please stop these things and leave our homes because we are Muslims and we live in our homes in peace with other religions."
USA TODAY has requested additional information from commanders in Iraq.
Update at 8:55 a.m. ET: One of the coins, according to McClatchy, says "Where will you spend eternity?" on one side and "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16." on the other side.
Some of you may be wondering, "So what?" The "so what" is that many in the Arab country think that the United States is on a crusade to change them. They think the United States does not respect their values, culture, and mostly, their religion. Of course, that is not true, as a matter of policy. But this type of thing makes that deniable difficult to stand by. It certainly looks like the government of the United States is trying to prosyletize, when uniformed soldiers are passing out the Gospel.
The guys should be tried, convicted, and discharged.
"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." — Ann Coulter, 9/13/01
Better than Michael Jackson:
OMG! Look! It’s celebrity spokesperson Rachael Ray talking about Dunkin Donuts!! And look what she’s wearing around her neck! That looks vaguely middle eastern! It looks like a keffiyeh. Is she a terrorist-supporter?!? Does Dunkin Donuts (by inference) support terrorism?!?!?
Some observers, including ultra-conservative Fox News commentator Michelle Malkin, were so incensed by the ad that there was even talk of a Dunkin’ Donuts boycott.
‘‘The keffiyeh, for the clueless, is the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad,’’ Malkin yowls in her syndicated column.
‘‘Popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos, the apparel has been mainstreamed by both ignorant and not-so-ignorant fashion designers, celebrities, and left-wing icons.’’
The company at first pooh-poohed the complaints, claiming the black-and-white wrap was not a keffiyeh. But the right-wing drumbeat on the blogosphere continued and by yesterday, Dunkin’ Donuts decided it’d be easier just to yank the ad.
Said the suits in a statement: ‘‘In a recent online ad, Rachael Ray is wearing a black-and-white silk scarf with a paisley design. It was selected by her stylist for the advertising shoot. Absolutely no symbolism was intended. However, given the possibility of misperception, we are no longer using the commercial.’’
Now, what’s important to grasp here is that the scarf in question (see link) is rather clearly just a scarf. It is admittedly black and white, which apparently would be symbolic in the Palestinian world, except I’m not sure if something frilly and paisley can ever really count as being as menacing as we are supposed to believe. And there’s clearly no pro-terrorist vibe being intended by Dunkin Freaking Donuts — Ray is holding a latte, which I’m pretty sure is like kryptonite to jihadists. I don’t know, I’m not up on all the comic-book-style interpretations of what we should and shouldn’t be afraid of these days.
No, the issue was that there was a scarf that looked sortof like something Islamic. That’s it. That was enough to dampen pants and blister typing fingers across the great and paranoid conservative nation. Maybe it was a scandalous example of unintended cultural tolerance? Maybe it was a secret message to terrorists that they could count on Dunkin’ Donuts to cater their next meeting? Or, maybe, it was just a goddamn scarf.
So this is what we’ve (well, I say "we", but I mean a small subset of American patriots who, having absolutely no intention of doing anything meaningful for their country that involves getting out of their chairs, spend their days looking for secret terrorist messages in television commercials) been reduced to. We’re examining the fashion statements of donut ads and parsing them for hints of surreptitious Islamic culture. We’re locked into a mortal combat against those that casually accessorize without remembering that we are at war; we’re mere weeks away from probing the hidden alliances of the doilies on our grandmothers’ coffee tables
My response? I’m going to boycott Dunkin Donuts for bowing to the stupid pressures of alarmist wingnuts.
Nice to get quoted by Bloomberg…..
