It recommended everyone write their Congressman to join a number of radical House Republicans in an investigation of Muslim infiltration of the US government.
Brewing for a few months, we’ll get to the culprits/instigators in a minute.
Rep. Michele Bachmann says the Muslim Brotherhood, the international Islamist movement that recently came to power in Egypt, has made “deep penetration??? within the U.S. government, and she wants an investigation of its influence within five federal agencies …
[Bachmann,] R-Stillwater, and four other members of Congress see the Muslim Brotherhood as a domestic threat.
The lawmakers singled out the movement last month in letters to federal defense, diplomatic, intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, requesting investigations into whether — and through whom — the Muslim Brotherhood is exerting influence within President Barack Obama’s administration …
Bachmann’s letters are addressed to the inspectors general — the independent offices within federal agencies responsible for ensuring they operate efficiently and legally — for the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice and State, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Reps. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, Thomas Rooney, R-Fla., and Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., joined Bachmann in cosigning the letters, which cite people or actions by the agencies that raise the lawmakers’ concerns.
The letter to the State Department singles out Huma Abedin, a deputy chief of staff for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and asserts that three of Abedin’s family members are connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. It says Abedin’s position affords her access to Clinton, and adds that the department has “taken actions recently that have been enormously favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood and its interests.???
The letter to the Department of Defense charges the U.S. Army with failing to “characterize accurately the jihadist motivations??? of Major Nidal Hassan, the alleged Fort Hood shooter …
The GOP extremists have been pursuing Abedin, the wife of the disgraced Anthony Weiner, for months.
Did you know Islamic subversion is infiltrating the highest levels of US government?
Today, Bill Gertz of the Washington Times published the claim that Hillary Clinton might be associated with it, all revealed in a course offered by Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy and Islam-o-phobe Frank Gaffney.
Gaffney’s a birther. And [for the past few years] a great deal of his business [has been] centered around the alleged security threat of shariah-law permeating the US justice system.
Wrote Gertz, for the WaTimes:
Islamists linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and similar groups are working to undermine the U.S. government through “civilization jihad??? aimed at imposing Islamic law rule in the United States.
That is the conclusion of a new 10-part online video course produced by the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a Washington think tank, that was made public Tuesday.
The briefing-style educational video, “The Muslim Brotherhood in America: The Enemy Within,??? features lectures by CSP chief Frank Gaffney.
The video includes a detailed section on “Team Obama??? that identifies six people working close to or inside the Obama administration that the course says are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood or similar Islamist groups through numerous front organizations.
They include Rashad Hussein, special envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation; Huma Abedin, deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton …
The GOP’s new McCarthy’s have not ignited the same hysteria the original did in 1950 in what is recognized as one of the very dark moments from US history.
But it has not been for lack of trying.
The Islam-o-phobes pursue their persecutions with great tenacity, making up claims based on fictions, all for the tarring of enemies. Directly, they have been responsible for absurd anti-shariah law party platform planks and legislation in states controlled by the GOP/Tea Party. They’re a disgrace to the nation.
But one can guarantee that whatever the oral or written response is from the various government agencies targeted by the new McCarthy’s, it won’t be the end of the matter.
The misconduct of the financial industry no longer surprises most Americans. Only about one in five has much trust in banks, according to Gallup polls, about half the level in 2007. And it’s not just banks that are frowned upon. Trust in big business overall is declining. Sixty-two percent of Americans believe corruption is widespread across corporate America. According to Transparency International, an anticorruption watchdog, nearly three in four Americans believe that corruption has increased over the last three years.
We should be alarmed that corporate wrongdoing has come to be seen as such a routine occurrence. Capitalism cannot function without trust. As the Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow observed, “Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust.???
The parade of financiers accused of misdeeds, booted from the executive suite and even occasionally jailed, is undermining this essential element. Have corporations lost whatever ethical compass they once had? Or does it just look that way because we are paying more attention than we used to?
The story is not the best the Times could have done.
The truth is more complicated. In anonymous polls, and to friends at home, a majority of Americans may say they don’t trust corporate America. However, in public it’s another matter.
My frequent impression is that, no matter how poorly they have been treated by a rigged economic system, many resent being told it is that way because of moral failure in big business.
Pity the Billionaire portrays it well. When many people were the most riled up about the economic collapse, they were told a fabulist’s story on how it was big government’s fault. And that if big government hadn’t been so corrupt and tyrannical, the banks would have never had to give all those loans to people who didn’t deserve them.
Pure unfettered capitalism is the answer and the economic collapse occurred because we no longer had it.
If, indeed, Americans distrust corporate America, why is it so easy to find examples like the pugnacious-looking fellow in Mean Future, marching along with his absurd “I Love Capitalism” sign?
“It’s hard to fathom the broader social implications of corporate wrongdoing,” reads the chin-scratcher at the Times. “But its most long-lasting impact may be on Americans’ trust in the institutions that underpin the nation’s liberal market democracy.”
Even the journalist, given an opportunity to state the obvious, hedges his bets. Working and playing in Wall Street’s backyard, he has too much to lose.
“This is stewpit blah blah blah,” wrote a 61 year-old white guy before I sent him to the trash can.
We’re getting outraised — a first for a sitting president, if this continues. Not just by the super PACs and outside groups that are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into misleading ads, but by our opponent and the Republican Party, which just outraised us for the second month in a row.
We can win a race in which the other side spends more than we do. But not this much more.
So I need your help. If you believe that regular people should decide elections, then please chip in $4 or more today.
This isn’t about me or the outcome of one election.
This election will be a test of the model that got us here. We’ll learn whether it’s still true that a grassroots campaign can elect a president — whether ordinary Americans are in control of our democracy in the face of massive spending.
I believe we can do this. When all of us chip in what we can, when we can, we are the most powerful force in politics.
But today is the day to prove it. Donate now:
https://donate.barackobama.com/Outraised
Thank you — for everything you’ve done before and everything you’re doing now. It matters.
Barack
Mr. President, can’t help. Broke and strapped in the economy that makes and does nothing except sell apps, smartphones, financial services, arms and artisan goods for the wealthy.
But you’re on the right track. Be more populist, I know it’s hard. Play the class warfare hand for everything. It may not be too late.
Mitt Romney should have been an easy mark but you tried to work with the enemy and they tied you up and imposed their will on the country through paralysis, sabotaging the economy and you.
Now you must spend all your time pointing out the obvious, that Mitt Romney is as odious an example of great wealth and indifference toward everyone else in 2012 America as there is.
That might win it. But I won’t be part of the crowd-sourced money thing anymore. I don’t have the juice to fight Citizens United and crazy right-wing sugar daddies, not even close. And if I’m going to be another grain of sand on the beach at least it will be with another four dollars in my pocket. No more celebrity lottery tickets. I don’t believe in them anymore than I believe that if I drop a few extra at the liquor store on a state-issued piece of paper it might pay off.
In fact, that’s what the automated Daily Dun means to me. Another day at the liquor store watching someone else stupidly purchase a Five Dollar Scratcher. I’ll keep that cash money and buy something cheap and intoxicating at Trader Joe’s instead.
I know I am setting a bad example but in this way I do my part to help the economy keep limping along.
And I’ve given you this funny little story and a song.
David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, his account of the policy-makers in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and the nature of the Vietnam disaster, is a classic on the delusions of American power. Everything Halberstam described then is present today. Only conditions and decision-making at the highest level are more deteriorated.
This voluminous book maps the roots of the war in post WWII decision making and American dealings in China as the communist insurgency battled with an American client named Chiang Kai Shek, a man who’d been an ally against the Japanese.
Th Americans on the ground in China, diplomats and old soldiers like Joe Stilwell, knew the Chinese detested Chiang, a descendant of mandarins, and that there was no popular support for him. China was going to crumble, the communists were going to win and take power. Despite having people who knew the score the US government backed the wrong horse.
Truman became known as the President who lost China to communism.
The McCarthy era was ushered in and everyone who had a rational idea about what to do in southeast Asia was either tarred or banished in the hysteria over alleged communist infiltration of US government.
As a result, America’s leaders, including those in the Eisenhoiwer and Kennedy administrations, refused to view the Vietnam insurgency, first with the Vietminh against France and later the Vietcong in the south, as an anti-colonial struggle deeply rooted in the people of that country.
Only the views that Communism was monolithic, that every Communist country was exactly the same as Joe Stalin’s Soviet Union, were allowed to prevail.
Thus was born the Domino Theory, as countries — one after another, tipping into each other — would be said to fall if the Communists were not stopped in one poor small nation which had waged an endless war to free itself from western colonialism.
Anyone with dissenting views was purged or learned to be silent. The role of the State Department became virtually non-existent, except as an adjunct to the Pentagon.
The decision-makers held the beliefs, common now, that American technological supremacy and military might were the only answers. The government became obsessed with quantifying the unquantifiable, believing that if enough bodies were amassed (today, it’s the tabulation of al Qaeda and Taliban leaders killed in drone strikes, always advertised as a new kind of war), enough tonnage in bombs dropped, the Vietcong would be beaten.
Reports from the field that programs like the making of “strategic hamlets” in the Mekong Delta were a complete failure, that the Vietcong were much better than the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, that the enemy controlled most of the places continuously claimed to be pacified by the US military, that the natives — as with the Chiang government in China, despised the Diem government in Saigon, were either sanitized or completely suppressed. Critics were silenced. If you were right, you were fired. If you were wrong you were promoted.
Today there is no David Halberstam, or Neil Sheehan or Malcolm Browne to make news reports and books that would expose such matters.
Still, news can be gleaned of the same fossilized strategy at the top, the poisoning of critical thinking so that nothing is allowed to get in the way of the prosecution of war.
The US isn’t fighting communism and it is not in a country struggling to rid itself of foreign interference. Vietnam deeply damaged faith in the US military as an institution. It had cost 60,000 lives. Today, American faith in the military remains high, one assumes at least part due to the fact that almost all of us have not had to go to war. In the Sixties many Americans could name General William Westmoreland and Secretary of Defense Bob McNamara. Today nobody knows the names of American fighting generals. And only perhaps slightly over half of the educated could probably name the fellow who is the definition of the
civilian functionary, the Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta.
But al Qaeda has been substituted for communism and the endless battleground has become the failed states of the Middle East, Asia and Africa
In these places, the war can never end because all insurgencies and very little wars between bad people are viewed through a dark lens created on 9/11, one that colors the world much as the old Cold Warriors saw communism, a monolithic threat that can only be smashed by the immediate application of military power before it poses a threat to the homeland.
With such thinking ascendant every failed country becomes a place where the line must be held.
[The] crash in Mali has revealed some details of the commandos’ clandestine activities that apparently had little to do with counterterrorism. The women killed in the wreck were identified as Moroccan prostitutes who had been riding with the soldiers, according to a senior Army official and a U.S. counterterrorism consultant briefed on the incident, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
U.S. counterterrorism officials have long worried about Mali, a weakly governed country of 14.5 million people that has served as a refuge for Islamist militants allied with al-Qaeda.
With only 6,000 poorly equipped troops, the Malian armed forces have always struggled to maintain control of their territory, about twice the size of Texas …
About six years ago, the Pentagon began bolstering its overt aid and training programs in Mali, as well as its clandestine operations …
In what would have represented a significant escalation of U.S. military involvement in Mali, the Pentagon also considered a secret plan in 2009 to embed American commandos with Malian ground troops, diplomatic cables show.
Under that program, code-named Oasis Enabler, U.S. military advisers would conduct anti-terrorism operations alongside elite, American-trained Malian units. But the idea was rejected by Gillian A. Milovanovic, the ambassador to Mali at the time.
In an October 2009 meeting in Bamako with Vice Adm. Robert T. Moeller, deputy chief of the Africa Command, the ambassador called the plan “extremely problematic,??? adding that it could create a popular backlash and “risk infuriating??? neighbors such as Algeria.
It might as well be taken from the pages of The Best and the Brightest in its disregard of the State Department in favor of whatever the US military wishes to do.
Once again, the military, which runs our wars, as decades ago, brooks no interference. The security bureaucracy wants someone from the State Department ousted. After more than a decade of war, the US military and national security leadership are now as rotted as they were during Vietnam.
Paradoxically, it’s Richard Holbrooke who the military core of Obama’s advisory group wanted deposed. Holbrooke was actually a young man at the Paris peace talks which were the beginning of the end of the US involvement in Vietnam. Only intervention by the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, momentarily saved his job, according to the Post’s reporter. Eventually the military’s problem was solved: Holbrooke died two years ago.
As in Vietnam, where the people loathed the government propped up by American forces, the Afghan people — logically — despise the American toady in Kabul, Hamid Karzai. If there was any goodwill after the Taliban were overthrown, it was lost many years ago:
In Afghanistan, the military surge, argues Chandrasekaran, was a mistake.
“What we fail to understand was that the Afghan people largely wanted to be left alone and they hate their government, in many cases, as much as they hate the insurgents. And when we went to them and said, ‘Ah, we’re coming here to help bring your government to you.’ They said, ‘Whoa we don’t want our government!’
It’s presented as diverting froth from the war on terror, something to be clucked over on the evening news for a few minutes. And so it will be taken.
This morning it was Anne Marie Habershaw, asking for four bucks. This afternoon, it’s Patrick Gaspard of the DNC, depreciating the request to three dollars, perhaps detecting a loss of enthusiasm among the crowd-sourced:
George —
Our fundraising numbers from June are in. Along with President Obama’s campaign, we raised $71 million, making this month our biggest yet. That’s something to be proud of.
But we still got beat. Mitt Romney and the Republican Party raised more than $106 million — making it the second month in a row that they outraised us, this time by $35 million.
That’s a big gap. And if we don’t do everything we can to close it now, we risk losing more than just a fundraising race in November.
Donate $3 or more today to close the gap.
We’ve got to do everything we can to put a stop to the Republican momentum — so donate $3 or whatever you can to close the gap. It can’t wait another day …
The looming $500bn US defence budget cut is already paralysing company investment and hiring decisions and would have a devastating effect if it came into force at the start of next year, defence industry executives warned on Sunday.
Dennis Muilenburg, president and chief executive of Boeing Defense, Space and Security, the US’s second largest defence contractor by sales, said on the eve of the Farnborough Air Show: “Sequester will have a devastating impact …???
So far the industry has been cautious about offending its biggest customer, with many of its warnings coming from Bob Stevens, chief executive of Lockheed Martin, who will retire before any sequester would come into effect …
The message from industry is that defence cuts mean lost jobs.
Here’s the story over the last few years. Any government “stimulus” is bad and doesn’t create jobs, which is a lie, but bear with me. But all government “stimulus” that goes to arms manufacturers is necessary and good, so we don’t shed jobs.
Ted Nugent’s rock fans are the bottom out-of-sight riff-raff and wife-beaters of American country fairs, casinos and dive bars. After years of playing to them as a musician in Nugent’s band, and having to deal with Ted himself, I would think it understandable if you drank heavily:
People are always fleeing police, but usually it’s in a vehicle where they have a chance to get away. That wasn’t the case for Mick Brown, drummer for Ted Nugent, who tried to make his escape in a golf cart, according to the Bangor, Maine police department.
According to the police department, Brown, 55, reportedly stole a golf cart after a Bangor concert featuring Nugent, Styx and REO Speedwagon at Bangor’s waterfront pavilion.
Brown, who was reportedly intoxicated, evaded several people who tried to stop him and somehow picked up two women along the way, the department says on its Facebook page …
Brown was arrested and later released on $4,000 bail, and faces a court date of Aug. 15 for charges of operating under the influence of alcohol, driving to endanger, theft, and assault …
Ted Nugent himself has been in the news lately for his political opinions, most recently for suggesting that the South should have won the Civil War.
Q: Michigan hasn’t gone Republican in a presidential election since 1988 and has been decidedly Democratic in the most recent presidential elections. However, recent polls suggest the state is up for grabs. Why do you think that is?
“Even those feeble-mined Michiganiacs on the receiving end of the government’s communist offenses of redistribution are waking up to how unfair and suicidal this system is for any meaningful quality of life in MI and America. This waking up is alarming all smart people to the disastrous results of the liberal democrats’ destruction of our great state.
Another day, another robotic minion to send the plea:
George —
Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news.
Good news first: June was our best fundraising month yet. We exceeded expectations — more than 706,000 people like you stepped up and pitched in for a grand total of $71 million raised for this campaign and the Democratic Party.
Bravo. That’s seriously impressive.
Bad news? We still got beat. Handily. Romney and the RNC pulled in a whopping $106 million.
So, to recap: We had our best fundraising month yet, and we still fell about $35 million short. We can win while being outspent — but we need to keep it close.
You know what that means. We’ve got some work to do.
Pitch in $4 or more right now to start closing the gap.
This is no joke. If we can’t keep the money race close, it becomes that much harder to win in November.
But this election isn’t about how much money our campaigns can raise — none of us would be fighting this hard just to win a money war. We’re here because we believe in something bigger — because none of us wants to see this country go back to the policies that drove our economy into a ditch, which is exactly what the other side wants to do.
Whatever it is that brings you to this fight, what happens next is up to you. Donate today:
EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. – As protesters assembled on a beach in advance of Mitt Romney’s evening event at the home of conservative billionaire David Koch, the candidate slipped to East Hampton for his first of three fundraisers on this tony stretch of Long Island.
The line of Range Rovers, BMWs, Porsche roadsters and one gleaming cherry red Ferrari began queuing outside of Revlon Chairman Ronald Perelman’s estate off Montauk Highway long before Romney arrived, as campaign aides and staffers in white polo shirts emblazoned with the logo of Perelman’s property — the Creeks — checked off names under tight security.
They came with high hopes for the presumed Republican nominee, who is locked in a tight race with President Obama. And some were eager to give the candidate some advice about the next four months …
A New York City donor a few cars back, who also would not give her name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. “I don’t think the common person is getting it,” she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. “Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.
“We’ve got the message,” she added. “But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact …”
“It’s not helping the economy to pit the people who are the engine of the economy against the people who rely on that engine,” Michael Zambrelli said as the couple waited in their SUV for clearance into the Creeks shortly after the candidate’s motorcade flew by and entered the pine-tree lined estate. “He’s basically been biting the hand that fed him in ’08. … I would bet 25% of the people here were supporters of Obama in ’08. And they’re here now.”
I’m all for total class warfare but I’m not interested in a crowd-sourced competition with these people.
The Comedian, in Watchmen, right before he shoots someone with a tear gas round: “What happened to the American Dream? It came true. You’re lookin’ at it.”
KABUL — The United States declared Afghanistan a major non-NATO ally on Saturday, with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton personally delivering the news of Afghanistan’s entry into a club that includes Israel, Japan, Pakistan, and other close Asian and Middle Eastern allies.
The move, announced as Clinton stood with President Hamid Karzai amid the towering trees and rose beds on the grounds of the presidential palace here …
The moves also appear to have already yielded one dividend for the United States: Karzai has not recently lashed out at his backers, as he has in the past, at one point calling Americans ‘‘demons.’’
“Comedy thrives; indeed writers are hardly needed to invent outrageous events.??? — Sun Tzu for the American Geo-Politician
