I’m pretty sure you all remember the case of Black Panthers intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling station last election. Well, The Washington Times reports this morning that career prosecutors at the Department of Justice were ready to drop the hammer on three men involved in the incident, but they were prevented from prosecuting by their superiors;
Justice Department political appointees overruled career lawyers and ended a civil complaint accusing three members of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense of wielding a nightstick and intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling place last Election Day, according to documents and interviews.
The incident – which gained national attention when it was captured on videotape and distributed on YouTube – had prompted the government to sue the men, saying they violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by scaring would-be voters with the weapon, racial slurs and military-style uniforms.
Yeah, it was a slam dunk – they were caught on video declaring “A Black Man will win today” and intimidating voters. Not like those unfounded cases we heard about in the 2000 and 2004 elections that the EEOC investigated and couldn’t prove happened, yet blamed Republicans anyway.
This is a bigger scandal than the Bush Administration firing a few lawyers at DOJ – the Obama Administration has decided that they won’t prosecute voter rights cases as long as the voter rights being violated are those of Republicans. So we can expect the New York Times and the Washington Post to be all over this, huh? Eric Holder will be named Keith Olbermann’s Worst Person of the Week, right?
How many of you have been gone to your local county fair every year and passed by the National Guard or recruiters’ booths where they had military stuff on display? Everyone right? Well, now all of a sudden, the Geezers For Sitting On Our Hands freak out over the same thing we’ve been seeing for decades – suddenly it’s immoral. Here’s the picture from the Juneau Empire that set their bony asses on fire; (more…)
This morning, North Korea decided that, since the world hasn’t made an active response to their missile launches and nuclear tests, they’d abrogate the 1953 armistice that ended the hot war on the intra-Korean frontier (CNN link).
“Our revolutionary armed forces … will regard” South Korea’s participation “in the [the 6-year-old Proliferation Security Initiative] as a declaration of war …” the North’s official news agency said.
Pyongyang also announced it was no longer bound by the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War.
“The Korean Peninsula is bound to immediately return to a state of war from a legal point of view, and so our revolutionary armed forces will go over to corresponding military actions,” North Korea said through its news agency.
Sweet. It’s the 1950s all over again. But that’s not the extent of the dangers we now face because the Obama Administration wouldn’t take the lead in shutting down North Korea’s nuclear program. Israel has discovered that Bolivia and Venezuela are supplying Iran with uranium (CBS News link);
“There are reports that Venezuela supplies Iran with uranium for its nuclear program,” the Foreign Ministry document states, referring to previous Israeli intelligence conclusions. It added, “Bolivia also supplies uranium to Iran.”
The report concludes that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is trying to undermine the United States by supporting Iran.
So hugging Hugo Chavez did Obama a lot of good, didn’t it? Of course, if you read this blog in December 2007, you’d have got a whiff of the uranium connections, when a suitcase full of cash was discovered on an airstrip in Bolivia’s uranium-mining region.
Since there was supposedly collusion between the North Koreans and Syrians on Syria’s own nuclear program, we can probably assume that the North Koreans lent aid to the Iranians – so it’s come full circle.
So, it was with little surprise that I read this post of Dicksmith’s that Mr Wolf sent me late last night.
Vets for Freedom was founded a few months after the progressive Veterans’ organization I work with (not for, since I volunteer), VoteVets.org. You’d have to ask Pete [Hegseth] and his cronies to confirm this, but as best I can tell Vets for Freedom has served no other purpose than to be a GOP front group countering the work of VoteVets.
Now, I’m not saying that Dicksmith likes to bugger young boys, to drink the blood of young virgins from a rugby boot, to drink and then drive home to beat his girlfriend and dog, I mean, you’d have to ask his cronies about that, but what I can tell you is that master of the intertubes he is not. Rather than just using SourceWatch as a one stop shop, he might have been able to find that one of VFF’s first endorsements was for Jim Marshall, Democrat from Georgia. It would be hard to figure out why VFF’s masters in the GOP would stand for VFF endorsing their House Target #1.
….said Vets for Freedom Chairman, Pete Hegseth. “Jim has stood with us on Capitol Hill, and it’s time for us to stand with him. During his tenure in Congress, Jim has proved time and time again that politics always takes a back seat to doing what’s right when it comes to fighting our enemies and supporting those who wear the uniform. Our country needs more people like Jim in Washington.”
Vets For Freedom has emerged as one of the most influential and authoritative voices in the debate over the war in Iraq. As soldiers, the members of VFF answered the call to duty to serve our nation. Now they stand among our nation’s leaders to remind us to do our duty.
– United States Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT)
And how does one explain the comments of Brian Baird with regard to VFF?
Vets for Freedom speaks with unique authority and is an essential non-partisan voice supporting those who are committed to success in Iraq.
– United States Congressman Brian Baird (D-WA)
Wait a minute? How the hell can that be? Isn’t Baird a Democrat? Isn’t that what the “D” means? And, holy hell, isn’t he a liberal? The American Conservative Union gave the guy a 4 out of a possible 100 in 2008. That means he’s to the LEFT of Baghdad Jim McDermott.
Well, possibly it has more to do with his position on Iraq than any partisan angle. This is from Baird’s piece from August 24, 2007 in the Seattle Times.
As a Democrat who voted against the war from the outset and who has been frankly critical of the administration and the post-invasion strategy, I am convinced by the evidence that the situation has at long last begun to change substantially for the better. I believe Iraq could have a positive future. Our diplomatic and military leaders in Iraq, their current strategy, and most importantly, our troops and the Iraqi people themselves, deserve our continued support and more time to succeed.
I’m not going to go into some lengthy defense of Pete, who can ably do so himself, but a few things about Dicksmith and his post. He goes on some rant about Pete apparently now writing at the Weekly Standard. Not sure why this is even relevant, but good for Pete, he got a paying gig. And thanks for all of us it isn’t as an accountant, because Pete refers to 8+ years without an attack, when it is 7+ years without an attack. Seemingly Pete saying this is far worse for veterans than say (hypothetically) a guy who stole a car in Nevada, and was in mental health counseling during the Battle of Fallujah that he claimed to have been injured in despite never having served in the military at all. Or, worse (again, hypothetically) than saying that Viet Nam-issued vests were being distributed to our troops in Iraq, when in fact no such thing was taking place. Pete’s inability to differentiate 7 from 8 is clearly one of the biggest problems faced by returning veterans, and I am on board for jacking him up over it. VFF should do what VoteVets does and just take all his shit down, issue only a press release to a media outlet without putting anything on this blog about it, and then just go along pretending that VFF never knew the mathematically challenged Mr. Hegseth. (Here is where I would link to the many comments of Dicksmith located on “Rick Duncan’s” various VoteVets postings, but alas, they are preserved for posterity only on Jonn’s computer.)
And to close out, Dicksmith cites to Matthew Yglesias. I know the name, but know nothing about the guy and don’t care to, but Dicksmith uses this quote to characterize his belief on the fallibility of Pete’s argument that we were safer post 9/11 for our actions:
The overwhelming majority of Americans to ever be killed by foreign terrorists were killed during Bush’s presidency. And even if you give him a pass on 9/11 itself it’s still the case that his conduct of the “war on terror” led to the deaths of thousands more Americans.
Well, let me take that quote and change it a bit, and you tell me if there are any inaccuracies.
Option A:
The overwhelming majority of Terrorists to ever be killed by American Military Forces were killed during Bush’s presidency. And even if you give them a pass on 9/11 itself it’s still the case that the conduct of the “war on terror” led to the deaths of thousands more Terrorists than Americans.
Option B:
The overwhelming majority of Americans to ever be killed by a foreign government were killed during Roosevelt’s presidency. And even if you give him a pass on Pearl Harbor itself it’s still the case that his conduct of the “war on the Axis powers” led to the deaths of thousands more Americans.
So, here we go again, a VoteVets guy who doesn’t do any research, throws in some ad hominem attacks under the guise of “go look for yourself at Source Watch” whose primary concern is with Pete’s ability to count, who closes with an argument from another liberal blogger than has no bearing on the argument at hand. It’s almost becoming cliché at this point, no?
ADDENDUM: For a bit of added idiocy, or to get a 2404 if you need one, go read Jon Stolz’s piece over at VoteVets today on why Petraeus could never be the 2012 GOP Nominee because he thinks we shouldn’t torture people and we should close Gitmo.
The Washington Post is reporting this morning that Colin Powell is going on CBS’ Face The Nation to explain to the rest of us Republicans how we can be more like Colin Powell. Like Dick Cheney, I was surprised that Powell still considers himself a Republican after supporting the most anti-Conservative candidate to run for president from the Democrat Party.
Some of the quotes from Powell in the article are staggeringly ignorant coming from a person I formerly considered fairly bright;
The appearance will come just days after Powell, one of the country’s leading black political figures, told an audience in Boston that a new Republican Party is “waiting to emerge.” Earlier this month, he said the party is in “deep trouble” because “Americans are looking for more government in their life, not less.”
The party should realize that the country has changed, he said, adding: “Americans do want to pay taxes for services.”
In April, he appeared on liberal host Rachel Maddow’s TV show, telling her, “I am a Republican, yes,” but saying the party should reduce its emphasis on cutting spending.
But even if you think these quotes from Powell are based in ignorance, you can’t look away from that car wreck called the Republican Party as they plant their lips firmly on Powell’s ass;
“We are not going to get to a majority if we weed out people who disagree,” said Rep. Mark Souder (Ind.). “I’m very conservative, but we need people like him, even if we disagree on some issues.”
Sen. John Thune (S.D.), a member of the GOP leadership in the Senate, said Powell is “one of the greatest leaders of our generation, and he is at heart a Republican.”
I’ll admit, I haven’t liked Colin Powell as a Republican ever since he coined that stupid “conservative with a heart” phrase. Conservatism is compassionate in that we think you can do better for yourself and your family than some heartless bureaucrat in Washington. For Powell, or anyone else, for that matter, to think that we need to qualify our individual conservatism with divisive labels, they’re missing the whole point of Conservatism.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I didn’t join the Republican Party because it has a cool-sounding name. I looked at Jimmy Carter’s Administration, counted his lies to the American people and watched them drive poor people further into poverty and dependence. I decided that Democrats and government is not the Big Answer to our problems. A landslide number of Americans agreed with me when we voted Ronald Reagan to replace Carter and his band of ignoramuses.
If the Republican Party isn’t about smaller government and lower taxes, it’s the Democrat Party with a different name. We don’t need Colin Powell in the Republican Party, we don’t need to drop to our knees every time he walks in the room. As Dick Cheney says in the Washington Post article;
I didn’t know he was still a Republican.
He’s not and we need to stop acting like he has anything of substance to add to the discussion.
Chris Raissi sent me an email yesterday that accompanied the link he posted on his Facebook page when he resigned from IVAW;
Jonn,
Kristopher Goldsmith send me your info and suggested that I let you in on why I left IVAW. Here it is: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=83837947235
I name names. Jacob Flom is a chapter president, and told me at the IVAW national convention last year that he’s a communist using IVAW to recruit veterans to his radical communist ideology. Oh yeah, he was in the air force for a little while after 9/11 and never left CONUS. He’s not even an Iraq vet. Fucking pathetic.
Put it out there, add it to your blog, I don’t give a shit.
By the way, I actually served in Iraq. I got an award for meritorious service out there. I served in the Horn of Africa before that, where I got a previous award for meritorious service. I completed my first enlistment honorably, reenlisted as a Sgt and went into recruiting.
I ended up getting adsep’ed from the Marines for misconduct. I’m not down on getting hazed by fleet dodging loser career recruiters who’ve been sitting out the war on recruiting duty and then telling folks with combat tours that their previous accomplishments are old business and that they’re worthless unless they feed three bodies every month into the meat grinder. Sales is sales, but the Marine Corps doesn’t see it that way. I had to violate the UCMJ to get out of that hell, so I did.
Bottom line is that I didn’t take to a fleet dodging MSgt with four ribbons and no combat tours telling me what a Marine is supposed to be any more than I take to Alex Bacon telling me what an Iraq vet is supposed to be.
I figure I’d put my dirt out there before you have fun with it after some FOIA requests. We have some disagreements, but we’re more alike that unalike.
Christopher
I’m not going to judge Chris based on a recruiting assignment -but this Jacob Flom clown attracted my attention. Here’s his profile at IVAW – he never left the US, like Raissi wrote;
But Flom is qualified to be Chapter President in Milwaukee. Probably because he has interests outside of IVAW that would be attractive to the ISO clowns of IVAW;
Yeah, that seems to be the MO of the ISO dorks – they like wearing the “Iraq Veterans” banner on their shirts without having to actually serve in Iraq. Here’s Flom criticizing the troops using his tenuous veteran status, although he never really was one of the troops.
The further they are from the war the more absurd their stories. But Flom has the same experienceas IVAW co-founder Tim Goodrich who also never got closer to Iraq than an airconditioned control center on a Turkish Airbase.
Yesterday, I wrote a short screed about Joe Biden being a boastful braggart, like he usually is and telling the people at his table at the Gridiron Dinner how Dick Cheney’s “undisclosed location” was in a bunker beneath the VP’s living quarters at the US Naval Observatory in Northwest DC. Of course, the Left immediately discovered my post, especially since I disparaged the whole party by claiming that they’re dumber than Joe Biden. I can’t blame them, I’d be upset at that discovery, too, if I were a Democrat.
So immediately, the first nutroot to weigh in was my old buddy TBogg at Firedog Lake who admits that we have an actual braintrust here at This Ain’t Hell, a fact that must really grate on TBogg. But not understanding the difference between speculation and confirmation, TBogg posts a Washington Post article from seven years ago in which author Nakamura guesses that there’s some construction going on under the Naval Observatory. Good catch, TBogg, but I don’t believe anyone actually knew what was going on there until Biden admitted it. Kind of like we didn’t know there weren’t WMDs in Iraq at the time of the invasion until we got there and looked around. See how that works?
And then I got a link from the Village Voice. Somehow, my post was lumped in with WHOLE bunch of reaction from the Right on the President’s speech at Notre Dame yesterday as proof that we (The Right) make mountains of molehills. Kinda like the mountain that the Left made a mountain of out of the waterboarding issue.
But, I don’t think comparing my post to the anti-abortion issue is quite fair, since I’m just talking about how stupid Democrats are for selecting Joe Biden while the abortion issue is about saving millions of innocent lives. But, since Joe Biden is the smartest Democrat, I wouldn’t expect the nutroots to understand without getting Biden’s opinion first.
If my post about Biden didn’t ring true to the nutroots, they would have ignored it, like usual.
I got a call last night from someone who alerted me to a Philadelphia Enquirer opinion piece written by Geezers for Sitting on Our Hands (Vets For Peace to some people) member John Grant who has made it his mission to shut down the Army Experience Center in Franklin Mills Mall outside of Philly. I wrote about their protest there last week. Also, check out Skye, at Midnight Blue who lifts a corner of the Philly anti-war refrigerator to shine a light on some of the cockroaches dwelling there.
I waded through the drivel about the Army’s tax payer funded child abuse and the complaints that the staff of the AEC “soft sell” Army recruiting (imagine how much he’d complain if they “hard sold” it instead), but it was the last few lines that I really have to take issue with;
The taxes that support the Army Experience Center come from a variety of Americans, many of whom – like me – are troubled by this means of recruiting young people. Society agrees that many of them are not developed enough even to drink a beer or drive a car.
This is not an argument against defending ourselves, or against employing violence when it’s necessary. This is an argument for giving kids the information they need to make the best decisions for themselves. One thing we can do is instill in them a much more rich, complex, and cooperative view of human life on the planet – not the good-guys-blasting-bad-guys dichotomy drilled into them by the Army Experience Center.
First of all, it wasn’t society who raised the drinking age, it was the government. I’m pretty sure, if polled a vast majority of Americans would return the drinking age to a more reasonable 18 years of age and then just punish the people who violate the responsible civil behavior.
Secondly, sometimes bad guys need blasting and the “rich, complex and cooperative view of human life” is abundantly provided in countless other mediums outside of the AEC. Now, if the AEC is living quarters for the sequestered youth of Philadelphia, Grant might have a point, but I’m pretty sure the teens who live in that area experience other things outside of the Army’s recruitment facility. And they’re not as dumb as Grant and the rest of the Geezers For Sitting On Our Hands think.
Grant and his pals should be more concerned about the image of veterans that is being propagated in Pennsylvania by their own universities, among other stereotypes taught in college. He should be concerned about a whole generation of veterans being smeared by their own government. But that task must seem daunting to Grant since he prefers to focus on a few video games at the Mall.
