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lostinshanghai
Social climber
someplace
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Fattrad,
Cheney is looking for a place to hide: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, any truth to that?
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lostinshanghai
Social climber
someplace
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Fattrad,
Sure he is not there to pick up a check. Interesting group of fellows that showed up in the last couple of days. Wondering what Hillary and her crew are thinking?
Going to be interesting now. Rogue CIA forming in the mist?
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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May 10, 2010 - 10:31am PT
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from today's wapo:
John O. Brennan, the top counterterrorism adviser at the White House, said the administration is “taking very seriously” the threat posed by the Tehrik-e-Taliban, or TTP, calling it a “very determined enemy.” But Brennan suggested the many errors in the execution of the Times Square plot on May 1 also illustrate that the administration’s existing counterterrorism strategy — which hinges on striking targets abroad using Predator drone aircraft — is working.
“Because of our success in degrading the capabilities of these terrorist groups overseas, preventing them from carrying out these attacks, they are now relegated to trying to do these unsophisticated attacks, showing that they have inept capabilities in training,” Brennan said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
so barry's system "works" because some jihadis are "unsophisticated"? not so unsophisticated that they couldn't get on a plane with their panties stuffed with explosives or blog on jihadi websites and travel all the way to pah-kee-stahn for five months and return flush with cash and plant a car bomb in the middle of times square and buy a one-way ticket to the middle east and board the getaway plane, but still "unsophisticated" nonetheless
by the way:
bush--ONE attack in eight years
barry--FOUR attacks in 16 months
but whose counting?
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Yvergenhauf
Trad climber
UT
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May 10, 2010 - 10:57am PT
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bush- one attack?
Sept 2001 Twin Towers, Pentagon…
September 2001 Anthrax attacks
December 2001 shoe bomb plot
May 2002 injures 6 by placing pipebombs in mailboxes in the Midwest. Motivation to protest government control over daily lives and the illegality of marijuana.
July 4 2002 An Egyptian gunman opens fire at an El Al ticket counter in Los Angeles International Airport killing two Israelis before being killed himself.
October 2002 John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo conduct the Beltway Sniper Attacks, killing ten people in various locations throughout the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area from October 2 until they are arrested on October 24.
October 2005 Joel Henry Hinrichs III detonated a bomb near the packed football stadium at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma killing himself in the process.
March 2006 Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, an Iranian-born graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, drives an SUV onto a crowded part of campus, injuring nine.
August 2006 An Afghani Muslim hit 19 pedestrians, killing one, with his SUV in the San Francisco Bay area
One attack? really?
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Yvergenhauf
Trad climber
UT
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May 10, 2010 - 02:35pm PT
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Fatrad,
I get the feeling you'll be finding personal pleasure in a failed attempt at mid-east peace talks. Interesting statement about your character if this is indeed the case.
Chances are not in favor of success in this difficult situation. However, if humans gave up trying a thing because others thought it might fail, or because a thing is difficult, then we would accomplish little. I can imagine someone saying about Lynn Hill's attempt to free the nose something like-
"Well, 'Lynn Hill' has started down the path that 'so many others' failed at, 'she' likely won't fare any better:
http://www.stanford.edu/~clint/yos/nosehill.htm
I was wishing her success in her attempt at what some thought to be impossible. Likewise I am wishing President Obama success in mid-east peace talks.
I'm sure there are plenty of extremists around the globe who hope he fails. I am surprised how many of those cheering for failure are here in the U.S.
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lostinshanghai
Social climber
someplace
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May 10, 2010 - 03:20pm PT
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Are Netanyahm and his Likud party in the drink, Fatty? Maybe Obama has some balls left?
Settlements frozen for the next two years. But will see it to believe it, can’t trust those right wing x.
Peace process or proximity [well indirect peace talks] now on the way with PLO and Fatah and all parties. Problem will be Israel as usual. Last week’s meeting in Riyadh must had something to do if it.
Still trying to figure out why Cheney was there? Sure it must have something to do with torture, since he is good at that and oil spills.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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May 12, 2010 - 09:15am PT
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In Your Face
French attempts to outlaw the burqa strike a blow for the rights of women.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, May 10, 2010, at 11:16 AM ET
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The French legislators who seek to repudiate the wearing of the veil or the burqa—whether the garment covers "only" the face or the entire female body—are often described as seeking to impose a "ban." To the contrary, they are attempting to lift a ban: a ban on the right of women to choose their own dress, a ban on the right of women to disagree with male and clerical authority, and a ban on the right of all citizens to look one another in the face. The proposed law is in the best traditions of the French republic, which declares all citizens equal before the law and—no less important—equal in the face of one another.
On the door of my bank in Washington, D.C., is a printed notice politely requesting me to remove any form of facial concealment before I enter the premises. The notice doesn't bore me or weary me by explaining its reasoning: A person barging through those doors with any sort of mask would incur the right and proper presumption of guilt. This presumption should operate in the rest of society. I would indignantly refuse to have any dealings with a nurse or doctor or teacher who hid his or her face, let alone a tax inspector or customs official. Where would we be without sayings like "What have you got to hide?" or "You dare not show your face"?
Ah, but the particular and special demand to consider the veil and the burqa as an exemption applies only to women. And it also applies only to religious practice (and, unless we foolishly pretend otherwise, only to one religious practice). This at once tells you all you need to know: Society is being asked to abandon an immemorial tradition of equality and openness in order to gratify one faith, one faith that has a very questionable record in respect of females.
Let me ask a simple question to the pseudoliberals who take a soft line on the veil and the burqa. What about the Ku Klux Klan? Notorious for its hooded style and its reactionary history, this gang is and always was dedicated to upholding Protestant and Anglo-Saxon purity. I do not deny the right of the KKK to take this faith-based view, which is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I might even go so far as to say that, at a rally protected by police, they could lawfully hide their nasty faces. But I am not going to have a hooded man or woman teach my children, or push their way into the bank ahead of me, or drive my taxi or bus, and there will never be a law that says I have to.
There are lesser objections to the covered face or the all-covering cloak. The latter has often been used by male criminals—not just religious terrorists but common thugs—to conceal themselves and make an escape. It has also been used to conceal horrible injuries inflicted on abused females. It is incompatible—because of its effect on peripheral vision—with activities such as driving a car or negotiating traffic. This removes it from the sphere of private decision-making and makes it a danger to others, as well as an offense to the ordinary democratic civility that depends on phrases like "Nice to see you."
It might be objected that in some Muslim societies women are not allowed to drive in the first place. But that would absolutely emphasize my second point. All the above criticisms would be valid if Muslim women were as passionately committed to wearing a burqa as a male Klansman is committed to donning a pointy-headed white shroud. But, in fact, we have no assurance that Muslim women put on the burqa or don the veil as a matter of their own choice. A huge amount of evidence goes the other way. Mothers, wives, and daughters have been threatened with acid in the face, or honor-killing, or vicious beating, if they do not adopt the humiliating outer clothing that is mandated by their menfolk. This is why, in many Muslim societies, such as Tunisia and Turkey, the shrouded look is illegal in government buildings, schools, and universities. Why should Europeans and Americans, seeking perhaps to accommodate Muslim immigrants, adopt the standard only of the most backward and primitive Muslim states? The burqa and the veil, surely, are the most aggressive sign of a refusal to integrate or accommodate. Even in Iran there is only a requirement for the covering of hair, and I defy anybody to find any authority in the Quran for the concealment of the face.
Not that it would matter in the least if the Quran said otherwise. Religion is the worst possible excuse for any exception to the common law. Mormons may not have polygamous marriage, female circumcision is a federal crime in this country, and in some states Christian Scientists face prosecution if they neglect their children by denying them medical care. Do we dare lecture the French for declaring simply that all citizens and residents, whatever their confessional allegiance, must be able to recognize one another in the clearest sense of that universal term?
So it's really quite simple. My right to see your face is the beginning of it, as is your right to see mine. Next but not least comes the right of women to show their faces, which easily trumps the right of their male relatives or their male imams to decide otherwise. The law must be decisively on the side of transparency. The French are striking a blow not just for liberty and equality and fraternity, but for sorority too.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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May 19, 2010 - 12:45pm PT
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well, fattrad, you give barry more credit than i do...and, we both know where the road of good intentions leads
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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May 27, 2010 - 12:59pm PT
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according to barry's top security guy:
"The President’s strategy is absolutely clear about the threat we face. Our enemy is not “terrorism” because terrorism is but a tactic. Our enemy is not “terror” because terror is a state of mind and as Americans we refuse to live in fear. Nor do we describe our enemy as “jihadists” or “Islamists” because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenant [sic] of Islam, meaning to purify oneself, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children.
Indeed, characterizing our adversaries this way would actually be counterproductive. It would play into the false perception that they are religious leaders defending a holy cause, when in fact they are nothing more than murderers, including of thousands upon thousands of Muslims. This is why Muslim leaders around the world have spoken out—forcefully, and often at great risk to their own lives—to reject al Qaeda and violent extremism. And frankly, their condemnations often do not get the recognition they deserve.
Moreover, describing our enemy in religious terms would lend credence to the lie—propagated by al Qaeda and its affiliates to justify terrorism—that the United States is somehow at war against Islam. The reality, of course, is that we never have been and will never be at war with Islam. After all, Islam, like so many faiths, is part of America."
brilliant...even though the people trying to kill us claim they're pursuing "jihad", we shouldn't describe them as jihadists because...um ... well...that might hurt their feelings
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Douglas Rhiner
Mountain climber
Good question?!?!?!?!?
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May 31, 2010 - 12:46pm PT
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Jeff,
That was the best post you have ever made.
Good on ya.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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May 31, 2010 - 01:03pm PT
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From what I understand, when Israeli Naval forces boarded the ship, the activists grabbed an Israeli gun and stabbed naval commandos with knives.
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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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May 31, 2010 - 03:50pm PT
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Oh and they can't let international relief goods like food and medicine in even when it comes overland thru Egypt from an Americam Christian Peace Organization.
Face it Fatty, Israel has been stealing, annexing and occuping land all along. And they don't give it back. And be honest, the radical fundimentalists in power in Israel have no intention of playing fair or decently to the Palestinians. Their intent in Gaza is to squeeze the necks of the Palestinians nearly to death in hopes they will leave their land. Fat chance Fats. Israel is displaying it's blood thirsty ways for all the world to see and condemn.
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philo
Trad climber
Somewhere halfway over the rainbow
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May 31, 2010 - 03:56pm PT
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Let the juggernaut of AIPAC lies commence. Pansys!
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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May 31, 2010 - 03:59pm PT
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Israel really can't let aid in that is from a group that calls for its destruction, really a problem. An unprovoked attack on foreign-registered vessels in international waters, as appears to have been the case, is an act of piracy. Even if 'provoked' by a few poorly-armed idiots, the response was disproportionate. And it's particularly dumb in that the convoy was in effect sponsored by Turkey, one of Israel's few (lukewarm) friends in the region. Israel could easily have waited until the boats were in domestic waters, or simply have demanded to inspect the cargoes before allowing them to be landed.
A major blunder by extremists in the Israeli government and military. No wonder its prime minister had to rush home from Canada to deal with the fallout.
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lostinshanghai
Social climber
someplace
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May 31, 2010 - 04:11pm PT
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Fatty
Looks like bye, bye so long, take it easy, write, send a postcard, for Netanhayu.
You now don't have any friends now: Jordan, Egypt and Turkey.
Who has best hand now.
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