Monthly Archives: August 2010

A quick FreeRepublic update

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FreeRepublic thinks the media is racist! Therefore, N-words for everyone!
f1.jpg

Now, unfortunately for us, but fortunately for common decency, this first post was deleted. It is unfortunate because we were unable to screencap it in time, and have to rely on a copy/paste. But as you can see below it, there is still Google records of the actual post.

To: reaganator

“Define “racist”.

I’m starting to believe that “racist” is the new “n” word for anyone who does not agree with blacks and I am deeply offended. Thus, I will start using the word nigger until “they” stop using the word “racist”.

11 posted on Friday, August 27, 2010 5:06:30 AM by freeangel ( (free speech is only good until someone else doesn’t like what you say))

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Drain Clogs – 08-30-2010

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America’s honor is restored. And by America’s honor, I mean Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin’s bank accounts! good job, Wingnut Suckas! I’m sure maybe a few cents will end up at the charity, but only whatever Canadian pennies accidentally got put in the donation baskets.

The crowd was estimated at 87,000, but that didn’t stop Glenn Beck and the rest of the rightwing loons to inflate the numbers and soon they were over half a million. By Friday there will have been 96 quintillion people at Beck’s rally. All of them white.

And the “peaceful crowd” was filled with violent psychopaths.


Hey, Japan is ripping off the Teabaggers for their own crazy xenophobic mobs!

The demonstrators appeared one day in December, just as children at an elementary school for ethnic Koreans were cleaning up for lunch. The group of about a dozen Japanese men gathered in front of the school gate, using bullhorns to call the students cockroaches and Korean spies.

….

More significantly, the protests also signaled the emergence here of a new type of ultranationalist group. The groups are openly anti-foreign in their message, and unafraid to win attention by holding unruly street demonstrations.

Since first appearing last year, their protests have been directed at not only Japan’s half million ethnic Koreans, but also Chinese and other Asian workers, Christian churchgoers and even Westerners in Halloween costumes. In the latter case, a few dozen angrily shouting demonstrators followed around revelers waving placards that said, “This is not a white country.”

….

No such estimates exist for the size of the new Net right. However, the largest group appears to be the cumbersomely named Citizens Group That Will Not Forgive Special Privileges for Koreans in Japan, known here by its Japanese abbreviation, the Zaitokukai, which has some 9,000 members.

The Zaitokukai gained notoriety last year when it staged noisy protests at the home and junior high school of a 14-year-old Philippine girl, demanding her deportation after her parents were sent home for overstaying their visas. More recently, the Zaitokukai picketed theaters showing “The Cove,” an American documentary about dolphin hunting here that rightists branded as anti-Japanese.

In interviews, members of the Zaitokukai and other groups blamed foreigners, particularly Koreans and Chinese, for Japan’s growing crime and unemployment, and also for what they called their nation’s lack of respect on the world stage. Many seemed to embrace conspiracy theories taken from the Internet that China or the United States were plotting to undermine Japan.

…..

Mr. Sakurai says the group is not racist, and rejected the comparison with neo-Nazis. Instead, he said he had modeled his group after another overseas political movement, the Tea Party in the United States. He said he had studied videos of Tea Party protests, and shared with the Tea Party an angry sense that his nation had gone in the wrong direction because it had fallen into the hands of leftist politicians, liberal media as well as foreigners.

Here’s a good article about the shrinking privacy rights for our public schools.

Libertarians are so mature they yell, curse, and swear at each other even if they unanimously agree.

Focus on Family is defending school bullies and their right to beat up gay students! Yes, Jesus wants you to smear the queer, thus sayth the Lord!

The Taliban is totally for stopping the Park51 center (aka the Ground Zero Mosque) because it is the best recruitment tool they’ve had in years! Thanks, hateful bigots, for helping America’s enemies once again. I present to you the George W. Bush Award for FUBARing Everything Up, Big Time!

Speaking of FUBAR, some nutjob set a fire at the site of a proposed mosque in Tennessee

Cartoon of the Day:

Drain Clogs – 08-26-2010

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  • Friend of the site D.C. Douglas has made a new video to help Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe sell their book Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto:

    Also how awesome is it that DC Douglas is in Titanic II? Pretty awesome.

  • Alan Simpson says dumb stuff, somehow isn’t fired from awful committee that shouldn’t exist. Also Digby is almost always right.
  • Some Muslim/American news:
  • Glenn Beck’s 8-28 Rally is this weekend, where Beck will try to co-opt the Civil Rights Movement in order to sell books..I mean, be patriotic and take back America. It has nothing to do with selling books. But his books will be available for purchase! Real Patriotic Americans will be at the 9-12 Rally instead! Which one will have the larger made up number of attendees? You’ll have to wait and see!
  • Roseanne is running for president of the US and Prime Minister of Israel.

  • So there were a few fights at the Iowa State Fair and rumors swirled it was Beat Whitey Night and that gangs of black youths were systematically beating down poor white people. Despite the police now denying there was a Beat Whitey Night, the right wing noise machine went into full force, and soon FreeRepublic’s whining and blanket race war threats had gotten the attention of the Aryan Nation!

    Aryan Nations Headed to Des Moines, Iowa

    Paul Mullet is the director of the Aryan Nations Church of Jesus Christ Christian. When he heard Rep. Ako Abdul-Samad, Democrat from Des Moines say that there wasn’t enough information about the beatings and attacks to call them racially motivated, he said they (Aryan Nations) were going to Des Moines. When asked how many were coming or when they were coming, Mullet said he wasn’t going to let anyone know ahead of time. He (Mullet) said he wasn’t stupid.

    That’s right, the white supremacist guy’s name is Mullet.

    Luckily FreeRepublic is sensible and they all deny the Nazis..oh, wait..

    To: stillafreemind

    Funny…don’t much about Iowa Aryan Nations sorts but maybe the black fellows should study Greensboro NC before they go off half cocked

    just some helpful advice

    24 posted on Thursday, August 26, 2010 8:52:46 AM by wardaddy (effed up times..)

    wardaddy is making a reference to the Greensboro Massacre, the 1979 Klan-Nazi Shootings of 14 blacks at a workers march, 5 were killed.

  • Cartoon of the Day:

The (not so) Secret History of FreeRepublic.com

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If you have spent any time on the internet in the world of politics, you have heard of FreeRepublic.com. A right wing message board that boasts one of the largest memberships and pageviews of any right wing website. It is its own self-contained community that has a long history of ups and downs. Many times members of FreeRepublic.com have influenced real world events, and their notoriety have made them a powerful block in right wing circles. Even if the right wing circles don’t want to acknowledge exactly what is being said by the various Freepers.

So what exactly is FreeRepublic.com? How did it get started? What have they done? this article attempts to answer those questions by giving a timeline overview of the history of FreeRepublic.com. We use publicly available messages, both from FreeRepublic.com and external sources (members, ex-members, bitter ex-members, news reports, and enemies) FR has done A LOT of stuff. This is in no ways a complete list of everything they have accomplished or a complete history. Most major events are mentioned, as well as many minor events, some listed just as examples of the state of the FR forums at the time. Some of the sources are more dodgy than others, even history on the FR boards themselves are whitewashed and purged at times. But it is a good rough draft, and revisions are welcome in the comments section.

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Domestic implications of drone strikes and the ICC

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For background on the ICC, see Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Wikipedia).

Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution states:

[The President] shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur;

In practice, President signs UN treaties and submits them to Congress for ratification.  In some cases, the treaty can be left in limbo if the former happens but not the latter, such as the forty-year lag on the ratification of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.   The Rome Statute is an even stranger case because President Clinton signed it in 2000, but chose not to even submit it to the Senate for ratification, stating:

The United States should have the chance to observe and assess the functioning of the court, over time, before choosing to become subject to its jurisdiction. Given these concerns, I will not, and do not recommend that my successor, submit the treaty to the Senate for advice and consent until our fundamental concerns are satisfied.

Concerns about his successor proved unwarranted.  Section 9 of the 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS) went a step further:

We will take the actions necessary to ensure that…[“we”] are not impaired by the potential for investigations, inquiry, or prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose jurisdiction does not extend to Americans and which we do not accept.

The curious thing about this is that numerous public opinion polls and surveys have shown that Americans support the ICC by wide margins.  In particular, a 2008 poll (pdf) by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that

There is also bipartisan support for the International Criminal Court (ICC), with  68 percent of Americans saying the United States should participate in the agreement on the ICC that can try individuals for war crimes, genocide, or crimes against humanity if their own country won’t try them.

So while its jurisdiction may not extend to Americans, it’s certainly not accurate to say that Americans wouldn’t accept it if given the choice.  Nevertheless, the farcical American Service-Members Protection Act (Hague Invasion Act) was passed in 2002 as well.  The Act finds that

Any American prosecuted by the International Criminal Court will, under the Rome Statute, be denied procedural protections to which all Americans are entitled under the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution, such as the right to trial by jury.

Which brings us to the drone strikes.  The drone strikes/assassinations are very illegal in Pakistan and the Obama administration has formally declared (the Bush administration did so implicitly) that it will use them on whoever they want, including American citizens without “impairing” itself with the whole procedural protection deal that was the rationale for obstructing the ICC.

More Transparency and Accountability

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NYT: Blackwater Reaches Deal on U.S. Export Violations

A settlement of $42 million over has been reached with the State Department who they’re currently still contracting with, not an actual court.  It almost certainly includes provisions about “admitting to no wrongdoing” so this is really just a whitewash.   The fines were for “export violations” including:

  • Illegal weapons exports to Afghanistan.
  • Making unauthorized proposals to train troops in Sudan.
  • Providing sniper training for Taiwanese police/paramilitaries.

The first is an actual export violation, the others could be if you count them as “services” but that’s kind of a ridiculous way to treat the situation in Sudan in particular.   The story cited anonymous sources and it’s all probably classified so I don’t expect any documents to be released.

Update

On the same day, the NYT has an Op-Ed about how Afghan women will be maimed at a faster rate if foreign contractors are banned.

UNDER orders from President Hamid Karzai, over the next four months Afghanistan will be phasing out almost all foreign private security companies, a move meant to bring the country’s vast security apparatus under tighter government control.

It’s a laudable goal. But it also means that foreign aid workers, government officials and companies will have to rely instead for security on the Afghan National Police and the Afghan National Army — arguably two of the most corrupt and incompetent organizations in the country. Without a more effective replacement for foreign security companies, Mr. Karzai’s order could make the situation in Afghanistan significantly worse.

Who created and trained them in the first place again?  Oh, that’s right, foreign contractors!  And only a year ago it was about putting an “Afghan face” on the war:

There is a new push to dramatically expand the size of the Afghan Army and police, as the military operations now under way in southern Afghanistan is marked by a conspicuous absence of Afghans in the fight.

….

The Helmand offensive points to the need for more Afghans in the battlefield. There are roughly 4,000 US Marines operating in the Helmand region, but only about 650 Afghan soldiers fighting alongside them. There are also 6,500 British troops in the province.

“I’m not going to sugarcoat it,” said Brig. Gen. Lawrence Nicholson, commander of the Marine Expeditionary Brigade running the operation there, in a briefing with reporters earlier this month. “The fact of the matter is, we don’t have enough Afghan forces, and I’d like more.”

There are in fact a total of 5,000 Afghan soldiers in Helmand, and more are said to be on the way, but officials haven’t explained why they’re not involved in the new offensive. The rest of the Afghan army is posted around the country, with many in the north, where violence is reasonably low.

Putting an “Afghan face” on military operations is more than window dressing.

“Building a larger – yet still professional – ANA [Afghan National Army] will be one of the pillars of a successful counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan,” says Carter Malkasian, an analyst with CNA, a think tank in Washington. “The ANA are cheap, good at gathering information, and respected by the population. The more well-trained, well-advised Afghan soldiers, the better.”

Drain Clogs – 08-20-2010

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Alternet has a list of 10 young Right Wingers who are the future of the conservative movement. Read up because they’ll be saying horrible crap on a tv near you soon enough!

A scam company is using a Bill O’Reilly interview to pretend he endorses them to scam more people! Ever wonder why scams are so popular with Right Wing news advertisers? It’s almost if they think the audience is stupid…why could that be? For his part, BillO is pissed. But NewsMax is the group promoting this junk along with scam organizer Bill Spetrino, who turns his 60-day “trial” account for his system into a $99/year payday.

Teabagger Republican Nevada Senate Candidate Sharron Angle – “Black is Evil!”

Professor HM Orly Taitz TE got smacked down by the Supreme Court (again) and is trying to appeal. Expect that to go nowhere fast. Taitz is also claiming she has new evidence Obama is not a citizen because she’s seeing things in videos posted on the WhiteHouse.gov site. Yeah.

So Dr. Laura will be ending her show after her now-legendary N-word rant. Luckily, Sarah Palin supports her and tells her to reload! I guess, yell the n-word even more? And she was against the n-word a few months ago. I’m totally confused, but who would have though Sarah Palin would back racist rants?

Wingnuts go insane on a juror in the Blago trial, blaming her for being the loan holdout that got Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich convicted on only one count. Their evidence? She’s black, worked for the state, and listens to NPR! Shirley Sherrod 2.0

Juror # 106, a black female believed to be in her 60s, is a retired state public health director who has ties to the Chicago Urban League. She has handed out campaign literature for a relative who ran for public office. She listens to National Public Radio and liberal talk radio shows.

Who would have though the Wingnuts would destroy the life of a black woman?

The anti-Mosque hysteria might cost the GOP a big name donor! Who would have though the Wingnuts would be racist against Muslims?

This is a good read about the Tea Party Exchange: One man came up with a scheme for a Tea Party discount card, and the businesses that signed up suddenly had a lot of angry customers that didn’t want to do business with supporters of crazy Teabaggery. Now the whole thing has collapsed and the guy is going to lose all the sweet sweet money he made of the back of hard working local businesses.

Cartoon of the Day:

Mark Williams returns

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In the past few weeks some stories have slipped by due to work leaving me solo, so here we’re catching up on one and using it as an excuse to post more Resistnet caps. Remember Tea Party Express racist Mark Williams? He wrote a fake letter to the NAACP by a “slave” that was denounced by pretty much everyone with a nanogram of common sense. Then the Tea Party Express kicked him out. He disappeared…for a few weeks, and is now back hyping up the new Citizens Reclaiming Constitutional Liberties PAC. So that’s the new scam! Donate today, Mark Williams needs some new white sheets!

As Williams revealed his new plans he also took a swipe at the Tea Party movement for not being able to move beyond “the cheerleading stage.”

Williams revealed, first to CNN, that he is helping to form a political action committee that will channel “Tea Party passion” into electing conservative candidates.

Williams said the effort will be called the “Citizens Reclaiming Constitutional Liberties PAC.” He told CNN that paperwork is currently being filed to establish the group and that it should be up and running by August 16. From there, the PAC will proceed in raising seed money and finding candidates it deems conservative enough, Williams said.

“We’ll be looking for…conservative young people who have something to offer, something to say and don’t identify, in some cases, with either party,” Williams told CNN in an exclusive interview.

Below the fold is some Resistnet screencaps of all their Tea Party Express mentions, because, why not?

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Fake Iraq exit #2

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For fake exit #1, see this and this.

As for the second attempt:

Guardian

The last US combat troops have left Iraq, seven-and-a-half years after the US-led invasion, and two weeks ahead of President Obama’s 31 August deadline for withdrawal from the country.

The final troops to leave, 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, rolled in convoy across the border and into Kuwait this morning, officially ending combat operations which began in March 2003.

The Obama administration had pledged to withdraw troops to 50,000 by 31 August. CNN reported that according to the US military there are now 56,000 US troops in Iraq, meaning another 6,000 must leave if the US president is to meet his own deadline.

….

“By the end of this month, 50,000 troops will be serving in Iraq. As Iraqi security forces take responsibility for securing their country, our troops will move to an advise-and-assist role.

“And, consistent with our agreement with the Iraqi government, all of our troops will be out of Iraq by the end of next year.

Ah, notice that it says combat troops.  The agreement being referenced is the 2008 U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement, which states:

All the United States Forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011.

AP

KHABARI CROSSING, Kuwait — A line of heavily armored American military vehicles, their headlights twinkling in the pre-dawn desert, lumbered past the barbed wire and metal gates marking the border between Iraq and Kuwait early Thursday and rolled into history.

For the troops of the 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, it was a moment of relief fraught with symbolism but lightened by the whoops and cheers of soldiers one step closer to going home. Seven years and five months after the U.S.-led invasion, the last American combat brigade was leaving Iraq, well ahead of President Barack Obama’s Aug. 31 deadline for ending U.S. combat operations there.

Makes for a nice photo-op.

Reuters

The U.S.-Iraq military pact that came into force in 2009 provides the legal basis for U.S. troops to be in Iraq. Under the agreement, all U.S. troops must be out by 2012. But U.S. negotiators say that even as the pact was being negotiated, it was considered likely it would be quietly revised later to allow a longer-term, although much smaller, force to remain.

There are currently 56,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, down from about 140,000 when Obama took office in January 2009.

With opinion polls showing Americans tired of nearly a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, any decision to extend U.S. military involvement in Iraq would be enormously risky for Obama, who is up for re-election in 2012.

….

Iraq’s military commander, Lieutenant-General Babakir Zebari, caused consternation last week when he said his troops would not be ready to protect the country until 2020, and that the United States should keep its forces there until then.

And then there’s the contractors:

….the State Department is planning to more than double its private security guards, up to as many as 7,000, according to administration officials who disclosed new details of the plan. Defending five fortified compounds across the country, the security contractors would operate radars to warn of enemy rocket attacks, search for roadside bombs, fly reconnaissance drones and even staff quick reaction forces to aid civilians in distress, the officials said.

This isn’t exactly going to fool the Iraqis, so it’s clear who the intended audience is.