I usually don’t read forwards, but this one was sent by one of our trusted readers, and I think it’s worth reposting here:

Dear Friend,

In just a few days, the White House Correspondents Association will decide which news organization will be awarded the seat recently vacated by Helen Thomas. The news organizations most actively vying for the seat are FOX, NPR and Bloomberg News.

FOX News is a right-wing propaganda outlet, not a legitimate news agency. In recent weeks the network has turned the volume up on its race-baiting political agenda. The media assault on Shirley Sherrod is just a latest in a series of racist and politically motivated attacks on targets like Van Jones, ACORN, and Eric Holder’s Department of Justice.

It’s bad enough that we have to fight the constant smear campaigns and appeals to racial paranoia from FOX and the right-wing media. We can’t let them have the best seat in the White House press briefing room and the legitimacy that it confers.

I just told the White House Correspondents Association to give the best seat in the briefing room to NPR, not FOX. I hope you will, too.

Have a look and take action at the link below:
Help NPR beat FOX News

This meeting happens Sunday, so take 30 seconds and sign this petition asap. You can check out NPR’s classy letter to the white House Correspondents Association here. I haven’t seen one from Fox, so I’m assuming that it looks something like this:

Deer white black House,

Their is a front row seat with our name on it and we need to fill it with a hot chick. that’s right – Hellen Tomas (sp?) was an old wrinkly ballsack and we’re the…um…not wrinkly ballsack that teabags you while your sleeeping and posts that shite on the internet. Wait…anyway, we have Sarah Palin and that chick from Fox n Friends…you know the bitch…blonde hair (all our hosts are blond LOL). You know wich one we mean becuz we’re the #1 top rated news station in the world by the poll we just conducted ourselves, so youve def seen her. So yea, if you dun’t were just going to rag on you more, (jk LOL but srs we will) so do it unless you want too get bored to def by NPR. My grandpa listenz two that shit for fucks sake. you don’t want to be like him – hes wrinkly too like my nutz in yer face lolepicpwn.

Laterz,
FOX

Post from: Muckmakers.com

NPR Vs. Fox News

General David Petraeus has been oft-quoted recently for his bold, “We are in this to win,” statement, but how do we define “win” in the War on Terror? Not everyone can get what they want (or what they deserve) out of this continually costly conflict, and were any of the U.S.’s goals ever really achievable in the first place? Much of this is due to the fact that the Bush administration pushed us into this conflict in the first place and that, after watching the bills and the bodies pile up since 2001, we haven’t learned a damn thing. The Obama administration has had an ample amount of time now to wake us up from this “stay the course” mentality, but in a pointless attempt to be a “centrist,” Obama is not only making the same mistakes, but allowing the same people to make them.

Michael Leiter has been the Director of the United States National Counterterrorism Center since 2007, and he’s made it quite clear over the years that he’s the type of guy who prefers security (or a false sense of it) over freedom. Like most Bush employees, he’s all for stripping everyone of their civil liberties in the name of “protecting the American people,” even if those people are Americans themselves, and then claiming that we’re fighting the War on Terror to protect those very liberties. It seems that you’re more likely to get picked up by a government agent who labels you as a threat than a terrorist who labels you as an infidel, and apparently both would treat you with the same lack of humanity. Leiter hasn’t changed this tune, either, yet he kept his position when Obama took office in 2009. Take a look at what he recently told Newsweek…

Q: But what is the standard that you use for targeting a U.S. citizen [who has not been charged with a crime] and what is the decision-making process for targeting that individual?

Leiter: Just to be clear, the U.S. government through the Department of Defense goes out and attempts to target and kill people, a lot of people, who haven’t been indicted.

Well thanks for making it clear that the U.S. government is still a bunch of fascist assholes who have no respect for freedom, never mind warrants. He continues…

Q: When the Bush administration declared Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, an enemy combatant, stripped him of all his legal rights, and threw him in a military brig, there was an enormous outcry from the civil liberties community. Here, the Obama administration is going one better than that; they’re saying, “We can kill this guy. We can take him out.” And there’s been very little public debate about how that decision was made. Doesn’t the government at least owe a [fuller] explanation of how it’s reaching these decisions?

Leiter: I absolutely agree with you. These are tough issues that require a full and open debate. That may not mean there’s a full and open debate about an individual…because there are sensitive sources and methods involved. But certainly, the policy decisions about the ways in which we should or should not use force demand a full and open discussion…But I will tell you from my perspective as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, if someone like Anwar al-Awlaki is responsible for part of an operation to kill more than 300 people over the city of Detroit, I think it would be wholly irresponsible…not to at least think about and potentially direct all elements of national power to try to defend the American people.

These issues “require a full and open debate,” but we’re not going to debate them and we’re just going to do what we want anyway. Awesome. Pardon me if that’s about as comforting as a Big Brother monitor installed in my living room. So how many of these psychos are we cowering in fear from?

Q: Let’s get a sense of what the overall threat picture looks like right now. [White House chief of staff] Rahm Emanuel said [recently] that about half of Al Qaeda has been eliminated in the last 18 months. How many people is that, and how many people are left in the other half?

Leiter: I think [CIA director] Leon Panetta said on Sunday, and I agree with him, that in Afghanistan, you have a certain number, a relatively small number, 50 to 100. I think we have in Pakistan a larger number.

Q: How many?

Leiter: Upwards – more than 300, I would say.

WHAT?! So there’s roughly 400 of these assholes and I’m still supposed to feel threatened?! About four times that amount work in the White House alone, and those people are doing way more to shit on my way of life than these 400 motherfuckers hiding out in caves on their magic prayer mats. We’re still spending billions of dollars on these wars and sacrificing thousands of troops to stamp out a bunch of idiots so pathetic that they’ve resorted to hiding dud bombs in their underwear. Are we serious? Leiter even admits that the more of these people we kill (or accidentally kill) in these wars, the more potential terrorists we breed, so why continue to recruit?

And speaking of the underwear bomber, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Mr. Leiter was in charge of the NCTC when this occurred, and they ignored several valid warnings, including those from the bomber’s own father, and watched it happen. (Sounds eerily like 9/11, doesn’t it? We let the shit hit the fan so we have enough fear and confusion on our side to justify doing whatever we want.) He was the one who was famously lambasted in January for taking a skiing vacation during the incident, dodging the press and all accountability. It was up to a few brave everyday civilians to tackle the would-be bomber, not some highly trained “super spies” (like this fucking winner) funded by our tax dollars. Hell, the Obama administration even defended him and said he deserved the break…from what, exactly? Wasn’t Bush the guy who said he was declaring the War on Terror to keep us safe after he failed to keep us safe?

So, in other words, even if we agree to surrender our civil liberties and grant our government the right to assassinate any American citizen they want, without checks, balances, or due process, in the name of national defense, we still aren’t any safer because they’re not even doing their fucking jobs in the first place – they’re too busy defending their “right” to indiscriminately shoot people. Even more awesome. Leiter’s got to go, and so does this outmoded idea that we have to give up our rights to keep them. It’s about time Obama started cleaning house and dusting the cobwebs from an administration that failed so badly that they got him elected in the first place.

Post from: Muckmakers.com

Leiter Is Living Proof of Why Obama Must Stop Continuing Failed Bush Policies

When Christopher Hitchens gets it right, he really gets it right, and when President Obama gets it wrong, he gets it really wrong. Elena Kagan, the Solicitor General and Obama’s pending nominee to the Supreme Court, and her office are also quite wrong…Wrong about what, you ask? It seems that both the president and the office of the solicitor general are siding with the Vatican on the child rape cases. The Vatican claims that they are a sovereign state immune from prosecution in the many cases in which the Pope is named as a defendant for remaining complicit or covering up the crimes, and the Obama administration is advising the Supreme Court to agree with them. Hitchens calls bullshit on this one, I have to wholeheartedly agree…

It is not usually considered polite to mention that the majority of Supreme Court justices are practicing Roman Catholics. (Writing about this delicate matter during the argument over the nomination of John Roberts, I did warn that there might come a day when it could pose a double conflict of interest, both in respect of church teachings and in respect of the Vatican’s decision to shelter Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston after he skipped town to avoid a subpoena. This was before it came to light that the current pope had been so deeply and personally involved in the church’s strategy of delay and obfuscation.) We will soon have a Supreme Court that contains no Protestants and no secularists and which is being asked to rule on a matter central to the religious beliefs of a majority of its members, who are bound to regard the man formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger as the vicar of Christ on earth. If they now take refuge in the lesser claim that he is the bureaucratic head of a foreign government, will that serve to assuage their consciences?

That’s exactly what this is – a conflict of interest. This illustrates exactly why the separation of church and state is so essential. Judges are supposed to remain impartial, and the court system is supposed to uphold truth and justice above all else, but if even the country’s highest court is in the pocket of the Holy See, what chance does justice have in these cases? A real judge puts their own personal beliefs and biases aside when deciding a case, but in a country where one cannot even get elected unless they believe in a widely-accepted god, how can we expect them to truly remain impartial? The questions don’t end there…

To give just one example that has not so far had the attention it deserves, the State Department is required by Congress to make an annual report on the human rights record of every government with which we have relations. Yet there is no annual human rights report on the Vatican—or Vatican City or the Holy See, if you prefer. When questioned on this rather glaring lacuna, officials at Foggy Bottom say that for human rights purposes, the Vatican is not a state. It enjoys, for example, only the status of an observer at the United Nations. Very well then, if the Supreme Court rules that it is a sovereign government, then it necessarily follows that it must be subjected to official scrutiny on its rights practices, which in international law include the treatment of children. It will be interesting to see how the Obama administration gets itself off the horns of that dilemma. (It is also perhaps a pity that this question was not resolved earlier, so that we could have had an official U.S. government report on, say, the open complicity of the Catholic Church and the papacy in sheltering the men who organized the genocide in Rwanda.)

Didn’t know about that last one? There’s good reason for that; the Church does what it wants and thinks that it answers to no one – not even god, apparently, and they’re particularly good at persuading the media (and its overall Christian bias) to cover it up, or at least not talk about it, which is essentially the same thing. As the Vatican are hypocrites in everything else, this next part should come as no surprise…

This all arises because the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made a ruling that effectively lifted the Vatican’s immunity under a 1976 law (the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which governs the extent to which foreign entities can be pursued on American soil). The case involves an Oregon victim who was molested by a priest who had been moved, after previous offenses, from parishes in Ireland and Chicago. Other plaintiffs in other states such as Kentucky and Wisconsin have asked the courts to view offending priests and complicit bishops as employees of the Vatican, thereby illustrating the general responsibility of the papacy. The church’s response to this has been especially absurd, claiming that the pope exercises only spiritual authority and not managerial control. The first thing to say about this is notice how it abolishes the church’s other claim to be a political and accountable state! Then ask yourself what would happen to a priest or bishop who expressed doubts about the Vatican’s teaching on abortion or divorce. He would soon find that Rome was very interested in disciplining him. It was Joseph Ratzinger himself who invited Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson all the way from Argentina and back into the fold in an attempt to conciliate Catholicism’s more reactionary wing. It was Rome that gave shelter and succor to Cardinal Law after the long disgrace of his tenure in Boston. Suddenly we are asked to believe that the church is not really responsible for the actions of those who have a sworn duty of obedience to its headquarters? This will not wash. State or no state, the church is a highly disciplined multinational corporation that allows little or no autonomy to its branches and can no more be the judge in its own cause than British Petroleum.

That’s the Catholic Church for you – using weasel words and half-assed excuses whenever they’re asked a tough question. Of course, this is the religion that is so busy hating gays, women, and other religions that they just don’t have any hate left in their little black hearts for child molesters, so I guess we shouldn’t expect much in terms of logic and reason. What we should expect, however, is our lawmakers to uphold the law. Obama and Kagan (who is Jewish, by the way, so she has one less excuse to side with the Vatican) couldn’t be more wrong on this one, and if the Supreme Court ignores these clear cases of human rights violations, then we are no better than the countries we invade in the hope of making them more like us.

Post from: Muckmakers.com

Hitchens on Obama’s Appeasement of the Vatican

Via: Gawker

Chris Simcox, co-founder of the Minutemen border militia and recent primary opponent of John McCain, is getting divorced. According to his wife, it’s just small stuff, like how he “twice brandished a gun and threatened to shoot his family.”

Simcox, whose work starting an organization for people to point their guns at Mexicans made him a rising star in the Arizona Republican party, is accused of two lovely gun incidents in an order of protection that his wife Alena filed this April. In the first, she claims that she came home to find her husband drunk and pointing guns and threatening the family, a “six-hour ordeal during which she locked herself and her three children in a bedroom until he passed out at 2 a.m.” Jesus.

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Chris Simcox – Right Wing Hero

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Obama on BP

Whether you love or hate this polarizing writer/atheist/pundit/alcoholic, Christopher Hitchens has a new book out today, Hitch-22: A Memoir, and the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive so far. It’s practically impossible to agree with the man on everything, but when he gets something right, goddamn does he ever get it right. While he’s known for his frank manner and brutal honesty, this is arguably his most truthful work yet, as he’s not examining religion or the founding fathers in this book, but himself. This is not an easy task for anyone – never mind this obscenely critical and eternally cynical author. Appropriately, his publisher put together this great little video of 22 quotes from Hitchens to promote Hitch-22, so I’ll just let the man speak for himself…

Post from: Muckmakers.com

Christopher Hitchens’ New Memoir, Hitch-22, Released Today

It’s been way too long since Lewis Black did a “Back in Black” segment for the Daily Show (February, to be exact), but it was well worth the wait. Bashing Glenn Beck is easy, but he does it with such flare…

“Glenn Beck plays ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,’ except there’s just one degree and Kevin Bacon is Hitler.” Pure gold.

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Video: Lewis Black on Glenn Beck’s Nazi Tourette’s

Over one year later, one of our biggest articles, A Letter From a True Patriot of the Tea Bag Movement, is still pulling in traffic from sites like StumbleUpon and still generating both positive and downright insane comments…but hey, it got people talking about this issue, right? It took people long enough to catch on to the fact that the same rhetoric Timothy McVeigh used to justify his bombing in Oklahoma City is the same bullshit that the tea parties are spewing at their rallies, but now it seems that everybody, on both sides of the aisle, are talking about it.

I’m not saying that we were definitely the first ones to make the obvious connection, but c’mon, we do deserve a bit of credit for tackling this head-on before the mainstream picked it up, and more creatively than they did at that.

• CBS News did a nice big piece on it.
• Sean Hannity made a Biden-sized flub by comparing teabaggers to Timmy.
• Bill Clinton warned that “demonizing” the government could lead to McVeigh-like violence.
• Clinton’s warning sparked all kinds of debate in the papers and the blogosphere.
• Rachel Maddow hosted a two-hour documentary on MSNBC about McVeigh and his connection to modern anti-government extremism.

There are many more pages I could link, but a bunch of them are right-wing nutjob blogs that I wouldn’t link if a teabagger had the shotgun he brings to “peaceful” rallies pressed up against the back of my head. Take note that every one of the above links are from April of this year; now take note that our article was posted in April of last year. I’m not asking for a pat on the back here, but I am asking, “What the fuck took you people so long?!”

…though a link giving us some fucking credit wouldn’t hurt every once in a while, MSM. Just sayin’.

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The Timothy McVeigh/Tea Party Connection Still Resonates One Year Later

A lot of anti-war protesters have come and gone over the last few years, but Cindy Sheehan is still giving hell to the war machine, still shouting into megaphones and being led away in handcuffs. As you may or may not recall, after her son was killed in the Iraq War in 2004, she became a peace activist and staged a highly publicized protest outside of Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas in 2005. Whether you agree with her stance or not, you’ve got to give her credit for consistency – she didn’t just stop when Dubya left office, and she criticizes Obama regularly for practically picking up where Bush left off. She was out of the national spotlight for a little while, but now she’s back and just as controversial as ever. So controversial, in fact, she was practically banned from my hometown of Scranton, PA on April 9th.

To make a long story short, some organizers from New York had her fly in from California to speak at their churches, and since Scranton is only about an hour away, they wanted to have her speak in Northeast Pennsylvania as well. She was all set to talk at a venue owned by the Diocese of Scranton when they suddenly canceled at the last minute. Here was their official statement:

The Diocese respects Ms. Sheehan’s right to speak about the issues involving the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The reason she cannot be given a forum inside a Church facility is because she supports positions that are contrary to Church teaching, in particular her support for abortion rights and same-sex marriage.

Ironically, Cindy wasn’t planning on talking about either of those issues in her speech. As we’ve posted about before, the Diocese of Scranton is known for putting their politics ahead of everything else, even a message to end two wars that the Pope himself is against. Bishop Martino, former head of the Diocese, made national headlines in 2008 by forcing every priest in the area to read a letter urging congregations not to vote for Democrats because they’re pro-choice. Martino continued his neo-conservative crusade by pushing his politics (including his hatred of gays) down the throats of every Catholic who would listen…the problem was people stopped listening. As churches and private schools continued to close from lack of attendance, the Church realized that in such a heavily Democratic area, they weren’t doing themselves any favors by pushing more people away and quietly asked Martino to “retire,” which he did, citing “fatigue.” They found a more popular replacement, Bishop Bambera, and while they’ve tried to spin this as a positive change and step forward for the Church, it’s clear judging by this incident that it’s the same old politics in a new funny hat. What if a speaker was pro-capital punishment? Would they have banned him/her too?

I give Cindy credit – she didn’t give up there. She unsuccessfully tried to arrange a talk at several other non-religious, apolitical venues, but was turned down or outright refused because no one wanted to touch the controversy that the Church had drummed up. Finally, she decided to speak on public property (where they really couldn’t stop her) in Courthouse Square in downtown Scranton…and on the steps of the Diocese Chancery Building. While she wasn’t planning to speak about abortion or gay marriage, she now made it a point to do just that before getting into the anti-war stuff, so it just goes to show you that you’re better off listening to opposing views rather than censoring them – you end up doing your opponent more favors by exposing how weak your arguments really are. If the media wasn’t planning on covering her speech before, they certainly were now.

I was among those covering the story, and afterward, I had the opportunity to meet Cindy and talk with her one-on-one. Being a nationally known figure, I’ve heard countless right-wing criticisms of her being this media “attention whore” who cares more about her own fame than the memory of her son; this nasty bitch who is attempting to profit from her son’s death. This just isn’t the case. Never once did she ask for money (she didn’t even bring copies if her books to sign), and her organizers asked only once if anyone could spare a dollar or two after her speech because she flew from one coast to the other on her own dime. She was the kind of person that you didn’t introduce yourself to – she walked up to each person individually and introduced herself. Even though she had done so much traveling in the last 24 hours and was on only three hours of sleep, she hid it well and was witty and engaging, even in between her talks, where she could have easily got into a car and ignored the bystanders. Instead, she hung around with us and talked politics. Even when hecklers showed up to yell at her and try and throw off her momentum, she calmly addressed their views and never once raised her voice at them. Whether you agree with her views or not, to paint her as a raving, greedy madwoman is just so far from the truth that’s it not even funny…it’s just more spin from the media that loves to hate her.

If you’re interested in hearing what she had to say, listen to our latest podcast by clicking the “play” below or download it for free at the link below or on our podcast page. We throw in our own commentary as well, so there’s a good two hours of rousing political content there if you love a good heated political discussion…and we certainly do.

Muckmakers Podcast: Episode 13
Running Time: 125 minutes 21 seconds

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Muckmakers Exclusive: Cindy Sheehan Gets Banned From Scranton

A bit of an expansion on the clips making the rounds on the news stations.

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One Shitty Deal