by Robert Fisk
Obama and Osama are at last participating in the same narrative. For the US president's critics - indeed, for many critics of the West's military occupation of Afghanistan - are beginning to speak in the same language as Obama's (and their) greatest enemy.
There is a growing suspicion in America that Obama has been socked into the heart of the Afghan darkness by ex-Bushie Robert Gates - once more the Secretary of Defense - and by journalist-adored General David Petraeus whose military "surges" appear to be as successful as the Battle of the Bulge in stemming the insurgent tide in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq.
India wrong-footed the United States and other rich nations yesterday by agreeing for the first time to set numerical targets for curbing its greenhouse gas emissions.
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The Rude Pundit
In Brief: If You're Gonna Ban ACORN Funding, You Oughta Ban Catholic Charities Funding:
Some things are easy to put in perspective: We have a case in Albany, NY, where Catholic Charities funds were used as part of a settlement on a case of molestation by clergy. In Cleveland in 2002, at a Catholic Charities-supported child care center, five workers were arrested on charges of sexual abuse of children. The number of cases of molestation by workers, of the cloth or not, at Catholic Charities-run or -owned facilities could go on and on and on, as the abuse did for years.
In August of this year, Catholic Charities received a federal government contract for $100 million over five years to work with victims of natural disasters.
And the outrage is...where exactly?
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Another one from the Rude One:
Regarding Jimmy Carter: Was This Even Up For Discussion?:
Listen: when former President Jimmy Carter, from rural Georgia in the goddamned 1920s, says something is racist, he knows wtf he's talking about. Can you imagine the number of toothless crackers he grew up around? No, you can't. Don't even try. Because if you didn't grow up during a time when racism was seen as the way things were, where a white person who was polite to a black person was seen as a traitor to their race, where being a dirt poor white man meant that you had to find someone to beat up on and you sure as hell weren't gonna go after the rich white people actually keeping you down, where there were more lynchings of blacks than in any other state but Mississippi, you stfu and listen to the man. Keep reading (foul language alert!) http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2009/09/regarding-jimmy-carter-was-this-even-up.html
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BAGHDAD // Water supply problems in southern Iraq are escalating, with local officials warning of a humanitarian and political crisis, and residents claiming they are being prevented from fleeing parched land by security forces.
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CNN's Rick Sanchez calls Fox News liars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM1f5xrOfGU&feature=player_embedded
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And after we pay them not to water, we can pay them for lost crops!
Right now, America's Bread Basket relies on an aquifer that's nearly drained. And, many say, it will dry up if farmers keep pumping water from it at the current rate. Devin Browne reports the government plans to pay farmers as one way to get them to cut water use:
Wikipedia's page on the Ogallala Aquifer
A related article from Scientific American
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We Is America
Margaret, I haven't laughed so hard since Katie Couric interviewed Sarah Palin. A few thousand white folks called in sick to work last week so they could parade around the nation's capital on Saturday and Fox News declares a revolution is underway. My goodness. I don't know which is more sad – the fact that they couldn't spell half the words written on their illegible signs or that they all left their white hoods at home. Bring the hippies back. Their protests were much more entertaining.
Just to give you some perspective:
- 1925 - Ku Klux Klan – 35,000 KKK members marched on Washington
- 1963 – March for Freedom with Martin Luther King – 250,000 marched
- 1969 – March to end the Vietnam War – 600,000 marched
- 1993 – Gay and Lesbian Rights – 800,000 marched
- 1995 – Million Man March – 600,000 marched
- 2004 – March for Women's Lives (Pro-Choice) – over 1 million marched
- 2009 – Obama Inauguration – over 1 million celebrate
- September 12, 2009 – Tea Party Hillbilly Rally - 78,000 marched but only 3 seemed to know what they were marching about.
I'll tell you what Margaret. You would never know by watching Fox News that 78,000 racists marching on the nation's capital was cause for concern. You would think we were finally winning the war against the British. Of course, according to Harold's television set, larger crowds gathered at dozens of football games that day so what the hell do I care.
Let me just say something about the 9-12 Project. On September 12, 2001 everyone was an American. There were no Blue States and no Red States. There were no Black Americans and no White Americans. There were no Europeans, no Asians, no Hispanics, no Africans… The world was standing with America against the evil that is terrorism. The globe was united like never before. And what did our President do when given that moment? He told us all to go shopping while he and his buddies planned a war. And 8 years later the 9-12 project has been reduced to a movement of no Blacks, no Hispanics, no Asians… just 78,000 white people who can't spell.
But it's not really these 78,000 marchers that worry me. It's the media that gives them so much attention. Did anyone else notice that when a million Pro-Choice women marched on Washington and 50 nut-jobs stood on the corner mis-quoting the bible, it was the bible thumping nut-jobs getting more coverage on the evening news? I mean 5 KKK members march down Main Street and the news crew out number the marchers 10 to 1.
69 million people voted for Barack Obama knowing full well that Universal Healthcare was a major issue in his campaign. 78,000 people marched on Washington claiming that America has been stolen. Now I am not an expert, but I have to believe that fancy CNN map of John King's should be able to figure out that math.
The biggest problem facing America today isn't the war, the economy, healthcare or even racism. The biggest threat to America is the lack of news coverage in our newscasts. Honestly I don't give a damn what LaToya Jackson thinks, what Paris Hilton ate, what Hillary Clinton is wearing or who Brad Pitt is dating. And I especially don't give a rat's ass what 78,000 peckerwoods with too much time on their hands think about something as complicated as Universal Healthcare.
You know what would have been a good news story? How many of those yahoos marching last weekend actually have health insurance much less a full set of teeth? Did anyone bother to ask that question?
It's not news. It's nonsense. Really. I mean it.
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Print the Teabagger Socialist-Free Purity Pledge and ask all your teabagger/libertarian friends and family to sign it!
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Fox upset that Obama snubbed them.
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Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, "warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict 'will likely result in failure.'" McChrystal adds that if insurgent momentum is not reversed within the next year, "defeating the insurgency is no longer possible."
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$30 billion home loan time bomb set for 2010.
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P.S. I am sorry to inform you that today is the Rapture.
