During his much-ballyhooed "Restoring Honor" rally on Saturday, Glenn Beck told a whopper involving the founding father who was supposedly unable to tell a lie: George Washington.
...
Beck also invoked Washington while describing the inspiring experience of visiting famous tourist destinations around the nation's capital. "I have been going to Mt. Vernon," he explained. Holding out his hands for emphasis, he declared with emotion, "I went to the National Archives, and I held the first inaugural address written in his own hand by George Washington."
It was an eyebrow-raising revelation and certainly an original image: Beck cradling the actual words of the first president. But would the persnickety gatekeepers of the nation's historical legacy at the National Archives allow some talk show bombthrower to put his mitts on a rare (and fragile) artifact? The answer, it turns out, is no way. Beck was not telling the truth.
Like everything else Beck says or does, the truth is just an obstacle in the way of a quick buck.
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The Iraq War May Be Over, But Don't Forget The Lies That Got Us There
Watch every minute of this.
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Billions wasted in Iraq as U.S. cuts back services.
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Leading Israeli rabbi and shas party leader calls for a plaque on President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian people before the start of negotiations. Meanwhile, Hamas has found its own way of contributing to the peace process by killing four Israeli settlers, including a pregnant woman. Hamas called the murders an "heroic operation."
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Glenn Beck the faith healer continues to scam his followers.
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I'm going to be late for everything today because I can't stop reading this new profile of Sarah Palin in Vanity Fair.
The obvious money quote:
...anywhere you peel back the skin of Sarah Palin's life, a sad and moldering strangeness lies beneath.
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NSFW: Full Metal Disney.
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Margaret & Helen: 100 grand Bore.
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Ironic Times:
Plan to Build Mosque in Southern California Draws Protests
Opponents say proposed building in Temecula "too close to Ground Zero."
Iran unveils its first drone bomber - like ours, it can accurately strike weddings, family gatherings.
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How to stop an oil rig: http://irregulartimes.com/index.php/archives/2010/08/31/how-to-stop-an-oil-rig/
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Things the President Left Out of His Big Speech
More.THE PRESIDENT: Good evening. Tonight, I'd like to talk to you about the end of our combat mission in Iraq, the ongoing security challenges we face, and the need to rebuild our nation here at home. But before I do that, we need a moment of truth. The Iraq war was based on a deliberate lie involving the White House distorting the National intelligence estimate on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). The report got it wrong on WMD. There were none. But it concluded that the only way the nonexistent WMD would be used against the United States was in retaliation for a US attack on Iraq that threatened Saddam Hussein. By deleting this information, the Bush-Cheney White House justified a preemptive invasion without any basis, a crime under international law that our nation helped establish after World War II.
We're treating the signature wounds of today's wars -- post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury -- while providing the health care and benefits that all of our veterans have earned. These veterans and all those lost and injured would be here today, never have needed treatment were it not for the illegal invasion. As a result, I'm appointing one of the nation's greatest prosecutors, Vincent Bugliosi, to prosecute those responsible for the injuries and deaths of all U.S. soldiers who served in Iraq.
I think we learned something very valuable from Bush's Criminal War: If you're going to lie the nation into an an unnecessary war of criminal aggression, it's important to fearmonger the citizenry into a stinky lather, yes, but it's much more important to scare the crap outta the politicians whom they vote for, very few of whom will do the right thing when their seat on the gravy train might be put at risk.
One question for President Obama about something else that was noticeably not in his speech: Besides staggering debt, the deaths and suffering of hundreds of thousands of people, and the unbridled scorn of the rest of the world, what did we GAIN from the Iraq clusterfuck?
[Crickets]
Update:
A word about the final outcome of the monumental neocon blunder of Iraq as I see it.
The 50,000 American troops still in theater are there ostensibly to 'advise and assist' and will no doubt do that to the best of their considerable ability, but they remain there as a tripwire to try to keep Iran from waltzing into Iraq right now as the victor claiming its spoils, much the same function as our troops in South Korea have had for 57 years.
Once they are gone at the end of next year, the best we can hope for is that Iran will wait a decent interval so that the fall of Iraq will not be blamed directly on us, though it will be and rightly so. The mostly Sunni Arab world will not be happy when the Persian Shiites are strengthened by 20-something-million more Shiites. Your guess is as good as mine about what may happen next. It will not be pleasant.
Note to the American embassy in Baghdad: build more helipads in anticipation of the final comparison of Iraq to Vietnam. See Fall of Saigon.
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Get a spine, Democrats!
You yahoos are nothing but a bunch of gutless fools. No wonder the party of the Confederacy eats your lunches every single day.
WASHINGTON — Democrats in Congress are poised to play a leading role this month in thwarting their party's effort to raise income tax rates on the wealthy. ... [A] small but growing number of moderate Democrats are balking at boosting taxes on the rich.
"Oooh, oooh, the Tea party might get mad at us!" That's probably what those fools are muttering in their expensive scotches.
Here's a news flash for you purile pantywaists: It's not going to make a bloody bit of difference. If your electorate is in a "throw the bums out" mood, then you are going to get thrown out no matter how many of your children you throw from the sleigh. You can go out either with your head held high and try to stand up for something, or you can slink away like the craven political cowards that we all know you are.
Lyndon Johnson had more courage and guts in his fingernail clippings than all of the Blue Dogs have in their collective bodies. LBJ knew what would happen when he signed the 1960s civil rights acts, but he went ahead and did it. He put the good of the nation ahead of the good of his party.
If one thing is certain, it is this: If you assembled all of the Congressmen and Senators who put the good of the nation ahead of partisan politics, you would not have enough people to fill all of the seats in a VW minibus.
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Just what the global recession ordered. "The UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) says that world food prices have risen to their highest level in two years. It says the increase is due partly to a drought in Russia and to government export restrictions which have brought about a surge in the price of wheat. The Rome-based agency says that its food price index shot up 5% between July and August. However, this is 38% down from its peak in June 2008."
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Everywhere you look, Goldman Sachs is screwing this country over
I wouldn't be surprised to read that a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs sold defective rivets for the Titanic. Whenever there is financial fuckery afoot, it sure seems as though Goldman Sachs has something to do with it.
Cool Science Discovery of the Week. "An ancient reef found in the Pacific may provide clues to what will happen to coral when sea temperatures rise. A team of researchers from Australia and New Zealand have discovered a huge 9,000-year-old reef surprisingly far south. Lord Howe Island is 600km east of the Australian mainland and has a small modern coral reef - the furthest south in the world. The ancient reef however is nearly 30 times as large as the modern reef. The scientists, headed by Colin Woodroffe from the University of Wollongong in Australia and researchers from Geoscience Australia, discovered a large ridge about 30m under water in the Tasman Sea. They have published their work in Geophysical Research Letters. The team suspected it might be an ancient reef. The size and shape of the ridge can be mapped using a type of sonar called multi-beam echo sounding. The researchers could not be sure it was coral until they had taken samples."
Cool Archeology Discovery of the Week. "The remains of a huge 12,000 year old feast have been found in a cave in Northern Israel. Archaeologists working in Hilazon Tachtit found what they thought was a late Palaeolithic campsite, when they discovered tools and animal bones. However they soon realised they were looking at a large burial site, with huge numbers of animal bones. They found the remains of at least three aurochs - giant extinct cattle - and over 70 tortoise skeletons. The site, from the era known as the Natufian phase, had at least 28 human bodies, ranging from babies to those who would have been elderly for the time - aged about 45. Natalie Munro from the University of Connecticut in the US and Leore Grossman from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem were especially interested to find two pit-like depressions in the centre of the cave that were too small for habitation. Instead, the depressions contained these animal bones. One depression had the auroch remains which had been butchered. The other contained the tortoise bones and shells, which were mostly intact, and some of which were burned. The team drew the conclusion that the tortoises had been cooked and the meat had then been removed. This was the best evidence that the animals had been killed and cooked for eating, not killed as a sacrifice."
According to this report in Newsweek, the anti-Muslim hatred that has been ginned up by Rupert Murdoch's media empire is turning out to be the best recruitment tool that the Taliban has ever had.
"We talk about how America tortures with waterboarding, about the cruel confinement of Muslims in wire cages in Guantánamo, about the killing of innocent women and children in air attacks—and now America gives us another gift with its street protests to prevent a mosque from being built in New York. Showing reality always makes the best propaganda." -- a Taliban operative named ZabihullahI hope you f**kers on the Right are really proud of yourselves over this one. You should be happy with yourselves as the Taliban and the other extremists use your anti-Islam frothings to recruit more young men to kill Americans.
What I say here goes double for those idiots in the Christian Taliban down in Florida who are planning to bun a stack of Korans on September 11th.
Funny how today's repugs don't seem interested in applying that same logic to wingnut masturbatory materials like the Iraq clusterfuck.
So the wonks at Think Progress did it for them.
But while the ultimate legacy of the U.S. intervention in Iraq is still to be determined, it is possible - and necessary, given the implications for future interventions - to attempt to tally the war's costs and benefits to the national security of the United States. Back in May, my colleagues Brian Katulis and Peter Juul and I attempted to do this with our report, The Iraq War Ledger.Read the whole thing.SNIP
But while a nascent democratic Iraqi republic allied with the United States could potentially yield benefits in the future, the costs of the war are very real in the here and now. The financial costs are fairly straightforward, and they are staggering (sources in report):
- Cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom: $748.2 billion
- Projected total cost of veterans' health care and disability: $422 billion to $717 billionThe human costs, especially in terms of Iraqi casualties, are somewhat more difficult to ascertain, but even using the most conservative estimates, the numbers are deeply troubling:
- Total deaths: Between 110,663 and 119,380
- Coalition deaths: 4,712
- U.S. deaths: 4,394
- U.S. wounded: 31,768
- U.S. deaths as a percentage of coalition deaths: 93.25 percent
- Iraqi Security Force deaths: At least 9,451
- Total coalition and ISF deaths: At least 14,163
- Iraqi civilian deaths: Between 96,037 and 104,7542
- Non-Iraqi contractor deaths: At least 463
- Internally displaced persons: 2.6 million
- Refugees: 1.9 millionLeast appreciated, however, are the war's strategic costs, the implications of which the U.S. will likely be grappling with for decades:
SNIP
When measured against the war's costs, there's simply no plausible calculus by which the Iraq intervention can be judged a success. Acknowledging this is, of course, not a criticism of the American troops who fought honorably and sacrificed immensely to carry out a misguided policy, but of the politicians, policymakers and pundits who helped sell and implement that policy in the first place.
Cost-benefit analysis cuts both ways.
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It always comes back to the same thing
Zandar, the blogosphere's premier chronicler of Obama Derangement Syndrome, explains how every outbreak of baseless repug attacks on the president comes from the same place.
Yeah, that's right: a majority of Republicans think Obama wants to impose Sharia law around the world. That's insanity, mass delusion on a staggering scale, and yet among Republicans it is now the majority belief, the definition of mainstream Republicanism.I can't think of why this is happening save that A) hard-core Republicans will believe anything talk-radio says, and that B) just as I believe "Obama is a Muslim" is a dog-whistle euphemism for race, "Obama supports Sharia law" is a euphemism for reparations and vengeance for America's bloody history of enslavement.
There are millions of folks out there who honestly believe that Obama is trying to destroy the economy and the country out of revenge for slavery. All this paranoid shuddering, playing the victim card again and again, the belief that Obama is a traitor to America and not even American himself, it all stems from fears that Obama is the agent of vengeance for hundreds of years of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, you name it.
But hey, it's called Obama Derangement Syndrome for a reason.
Because they won't be satisfied until that ni**er is out of the White House.
