From Spencer Ackerman for WIRED:
Never mind the dead civilians. Forget about the stolen guns. Get over the murder arrests, the fraud allegations, and the accusations of guards pumping themselves up with steroids and cocaine. Through a "joint venture," the notorious private security firm Blackwater has won a piece of a five-year State Department contract worth up to $10 billion, Danger Room has learned.Spencer is clearly just a whiner.
Apparently, there is no misdeed so big that it can keep guns-for-hire from working for the government. And this is despite a campaign pledge from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to ban the company from federal contracts.
Eight private security firms have won State's giant Worldwide Protective Services contract, the big Foggy Bottom partnership to keep embassies and their inhabitants safe. Two of those firms are longtime State contract holders DynCorp and Triple Canopy. The others are newcomers to the big security contract: EOD Technology, SOC, Aegis Defense Services, Global Strategies Group, Torres International Services and International Development Solutions LLC.
Don't see any of Blackwater's myriad business names on there? That's apparently by design. Blackwater and the State Department tried their best to obscure their renewed relationship. As Danger Room reported on Wednesday, Blackwater did not appear on the vendors' list for Worldwide Protective Services. And the State Department confirms that the company, renamed Xe Services, didn't actually submit its own independent bid. Instead, they used a blandly-named cut out, "International Development Solutions" to retains a toehold into State's lucrative security business. Blackwater's "affiliate U.S. Training Center is part of International Development Solutions (IDS), a joint venture with Kaseman," according to an official State Department statement to Danger Room. "This joint venture was determined by the Department's source selection authority to be eligible for award."
WASHINGTON — When federal agents finally caught up with Gilberto Jordan, he had all the trappings of a solid American life: a house in a tidy South Florida neighborhood, steady work as a chef and a spotless record as a law-abiding citizen since emigrating from Guatemala in the early 1990s. ...What about our own war criminals? What about the National Security Council of the Bush Administration, which discussed, with great specificity, what torture techniques were to be used?
The prosecution of Jordan, 54, underscores a new push by federal law enforcement agencies to hunt down war criminals and human rights abusers who have found refuge in the United States.
The agents that tracked him are from a special center that Immigration and Customs created last year to bolster its work on such cases.
No, we won't go after our own war criminals. We'll let other nations do that. Which is why you probably have not seen any of the senior cabinet members of the Bush Administration, other than maybe the Secretary of Agriculture (whoever the hell that was) take any foreign vacations since they left office.
Former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney are confirmed to speak next week at the 97th annual Insurance Leadership Forum at The Broadmoor hotel.
Cheney will give the keynote speech Monday morning during the opening session; Bush will speak Tuesday morning.
Also speaking will be retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal
O'Donnell said the road to seeking elected office has been rocky. In 2008, she endured personal attacks and even vandalism in her run against then Sen. Joe Biden. It would have been easy to give up, but she says God wouldn't "release her."
"God continued to strengthen and empower us," O'Donnell said. "His strength is perfected in our weakness and that's what's exciting, because you see that if it weren't for faith, when all logic said it's time to quit — we pursued."
"We marched on because we knew God was not releasing us to quit and now with such an important lame duck session you realize why we were to endure all that stuff," she added.
And so when you lose, No'Donnell, will you also tell us that it was God's Will?
Lookit, I'm not much of a believer in anything, having famously said that I don't even believe the next Kleenex will pop up, but it seems to me that from football games to elections, both sides pray and one side or the other loses. Why doesn't the losing side then say that it was God's will?
###
Charles Krauthammer blasts Obama for perpetual war.
###
Of course, this requires ignoring decades of research and the established opinion of the medical community. But I don't need some fancy-pants, ivory tower elitist medical degree. Common sense tells me that the more I work out, the worse off I'll be. It's a declaration I feel totally qualified to make: stop exercising everyone, it's killing you. It's all just a big scam to sell gym memberships and Gatorade. I don't care what your doctor might tell you, I'm just relying on good old American horse sense. And isn't that always better? It's certainly easier to understand than this pie-in-the-sky science stuff.
This should say just about everything you need to know about the modern Republican Party and the freakdogs they're championing.
O'Donnell: After Witchcraft I Tried to Be A Hare Krishna -- But I Liked Meatballs Too Much
And we're supposed to engage these people on the issues?
###
###
Fox and its sheep
Ben Smith reports that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, after having donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, has also donated to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a pro-Republican business lobby.
This makes zero sense to me. The value of News Corp to the Republican party is massive. It's worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Why also give money to Republicans? By openly donating to the party, you help tear away the mask of objectivity, thereby reducing your own value as a propaganda outlet. It seems like a bad move both for Fox and the GOP. (If I'm the Republicans, I'd rather have Fox retain a more plausible claim of objectivity.) And if you're Fox, you're obviously making a joke out of your "Fair and Balanced" mantra.
So, really, why?
Why? 'Cause Fox doesn't give a f**k what anyone from the left thinks. They're secure in knowing that their idiot audience will buy whatever trash they're selling. Will Fox report their $1 million dollar donations to Republican institutions? Probably not and to the sheep, if Fox doesn't report it, it isn't news.
Baaah!
