today:

Three detectives were found not guilty Friday on all charges in the shooting death of Sean Bell, who died in a hail of 50 police bullets outside a club in Jamaica, Queens, in November 2006.

...

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg called for calm. “There will be opportunities for peaceful dissent and potentially for further legal recourse — those are the rights we enjoy in a democratic nation. We don’t expect violence or law-breaking, nor is there any place for it.”

"Unless of course, you're a cop. We've got lots of places for that.", he added.



Ford:

During a speech Obama claimed that activists...had brought black America "90 percent of the way" to racial equality.

That last ten percent is a bitch.

Now this was the relationship between church and state that I was familiar with...

“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran,” Senator Clinton told ABC News, asked what she would do as president were Iran to launch a nuclear attack on Israel.”In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”

See here.

"If" she's president? Fuck her. She would have more chance of beating McCain if, instead of "campaigning," her "handlers" tied her in a straight-jacket and locked her in a silent, padded room, where she could spend the next 6 months babbling to a wall about nuclear bombs, experience, exploding ducks, and rivers of blood. Which is obviously what should be done with her (I'm speaking both as a political analyst and as an armchair psychologist).

Is she actually being paid by McCain? Do they have some kind of deal set up, by which RNC funds are given to Hillary in exchange for her promise to submit to public execution by firing squad on Nov. 1, 2008? Is the idea that she will let herself be strapped to a large piece of uranium-enriched ordinance and tossed over the wall of the Green Zone upon accepting the Democrat nomination?

Who am I kidding? McCain doesn't need any deals to be made. He doesn't have to say a word. As soon as Hillary becomes the nominee, Hillary is dead.

Douglas Valentine, historian of the Phoenix Program (thousands of illegal assassinations in Vietnam), on why McCage is crazier than a shithouse rat. Not because he was tortured into madness during a prolonged cage occupancy; rather because the press' adulation only aggravates the self-hatred he feels for spending years collaborating with the enemy.

“War is one thing, collaborating with the enemy is another; it is a legitimate campaign issue that strikes at the heart of McCain’s character. . .or lack thereof. In occupied countries like Iraq, or France in World War II, collaboration to that extent spells an automatic death sentence.. . .The question is: What kind of collaborator was John McCain, the admitted war criminal who will hate the Vietnamese for the rest of his life?

“Put it another way: how psychologically twisted is McCain? And what actually happened to him in his POW camp that twisted him? Was it abuse, as he claims, or was it the fact that he collaborated and has to cover up? Covering-up can take a lot of energy. The truth is lurking there in his subconscious, waiting to explode. ”

“McCain had a unique POW experience. Initially, he was taken to the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp, where he was interrogated. By McCain’s own account, after three or four days he cracked. He promised his Vietnamese captors, “I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital ...

“His Vietnamese captors soon realized their POW, John Sidney McCain III, came from a well-bred line in the American military elite. . .The Vietnamese realized, this poor stooge has propaganda value. The admiral’s boy was used to special treatment, and his captors knew that. They were working him.”

“. . .two weeks into his stay at the Vietnamese hospital, the Hanoi press began quoting him. It was not ‘name rank and serial number, or kill me’. as specified by the military code of conduct. McCain divulged specific military information: he gave the name of the aircraft carrier on which he was based, the number of U.S. pilots that had been lost, the number of aircraft in his flight formation, as well as information about the location of rescue ships.”

“…McCain was held for five and half years. The first two weeks’ behavior might have been pragmatism, but McCain soon became North Vietnam’s go-to collaborator…..McCain cooperated with the North Vietnamese for a period of three years. His situation isn’t as innocuous as that of the French barber who cuts the hair of the German occupier. McCain was repaying his captors for their kindness and mercy.

“This is the lesson of McCain’s experience as a POW: a true politician, a hollow man, his only allegiance is to power. The Vietnamese, like McCain’s campaign contributors today, protected and promoted him, and, in return, he danced to their tune. . .”

I hadn't seen the Goldwater "Daisy" ad in a while...

...and had completely forgotten the ad's voice-over at the end:

These are the stakes.

To make a world in which all of God's children can live; or to go into the dark.

We must either love each other, or we must die.

44 years ago, that actually won votes.

Makes me think of McCarthy's "The Road."

So Hillary's actually running a freaking Osama ad in PA.  You've almost got to admire her ability to continually amp things up to that whole other level of the game.


One thing is certain: this ad is sure to sway voters for whom preparing for Pearl Harbor is the paramount issue.

So it should come as no surprise to anyone that all those "military analysts" you see on TV are not regular citizens sharing dispassionate insights won from many years of military service, but are, in fact, heavily coached by the Pentagon, and have been lured into "military analyst" service by the promise of access to the highest levels of Pentagon procurement and contracting officials. Which comes in handy, because the primary sideline of most of these retired "military analysts" is working for contractors trying to get to those officials to get those contracts. One man's "analyst" is another's "message force multiplier," as this NYTimes report explains.