Rep. William Keating: Russian FSB More Forthcoming than FBI on Boston Bombing
Posted: June 2, 2013 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, U.S. Politics | Tags: Boston Bombings, Chechnya, Dagestan, Eurasia and Emerging Threats, FBI, FSB, House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ibragim Todashev, Mansur Mukhamed Nidal, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, Rep. William Keating, Russia, Subcommittee on Europe, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, William Plotnikov 15 Comments
Congressman Bill Keating, holds a press conference at Logan airport upon his return from Russia, June 1, 2013. (Photo by Faith Ninivaggi)
No, Keating didn’t come out and say it exactly like that, but he made it pretty clear yesterday that he has he has gotten just about zero information from the FBI since the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15.
Keating, who is the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats of the Foreign Affairs Committee, had just returned from a trip to Russia with a delegation of House members led by California Rep. Dana Rohrbacker. The delegation also included Reps. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn; Steve King, R-Iowa; Paul Cook, R-Calif.; Steve Cohen, D-Tenn. The purpose of the trip was to
examine some of the apparent gaps in intelligence sharing between the United States and Russia. The Russians had warned the US in 2011 that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a potential extremist.
“If there was a distrust, or lack of cooperation because of that distrust, between the Russian intelligence and the FBI, then that needs to be fixed and we will be talking about that,” Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who is leading the trip, told ABC News, which first reported details of the trip.
“Our goal is to use Boston as an example, if indeed there was something more, that should’ve been done that wasn’t because of a bad attitude,” Rohrabacher added
Wesley Lowery of the Boston Globe reports that at a press conference at Logan airport after his arrival in Boston Keating noted that:
FBI agents in Boston have yet to provide information about why Tamerlan Tsarnaev was able to move freely in and out of the country after US officials were warned about him, or about the May 22 fatal shooting of one of his friends in Orlando, Representative William R. Keating said on Saturday after returning from a trip to Russia to meet with that country’s top intelligence officials.
In contrast, Keating said Russian officials were anxious to be helpful.
Keating said officials with the Russian Federal Security Service provided details about how they warned US intelligence agents in 2010 that they believed Tsarnaev was preparing to join a terrorist cell in Dagestan, in southern Russia….[and] said he was impressed with what he saw as the forthcoming nature of the Russian intelligence officials. Meanwhile, he said, FBI officials were absent from Capitol Hill hearings about the bombings.
“We had a hearing on homeland security and [the Boston FBI office] were invited,” Keating said. When asked whether agents from the office had shown up, he responded: “No.”
It doesn’t get much clearer than that, does it?
Meanwhile, the FBI was involved in a fatal shooting of Ibragim Todashev, an important witness who may have had valuable information about the Tsarnaev brothers, the Marathon bombing, and perhaps even a triple murder that took place in Waltham, MA in 2011. Since the shooting, we’ve gotten nothing but obfuscation from the FBI, with anonymous sources leaking contradictory claims about who was present at the shooting and what actually happened. I detailed the various accounts in a post on Thursday.
Keating said he hasn’t been briefed on that by the FBI either, but he did learn from the Russians that they had given Todashev’s name to the U.S. back in April.
Keating said that Ibragim Todashev, the 27-year-old friend of Tsarnaev who was shot and killed by an FBI agent in Orlando on May 22, was mentioned by name in intelligence exchanges between US and Russian officials on April 21. The nature of that citation, he said, remains unclear.
While senior members of the intelligence committee are often given classified briefings on controversial FBI actions, Keating said he has received none from the FBI on the Todashev killing.
A little more on the letter that mentioned Todashev, from The Boston Herald:
Todashev was one of many Russian nationals named in the April 21 letter to U.S. officials, said Keating.
Keating said the missive was not a warning letter about Todashev, but he told the Herald his name came up during intelligence information sharing.
“It was just clear that his name was referenced among others in that letter. It could have been in response to the FBI asking them what they knew,” Keating said, adding it was unclear why Russia shared the information. “We’ll be able to get these letters.”
Keating said he spent more than an hour with Russia’s counterterrorism director and a top deputy at FSB, Russia’s equivalent of the FBI, who both candidly shared information on Tsarnaev, his association with militants and his visit to Russia last year.
“I never thought we’d get that level of information and cooperation from the Russians,” Keating said.
Previously, Keating had learned through private channels that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had had contact with two other islamic “extremists.”
Keating said the staffers discovered — through unofficial, nongovernment sources — that Tamerlan Tsarnaev first came on the radar of the Russian security officials when they started questioning William Plotnikov, a Canadian boxer who was linked with extremist groups in Russia.
The Russians then discovered that Tsarnaev was active on a jihadist website and listed his home in the United States. That led to the initial tip from the Russians, who asked the FBI for more information about Tsarnaev.
Tsarnaev later traveled to Dagestan and he met with both Plotnikov, as well as another extremist, Mansur Mukhamed Nidal, according to the findings from the congressional staffers.
Plotnikov and Nidal were later killed in separate skirmishes with the Russians. Tsarnaev left Russia shortly after Plotnikov’s death.
So, to summarize, the information we know about Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s trip to Russia has come either from Russian intelligence officials or independent research by Keating staffers. The Russians have reportedly been surprisingly forthcoming and anxious to help.
Meanwhile, we’ve gotten no explanation from the FBI or Homeland Security of how Tsarnaev managed to fly out of JFK airport and back with no alarms being set off–despite the fact that he was on two terrorist watch lists.
Furthermore, the FBI has killed a man who may have had valuable information about Tsarnaev and they refuse to explain the circumstances under which he was killed. Instead they are “investigating” and they say the “investigation” could take months.
What is wrong with this picture?
Caturday: Happy Birthday, Marilyn Monroe!
Posted: June 1, 2013 Filed under: just because, morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Benghazi, immigration, John McCain, Louis Gomert, Marilyn Monroe 12 Comments
Good morning, newsjunkies!
Eighty-seven years ago today, the inimitable Marilyn Monroe was born. To the right is perhaps my favorite photo of Marilyn, taken by Anthony Beauchamp. It projects such strength and awesomeness…and so fabulously complements the vulnerable doe-eyed look that she is known and celebrated for elsewhere.
Huffpo has an interesting 1-and-a-half minute clip of an interview with Marilyn’s “closest” friend Amy Greene, from just two days ago. Greene talks about how she met Marilyn…and she has some very spirited and choice words summing up her thoughts on the film, My Week with Marilyn. I tried to embed the clip, but the code won’t work on wordpress. So please take a moment to click over and watch when you can. You won’t want to miss the punchline!
Also, if you are so inclined, check out this recent drama going down regarding a letter written by Marilyn. The letter in dispute is characterized as follows:
According to The Beverly Hills Courier, Monroe wrote the undated letter to Monroe’s longtime mentor and acting coach, Lee Strasberg, on Hotel Bel-Air stationary. It reads, in part, “My will is weak but I can’t stand anything. I sound crazy but I think I’m going crazy…It’s just that I get before a camera and my concentration and everything I’m trying to learn leaves me. Then I feel like I’m not existing in the human race at all.”
Wow, that gives me chills.
Huffpo also has a nice gallery of photos up for Marilyn’s birthday. One of the last photos:
Undated photo shows US actress Marilyn Monroe a few weeks before she died in 05 August, 1962 at the age of 36. The circumstances of her death have never been cleared up. AFP PHOTO (Photo credit should read STR/AFP/Getty Images)
Damn. Maybe it’s because I turned 32 a couple months ago, but to me that photo looks like a woman just getting started in life.
A few rare shots of Marilyn here, by a reporter who took these photos at the time as a teenager himself for his high school newspaper. He actually ended up selling them to some other small magazine instead of publishing them in his school paper. Anyhow, check them out. They’re all black and white and pretty fantastic for a high school paper photog!
And to the right, a sight for my 30-something crazy cat lady self! According to the internet, it’s Marilyn with her adopted kitty Serafina. I wish I could find the official credits for that photo, but all I was able to track it down on, through a cursory search, was pinterest- and fanpop-type sites. I’ll keep looking, or maybe one of you knows!
In the meantime, here are a few other news stories for you to nibble on this morning with your brew or beverage of choice…
This first one is a doozy. Wingnut radio tinfoil chaser says McCain was “hobnobbing with jihadists” with his Syria trip, and Gohmert faults McCain for being partly responsible for Benghazi. (And, this ‘my friends’ is why I am going to bypass all the political freakshows taking up all the headlines. Cuz, just WTF? Who even cares anymore. The Onion is more realistic.)
Here’s something much better to click over to: May 31, 2013 – American Voters Like Clinton Over Paul, Jeb Bush, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds. Keep whining about MarshaBenghazi, Jan Brady GOP-ers. That’s really working out for you.
And, this one is an arrow from Marilyn’s bow shot straight into the heart of rightwing canards… New Study Shows Immigrants Pay More Into Medicare Than They Take Out:
A study released by the Harvard Medical School on Wednesday shows that immigrants as whole pay more into Medicare than they use, effectively subsidizing the program. The study found that in 2009 alone, immigrants created a $13.8 billion surplus for Medicare. From 2002 to 2009, immigrants paid a total of $115 billion more to the government health program than they used. American-born workers, on the other hand, posted a $28 billion deficit in the same 2002 to 2009 time frame.
But, hey what are facts in the face of xenophobic hate and mistrust?
And, finally this one here is my favorite and I highly recommend if you click any link in this roundup, it’s this: If I Admit That ‘Hating Men’ Is a Thing, Will You Stop Turning It Into a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? Seriously, if I excerpted from it, it wouldn’t do the piece justice. Go read now!!
Alright Sky Dancers, your turn. What’s on your list for today? Have a great weekend and would love to hear from you if you get a chance.
Friday Reads: Hacks that Hate Women
Posted: May 31, 2013 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Erick Erickson, media assholes, patriarchy, religious crap, Ross Douthat 82 Comments
Good Morning!
I’m going to try to try not to let the rant out quite yet. But, wow, these two guys really piss me off and I cannot figure for the life of me why ANYONE takes them seriously. They belong in museums with the other prehistoric cave dwellers. I hate to ruin your day by quoting Erick Erickson and Ross Douthat in one post. But, sometimes you just have take them out and on. I have never had a single nice word to say about either of them. You’ll notice that nothing will stop that trend today. So, let’s start with the fat boy at FOX instead of the fat boy at NYT. I can’t even imagine what kind of hell realm their wives must experience daily.
Appearing on a Fox Business panel Wednesday evening, Fox contributor Erick Erickson suggested it is “anti-science” to reject the biological claim that men should be in the “dominant” role in the nuclear family.
This particular panel segment of Lou Dobbs Tonight took on a recent Pew study claiming that mothers are now the primary source of income in 40 percent of American households. Dobbs characterized the findings as “troubling” while panelist Juan Williams asserted that it indicates “something going terribly wrong in American society.”
Erickson added to that by suggesting female breadwinners are antithetical to biology:
“I’m so used to liberals telling conservatives that they’re anti-science. But liberals who defend this and say it is not a bad thing are very anti-science. When you look at biology — when you look at the natural world — the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complementary role.”
He continued on to lament that “We as people in a smart society have lost the ability to have complementary relationships in nuclear families, and it is tearing us apart.”
He concluded: “Having mom as primary bread winner is bad for kids and bad for marriage.”
Have you ever read anything so far removed from history, biology, or life as that? Amanda Marcotte dissects his tiny little brain that seems incapable of any thought that isn’t straight out of 1950s black and white family life that was shown in home ec classes to keep women thinking one man and one kitchen was the be-all and end-all of her life. The reality today is that 4 out of 10 households have female breadwinners. Penguins must be spawn of the devil in Erickson’s world.
Erickson must have this nifty scientific “fact” by studying the animals in the well-known academic text, The Berenstain Bears, which clearly shows Papa Bear going out and earning the money while Mama Bear stays at home and cooks the food for the cubs. Of course, in the actual natural world, bears don’t make money—plus there’s a lot of diversity in how animals raise their young. (In case you’re wondering, outside of the two weeks of maternity leave mothers take to nurse their babies, foxes embrace a fairly egalitarian approach to child rearing where both parents go out and get food for their young.) One thing, however, is certain: Other primates besides humans mostly shun the male-dominated monogamy that Erickson prefers, with most species living in large bands with lots of kinky partner swapping.
Needless to say, the utter destruction of social stability that these men predict from the growth of female independence is not borne out by the facts. The divorce rate is actually declining. The abortion rate is roughly what it was pre-Roe and is mostly in decline, in part because of all those women opting into the sole breadwinner lifestyle. The only man on this panel who got close to the facts in midst of the full-blown panic was Williams, who hinted at how this is more about men’s declining fortunes than women’s growing ones. It’s true that these new breadwinner stats are not all good news, but the real problem is that men earning less means less money overall for the average American home. What’s really hurting Americans isn’t female equality, but growing income inequality between the rich and everyone else. Pitting men against women is simply a distraction from the real economic issues facing us all.
Douthat’s pudgy little fingers typed out some earlier diatribe in the NYT. Douthat belongs in the religious propaganda pages of The Catholic Voice. I’ve said this time
and time again. But, his insistence that “conservativism” is aligned with his religious dogma really gets old. It shows there is something seriously wrong with the people that run the NYT that they continue to give him space for this kind of drivel. Yes, folks. The decline of Western civilization is because women just won’t get back in the home and do their thing and stop complaining about spitting out babies. Barry Goldwater–and probably even Ronald Reagan–would take issue with every word here.
1) The core economic challenge facing the American experiment is not income inequality per se, but rather stratification and stagnation — weak mobility from the bottom of the income ladder and wage stagnation for the middle class. These challenges are bound up in a growing social crisis — a retreat from marriage, a weakening of religious and communal ties, a decline in workforce participation — that cannot be solved in Washington D.C. But economic and social policy can make a difference nonetheless, making family life more affordable, upward mobility more likely, and employment easier to find.
2) The existing welfare-state institutions we’ve inherited from the New Deal and the Great Society, however, often make these tasks harder rather than easier: Their exploding costs crowd out every other form of spending, require middle class tax increases and threaten to drag on economic growth; their tangled web of subsidies and credits and tax breaks often benefit the already-affluent and create perverse incentives for the poor, and the distortions created by the way they pay for health care, in particular, contribute mightily to the rising cost of health insurance and thus the stagnation of middle class incomes. So we don’t face a choice between streamlining the welfare state and making it more supportive of work and family; we should be doing both at once.
You just can read the implied disdain of thing not being like they are on Leave it to Beaver. So Ericson, after probably being reminded of penguins and all the huge number of animals where the male is never even around except for breeding, insisted he was right. He says it’s the truth on his own stinker of a blog Red State, and that it’s not only a conspiracy by women but by GLBT who want to get married and raise children.
Feminists and politicians on both sides of the aisle view these statements as insulting to single moms and antithetical to their support for gay marriage. What should be insulting to single moms is for society to tell them they can do it all and, in fact, will subsidize their doing it all. I know a number of wonderful, nurturing single mothers. They do as best they can. Most of them have wonderful children. But not one of them prefers to be a single mother.
His small little world has produced its truth. He ignores that fact that most violence, child abuse and child sexual assault occurs in the sole family situations he worshipfully desires. To put it in terms of no one wants to be a single mother when they are one is enough to make me want to hit him and puke at the same time. He needs to be reminded that the traditional way of raising children is really extended families, children working instead of going to school or playing, both parents work with children left to older children or the elderly. I have never in my life read so much that just is so microscopically focused on a small period of time in human history that it is just freaking laughable. However, it is hard to laugh because both of these asses wind up with audiences and they really don’t do deserve it.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Thursday Reads: What Really Happened to Ibragim Todashev?
Posted: May 30, 2013 Filed under: Barack Obama, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Crime, Criminal Justice System, Eric Holder, morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Boston Bombings, CAIR-Tampa, FBI, Hassan Shibly, Ibragim Todashev, Khusen Taramov, Massachusetts State Police, Reniya Manukyan, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Waltham triple murders, Wesley Lowery 44 Comments
Good Morning!!
We’re heading into a heat wave here in the Boston area. It’s supposed to be hot and humid for the next few days with temps in the high 80s or low 90s. It will be a shock to my system, since it has been rather chilly here recently.
I’m going to focus on the ongoing Boston bombing story again, but you can treat this as a regular morning reads post/open thread. Don’t feel you have to comment on this topic. I haven’t paid much attention to other news for a few days, so I hope you’ll update me on the latest news in the comment thread!
A week ago, I wrote a post about the death of Ibragim Todashev, who was shot and killed in an apartment in Orlando, FL by an FBI agent from Boston in the early hours of Wednesday May 22. Todashev was being questioned by representatives of the FBI, the Massachusetts State Police, and “other law enforcement personnel” about his relationship with deceased Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and possible connections to an unsolved 2011 triple murder in Waltham, Massachusetts. Todashev had reportedly been questioned for hours on Tuesday and was shot shortly after midnight. The FBI had been following him for about a month, calling him daily and questioning him on several different occasions.
At the time I wrote that post, there was a great deal of confusion about the circumstances of the shooting and that confusion has only increased during the past week. At first, anonymous law enforcement sources claimed Todashev had been killed after he attacked the agent with a knife. By he next day sources were walking back that claim, some saying Todashev had something in his hand but it wasn’t a knife, others suggesting it was a pipe or something similar.
I’ve been following this story closely, and I’ve never seen anything like it. Presumably, the events in question were fairly straightforward. A man was shot dead with at least four–perhaps more–law enforcement officers present. How hard would it be to figure out if the dead man had a knife in his hand or not? Something was obviously not right.
During the past week, the reported details of the Todashev shooting have continued to change. On May 25, the Boston Globe offered a new version of events, again based on anonymous sources.
An FBI agent from the bureau’s Boston office fired the shot, or shots, that killed a friend of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev early Wednesday morning during an interview about an unsolved Waltham homicide, say officials briefed on the investigation.
Ibragim Todashev, a 27-year-old mixed martial arts fighter formerly from Allston and Cambridge, was shot in the kitchen of his apartment after overturning a table and attacking the agent with a blade, the officials said. The Globe has reported that the shooting came after Todashev had implicated himself in a grisly 2011 triple homicide in Waltham. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was friendly with one of the Waltham victims, and authorities suspect he may also have taken part in the slayings.
Two law enforcement officials said that the Boston FBI agent felt he was in grave danger when Todashev attacked him and that he fired in self-defense.
“This was a tough guy; he was a dangerous individual,” one law enforcement official said, speaking of Todashev. The official asked not to be named because the official was not authorized to discuss the case.
Okay, but with at least four trained law enforcement officers present, why was it necessary to kill a potentially valuable witness? Is it really credible that they couldn’t control one not very large (about 5’8″) man?
Yesterday morning there was another version. In this one, first reported by Fox Boston, Todashev not only knocked over a table, but also slammed the FBI agent’s head into a wall and attacked him with a sword. Yes, a sword. As in previous stories, the claim was that Todashev had been about to sign a confession about his involvement in the Waltham murders when things got out of control.
During the interview, investigators took notes and everything appeared to be going well. Eventually, Todashev was asked to write down, in his own handwriting and in his own words, what he had been telling authorities about his role in the murders when in the words of one source – all hell broke loose.
Todashev allegedly began writing, but then flipped a table over, knocking the Boston FBI agent into the wall hitting his head.
FOX 25’s Bob Ward was told the agent looked up to see Todashev waving in his direction what was described as a Banzai ceremonial sword.
Fearing for his life, the FBI agent drew his weapon and fatally shot Todashev. The entire incident taking only seconds.
During the course of the day, the story continued to change as more anonymous “sources” weighed in. WESH Orlando’s “sources” told a slight different tale than Fox Boston’s.
Sources said Todashev might have been lunging toward a sword, but he was not in possession of it.
Law enforcement officials said Todashev was in the process of confessing to a 2011 triple murder in Waltham, Mass., and was working on writing out the details of the crime when he snapped and turned violent.
Officials said Todashev pushed a table and possibly threw a chair.
Sources said a sword was inside the apartment, but the weapon was moved to the corner of the room before questioning began. Law enforcement said when Todashev lunged, the FBI agent believed he could have possibly been going for his gun or the sword in the room, and that’s when the agent opened fire.
Because of course the best law enforcement technique is to move any sharp objects to the corner of the room before questioning a suspect? WTF?!
Finally, last night several news outlets–among them The Washington Post–reported that Todashev had been unarmed when he was shot.
One law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said Wednesday that Todashev lunged at the agent and overturned a table. But the official said Todashev did not have a gun or a knife. A second official also said Todashev was unarmed.
An official said that according to one account of the shooting, the other law enforcement officials had just stepped out of the room, leaving the FBI agent alone with Todashev, when the confrontation occurred.
The shooting followed hours of questioning by the law enforcement officials that had begun the night before.
And exactly why did the other officers “step out of the room?” The source doesn’t say.
This story is becoming just plain ridiculous, and as Emptywheel wrote yesterday, it makes the FBI look just plain stupid. Last night on twitter, someone compared it to the old “Get Smart” recurring bit, “Would you believe…”
@BostonBoomer Not to be flip, but it reminds me of Get Smart: “Would you believe a knife? No? Then, would you believe a sword?”@LibertyLynx
— streetwiseprof (@streetwiseprof) May 30, 2013
But as ridiculous as this story seems, we need to understand that something like this could happen to any one of us. A man was killed in an apartment with multiple law enforcement officers present, and after more than a week, we still don’t know for sure what happened.
At 7PM yesterday, the Florida chapter of the Council on Islamic-American Relations (CAIR) held a press conference with Todashev’s wife, her mother, and a close friend of Todashev’s in attendance and called for the Department of Justice to initiate a civil rights investigation of the shooting.
[T]he Tampa director of that group said not only was 27-year-old Ibragim Todashev unarmed when he was shot by the agent May 22, he was hit seven times, including once in the head….the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Florida chapter on Wednesday cited unnamed sources within the FBI as saying Todashev was not armed at the time of the shooting.
“We did confirm today with sources within the FBI that he was unarmed,” CAIR-Tampa Executive Director Hassan Shibly told the Orlando Sentinel on Wednesday afternoon. Later, Shibly told reporters that CAIR has an “intermediary” who said the FBI told him Todashev was unarmed. Shibly did not identify the intermediary.
At a news conference Wednesday evening, Shibly showed what he said were photos of Todashev’s body after the shooting. The photos were taken at an Orlando funeral home after the Orange-Osceola County Medical Examiner’s office released the body to Todashev’s next of kin, he said.
The photographer was Khusen Taramov — a friend of Todashev’s who lives in Kissimmee — and photos show at least a dozen wounds, although some may have been exit wounds, Shibly said.
In addition, Todashev’s widow Reniya Manukyan claimed that she has evidence to show that her husband could not have committed the murders in Waltham in September 2011.
Todashev’s widow said Wednesday that she has records proving her husband was with her in Atlanta on Sept. 11, 2011, so he could not have been in Massachusetts on the day of the triple killing. Manukyan was married to Todashev for about three years, she said.
In another interaction on Twitter last night Boston Globe reporter Wesley Lowery told me he wasn’t ready to accept the latest version of events until he can independently confirm it from official sources. His reporting on the Boston bombing generally and the Todashev story specifically has been very good, and I’ll be watching to see what he finds out.
Once again, I’ve used up most of my space on a Boston bombing story, but I still have room for a few more quick links, with an emphasis on law enforcement and civil liberties.
Cory Doctorow: Kafka, meet Orwell: peek behind the scenes of the modern surveillance state. At the link you can watch a short, powerful documentary about public surveillance in the UK.
Rob Fischer at The New Yorker: Watching the Detectives–a piece about “Floyd v. Floyd v. City of New York, a landmark challenge to the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policies.”
NYT: Former Bush Official Said to Be Obama Pick to Lead F.B.I. Obama is about to nominate James Comey as FBI Director–a man who was in the Bush DOJ during the torture deliberations.
Emptywheel: When NYT Accused Jim Comey of Approving Torture
Holder Faces New Round of Criticism After Leak Inquiries
HuffPo: Eric Holder To Meet With Washington Bureau Chiefs Amid Leak Investigation Criticism (UPDATE)
Politico: N.Y. Times will not attend DOJ session, citing opposition to off-the-record provision
Buzzfeed: ACLU Defends News Organizations For Rejecting Off-The-Record Meeting With Attorney General
And another Boston link: Dirty Old Boston Facebook page shows the city as it really was
Now it’s your turn. What are you reading and blogging about today?
One Less Clown in the Clown Car
Posted: May 29, 2013 Filed under: 2012 elections, Breaking News, The Right Wing | Tags: Michelle Bachmann retires 17 Comments
Michele Bachmann has announced her retirement. She announced that this term–her fourth one–would be her last. Who else but James Carville could put it like this?
Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville predicted on Wednesday that Republicans throughout the country would be “relieved” Rep. Michele Bachmann has decided to retire.
“Sad day,” Carville quipped on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” when host Joe Scarborough mentioned Bachmann’s retirement.
“It makes me so sad and you so happy, Joe,” Carville said later. “God closes one door for Michelle Bachmann and opens three to Louie Gohmert. Everybody in a political party feels some sense of: ‘God, why can’t these people just shut up?’ We have many of them in the Democratic party that I’m not going to name right now, but I do think there are a lot of Republicans that are going to be relieved that some of these fringe people decide to pursue a speaking career.”
There are several thoughts going through my mind. First, maybe she wants to try to go the Palin route and make some money. She may be a religious nutter, but she did say fewer stupid things in her presidential debates. She at least his some facts at hand and could make a go of it at Fox. Second, she is under investigation for irregularities in her campaign finances and aids have said she had a weird relationship with one of her advisers. Given she is married to an obviously gay man, she may have been ripe for all kinds of things we don’t know about yet that could come out. The FBI is investigating her.
A recent study by PolitiFact found that she was one of the most dishonest politicians inside the Beltway. That’ s even though she stopped at nothing to call President Obama all manner of names. Of course, Republicans have so much nerve that a dishonest GOP pol would never admit he or she is dishonest. That reminds me of her intro to “Lying Ass B*tch” on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.” I think Quest Love was on to something then…..
Representative Michele Bachmann, the Minnesota Republican who made an ill-fated run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, announced Wednesday that she would not seek a fifth term in Congress next year.
She made the announcement just six months after being re-elected in what was her most challenging campaign since she was first elected to Congress nine years ago. Her announcement also comes as her former presidential campaign faces inquiries into its fund-raising activities.
“I have decided next year I will not seek a fifth congressional term,” she said in a video on her campaign Web site. “This decision was not impacted in any way by the recent inquiries into the activities of my former presidential campaign or my former presidential staff,” she added. … In her congressional race last year, Mrs. Bachmann won re-election by just 4,200 votes, beating the hotelier Jim Graves, who was greatly outspent. Mr. Graves recently announced that he would seek the seat again.
Michele Bachmann also added: “[T]he law limits anyone from serving as president of the United States for more than eight years.
And in my opinion, well, eight years is also long enough for any individual to serve as a representative for a specific congressional district.” Sorry, but she’s not just stepping aside because she believes she should only serve eight years in Congress. She may have decided to cut and run a week after reports that thw FBI is probing her campaign finances.
The FBI probe would undoubtedly play out in an election. Minnesota is an unbelievably squeaky clean state and really hates any kind of improprieties.
The FBI is scheduling interviews related to allegations of financial impropriety in Rep. Michele Bachmann’s 2012 campaign.
An attorney for Andy Parrish, the Minnesota Republican’s former chief of staff, confirmed that he will be interviewed by the FBI next week. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that two other former Bachmann staffers have also been contacted.
Peter Waldron, who served as Bachmann’s national field coordinator in Iowa, has filed a Federal Elections Commission complaint alleging that the lawmaker’s campaign improperly used leadership PAC funds to pay presidential campaign staff — including national political director Guy Short — and concealed payments to state Sen. Kent Sorenson. Waldron would not confirm or deny that he had been contacted by the FBI.
We haven’t been exactly kind to Bachmann here even though she is a woman in politics. But, any one with her agenda is a friend to no woman. Her outspoken hatred of gays, her race-baiting, and just general creepiness when it comes to crack pot religious beliefs puts her in the “not to be taken seriously” category. I am personally glad that both Palin and Bachmann will fade into no where. You hate to have bad role models for girls being given face time on national air waves. Plus, when they fight for policies that so obviously hurt women, they become the most effective tools of injustice. I really hate that too. Anyway, it’s garbage day tomorrow. Nice to see that some of the trash has been taken out early.
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