Tuesday Reads: The Agony of Glenn Greenwald, The Ickiness of Ted Cruz, & Other News

Posted: August 20, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: 2016 elections, Egypt, Foreign Affairs, Great Britain, morning reads, Pakistan, Republican politics, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, US & Canada | Tags: , , , , , , , | 29 Comments

Dog_getting_the_newspaper

Good Morning!!

As of yesterday, we’ve reached the point with the NSA leaks story that the entire focus is on Glenn Greenwald and his martyrdom. Even Edward Snowden has now faded into the background.

On Sunday, Greenwald’s domestic partner David Miranda was detained for nine hours by UK authorities as he passed through Heathrow Airport on his way from Berlin to Rio de Janeiro where he and Greenwald live. Miranda was finally released, but his laptop, an external hard drive, a number of memory sticks and other electronic devices were confiscated. Greenwald reacted by threatening the UK government with harmful revelations from the Snowden stash.

As with previous Greenwald stories, this one quickly evolved from a tale of horrendous government repression as reported by the Guardian to a more complex story reported by other news outlets–forcing the Guardian to walk back or provide more details on aspects of its original reporting. Bob Cesca does a good job of summarizing the process.

Like most people, Cesca was at first shocked by the news of Miranda’s detention. Then he began reading the stories under the headlines.

When I read The Guardian‘s article about the incident, however, more questions popped up — as with much of The Guardian‘s reporting on this topic, the publication’s tendency for coy, smoke-and-mirrors reporting invariably raises more questions than it answers. The article was credited to “Guardian staff,” for one, there weren’t any quotes from Miranda himself and the only source for the article appeared to be Greenwald, who, from my experience covering this story, tends to be incendiary and misleading.

The wailing and garment rending was underway — the predictable group freakout we’re forced to endure every time a new article is published. Greenwald himself wrote that the U.K. authorities were actually worse than the Mafia because the Mafia doesn’t target family members. (Clearly, Greenwald knows less about the Mafia than he does about political realities or history.)

An aside: Cesca coined the term “the 24 hour rule” after a the first few Greenwald NSA “bombshells.”

The 24 Hour Rule: 1) A wild claim is made via a news article, most often The Guardian, about the U.S. government or related entities. 2) The article sparks wild fits of outrage. 3) Then, within 24 hours, a mitigating detail is added, undermining or totally debunking one or more of the central claims contained with the article. Related quote: “A lie can travel half-way around the world before the truth gets its pants on.”

Back to Cesca’s take on the Miranda story:

As the hours rolled by, Charlie Savage, reporting for The New York Times, began to revealmore details about the trip — details which The Guardian mysteriously didn’t include in either of its articles….

First, we learned from The New York Times that The Guardian financed Miranda’s trip to Germany and back. This means Miranda was conducting some sort of official business for the publication. Around the same time, Amnesty International referred to Miranda as “a Guardian newspaper employee.” Combined with the Laura Poitras detail, it’s obvious that Miranda was commissioned to do some serious leg-work on the Snowden/NSA reporting, the extent of which was unknown at the time.

And then, late in the evening east coast time, The New York Times revealed the purpose of Miranda’s trip to Berlin:

Mr. Miranda was in Berlin to deliver documents related to Mr. Greenwald’s investigation into government surveillance to Ms. Poitras, Mr. Greenwald said. Ms. Poitras, in turn, gave Mr. Miranda different documents to pass to Mr. Greenwald. Those documents, which were stored on encrypted thumb drives, were confiscated by airport security, Mr. Greenwald said. All of the documents came from the trove of materials provided to the two journalists by Mr. Snowden.

So Miranda, Greenwald’s spouse, served as a paid courier to transfer stolen, top secret national security documents from Greenwald to Poitras, and from Poitras back to Greenwald.

While I’m not defending UK authorities for their ham-handed treatment of Miranda–and neither is Cesca–it’s really not surprising that Miranda was stopped and questioned. It also later came out that Miranda had been offered an attorney, but he refused the offer (Greenwald had originally said his partner was refused access to legal advice). From The Guardian on Monday:

He was offered a lawyer and a cup of water, but he refused both because he did not trust the authorities. The questions, he said, were relentless – about Greenwald, Snowden, Poitras and a host of other apparently random subjects.

“They even asked me about the protests in Brazil, why people were unhappy and who I knew in the government,” said Miranda.

He got his first drink – from a Coke machine in the corridor – after eight hours and was eventually released almost an hour later. Police records show he had been held from 08.05 to 17.00.

The questions about the Brazilian government weren’t actually that outrageous, since Glenn Greenwald had contacted high level officials there and they had tried to intervene.

So the “24-hour rule” still holds. This entire story turned around in 24 hours, but many news outlets are still reporting information that is either wholly or partially untrue. After it became clear that their original reporting on the Miranda detention was problematic, the Guardian released another bombshell article written by Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusberger in which he claims that two months ago GCHQ (Britain’s version of NSA) agents forced the Guardian to destroy their hard drives and computers unless they turned over their NSA materials. Again Bob Cesca has a good summary. Please read the whole thing if you can–it’s not long.

We’ll have to wait another day to see if this story also morphs into something different. Cesca has a list of questions for Rusberger. My big question is why wasn’t this reported immediately after it happened, and why didn’t the Guardian go to court over it?

And so Glenn Greenwald and his victimization remain the center of international attention. I have to wonder why Greenwald arranged for his partner to travel through Heathrow in the first place. Was he deliberately inviting something like this? He couldn’t have asked for better free publicity that he and the Guardian are getting right now.

Meanwhile, any discussion of NSA spying is hindered by so much inaccurate information; yet the NSA story is distracting Americans from focusing on equally important and even more pressing issues like jobs, the economy, voting rights, the war on women’s autonomy, the environment, and the upheavals in the Middle East. So now I’ll move on to some other news–I’ll add more links on the Miranda story in the comments.

In other news,

The Atlantic has a good story on economic inequality: Are the Rich Getting Too Much of the Economic Pie?

When one of you asked, “Are the rich getting too much of the economic pie?” the team behindEconomics in Plain English got pretty excited. Because you said “pie.” So we headed toDangerously Delicious Pies in northeast Washington, D.C., with business editor Derek Thompson to explain income inequality over dessert. We ordered three pies — peanut butter, blueberry, and something amazing called the “Baltimore Bomb” — to make three charts that illustrate the income and wealth gap in the U.S. We’re not the first to mix math and pastry, as we discovered recently, but we hope this video offers a tasty perspective on a complex economic question.

Watch the video–and others by the same group–at the link.

In Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf has been indicted in the 2007 murder of Benazir Bhutto

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A Pakistani court indicted Pervez Musharraf on Tuesday in connection with the 2007 assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the first time that a former military leader has faced criminal proceedings in Pakistan.

The court in Rawalpindi, near the capital, Islamabad, filed three charges against Mr. Musharraf, including murder and conspiracy to murder, said a prosecutor, Chaudhry Muhammed Azhar.

Mr. Musharraf, who has maintained that the charges against him are politically motivated, pleaded not guilty, his lawyers said. Reporters were excluded from the hearing. Afterward, police commandos and paramilitary rangers escorted Mr. Musharraf back to his villa on the edge of Islamabad, where he has been under house arrest since April in connection with other cases stemming from his rule from 1999 to 2008.

The sight of a once untouchable general being called to account by a court had a potent symbolism in a country that has been ruled by the military for about half of its 66-year history. While the military remains deeply powerful, the prosecution has sent the message that Pakistan’s top generals are subject to the rule of law — at least after they have retired.

In Egypt, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood has been arrested. The LA Times reports:

CAIRO — Egyptian authorities early Tuesday arrested the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, another demoralizing blow to the Islamist organization amid a crackdown by the military to silence dissent and build support for its control of the nation.

Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie was arrested in a Cairo apartment. Dressed in a gray tunic, the 70-year-old spiritual leader looked shaken, sitting next to a bottle of water in police custody. The image distilled the desperation the world’s most influential Islamist organization faces against an army that appears determined to crush it.

Most of the Brotherhood’s top leaders, including Khairat Shater, its chief strategist and financier, and former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, who was overthrown in a coup last month, are in detention or have gone underground. Much of the group’s strategy appears to have shifted to the Anti-Coup Alliance, an umbrella group the Brotherhood organized to protest Morsi’s downfall.

The army’s crackdown on the Brotherhood has been ferocious. Police raids on two Brotherhood sit-ins last week and the protests and violence that ensured killed more than 900 Morsi supporters, many of them shot by live ammunition fired by security forces that have shown little restraint.

“When the hand of oppression extends to arrest this important symbol,” the Brotherhood said in a statement regarding Badie, “that means the military coup has used up everything in its pocket and is readying to depart.”

I’ll be honest–I’m really clueless about what’s going on in Egypt right now. I just hope the situation doesn’t descend into a Syria-like civil war.

Texas Tea Party Senator Ted Cruz is back in the news. The Dallas Morning News revealed yesterday that Cruz holds dual citizenship in the US and Canada.

Born in Canada to an American mother, Ted Cruz became an instant U.S. citizen. But under Canadian law, he also became a citizen of that country the moment he was born.

Unless the Texas Republican senator formally renounces that citizenship, he will remain a citizen of both countries, legal experts say.

That means he could assert the right to vote in Canada or even run for Parliament. On a lunch break from the U.S. Senate, he could head to the nearby embassy — the one flying a bright red maple leaf flag — pull out his Calgary, Alberta, birth certificate and obtain a passport.

“He’s a Canadian,” said Toronto lawyer Stephen Green, past chairman of the Canadian Bar Association’s Citizenship and Immigration Section.

The circumstances of Cruz’s birth have fueled a simmering debate over his eligibility to run for president. Knowingly or not, dual citizenship is an apparent if inconvenient truth for the tea party firebrand, who shows every sign he’s angling for the White House.

Cruz has decided to renounce his Canadian citizenship, according to CNN:

“Because I was a U.S. citizen at birth, because I left Calgary when I was 4 and have lived my entire life since then in the U.S., and because I have never taken affirmative steps to claim Canadian citizenship, I assumed that was the end of the matter,” Cruz wrote in his statement.

“Now the Dallas Morning News says that I may technically have dual citizenship. Assuming that is true, then sure, I will renounce any Canadian citizenship,” he continued. “Nothing against Canada, but I’m an American by birth, and as a U.S. Senator, I believe I should be only an American.”

Too bad he didn’t decide to run for office in Canada. I guess we’re stuck with him now.

I’ll end with this Daily Beast story about what Ted Cruz Princeton roommates recall about him. Some excerpts:

When Craig Mazin first met his freshman roommate, Rafael Edward Cruz, he knew the 17-year-old Texan was not like other students at Princeton, or probably anywhere else for that matter.

“I remember very specifically that he had a book in Spanish and the title was Was Karl Marx a Satanist? And I thought, who is this person?” Mazin says of Ted Cruz. “Even in 1988, he was politically extreme in a way that was surprising to me.” [….]

“It was my distinct impression that Ted had nothing to learn from anyone else,” said Erik Leitch, who lived in Butler College with Cruz. Leitch said he remembers Cruz as someone who wanted to argue over anything or nothing, just for the exercise of arguing. “The only point of Ted talking to you was to convince you of the rightness of his views.”

In addition to Mazin and Leitch, several fellow classmates who asked that their names not be used described the young Cruz with words like “abrasive,” “intense,” “strident,” “crank,” and “arrogant.” Four independently offered the word “creepy,” with some pointing to Cruz’s habit of donning a paisley bathrobe and walking to the opposite end of their dorm’s hallway where the female students lived.

“I would end up fielding the [girls’] complaints: ‘Could you please keep your roommate out of our hallway?'” Mazin says.

Eeeeeeeeek!!

OK, now it’s your turn. What stories are you focusing on today? Please post your links on any topic in the comment thread.

Saturday Late Morning Reads

Posted: April 20, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 28 Comments

informationoverloadcartoon

 Good Morning!!

I’m feeling kind of overwhelmed and paralyzed at the moment, so I’m going to have to limit myself to a link dump this morning. Otherwise I’m never going to get started.


Stories that may fill in some blanks on the Tsarnaev brothers.

A very helpful piece from the Wall Street Journal: Life in America Unraveled for Brothers, By ALAN CULLISON and PAUL SONNE in Moscow and JENNIFER LEVITZ in Cambridge, Mass.

The New Yorker’s David Remnick on The Culprits provides some background on the Chechen connection.

At Crooks and Liars, Boston Bombing Suspects Recall Home-Grown Terrorists in Madrid, London Attacks
By ProPublica

CBS News: FBI interviewed dead Boston bombing suspect years ago

Henry Blodget at Business Insider: The FBI Needs To Explain Why It Failed To Monitor Boston Bombing Suspect Despite A Clear Warning

FBI Press Release on their Investigation of Tamerlan Tsarnaev

Tsarnaev Brothers


A little more news related to the Boston bombings

Report: 3 arrested in New Bedford in connection to bombing suspect

Neighbors say three have been arrested in New Bedford in connection with the Boston Bombing suspect.

Police apprehended suspects from the Hidden Brook Apartments on Carriage Drive in New Bedford. Neighbors say they think that the girlfriend of 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev may have lived in the complex and they have seen him in the area as recently as yesterday.

The National Memo: Lindsey Graham Does A Quick Trashing Of the Constitution On Twitter

Slate.com on the high tech methods used to catch the second suspect

Police used a robot, flashbangs, and a thermal camera to apprehend second Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on Friday night, as Boston police recounted in a press conference shortly afterward. But it was a citizen’s alarming encounter with the suspect that proved to be the key in finding him.

Russ Baker at Who What Why: The Marathon Bombing: What the Media Didn’t Warn You About

Seth Mnookin at The New Yorker: Watertown Diary

I have lots more, but I’ll leave the Boston story there for now.

west_texas_fertilizer_plant_blast_map


The Texas Fertilizer Plant Explosion

NBC News: Investigators: Texas plant explosion death toll raised to 14

CBS News: Majority of deaths in West, Texas explosion were first responders

HuffPo: Texas Explosion: 60 People Still Missing According To Report

NYT: Texas on Fire, Again and Again

NBC News: Texas fertilizer plant also stored explosive chemical used in Oklahoma City bomb

Reuters: Texas fertilizer company didn’t heed disclosure rules before blast

The fertilizer plant that exploded on Wednesday, obliterating part of a small Texas town and killing at least 14 people, had last year been storing 1,350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger safety oversight by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Yet a person familiar with DHS operations said the company that owns the plant, West Fertilizer, did not tell the agency about the potentially explosive fertilizer as it is required to do, leaving one of the principal regulators of ammonium nitrate – which can also be used in bomb making – unaware of any danger there.

Fertilizer plants and depots must report to the DHS when they hold 400 lb (180 kg) or more of the substance. Filings this year with the Texas Department of State Health Services, which weren’t shared with DHS, show the plant had 270 tons of it on hand last year.


In other news…

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Across America, a week of chaos, horror — and hope

the International News: Pervez Musharraf transferred to farmhouse

Christian Science Monitor: Judge orders Musharraf held for 14 days before next hearing

PC Magazine: Transcript of Julian Assange, Eric Schmidt Chat Posted on WikiLeaks

Foreign Policy Magazine: Eric Schmidt: Money is the only reason Julian Assange redacted WikiLeaks files

The Guardian: Inside the mind of Eric Schmidt

That’s about all I have the energy for right now. I’ll post more links in the comments. What are you focusing on today? Please share your recommended reads, and have a great Saturday!

Sunday Reads: No more…please!

Posted: January 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Afghanistan, China, DR Congo, Foreign Affairs, Iran, Iraq, Marriage Equality, Middle East, Mitt Romney, morning reads, Newt Gingrich, Pakistan, Republican presidential politics | Tags: , , , , , , , | 36 Comments

Good Morning!

Did you catch the debate last night?  If you didn’t Wonk did an excellent job of hosting a live blog.

Presidential debates sometimes have their moments…a thousand points of light, Hillary is likable enough, I know there are more but I am just too exhausted to think of other fine debater examples. There wasn’t any gotcha moment last night, with the exception of Huntsman who was absent in the last few Iowa debates, the performance was pretty much the same as the last 12 or 50 GOP debates this past month.

Last night just emphasized the quality, or lack thereof, of the GOP offering. They are having another “forum” on Meet the Press today, so it will be yet another reason to sleep in this morning.

Here are a few links to get you caught up on what the media has to say about the freak show, I’ll save the best pundit remarks for last:

For a quick summary:  Five Takeaways From Saturday Night’s GOP Debate

When asked about those racist newsletters, Paul tried to pass off his hero-worship of MLK and his opinion on the unfairness of the justice system as proof he is not a racist. Ron Paul says he is not racist, slams drug laws as unfair to blacks

Paul said that Martin Luther King is one his heroes for practicing “the libertarian principle of peaceful resistance and peaceful civil disobedience,” and highlighted his understanding that the drug laws in the United States unfairly penalize African Americans.

Well, it still doesn’t answer the question about holding Ron Paul accountable for his racist newsletters. Ron Paul Calls MLK a “Hero”—After Newsletter Trashed Him as a “World-Class Adulterer”

If you need a refresher on what else these newsletters contained: 10 Extreme Claims in Ron Paul’s Controversial Newsletters

As far as Mittens is concerned. Meh…

Why Romney’s Answer on Contraception Doesn’t Add Up

Mitt Romney Is Confused About Iran Sanctions

Here is what Charlie Pierce had to say, see you could have just skipped over all the other links…I am betting most of you did. 😉

New Hampshire Debate: The Trickless-Dick Mitt Fix Is In, by Charles P. Pierce – Esquire

At this moment, I am still digesting the incredible farrago of gibbering nonsense, vengeful religious rage, political chickenshit, and Mandarin Chinese that combined to make the 45,670th of 62,390 scheduled Republican presidential debates the Level 4 biohazard that it was.

Oh yeah…you know Pierce take on the debate is going to be good.

In brief, Saturday night may have been the most naked piece of point-shaving and game-throwing since the 1919 World Series. I’ve seen fixed prizefights where the issue was more in doubt. The other candidates went so far into the tank for Willard that they may not dry off until next August. In the 1950’s, Frankie Carbo would have had them all killed because they made it look so damned obvious. Where was the promised Gingrich assault on the frontrunner? Where was the blood, the guts, the glory? Where was the damn slasher film we all anticipated? This was a waltz, and a clumsy one. If the people in that audience had any pride at all, they’d have attacked the ABC platform and demanded satisfaction for this massive piece of consumer fraud.

The coalescing has begun. The non-Romneys seem to be coming to grips with the fact that there’s virtually no chance that Willard isn’t the nominee. So, by and large, the rest of them started paying court staying away from him.

Pierce then breaks down the two things all this VP ass kissing accomplished.

1) Willard was able to get away with being even more banal than he usually is, except for that one moment when George Stephanopoulos tried to get him to give a straight answer on the right to privacy as derived from the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision in reference to contraception. “I don’t know any state that wants to ban contraception, George,” said Willard, running through all four of the expressions of which his face is capable, beginning with “Lordly Disdain” and ending with “Flog The Butler.” Stephanopoulos pressed on. (At one point, I thought he might throw a packet of Trojans at Willard and say, “These, motherfucker!”) Romney ducked, weaved, made his face work harder than he was, until he finally cried, “Hey, contraception works!”

Not exactly Webster’s Reply To Hayne, true. But not banal.

And:

2) Because they declined to be dicks to Willard, because they’re all going to spend most of next autumn getting sockless, drunk, and standing behind him on a stage, pretending they don’t want to hit him with their shoes, the rest of the cast decided to be dicks toward each other, toward the president, and toward large numbers of their fellow countrymen and countrywomen. Ron Paul called Newt Gingrich a chickenhawk, and Newt responded by saying that he’d never asked for his deferment, which he received because he was married at the time to the first of his future ex-wives. Paul came back at him. “When I was called, I was married and had two kids. I went.” Dr. Paul has a dickish side to him that has been heretofore covert. Not anymore.

However, not to be outdone…

Newt rallied his well-wrought dickness, though, right after a lengthy wrangle over gay marriage that might have been the most pointless discussion of that particular controversial issue ever conducted, by attacking the “liberal news media” for paying so much attention to discrimination under the law aimed at gay people, and none at all to the fact that Catholic organizations have been forbidden from arranging adoptions and performing other social services because they choose to practice discrimination based on religion. “There’s anti-Christian bigotry and none of it gets covered,” thundered Gingrich, who earlier in the discussion said that being nice to gay couples (Hey, you can visit your partner when he’s dying. Is this a great country or what?) didn’t mean adjusting the sacrament of marriage. It apparently has eluded his Holiness, Pope N. Leroy I, that not only is secular marriage not a sacrament, but also that a lot of Protestant denominations don’t believe it is, either.

Just go over to the link and read the whole thing…

The thing that stood out to me was the misleading remarks when it came to Obama and his weak liberal stance on Iraq, and his European socialist policies. Misleading is putting it mildly. Obama follows in Rumsfeld’s footprints

Defense analysts almost immediately drew the comparison between Rumsfeld’s vision and the one spelled out in Obama’s plan.

“It is easy to emphasize Asia, technology, and quality over quantity,” Pentagon adviser and Center for Strategic and International Studies analyst Anthony Cordesman said Thursday. “In fact, this is what Secretary Rumsfeld did.”

Center for Defense Information analyst Winslow Wheeler, a former congressional defense aide, said the Obama plan is “very much like Rumsfeld’s ‘Transformation’ agenda.”

What’s more, Wheeler said, the Obama plan’s shifting of the nation’s defense strategy toward the Asia-Pacific region “re-emphasizes the focus on the Air Force and Navy as the ‘transformative’ military services — Rumsfeld’s word, not theirs — but they seem to mean very much the same thing.”

As far as the European Socialist remark made by Newt, let’s go back to Pierce for a moment:

The trademark Gingrichian sneer was mostly leveled at President Obama, who, Gingrich said, “in his desperate attempt to create a radical socialist European model is undoubtedly sincere.” Ooooh, snap! Look upon my adjectives, ye mighty, and despair!

I won’t spend any time on the frothy dick, aka Santorum, you can read Pierce for that…

In other news…Musharraf Will Be Arrested on Arrival in Pakistan, PTI Reports

Pervez Musharraf, who resigned as Pakistan’s president in 2008, will be arrested on arrival in the country later this month, the Press Trust of India reported, citing a prosecutor.

Musharraf is a “proclaimed offender” and there’s no need for a warrant for this arrest, PTI reported today, citing Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali, prosecutor at the Federal Investigation Agency. Musharraf lives in Dubai and London and plans to return to Pakistan on Jan. 25 or Jan. 27, according to the report.

In Texas, CVS Refuses To Sell Texas Man Emergency Contraception For His Wife, Suggests He’s A Rapist

A Texas man has enlisted the ACLU to help him sue CVS for gender discrimination after a pharmacist refused to sell him emergency contraception.

Jason Melbourne had already visited four pharmacies in search of Plan B for his wife when he was referred to a CVS in Mesquite, Texas, some 15 miles away from his home. They had one box left:

But when he finally got there, the overnight pharmacist, Minni Matthew, told Melbourne she wasn’t going to sell it to him.

In order for him to buy the meds, the pharmacist said, she’d need to talk to and see the ID of his wife, who was at home with their two young children. He asked why, and she pointed to the fine print on the medication’s box, which says it can only be sold to someone age 17 or older. Melbourne pointed out that he was well over 17.

“I’ve bought this plenty of times in my life, and it’s never been a problem,” he said. “Are you telling me every other place I’ve bought it from has been wrong?”

Didn’t matter, Matthew said, since the medicine obviously wasn’t for him.

“Why don’t you show me the law that says you can’t sell this to a man?” Melbourne replied.

The situation got worse from there. Melbourne put his wife on the phone and even Googled the medication to show the pharmacist there was no law against selling it to a man. But “she didn’t want to see it,” he said.

That’s when a male pharmacy technician informed Melbourne that they didn’t want to sell emergency contraception to men because they might be giving it to “rape victims.”

Jezebel notes that Melbourne’s ordeal happened around the same time that a Houston CVS store refused to sell another man Plan B. CVS apologized for that last month, calling it an “isolated incident.” It wasn’t.

CVS isn’t the only pharmacy that has issues with selling Plan B to a man…

In fact, in 2010 ACLU received reports that Walgreens stores in Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma were refusing to sell emergency contraception to men. Walgreens relented when the ACLU confronted them publicly.

Moving on, yes I am too tired to keep this up much longer.

‘Whooping cranes plane’ runs afoul of FAA

Ten young whooping cranes and the bird-like plane they think is their mother had flown more than halfway to their winter home in Florida when federal regulators stepped in.

Now the birds and the plane are grounded in Alabama while the Federal Aviation Administration investigates whether the journey violates regulations because the pilot was being paid by a conservation group to lead the cranes on their first migration instead of working for free.

FAA regulations say only pilots with commercial pilot licenses can fly for hire. The pilots of Operation Migration’s plane are instead licensed to fly sport aircraft because that’s the category of aircraft that the group’s small, open plane with its rear propeller and bird-like wings falls under. FAA regulations also prohibit sport aircraft — which are sometimes of exotic design — from being flown to benefit a business or charity.

From Minx’s Missing Link File: An interesting health link for you today…

Radical liver surgery saves life of young mom, California first

A team led by Alan Hemming, MD, transplant surgeon at UC San Diego Health System, has successfully performed the west coast’s first ex-vivo liver resection, a radical procedure to completely remove and reconstruct a diseased liver and re-implant it without any tumors. The procedure saved the life of a 27-year old mother whose liver had been invaded by a painful tumor that crushed the organ and entangled its blood supply.

“During a 9-hour surgery the team was able to remove the basketball-sized tumor,” said Hemming, professor and surgical director of the Center for Hepatobiliary Disease and Abdominal Transplantation (CHAT) at UC San Diego Health System. “This is a surgery that carries a 15 to 20 percent risk of mortality. In this case, the patient would not have survived if she did not have surgery. This was the only way we could save her liver and her life.”

During the procedure, the diseased liver was detached from the body, flushed with preservation solution and cooled to a temperature of 4 degrees Celsius. This allowed Hemming to carefully remove the tumor from the liver in a bloodless field while preserving vital structures. Hemming then removed the tumor which weighed as much as the liver itself. Once the tumor was removed, the vessels were meticulously reconstructed. The liver was then successfully reimplanted.

Easy Like Sunday Morning Link of the Week: A few weeks ago I wrote about the Congo’s version of the Loch Ness Monster. Well, there is a guy heading into the jungle to find the Congo mokele mbembe. Dom Joly: If I’m munched by a mokele mbembe, farewell, dear readers – Dom Joly – Columnists – The Independent

I’m off to the Congo for two weeks. I’m still travelling the world looking for reputed monsters to put in my new book, Scary Monsters and Super Creeps. This time I’m going after the mokele mbembe, a dinosaur-type creature that is supposed to inhabit Lake Tele in the far north of “good” Congo.

In case you didn’t know, there are two Congos: the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) is the “bad” Congo. The giveaway being the use of “democratic” in the name – this is always a sign that it is not democratic and not much fun (see the German Democratic Republic and the Democratic People’ s Republic of North Korea). I’m off to the Republic of Congo to try to find the elusive beast that has apparently forced tribes of pygmies to build huge stockades around their villages.

Lets hope he doesn’t become lunch.

That is it for me, it is 3am and I just want to go to sleep. So if you come accross any typos…you know why.

What are you all reading and blogging about today?

 

**Updated**

The New York Times has a review of this mornings debate: <a href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/us/politics/romney-is-the-main-target-in-a-caustic-gop-debate.html”>Romney Is the Main Target in a Caustic G.O.P. Debate – NYTimes.com</a>

SDB Evening News Reads for 082911: Musharraf’s Property Seized, Syria’s New Censorship and Bachmann’s “Joke”

Posted: August 29, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Diplomacy Nightmares, Foreign Affairs, Hillary Clinton, Libya, Media, Pakistan, religious extremists, Republican presidential politics, SDB Evening News Reads, Syria | Tags: , , , , , , | 35 Comments

Good Evening!

Do I have a juicy post for you today! H/T to Wonk the Vote who sent me the news about:

Pakistan court orders Musharraf assets seized – Central & South Asia – Al Jazeera English

A Pakistani court has ordered former president Pervez Musharraf’s financial assets to be frozen and confiscated, a prosecutor said.

A hearing in Adiyala prison in the garrison town of Rawalpindi on Saturday ruled for his property to be confiscated and his Pakistani bank accounts to be frozen, Chaudhry Azhar, a public prosecutor, told the AFP news agency.

The hearing is adjourned until September 10, Azhar said.

Musharraf, the former military ruler, has been living in self-imposed exile in London and Dubai since leaving office in 2008.

He is alleged to have been part of a “broad conspiracy” to have Benazir Bhutto, ex-premier and his political rival, killed in 2007 before presidential elections.

Prosecutors issued an arrest warrant in February over what they said was his failure to provide her with enough security.

The exact nature of the charges against him, however, has not so far been made clear.

Pakistani Court Orders Seizure of Musharraf’s Property – NYTimes.com

The court order was issued Saturday by Judge Shahid Raffique at a hearing in Rawalpindi, the garrison city next to Islamabad where Mrs. Bhutto was killed in a gun and suicide bomb attack on Dec. 27, 2007.

Mr. Musharraf was charged in the case earlier this year, but he left the country in 2008 under threat of impeachment and has been living in exile in London and Dubai.

He has not appeared at any court hearing in the case.

During the hearing on Saturday, the judge ordered the Federal Investigation Agency to confiscate all of Mr. Musharraf’s property for failing to respond to subpoenas.

At the time of the assassination, Mr. Musharraf’s government had accused the Taliban and Al Qaeda of being behind the plot to kill Mrs. Bhutto, his political rival.

A United Nations report released in April 2010 suggested that Pakistani authorities had deliberately failed to effectively investigate the killing, but it did not say who it believed to be responsible for her death.

Last October, Mr. Musharraf apologized to Pakistan for what he characterized as mistakes he made in office, and he said he would return to the country in time for elections due by 2013.

According to this report in the Telegraph, Musharraf’s Pakistani bank accounts totalling £625,000, where seized. Pervez Musharraf’s Pakistan property confiscated – Telegraph

A United Nations investigation published last year said Mr Musharraf’s government did too little to ensure her security and criticised investigators for hosing down the crime scene after her death and failing to perform a post mortem.

Two senior police officers arrested for alleged dereliction of duty apparently told investigators that Mr Musharraf himself had ordered the removal of a security detail on the day of her death.

When Wonk sent the link to the NYT’s article, she remembered that David Axelrod used the Bhutto’s assassination as an attack against Hillary Clinton during the 2008 campaign. Here are a few articles I found…

Did Hillary Clinton kill Benazir Bhutto? CNN.com – Anderson Cooper 360° Blog

Did Hillary Clinton kill Benazir Bhutto? Not quite, though Barack Obama’s right hand man thinks she may have had something to do with it.

“She was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq,” David Axelrod said, speaking of Hillary “which we would submit, is one of the reasons why we were diverted from Afghanistan, Pakistan and al-Qaeda, who may have been players in this event today. So that’s a judgment she’ll have to defend.”

[…]

Axelrod’s comments are not just distasteful. They’re nonsensical. Exactly how were we diverted from Pakistan because of the war in Iraq? If it weren’t for the Iraq war, and the larger war on terror, we would not give Pakistan a second’s thought. The country would still be under US sanctions for its illegal nuclear program.

Perhaps Axelrod means to say that our presence in Iraq has elevated the terrorist threat in Pakistan, thereby forcing the US into an uncomfortably cozy relationship with — and $10 billion in aid to — the country’s military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, which he seems to have squandered on military equipment to maintain a police state rather than fight al-Qaeda elements in the country, thereby compelling the US to send in Bhutto under a power sharing agreement with Musharraf to salvage what’s left of Pakistan’s democracy, thus tainting her as an American stooge and leading to her assassination by the very same al-Qaeda elements that Musharraf has yet to do anything about.

Now, there is no way I can do this story any justice…Wonk is the Hillary expert extraordinaire, but here is a quote from a New York Times article back in December of 2007, when Benazir Bhutto was assassinated.

Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Bhutto – NYTimes.com

Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Bhutto
Benazir Bhutto with Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton after a dinner reception in Pakistan in 1995. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated today, was the only celebrity whom Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton says she stood in a rope line to see. Later, after Mrs. Clinton came to international prominence, Ms. Bhutto would hold a luncheon for her and share an amusing observation about the status of husbands married to women politicians.

[…]

Mrs. Clinton apparently found in her a kindred spirit.

“Bhutto acknowledged the difficulties faced by women who were breaking with tradition and taking leading roles in public life,” she wrote. “She deftly managed to refer both to the challenges I had encountered during my White House tenure and to her own situation. ‘Women who take on tough issues and stake out new territory are often on the receiving end of ignorance,’ she concluded.”

I also found these little nuggets over at TalkLeft.  It is interesting to see what hindsight can do for you when you look back at the comments of this post…

Edwards Rips Axelrod – TalkLeft: The Politics Of Crime

I wonder…who is that RalphB? Well, whoever he was…he was right! Obama is Bush with a better vocabulary, as long as he has that  teleprompter to lean on, no question about that.

Steve Clemons: Is Axelrod Nuts? – TalkLeft: The Politics Of Crime

Steve Clemons, no one’s idea of a hothead, is dumbfounded by David Axelrod’s behavior:

[B]y David Axelrod’s own accounting, his candidate Barack Obama has complicity in our nation’s distraction from the serious, building threat of organized Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, by not commanding the resources under his control to raise attention. And then of course, Biden, Dodd and Edwards all voted for that Iraq War Resolution in 2002 as well. Did they all help to kill Benazir Bhutto too?

Here is something kind of funny from Steve:

Obama’s foreign policy team — of which Axelrod is not really a qualified member — needs to quickly assemble and get their candidate back in the game.

I guess Steve missed Susan Rice’s outrageous contribution to the Obama meltdown on this. Apparently, there are no grownups on the Obama campaign.

“No grownups?” Hey, who would have guessed that Obama would use the idea that he is the only “grownup” in the room during the Debt fiasco?

Thank you Wonk…for that heads up on this Musharraf story, and the nudge to find old articles about the Axelrod attack on Hillary.  Let me just say that I miss you Wonk, and when I see your name in the inbox of my email…I get very happy and excited…like a kid on Christmas morning, anticipating what your email has in store!

On to some other news items of interest…

Qadhafi family surfaces in Algeria – Jennifer Epstein – POLITICO.com

Former Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi’s wife and three of his children have fled to Algeria, that country’s government said in a statement on Monday.

I wonder where the Mad Dog is? Algeria failed to make a statement about the former dictators where abouts…

The news that some of Qadhafi’s family members have departed Libya comes as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton prepares to put her summer vacation on hold this week for a trip to Paris, where she will meet with top officials from NATO countries to discuss ways to help the Libyan opposition take control of Tripoli.

There is also some news in Syria, Video: Syria imposes new censorship as protesters beg for “international protection” « Hot Air

Two interesting developments have taken place in Syria over the last couple of days. First, the Bashar Assad regime has included strict media censorship laws as part of its so-called “reforms” in Syria. CNN can no longer report from Syria, and now has to report on the story from Istanbul. This has been greeted with alarm in the region — so much so that CNN’s Ivan Watson reports that Assad has been told that he needs to listen to his people and conduct real reform by … Iran and Hezbollah?

It is amazing what global news you can miss when the coverage has been wall to wall Irene.  I linked to this Hot Air piece because it was not getting much play on left leaning blogs…

The tenor of the protests has changed as well.  People in the streets have begun calling for international intervention against the Assad regime, referring back to the principle of civilian protection and the precedent of UN Resolution 1973.  And on its face, it’s hard to distinguish between Libya in March and Syria almost ever since.

And what about that international intervention? Morrissey has this to say about that:

Will the Syrian protesters get international intervention?  I’d call it unlikely in the extreme.  NATO could go after Qaddafi because he didn’t have strong ties to a military power in the region; he managed to alienate everyone around him.  Assad’s ties to Iran would almost guarantee that any Western or even Arab-only intervention would provoke Tehran into joining the fight.  They have no intention of allowing their most critical alliance to disappear, and with it their pipeline to Hezbollah and Lebanon.  They might even consider threatening a strike on Israel as a way to sideline the Arab nations and force NATO back to the sidelines.  If the Syrians are to be rescued from Assad, they’ll have to do the rescuing themselves.

Which leads me to this article in the New York Times:  In Times of Unrest, Social Networks Can Be a Distraction – NYTimes.com

THE mass media, including interactive social-networking tools, make you passive, can sap your initiative, leave you content to watch the spectacle of life from your couch or smartphone.

Apparently even during a revolution.

That is the provocative thesis of a new paper by Navid Hassanpour, a political science graduate student at Yale, titled “Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest.”

Using complex calculations and vectors representing decision-making by potential protesters, Mr. Hassanpour, who already has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford, studied the recent uprising in Egypt.

His question was, how smart was the decision by the government of President Hosni Mubarak to completely shut down the Internet and cellphone service on Jan. 28, in the middle of the crucial protests in Tahrir Square?

His conclusion was, not so smart, but not for the reasons you might think. “Full connectivity in a social network sometimes can hinder collective action,” he writes.

To put it another way, all the Twitter posting, texting and Facebook wall-posting is great for organizing and spreading a message of protest, but it can also spread a message of caution, delay, confusion or, I don’t have time for all this politics, did you see what Lady Gaga is wearing?

I am not sure about that…I mean it all depends on who you are following right? During the Egyptian uprising, so much of our information came from reliable sources via twitter.  Hassanpour goes on to say…

“The disruption of cellphone coverage and Internet on the 28th exacerbated the unrest in at least three major ways,” he writes. “It implicated many apolitical citizens unaware of or uninterested in the unrest; it forced more face-to-face communication, i.e., more physical presence in streets; and finally it effectively decentralized the rebellion on the 28th through new hybrid communication tactics, producing a quagmire much harder to control and repress than one massive gathering in Tahrir.”

In an interview, he described “the strange darkness” that takes place in a society deprived of media outlets. “We become more normal when we actually know what is going on — we are more unpredictable when we don’t — on a mass scale that has interesting implications,” he said.

It is truly a fascinating article, please give it a full read…Hassanpour discusses Libya, Iran, and Great Britain…and then touches on Germany during the cold war.

And lastly, Bachmann is in the news yet again…this time channeling Pat Robertson… Bachmann Plays Down Comments Linking Disasters and Deficits – NYTimes.com

As municipal crews around the Northeast work to clean up after Hurricane Irene, Representative Michele Bachmann is doing her own damage control after she used a Florida political rally to suggest that the recent natural disasters were God’s way of sending a message to the politicians back in Washington.

“I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians,” she told a group of generally older residents in central Florida on Sunday, referring to the need to rein in spending. “We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here? Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now.’ ”

Mrs. Bachmann’s comments came less than a week after a 5.8-magnitude earthquake near Mineral, Va., shook a large swath of the East Coast, including Washington and New York — areas that would have to brace for a hurricane days later. Irene, as both a hurricane and tropical storm, knocked out power for more than a million people and left nearly 30 dead, according to The Associated Press’s latest count.

Her campaign downplayed the remarks of course, saying that she spoke “in jest.”  Bachmann Campaign: Bachmann Spoke ‘In Jest’ When She Said God Was Communicating Via Earthquakes And Hurricanes | TPMDC

“Obviously she was saying it in jest,” campaign spokesperson Alice Stewart told TPM in a statement.

Really? A joke, come on how dumb do you think we are? Wait…strike that…

Check out these registered voter’s remarks as Bachmann continued her Florida tour…

Michele Bachmann rally draws over 1,000 in Sarasota, but some prefer Rick Perry – St. Petersburg Times

“I spoke to Rick Perry Thursday night,” said Wes Maddox, a GOP activist in Tampa who went to Texas A&M with Perry, who is expected to make his first Florida stop Sept. 13 in Tampa Bay. “He said, ‘You tell them (in Florida) help is on the way.’ That’s what the governor’s message is — help is on the way.”

Bradenton retiree Philip Staples said he’s already sold on Bachmann. “She’s got the fire in the belly, and she’s a straight shooter. She’s one of the common people,” he said.

“I like Michele Bachmann a lot,” said Stephen Gately, a Republican activist from Pinellas County who was among more than 1,000 people at a Bachmann rally in Sarasota on Sunday afternoon. “But I’m supporting Gov. Perry. I prefer governors as our nominee.”

Hmmm, I wonder what Mr. Gately thinks about governors that say things like…social security and disability are nothing but a Ponzi scheme for the “young”..a scam…perhaps Mr. Gately is one of those “young” supporters of Perry?  I bet Gately gets his monthly “scam” checks…what do you think?

I don’t know why, but I also detect a hint of masochism in that comment from Gately…but maybe I am just experiencing some major PMS and I’m just a bit tired of all this GOP Godly Jesus Freak crap…from both the men and women who are preaching, sorry, campaigning there way to the nomination.

So that is it for me, what you all think of that? Catch ya later in the comments!