Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) says the Bush Administration let Osama bin Laden escape into the mountains of Tora Bora on purpose.  The reason?  So Republican President George W. Bush could justify his war on Iraq.

Sound crazy?  Well, let’s just think about this for a moment.  Think back to those first shell shocked months after the 9-11 terror attack on the World Trade Center in New York City.  The Tora Bora incident was just a little over three short months after that terror attack.  Remember all the dead or alive cowboy crap coming out of the Bush White House?  Remember our fearless leader playing schoolyard bully with his big talk and his puffed up swagger?  Think hard on those things for a minute or two.

Now imagine, just imagine Osama bin Laden in US custody in December of 2001.  No more fear of him.  No more of him being built up as a hero for disaffected youth in the Muslim countries.  His aura and his recruitment ability down the toilet.  Imagine the statement it would have made.  You attack the United States, you get caught…quickly. You are tried for your crimes if you are not killed during capture.  We don’t play games with terrorists.

Now let your mind try to wrap itself around what reason the US could have given for going into Iraq.  We know the war was started because of outright lies on the part of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their minions with the Republican neo-cons as cheerleaders egging it on.  We know that the Bush Administration wanted to fight a war in Iraq from the first day they were in office.  All of this has been proven by documentation from this very administration.

But, now imagine how much harder it would have been to convince The House and the Senate, let alone the American people to invade Iraq if bin Laden was in custody.  The back of Al-Quida would have been broken and the threat greatly diminished for any further terror attacks by any group.

Do I think the Bush Administration let Osama go intentionally?  Knowing how much W, Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted to attack Iraq and knowing how they called back the troops that could have caught Osama, I think it is a very, very real possibility.  Logic points to yes as the answer.

Now, when are we going to see these war criminals brought to justice?  I am not talking about Osama bin Laden.  I am talking about the American war criminals that perpetrated this whole horrible scam on the American public as well as the rest of the world.  I am ashamed of them.  And to think they did all this in my name and yours.

There are a lot of levels of not believing a story you hear.  They range from “nah” to “no f’ing way” to “totally bogus” but the following story, though it may fall into the totally bogus category, is true.

Employees of a New York McDonald’s not only refused to let a disabled war veteran eat with his service dog in their establishment, they actually beat the war vet and his service dog with trash cans and the lids, going so far as to chase him and his dog down the street once he was outside.

Two all beef patties, special sauce and a beat down from our intolerant establishment should be the new theme song of old Micky’D's.

There happens to be two sides to every story and this one seems to have gone on for quite some time.  From the disabled vet and his dog being shooed out to stickers going up stating the establishment allows service dogs to a manager asking the same disabled vet and his dog to leave after those stickers went up.  This is harassment of a disabled vet no matter what spin you put on it.  When the vet was writing yet another letter to the President of McDonald’s to update him of what was happening he went back to take a picture of the sticker on the door that stated service animals are welcome.  When they saw him the employees of this McDonald’s aggressively confronted the vet as to why he was taking pictures and then proceeded to grab trash cans and lids and commence beating him and his service dog.

Beating him until he left their property was not enough for these happy clowns.  They pursued him for almost a block on a public sidewalk merrily striking him the entire time.  This time however, they happened to pick on the wrong disabled veteran.  This man happened to have a few contacts, like U.S. Senators.  This veteran happened to be an officer of the military.  This officer happened to have a home.  This wounded veteran happened to help write Senate proposals regarding service animals.

That is why we know about this today.

Given the numbers of McDonald’s nationwide and the ever increasing amount of disabled vets and vets with service animals there are, how many disabled veterans have been thrown out of Americas largest restaurant chain?  How many have been verbally harassed?  How many have been dismissed?  How many humiliated.   How many have been beaten?

McDonald’s is not really good anymore, it’s just cheap. The one up the street from me makes me sick every other time I eat there.  I go less and less often these days because of that.  Now, even though McDonald’s is one of just two fast food places in town, I will not eat there again.

Just after this incident, this particular location failed a N.Y.C. health inspection.  It is closed at this time.  I feel this shows just how much they care about their customers.

If you really support our troops you will think twice before hitting the drive-thru at this national chain.  There are obvious problems with dining at a chain that fails a health inspection when the spotlight is on, there are even more when you think what it must be like when the spotlight is off!  There are additional problems with eating at a place that greets the disabled and veterans with violence.

Our household is now boycotting McDonald’s.  Like I said we only eat there once a month so  my family will not bankrupt them.    I will not ask you to do the same.  I would ask you to spend your money at a fast food chain you trust to be clean.  I ask you to spend your money at a chain you trust to treat disabled veterans with some respect.  I ask you remember that this McDonald’s location is corporate owned and followed corporate policies.

If you live in a larger city and have a choice of where your going to grab the drive thru I ask you to think about what window you head for.  I ask you to remember a hungry disabled vet and his service dog.  I ask you to remember the name of the place where the employees beat a disabled soldier and his service dog.  I want you to remember that they beat him away from a kitchen that served food to you and me that failed a health inspection.

Remember these things and then choose where you want to eat.

That’s all I ask.

Read more about this story and Senator Al Franken’s involvement at the link.

http://www.startribune.com/politics/72016162.html

The ‘Doublespeak Award’ is given annually by the National Council of Teachers of English.  This years winner is Glenn Beck who joins noted past recipients George W. Bush, Alberto Gonzales, The Bush Administration and The Defense Department among others.

The nonprofit group giving the award promotes literacy and the language arts.  They give their award each year “to public speakers who have perpetuated language that is deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing & self-centered.”  Sounds like Glenn Beck is a deserving  winner.

For anyone out there who is not familiar with Beck, he is the mealy mouthed little Fox News coward who hypes the teabagger and birther movements.  He uses his show to promote Christians, Sarah Palin, so called conservative Republican ideals and his own strange conspiracy theories.  He also grabs every opportunity to slander President Obama and the Democratic Party.  In short, he is a real piece of mentally challenged work and a total waste of perfectly good skin.

The hook to this as I see it, is that Beck will probably think he has received a real honor when he is actually getting an award for being a liar.  The citation is couched in nicer language, but it still comes down to calling him out on his lies.

From the Washington Post:

Beck, a popular radio and television commentator who moved from CNN to Fox News, and who became a prominent critic of liberalism and the Obama administration this year, wrote two New York Times bestselling books in 2009: “Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine” and “Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government.”

Beck has also been pushing his “9-12 Project,” named for the nine principles and 12 values he says embody the spirit of the American people on the day after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

That spirit, if we are to believe Beck’s own words, is pure doublespeak. When he moved to Fox this year, Beck attacked health care reform by repeatedly telling his audience, “You’re about to lose the best health care system in the world.” But in 2008, after experiencing problems during a routine surgical procedure, Beck vehemently complained to his CNN audience that the American health care system had gone “horribly awry.”

He told viewers it was a “nightmare” system that doesn’t care about “average working stiffs” and tries to “shove the patients out the door as fast as they can.” Beck concluded one of several diatribes against American doctors and hospitals with this shocker: “Getting well in this country actually will almost kill you”—a phrase that was recently echoed in Alan Grayson’s critique of the two-part Republican health care plan: “Don’t get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly.”

Read the rest here http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/accountability/ncte-award-glenn-beck-the-doub.html

The rest of the citation reads about like the excerpt above.  Beck’s ‘doublespeak’ is graphically pointed out.  However, I still just prefer to call him a liar.  It seems to roll off my tongue more easily and I think it describes the little weasel perfectly.

Defend Glenn Beck by Swamp Rat. There is no defense for this piece of flotsam.

Sarah Palin gives the impression she is going from town to town to sign books via a bus reminiscent of those used by the teabaggers last summer.  It turns out the Christian conservative and former Republican vice presidential nominee Palin couldn’t lower her royal self to ride in a bus across the country.  Instead, the bus takes her to small local airports where she catches one of several loaned private jets that then whisk her to the next city where she again catches one of the book tour buses to go to her scheduled event.

What a phony crock this woman is.  It is also reported that she is staying at the finest hotels on her tour and just using the bus to go to the local events where she signs books for people ‘just like her.’

Read more and see pictures of the Gulf Stream here:

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/scarce/sarah-palin-being-jetted-around-evangelical

In the lower forty eight we have our share of ‘trailer trash’.  In Alaska, they have igloo trash and one of them has escaped into our territory.  Alaska, please send helicopters and marksmen to take her down humanely from the air.  Oh, and let the village of Wasilla know that we found their idiot.

Don't know about you, but I hope the wolf gets her. Karma and all that don'tcha know?

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has released a report which says Osama bin Laden was without question within the reach of our troops in the mountains of Tora Bora when American leadership made the decision not to pursue the terrorist leader with massive force.  This all occurred in December of 2001, just three months after the September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City, New York.

Can you imagine how much differently the so called War on Terror might have gone if bin Laden had been caught and brought to justice back then?  Iffy history is a game we all can play, but it seems to me this particular mistake by the United States leaves little doubt as to a better outcome for the country, the Bush Cheney Administration and their conservative neo-con quest.  That quest may be good or bad in your view, but their seems little doubt they blew their chance to bring a quick end to the terror of bin Laden when they missed this opportunity.  The question would seem to be …Why?

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

“Removing the al-Qaida leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat,” the report says. “But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide. The failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism.”

The report states categorically that bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora when the U.S. had the means to mount a rapid assault with several thousand troops at least. It says that a review of existing literature, unclassified government records and interviews with central participants “removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora.”

On or about Dec. 16, 2001, bin Laden and bodyguards “walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan’s unregulated tribal area,” where he is still believed to be based, the report says.

Instead of a massive attack, fewer than 100 U.S. commandos, working with Afghan militias, tried to capitalize on air strikes and track down their prey.

“The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines,” the report said.

At the time, Rumsfeld expressed concern that a large U.S. troop presence might fuel a backlash and he and some others said the evidence was not conclusive about bin Laden’s location.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/11/28/national/w195840S65.DTL&tsp=1#ixzz0YHolT7Sp

Osama bin Laden

I don’t think anyone who reads this blog would ever have described Republican President George W. Bush as a mental heavyweight.  In fact, it seemed that most people thought he was barely understandable and definitely not overly bright.

It seems a group of psychologists have done a study of the conservative mindset and Bush is a prime example of this small minded group.  The Guardian Newspaper in the UK wrote a great article about this study and shines a light on its highlights.

From the Guardian:

The authors also peer into the psyche of President George Bush, who turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his preference for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance.

“This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes,” the authors argue in the Psychological Bulletin.

One of the psychologists behind the study, Jack Glaser, said the aversion to shades of grey and the need for “closure” could explain the fact that the Bush administration ignored intelligence that contradicted its beliefs about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

The authors, presumably aware of the outrage they were likely to trigger, added a disclaimer that their study “does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false”

Read the rest here  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/aug/13/usa.redbox

This sounds very familiar doesn’t it?  I do have to disagree with them on one point.  I do think conservatism is pathological and most conservative beliefs are false.

I cannot tell you how happy I am that W is out of office.

Was Bush mentally ill, stupid or just a bad president? Did his drug and alcohol overuse damage his brain or is conservatism a mental condition?

Can your D.N.A. be copied by anyone that wants to? The truth is it can!  All they need is a sample of your own D.N.A. and you now can be placed at any crime scene the new owner of your D.N.A. wishes to place you.

Think that your D.N.A. would be hard to get?  Think again.  Your cells are left behind on every piece of silverware, spork, cup, bottle or can you use.  Be it at a restaurant, plucked from a discard in your office or your own trash on the curb in front of your home your D.N.A. would not be that hard for anyone to lay their hands on.

Think that your D.N.A. would be hard to replicate?  From what I have read it is actually a fairly simple process.  Anyone with a basic background in chemistry or biology has the knowledge to do it.  The equipment required is readily available in hospitals, universities, crime labs and private medical facilities.  The equipment needed is also for sale through medical supply companies to any private individual who wishes to purchase it.

So now through modern medicine anyone with basic knowledge and skills can buy the equipment and set up a D.N.A. fabrication facility in their spare bedroom.  All they need is a sample of your D.N.A. and a sample of blood that is the same type as yours.

Just so you know, I have no schooling or background in medicine or chemistry but to me the process sounds fairly simple.  If your blood type is A-negative (that is a blood type right?)  then the person wanting your D.N.A. starts out with any sample of A-negative blood and a fork you have used.  They draw your D.N.A. off the fork and then spin the blood sample to remove the white blood cells from it.  Once the white blood cells are removed the red blood cells which are left are basically a blank slate.  When your D.N.A. is injected into the clean red blood cells then the entire sample now will read as yours to any future D.N.A. testing.

Place that new sample at any crime scene and you are now implicated in the crime.  It is your D.N.A. that the police lab will find.

How this process will affect our court system is yet to be seen but the implications could be massive.  For years now D.N.A. evidence has been accepted by our court system as indisputable evidence of involvement in a crime.  It has gotten to the point of being a higher level of proof of guilt than fingerprints because it could not be replicated and there are several ways to lift and plant fingerprints.

D.N.A. evidence has been used to convict criminals for crimes that are years old and to pull convicted criminals off of death row.  Now all D.N.A. evidence must be called into question.  Whether it is someone who wants to send a enemy to prison or a loved one that wants to clear a suspect, a cop with an axe to grind against a person he feels is guilty or simply a case of a criminal attempting to cover his tracks, D.N.A. can no longer be considered proof of anything except that you are alive.

How many cases have been tampered with is something none of us can know.  We can be certain that there have been some instances where D.N.A. has been manipulated and that by definition calls all D.N.A. evidence into question.

The structure of part of a DNA double helix

Back in October lunacanus posted about lobbyists anger because they were going to be bounced off advisory panels.  K Street has been in an uproar about it but President Obama’s promise to limit the influence lobbyists have on legislation is being kept.

I thought at the time I read this on the White House site and then posted about it that it could be one of the most far reaching and important things done to limit big money corporations and their ability to change laws in their favor.  Now attention is being focused on this little noticed act by the Obama Administration by the press.

Lobbyists are up in arms and claim nothing can get done in DC without their input.  They say the government will be severely crippled.  My question is, how in the world did anything ever get done before lobbyists?  Are members of the Senate, The House and their staffers going to have to do research themselves?  Will this force them to make decisions by weighing the facts and coming to their own conclusions by using their best judgement?  Is this all too hard for them?

From the Washington Post:

Hundreds, if not thousands, of lobbyists are likely to be ejected from federal advisory panels as part of a little-noticed initiative by the Obama administration to curb K Street’s influence in Washington, according to White House officials and lobbying experts.

The new policy — issued with little fanfare this fall by the White House ethics counsel — may turn out to be the most far-reaching lobbying rule change so far from President Obama, who also has sought to restrict the ability of lobbyists to get jobs in his administration and to negotiate over stimulus contracts.

The initiative is aimed at a system of advisory committees so vast that federal officials don’t have exact numbers for its size; the most recent estimates tally nearly 1,000 panels with total membership exceeding 60,000 people.

Under the policy, which is being phased in over the coming months, none of the more than 13,000 lobbyists in Washington would be able to hold seats on the committees, which advise agencies on trade rules, troop levels, environmental regulations, consumer protections and thousands of other government policies.

“Some folks have developed a comfortable Beltway perch sitting on these boards while at the same time working as lobbyists to influence the government,” said White House ethics counsel Norm Eisen, who disclosed the policy in a September blog posting on the White House Web site. “That is just the kind of special interest access that the president objects to.”

But lobbyists and many of the businesses they represent say K Street is being unfairly demonized by a White House intent on scoring political points with scandal-weary voters. They warn that the latest policy will severely handicap federal regulators, who rely heavily on advisory boards for technical advice and to serve as liaisons between government and industry.

“It’s taken me years to learn what the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade is,” said Robert Vastine, a lobbyist for the Coalition of Service Industries who also serves as chairman of a trade advisory board. “It’s a whole different and specialized world. It is not easily obtained knowledge, and they are crippling themselves terribly by ruling out all registered lobbyists.”

Read the rest here  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/26/AR2009112602362_pf.html

I would find this almost laughable, but it is just too sad.

If you do not have time to read the entire Washington Post article, I have also included this bit that seems to me to pretty much wrap it up.

Administration officials remain sanguine, saying the criticism is overblown and arguing that top corporate officers are free to sit on advisory panels as long as they aren’t lobbyists. Eisen, in a response letter to the ITAC leaders last month, wrote that “arguments that only lobbyists can bring requisite experience to provide wise counsel . . . are unconvincing on their face.”

“If the result of this new approach is that business owners join the conversation in D.C. about issues affecting them, that’s fine,” Eisen said in an interview. “It’s healthy to move away from the professional advocates for the special interests and let some new voices be heard.”

And though lobbyists are unhappy, some good-government advocates say the policy is sound.

“You may lose a lot of expertise, but these people are also paid to have a point of view; they have an agenda,” said Mary Boyle, a vice president at Common Cause. “We support what the administration is doing to get deep-seated special interests out of the business of running our government, so this seems like a step in the right direction.”

Bravo! to the Obama Administration.

Highly paid lobbyists will be leaving and they wil be replaced by the actual people that live day to day with the subject they are advising about. This seems like a good way to get a lot of corporate dollars and influence out of DC.