‘Nuff Said! A Picture’s Worth….

 

We may have our issues with O, find him less than perfect, but there's no doubt Presient McCain will be the worse thing that can happen to our nation!

If They Weren’t Succeeding At Destroying America, The Wingnuts Might Actually Be Amusing If Not Funny

Most political junkies never get the chance to protect the candidates they admire from rapacious Muslim terrorists with a yen for televised beheadings. But, just last week, Yomin Postelnik–a Pompano Beach, Florida, GOP activist–answered his own personal three a.m. call when, he wrote, a “low-level operative” with a Middle Eastern group attempted to ferry the Republican nominee for Congress in Florida’s 22nd district, Allen West, to “an undisclosed location” and “pull off what most certainly seems to be a heinous stunt.” Outraged, Postelnik posted a promise of retaliation against “the fiends” who targeted West at the news site CanadaFreePress.com, where he is a columnist. “I’d caution you against so much as threatening this man again, as the result would be a torrent of articles and books highlighting his exemplary nature and service,” he wrote. “More writers than you care to know of have made this pact out of admiration for Allen and for what he stands for[.]“

Fortunately, Allen West managed to save himself. To be fair, it wasn’t that hard. The fiendish Middle Eastern group was Al Jazeera, the intended “stunt” was an interview for a segment on black Republicans, and West just politely declined. The next day, when he regaled a group (including Postelnik) at a Coconut Creek retirement community with the tale of Al Jazeera’s interview request, he meant the “undisclosed location” part to be a joke. “I doubt anyone was thinking about kidnapping me,” he admitted later.

You can see why people might have missed the humor. The most famous thing about West–a former high-ranking African American Army officer–is that he was accused by the military in 2003 of abusing an Iraqi detainee. The fact that he is now the Republican nominee for Congress in an ostensibly competitive district speaks volumes about the current state of the GOP. “This is not the year in which an intelligent Republican would want to run against an incumbent, ” says GOP strategist Whit Ayres glumly. Recruitment troubles have plagued the party in what should be competitive districts from Arizona to Indiana to New York; in one blood-red district in North Carolina, the Republican choice, a right-winger named Carl Mumpower, recently shut down his own campaign to protest his party’s lax stance on immigration.

The GOP’s greatest embarrassment of all might seem to be Florida’s 22nd, where the party that Iraq destroyed is running a candidate charged with violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And, yet, the South Florida GOP doesn’t see it that way. This year’s surprise in Palm Beach County is that local Republican officials, some of whom are also presiding over more competitive races, believe their candidate is not a laughingstock butthe marquee Republican of the year–that he is not a symptom of what ails the national GOP but a possible cure.

Link.

But wait, there’s more.

Our Shamelessly, Contemptuously Lying Leaders

A new book by the author Ron Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.

Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.

The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.”

The letter’s existence has been reported before, and it had been written about as if it were genuine. It was passed in Baghdad to a reporter for The (London) Sunday Telegraph who wrote about it on the front page of Dec. 14, 2003, under the headline, “Terrorist behind September 11 strike ‘was trained by Saddam.’”

The Telegraph story by Con Coughlin (which, coincidentally, ran the day Hussein was captured in his “spider hole”) was touted in the U.S. media by supporters of the war, and he was interviewed on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“Over the next few days, the Habbush letter continued to be featured prominently in the United States and across the globe,” Suskind writes. “Fox’s Bill O’Reilly trumpeted the story Sunday night on ‘The O’Reilly Factor,’ talking breathlessly about details of the story and exhorting, ‘Now, if this is true, that blows the lid off al Qaeda—Saddam.’”

According to Suskind, the administration had been in contact with the director of the Iraqi intelligence service in the last years of Hussein’s regime, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti.

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.” 

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Did The Wrong Man Commit Suicide?

Something to think about.

Faux Bidness Journal:

Over the past week the media was gripped by the news that the FBI was about to charge Bruce Ivins, a leading anthrax expert, as the man responsible for the anthrax letter attacks in September/October 2001.

But despite the seemingly powerful narrative that Ivins committed suicide because investigators were closing in, this is still far from a shut case. The FBI needs to explain why it zeroed in on Ivins, how he could have made the anthrax mailed to lawmakers and the media, and how he (or anyone else) could have pulled off the attacks, acting alone.

I believe this is another mistake in the investigation.

Let’s start with the anthrax in the letters to Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. The spores could not have been produced at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where Ivins worked, without many other people being aware of it. Furthermore, the equipment to make such a product does not exist at the institute.

Information released by the FBI over the past seven years indicates a product of exceptional quality. The product contained essentially pure spores. The particle size was 1.5 to 3 microns in diameter. There are several methods used to produce anthrax that small. But most of them require milling the spores to a size small enough that it can be inhaled into the lower reaches of the lungs. In this case, however, the anthrax spores were not milled.

What’s more, they were also tailored to make them potentially more dangerous. According to a FBI news release from November 2001, the particles were coated by a “product not seen previously to be used in this fashion before.” Apparently, the spores were coated with a polyglass which tightly bound hydrophilic silica to each particle. That’s what was briefed (according to one of my former weapons inspectors at the United Nations Special Commission) by the FBI to the German Foreign Ministry at the time.

Another FBI leak indicated that each particle was given a weak electric charge, thereby causing the particles to repel each other at the molecular level. This made it easier for the spores to float in the air, and increased their retention in the lungs.

In short, the potential lethality of anthrax in this case far exceeds that of any powdered product found in the now extinct U.S. Biological Warfare Program. In meetings held on the cleanup of the anthrax spores in Washington, the product was described by an official at the Department of Homeland Security as “according to the Russian recipes” — apparently referring to the use of the weak electric charge.

The latest line of speculation asserts that the anthrax’s DNA, obtained from some of the victims, initially led investigators to the laboratory where Ivins worked. But the FBI stated a few years ago that a complete DNA analysis was not helpful in identifying what laboratory might have made the product.

Furthermore, the anthrax in this case, the “Ames strain,” is one of the most common strains in the world. Early in the investigations, the FBI said it was similar to strains found in Haiti and Sri Lanka. The strain at the institute was isolated originally from an animal in west Texas and can be found from Texas to Montana following the old cattle trails. Samples of the strain were also supplied to at least eight laboratories including three foreign laboratories. Four French government laboratories reported on studies with the Ames strain, citing the Pasteur Institute in Paris as the source of the strain they used. Organism DNA is not a very reliable way to make a case against a scientist.

The FBI has not officially released information on why it focused on Ivins, and whether he was about to be charged or arrested. And when the FBI does release this information, we should all remember that the case needs to be firmly based on solid information that would conclusively prove that a lone scientist could make such a sophisticated product.

From what we know so far, Bruce Ivins, although potentially a brilliant scientist, was not that man. The multiple disciplines and technologies required to make the anthrax in this case do not exist at Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Inhalation studies are conducted at the institute, but they are done using liquid preparations, not powdered products.

The FBI spent between 12 and 18 months trying “to reverse engineer” (make a replica of) the anthrax in the letters sent to Messrs. Daschle and Leahy without success, according to FBI news releases. So why should federal investigators or the news media or the American public believe that a lone scientist would be able to do so?

Mr. Spertzel, head of the biological-weapons section of Unscom from 1994-99, was a member of the Iraq Survey Group.

Congrats To Raw Story!

Link.

Another Tumble Down That Slippery Source

DEA getting a little privatized….

WARNING! Filthy Video Showing Young Woman Admiring Cleanliness Of Hotel Room

There’s nothing to say except, like, OMG!!!!!

And here’s the site the video supports….