in memory of st. rudy of 9-11...

wonkette has complied the top 6 rudy "i'm running for president of 9/11" giuliani sept. 11 references in honor of his now-imploded campaign. i know, how can you pick just six out of...well, at least 911 of them...oh rudy...

6: After Rudy placed sixth in the Iowa caucus, all the newspaper and teevee reporters wanted to know if this in any way “worried him,” it being sixth place and all. But he told the New York Daily News that it didn’t, although another time in his life something else happened and, indeed, he was worried: “None of this worries me - Sept. 11, there were times I was worried.”

5: After Hillary sobbed like a little whore in New Hampshire, the folks at MSNBC wanted to know if the Mayor of Everything ever sobbed. And he did, at the various 9/11 funerals! Was this because of the death surrounding him? Or was it then when he realized he could turn this into a lucrative “security” firm as well as a failed presidential bid?

4: When Rudy’s firewall in Florida collapsed — other humans forgot he existed after a while — he knew just the trick to win over those similarly one-track-minded Floridians: mention that 9/11 and hurricanes are both bad things, and that he should be the president by default.

3: Muslims are torturing, killing, Americans are dying, a religion bastardized, fires, mayhem, planes, illegal guns, Iran, nuclear weapons, fear, fear, jihad, Al Qaeda, no freedom, rape, Muslim rape. Image of World Trade Center rubble. Rudy’s best ad.

2. Rudy was on fire one night before the John Birch society, which drinks as much if not more blood than Rudy on a Saturday night. He let it all out:

“This war ends when they stop coming here to kill us!” Giuliani said in his speech. “Never, ever again will this country ever be on defense waiting for [terrorists] to attack us if I have anything to say about it. And make no mistake, the Democrats want to put us back on defense!” Giuliani said terrorists “hate us and not because of anything bad we have done; it has nothing to do with Israel and Palestine. They hate us for the freedoms we have and the freedoms we want to share with the world.”

1. In September — the same month that 9/11 happened several years ago — an “independent, non-denominational grass-roots campaign to raise $10,000” organized a special “theme” for its fundraiser: it requested $9.11 donations for a delightful fear party. The Giuliani team distanced itself from the private event after, you know, the media heard about it, and they even returned the $9.11 donations after many weeks. This may not have been Rudy himself, but nothing more accurately described the Giuliani Campaign’s basis for existence, ever.

keith's special comment on waterboarding and torture

brilliant, as always:

It is a fact startling in its cynical simplicity and it requires cynical and simple words to be properly expressed: The presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.

All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare stupidity; all the invocations of World War III, all the sophistic questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop, all the phony secrets; all the claims of executive privilege, all the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence of his apologists...

All of it is now, after one revelation last week, transparently clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of the government, the refocusing of our entire nation, toward keeping this mock president and this unstable vice president and this departed wildly self-overrating attorney general, and the others, from potential prosecution for having approved or ordered the illegal torture of prisoners being held in the name of this country...

view the rest (and it gets better) here:

Special Comment: On waterboarding and torture

victory in iraq...if passing is 35%

if a student gets 39% on a test, that's much worse than just failing, right? so, if iraq missed 11 of 18 benchmarks, does that mean they have to retake the test again or do we just hold them back a year (again)? someone needs to tell the president that even though karl rove is gone, he still doesn't (and never did) have the math.

democrats cave. yet again....

really? the dems are so fearful of being called "weak on terror" or whatever, they caved to the bush administration on its warantless wiretapping bill.

House Approves Wiretap Measure
White House Bill Boosts Warrantless Surveillance

The Democratic-controlled House last night approved and sent to President Bush for his signature legislation written by his intelligence advisers to enhance their ability to intercept the electronic communications of foreigners without a court order.

The 227 to 183 House vote capped a high-pressure campaign by the White House to change the nation's wiretap law, in which the administration capitalized on Democrats' fears of being branded weak on terrorism and on a general congressional desire to act on the measure before an August recess.

The Senate had passed the legislation Friday night after House Democrats failed to win enough votes to pass a narrower revision of a statute known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The original statute was enacted after the revelation of CIA abuses in the 1970s, and it required judicial oversight for most federal wiretapping conducted in the United States.

Privacy and civil liberties advocates, and many Democratic lawmakers, complained that the Bush administration's revisions of the law could breach constitutional protections against government intrusion. But the administration, aided by Republican congressional leaders, suggested that a failure to approve what intelligence officials sought could expose the country to a greater risk of terrorist attacks.

Democrats facing reelection next year in conservative districts helped propel the bill to a quick approval. Adding to the pressures they felt were recent intelligence reports about threatening new al-Qaeda activity in Pakistan and the disclosure by House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) of a secret court ruling earlier this year that complicated the wiretapping of purely foreign communications that happen to pass through a communications node on U.S. soil.

The bill would give the National Security Agency the right to collect such communications in the future without a warrant. But it goes further than that: It also would allow the interception and recording of electronic communications involving, at least in part, people "reasonably believed to be outside the United States" without a court's order or oversight.

homeland security asks science fiction writers to help prevent terror attacks

no, really...and from the dude who wrote ringwold...i couldn't make this one up if i tried:

Looking to prevent the next terrorist attack, the Homeland Security Department is tapping into the wild imaginations of a group of self-described "deviant" thinkers: science-fiction writers.

"We spend our entire careers living in the future," says author Arlan Andrews, one of a handful of writers the government brought to Washington this month to attend a Homeland Security conference on science and technology.

Those responsible for keeping the nation safe from devastating attacks realize that in addition to border agents, police and airport screeners, they "need people to think of crazy ideas," Andrews says.

The writers make up a group called Sigma, which Andrews put together 15 years ago to advise government officials. The last time the group gathered was in the late 1990s, when members met with government scientists to discuss what a post-nuclear age might look like, says group member Greg Bear. He has written 30 sci-fi books, including the best seller Darwin's Radio.

Now, the Homeland Security Department is calling on the group to help with the government's latest top mission of combating terrorism.

Although some sci-fi writers' futuristic ideas might sound crazy now, scientists know that they often have what seems to be an uncanny ability to see into the future.

"Fifty years ago, science-fiction writers told us about flying cars and a wireless handheld communicator," says Christopher Kelly, spokesman for Homeland Security's Science and Technology division. "Although flying cars haven't evolved, cellphones today are a way of life. We need to look everywhere for ideas, and science-fiction writers clearly inform the debate."

Bear says the writers offer powerful imaginations that can conjure up not only possible methods of attack, but also ideas about how governments and individuals will respond and what kinds of high-tech tools could prevent attacks.

The group's motto is "Science Fiction in the National Interest." To join the group, Andrews says, you have to have at least one technical doctorate degree.

"We're well-qualified nuts," says Jerry Pournelle, co-author of the best sellers Footfall and Lucifer's Hammer and dozens of other books.

Pournelle and others say that science-fiction writers have spent their lives studying the kinds of technologies and scenarios Homeland Security officials have been tackling since the department began operating in 2003.

"We talk to a lot of strange people and read a lot of weird things," Bear says.

At the Washington conference, Bear offered to put biometrics researchers in touch with movie special-effects experts. The experts might be able to help the government determine how to match the face of someone walking through an airport to a grainy photo of a known terrorist.

Bear's latest book, Quantico, is a sci-fi thriller that has FBI agents and a bioterrorism expert racing to hunt down a homegrown terrorist.

"We'll play 'What if?' with anything," says Sage Walker, an emergency medicine physician turned sci-fi writer and the only woman in the group. She says the discussions with government officials "tend to be very intense and far-ranging."

So are discussions between the writers. During a coffee break at the conference, Walker, Bear and Andrews started talking about the government's bomb-sniffing dogs. Within minutes, they had conjured up a doggie brain-scanning skullcap that could tell agents what kind of explosive material a dog had picked up.

The 9/11 Commission called the 2001 terrorist attacks a result of the government's "failure of imagination." For this group, Walker says, there's no such thing as an "unthinkable scenario."

Why offer their ideas to the government instead of private companies that pay big bucks?

"To save civilization," Ringworld author Larry Niven says. "We do it in fiction. Why wouldn't we want to do it in fact?""

attention al qaeda, we are now prepared for your cloaked ship phaser attacks. this whole story makes my brain hurt on so many levels....

congressman hopes terrorists kill peace activists

on april 17, rep. dana rohrbacher (r-ca) had some choice words for members of the european union parliament’s committee on human rights who were invited guests and witnesses an the house of reps' foreign affairs european subcommittee hearing:

Rohrabacher said if European countries did not cooperate with the United States and go along with whatever the Bush administration wanted, they were condemning their countrymen to death by not using extralegal methods to imprison terrorist suspects. When citizens attending the hearing, including members of Codepink Women for Peace and Veterans for Peace, heard Rohrabacher’s statement, they collectively groaned. Then, much to the shock and disbelief of everyone in the hearing room, Rorhbacker said to those who had expressed displeasure at his statements: "I hope it’s your family members that die when terrorists strike."

now i realize the bar is set pretty low for u.s. representatives nowadays, but this is simply heinous and abhorrent.

more quixotic american wars

wow...see, i have played versions of this game before; it's good to know other people are spending their free time in likewise pursuits.

Some Entirely Realistic Suggestions Following the Failures of the Quixotic "War on Drugs" and "War on Terror."
BY JAMES MURRAY AND ANDREW MEEK
- - - -

The War on Drunks

The War on Unpaired Socks

The War on Late DVD Rental Fees

The War on Teaspoons Left in the Sink

The War on Declaring Wars on Stateless Individuals and Ideologies Whose Very Nature Precludes There Ever Being an End to Said Conflicts

The War on France