Needlenose

Shrubya antagonized Russia and bilked US taxpayers with his expensive plan to build a cordon of missiles  around Western Russia under the guise of defending Western Europe from Iranian nuclear missiles – a cordon that would be ineffective at shooting anything out of the sky but extremely effective at putting our money in the hands of his defense contractor buddies.

Obama has sensibly shelved this bogus European missile defense plan. Wrong-wingers are already screaming that we’ve given Russia something for nothing, but the real winner of this decision is the US taxpayer – who will no longer be paying something for nothing.

Flipping off the ‘Road Map’ and US policy on the Palestinian question appears to be a sacred Israeli institution.  Whatayahoo is going forward with the settlement expansion that Obama asked him not to do back in May.

While Obama is still enjoying high poll ratings on his foreign policy leadership, it would be  a good time to really test out the power of AIPAC and start cutting back on our billions in aid.

Seriously, there’s not much point in funding a client state that not only doesn’t follow orders, but publicly humiliates us in the process.  They are like the Billy Carter to our Jimmy Carter, but they don’t even give us Billy Beer – what a crock!

You know, Huckleberry really had me fooled on the campaign trail.  I thought he was a decent, if misguide fellow.  This pronouncement shows that he is just as evil and self-serving as any Repug – just a better actor:

“The 2008 Republican presidential candidate suggested during his radio show on Friday that, under President Obama’s health care plan, Kennedy would have been told to “go home to take pain pills and die” during his last year of life.”

via Huckabee: Kennedy Would Have Been Urged To Die Earlier Under ObamaCare.

Mainland wingnuts may obsessed with their fantasies of a Kenyan birth, but here in Hawaii there is no doubt that Obama is 100% Hawaiian.

I’ve been warning for some time about the rising levels of wrong-wing hate, and how that hate is again turning to either outright violence, preparing for violence or just simple hate-mongering and hate-speech that can incite others to violence.  Now others are noticing a dramatic resurgence of militia activity that is

“(is) reminiscent of what was seen in the 1990s – right-wing militias, people ideologically against paying taxes and so-called “sovereign citizens” are popping up in large numbers, according to the report to be released Wednesday. The SPLC is a nonprofit civil rights group that, among other activities, investigates hate groups”

Did you catch the news about the wing-nut who brought and dropped a gun at a political meeting?  I mean I know the reactionaries are crazy and stupid, but do they really believe the Libruhls are gonna attack their crazy tea-bag parties and protests?  Don’t they realize that we aren’t armed?

Back in the Clinton era my own life was threatened by some wing-nut because I had posted a tongue-in-cheek website parodying the ‘black helicoper’ crowd (the main reason why I remain anonymous on this site).  Bad as the Bush years were, the wing-nuts seemed to calm down in spite of the volume and stridency of the reactionary media hate speakers like Billo the Clown and Ann Coulter.

However the massive rejection of the Repugs at the polls and the election of a centrist President seems to have thrown them back into a frenzy that if anything seems even nastier and scarier than before.  Living in San Francisco as I do I rarely encounter reactionaries, but today I was having a conversation with a self-described “moderate” from the South who went on at length about Obama’s Socialist agenda for health care and financial services, and railed about the swelling deficit – a guy who never squawked once about how Shrubya threw Clinton’s balanced budget to the wind and drove up the deficit like a two-bit lobbyist with a federal credit card.

I guess one of the downsides of the end of the “War on Terror” is that the reactionary talking heads have turned the other half of their hate rhetoric, formerly targeted at the Islamic world, at us Libruhls, again firing at us figuratively and literally with ‘both barrels.’

*Update* Bill Clinton better worry if he plans to participate in the contentious health care ‘town hall’ meetings - wing-nuts might use this guy’s technique to conceal an assassination weapon.

Remember the Media-driven perception back in the dark days of ’00 and ’04 about how Bush was the candidate “you’d rather have a beer with?”  Ironic because he was a recovering alcoholic.  Doubly ironic because he never invited anybody over for a beer.

The sign of Obama’s genius is his latest press op drinking beer with Professor Gates and Sargeant Crowley.  Genius because…that’s how ‘ordinary guys’ solve disputes – you sit down over a beer and talk through your dispute.

But beyond the ‘ordinary guy’ image going here (he’s already out-ordinaried Bush with his earlier burger joint runs), there is a subconcious appeal to a secret desire we all share here – that somehow we ordinary people could actually sit down and have a beer with Obama! 

Of course it’s a preposterous notion, you’d have to engineer some awful confrontation, get Obama to misspeak and say something stupid, and hope he invites you to the Oval office to smooth things over.  But the genius is the subconcious appeal of a celebrity President.

Although Obama seems to be having some trouble getting unity among his own party in Congress, there is some good news – 8 Republican Representatives  crossed party lines to vote with the Dems on the recent climate change legislation.

Although I’ve occasionally decried the leadership of Pelosi and Reid, the looming GOP attacks on these 8 Representatives could give Pelosi something to work with in the form of a small group of ‘quislings’ to give the appearance of bi-partisan support to legislation and offset the more disloyal and conservative Democratic Representatives.  Definitely 8 Reps to keep an eye on!

In related and joyful news, Al Franken is now Senator Al Franken, because “he’s good enough, and smart enough, and doggone it, Minnesotans like him!”

I found this puff piece on ‘secret’ negotiations between the US and so-called ‘moderate’ members of the Taliban on HuffPo and I was quickly skimming through it when this bit caught my eye:

Also included in the negotiations is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the notorious renegade Afghan warlord whose active insurgency continues to fight against U.S. and coalition forces.
Two former Pakistani intelligence officials say a deal was underway in which Hekmatyar would call for an end to his insurgency and be allowed to live above ground in Saudi Arabia with a budget of $85 million. At least one Afghan government official confirmed that a deal with Hekmatyar was being assembled.

Seriously?  Gulbuddin Hekmatyar? If there is any credence whatsoever to the article, Obama will just be the next in line to be taken by this consummate “Khan” artist.

Several weeks ago I wrote a despairing post about the state of our war in Afghanistan, criticizing Obama for following Shrubya’s tired strategy of fighting a counter-insurgency conflict in Afghanistan while the enemy thrived, unmolested, across the border in Pakistan.

Since then, Pakistan really bumped up their game and has made major gains in fighting the Taliban, Al Qaeda and their sympathizers in the Swat Valley.

I should probably have posted something about that  earlier, but their past claims of ‘victories’ and gains were either gross hyperbole or outright lies.  However, I’m actually heartened by Osama Bin Laden’s latest missive blaming Obama for “ordering” President Zardari to attack the guerrillas.

Check out the speech – it strikes me as the typical ‘tough talk’ a leader has to give when his followers are backed into a corner – kinda like that some of the speeches given by the (now dead) head of the Tamil Tigers as his guerrillas were increasingly trapped by Sri Lankan forces.  The other comforting thought is that Obama could actually ‘order’ President Zardari to do anything!  Don’t you wish that were true?  I guess American Liberals aren’t the only people that believe Obama has magical powers!

It’s much too early to determine if this is a true sea change in the battle – who knows how many Taliban and Al Qaeda warriors donned burkhas and slipped out among the civilian refugees?  And don’t forget that Pakistan is only one of the countries bordering Afghanistan suitable for a base for the guerrillas, and that is a horribly corrupt country at that.

But it’s definitely cause for optimism – let’s hope this reduces some of the strain on President Karzai and the NATO forces in Afghanistan!

*Update 6/4/09* A friend of mine just got back from a couple of weeks in Karachi – he tells me things are really messy there right now – lots of internal divisions between groups such as the Muhajirs and the Pashtuns are boiling up to the surface resulting in pitched street fighting.

What’s the profile of a terrorist likely to strike in America’s heartland?  If you say a swarthy, middle-eastern guy in a turban, you’ve been watching too much Faux News!  How about:

“…a white male in his 50′s or 60′s with grey hair that is balding in the middle. He is about 6’1″ and about 220 pounds and was wearing a white shirt and dark pants.”

Man that sounds just like the profile of an American wrong-winger, and surprisingly like a stereotypical serial killer.

Joining in the ranks of Eric Rudolph, Timothy McVeigh and the Anthrax Letter guy, the suspect of today’s murder of an abortion doctor has been apprehended, identity still unreleased.

Don’t be fooled, folks – these pudgy, aging wrong-wing haters aren’t buying guns because they are afraid Obama and the Dems are going to enact gun control legislation, they are buying guns to terrorize the rest of us!

*Update* Evil has a name, Scott Roeder, and apparently he was pretty open about his extremist wrong-wing views and was: a member of the nasty ‘Freemen’ group, once convicted for making explosives, and  one of those guys who went to various anti-abortion events and said obliquely menacing things in a monotone.

*Update* Cristina Page clearly lays out the case for why this isn’t a random incident, but rather part of a pattern of wrong-wing terror:

During the Clinton era, between 1994-2000 there were 6 abortion providers and clinic staff murdered, and 17 attempted murders of abortion providers. There were 12 bombings or arsons during the Clinton years.

During the Bush administration, not only were there no murders, there were no attempted murders. There was one clinic bombing during the Bush years.