Tuesday Open Thread

10 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread”

1. Facts for right wingers   http://www.politicususa.com/2015/11/16/president-obama-remarkable-grasp-fight-isis-hes-correct.html

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   1. OK…. first "facts for tight wingers" is an oxymoron. Because, you know, they're fact averse morons.

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      1. Meant right wingers but tight ass right wingers would do just as well. And before they ban all five year olds from non-Halliburton Middle Eastern countries they might want to put a hold on their usual rush to judgement hysteria. It might save them millions in pampers:

          All of the attackers from Friday’s massacre in Paris so far have been identified as European Union nationals, according to a top EU official. The announcement further casts doubt on the validity of a Syrian passport found near the bodies of a slain attacker.

         “Let me underline, the profile of the terrorists so far identified tells us this is an internal threat,” Federica Mogherini, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy/Vice-President of the European Commission, said after a meeting with EU foreign ministers. “It is all EU citizens so far. This can change with the hours, but so far it is quite clear it is an issue of internal domestic security.”

         http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/11/16/3722838/all-paris-attackers-identified-so-far-are-european-nationals-according-to-top-eu-official/

         It does seem terribly convenient that a Syrian passport was found and wouldn't a wholesale turning on France's Muslim immigrant population, expanding even further the pool of angry young Muslims to join their ranks, suit them awfully well? 

         Unlike our rightie friends I'm not going to rush to judgement either. Maybe the passport did belong to a Syrian attacker who entered in the latest wave of refugees. I'm just saying, this is still early days in the investigations and we should exercise caution in what we accept and present and act on as proven fact.

         How about it Diaper Duo (yes I'm lookin' at you)?

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         1. Moddy is still indisposed, resting on the fainting couch while trying to overcome yesterday's episode.

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2. Like the seed of a noxious bindweed plant (one that can lay dormant in the soil for years before sprouting) we reap what we have sown.  

   We only have to go back 150 years, on our soil, to revisit the reign of terror on our own indigenous people: riding into sleeping villages killing women and children, and not only killing them, desecrating their bodies and hauling back scalps and other assorted body parts as "trophies" to display in the finest hotels east and west of the Mississippi.  

   All justified in the name of our God. 

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3. It took 3000 dead on American soil to get us to invade the wrong country.

   It takes only a few hundred (lazy) French dead to get us all riled up into WWIII.

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4. Ward Churchill? No, Republican Economist and Confidant to Saint Ronnie, David Stockman: 

   Exactly 26 years ago last week, peace was breaking out in a manner that the world had not experienced since June 1914. The Berlin Wall—the symbol of a century of state tyranny, grotesque mass warfare and the nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over the planet—had come tumbling down on November 9, 1989.

   It was only a matter of time before the economically decrepit Soviet regime would be no more, and that the world’s vast arsenal of weapons and nuclear bombs could be dismantled.

   …

   So with its “mission accomplished” there was no logical reason why NATO should not have been disbanded in parallel with the Warsaw Pact’s demise, and for an obvious and overpowering reason: On November 9, 1989 there were no material military threats to US security anywhere on the planet outside of the suddenly vanishing front line of the Cold War.

   Remember the "Peace Dividend"? Maybe it was just a Frank Luntz focus-group concoction of the Military-Industrial-"Congressional" Complex.

   As it turned out, however, there was a virulent threat to peace still lurking on the Potomac. The great general and president, Dwight Eisenhower, had called it the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address, but that memorable phrase had been abbreviated by his speechwriters, who deleted the word Congressional in a gesture of comity to the legislative branch.

   So restore Ike’s deleted reference to the pork barrels and Sunday afternoon warriors of Capitol Hill and toss in the legions of beltway busybodies that constituted the civilian branches of the cold war armada (CIA, State, AID etc.) and the circle would have been complete. It constituted the most awesome machine of warfare and imperial hegemony since the Roman legions bestrode most of the civilized world.

   In a word, the real threat to peace circa 1990 was that Pax Americana would not go away quietly in the night.

   …

   So the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 meant the world could have reverted to the status quo ante. That is, to a normalcy of peace, liberal commerce and a minimum of armaments that had prevailed in the late 19th century. The 20th century curse of militarism, totalitarianism and global warfare was over.

   Needless to say, the sudden end to 20th century history posed an existential threat to Imperial Washington. A trillion dollar complex of weapons suppliers, warfare state bureaucracies, intelligence and security contractors, arms exporters, foreign aid vendors, military bases, grand poobahs and porkers of the Congressional defense committees, think tanks, research grants and much more——were all suddenly without an enemy and raison d’etre.

   As it has happened, Imperial Washington did find its necessary enemy in the rise of so-called “global terrorism”.

   Instead of investing that peace dividend wisely, we funded Saudi Arabia's political/religious perversion by way of gasoline purchases that would fund the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden. 

   And the rest is now, and was, our history.

    

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5. Gate A-4 – a lovely story by Naomi Shihab Nye

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6. I heart Shep Smith of Fox News

   http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2015/11/fox-news-shepard-smith-refugees-isis

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   1. He's their token not entirely dickish person.

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