Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Eh, that’s media spin. biden’s health is fine and he’s doing a good job.

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

“But what about the lurkers?”

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

T R E 4 5 O N

No one could have predicted…

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Republicans in disarray!

Accountability, motherfuckers.

We still have time to mess this up!

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Not all heroes wear capes.

I did not have telepathic declassification on my 2022 bingo card.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

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War on Terror

Charges Filed

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I’m not sure how some of these charges will stick:

Enrique Marquez, who bought the assault rifles used in the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., that left 14 people dead, was arrested and charged Thursday with conspiring to conduct two terrorism attacks in 2011 and 2012.
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Federal officials charged Mr. Marquez, 24 of Riverside, Calif., with providing material support — including himself, a firearm and explosives — for crimes of terrorism; making a false statement in connection with acquisition of firearms; and immigration fraud. The federal complaint said that in addition to buying the guns, Mr. Marquez bought some of the explosive material found at the shooting rampage.

Mr. Marquez became the first person charged in connection with the shooting rampage by Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, that also left 22 wounded. A longtime friend and neighbor of Mr. Farook, Mr. Marquez had been cooperating with investigators, supplying much of what the federal authorities know about the couple, who died in a shootout with the police.

“While there currently is no evidence that Mr. Marquez participated in the Dec. 2 attack or had advance knowledge of it,” a United States attorney, Eileen M. Decker, said in a statement, “his prior purchase of the firearms and ongoing failure to warn authorities about Farook’s intent to commit mass murder had fatal consequences.”

Again, IANAL, so I don’t understand how he could be charged with terrorism if he didn’t know of or plan or participate in the actual attacks. The other charges make sense, but that one does not. Maybe as more information trickles in or maybe one of you legal types can explain the statute he is supposed to have violated.

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Open Thread: Ted Cruz, Chickenhawk Idiot Blowhard

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Big talk for a small, small man. If Cruz had spent his adolescence reading science fiction instead of hectoring his parents and lecturing his schoolmates, he’d know the correct Tuff Guy Talk is “bomb the Arabian Peninsula into a sheet of radioactive obsidian.” A solution which makes as much sense as announcing he’s gonna solve the nascent termite problem in his basement by setting fire to his neighbor’s house, but I bet Ted Cruz looked very butch (to Ted Cruz) when he practiced snapping off his manly threats to the bathroom mirror.

Context, per the Washington Post, which also has video:

DES MOINES — “If I am elected president, we will utterly destroy ISIS,” the Texas senator and Republican presidential candidate told reporters. “We won’t weaken them. We won’t degrade them. We will utterly destroy them. We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. We will arm the Kurds. We will do everything necessary so that every militant on the face of the earth will know if you go and join ISIS, if you wage jihad and declare war on America, you are signing your death warrant.”…

Also on Saturday, the Cruz campaign is beginning to air a new television ad in Iowa featuring a similar vow to “kill the terrorists.”

Cruz’s comments to reporters came during a pep rally in Des Moines with dozens of volunteers, many of whom came from Texas to stay at “Camp Cruz,” a former college dormitory that the candidate’s campaign has commandeered as temporary housing for volunteers….

Of course, Iowa evangelicals should have no problem with apocalyptic war in the Middle East, because they are Ready for the Rapture!!! And so is Ted Cruz, 2016 god-king candidate for his own personal Republic of Gilead.

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The San Bernardino Shooters: “How Could A Young Mother??…

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That seems to be the catchphrase of the day on the evening news, so I’ll take my own second-wave-feminist WAG: Tashfeen Malik, as Adam mentioned earlier, was a new mom in very isolated circumstances. She was thousands of miles from her family, shy around her (Americanized) inlaws, didn’t speak English well. She “chose not to drive” — that’s influence from her childhood in Saudi Arabia — which I’m assuming meant, in a Southern California suburb, that there isn’t much in the way of public transit, and she couldn’t take cabs because of the talking-to-strange-men Wahhabi prohibition. The American internet boards for new moms where she might otherwise have found some outlets tend to be (from my outsider perspective) larded with “everyday” praise-Jesus talk that would have made her very, very uncomfortable even if she understood them as no more than folk affirmations.

She was, from all descriptions, a bright and educated woman stuck alone in a house in a strange country, day after day, with a helpless screaming needy piss and vomit machine infant. And when her poor husband came home from another long day of facing The Infidel (I assume a Muslim guy from Detroit named ‘Sayed Farook’ could’ve written a book about microagressions), he’d have been greeted by a woman desperate for grown-up interaction… possibly ashamed by her inability to be a ‘good wife’, overwhelmed by her hormones and her responsibilities as a mother.

We’ll probably never know if Malik suffered from post-partum depression, but it surely wouldn’t have come as a surprise if she did. I remember the guy responsible for Desperate Housewives saying he conceived the idea when he was watching the news with his mother and expressed surprise that a different “new mother” could be so damaged as to kill her baby before committing suicide… and his mom told him, Don’t be — I often thought about doing that myself, when you were a baby.

And, tragically, the “consolation” of religion in Malik’s case gave her a ready-made instruction set for making something blessed of her despair and her husband’s weariness. People get radicalized because they need something they can’t find elsewhere. Was Malik and Farook’s radicalization due, at least as a contributing factor, to a new mom’s isolation and her husband’s feeling of helplessness?

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On the Limits of Revenge

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Excellent Read: About Those “Terrorist Camps”…

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During my involuntary hiatus, I couldn’t even read Balloon Juice — I was checking Google cache on the regular, but that was spotty & I couldn’t manage to read entire comment strings. So you’ll have to forgive me if this got written up already, but I thought Philip Bump’s Washington Post explainer on the ‘terrorist training camps’ conspiracy theory was too interesting to miss.

Can’t work the auto-links function, so here’s the link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/18/donald-trump-and-the-terrorist-training-camps-conspiracy-theory-explained/?tid=pm_politics_pop_b

… “We have a problem in this country: It’s called Muslims,” the questioner began, going on to state that President Obama was himself Muslim. “We have training camps, growing, where they want to kill us. That’s my question: When can we get rid of them?”

Trump’s response met with immediate backlash. He didn’t correct the questioner’s incorrect assertion about Obama’s religion and, further, suggested that his administration was “going to look at that.” Trump’s campaign insisted that the “that” they’d be looking at wasn’t getting rid of Muslims — but rather, those alleged training camps.

Which is itself a weird proposition.

The idea that there are 22 (or, in some iterations, 35) terrorist training camps in the United States appears to stem largely from a 2005 report from the National White Collar Crime Center (https://www.nw3c.org/), a nonprofit organization that receives federal funding. The report, “Identifying the Links between White-Collar Crime and Terrorism,” (https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/209520.pdf) focused on a group called Jamaat Ul Fuqra and the ways in which it used white-collar crime to fund its activities. An appendix to the report indicates a number of places where Fuqra had conducted activities or had training compounds across the country…

Other conservative sites have zeroed in on particular compounds. There’s Islamberg, along the eastern New York-Pennsylvania border, usually described as the “national headquarters” of Muslims of America — which the sites link to Fuqra — in the United States. There’s Mahmoudberg, near Sweeny, Tex., which has received a lot of attention thanks to an accidental shooting in 2002 that resulted in an FBI report (http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/exclusive-clarion-project-discovers-texas-terror-enclave#popup-1) on the compound. And there’s Islamville, in South Carolina, home of a holy shrine (http://www.holyislamville.net/). A Web site focused on Islamic terror called “Clarion Project” released footage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxoykqCSruY&feature=youtu.be) that it claims shows weapons training in Islamberg…

A lot of the Fuqra’s nefarious activity occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. The point of the White Collar Crime Center report, after all, was that Fuqra was involved in white-collar crime, like workers-compensation fraud. That’s tough to pair with spooky music…

So why the conspiracy theories? Because that’s how conspiracy theories work. Conspiracy Web sites often point out how close to New York City Islamberg is — even though it’s really not very close at all. It’s far enough away that Brooklynites see it as a refuge from the city’s noise and activity… In a response to Trump’s comments, a commenter at FreeRepublic.com (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3338327/posts) points to the 2006 arrest of Muslims near Virginia — right near “the Virginia Muslim cemetery [where] the Chechen who bombed Boston was buried.” We’re through the looking glass here, people…

So, there’s “reasons” why those numbers keep getting passed around. The looking glass is warped and cracked, but there are weird images from which the Wingnut Wurlitzer ink-blots a new nutball “explanation” for every purpose…

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Snow Jobs And Snowden Jobs

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Edward Snowden is back in the news for his document cache, allegedly now in the hands of the Russians and Chinese.

Britain has pulled out agents from live operations in “hostile countries” after Russia and China cracked top-secret information contained in files leaked by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, the Sunday Times reported.

Security service MI6, which operates overseas and is tasked with defending British interests, has removed agents from certain countries, the newspaper said, citing unnamed officials at the office of British Prime Minister David Cameron, the Home Office (interior ministry) and security services.

Snowden downloaded more than 1.7 million secret files from security agencies in the United States and Britain in 2013, and leaked details about mass surveillance of phone and internet communications.

The United States wants Snowden to stand trial after he leaked classified documents, fled the country and was eventually granted asylum in Moscow in 2013.

He went to Russia via Hong Kong, and although he claimed in 2013 that the encrypted files remained secure, Britain believed both Russia and China had cracked documents which contain details that could allow British and American spies to be identified, the newspaper said, citing officials.

British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said Snowden had done a huge amount of damage to the West’s ability to protect its citizens.

Team Greenwald calls bullshit on the allegations.

Aside from the serious retraction-worthy fabrications on which this article depends – more on those in a minute – the entire report is a self-negating joke. It reads like a parody I might quickly whip up in order to illustrate the core sickness of western journalism.

Unless he cooked an extra-juicy steak, how does Snowden “have blood on his hands” if there is “no evidence of anyone being harmed?” As one observer put it last night in describing the government instructions these Sunday Times journalists appear to have obeyed: “There’s no evidence anyone’s been harmed but we’d like the phrase ‘blood on his hands’ somewhere in the piece.”

The whole article does literally nothing other than quote anonymous British officials. It gives voice to banal but inflammatory accusations that are made about every whistleblower from Daniel Ellsberg to Chelsea Manning. It offers zero evidence or confirmation for any of its claims. The “journalists” who wrote it neither questioned any of the official assertions nor even quoted anyone who denies them. It’s pure stenography of the worst kind: some government officials whispered these inflammatory claims in our ears and told us to print them, but not reveal who they are, and we’re obeying. Breaking!

The truth I suspect is somewhere in the middle.  Of course Greenwald will deny everything vehemently and his permanent, self-serving outrage mode is grating as hell (and no, the NSA is not reading every single e-mail in America), but Britain has a surveillance regime that makes the Patriot Act look like child’s play, and they’re not above actually using the scare tactics Greenwald is accusing them of using this time.

Where that truth is, well, I don’t know. Neither side benefits from telling it, it seems.

Hash it out below.

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