WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The suspect in Wednesday's shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is James von Brunn, an 88-year-old white supremacist from Maryland, two law enforcement officials told CNN.
Oh, wait. Someone did predict it. And folks were offended. Imagine that.
I take some comfort in the fact that the shooter was 88 years old. As Atrios says here, I'm hopeful that there aren't too many of these crackpots left in the country.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) was interviewed last night by Sean Hannity on Fox News:
Palin: We are the only state with a negative tax rate where we don't have any income, sales or property tax statewide, and yes we have a share of our oil resource revenue that goes back to the people that own the resources. Imagine that.
Hannity: And it went up higher since you've been the governor and you negotiated with the oil companies. That all went up so people get a bigger check.
Palin: There was a corrupt tax system up there and we had a couple of lawmakers end up in jail because of the tax system that was adopted so we cleaned it up and said we wanted a fair and equitable share of the resources that we own, and the people will share in those resource revenues that are derived.
Not long after that Palin made her famous “socialism ... that’s where we’re headed” remark.
Umm .... Someone needs to take the Governor aside and tell her what socialism is. Looks like you guys have a taste of it up in Alaska.
In the meantime, why don’t we nationalize our oil companies the way socialist countries like Norway do. Like Alaska, Norway believes oil revenues belong to the people, not a corporation. Except in Norway, it belongs to all the people, not just those who live near the oil platforms.
Of course, in this country these royalties--when they are collected--are supposed to go to the Dept. of the Interior. However, Houston, we have a little problem:
WASHINGTON - June 9 - The U.S. Interior Department is wrongly withholding information that will reveal whether taxpayers are being ripped off in a controversial oil and gas royalty program, according to a lawsuit filed today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Interior claims that disclosure of bidding and contracting information about its Royalty-In-Kind sales would reveal oil company trade secrets.
Oh, whah. That would just be too fucking bad, now wouldn't it. Geez, what is it with the graft at the Interior Dept.? Must be too many loyal Bushies still left behind.
Why don't we natonalize the oil companies and get rid of the middle man. And in the meantime, we can create the dream socialist state that the wingnuts are saying we already have?
I"m not serious of course, but I think it's funny that people like Sarah Palin can have their socialism when they want it, and then can call for drilling "our" oil. It's not "our" oil. It's ExxonMobil's. The government gets a royalty but half the time the energy companies are paying someone off with hookers and blow and Toby Keith concert tickets.
Why has Obama extended the Iraq occupation timeline? Why is he surging troops in Afghanistan? Why won’t he shut down Cold War relic bases in Germany and elsewhere?
Possibly because of strategic considerations. Possibly because he’s a tool of the military-industrial complex. But also possibly - and nobody ever seems to mention this - because he doesn’t want to dump a quarter of a million Americans on an economy that won’t hire them.
I have to say, that same thought has occurred to me as well.
But I also thought that the $12 billion a month we are spending in Iraq could be better used here at home. Make levees, not war, yada yada. And we really need some levees, people. Do we need an Iraq War? But then idiots like Marsha Blackburn and Sarah Palin start screaming “socialism” every time a penny of government money is spent on people and communities, not corporations. So, there's that.
I’m still waiting for that “national conversation” about the Iraq War. We’ve danced around it plenty, we’ve talked about whether torture is torture when we do it, or if it’s only torture when other people do it to us. We’ve had 9/11 invoked, a lot. We’ve never talked about what the Iraq War is costing us, not just fiscally but socially and morally. We’ve never talked about our permanent war economy. Every time we start to have that conversation it gets shut down, and those who want to discuss it are written off as crackpots.
Interesting.
Guess we don’t want to look under that rock.
• Available Only as a Fallback: The availability of a public option would occur only as a fallback and in the absence of adequate competition and cost containment. Fundamental insurance market reforms and increased choice through the Exchange should improve access and contribute to lower costs. However, should the private plans fail to meet specific availability and cost targets, a public option would be triggered and be allowed to compete on a level playing field subject to the conditions outlined above.
So it seems Rep. Cooper is breaking from the Blue Dogs on this key point, which would be fabulous news. So, good on’ya, Coop.
Seems like those folks against the public option are arguing that the government shouldn’t be competing against private enterprise. That’s a long, complicated issue, and it’s one I’ve heard before applied to a different industry. But the bottom line is, if competition is supposed to be so great, then what does it matter if it’s the government competing or another private insurance company?
Personally, I don’t see why private insurance companies are supposed to be so great. They take your money every month and then use your premiums to hire people to pour over your claims to figure out why they shouldn’t have to pay them. But whatever. Maybe a little pressure from a government plan would force them to operate a little more legitimately.
On 06/05/09, at approximately 7:00 p.m., a suspect was at 60th AV SW and Alki Av SW with a female friend, when he got into a confrontation with a group of juveniles (young teenagers — middle school students). The suspect hurled profanities at the teens and pulled up his shirt to display a holstered handgun, frightening the juveniles and many onlookers. Officers arrived on scene and quickly located the suspect at Alki & 63rd SW. Officers recovered a .357 magnum revolver from the suspect’s waistband. He appeared to be under the influence of alcohol, and was also carrying a flask of whiskey. The suspect, produced a US Army ID, identifying him as an active duty sergeant, and a CCW permit issued by the state of Ohio.
And here I thought we were told all CCW permit holders are law-abiding citizens. This one was booked into the King County Jail for “unlawful carrying/display of a weapon.”
A front-page article and headline on May 21 reported findings from an unreleased Pentagon report about prisoners who have been transferred abroad from the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The article said that the Pentagon had found about one in seven of former Guantánamo prisoners had "returned to terrorism or other militant activity," or as the headline put it, had "rejoined jihad."Glad we got that straightened out.
Those phrases accepted a premise of the report that all the former prisoners had been engaged in terrorism before their detention. Because that premise remains unproved, the day the article appeared in the newspaper, editors changed the headline and the first paragraph on the Times Web site to refer to prisoners the report said had engaged in terrorism or militant activity since their release.
The article and headline also conflated two categories of former prisoners. In the Pentagon report, 27 former Guantánamo prisoners were described as having been confirmed as engaging in terrorism, with another 47 suspected of doing so without substantiation. The article should have distinguished between the two categories, to say that about one in 20 of former Guantánamo prisoners described in the Pentagon report were now said to be engaging in terrorism. (The larger share — about one in seven —applies to the total number described in the report as confirmed or suspected of engaging in terrorism.)
