Terror plot or entrapment

Seems like the latest FBI terrorist scare may be another case of jumping from behind the door and shooting, "Boo!"

"According to the New York Times, and they are hardly ever wrong..."

These are words that should surely come back to haunt VP nominee (she seems to enjoy using the vernacular "VP" over "vice-president"), Bush-in-skirts, Sarah Palin.

They came in a nasty campaign speech where she attempted to reconnect Barack Obama with William Ayers, former sixties radical, and Weatherman (you would think Palin would feel a comraderie since she herself was a Sportscaster).

She was quoting a New York Times article, that we are expected to believe she picked up on her own (she said in the speech, "my copy of the New York Times." Right.), in which, in fact, the Times made clear that Obama's relationship with Ayers was infrequent and relatively casual.

Of course Palin twisted the article for her own perverse, divisive and negative purposes. Isn't The New York Times one of those "main stream media filters" she swore to avoid?

When citing the Times she said, "according to the New York Times, and they are hardly ever wrong..." Now, since there is no video of this speech in Denver (which she repeated later in the day in Carson, California without her endorsement of The Times' veracity - video below), there's no telling if she winked when she delivered the line. If she intended irony, then she undermined her entire argument. If they New York Times cannot be trusted (and is there a conservative who does trust?), then her attack on Obama is illegitimate.

However, if she meant to praise the New York Times' accuracy in reporting, then any criticism it levels agains Palin, McCain, their campaign, or Palin's troubles in Alaska, have to be taken at face value, don't they? She can no longer dismiss these criticisms as the out-of-control crusade against her, Joe Sixpack, hockey moms and conservatives of all stripes, can she?

Inevitably, Palin will continue to accuse Obama of some who would "pal around with terrorists," she should be reminded that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin all could be accused of the same thing. This country began in revolution, guided by radicals and terrorists, and that people like Palin are betraying the freedoms and democracy that those terrorists fought for.

BTW, in watching this speech, she talks of America as "a nation of exceptionalism." She's apparently been asleep through the past eight years. If American is a nation or exceptionalism, how is it that our financiers are steeped in the "corruption and greed" she denigrated in her debate on Thursday? Exceptional greed?

Troubled waters, or sending torture offshore

Here's an accusation in The Guardian about the "new Guantanamo." It floats.

Seems the folks in Homeland Security have taken a tip from all those Casinos in Mississippi which, by law, can't be built on land in Mississippi, so they float just a foot or two offshore.

I can hear Cheney now - there is no Constitution on the high seas. Aaargh.

George Bush's worst nightmare

A respected Air Force colonel, former advocate of the Military Commissions system, a dogged prosecutor, and now, a vociferous opponent to the "rigged" trials of Guantanamo terrorists.

Soon, we'll be hearing from the Pentagon and the White House about Colonel Morris Davis' mental breakdown from post-traumatic stress, or some other smear campaign in their attempts to create a smokescreen.

The newly revealed photos from Abu Ghraib, out today, prove again that we are not the noble nation we believe ourselves to be.