Like this:

1.  You’ve GOT to be fucking kidding:

“British, French nuclear subs collide in Atlantic
…
Nuclear-armed submarines from Britain and France collided in the Atlantic Ocean earlier this month, authorities acknowledged Monday — touching off new concerns about the safety of the world’s deep sea missile fleets…….
…

“Some British lawmakers demanded an explanation from Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government.

“(The government) needs to explain how it is possible for a submarine carrying weapons of mass destruction to collide with another submarine carrying weapons of mass destruction in the middle of the world’s second-largest ocean,” lawmaker Angus Robertson of the opposition Scottish National Party said…”

http://www.911blogger.com/node/19400

2.  “I don’t, as a rule, endorse legislation: being a libertarian and all, my faith in the ability of government action to have any beneficial effect is exactly nil. However, in the case of the Executive Accountability Act of 2009 [.pdf], I’m making an exception. This is because, unlike most if not all legislation that seeks to regulate or otherwise shape the behavior of ordinary people, the Executive Accountability Act regulates the behavior of government officials, namely POTUS and his underlings – and exacts severe penalties in case of violation.

Rep. Walter B. Jones, Republican of North Carolina, has introduced a bill that makes it a federal crime for a U.S. president or “an officer or employee of the executive branch of the government” to “knowingly and willingly” mislead Congress and the American people to gain authorization for U.S. military action. The five-year statute of limitations, moreover, doesn’t begin to run until the president leaves office.“

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=14252

3.  Totally awesome!

“STUDENTS BEAT MILITARY: WEAPONS TRAINING IN SAN DIEGO SCHOOLS ENDS

Education Not Arms - San Diego Unified, located in the middle of one of the largest military complexes in the world, took the uncharacteristic step of banning rifle training conducted under the military’s high school JROTC program. Eleven schools with rifle ranges were affected in the nation’s eighth largest urban district. . .
…
One of their main concerns was the way schools were tracking students into military training (via JROTC) while denying them adequate class alternatives, especially ones needed to qualify for college. Students from African American and Latino families were being disproportionately affected.

To address the problem, the coalition adopted three initial goals–convince the school district to:

-stop placing students into military science (JROTC) classes without their informed consent.

-stop telling parents and students that the class will help them qualify for college, when it won’t.

-ban weapons training and JROTC gun ranges in San Diego schools.

All three goals have now been achieved, the first two by a superintendent’ s directive, the third by school board action. Throughout the over one-year long campaign, high school students have played a central role in educating and mobilizing their peers, with support from a variety of community and college groups.”

http://prorev.com/2009/02/students-beat-military-weapons-training.html

4.  This is the silliest scare story I’ve ever read – what a ludicrous insult to our intelligence:

“Could missing Wal-Mart signs wind up as dirty bomb?

A little over a year ago, a routine audit at Wal-Mart reported a few missing exit signs at the company’s stores and warehouses. As the audit continued, more and more signs turned up missing, and a month ago, Wal-Mart revealed that as many as 20% of the 70,000 signs at its 4500 facilities cannot be accounted for, a stunning total of 15,800 signs in all.“

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Could_missing_WalMart_signs_wind_up_0215.html

5. “THERE are no butlers waiting on Australia’s military leaders, Defence Chief Angus Houston says, following reports of top brass revolting over cost cutting plans.

News Ltd reports that defence heads are furious at government plans to cut perks such as taxpayer funded butlers, valets, housekeepers, cooks, drivers, first class travel, spouse travel and access to the RAAF’s VIP aircraft.“

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25060136-5005961,00.html

6.  “The demonstrating crowds have gone home. The blog postings have tapered off. The pundits have moved on. Congress is back to its old tricks, ignoring public opinion in favor of the lobbyists and money men. The US public is worried about losing its job or getting back the one it lost. Gaza here is a dimming memory, a momentary nightmare now past.

But the Palestinian children wounded and charred by Israeli bombings are still screaming, their physicians unable to get hold of enough pain killers to still their yelps of pain. Some 5300 Palestinians, most of them children, women and noncombatants, were wounded in Israel’s savage war on the Gaza population.
…
MP George Galloway is accompanying the convoy part of the way. He told the Independent,

‘ Anywhere else, there would be a Berlin-style airlift, he says. “Almost every window has been broken but Israel refuses to allow glass across the border. So, in the bitter winter, 61,000 families whose homes have been destroyed are living among the rubble and the rest are freezing because they’ve got no windows. You could solve that problem in a weekend, but because it is the Palestinians it doesn’t happen.”
‘
The volunteers are taking their own aid. “What we asked people to bring was bedclothes, clothes, nappies, food and medical equipment.” Does he really expect to be allowed in? “I do, actually. My prediction is that by the time we arrive in Gaza there will be a 12-month ceasefire.” If not, they will wait there until let in.’

Galloway is pilloried by the British establishment as an exhibitionist, but he has a knack for speaking uncomfortable truths eloquently. He points out that given the magnitude of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, the whole world would be doing an airlift if the victims were not Palestinians.“

http://www.juancole.com/

7.  “On Friday in Salon, Joe Conason argued that there should be no criminal investigations of any kind for Bush officials “who authorized torture or other outrages in the ‘war on terror’.”  Instead, Conason suggests that there be a presidential commission created that is “purely investigative,” and Obama should “promis[e] a complete pardon to anyone who testifies fully, honestly and publicly.”  So, under this proposal, not only would we adopt an absolute bar against prosecuting war criminals and other Bush administration felons, we would go in the other direction and pardon them from any criminal liability of any kind.

I’ve already written volumes about why immunizing political officials from the consequences for their lawbreaking is both destructive and unjust — principally:  the obvious incentives which such immunity creates (and, for decades, has been creating) for high-level executive branch officials to break the law and, even worse, the grotesque two-tiered system of justice we’ve implemented in this country (i.e., the creation of an incomparably harsh prison state for ordinary Americans who commit even low-level offenses as contrasted with what Conason calls, approvingly, “the institutional reluctance in Washington to punish political offenders”).  Rather than repeat those arguments, I want to focus on an issue that pro-immunity advocates such as Conason simply never address.
…
Apparently, huge numbers of Americans — majorities, actually — are now liberal, vengeance-seeking, score-settlers from the Hard Left.  What we actually have is what one finds again and again:  establishment journalists who will resort to outright distortions about American public opinion in order to render it irrelevant, by claiming that “most Americans” believe as they believe even where, as here, that claim is categorically false.  It’s hardly surprising (except to an insular Beltway maven) that Americans, who know that they will be subjected to one of the world’s harshest and most merciless criminal justice systems if they break the law, don’t want political elites exempted from the rule of law.  Imagine that.
…
Finally, Newsweek‘s Michael Isikoff — echoing a report from John Yoo’s Berkeley colleague, Brad DeLong — reports that an internal DOJ probe (initiated during the Bush administration) has preliminarily concluded that Bush DOJ lawyers who authorized torture (John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Stephen Bradbury) violated their professional duties as lawyers by issuing legal conclusions that had no good faith basis, and that this behavior will be referred to their state bar associations for possible disciplinary action.  Those conclusions so infuriated the allegedly honorable Michael Mukasey that he refused to accept the report until changes were made.  Now it is up to Eric Holder to accept and then release that report.

The implications of this event can’t be overstated.  One of the primary excuses offered by Bush apologists and those who oppose investigations is that Bush DOJ lawyers authorized the torture and opined that it was legal.  But a finding that those lawyers breached their ethical obligations would mean, by definition, that the opinions they issued were not legitimate legal opinions — i.e., that they were not merely wrong in their conclusions, but so blatantly and self-evidently wrong that they were issued in bad faith (with the intent to justify what they knew the President wanted to do, rather than to offer their good faith views of what the law permitted).

The Convention Against Torture explicitly prohibits the domestic legalization of torture, and specifically states that it shall not be a defense that government officials authorized it. So whether or not these legal opinions were issued in good faith is irrelevant to our obligations under that treaty to investigate and prosecute.  But a finding that these legal opinions were issued in bad faith — with the deliberate intent to knowingly legalize what was plainly criminal behavior — will gut the primary political excuse for treating Bush officials differently than common criminals.

…
If George Bush, citing our obligations under the Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions, can publicly vow that “we will investigate and prosecute all acts of torture,” why can’t Democratic politicians and liberal pundits simply cite the same treaty obligations and make the same commitment?”

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/

8.  “In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US -directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff’s notorious Ponzi scheme.

“I believe the real looting of Iraq after the invasion was by US officials and contractors, and not by people from the slums of Baghdad,” said one US businessman active in Iraq since 2003.”

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22004.htm

Advertisement