“Maybe they’ll realize that life isn’t 24. But I doubt it.” ; ME TOO. But what I want to know is why 24 is so popular.

Because Americans love a torturing bullyboy.

Wait until they stage the next attack. It’s coming. The government says so, and you know how they ensure that some things happen. Then the wingnuts heads will explode, War on Terra will be further expanded, and the worries about unemployment will vanish when a draft is needed to expand these military escapades.

Collins, shocked that she actually had to defend her moronic talking points, evaded the questions she didn’t want to answer,

“But wait. Aren’t you married to the former Fed chairman? I thought you were one of us…”

Susan Collins is a jerk and she talks funny.

It’s coming. The government says so, and you know how they ensure that some things happen.

Say what?
I don’t know that.

The Costermonger’s Interlude.

I can hardly wait for the video. Wow, actual journalism from Mrs Greenspan. Who could have expected that?

Let’s show her some love!!! Yay, Andrea!

BTW, speaking of pop culture and 24, the latest story line on NCIS was along the lines of a private military contractor faking a Peruvian terrorist plot with a bomb scare in DC – right before a congressional hearing for funding for protection in…Peru!

Nice way to get the message through into the public imagination to counterbalance 24.

Well, yes, I guess today was good.

Nice that every once in awhile they do their job – and are prepared!

I actually saw Collins onscreen – but had tv muted, and saw no reason to un-mute.
Perhaps Andrea had read Holder’s letter? (see EW)

Thanks to the Bush administration and Congress, under the Military Commissions Act President Obama has the authority to declare anyone at all an enemy combatant and shut them up permanently. Including talking-point-spouting senators. Now that’s flexibility.

Too bad I’m just fantasizing, these powers only get used against nobodies like Padilla and Abdulmutallab.

Collin’s assertion that huge amounts of intelligence may have been lost because of the 5 to 6 week gap is fear mongering at it’s worst.
I ask you how much could this guy know? Some names maybe some places sure, but I doubt he has any information on the upper echelon of Al Queda, or of the things they may be planning. This guy isn’t exactly the brightest terrorist ,he did try to light his own private parts on fire and failed in his attempt to create an explosion.

Mitchell prepared and challenged Collins. Will miracles never cease

MSNBC has posted video of the interview here.

If the Republicans want to go through life being afraid of the boogeyman in the headscarf , I say let them. I just wish they’d leave the rest of us out of it.
I’m really sick of the be afraid ,be very very afraid crowd ,and I don’t plan on giving them any more of my attention.

Al Kaida is going to have to rethink the Wile E Coyote strategy of a man lighting his own gonads on fire.

Let’s see: 72 raisins for lighting my nads afire. Hmmm?

Are we seeing some kind of sea change in our media?

I’m referring to the killer interview Chris Matthews just did regarding gays in the military, added to this story.

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/02/03/family-research-council-calls-for-criminalization-of-gay-sex/

I love the reporting here. I got to enjoy learning about this WITHOUT listening to either of those women (whom I have reasons to detest). Thank you.

Is it possible Andrea is not some kind of big money agent and just a reporter? I have a hard time believing it, but killer reporting and investigative journalism could go a long way towards convincing me. I would love to see a change like that.

How are they going to take your remaining freedoms away if they can’t make you afraid?

Like all repthuglicans, Creep Collins wants to entice her voters with the delicious prospect of breaking bones, busting heads AND getting the info.

To which Mitchell replied, “oh wait, aren’t you a republican? we thought you were one of us…since you were working with Obama on health care, oh well…”

Let’s not go down this path, shall we? No fantasy violence.

Good for Andrea Greenspan. Good to see a phony disingenuous Republican challenged on occasion.

Without irony, NPR reported that Lindsey Graham has a thing or two against repealing DADT.

Where in the world is Jeff Gannon when you need his inspiring viewpoint?

re: the 55 minutes thingie
DD, you got to get yer hands dirty and pick up on the hate radio memes. (Because that’s where the Responsibles get their talking points)

The 55 minutes thing is part of the wingnut, hate radio talking snahuasage now coming out of the mouths of responsible elected officials who should know better: “They only interrogated him for 55 minutes then gave him the Miranda warning, how irresponsible!” To wingnut audience, it means that Obama spent less that an hour trying too to get intel and is prevented now and evermore from eveing talking to this guy. Really. I just heard Shear Insannity say we can’t talk to thy guy. The bomber guy was interrogated for 55 minutes before the doctors operated on him; repored in the LA Times.
he 55 minute The LA Times reported that the doctors.

Well call me cynical but I don’t think Andrea burns anybody without permission from her crowd.

lol. I hear that one hand clapping. I knew you could do it.

I would really like to see the Republicans actually afraid of something other than the boogeyman, like a mob of outraged citizens with torches, poles, tar and feathers chasing them and their bankster friends down the road.

If only they realized that banksters ARE the terrorists. How shall we interrogate them? Over dinner at the White House?

That would be loverly.

My guess is that there’s a spinning wheel and it was Andrea’s turn to “go against the grain” on the unfortunate warmongering Collins.

The Media maintains its fake liberal bona fides in this way. All can point to this one in a thousand example as liberal media bias.

Collins’s seat is perfectly safe. Ergo, she can take a ding or two without fear of losing it.

Aside from being called out about everything she misspoke or lied about in her After SOTU Address, I have to wonder why in the hell did the Republicans chose to use her for their front person on not only the After SOTU Address, but for this subject at all? She’s a horrible speaker. How could anyone hear that voice and that strange irritating meter and hear anything other than ‘horrible speaker’?

I hope this puts to rest the insane notion that Collins is some kind of “good” ReThug that we progressives should trust or like or something. She’s just as thuggish and venal as all the rest, perhaps more so.

I believe it was the FBI that refuted the waterboarding and other forms of torture long ago as being somehow “superior” in terms of gaining info from anyone. The PDs and FBI have numerous non-violent interrogation techniques, many of which work much better. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if you’re being tortured, sooner or later you’ll “confess” to something (who knows what) and provide any kind of tripe that is being sought.

Unsurprised to hear that the rightwing noise machine is shrieking that this was a botched job, and we lost out on the chance to torture this young man into divulging fountains of “valuable info.” Sheesh.

US citizens need to grow up and get over the fact that we were attacked on our own soil. I am very sorry that 9/11 and other incidents happened and totally sorry for everyone who lost their lives (and their families). Yet here we are: 7 years down the road on a ridiculously futile, financial disaster of two wars in Iraq & Afghanistan where more US citizen lives (in terms of soldiers, journalists, and other civilian workers) were lost than in 9/11 (not to mention, of course, all of the Iraqi’s, Afghani’s etc).

Does anyone in the laughingly called “mainstream media” ever discuss this fact? No, in fact, when was the last time any of us heard diddly about the Iraq war from those vapid talking heads on the trad meds? Not in a long time.

That the USA will, at some future point, experience some of kind of terrorist attack on our soil is, sadly, a given. Grow up. It happens all over the world. It is called: reality. Torturing people only makes us more hated around the globe and does far more to exacerbate the situation than improve it.

GAH!!! But: wow. This week’s a two-fer. First Tweety & now Mrs. Greenspan. Will wonders never cease??

Eventually, Collins resignedly said that yes, she’s glad Abdulmutallab is cooperating now …

Yes, it’s good that the thought bubble went off over her head reading “Do you realize that you look like you’re disappointed that we’re getting intel from a terrorist?”

Good on Mitchell. More of the same, please.

Heh, I just had a thought. An ugly thought at that. Anyone wondering if the xmas bombers family are now targets for various terrorists? Any word of a witness protection thing for these folks?

Like I said, an ugly thought.

“Time-sensitive information”

Any terrorist organization that was even starting down the path to even half-way competence, would not have sent even a realiable person out with time-sensitive information on a mission in which there was an excellent chance that even a serious person could get cold feet, be apprehended before he could detonate, or simply not be able to detonate. Not that this was a reliable agent. This person was, after all, someone who contacted his family and revealed, in some at least broad and general way, his plans and intentions, enough to make his own father run off to talk to an embassy official that he had to presume was CIA. This organization would have to be such an incredibly incompetent bunch to so badly misjudge this person as a security risk, to give him any information at all, time-critical or not, that I don’t see why we would want to roll them up. Good God, leave them out there. We need more like them out there. Maybe they will attract and effectively neutralize the occasional recruit who might have been developed into a real threat had he joined some competent terrorist outfit, and not fallen in among such utter and complete incompetents.

Not that it is at all unreasonable on other gropunds to suspect the basic competence of this group. Three oz of PETN, even if successfully detonated, would not have done anything if detonated in this guy’s lap, except castrate him. Shape it and put it against the hull of the plane before detonating it, and maybe you could blow a hole in the hull, but not a hole hearly big enough to bring the plane down. Perhaps there are places in the hull where critical control wires or hydraulics pass, and you could precisely place a charge where it would bring them down, and thus the plane. But again, you have to place the charge against the hull, not in your lap. Not that any of that discussion is relevant, because you can’t detonate PETN by setting it on fire, in your lap or anywhere.

This was not a serious attempt to bring down a plane, period. If the organization that sent this guy thought it was, they and he are mental cases both. If the organization that sent him was even remotely competent, knew anything at all about explosives, or even knew enough about reality-testing to, you know, test their products before sending someone to be arrested trying to use crap that had no chance of working, they did not send this guy to bring down a plane. They sent him to sow fear and panic. They sent him to prove to anyone who is paying attention just what complete fools and cowards we are. Rousing success.

They must get a fair number of volunteers for martyrdom who are not right in the head. People who would be willing to do this who aren’t crazy must be a rare commodity. They may have used up the total world supply on 9/11. You wouldn’t trust someone like this Underpants Bomber for a real operation, because they’re unstable and not serious. They’re likely to call their parents or something, and blow the whole thing. But they would be just the people to send out to sow fear and panic, if you didn’t want to completely waste them and their lack of talent.

Why al Qaeda would do this is not hard to understand. Why we would cooperate so perfectly in our own degradation is utterly mystifying.

It took me the longest time to (ding!) get who Lady Susan Collins looks exactly like! Mr. Garrison when he put on lipstick and became a woman.

That’s mean, uncalled for, and cheapens the discourse. I take it back.

“Why we would cooperate so perfectly in our own degradation is utterly mystifying.”

Not really. Not up next to the ignored warnings on the guy, and the ignored warnings on the Ft. Hood killer, and the not-one-soul held to account for any of it, with forgiveness coming down directly from the top.

What ISN’T mystifying nowadays? That’s a smaller, easier list.

Oh, please

The Underpants Bomber is obviously mentally ill. I haven’t seen whatever report was generated from the approach to our embassy in Nigeria, but I suspect that it concluded from what the father had to say was that his son was mentally deranged. These people aren’t really threatening, because they lack the capacity for rational planning and reality-testing, so one suspects that a compleely insighful report would have concluded that the Underpants Bomber was no serious threat. The event bore this conclusion out, because his was not even close to being a serious attempt to bring down a plane. If he thought it was, he was truly not reality-testing. And you can’t blame this failure, in this case, on simple ignorance. This guy was a chemical engineer. He was probably experiencing a psychotic break, because no one with his faculties about him, who had that training and expertise, would have lit his lap on fire and expected that to detonate PETN in his underwear.

Even if it were possible to detonate PETN by lighting it on fire, which it is not, detonating 3oz of it in your lap would only succeeed in self-castration. This was not even close to a serious attempt, only narrowly averted. The degradation I was talking about includes the fact that we have reached such a state in our self-terrorization and self-befuddlement, that our politicians find it impossible to treat even an obviously non-serious non-attempt, by an obviously deranged individual, as anything but the gravest threat to our national security. They have no choice but apologize profusely, when the system actually seems to have worked splendidly, if with overkill and redundancy. Harmless crazy person correctly identified as such — check. The only reliable means of detonating PETN, a blasting cap, successfully kept off flights, with the result that supposed terrorist groups are reduced to trying things that simply won’t work to detonate high explosives in shoes, and underwear and bottles of liquid — check.

As for the MAJ Hasan affair, yes, the Army should not allow people to enter into the sort of lengthy service obligations that people who attend USUHS incur. That’s 7 years for the school, and another 3-5 for the residency. When Hasan joined the service, pre-9/11, it and the country was demonstrably non-crazy on the subject of Islam. The Army has generally done quite well at maintaining a healthy atmosphere in terms of race, ethnicity and creed. All that flew out the window post 9/11. I’m not even Muslim and I’m ashamed and angered by what the service has become, the sort of tool of occupation it has let itself become. I served 20 years, but I wouldn’t even consider joining today if I had the decision to make over again.

Yes, many people who worked with Hasan warned about his state of mind. But what they warned about was his conscientious objection to helping occupy and oppress Muslim countries. Hasan himself made no secret of his objections in this regard, but there’s a war on, and the Army has tightened all conscientious objector status determinations (Indeed, they’ve tightened up on pretty much all avenues out of the Army except saying you’re gay, which was suggested to Hasan as a way out, but which an arguably faulty sense of honor kept him from resorting to. It looks like even saying you’re gay won’t work much longer.). Not that the Army ever accepted anything but an objection to all wars, not Hasan’s objection just to specific wars, the wars of aggression and occupation of Muslim countries that we launched after he had made his 11-year committment to the Army.

There was never any reason for anyone to think of Hasan as a terrorist, he isn’t a terrorist, however deplorable what he did was, so I don’t see any failure of prediction in that respect. Not thinking that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are justified is utterly unexceptional, and hardly makes one a terrorist. A strong objection to serving in such wars, because one finds them morally objectionable, is admittedly less common in the military, and should have been addressed, as Hasan requested and several of his superiors agreed with, by releasing him from his service obligation. I certainly agree that it’s criminally wrong of him to have responded to the Army’s foolish and arguably unjust refusal of his reasonable request by killing fellow soldiers, but that isn’t terrorism, it’s simply an extreme and arguably irrational assertion of personal honor. I haven’t heard any evidence that anyone around him should have predicted such an extreme and idiosyncratic response, that he threatened to go on a killing spree.

Nor does Hasan, unlike the Underpants Bomber, seem to have acted in ways that would have made reasonable people suspect a mental illness. He doesn’t seem to be mentally ill, merely in emotional distress over being forced to participate in a war he believes to be morally wrong.

We have indeed reached a state of self-degradation when we are so incapable of acknowledging that our nation’s actions might not meet with universal approval, even by the victims of our often blind and irrational actions, that we insist that the forces of evil, forces that we expect the authorities to be able to easily distinguish, must be at work behind every untoward occurrence, behind every even quite reasonable objection to our actions, and every quite unexceptional adverse reaction to our actions. But, you know, if you send people off to kill and be killed in foreign countries for no good reason, and plenty of bad reasons, you just have to expect that some of them will snap and go rogue on you, for any number of particular reasons. Sadly, there’s nothing at all unusual or unexpected in a soldier in today’s Army snapping with murderous consequences, even if the particulars of each such case are completely unpredictable.

Christmas Bomber was allowed into the US by US intelligence services, regardless of the possibility that he would kill US passengers!

Why isn’t the Post, NYT, and other MSM reporting this truth:

This was a spooky ploy, and NO media other than WSWS is saying boo about the truth behind the facade.

“A January 27 hearing of the House Committee on Homeland Security established that US intelligence agencies stopped the State Department from revoking the US visa of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The Nigerian student, whom US officials suspected of being affiliated with the Yemeni terrorist group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, attempted to set off a bomb on Northwest Flight 253 into Detroit on Christmas Day. Revocation of Abdulmutallab’s visa would have prevented him from boarding the airplane.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/f253-f03.shtml

The MSM should be ashamed of not reporting this.

Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine

This link is the complete link to WSWS report — sorry for previous shortened link.

“The revelation that US intelligence agencies made a deliberate decision to allow Abdulmutallab to board the commercial flight, without any special airport screening, has been buried in the media. As of this writing, nearly a week after the hearing, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have published no articles on the subject. Nor have the broadcast or cable media reported on it.”

“Under questioning by the committee chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, Kennedy [State Dept Under Sect.] explained why the State Department might not revoke the US visa of a suspected terrorist: “We will revoke the visa of any individual who is a threat to the United States, but we do take one preliminary step. We ask our law enforcement and intelligence community partners, ‘Do you have eyes on this person and do you want us to let this person proceed under your surveillance so that you may potentially break a larger plot?’”

He added: “And one of the members [of the intelligence community]—and we’d be glad to give you that out of [open session]—in private—said, ‘Please, do not revoke this visa. We have eyes on this person. We are following this person who has the visa for the purpose of trying to roll up an entire network, not just stop one person.’”

Yeah, but whaddya bet those in-bred, toothless down-Mainers send her right back to the Senate for another 6 years? I’ve voted for Boxer every time she came up, out here in California, but if she got her whatchacallits stuck in the fanbelt the way Collins did, I’d take a leave of absence from my job and FIND someone to run against her in the Dem primary!

Come to think of it, why haven’t Feinstein and Boxer called a joint press conference to announce they are holding multi-committee hearings to inquire into the whereabouts of Sen. Collins’s frontal cortex or, better yet, to call bullshit on their colleague and her attack on the head of their party? Where is the loyalty of Senate Dems to Obama, PUBLIC loyalty, when Obama plays by the rules and the know-nothings get to make a negative media event out of it?