Muslimification

The Daily Show on how the Obama Administration may or may not be sending coded message to its Muslim brethren through summit logo designs and how Fox News is either SS or kamikaze sympathizers. Also, as a bonus: John Oliver converts weights from metric to Americanese.



That's convincing and all, but we've already seen how Obama morphed a missile defense logo into a combo Muslim crescent/Obama campaign logo signaling that this country would soon be under Shariah Law, what's to stop us from baselessly thinking this is all also Muslim conspiracy related? I mean, have you seen this?


What about this?

Do I need to put you in a burka and then honor kill you or are you starting to get it yet? OBAMA IS SENDING MESSAGES OF IMMINENT ISLAMIC OVERTHROW THROUGH THE LOGO DESIGNS OF MINOR GOVERNMENT AGENCIES AND SUMMIT MEETINGS! It's so obvious!

Look, when we're all praying five times a day towards Mecca and flying our own planes into our own buildings to teach us a lesson, don't say I didn't give you clear warnings that it was going to happen. It was in the logos!

Evidence of the Muslim conspiracy

What's this, you say? Some would claim it's just the new logo redesign for the US Missile Defense Agency juxtaposed next to the old logo. Most people would be fine with that because ROCKETS BOOM KAPOW PEWPEWPEW WHOOSH BOOOM!

But others, namely Frank Gaffney, see it as something far more nefarious, something far more insidious, and something that gravely endangers America... as we know it.

A just-unveiled symbolic action suggests, however, that something even more nefarious is afoot… Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiatives are not simply acts of unilateral disarmament of the sort to be expected from an Alinsky acolyte. They seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah… the new MDA shield appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo… Watch this space as we identify and consider various, ominous and far more clear-cut acts of submission to Shariah by President Obama and his team.

Well, obviously.

It must be of crushing disappointment to Obama to see his plans for US Shariah exposed so quickly. He's spent all these past decades forging his own birth certificate, hiding his Muslim heritage, infiltrating himself into American society, amassing power, and then tricking the masses so that he might control our government. He must be heartbroken that it's all going to come crashing down just because he decided to explicitly explain his plans for the Muslim overthrow of our country in a logo redesign.

You tripped up, Obama. We're on to you and there's nothing you can do to silence us. No Shariah in the US!

God bless our stupid system of government

You have to love the logic that comes out of our elected betters in Washington, sometimes. While some Democrats took time out at the beginning of the health care debate to mention what they'd really prefer is single payer health care, they know it's a pip dream. For most other Senators the reaction to single payer was NOFUCKINGNOSOCIALISMSTALINCOMMUNISMNOOOO!

Hell, even people like Joe Lieberman and others were deeply opposed to a public option because they thought it was a trojan horse for single payer. But now when you see one of the proposed amendments that has popular support, you find out that our senators fucking love single payer... just in a way that's completely backwards, overly complex, and makes little logical sense. To wit:

Senate leadership has pledged to allow a vote on re-importing prescription drugs from Canada as an amendment to the health care reform bill...
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On top of the billions it would save consumers, the re-importation measure introduced by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) would save the federal government $19 billion over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Dorgan's amendment would also bust the deal the White House cut with Big Pharma, which has vowed to kill the re-importation provision in "hand to hand combat."
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When it does come time to vote on re-importation, however, the White House-PhRMA deal may be a bigger obstacle than Republicans. Dorgan's amendment is also championed by health care linchpin Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), who pledged last weekend to work to garner other GOP votes. Republican Sens. Charles Grassley (Iowa), John McCain (Ariz.) and David Vitter (La.) are cosponsoring a bill that would do the same thing.

Yes, not only are Democrats largely supportive of re-importing drugs from the socialist single payer health care wonderland of Canada, so are several Republicans. You follow? SIngle payer is something that would mean the death of freedom here in the US, buuuuuut if Canada wants to have it that's fine and oh, by the way, can we completely piggyback off it in order to lower our crippling medical costs?

You know why Canada has lower drug prices? Because they, like every other country in the world that has lower drug prices than us, negotiate directly with drug companies on prices. So of course we'd want to take the long, convoluted path of letting them do the work and then importing their drugs instead of, say, passing a bill that allows our government to directly negotiate our drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. I mean sure, our country is much larger and with much more people and we'd be able to use our leverage to garner much lower prices than Canada, but doing so would be socialism. No, it's makes better sense to import our drugs from socialists.

Don't you love the logic of the Senate? Now do you understand why nothing good ever happens there? Good, now go pass this amendment, Senators.

Your morning reminder of the crushing stupidity of the health care debate

We've heard lots of reasons for why we shouldn't pass any type of health care reform: Joe Lieberman's feelings are hurt, it'll eat all the money the financial sector hasn't already eaten, SOCIALISM~!, COMMUNISM~!, because Americans prefer their shitty health care system, or because it will result in our Muslim President ordering the mass deaths of everyone's favorite grandma or great aunt. But it's rare when we see a political hack just open up and admit the naked political calculation behind desperately trying to block a bill. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) is just that kind of hack.

"And if they get there, of course, you're going to have a very rough time having a two-party system in this country, because almost everybody's going to say, 'All we ever were, all we ever are, all we ever hope to be depends on the Democratic Party,' " Hatch said during an interview with the conservative CNSNews.com.

"That's their goal," Hatch added. "That's what keeps Democrats in power."
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"Do I believe they're that diabolical? I don't believe most of them are, but I think some of them are," Hatch said. "Maybe diabolical's too harsh of a word, but the fact is, they really, really believe in socialized medicine."

That's right, we can't do a reform of health care or include a public option because people will like it too much, will be grateful, will vote for Democrats on the basis that they passed it, and vote against Republicans just because they opposed its entire creation and worked actively to kill it. Well, I have to say that's clearly a concern. I mean who would want to vote for a plan that people would like? This whole popularity/voting problem is even more of a problem than Ben Nelson's fears that a public option would be too beneficial and win any competition against private insurance. Thankfully our elected betters exist to protect us from things they know we'd like and would work to reduce health care costs and make health care more available.

Just one last thing Orrin: the Democrats don't really believe in socialized medicine, or even really, really believe in it. If they did they wouldn't be trying to pass some ultra-watered down, half-assed public option that will almost invariably now be taken out of the bill. No, they'd be trying to pass the thing that would actually massively reduce health care costs and cover everyone: single payer health care. But after Medicare and Medicaid reduced costs for its users, proved to be the two most popular health plans in the country, and covered people fully, Government learned better than to try that horrific fiasco again. So keep on protecting us from things we'd like and things that would make life better and easier for us, otherwise we might just like and vote for the people that do pass it. Orrin, I can't believe you were actually in the Senate Finance Committee health care negotiations. Great call, Max.

Chart of the day

As if you needed a graphical representation that the event of yesterday were in no way good for you, ThinkProgress stepped to the forefront to shove a chart in your face and make it clear.

The first part of the graph charts the stock performance of WellPoint, United Health the Connecticut based Aetna when news of Reid including a public option on around 11AM of the 26th. Note the downward trajectory.

The second part is where Joe Lieberman announces his opposition to voting on health reform with a public option at around 1:30 on the 27th, whereupon the health industry stocks shoot up.

God bless the stock market, it's always there to tell you in the starkest dollar and cent terms just how well founded your suspicions were that something bad happened. Not that we needed a reminder beyond the beginnings of the phrase "Joe Lieberman said..." to know we were getting screwed, but it's nice to be able to measure it in terms of a stock price.

I'd imagine so, Shep

Fox News anchor Shep Smith looking at the von Brunn shooting and von Brunn's racist white supremacists writings, his membership in the 9/11 truther movement, and his membership in the Obama is a Muslim/he never showed his birth certificate club. He decided that there was a seeming connection between the type of stuff von Brunn wrote and the sort of stuff he was being sent by Fox News viewers on an hourly basis.

Really Shep, Fox News viewers include a large portion of crazy right wingers? Nice of you to make the connection. Maybe you'd like to pass that message on to Glen Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity. That is if you can get in a word edgewise in between their fevered ranting about encroaching socialism, encroaching fascism, one-world governments, Obama being the new Hitler, another civil war, the Mexicans that are stealing all our jobs, race wars, liberal conspiracies, the liberal media, and evil Moos-lams. If you can, maybe you'd like to draw a connection between their delusional paranoid, conspiracy rantings (I'm looking hardest at you, Beck) and these terrorists acts and the beliefs of the people who commit them.

Maybe it'll eventually dawn on them to conduct themselves like rational humans. OK, it clearly won't work on Beck, but it only probably won't work on Hannity or O'Reilly. Why not give it a shot, if only so you can sleep at night. It's gotta be rough as the only guy on Fox News with a conscience.

Cheney Hate Triad

That son of a bitch popped his head up and started talking again yesterday. Naturally, as he can't seem to ever stop talking, there are numerous fallacies, straw men, and lies to go over. Even the thes and ands are false. Let's hit on a couple of noteworthy parts of his remarks.

"On the question of whether or not Iraq was involved in 9-11, there was never any evidence to prove that," he told the "On The Record" host in a joint interview with his daughter Liz. "There was "some reporting early on ... but that was never borne out," Cheney said.

You know,that would have been a nice thing to mention when you were mentioning there was solid evidence to prove Iraq and al-Qaeda were working together. That "reporting early on" was you. What tipped you off? Was it the complete lack of evidence or the fact that you spent all that time waterboarding prisoners to find out what the connection was and they never gave you anything good? Thanks for finally coming to the conclusion six years, two wars, thousands of lives, and a couple hundred billion dollars later.

At least he's finally dealing with 9/11 and criticism towards the Bush Administration like an adult.

CHENEY: You know, Dick Clarke. Dick Clarke, who was the head of the counterrorism program in the run-up to 9/11. He obviously missed it. The fact is that we did what we felt we had to do, and if I had to do it all over again, I would do exactly the same thing.

That's right, he's blaming Richard Clarke for 9/11. That's the same Richard Clarke who was trying to convince them to focus on terrorism while they were focused on missile defense. The same Richard Clarke who couldn't get a meeting with the Bush Administration. The same Richard Clarke who sent countless memos and e-mails to Cheney and guys like Cheney with titles like “Bin Laden and Associates Making Near-Term Threats”. The same Clarke whose 2000-01 terrorism plan languished inside the Bush bureaucracy. The same 9/11 that happened 8 months into the Bush Administration's reign. Clearly Richard Clarke's fault and not the guys who wouldn't listen to him.

Then there's this odious little comment.

Asked if “some form of legalized marriage” was “inevitable in the United States,” Cheney said that “freedom means freedom for everyone.” “I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish,” said Cheney, adding that believes marriage should be regulated at the state level.

See...wait. He just said something I agreed with. Getting dizzy...head spinning....world collapsing....urge to vomit increasing....

There. Recomposed myself. This raises an important question: If Dick Cheney supports gay marriage, is there a chance that it might be as morally ruinous as Christian Fundamentalists claim? I think we have to consider that possibility now. Though frankly, this would have been a nice thing to say during those eight years when you were running things and your party was making big hay out of demonizing gay marriage. I guess you were too busy violating the Constitution to notice. Isn't that always the way it happens?

Dept. of Obvious Conclusions

Right wing blowhard Erich "Mancow" Muller talks a bunch of stuff on how waterboarding isn't torture. Mr. Mancow to simultaneously prove how goddamn manly he is and how waterboarding barely rises above the level of say getting blasted in the face by a strong shower head, says he'll go through a waterboarding session. Unlike some people, he actually goes through with it. Guess what happens? He gives up 6 seconds in and starts telling everyone it's definitely torture.

Mancow decided to tackle the divisive issue head on -- actually it was head down, while restrained and reclining.

"I want to find out if it's torture," Mancow told his listeners Friday morning, adding that he hoped his on-air test would help prove that waterboarding did not, in fact, constitute torture.
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Turns out the stunt wasn't so funny. Witnesses said Muller thrashed on the table, and even instantly threw the toy cow he was holding as his emergency tool to signify when he wanted the experiment to stop. He only lasted 6 or 7 seconds.

"It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that's no joke,"Mancow said, likening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a child. "It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back...It was instantaneous...and I don't want to say this: absolutely torture."

So what's the count of people who say waterboarding isn't torture, go through one session of it, and can barely spit the water out of their mouth before yelling out "It's torture", up to now? We'll just say that it's everyone who's ever gone through with it.

But that Dick Cheney guy totally swears it's not. So I really don't know who to believe. I think I need to see a couple more self righteous right winger radio and TV personalities get waterboarded before I can make an informed decision.

Quote of the day

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), bringing the logic train to a screeching halt.

The Vice President is suggesting that there was good information obtained, and I’d like the committee to get that information. Let’s have both sides of the story here. I mean, one of the reasons these techniques have survived for about 500 years is apparently they work.

Former FBI Interrogator Ali Soufan has a nice response to Lindsay, but it's a shame he also couldn't have rolled up a copy of the Geneva Conventions and hit the Senator with it.

Calling bluffs

Cheney Calls for Release of Memos Showing Results of Interrogation Efforts

Now that the memos showing the rulings of interrogation techniques have been released, the Obama administration should release additional documents that show what the interrogations yielded, former Vice President Dick Cheney told FOX News on Monday.
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Cheney said he's asked that the documents be declassified because he has remained silent on the confidential information, but he knows how successful the interrogation process was and wants the rest of the country to understand.

"I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country," Cheney said. "I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was."

Gee, Cheney went and spouted off like a tough guy to Sean Hannity about how he knows for sure waterboarding was effective. I'm sure that this story is not going to have an obvious conclusion at all.

A CIA inspector general's report from May 2004 that is set to be declassified by the Obama White House will almost certainly disprove claims that waterboarding was only used in controlled circumstances with effective results.

On Monday, the Washington Post reported the impending release of a May 7, 2004 IG report that, the paper added, would show that in several circumstances the techniques used to interrogate terrorist suspects "appeared to violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture" and did not produce desired results. It is difficult, the report will conclude, "to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks."
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The important things to take away from the footnote seem clear: for a period of time interrogators were using the waterboard with a "frequency and cumulative use" that had to be toned down. Moreover, they were doing it in a way that was determined to not be "efficacious."

Cheney....lying? Waterboarding....not effective? Obvious conclusions....obviously concluded? World....spinning....out...of...control. Nothing....makes sense. How could The Dick have lied to us? How could a technique that the Chinese, Cambodians and Spanish Inquisition to elicit false confessions for political purposes turn out to have caused false confessions? How come calling something 'enhanced interrogation' doesn't magically make it not torture? I thought we all knew waterboarding was effective when we learned they had to do it 100 times in one month to a guy. Surely it must be effective if you have to do it so many times to the same guy. I'm just so shocked at all of this I can barely shake my head in disgust over the state of affairs in this country, nor am I able to even to imbue my cries of "arrest this fucking vice-cretin" (replete with menacing finger point) with the necessary venom.

I mean how could a bunch of professional liars with no understanding of torture, the techniques they were approving, their historical uses, international law, torture law, US law, oversight, effectiveness, restraint, basic human decency, who were also reading constant reports about the ineffectiveness of these techniques, ever get it so wrong? It all seems so foolproof.

Good 'ole Nixon logic

You have to admire the stones on some of the Bush Administration people. Take Condi Rice, who had a large role in approving torture. Now that the info has come out, instead of just saying it was wrong and plowing forward with some dissembling bullshit about "mistakes being made" she not only wants to pretend it isn't torture, pretend she didn't help authorize it, but also break out Nixonian logic to defend it.

Q: Is waterboarding torture?

RICE: The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture. So that's -- And by the way, I didn't authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency, that they had policy authorization, subject to the Justice Department's clearance. That's what I did.

Q: Okay. Is waterboarding torture in your opinion?

RICE: I just said, the United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.

So because the President said it wasn't outside the CAT, nothing that happened was outside the CAT. Because of the simple fact the President authorized it means it couldn't have been torture. Anyway it isn't even her fault, so go away. Condi, Condi, Condi, not the best defense. That's the kind of line that made David Frost chortle in disbelief when Nixon said it in all those Frost/Nixon trailers. Bush can't magically declare something legal, not even if he wiggles his nose, waves a wand over the authorization, or recites some phrase he half remembered from a Harry Potter book.

I'm surprised all it took was a couple of students from Stanford to break you down into a quivering ball of incoherent justifications. If a couple of buzzed freshmen can do it, how easy is it going to be for the Spanish courts?

Quote of the day: Logical conclusions

The American Life League on Krispy Kreme plan to hand out a free donut to everyone on January 20th on account of the Inauguration of this Barack Obama person.

The next time you stare down a conveyor belt of slow-moving, hot, sugary glazed donuts at your local Krispy Kreme you just might be supporting President-elect Barack Obama's radical support for abortion on demand – including his sweeping promise to sign the Freedom of Choice Act as soon as he steps in the Oval Office, Jan. 20.
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President-elect Barack Obama promises to be the most virulently pro-abortion president in history. Millions more children will be endangered by his radical abortion agenda.

Celebrating his inauguration with "Freedom of Choice" doughnuts – only two days before the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision to decriminalize abortion – is not only extremely tacky, it's disrespectful and insensitive and makes a mockery of a national tragedy.

A misconstrued concept of "choice" has killed over 50 million preborn children since Jan. 22, 1973. Does Krispy Kreme really want their free doughnuts to celebrate this "freedom.""

As of Thursday morning, Communications Director Brian Little could not be reached for comment. We challenge Krispy Kreme doughnuts to reaffirm their commitment to true freedom – to the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – and to separate themselves and their doughnuts from our great American shame."

Of course, why didn't I see it: free donuts equal abortion promotion. Everything always equals abortion promotion, especially abortion, that's like double abortion promotion. So kids, if you really want to combine free pastries with massive leaps of what we'll call 'logic', baby murder, and extreme religious paranoia, and I know you all do, make sure to head to the old double K to get your free abortion donut. If you wish to fully participate in the spirit of the day hand your donut off to a doctor, so he/she can throw it in a dumpster out back. It helps if the doctor is black to fully get the Obama abortion message through. Or go against God's plan and give that donut to a gay couple you know, trusting that they are just as qualified to eat that donut as a straight couple. It's all politics. Everything is politics.

Also: try not thinking about abortion the next time you have a donut or pastry of any sort. Forget even walking into a Krispy Kreme without thinking about it. I just hacked your mind. You're welcome.