Newshoggers.com

Brown Shirts in Camouflage

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Last spring the Department of Homeland Security warned law enforcement groups to be on the alert for extremists coming out of military duty or groups trying to recruit susceptible veterans for their combat skills.  The report was blasted by conservatives and some veteran's groups as being anti-military.  Well not so fast:

Dozens of active-duty troops found on neo-Nazi site

It is the Facebook for the fascist set, and the typical online profiles of its members reveal expected tastes.

Favorite book: “Mein Kampf”

Favorite movie: the Nazi propaganda film “Triumph of the Will”

Interests: “white women”

Dislikes: “anyone who opposes the master race”

But there’s one other thing that dozens of members of newsaxon.org, a white supremacist social networking website, have in common: They proudly identify themselves as active-duty members of the U.S. armed forces.

Participation in such a group is a violation of military regulations.

A Stripes reporter searched the user profiles listing their job category as “Military” and found 130 hits out of 7,906 total members.

A Defense Department directive issued in 1996 lays out the guidelines for “dissident” activities by service members, from publishing underground newspapers to organizing demonstrations.

“Military personnel must reject participation in organizations that espouse supremacist causes,” the rule states. “Active participation, such as publicly demonstrating or rallying, fund raising, recruiting and training members, organizing or leading such organizations, or otherwise engaging in activities in relation to such organizations ... that are viewed by command to be detrimental to the good order, discipline, or mission accomplishment of the unit, is incompatible with Military Service, and is, therefore, prohibited.”

Now I don't want to make more of this than it deserves but it only takes one - remember Timothy McVeigh.   Guys like this should be identified and watched:

This week, Stripes e-mailed interview requests to more than a dozen newsaxon.org participants claiming military affiliations. Only one responded.

The user, “clarkpatrick88,” said he would not reveal his real identity for fear of reprisals, but he said he was a 19-year old sailor. His profile includes a picture in which he is holding a Confederate insignia while wearing his blue Navy working uniform with a name patch reading “Clark.” The number 88 is commonly used among neo-Nazis as shorthand to the greeting, “Heil Hitler.”

“As for my political views, I have never once put them before my duty I signed up for,” the sailor said in one of his e-mails. “I didn’t outwardly show my beliefs or cause trouble.”

The sailor said he grew so frustrated at military life and at being closely quartered with servicemembers of other races that he sought psychiatric counseling for suicidal thoughts. He spent three days in the “psych ward,” he said, and is now being separated from the service on its recommendation.

NOTE:

When I was in the military 40 years ago The Stars and Stripes was a propaganda rag.  Well times change and so has Stars and Stripes.  I have it bookmarked and read it regularly.

I guess we are lucky

Commentary By Ron Beasley

We had a bat shit crazy VP in charge of the country for at least six years.  Can you imagine how bad it could have been in Israel had a bat shit crazy Prime Minister at the same time.

Netanyahu appears to be suffering from confusion and paranoia. He is convinced that the media are after him, that his aides are leaking information against him and that the American administration wants him out of office. Two months after his visit to Washington, he is still finding it difficult to communication normally with the White House. To appreciate the depth of his paranoia, it is enough to hear how he refers to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, Obama's senior aides: as "self-hating Jews."

"He thought that his speech at Bar-Ilan would become mandatory reading at schools in the United States, and when he realized that Obama gave no such order, he went back to being frustrated," one of his associates said.

At a recent meeting with with Netanyahu, ostensibly about the understandings with the U.S. on the settlements, former prime minister Ehud Olmert was shocked to see the prime minister focusing mainly on the media. "Is this what he called me in for?" a source close to Olmert quoted him as saying.

Behind closed doors, Netanyahu's coalition partners - including Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman - have also expressed shock at his behavior. One senior minister told an aide that he is finding it very difficult to work with the premier. "He drives us mad," the minister said. "Every minute things change, and I am constantly busy doing maintenance on Netanyahu."

Of course Netanyahu's paranoia may be justified.  He finally gets back into power but it appears he can't get along with the US President.  He knows history and he knows that Prime Ministers who can't get along with the US don't last long.  And this brings us to a quote of the day from Spencer Ackerman:

Something like three-quarters of American Jewish voters in November cast their ballots for Obama. Are we self-hating Jews too, asshole? What would your explanation be for how so many of us are in the throes of a false consciousness? Seeing major American Jewish "leaders" push this kind of ethnic-anxiety bullshit is disgraceful enough. Watching the Prime Minister of Israel do it is an order of magnitude beyond. Bibi, we're not self-hating; we just hate you.

Mocking The Conservative Intellectually Afflicted

By Steve Hynd

I know it's wrong to mock the afflicted but I just can't help it. And I'd at least try to argue that showing up such mouthdropping stupidity and the bigotry that comes from it is a public duty.

First up, via Steve Benen and Alex Kopelman, is FOX host Brian Kilmeade.

Kilmeade and two colleagues were discussing a study that, based on research done in Finland and Sweden, showed people who stay married are less likely to suffer from Alzheimer's. Kilmeade questioned the results, though, saying, "We are -- we keep marrying other species and other ethnics and other ..."

At this point, his co-host tried to -- in that jokey morning show way -- tell Kilmeade he needed to shut up, and quick, for his own sake. But he didn't get the message, adding, "See, the problem is the Swedes have pure genes. Because they marry other Swedes .... Finns marry other Finns, so they have a pure society."

Salon has the video. But seriously "marrying other species" as well as ethnic inter-marriage? Kilmeade must be thinking about anti-abortion activist Neal Horsley and his self-admitted intimate relations with the farm mule.

The ignorance and bigotry just shines through Kilmeade's Fox pas but there's a video doing the rounds today of a conservative so embarassingly ignorant that even the rightwing Little Green Footballs website can't resist mocking.

Arizona Republican State Senator Sylvia Allen argues in favor of uranium mining on state land, because our planet has managed to last 6,000 years without any environmental laws, and look, we’re just fine.

I can’t say enough how it’s time that we get beyond, and, and start focusing on the technology we have, and move forward into the future so that our grandchildren and, can have the same lifestyle we have, and, and, this earth’s been here 6,000 years and I know I’m goin’ on and on and I’ll shut up ... It’s been here 6,000 years, long before anybody had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn’t been done away with.

Video here.

Of course, as Phil Plait at Discover magazine notes:

The irony, of course — and there’s always irony when creationism is involved — is that she’s talking about uranium mining, and it’s through the radioactive decay of uranium that we know the Earth is billions of years old. And she also praises technological achievements!

This, folks, is the party of opposition. The one DC Dems keep falling over themselves to appease. Jeezy Creezy!

Neocons Love Nukes

By Steve Hynd

President Obama has won some praise from most arms control experts for his tentative deal with Russia's President Medvedev to replace the expiring Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with a new treaty that could see both nations' nuclear arsenals cut by about 500 warheads each. It's something that should have been done earlier, but the Bush administration - with it's neocon hatred of anything called a "treaty" - had dragged its feet and refused to talk.

The treaty that this deal replaces reduced US and Russian arsenals by 80%. The proposed next reduction represents about 25% of Russia and America's remaining stockpiles of nuclear warheads, which together still amount for 95% of all the nuclear weapons on the planet. The inescapable logic is that it's always going to be difficult-to-impossible to ask small nations to give up their own weapons, or even civilian programs, while the two nuclear superpowers have such vast stockpiles themselves. Not to mention that reductions make it significantly harder for humanity to be wiped from the face of the earth.

But that's not something the neocons are interested in. Witness Keith B. Payne in the pages of the WSJ today.

In the first place, locking in specific reductions for U.S. forces prior to the conclusion of the ongoing Nuclear Posture Review is putting the cart before the horse. The Obama administration's team at the Pentagon is currently examining U.S. strategic force requirements. Before specific limits are set on U.S. forces, it should complete the review. Strategic requirements should drive force numbers; arms-control numbers should not dictate strategy.

Second, the new agreement not only calls for reductions in the number of nuclear warheads (to between 1,500 and 1,675), but for cuts in the number of strategic force launchers. Under the 1991 START I Treaty, each side was limited to 1,600 launchers. Yesterday's agreement calls for each side to be limited to between 500 and 1,100 launchers each.

According to open Russian sources, it was Russia that pushed for the lower limit of 500 launchers in negotiations. In the weeks leading up to this summit, it also has been openly stated that Moscow would like the number of deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched missiles (SLBMS), and strategic bombers to be reduced "several times" below the current limit of 1,600. Moving toward very low numbers of launchers is a smart position for Russia, but not for the U.S.

Why? Because the number of deployed Russian strategic ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers will drop dramatically simply as a result of their aging. In other words, a large number of Russian launchers will be removed from service with or without a new arms-control agreement.

I'd think that if the strategy is to avoid worldwide nuclear holocaust then arms control numbers are a perfect metric to use to drive that strategy. Payne obviously doesn't care about sane strategy so much as that the U.S. shouldn't give something away for nothing. It's a ridiculous posture to take. So what if the Russians end up with a treaty to do what they were going to have to do anyway? We all end up safer by both sides' reductions and their agreement that such reductions are a good thing.

But Payne, the leader of the neoconservative National Institute for Public Policy which has been a staunch cheerleader for Bush's missile defense plans and replacement warhead program, is more interested in might makes right than in the safety of humanity. He argued in 1980 that the "United States must possess the ability to wage nuclear war rationally" and that "the West needs to devise ways in which it can employ strategic nuclear forces coercively, while minimizing the potentially paralyzing impact of self-deterrence." Payne also served on Donald Rumsfield's notorious Missile Commission which in 1998 said Iran was only five years away from a nuclear missile - the same gap as many analysts believe still exists today.

For the neocons, exemplified by Payne and heartily endorsed by his fellow neocons at the Heritage Foundation, the notion that America must stay militarily supreme in order to be a Hegemony still rules supreme. Nukes enable that and so neocons love nukes. But the rest of us should be aware of their underlying motive in their professed skepticism about Obama's nuclear treaty.

The Whiners

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The Republicans came to power - failed on a monumental scale - were justly defeated and now they have no new ideas so they whine.  Sarah Palin whines because the media reported her ignorant and incoherent ramblings.  Sarah Palin complains because after she used her family as props for the 2008 presidential election the media reports that her life looks like a trailer park reality show.  But that's not hard to take.

Under the Cheney administration the neocon/Zionists had their way and the results were a disaster.  And now they are whining.  Matt Yglesias does a good job of explaining why it is necessary to "bash" the neocons.  They are crazy and dangerous because they still have a voice in spite of the fact the shouldn't.

It’s actually true that neocon bashing is a bit on the tiresome side. That said, I think it really has to be understood as a vital social necessity. Adherents of a deranged and sociopoathic “neocon” conception of America’s role in the world continue to be tremendously influential in our society. They have columns at The Washington Post and dominate the foreign policy coverage on Fox News. They have The Weekly Standard and Commentary and a healthy slice of The New Republic. And most important, as best as anyone can tell their ideas remain utterly dominant in the Republican Party. Their intra-party critics like Colin Powell, rather than winning intra-party arguments seem to be simply drifting out of the GOP coalition.

This is a dangerous situation. In the United States, the opposition party is always one ill-timed recession or political scandal from taking power. So a set of ideas that dominates one such party is something you need to keep a watchful eye on, no matter how marginalized that party may seem at any particular moment.

The neocons are discredited time after time but they just keep coming back and the results are increasingly catastrophic.  Their target du jour, as Steve reported below , is Iran.  If we don't bash them they will come back for sure.  If we do bash them perhaps we have a chance. 

Quote Of The Day - Deeper and Deeper Edition

By Ron Beasley

Sarah Palin tried to elaborate on her resignation speech on Facebook.  Josh has the content.

The quote of the day comes from Steve Benen.

In case there were any doubts, Palin's personal spokesperson told the AP that the Facebook message was, in fact, written by the governor. It was a helpful clarification, since it was easy to assume the message was written by a junior high school student who had hacked into Palin's profile.

Now mindless incoherence may be a plus to her supporters but for a vast majority it's scary.

No sign Iran seeks nuclear arms: new IAEA head

By Steve Hynd

Promising to be neither a "soft" Director-General or a "tough" Director-General," the next IAEA chief, Yukiya Amano, has already rained all over the neocon parade. (H/t Kat)

VIENNA (Reuters) - The incoming head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Friday he did not see any hard evidence Iran was trying to gain the ability to develop nuclear arms.

"I don't see any evidence in IAEA official documents about this," Yukiya Amano told Reuters in his first direct comment on Iran's atomic program since his election, when asked whether he believed Tehran was seeking nuclear weapons capability.

That's a bit of a blow to folks like John "bomb them" Bolton and the Weekly Standard's Peter Berkowitz, who have busily been claiming that - despite and indeed because of Iranian election protests and the following clampdown - "the central question for Middle East politics" namely, "what to do about Iran's illegal pursuit of nuclear weapons," is best answered by an immediate Israeli attack because "relying on prayer for Mousavi and the Iranian people to overthrow the mullahs is no option at all, at least not for the state of Israel, the front line in Islamic radicalism's war against the West."

They go on to claim, beyond all credibility, that Israel could attack with relative impunity as far as Iranian blowback is concerned - using as part of their data for this wargames conducted by the neocon Heritage Foundation back in 2007 (which of course found the result the participants most wished to find) and for the rest wishful thinking.

So, this statement by the next atom watchdog head severely undermines their narrative, as it removes that first premise beloved of neocons and Clintonistas alike: that Iran is in "illegal pursuit of nuclear weapons." Expect the warmongers to ignore Amano as much as possible, just as they always ignore contrary expert advice and evidence. The point is to justify an attack by someone on Iran, not prevent a war.

And these warmongering, lying, cherry-picking Wormtongues are why I want to urge caution on the likes of Fareed Zakaria and Trita Parsi. I respect Trita immensely but he's forgotten the wolves in the wings when he says that the important criterion for American policy right now has to be to reject Ahmadinejad’s attempts at portraying his victory as final and that the best way to do that is by holding no negotiations for now. Steve Clemons points to pieces by Robert Dreyfuss and former UK ambassador to Iran Richard Dalton today and writes " I very much agree with Dreyfuss' kicker on engaging Iran and ignoring the John Bolton types who want to launch a new war." Ignore as in sideline, not hand them ammunition by derailing negotiation attempts.

I'd like to ask Trita - would he rather Obama talked or Israel bombed? Because I think those are going to be his choices. The meme that the election protests humanized Iranians and made an attack harder to justify - as repeated by Zakaria - didn't play at all in Tel Aviv or in US rightwing circles. White House opposition to an attack may also not be a meaningful deterrent factor if Obama himself has already implied, by disengagement, that the current Iranian government cannot be talked to. As long as Netan-yahoo, his Likudniks and their American neocon co-conspirators think US opinion is usefully split on an attack and that the waters of international opinion can be thus muddied, they will be highly tempted to tell themselves there will be no repercussions in the U.S. or internationally.

I got a paper cut and Obama is to blame

by Jay McDonough

Some things are almost too stupid to be true.

Here's Rush Limbaugh the other day explaining South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's disappearance and affair:

...So he ups and leaves for five days, doesn't leave anybody in charge of the state, in case there's an emergency.

This is almost like: I don't give a damn! Country's going to hell in a handbasket. I just want out of here!

He had just tried to fight the stimulus money coming to South Carolina. He didn't want any part of it. He lost the battle and said "What the hell? The Federal government is taking over! I want to enjoy life!"

Not quite stupid enough?  OK, then...how's this?

Michael Jackson's biggest successes, and as it turns out his final successes, real successes took place in the eighties. That was Billie Jean, Thriller and all this. I mean he was as weird as he could be but he was profoundly, because of his weirdness, an individual. He wasn't a group member. He reached a level of success that may never be equaled. He flourished under Reagan; he languished under Clinton-Bush; and died under Obama. Let's hope the parallel does not continue.

Got that?  Mark Sanford's and Michael Jackson's stories have nothing to do with bad judgment and bad choices.  It's actually the federal government and Barack Obama that forced the governor to disappear for five days, leaving his state in the lurch while he was off in Argentina with his mistress.  And it's the suffocating power of the state that caused Michael Jackson's declining popularity and death, not the multiple botched plastic surgeries, persistent rumors of improper behavior, freakish lifestyle, and reported drug abuse that doomed Jackson.

For a group that claims personal responsibility as a mantra, these conservatives sure are quick to blame someone, anyone, else for all their troubles.

The Next Neocon Government

By Steve Hynd

British Conservative leader David Cameron is considered a dead certainty to become the next prime minister of the UK by just about everyone. Cameron's talked a lot about caring conservativism, just as Bush did - and according to journalist Neil Clark, like Bush his time in office will be playtime for the neocons.

Cameron's campaign was masterminded by a triumvirate of MPs: Michael Gove, Ed Vaizey and George Osborne.

Gove, who believes the invasion of Iraq was a "proper British foreign policy success", is the author of the polemic Celsius 7/7, which has been described as a "neo-con rallying cry" for its attacks on Islamism, which he describes as a "totalitarian ideology" on a par with Nazism and Communism, and says must be fiercely opposed.

He, along with Vaizey, is a signatory to the principles of the ultra-hawkish Henry Jackson Society, an organisation founded at Peterhouse College Cambridge in 2005 and named after a warmongering US Senator who opposed détente with the Soviet Union.

The Society supports the 'maintenance of a strong military' with a 'global reach'; among its international patrons are the serial warmonger Richard 'Prince of Darkness' Perle, a former staffer of Henry Jackson who was considered one of the leading architects of the Iraq war, and Bill Kristol, the influential American journalist, formerly with the New York Times, who called for military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2006.

As for Osborne, Cameron's Shadow Chancellor and right-hand man; he praised the "excellent neoconservative case" for war against Iraq.

There are other strong neocon influences on Cameron. Policy Exchange, which has been described as the Tory leader's 'favourite think-tank', and which will have an open door to Number 10, was set up in 2002 by Michael Gove and fellow hawk Nicholas Boles, a member of the Notting Hill set who the Tories plan to parachute into the safe seat of Grantham and Stamford at the next election. Dean Godson, the group's research director and adviser on security issues, has been described as "one of the best connected neoconservatives in Britain".

All three would have prominent positions in Cameron's cabinet, alongside fellow hawks William Haig, Chris Grayling and Liam Fox. And as for David Cameron himself:

Although he said that Britain should learn from the 'failures' of neoconservatism in a speech in September 2006, and denied that he was a neocon himself, Cameron's public pronouncements on foreign affairs since then certainly give the Tory uber-hawks no grounds for believing that they have backed the wrong man.

Last summer, during the South Ossetia conflict, he called for Russia to be expelled from the G8, for Georgia's Nato membership to be "accelerated" and lambasted the British government for allowing Moscow's "aggression" to go unchecked.

He has consistently called for a tougher stance on Iran, warning that "every week, every month that goes by brings Iran closer to possessing a nuclear weapon." And, while staying largely silent on Israel's military assault on Gaza, he has declared his belief in Israel to be "indestructible" and pledged that he would be an "unswerving friend" to the country if he became Prime Minister.

Neoconservativism isn't dead, nor is it even a spent force. The trans-Atlantic ties between neocon groups are still strong and they look ready to become Wormtongues to yet another major Western leader of a nuclear power in the very near future. That won't lead anywhere good.

Deep Thoughts

Commentary By Ron Beasley

John Boehner had some choice words for the climate bill:

When asked why he read portions of the cap-and-trade bill on the floor Friday night, Boehner told The Hill, "Hey, people deserve to know what's in this pile of s--t."

Have you noticed that Boehner has spent so much time in the tanning booth that he's actually darker than Obama?  Maybe that explains his irrational behavior.