Twerking Will Set You Free

Between Daryl Cagle and Ted Rall, I can't keep up with the brilliance. This one's by Cagle. Perhaps when people ask the (perennially ignorant) question, "Why do they hate us?" they can remember displays like this (Miley Cyrus's performance at the VMA awards), which if not the nadir of Western civilization, I don't know what is. Then again, there are so many. Sigh.

LUV News Wed 28 August 2013

Jack couldn't do LUV News today, so I did it. If you don't know what I'm talking about, see LUV News tag below or links at side for other examples. I've removed the graphics 'cause I don't have time to reproduce them all here. But since the U.S. seems determined to start blowing more people to kingdom come, I thought it was important to get this up for those who are interested in more than just the same propagandistic pabulum constantly repeated by mainstream media:

What Kind of Man? (or woman, for that matter?)

I have posted and reposted this comment all over the place since I first saw it at Time magazine in June of 2011:

Question: What kind of a man knowingly surrenders his own daughter to one of us government workers to be molested, standing by passively even as her private parts are fondled while she screams “Daddy Daddy, please help me!” 

Answer: an American man. 

I speak only to you men when I say you gutless cowards will be lining up to hand over your wives and daughters in our airports, it will happen hundreds of time each day across our USA. You had better start explaining to your children that we government employees are allowed to touch their private parts whenever we want; it will make the whole thing a lot less dramatic. Seriously, the 1st time is always the worst. The next time you get molested will not feel as disturbing as we accommodate you to our abuses.

-Ksiadz_Robak

(Cross-posted at TSA News.) 

U.S. War Machine Never Rests: US Helped Hussein Gas Iran

As the U.S. (and U.K.) get set to bomb yet another country, to blow yet more people to smithereens, to use the excuse of a "red line" -- because, don'tchya know, murdering people by gassing them is so much worse than murdering them by blowing their brains out -- that's just logic -- can't you numbskulls see that? our overlords can -- as this relentless onslaught towards war continues, comes this news:

#NSAPickUpLines

Hat-tip to litbrit for telling me about these. I'm not on Twitter so wouldn't have seen them otherwise. Am laughing my ass off. 

You're free Friday. Would you like to have dinner? -Jay Rosen

Ted Rall: Crime and Punishment

Another cartoon by Ted Rall:

Crime and Punishment, c.f. Bradley Manning

PFC Bradley Manning is sentenced to 35 years behind bars for exposing crimes committed by men who walk free.

Bradley Manning, Daniel Ellsberg, and the Dreaded "P" Word

When I use the dreaded "p" word, it's amazing how many people get their knickers in a twist. 

Press Conference with David Coombs, and Bradley Manning's Public Statement

Here's the video of the press conference yesterday with David Coombs, Bradley Manning's defense attorney. Coombs reads Manning's profound public statement, words of courage, beginning at 12:38. The text is also reproduced in its entirety; I repost it here:

The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We’ve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life. 

I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized that (in) our efforts to meet the risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability. 

In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror. 

Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown out any logically based dissension, it is usually the American soldier that is given the order to carry out some ill-conceived mission. 

Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy — the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, and the Japanese-American internment camps — to mention a few. I am confident that many of the actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light. 

As the late Howard Zinn once said, “There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.” 

I understand that my actions violated the law; I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intent to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others. 

If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.

Pardon Bradley Manning

35 years is practically a life sentence. I thought he was going to get life; an activist friend, a lawyer, kept saying, no, 20 years. I kept saying no way. There are appeals and clemency hearings and all kinds of stuff in the works. Including a petition for pardon to Obama. Yeah, that’ll work.

35 Years for Bradley Manning

Just got back from the sentencing at Ft. Meade. 35 years for Bradley Manning, minus 1,294 days already served. Plus demotion to lesser rank of private, plus dishonorable discharge, plus reduction of whatever measly pay they were giving him.

Press conference with Manning's lawyer David Coombs at 1 o'clock. I'm going back for that.

Rally and march at White House tonight. Those of you in the DC area, join us.

Bradley Manning To Be Sentenced Today

This morning at 10 o'clock in Ft. Meade, military Judge Denise Lind is scheduled to pronounce her sentence on Bradley Manning. I'll be there. So will lots of other Manning supporters. I don't have high hopes.

The prosecution is asking for 60 years. Even the defense is asking for 25 years. In our Kafkaesque world, that's considered lenient.

The story is on the front page of the UK newspaper the Guardian. As for the New York Times? Of course not. You have to dig to even find mention of it anywhere.

But we live in the Land of the Free. Yeah. Right.

If we don't like what you're doing, we'll just destroy your shit

If you think Sunday's story was bad -- and it was -- wait'll you hear this.

UK tries to put the screws to Glenn Greenwald

Just in case you didn't already know the authorities own you, they're going to make sure you do:

LUV News Sunday 18 August 2013

Reproducing here, once again, the LUV Newsletter (see tags for other examples). And once again, I can't figure out what's going on with the font:

Heathrow security on “high alert” – can the TSA be far behind?

Well, since the UK is no better than the US when it comes to civil liberties, we can expect this kind of thing to be trotted out every now and again — which it is.

WTF is wrong with you people??

UPDATED BELOW.

Nah, we don't live in a police state. As I always say, it's just the ranting of my fevered imagination.

That's why, in a country where there are over 100 violent SWAT actions every day, this latest little simulation didn't happen either. I'm just making it up. Check that, WJRT, the ABC news affiliate in Rossford, Ohio, is making it up. Somebody just woke up on the wrong side of the bed one morning and decided to make shit up:

White House Tried to Rewrite Interview NSA Gave to Washington Post

Here's a must-read companion piece to what I posted earlier this morning. From Slate: 

Of Secrecy, Lies, and More Lies

With the (unsurprising) revelations that the NSA is screwing us over even more than we already knew it was, and that the worthless wankers in Congress are clueless, except when they're lying, even to each other, it's worth repeating that we wouldn't have known about any of this if it weren't for Edward Snowden. 

Bradley Manning: Forced to Apologize to War Criminals

Thanks to Jack Balkwill of LUV News (see Links at right) for this graphic:

Summer Vacation

Another brilliant cartoon by Ted Rall. Somebody give this guy a MacArthur already! (as always, click to enlarge)

TSA manager Shane Hinkle charged with sexual abuse

And yet another TSA agent has been arrested for sexual assault. 

Oh, well. Just another day in the TSA!

Black women’s hair once again focus of clueless TSA

My Master List of TSA Crimes and Abuses is full of stories like this -- and worse -- where a black woman has her hair pawed by a blue-shirted goon in the name of "security." But apparently people still don't get it.

Police Brutality Alive and Well in the USA

Police brutality in this country is out of control. We already have daily instances of cops "subduing" people by killing them. Yesterday I wrote about yet another of these murders. Today I see a story of cops killing a 95-year-old man. In a nursing home. Who used a walker. They had riot shields. Riot shields!

Call it what you want. I call it murder.

The police increasingly look on us as foes. They are increasingly militarized, as Radley Balko has been pointing out for years. And we are increasingly in danger. I would think twice before I ever called 911 in this country. I'd be afraid of getting shot.

Man Hit Repeatedly With Stun Gun, For "Fun" - And Boy Murdered By Cops

This kind of behavior doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's within a context. 

John Pilger on Bradley Manning

John Pilger and Glenn Greenwald both write for the Guardian, a UK paper that, thank god, doesn't kiss the asses of those in power quite as much as the American press does. That's why we get columns from them on quaint things like . . . oh . . . you know . . .  justice, virtue, human rights, civil liberties. And revelations about war crimes, torture, empire, and the sadism and hypocrisy that make those possible.

Matt Wuerker of Politico

Pulitzer-Prize-winning political cartoonist Matt Wuerker. As always, click to enlarge:

Voltaire

TSA News HuffPost Live video link

I was on the Alyona Minkovski Show on HuffPost Live last night with former TSA Administrator Kip Hawley and EPIC Administrative Law Counsel Khaliah Barnes to talk about the TSA’s VIPR teams. The show was prompted by an article in the New York Times the other day alerting the public to what some of us have been writing about for years — that it was only a matter of time before the TSA’s unwarranted searches and harassment of passengers would spread from airports to every other transportation hub. I don’t know why it took the NYT so long to catch on.

Ted Rall on "Diversity"

As I keep saying, Ted Rall is brilliant. If this doesn't sink into the brains of the bots, nothing will (click to enlarge):

TSA overreacts -- again -- to smart-ass comment

In another episode in the continuing saga of The Buffoons in Blue Overreact to Every Squeak, Burp, and Fart at the Checkpoint, a 26-year-old man at Bradley Airport in Connecticut was detained by the TSA and arrested by police for being a smartass.

Fukushima

Let's face it. We're fucked.

‘State of Emergency’ at Fukushima nuclear plant -Japan Official“ Right now we have a state of emergency,” Kinjo said, saying there is a “rather high possibility” that the radioactive wastewater has breached the barrier and is rising towards the ground’s surface.  Reuters Exclusive: Barrier is breached at Fukushima says official — ‘Highly radioactive’ water entering ocean — Will flow ‘extremely fast’ if it reaches surface — Tepco sorry for trouble

(Photo: CJ Kale) 

American Exceptionalism

Click to enlarge.

Summers Loving by Daryl Cagle

Summers Loving by political cartoonist Daryl Cagle (as always, click pic to enlarge). And if you want to read the story behind this cartoon, here ya go.

Team Snowden T-shirts $6 Today Only

Limited time only -- $6 and free shipping for one of these T-shirts supporting NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. For each sale, $1 will go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 

New York woman visited by police after researching pressure cookers online

From the Guardian:

New York woman visited by police after researching pressure cookers online 

A New York woman says her family's interest in the purchase of pressure cookers and backpacks led to a home visit by six police investigators demanding information about her job, her husband's ancestry, and the preparation of quinoa. 

Michele Catalano, who lives in Long Island, New York, said her web searches for pressure cookers, her husband's hunt for backpacks, and her "news junkie" son's craving for information on the Boston bombings had combined somewhere in the internet ether to create a "perfect storm of terrorism profiling". 

Members of what she described as a "joint terrorism task force" descended on Catalano's home on Wednesday . . . .

But nah -- we don't live in a police state. It's just my fevered imagination!

UPDATE here. But there are still too many unanswered questions.

UPDATE #2: By the way, you really should read Tarzie's take on this. His colorful language, common sense, and take-no-prisoners style are not to be missed.

Rectal Scrapings: Another Brilliant Cartoon by Ted Rall

As I've written before, if you don't know the political cartoons of Ted Rall, you're missing the boat. Here's his take on the latest revelations about the NSA's illegal snooping -- its "XKeyscore" program (don'tchya just love their cutesy little names?), which is getting more coverage in foreign press such as the Guardian than in the American press (gee, what a surprise). Click the cartoon to enlarge it: