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Cop Pulls Gun During Snowball Fight ... Could it Have Been 'Roid Rage'?
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on December 21, 2009 at 5:15 PM.

OK, here's an item. There's a snowball fight. Broad daylight. Young people. One of them chucks a snowball at a Hummer, which happened to be driven by an off-duty cop. The cop gets out, and decides that pulling his gun is an appropriate response. To a snowball.

The DC police department denied the allegation at first, until Reason put up footage of the incident on Youtube (video to your right).

BBC:

At one point on the video - shown on YouTube - the man identifies himself as a "detective", but refuses to give his full name.

Then he proceeds to admit to pulling his gun.

"Yes I did because I got hit by snowballs," he tells angry residents who demand to know his badge number.

He challenges them to "throw another snowball".

A senior police official in Washington DC has said an off-duty officer who drew a gun at a snowball fight behaved in a "totally inappropriate" way.

Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier said video footage left "no doubt" the office drew his gun after his vehicle, a hummer, was pelted with snowballs.

The footage showed an angry crowd gathering, chanting: "You don't bring a gun to a snowball fight".

Ms Lanier said the officer had been placed on desk duty.

[...]

Is a statement, Ms Lanier said she had reviewed all the video footage of the incident taken by the public and it was "very obvious" the officer had drawn his police-issue gun "in response to the snowballs hitting his vehicle".

"I have no doubt about this, nor has the officer denied the accusations," she said.

The confrontation ended only when other policemen were despatched to the scene, and managed to calm everyone down.

She said he had not denied the allegations.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Right-Wing World Net Daily Poll Solicits Gift Ideas For Obama: "Arrest Warrant;" "Ticket Back to Kenya"
Posted by Lee Fang, Think Progress on December 21, 2009 at 4:15 PM.

The right-wing website World Net Daily (WND) has been the source of a variety of smears, particularly a campaign to question the legitimacy of President Obama's citizenship. While WND exists at the fringes of the conservative movement, top Republican legislators frequent the WND radio program and the Republican National Committee, among other GOP organizations, fund WND through e-mail list rentals. The website, which files regular articles about the role of Christianity during the holiday season, has a new Christmas-themed poll which asks, "What would you like to give Obama for Christmas?" Readers have responded by voting for: "a court ruling booting his ineligible self from office," "a one-way ticket back to Kenya," and "an arrest warrant":

Ridiculous "Study" Supposedly Finds Widespread Anti-Semitism on Progressive Websites
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on December 21, 2009 at 3:00 PM.

Given how ubiquitous unsubstantiated charges of anti-Semitism have become in the debate over the Middle East conflict, I’m tempted to ignore the Institute for Global Jewish Affairs’ recent “report” supposedly exposing the liberal blogosphere as a teaming hotbed of raw Jew-hatred.

It's easy to dismiss. It may dress itself as some sort of empirical research project, but the "study" is transparently devoid of any informational value, intellectually bankrupt and clearly the product of working backwards from a conclusion arrived at on ideological grounds.

But I won't ignore it, because the strategic decision to pin one's political opponents with charges of anti-Semitism only dilutes the power of that word. Then, like the boy who cried wolf, when real anti-Semitism rears its decidedly ugly head the word loses its all-important power to shame. I'm Jewish, and I don't fear sharp-elbowed criticism of Israeli policy on websites, so it's not in my interest to allow it to be conflated with true anti-Semitism, which is absolutely no joke.

The gist:

Progressive blogs and news sites in the United States are a new field where Jew-hatred, in both its classic and anti-Israeli forms, manifests itself. This incitement is hardly monitored, as many of the most popular blogs are only a few years old and it seems counterintuitive that such anti-Semitic expressions would be found in this political milieu. Monitoring the media for anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli bigotry has so far almost exclusively consisted of reading the major American newspapers, magazines, and journals and attending to the three major news networks, as well as radio broadcasts. However, the huge amount of content in the political blogosphere makes such monitoring - which is increasingly necessary - much more difficult to achieve with any degree of thoroughness.

And they're not going to begin applying any thoroughness here. Ultimately, what the researchers actually found will come as a surprise to few readers: people tend to be mean on the internet.

That is undeniably true. They're mean, cantankerous, undignified, unrestrained and hyperbolic (obviously I don't mean you kids, who are always perfectly dignified). And that's true whatever the subject. For example, in addition to politics, I fancy baseball, and when Red Sox and Yankees fans go at it on the fan websites, it's as fierce as a member of Hamas debating an Israeli settler.

Progressive bloggers (and blog readers, which I'll get to in a moment) can offer some uncomfortable criticism. If one wants to marginalize them as fringe anti-Semites, it's easy enough to find a few saying mean things about their opponents on this issue, as one could with any other. Like baseball. Then if one works, say, at the Institute for Global Jewish Affairs, one merely extrapolates some larger, darker message about modern liberalism from that typically unconstrained rhetoric. It becomes more proof -- dubious, but eagerly accepted in some quarters -- of the rise of "new anti-Semitism" on the left.

Having established a point of agreement -- people are mean on the internet -- consider the flimsiness of the evidence the authors marshal in support of their larger thesis, at least when their ominous editorial flourishes are stripped away.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Revealed: Bush White House Raised Terror Alert Based On Con Man's Wild Al Jazeera "Decoding" Claims
Posted by Liliana Segura, AlterNet on December 21, 2009 at 12:00 PM.

From the Dept. of You-Can't-Make-This-Shit-Up, TPM Muckracker reports:

A self-styled Nevada codebreaker convinced the CIA he could decode secret terrorist targeting information sent through Al Jazeera broadcasts, prompting the Bush White House to raise the terror alert level to Orange (high) in December 2003, with Tom Ridge warning of "near-term attacks that could either rival or exceed what we experience on September 11," according to a new report in Playboy.

We all knew the DHS color-coded terror alerts were bogus and politically-motivated -- Ridge himself recently admitted as much -- but this? This is just ... loony tunes.

According to TPM, "the man who prompted the December 2003 Orange alert was Dennis Montgomery, who has since been embroiled in various lawsuits, including one for allegedly bouncing $1 million in checks during a Caesars Palace spree. His former lawyer calls him a 'habitual liar engaged in fraud.'"

He must have been a pretty good liar to have pulled this off (at least one would hope):

Working out of a Reno, Nevada, software firm called eTreppid Technologies, Montgomery took in officials in the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology and convinced them that technology he invented -- but could not explain -- was pulling terrorist-produced "bar codes" from Al Jazeera television broadcasts. Using his proprietary technology, those bar codes could be translated into longitudes and latitudes and flight numbers. Terrorist leaders were using that data to direct their compatriots about the next target.

The original article quotes a "former CIA official" who was incredulous when he discovered the arrangement between the agency and Montgomery:

The federal government was acting on the Al Jazeera claims without even understanding how Montgomery found his coordinates. "I said, 'Give us the algorithms that allowed you to come up with this stuff.' They wouldn't even do that," says the first officer. "And I was screaming, 'You gave these people fucking money?'" ...

In a detail that should really piss off right-wingers, credit for calling out this bullshit artist goes to ... France.

A branch of the French intelligence services helped convince the Americans that the bar codes were fake. The CIA and the French commissioned a technology company to locate or re-create codes in the Al Jazeera transmission. They found definitively that what Montgomery claimed was there was not. Quietly, as far as the CIA was concerned, the case was closed. The agency turned the matter over to the counterintelligence side to see where it had gone wrong.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Jailtime For Pregnant Soldiers? The Army Has Made Getting Pregnant a Punishable Offense
Posted by Amanda Terkel, Think Progress on December 21, 2009 at 11:00 AM.

Major General Anthony Cucolo, who is responsible for operations in northern Iraq, has issued a controversial new policy -- which went into effect on Nov. 4 -- that allows throwing women servicemembers on active duty in jail if they become pregnant:

Under the new policy, troops expecting a baby face court martial and a possible prison term -- and so do the men who made them pregnant.

And the rule applies to married couples at war together, who are expected to make sure their love lives do not interfere with duty.

Usual U.S. Army policy is to send pregnant soldiers home from combat zones within 14 days.

But Major General Anthony Cucolo, who runs U.S. operations in northern Iraq, issued the new orders because he said he was losing too many women with critical skills. He needed the threat of court martial and jail time as an extra deterrent, he said.

All troops under his command are covered by the extension to the military’s legal code -- the first time the U.S. Army has made pregnancy a punishable offence.

Military staff judge advocates for the Army have reviewed and approved the policy. The policy is legal under military law, but it raises "a mare's nest of legal, ethical and policy issues." For example, while the policy does say that a man who impregnates a woman will receive equal punishment, it may be difficult to identify him unless the woman reveals who he is.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

What Houston's Election of a Gay Mayor Tells Us About "Red State" Texas
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Comment Is Free on December 21, 2009 at 10:00 AM.

Some local news stories go nationwide and cause a national alarm, and some simply go nationwide and then sink underwater unnoticed. But on the very rare occasion, a news story goes nationwide and is received with a double take and a "come again?".

That's what happened when Houston became the biggest city in the U.S. last week to elect an openly gay mayor, Annise Parker. Yes, that would be Houston, Texas – the largest city in a state that's assumed worldwide to be nothing but a hot bed of gun-toting, Bible-thumping rightwing reactionaries. Obviously, it's time for the rest of the world to start taking a more complex view, and start thinking of Texas as more than the home of George W Bush.

Parker's election inadvertently revealed the dirty little secret that native (and liberal) Texans like myself have known and been trying to publicize for a long time, which is that Texas is far from a conservative monolith. On the contrary; not only do all the major cities in Texas vote consistently for Democrats, but some rural areas on the Texas-Mexican border have been marginal to consistently "blue" for some time now.

This lines up with the larger national trends in America. Republicans only win elections by controlling white-dominated rural and suburban areas, and almost all other parts of the country lean towards the Democrats. And thus Republican power is being chipped away at slowly through pure demographics, as the nation as a whole grows more racially diverse and more urban. In many ways, Texas is ahead of the trend, since the state has not had a white majority since 2005.

Despite the cold, hard facts, however, Texas is still seen as the old conservative stereotype. In fact, the mainstream media went to some lengths to downplay the significance of Annise Parker's election. The initial AP story covering the victory dedicated a lot of ink to the low voter turnout, without noting that this is typical in an off-season run-off election. It failed to mention that both candidates in the run-off -- Annise Parker and Gene Locke -- are Democrats, or that Locke also brings liberal bona fides to the table as a former civil rights activist. Anyone reading Andrew Malcolm's account of the election in the LA Times, in which he calls Parker "conservative" and refuses to mention that the actual conservative candidate, the Republican, got knocked out of the running in the first election, would not get a true picture of Houston politics. So wed are many mainstream media writers to the "Texas is a conservative monolith" narrative that Democrats are being turned into Republicans in order to make the story work.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

It's Time For Americans to Get Comfortable With Black Santa
Posted by Melissa Harris-Lacewell, TheNation.com on December 21, 2009 at 9:00 AM.

On Sunday night I indulged two of my favorite obsessions, the Christmas holidays and sentimental Americana, by watching Oprah Winfrey's special "Christmas at the White House."

This televised tour of the decorated White House immediately evoked my holiday musings from last year. In the month after Obama's election I felt like a kid at Christmas, with visions of a black president dancing in my head.

I have always been an over-the-top lover of all things Christmas: cookies, stockings, carols, lights, twinkly trees, sappy TV movies, egg nog, and wrapping paper. I was raised in a secular, humanist household. I came to Christianity as an adolescent. This means Jesus is a second string character in my holiday memories. It is Santa Claus who occupied the central iconic position of Christmas during my childhood.

And for me Santa Claus always was, is now, and always will be a black man.

Part of my investment in Santa's blackness derives from my personal biography. My father is a brown-skinned man who smokes a pipe and has had a full beard of gray hair since my infancy. Black Santa looks like my dad, so I am drawn to him. But my father is nothing like a jolly elf. Professor Harris is a stern disciplinarian and a politically engaged intellectual. I can't imagine anyone less likely to hang out with toy-building magical creatures while wearing a fur-trimmed red suit.

My attachment to black Santa is rooted in a fierce racial consciousness I have nurtured since childhood. In my adulthood I have revised much of my unthinking, black nationalist assumptions. My feminist commitments, interracial political work, and emerging cosmopolitan sensibilities make me somewhat less likely to exercise an automatic preferential option for blackness. This journey of political consciousness is also reflected in my holiday choices.

In college I added Kwanzaa celebrations to my holiday calendar. It was a way of countering Christmas commercialism and asserting my connections to black culture. Later I learned the brutal, misogynist history of Kwanzaa's founder, Malauna Karenga, and I became less enthusiastic about the holiday. I have experienced similar shifts in racial consciousness as a researcher, writer, political advocate, and Christmas enthusiast.

But through it all my insistence on and attachment to black Santa has never wavered.

As a kid, black Santa represented a benevolent spirit of goodness and kindness directed toward African American children. Black Santa cared about little girls who look like me. I did not need blue eyes or blond ringlet curls for black Santa to find me adorable. Black Santa did not put a blond baby doll under my tree. He knew that I needed to rock, hold and nurture a baby doll with brown skin and kinky hair. Black Santa expected Nat King Cole to be playing on the stereo when he arrived on Christmas Eve.

The election of Barack Obama has changed my thinking about black Santa a bit. I am now convinced that black Santa is equally important for white Americans. Barack Obama is now the President of the United States. He is a deeply imperfect president. Racism still exists during his presidency and will persist when it is over. Obama cannot cure racial inequality. But he, Michelle, and the girls have altered the face of the first family.

Symbols matter. They help shape our understanding of national culture and identity. A president is not a country, but he embodies the national identity. Santa is the secular, commercial symbol of a religious holiday, but he nonetheless embodies the popular imagination of the holiday.

It is time for Americans to get comfortable with black Santa.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

As Military Launches New Attack In Afghanistan, U.S. Ambassador Suggests Extended U.S. Occupation
Posted by , Democracy Now! on December 21, 2009 at 8:00 AM.

In Afghanistan, the U.S. has launched a major combat operation in the Uzbeen Valley. Five U.S. Special Forces have reportedly been wounded in the early stages of the attack. The new assault comes as the U.S. has begun sending the first wave of the 30,000 additional troops ordered by President Obama earlier this month. On Thursday, the first Marine battalion deployed under the escalation left Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Battalion member Lance Corporal Joseph Jones was asked about his mission.

Lance Corporal Joseph Jones: "This is what we do: kick down doors, and we look for people and shoot at people. This is what we do. This is what I signed up to do. I don't know about everyone else."

Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss Has No Idea What Roe v. Wade Actually Says
Posted by Jill Filipovic, Feministe on December 21, 2009 at 7:00 AM.

Can someone please send Saxby Chambliss a copy of Roe v. Wade? Because it does not say what he thinks it says.

The Senate healthcare bill’s language on abortion "sets up a Supreme Court challenge," one senator warned Saturday.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) asserted that the compromise on abortion contained within the bill, which would seek to segregate federal funds from subsidizing health plans covering abortion, is unconstitutional.

"What this provision does that Sen. Nelson negotiated sets up a Supreme Court challenge. Roe v. Wade's pretty clear on federal funding for abortion," Chambliss said at a Capitol Hill press conference early this afternoon.

The compromise was set up to win the vote of Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who had previously threatened to vote against the bill unless he was satisfied the bill wouldn’t provide federal support for abortion. Nelson announced on Saturday morning that he’d reached an agreement to his satisfaction, and would vote for the bill.

Pro-life groups, including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, have rejected the compromise language.

"And now, you're seeing that law that was laid down years ago in Roe v. Wade thrown up in the air. It's pretty obvious that votes have been bought," said Chambliss, who didn't signal whether or not he would lead a legal challenge to the bill.

Doesn't this man have a staff to vet facts before he gives press conferences?

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

John McCain Trashes Obama for Failing to Foster "Bipartisanship"
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on December 21, 2009 at 6:00 AM.

THE UNOBSERVANT SENATOR.... Just think, if John McCain wasn't on one of the Sunday morning talk shows every other week, we wouldn't be able to hear insightful whining like this.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) ripped into the president on Sunday for abandoning his pledge to foster bipartisanship in Washington, accusing Obama of creating a more toxic political environment than that which existed during the Clinton administration.

"In some ways, of course, yeah," McCain told Fox News Sunday when asked if the Obama White House was more partisan than Bill Clinton's. "At least under Hillarycare they tried to seriously negotiate with Republicans. There has been no effort that I know of -- of serious across the table negotiations -- such as I have engaged in with other administrations. And that was the commitment that the president made."

That McCain actually seems to believe this demonstrates just far gone the poor guy really is.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Conservatives Continue Their Assault on Climate Science ... And Reason
Posted by Brad Johnson, Think Progress on December 21, 2009 at 5:00 AM.

As President Obama brokered a last-minute deal with China, India, and other nations to jointly fight global warming, American conservatives continued their assault on reason when it comes to climate science. All through the week, right-wingers from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News highlighted the fact that Copenhagen, the site of the international climate negotiations, received snow at Christmastime, which they falsely characterized as a “blizzard.” Now the Drudge Report and others are highlighting the real blizzard sweeping up the East Coast as a supposed contrast to “global warming”:

Even CNN’s Ed Henry piled on, saying “DC snowstorm chills Pelosi’s global warming trip,” calling it a “strange twist.” Drudge, of course, linked to the story.

In reality, intense winter storms of this type are an observed result of climate change. As the Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States report issued by the federal government describes, warmer oceans and shifting atmospheric circulation are bringing “stronger and more frequent” winter storms to the United States:

– “Cold-season storm tracks are shifting northward and the strongest storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent.”

– “In winter and spring, northern areas are expected to receive significantly more precipitation than they do now, because the interaction of warm and moist air coming from the south with colder air from the north is projected to occur farther north than it did on average in the last century. The more northward incursions of warmer and moister air masses are expected to be particularly noticeable in northern regions that will change from very cold and dry atmospheric conditions to warmer but moister conditions. Alaska, the Great Plains, the upper Midwest, and the Northeast are beginning to experience such changes for at least part of the year, with the likelihood of these changes increasing over time.”

– “There is also evidence of an increase in the intensity of storms in both the mid- and high- latitude areas of the Northern Hemisphere, with greater confidence in the increases occurring in high latitudes. The northward shift is projected to continue, and strong cold season storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent, with greater wind speeds and more extreme wave heights.”

Health-Care Debate Gets Really Weird: Coburn Prays to Smite Enemies, Whitehouse Says GOP Hearts Aryans, Dean Dials It Back, and Everybody Hates Ben Nelson
Posted by Adele Stan, AlterNet on December 21, 2009 at 1:51 AM.

SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO

At 1:00 a.m. Eastern Time this fine Solstice, the Senate voted to bring a health-care reform bill to the floor. The procedural vote known as cloture required 60 votes to break a Republican filibuster, and the Democrats managed to pull off a straight party-line vote after a lot of ugly horse-trading.

Despite the nearly two feet of snow that enveloped the Capitol in the last days of Advent, no one seemed to be much in the holiday spirit, except, perhaps, for Howard Dean, the former DNC chairman and Vermont governor who had been leading a progressive revolt against the deal negotiated by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid after the Nevada senator traded away any vestige of a public health-insurance plan in order to get his 60 votes.

Last week, Dean told MSNBC that he would advise senators to vote against the bill, but by Sunday morning, he was in a more generous mood, telling David Gregory, host of NBC's "Meet the Press," that he was withholding judgment until the Senate bill was reconciled with the House bill in a conference committee (video after the jump).

While Dean may have handed his old nemesis, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, a late Hannukah present, it seemed that he was among the very few in a generous mood.

VIDEO AFTER THE JUMP

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Too Late: Obama Organizers Finally Rail Against Obama on Health Care
Posted by Daniela Perdomo, AlterNet on December 20, 2009 at 11:00 PM.

As Congress stumbles toward some parody of health care reform, and the White House sends its talking heads out to parrot that this is the delivery of Obama's promises, those who once provided the grassroots manpower for the President's presidential campaign have finally started to voice their mass dissatisfaction.

On Thursday morning, Andy Stern, the head of the nation's largest labor group, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), sent out an internal e-mail to all of its employees titled "Where do we go from here?"

The e-mail, forwarded to me by an SEIU organizer, detailed the massive union's internal "Town Hall-style telephone call" recently that confirmed what has already been so clear on the micro level -- progressives are pissed, en masse.

Indeed, Stern wrote, "SEIU does not accept that this monumental effort - that this reform that is so necessary to the health and wellbeing of our economy, our families and our future - can be over without a fight. A fight to make it work for you and your families."

But the clincher was the note on which he ended: "President Obama must remember his own words from the campaign. His call of 'Yes We Can' was not just to us, not just to the millions of people who voted for him, but to himself."

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

It Ain't Perfect, but I'd Support the Senate Health Bill
Posted by Booman, AlterNet on December 20, 2009 at 10:45 AM.

As Al points out, Teddy Kennedy would have voted for this health care bill. I just watched Bernie Sanders and Ben Cardin explain how they secured money to forgive medical school tuition for doctors who go into primary care, which they believe will give primary care access to 20 million Americans who don't have that access now. They're voting for the bill. I'd vote for it, too. Hopefully, the bill will improve in Conference. But, considering that we had to win over all 60 members of the Democratic Caucus (including Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman) the bill we have is close to as good as could have gotten. I believe, in retrospect, Reid should have cut a deal with Snowe for her support of the base bill. With her vote secured, he wouldn't have had to make so many concessions to Nelson and Lieberman, and we'd have a triggered public option going into Conference. I am confident that we could have had that and we lost it the moment the triggerless public option was put in the base bill. Others may think Lieberman would have thrown a tantrum anyway, but I disagree. He only acted because he realized Reid had to have his vote. Nevertheless, this bill is only slightly worse than the best that could have been expected.

I know people are pissed off about that, but this was the situation from the beginning. Really, after months of lobbying and activism, nothing much really changed from the beginning to the end.

Is Techno Chicken Gay (Not That There's Anything Wrong with That)?
Posted by Staff, AlterNet on December 20, 2009 at 9:33 AM.

Sadly, No! is in one of those crappy-video wars so popular in some corners of the blogosphere, and posted this one, which we think is just hilarious: