The Anthrax Questions

Glenn Greenwald has an excellent article up at Salon.com discussing the unresolved issues around the 2001 anthrax incident. As everyone knows Bruce Ivins committed suicide earlier this week as a Grand Jury prepared to indict him in connection with the anthrax incident. Ivins had been a top anthrax researcher at a U.S. Government research facility for 18 years. So seven years after the incident, and after having to pay a settlement to one falsely accused researcher, we’re to believe the government had an airtight case against Ivins witnessed by his apparent suicide.

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Fox News Pundit Says McCain Has to Bash Gays to Win

From the “comes as no surprise” category, Fox News Pundit Fred Barnes said Sunday that McCain would have to run a center/right (not sure what that actually looks like myself) in order to win the election. This would mean appealing to the far right wingnuts of the party by using the “gays in the military” and “gay marriage” issues. Barnes explicity cites these issues. The left side of the blogosphere is all in an uproar over the comments. I don’t like that this happens to be a true statement, but it is true that McCain will win friends from the krazy kristian kooks by bashing gays. This has been a winning issue for Republicans for a while now.

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The 4th of July, 2008

Today is a day or ironies. George Bush is visiting Thomas Jefferson’s beloved Monticello on this the 232nd anniversary of our declaration of independence from a king named George. As Jefferson warned that Americans would have to be ever on their guard against those who might turn the presidency into the tool of their “elected despotism,” I doubt he would be greeting Bush. And Jesse Helms, father of the politics of division, died today.

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John McCain is SHOCKED! SHOCKED! To Find There's Campaigning Going On Here

Well, the McCain camp is all atwitter about Wesley Clark’s comments Sunday related to McCain’s status as a POW. They’re calling it “Swiftboating,” and condemning Obama for it. Of course, that didn’t stop McCain from putting the head of the original Swiftboats for Truth on a conference call run by his campaign.

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Craig and Vitter Sponsor Marriage Protection Amendment

It’s not really surprising to find that a small group of Republican Senators re-introduced the Federal Marriage Amendment to write discrimination into the U.S. Constitution. After all, they are mostly behind in the polls, the base is distraught and disorganized, and even fund raising isn’t going so well. What you might find interesting though, is that two of original 10 sponsors is Larry “wide stance” Craig (R-Idaho) and David “I heart hookers” Vitter (R-LA).

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The Tears Continue for Our Once Great Nation

The New York Times is reporting that military trainers who came to Guantanamo Bay in December 2002 based an interrogation class on a chart showing various “coercive” techniques for use on prisoners. What the trainers did not reveal, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied an Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain false confessions from American prisoners. Whoohoo, we’re on a roll now.

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The Day After – Gay Marriage

Well, it’s the day after the first full day that gay marriage was legal in California, and gosh darn it, the sun came up, birds still sang, children were born, people died, there were even some heterosexual marriages, and I still had to go to work. In other words, if God is mad about it, he sure missed that wrath thing by taking it out on the mid-west. This raises a lot of questions, such as what happens next in California, what does this mean to Florida’s Amendment 2 initiative (and see a possible connection), and what does it mean for gay people around the country.

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