Afghanistan: Then & Now

How Dare You?!?!

Obama Campaign Selling Official Birth Certificate Shirts

Too funny!

Meghan McCain, Cindy McCain Fire Back At Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck hasn't a clue. The only thing that would be vomit inducing is him fully clothed! Meghan McCain is very sexy.



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ORIGINAL STORY: Cindy McCain lashed out at Glenn Beck after he mimed vomiting over her daughter Meghan's recent skin cancer PSA.



McCain was only one of the women featured in the ad, which compared not wearing sunscreen to being naked, and which showed McCain seemingly naked.



On Beck's Wednesday show, he and his co-hosts spent over eight minutes mocking McCain. Beck pretended to vomit repeatedly (with detailed sound effects) while looking at McCain's ad or even hearing her name.



"Put some extra clothes on," he said. "Like, lots of extra clothes...has she thought about a burqa, just to be extra safe?"



UPDATE: Meghan McCain also weighed in on Glenn Beck's mockery of her in a Thursday column for the Daily Beast.



"Clearly you have a problem with me, and possibly women in general, but the truth is, it’s 2011 and I heard your show on Fox was canceled," McCain wrote. "Isn’t that an indication that the era of the shock jock pundit is over?...There really is no need to make something like my participation in a skin cancer PSA into a sexist rant about my weight and physical appearance, because I’m going to let you in on a little secret, Glenn: you are the only one who looks bad in this scenario, and at the end of the day you have helped me generate publicity for my skin cancer PSA, a cause that I feel quite passionate about."

John Stewart pwns Bill O'Reilly

And of course, Fox News edited this video for their morning show, and removed Jon's criticism of Fox News, so lame.

John McCain: Torture did NOT lead to Bin Laden

Thank-you Senator.

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But this must be an informed debate. Former attorney general Michael Mukasey recently claimed that “the intelligence that led to bin Laden . . . began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information — including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.” That is false.

I asked CIA Director Leon Panetta for the facts, and he told me the following: The trail to bin Laden did not begin with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times. The first mention of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti — the nickname of the al-Qaeda courier who ultimately led us to bin Laden — as well as a description of him as an important member of al-Qaeda, came from a detainee held in another country, who we believe was not tortured. None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts or an accurate description of his role in al-Qaeda.

In fact, the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on Khalid Sheik Mohammed produced false and misleading information. He specifically told his interrogators that Abu Ahmed had moved to Peshawar, got married and ceased his role as an al-Qaeda facilitator — none of which was true. According to the staff of the Senate intelligence committee, the best intelligence gained from a CIA detainee — information describing Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s real role in al-Qaeda and his true relationship to bin Laden — was obtained through standard, noncoercive means.

Romney to offer health proposal

Nice try Willard, but you can't run away from your past!

LINK

Mitt Romney, whose emerging candidacy for president has been clouded by GOP doubts over his health care plan in Massachusetts, is planning a bit of political jujitsu tomorrow: taking the biggest perceived negative of his campaign and attempting to turn it into a positive.

The former Massachusetts governor will seek to redefine his candidacy by delivering a major speech outlining his vision for dismantling President Obama’s overhaul and creating a new national model.

Romney is expected to propose tax breaks for consumers buying coverage on the open market; a requirement that insurers cover patients with preexisting conditions; and provisions giving states more power in the health coverage arena.

His advisers say they wanted Romney to deliver this, his first major policy speech, before he announces his formal campaign and begins participating in debates, as a way to blunt the attacks that are sure to come. They also want him to be seen as putting forth ideas on not only a substantive issue, but one that has dogged him for the past year.

Prime Minister Is Defiant as Pakistan Outs C.I.A. Officer

Yet another blow to US/Pakistan relations....

LINK

In apparent retaliation, the ISI appeared to have told a conservative daily newspaper, The Nation, the name of the C.I.A. station chief who is posted at the American Embassy in Islamabad. A misspelled version of the station chief’s name appeared in the Saturday edition of The Nation.

In December, the prior C.I.A. station chief had to leave Pakistan after he was publicly identified in a legal complaint sent to the Pakistani police by the family of victims of the American drone campaign. The station chief received death threats after his identity was exposed. At the time, the Obama administration said it believed that the ISI had deliberately made the name public.

The new station chief was responsible for directing a large part of the operation that killed Bin Laden, including supervision of a C.I.A. safe house from which operatives spied on the compound where Bin Laden lived for five years. There was no expectation that he would leave Pakistan, American officials said.

The cost of bin Laden: $3 trillion over 15 years

Was it worth it?

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The most expensive public enemy in American history died Sunday from two bullets.

As we mark Osama bin Laden's death, what's striking is how much he cost our nation—and how little we've gained from our fight against him. By conservative estimates, bin Laden cost the United States at least $3 trillion over the past 15 years, counting the disruptions he wrought on the domestic economy, the wars and heightened security triggered by the terrorist attacks he engineered, and the direct efforts to hunt him down.

What do we have to show for that tab? Two wars that continue to occupy 150,000 troops and tie up a quarter of our defense budget; a bloated homeland-security apparatus that has at times pushed the bounds of civil liberty; soaring oil prices partially attributable to the global war on bin Laden's terrorist network; and a chunk of our mounting national debt, which threatens to hobble the economy unless lawmakers compromise on an unprecedented deficit-reduction deal.

All of that has not given us, at least not yet, anything close to the social or economic advancements produced by the battles against America's costliest past enemies. Defeating the Confederate army brought the end of slavery and a wave of standardization—in railroad gauges and shoe sizes, for example—that paved the way for a truly national economy. Vanquishing Adolf Hitler ended the Great Depression and ushered in a period of booming prosperity and hegemony. Even the massive military escalation that marked the Cold War standoff against Joseph Stalin and his Russian successors produced landmark technological breakthroughs that revolutionized the economy.

An Honest Birther