HoustonWade.com

Look, the security apparatus that we have in place did not fail us on Christmas day when a Nigerian dude with a bomb strapped to his junk tried to blow up a plane. The Intelligence was there, he was on a watch list. The problem was that he was let through. That he had the exact same plan and M.O. as Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber”, had–and no one was the wiser.

Not having beefy-enough security is not what failed us on 9/11 either. What failed us was the fact the FBI and CIA didn’t share information and the President never read the August 6th, 2001 memo entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike within US.”

If people would just do their jobs we wouldn’t have these problems. Plus, al Qaida keeps using retards and their poorly constructed explosive devices to blow up airliners. It is hard to make a binary explosive work in a controlled lab environment, let alone an 18″ wide, cramped airliner seat at 30,000ft.

I remember being in line at the airport after the liquid bomb suspects got busted in London and watching bottle, after bottle of liquid get poured out into a trash can by TSA employees. If you are so concerned about inert chemicals that when combined make and explosive then why are you pouring them out, thus combining them in a trash can?!?!

How much physical and human damage did the 9/11 hijackers cause us? The World Trade Center destroyed; a side of the Pentagon destroyed; four airliners destroyed; and 3,000 lives lost. Somewhere in the neighborhood of $19-25 billion in damages total. We have since spent several T-R-I-L-L-I-O-N dollars and an addition 5,000 or so lives on the wars and defense and security contracts to ensure that we don’t lose $20 billion again.

We could have focused on nothing but commando raids in Afghanistan to get Bin Laden and the Taliban would still control the 80% of the nation they control today.

Think of the “War on Terror” like mortgage securities derivatives. We spend trillions and end up a headache and less than we started with.

Here in Seattle we have Coastguard boats with 50cal machine guns chase the ferries to save us from bombers. We also have security sweeps and state troopers on the boats looking for suspicious materials left behind by disembarking passengers. In the automobile waiting line, bomb dogs sniff all the cars waiting to load onto the boat. This is nothing but a gigantic waste of time, money and resources. First, no one is going to bomb a ferry. Why? Because there are no passenger ferries in Middle America that everyone can be afraid of riding. Second, the Coastguard boats are useless because if anyone is going to blow up a ferry, they are going to do it from the inside. Third, security sweeps are pointless because we are dealing with SUICIDE bombers. They aren’t leaving any packages behind, they are going to be sitting with it hoping to blow up with everyone else and get their 72 virgins.

We are spending millions of dollars and wasting everyone’s time by putting all of our efforts into “feel good” security rather than actually doing what works. Things like detective work, intelligence gathering, sharing information, nation building…

Let’s make 2010 a lot less like the last decade, and start by just doing our jobs and being efficient about it.

Thank you, America.

All across America millions of us are either standing in line or glued to our television. It may be the only good thing Bush gave us during his miserable presidency and I hope it is the one thing that lasts; involvement in our democracy. The papers are saying that we could expect voter turnout beyond 80%! Can you believe that?

Bush has mad this country such a hole that we are finally going to have more people voting for president than American Idol.

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This one is enough to piss off anyone. You just have to read it in it’s entirety.

Voters Across Nation Hit by Dirty Tricks
By DEBORAH HASTINGS, AP

(Nov. 2) - In the hours before Election Day, as inevitable as winter, comes an onslaught of dirty tricks — confusing e-mails, disturbing phone calls and insinuating fliers left on doorsteps during the night.
The intent, almost always, is to keep folks from voting or to confuse them, usually through intimidation or misinformation. But in this presidential race, in which a black man leads most polls, some of the deceit has a decidedly racist bent.

Complaints have surfaced in predominantly African-American neighborhoods of Philadelphia where fliers have circulated, warning voters they could be arrested at the polls if they had unpaid parking tickets or if they had criminal convictions.

Over the weekend in Virginia, bogus fliers with an authentic-looking commonwealth seal said fears of high voter turnout had prompted election officials to hold two elections — one on Tuesday for Republicans and another on Wednesday for Democrats.

In New Mexico, two Hispanic women filed a lawsuit last week claiming they were harassed by a private investigator working for a Republican lawyer who came to their homes and threatened to call immigration authorities, even though they are U.S. citizens.

“He was questioning her status, saying that he needed to see her papers and documents to show that she was a U.S. citizen and was a legitimate voter,” said Guadalupe Bojorquez, speaking on behalf of her mother, Dora Escobedo, a 67-year-old Albuquerque resident who speaks only Spanish. “He totally, totally scared the heck out of her.”

In Pennsylvania, e-mails appeared linking Democrat Barack Obama to the Holocaust. “Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision on Tuesday, Nov. 4,” said the electronic message, paid for by an entity calling itself the Republican Federal Committee. “Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake.”

Laughlin McDonald, who leads the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said he has never seen “an election where there was more interest and more voter turnout, and more efforts to suppress registration and turnout. And that has a real impact on minorities.”

The Obama campaign and civil rights advocacy groups have signed up millions of new voters for this presidential race. In Ohio alone, some 600,000 have submitted new voter registration cards.
Across the country, many of these first-time voters are young and strong Obama supporters. Many are also black and Hispanic.

Activist groups say it is this fresh crop of ballot-minded citizens that makes some Republicans very nervous. And they say they expect the dirty tricks to get dirtier in final hours before Tuesday.

“Oh, there’s plenty of time for things to get ugly,” said Zachary Stalberg, president of The Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based government watchdog group that is nonpartisan.

Other reports of intimidation efforts in the hotly contested state of Pennsylvania include leaflets taped to picnic benches at Drexel University, warning students that police would be at the polls on Tuesday to arrest would-be voters with prior criminal offenses.

In his Jewish neighborhood, Stalberg said, fliers were recently left claiming Obama was more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israel, and showed a photograph of him speaking in Germany.
“It shows up between the screen door and the front door in the middle of the night,” Stalberg said. “Why couldn’t someone knock on the door and hand that to me in the middle of the day? In a sense, it’s very smartly done. The message gets through. It’s done carefully enough that people might read it.”

Such tactics are common, and are often impossible to trace. Robo-calls, in which automated, bogus phone messages are sent over and over, are very hard to trace to their source, say voting advocates. E-mails fall into the same category.

In Nevada, for example, Latino voters said they had received calls from people describing themselves as Obama volunteers, urging them to cast their ballot over the phone.

The calls were reported to Election Protection, a nonprofit advocacy group that runs a hot line for election troubles. The organization does not know who orchestrated them.

“The Voting Rights Act makes it a crime to misled and intimidate voters,” said McDonald. “If you can find out who’s doing it, those people should be prosecuted. But sometimes it’s just difficult to know who’s doing what. Some of it’s just anonymous.”
Trying to mislead voters is nothing new.

“We see this every year,” said Jonah Goldman of the advocacy group Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “It all happens around this time when there’s too much other stuff going on in the campaigns, and it doesn’t get investigated.”

In 2006, automated phone calls in the final days leading to the federal election wrongly warned voters they would not be allowed to vote without a photo ID. In Colorado and Virginia, people reported receiving calls that told them their registrations had expired and they would be arrested if they showed up to vote.

The White House contest of 2004 was marked by similar deceptions. In Milwaukee, fliers went up advising people “if you’ve already voted in any election this year, you can’t vote in the presidential election.” In Pennsylvania, a letter bearing what appeared to be the McCandless Township seal falsely proclaimed that in order to cut long voting lines, Republicans would cast ballots on Nov. 2 and Democrats would vote on Nov. 3.

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This study finds that Evangelical, holier-than-thou, fundamentalists have sex younger, more often and much more likely without protection than pretty much every other demographic in America. Not surpisingly this results in more pregnacies.

The studies conclusion is that in “Blue” America people don’t frown upon premarital, teenage sex and believe that sex-ed should be taught teaching children about their bodies and the dangers, consequences and protections involved with sex. This results in far less teenage pregnacy and rates of sexually transmitted diseases. Meanwhile, “Red” America believes that only absitance should be taught in schools and kids should be kept ignorant of all matters of sex and their bodies becuase sex should only happen in the confines of marriage. It’s funny that the children of Evangelicals find themselves pregnent more often than their “heathen” counter-parts.

The average American pops their cherry at age 17. The average Evangelical at 16. Sarah Palin gave birth to her first child, Track, 7 months and 21 days after she and Todd were married… err, I mean “eloped.”

Sarah “I am Godly” Palin, had premarital sex. She broke God’s law. She is a sinner of the highest order and she raises her children to be sinners just like her. That does not sound like someone I want leading America.

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On Monday Alaska’s senior senator, the longest serving Republican in the Senate, was found guilty on all seven counts of bribery, failing to report gifts and ethics violations. Now that he is finally guilty, and not just indicted, fellow Republicans are just now calling for his resignation. Way to get on board in the nick of time, half the senate.

Now that Sevens’ seat is too close to call, and that he may go to prison for the rest of his quite numbered days, let’s look back on what a wonderful fellow he has been to America:

There’s more, you get the idea. Ted is evil and a coot. A crazy coot.

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The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that Sarah Palin is telling McCain’s staffers to “GFYs” because she sees herself as the new leader of the Republican Party. That’s rich. This woman who is under indictment for a serious abuse of power as governor of Alaska; who has an approval rating hovering around 30%; who spent $150k on clothes in two months in an attempt to appeal to blue collar, Wal-Mart shopping “Joe Six-Pack” (yes the depressed alcoholic vote!); is the future of the Republican party? please let this be true!

Palin is a moron. She is a weenie too. She only lasted 3 weeks at UH Hilo. I got my degrees from there. Sure it’s a shithole, and it rains nonstop, but it is a whole lot better than Idaho. What level of intelligence does one have to possess to dream of becoming an ESPN anchor and in order to do so studied journalism and communication and yet doesn’t read the newspaper and can’t get hide her Minnesotan accent that no one else in Alaska has? She can’t even “monkey see, monkey do” like a moderately intelligent human being. I guess Bush did get a degree in History from Yale and probably couldn’t tell you what war his dad was a veteren of. She may be on to something…

I heard a great joke last night:

Q: What’s the difference between Sarah Palin’s mouth and her vagina?

A: Not everything that comes out of her vagina is retarded.

It’s mean. This does not bother me.

How can a woman whose only claim to fame is being cynical choice for VP hope to become president? I am all for it. Palin 2012!

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She’s just a little bit of dumb, ain’t she?

I read this sad story very late last night about this poor McCain volunteer who was mugged at an ATM and then, when her assailant saw she had a McCain/Palin bumper sticker he lost it, beat her up, and then carved a “B” into her face for some “unknown reason.” My first thought was bullshit.

Of course she claimed her assailant was “some black guy.” Yes, the elusive 6′4″ black guy that mugs people in the most whitebread section of Pennsylvania. It’s always a “black guy” with these Republicans isn’t it? The one time in my life I was mugged it was by white people (and happened last week!)

In my heart I knew she had to be making this up; and then I saw the picture of her black eye and the “B” and was certain she had made the whole thing up. The “B” was backwards as if some idiot, her, had carved it into her face using the reflection in a mirror. Don’t these people ever watch CSI? First of all, don’t claim you were mugged at an ATM. ATMs have cameras and the police said there was no video of her mugging; or of her even using the ATM for that matter. Second, realize that if someone carves a “B” into your face they are not going to do it backwards. Third, the only “Black Guy” in rural Western Pennsylvania is not going to go around mugging people, because everybody is going to know who it is: the only black guy for 50 miles!

Have you ever seen the South Park were Butters gets abducted? His mother who thought she had commited infaticide says it was “some Puerto Rican guy” to avoid going to jail. Very relavent I think. Watch it now because you need to.

Since you picked Sarah Palin, rather than someone smart, Obama is going to destroy you come election night. You were going to win, you were way ahead in the polls, the far left was just pissed at Obama for moving so rapidly to the right on issues like the FISA bill while women, the Dem’s largest voting block, were irked that Hillary was so visibly shafted by the Democratic party that picking a woman to be your VP was brilliant and according to the intitial numbers it was obvious that it was going to work. Too bad she’s a dumbass, huh?

If only you had chosen a woman whose husband wasn’t a member of an anti-American political party, who didn’t use the governors office to illegally persecute state employees who was once married to her sister, who has such a hard time walking the walk of being a true-to life evangelical christian that her first child was born a few short months after she was married and whose own 17 year old daughter didn’t learn a damned thing from abstinance-only education and is preparing to squirt out her own dim-witted offspring. I could go on and on but you get the idea. She’s dumb. Heck, even Bush could field a few questions from reporters and yet she can’t?

Your job was simple, Senator McCain, chose a lady who wasn’t completely retarded. Someone who Hillary voters wouldn’t see as a cynical, blatantly obvious attempt at appealing to the least common denominator and you would have coasted to a victory. A lady like Elizabeth Dole (former presidential candidate), Christine Todd Whitman (a former governor of NJ with executive experience from a blue state! Hello?), Olympia Snowe, or Kaye Baily Hutchison. It would’t have been hard to do. These women have been very vetted in the past and appeal to both right wing nutjobs as well as the blue collar “Reagan Democrats” who voted for Hillary and are racist about Obama.

Since you chose a retard, my prediction of your easy victory November 4th has all but evaporated. You were on the verge of demolishing Obama. Out of 55 primary contests Obama only won the white vote in six of those. Obama lost every swing state and every large state except Illinois to Hillary. Since the vast majority of obama’s wins came at caucuses and not elections Hillary lost despite having more votes than him. You were gonna whoop him. He didn’t stand a chance.

I don’t like Obama. I think he’s a pussy who doesn’t say anything other than connotative platitudes and he can’t speak without a teleprompter any better than you or Bush. I disliked him and his cult-like followers so much that I was going to vote third party. Since you made the terrible decision to pick Sarah Palin as you VP I am hodling my nose and voting for Obama.

Obama tried in every way he could to lose. To snatch defeat from the jaws of victory as it were. He has the most annoying followers. He pissed off more than half of those who voted in the primary contests; a quarter of whom said they would not vote for Obama if he was the nominee for the Democrats. Then, a week or two after he sewed up the nominations he jerked to the right by voting for the un-American FISA bill, voting to expand the terrible “faith-based” initiatives program, he rejected public financing after promising to accept it and proved himself to be a shameless liar. Then, in an act of true stupidity, Obama rejected any possibility of reuniting the fractured party (of which I am a fractured member) by not picking Hillary Clinton to be his VP and instead he chose the gaffaw king, and Bush rubber stamp, Joe Biden, who manages to say lots of dumb things on the campaign trail.

You had this in the bag McCain. All you had to do is pick a woman who wasn’t a bimbo and you whould have won a minimum of 40 sates in a landslide. I guess you always want a challenge or something. So after selling your soul and going back on everything you believed for the last 40 years you are still going to lose. Again. Great job.