Post offfice hostage taker angry at Tea Bagger targets: Obama, taxes, gun control

A wheel-chair bound registered sex offender, angry at the typical targets of the "Tea Bagger" movement: taxes, gun control, and the nation's first black president, Barack Obama, and distressed because his two year old pick up truck was about to be repossessed, took three people hostage using handguns and a fake bomb.

The man, with a criminal record and registered as a sex offender in Florida, railed about Obama and taxes, at first seemed intent on killing people. According to one of the hostages, quoted in an Associated Press article printed in the Austin Statesman:

"There was no mission statement. No demands made. No purpose in what he was doing. There was no reason for any of it," said Jimmy Oliver, 41, one of the hostages. "He just wanted to destroy a federal building with a lot of people. Once we established a relationship, he decided destroying people wasn't in the cards."

The gunman said he had no money, and his 2007 Dodge diesel pickup was about to be repossessed. Mostly, he railed against the government — high taxes, gun control and President Barack Obama.

"He was really down on the government," Oliver said. "About the government taking over the right to bear arms ... he was angry at the government overtaxing us."

After eight hours, he turned the hostages loose and surrendered to authorities, later apologizing during a arraignment in U.S. District Court that he had "got everyone out on Christmas."

Proposed ban on Muslims in US military doesn't go far enough?

The American Family Association, a religious organization described as conservative and Christian, has called for a ban on service in the U.S. military by those of the Muslim faith, according to Mother Jones.

This might seem shocking at first, flying in the face of U.S. constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and separation of church and state.

But it's simply addressing a basic fact: the faith professed by Muslims might well prevent them from full service.

And, I suggest, the proposed ban may not go far enough.

For the very simple reason that, like the Muslims, there are other faiths whose teachings proscribe such service. The simple and unavoidable fact is that other religions share these proscriptions.

Yes, Muslims share, with at least two other major religious groups, fundamental spiritual edicts which one would think would prevent obedient service in the military.

Like Christians and Jews, with whom they share what Christian's call "the Old Testament," Muslims profess obedience to the Ten Commandments handed down by Moses.

And the edict is clear from one of those Commandments: Thou shalt not kill.

Ban 'em all... 

 

Bearding the Fox in its den...

This interesting second thoughts piece from Newser blogger and founder, Michael Wolff, takes a second look at the conventional wisdom evinced by most of the blathering class: that the Obama administration's frontal assault on Fox News, depicting it as the propaganda mill that so many on the left and even in the middle feel it to be, is madness.

His conclusions might hearten many outside the conservative quarter.

30 Senate Republicans vote to shield Halliburton and other defense contractors from rape charges

30 Republican senators voted against an amendment designed to protect woman employees of US defense contractors from rape, physical abuse, and other abusive workplace practices, claiming to do anything else would amount to government interference with commerce, since the rapes and other abuse are no one else's business but the companies and the victims. If that sounds weird, read on and find out the kind of business rights that Republicans like former presidential candidate John McCain -- who this writer is ashamed to say he voted for in 2000's GOP primary -- were trying to protect from government interference:

... Jones, who was 20 at the time, says she was fed a knockout drug while drinking with KBR firefighters.

"When she awoke the next morning still affected by the drug, she found her body naked and severely bruised, with lacerations to her vagina and anus, blood running down her leg, her breast implants ruptured and her pectoral muscles torn‚ which would later require reconstructive surgery. Upon walking to the rest room, she passed out again," the papers say.

Jones was treated by a US army doctor who gave forensic evidence to company officials. She says the firm placed her under guard in a shipping container and she was released only after her father asked the US embassy to intervene. When the forensic evidence was handed to investigators two years later, crucial photographs and notes were missing.

Jones says she identified one of the men who attacked her after he confessed, but that Halliburton/KBR prevented her from taking legal action against him or the company by pointing to a clause in her contract requiring disputes to go to arbitration.

John McCain and 29 of his Republican colleagues in the Senate want to make sure no one interferes with Halliburton/KBR's right to make that nasty busy just go away...

Republicans join the Taliban in condemning Obama Nobel Peace Prize

Many -- including, we suspect, the president himself --  were surprised by today's announcement that the Nobel Peace Prize was going to U.S. President, Barack Obama.

Reactions were largely laudatory, occasionally bemused, but about the only folks coming right out and condemning the largely unexpected award were the U.S.'s number one enemies, the Afghan/Pakistani Taliban, joined by a number of prominent members of the U.S.'s own putatively loyal opposition, the Republican Party.

Read selected quotes from around the world  in the Associated Press.

Joe Wilson, R-SC, just doesn't get it...

Representative Joe Wilson, Republican from South Carolina, just doesn't seem to get it.

Chastened, apparently, by the outrage expressed by other members of Congress in both houses and on both sides of the aisle after Wilson heckled the President as he attempted to address Congress and the US citizenry, Rep. Wilson quickly offered a private apology to President Obama.

That's between him and the President, as far as I'm concerned.

What's not resolved is the audacious insult to the US citizenry who elected the President.

Wilson may not owe Barack Obama any further apology -- but, to my way of thinking, he owes the American people a huge apology.

And a resignation.

 

An interesting slip of the tongue...

This reader couldn't help but not an interesting slip of the tongue from Lindsay Graham, one of the few Republican politicians from South Carolina not caught up in a political or sexual scandal.

While trying to run interference for South Carolina representative Joe Wilson, who may be facing punitive action in Congress for his startling breach of Congressional decorum in yelling "You lie!" at the President of the United States as he addressed Congress and the American people, Graham let slip this interesting locution, as quoted by the Associated Press:

"Joe's a good man. He made a mistake," Graham said. "Don't give up on fighting health care. But what he said was inappropriate. This needs to come to the end for the good of Joe, South Carolina and the country. I'll leave it up to his good counsel as to what to do next."

Don't give up fighting health care.

Making sure Americans are faced with an ever increasing health care burden and ever higher insurance and health care costs has apparently become job number one for the rump Republicans remaining in office as they gin up a blizzard of lies, misdirection, and distortion in order to prevent health care reform.