It is often in the excuses and in the apologies that one finds the real offense. Looking back on the domestic political “surge” which the populist right has been celebrating since last month, I found myself most dispirited by the manner in which the more sophisticated conservatives attempted to conjure the nasty bits away.
Here, for example, was Ross Douthat, the voice of moderate conservatism on the New York Times op-ed page. He was replying to a number of critics who had pointed out that Glenn Beck, in his rallies and broadcasts, had been channeling the forgotten voice of the John Birch Society, megaphone of Strangelovian paranoia from the 1950s and 1960s. His soothing message:
Hitchens Blasts Tea Party: 'The Mad Ideas of Exploded Crackpots And Bigots'
Pakistanis protest civilian deaths in U.S. drone attacks
Victims of U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan took to the streets for the first time here Friday, as a new report claims that there are significant numbers of civilian casualties from the strikes and a lawsuit seeks hundreds of millions of dollars in damages from the CIA for those mistakenly injured or killed.
Fifteen people injured in the attacks or who claimed to have had family members killed in the bombardment appeared in public Friday and officially joined the $500 million lawsuit that began last month with just one claimant in the Pakistani courts.
Certain Drug Combinations May Beat Back Aggressive Breast Cancer
Combinations of targeted therapies for an especially aggressive type of breast cancer could potentially usher the majority of affected patients into remission, researchers at a major breast cancer meeting said Friday. Presenting results from three trials at the annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, scientists explained that administering two or more drugs designed to treat HER2-positive tumors resulted in much higher remission rates than doses of any one drug or standard chemotherapy alone.
Given to patients several weeks before cancer surgery, with or without chemotherapy, the medications often shrank tumors dramatically or eradicated them altogether, the researchers said.
WikiLeaks: Cables reveal U.S. military role in Muslim world
From the Saudi-Yemen border to lawless Somalia and the north-central African desert, the U.S. military is more engaged in armed conflicts in the Muslim world than the U.S. government openly acknowledges, according to cables released by the WikiLeaks website.
U.S. officials have struck relationships with regimes that generally aren't considered allies in the war against terrorism, and while the cables show U.S. diplomats admonishing the regimes to respect the laws of war, they also underscore the perils of using advanced military technologies in complex, remote battlefields with sometimes shifty friends.
E.P.A. Delays Tougher Rules on Emissions
The Obama administration is retreating on long-delayed environmental regulations — new rules governing smog and toxic emissions from industrial boilers — as it adjusts to a changed political dynamic in Washington with a more muscular Republican opposition. The move to delay the rules, announced this week by the Environmental Protection Agency, will leave in place policies set by President George W. Bush. President Obama ran for office promising tougher standards, and the new rules were set to take effect over the next several weeks.
Now, the agency says, it needs until July 2011 to further analyze scientific and health studies of the smog rules and until April 2012 on the boiler regulation. Mr. Obama, having just cut a painful deal with Republicans intended to stimulate the economy, can ill afford to be seen as simultaneously throttling the fragile recovery by imposing a sheaf of expensive new environmental regulations that critics say will cost jobs.
US Department Of State Cleared The Wikileaks Documents
Wikileaks' reluctance to post the materials to the internet probably results from a combination of factors. First and foremost, they have been threatened with prosecution in the US although this author believes that is no more than a bluff and accused of having "blood on their hands" already, despite the fact that even after several months, they haven't yet released the scandalous "Afghan war logs" documents which, among other things, accused the Pakistani ISI of running a suicide bomber network in Kabul, and former DG ISI Hamid Gul of being the ISI's liaison to the Taliban.
Tortured FBI whistleblower warns WikiLeaks fans
An FBI whistleblower has alerted that supporting WikiLeaks founder, Julius Assange and subsequently calling for revolution due to government cover-ups are intended results of a counterintelligence reverse tactic not in best interest of the public.
Bob Levin, FBI targeted whistleblower since 2000, knows sophisticated counterintelligence tactics designed to manipulate the unwitting.
“People NEED to be supporting Julian Assange through this ridiculous time. What a brave man for sharing the truth with the world. The governments of the world are just digging themselves a hole. IT'S TIME FOR A REVOLUTION!!!”
WikiLeaks cables: Pfizer used dirty tricks to avoid clinical trial payout
The world's biggest pharmaceutical company hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial drug trial involving children with meningitis, according to a leaked US embassy cable. Pfizer was sued by the Nigerian state and federal authorities, who claimed that children were harmed by a new antibiotic, Trovan, during the trial, which took place in the middle of a meningitis epidemic of unprecedented scale in Kano in the north of Nigeria in 1996.
Last year, the company came to a tentative settlement with the Kano state government which was to cost it $75m.
Nigeria: Halliburton plans plea bargain in Cheney corruption case
Halliburton is planning to make a plea bargain in former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's corruption case, Nigerian officials told GlobalPost. Nigeria's anti-corruption agency charged Cheney as the head of Halliburton when its engineering subsidiary, KBR, allegedly paid bribes totaling $180 million to secure contracts worth $6 billion.
KBR has admitted to bribing officials. Last year the company pleaded guilty in a U.S. federal court to paying the bribes to Nigerian officials prior to 2007, when it was a subsidiary of Halliburton. KBR, which is now independent from Halliburton, agreed to pay $597 million in fines, according to the Associated Press.
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