Our "allies", Pakistan

Pakistan is trying the doctor who helped catch Osama bin Laden for treason. Which doesn't surprise me, given that Osama bin Laden was killed basically in the Pakistani equivalent of West Point and there's no way that the Army didn't know he was there on their doorstep.

These are our "allies". Yeah, right. If Pakistan didn't have dozens of nukes I'd say just get the hell out of Afghanistan and Pakistan and cut'em off and let'em rot. Unfortunately, having dozens of nukes they can give to terrorists or lob via missiles at our call centers across the border in India sorta makes it difficult to ignore Pakistan...

Shorter: WASF.

-- Badtux the Gruntled Penguin

The winner of the debate was...

... Democrats. The most amazing thing was when the crowd bloodthirstily clapped when Goodhair boasted of how many innocent people he'd executed. Yeah, not a lot of Democrats in that crowd. Anyhow, Crazy White (Lady) and the Seven Dwarfs put on the show we've been expecting to see, even though the dwarf "Boring" got replaced with the dwarf "Dopey" for this debate. Hmm, let's name the dwarfs. Sleazy, Grumpy, Creepy, Dopey, Dope, Goldy, and Skeezy. What a collection. And of course Crazy White complements them quite well.

Which reminds me, the preliminaries for Wet Your Pants Day have started with the usual bogus terror alert to keep us all anxious for kindly Big Brother to protect us from them mean terriers who want to destroy our freedoms (huh, don't terriers usually just wanna destroy your shoes?!) and thus we must destroy our freedoms first or the terriers win and... err... I think I lost the plot here. But that's okay, the whole fucking nation lost the plot on September 11, 2001, so remember, we must all wet our pants on command in three days or Zombie Osama will KILL US ALL and the terriers will win!

- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Osama bin Laden dead

The President broke into network TV to announce that Osama bin Laden was killed today by a U.S. military team which assaulted a mansion in a suburb of Islamabad, Pakistan. His body is now in American hands.

Personally I wish they'd take the murderous bastard and put his head on a pike and tie it to a flagpole on the site of the former WTC until the birds rip all the flesh from the bones and the worms finish off the interior of the skull. But I'm just bloody-minded that way.

Now here's the question, President Obama: We've got Osama. Can we leave Afghanistan, now?

-- Badtux the Bloody-minded Penguin

And some borrowed snark:

Dear Mr. Bush,

We are sorry to inform you that in spite of efforts by ISI and Army of Pakistan on your behalf, your rental property in Abbottabad has been unexpectedly vacated. As the previous tenant gave no notice and failed to leave the premises "Broom Clean" you are not obligated to direct the return of the substantial security deposit or tenant improvement allocation. Payments to your Haliburton Account in the Cayman Islands will resume upon the next tenants occupancy.

Best Regards
Omar

And Fox News celebrates:

Alert cops foil terrorist attack

Alert cops in Cumberland County, PA, foiled a terrorist attack yesterday when they arrested two suspects who were gathering together terror weapons in hopes of overthrowing the government of the United States of America and imposing sharia law upon the land.

Oh wait.... Raymond Peake and Thomas Tuso are white. And not Muslim. So they're not terrorists. They're just common criminals. Alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

My congratulations to the Obama administration

They successfully have obtained a guilty plea from Osama bin Laden's chef. Who, presumably, pled guilty to providing Compote of Mass Destruction.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

But in more optimistic news...

the Department of Homeland Security's latest No Fly List is protecting us from those terrorist six-year-old Hannah Montana fans. Here is little terrorist Alyssa Thomas with her Musical Weapon of Terroristic Terror: The horror! Oh the horror! Protect me, oh Big Brother!

-- Badtux the Terror Penguin

America the Brave

For some definition of brave that includes standing up to a terror threat that is... err... light, flaky and buttery.

Yes, the terror threat that caused the St. Petersburg (Florida) courthouse to be evacuated was... a croissant. In a paper bag. Because, you know, all those French are nothing but trouble.

Says Bryan at Why Now::

I think people would like to believe that this is a rare occurrence, but, alas, the US spends a hell of a lot of money every year blowing up people’s lunches. Not that long ago cops could be depended on to eat found lunches, not detonate a blob of C4 near them. [There are rumors that the Air Force EOD guys do eat the lunches, but blow up the bag because they like excuses to blow things up.]

I think Fixer at Alternate Brain can verify the validity of that last sentence ;).

Ah, America the Brave. For some definition of "brave" that includes cringing in fear of killer croissants. Siiiiiiigh!

-- Badtux the "Reality is snarkier than penguin snark" Penguin

War on... what again?

Just thinking about the Underpants Bomber. I haven't posted on it before because, well, there's no "there" there. Some cretin tried to light his junk, got tackled by other passengers, problem ended. Worthy of about 15 minutes on the nightly news, then story over until the moron goes to trial, at which point he gets another 15 minutes of fame. Yawn. BORE-ing.

But then there came the collective underwear-soiling reaction of the Reich Wing and their enablers in the press, a collective underwear-soiling that is still going on today, and slowly I realized that the Underpants Bomber is a perfect symbol of the "War on Terror". Because the war isn't *really* on "terror" (which, after all, is a tactic, and you can't go to war with a tactic). Rather, it's really a War on Clean Undies -- a concerted attempt to have the American public soil their undies whenever prompted to do so. And the Underpants Bomber's roasted undies are the perfect symbol to use to prompt the American people to soil their undies once again.

Clean undies. According to the Reich Wing, they're the terrorist's best friends. Soil your undies upon prompting by your Party commissars in the media, or the terrorists win!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

The latest enemy of America!

What, you thought it was radical Islamists? No no, we all know what the real enemy of America is... 76 year old Jewish grannies from Brooklyn. Oy!

-- Badtux the Astounded Penguin

Quote of the day

If bin Laden et al. were really serious about attacking the US they would start a health insurance company, and make a lot of money while killing Americans… you know, like Aetna and Blue Cross.

-- Bryan at Why Now

Charles Manson is a nursery school teacher, say Republicans

What do Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, Jerry Brudos, Eric Rudolph, and Jeffrey Dahmer all have in common? Well, according to House Minority Leader John Boner err Boehner, all of them are cream-puffs compared to a bunch of illiterate goat herders, taxi drivers, and smugglers. Yeppers, that's right. We can't bring suspected terrorists, mostly illiterate goat herders with delusions of granduer, into America and give them a trial because, wait for it, they're more dangerous than Jeffrey Dahmer! Gah! The stupidity! It burns! It burns!

The fact of the matter, of course, is that the United States is the world's largest prison state with a full 3% of its population in prison or on parole at any given time, and has no shortage of places to stash even the most vile and evil prisoners, people who make these illiterate goat herders look like boy scouts. If it is decided to stash some of the prisoners currently at Guantanamo into a Supermax somewhere here in the US while they are tried, there's no (zero) chance that these people will get anywhere near the general population. If found innocent, there's no (zero) chance that they would actually get released into the general population -- instead they'd go into immigration prisons to be deported.

But those are facts. And, of course, for Republicans, facts don't matter, only politics matters, and they think they're going to be able to play politics by spewing nonsense and lies. Hey, it worked during the 2006 and 2008 elections, right? (Hmm, you think the American public is *finally* starting to catch on that the Republicans, are, like, full of shit?!).

-- Badtux the Prison Penguin

A summary of U.S. interrogation policy

Here is a summary of U.S. interrogation policies during the Bush Administration:

Oops, that was the Gestapo's interrogation policies. No matter. They weren't any different from the real U.S. interrogation policies. Which constituted torture, according to the Red Cross and pretty much every other human rights organization.

So, will the perpetrators of torture find themselves on trial for war crimes? To find out the answer to that question, this penguin turns to our crack panel of judges: I think that means "no". After all, that would require some self-examination and effort on our part. Can't have that, can we?!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

I can haz WMD?

The slobbering morons at the Hoover Institute, established by the worst President evah (though George W. Bush may have displaced him), now inform us that... spam and viruses are as deadly as nuclear weapons.

Really? I haven't noticed spam making me glow in the dark. I've never seen spam kill anybody. Spam is like the common goddamned cold, for cryin' out loud -- it's always out there, and it can make you miserable, but you simply don't die from the shit.

But none of that matters to the drooling cretins at the Hoover Institute, cretins so moronic that they propose that KIDS with M-16's be deployed to fight spam. WTF? What goddamned good is siccing the National Guard on spammers going to do? What we need to do is sic law enforcement on them -- and if any ISP's don't cooperate, shut them down. If they're overseas ISP's, cut them off -- no (zero) access to the civilized world from their IP address ranges. I mean, this isn't rocket science, folks. We know how to take down spammers. It's just that they've been hiding behind foreign ISP's. Well, there's an easy way to handle that -- simply cut off any ISP which refuses to cooperate in taking down spammers -- but our backbone providers here in the United States won't do it, and thus far there's no law to make'em do it. But we can fix that. We don't need the goddamned National Guard to handle this thing. I mean, we got tens of thousands of paramilitary policemen on SWAT teams all around the country who can slam through ISP doors with their jackboots to force them to comply with court orders perfectly well, thank you.

So what are the dunce boys from the Hoover Institute up to? Hell if I know. I suppose they needed to write something to get their next quarter's Wingnut Welfare, and this is the drool they dribbled to justify their Wingnut Welfare. But the fact that there's people who might actually take this bullshit seriously -- who think a virus or spam can actually, well, kill people, just like atomic bombs -- sorta rankles this here penguin who grew up under the runway of a major SAC airbase knowin' he was gonna fuckin' die if the Soviets ever decided to actually launch their missiles (we didn't practice duck-and-cover in our city, there was no fuckin' point, we were all deader than Richard Nixon and Zombie Ronald Reagan if the big one lit off and we damn well knew it). Morons. Cretins. Idiots. GAH! THE STUPID! IT BURNS, IT BURNS!

-- Badtux the "Virus=nuke?!" Penguin

Below: A typical Hoover Institute resident scholar performs a study of adding seafood to one's diet, and finds it a bit more difficult than expected...

Britain declares a new terrorist state

Well, now that North Korea has been struck from the list of official terrorist states, there's room on the list for a new one. There's plenty of nasty states out there, so I'm sure that there was no shortage of candidates. Finally, after much thought, a new terrorist state was found to take its rightful place on this list of awful terrorist states. And the name of this terrorist state is... Iceland.

Yes, Iceland. Land of peaceful Nords and Celts with no military, land of Björk and Magnús Scheving (Lazytown, in case you don't have toddlers). And while I think Björk is over-rated and Lazytown is just demented, terrorists? Really?

What this points out is the problem with anti-terrorism legislation. When you have over-broad legislation that basically can define anything and anybody as a terrorist, everybody is a terrorist. The British law being used to seize Iceland's assets in Britain is not much different from the equivalent U.S. law. Sad to say, these laws are also very popular both in the United States and in Britain because people want to be "safe". But when we are all terrorists under these over-broad laws, how can any of us be safe?

-- Badtux the As-terrorist-as-Björk Penguin

H/T to Earthbound Misfit

OMG! Terrierists!

Department of Vaterland Security Skeletor appeared at a press conference today and says, OMG, there's a big chance of terrier attacks as the 7th anniversary of 9/11 comes up! (And BTW, that's seven years -- *SEVEN YEARS* -- that Osama bin Laden has gotten away scot-free for killing thousands of Americans, rather than all American resources being used to bring that scumbag to justice instead they're being dumped into the world's biggest catbox i.e. the Mess in Mesopotamia). I wonder, is there an election coming up or somethin'?

But then I remember that I have my own built-in terrier defenses at home (called "Mencken" and "Fang"), and feel relieved. Here is an example of this crack terrier defense system in action:

Errm... perhaps I should be a bit more worried after all...

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

OMG I got defense against terrierists!

Here, in a super-secret training film, is one of our brave defenders of the nation defending our nation from those nasty terrier attacks:

I feel safer already. Vaterland Security Secretary Skeletor (and Doctor Princess), I salute you for pointing out that I already had terrier defenses in my home!

-- Badtux the Youtubing Penguin
Yes, *really* going whole-hog on the YouTube!

Busting the Anthrax myth

Stratfor brings reality into the anthrax-as-weapon discussion. Says Stratfor: It ain't as easy as sci-fi thrillers make it sound. For example:

The [Aum terrorist] group sprayed thousands of gallons of aerosolized liquid anthrax in Tokyo. This time, Aum not only employed its fleet of sprayer trucks but also used aerosol sprayers mounted on the roof of their headquarters to disperse a cloud of aerosolized anthrax over the city. Again, the attacks produced no results and were not even noticed.

Oooh, I'm so scared of anthrax!

Reality is that terrorists go with what gets them the most bang for the buck. A single suicide bombing in Iraq typically kills more people than have been killed in all the anthrax attacks in known history -- combined. And it takes less than a hundred bucks worth of explosives, not a massive R&D laboratory and fancy equipment and shit. The humble truck bomb that blew up the Oklahoma City federal courthouse is what we should be concerned about insofar as terrorism is concerned. Some bug that even the most highly weaponized version, out of our own weapons lab, can't manage to kill more than a dozen people total despite multiple attacks... uhm, yeah. About those truck bombs...

-- Badtux the Practical Penguin

Anthrax terror attack finally solved?

Scientist about to be charged with terror attack "commits suicide".

Funny how that always seems to happen in these cases.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

625,000 American casualties in Iraq

Folks say "well, sure, the Iraq war has been hard on Iraqis, but at least there aren't hundreds of thousands of American dead." Well, true enough. Modern body armor will keep our soldiers from dying. But 620,000 soldiers and Marines -- or roughly 1/3rd of those deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan -- come back and end up either disabled or suffering PTSD. To quote a report on the topic:

According to an April 2008 study by the Rand Corporation, 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans currently suffer from post traumatic stress disorder or major depression. Another 320,000 suffer from traumatic brain injury, physical brain damage. A majority are not receiving help from the Pentagon and VA system which are more concerned with concealing unpleasant facts than they are with providing care.

And from the Bush Administration, all you hear is that adequate VA care for these disabled is "pork", thus why they're fighting the latest war funding act which calls for full funding for the VA as well as full funding of the GI Bill to pay for college for veterans. They call this "pork". And say we can't afford this -- the minimum that we owe to veterans for sending them into harm's way in a useless war. For shame, George W. Bush and Republicans. For shame. Why do you hate our veterans so much? Is it because they're heros, and you're just a draft dodging dry drunk whose daddy's friends bought you the Presidency but you will always, forever and ever, be a failure? Or is it just that you're an evil mean-spirited dry drunk? I suppose we'll never know...

-- Badtux the Unsnarky Penguin

DHS: Defending America from tourists

Dear Department of Vaterland Security: you're supposed to be protecting us from *terrorists*, not *tourists*. Note to DHS staffers. The second letter in "tourists" is an *o*, not an *e*, and "tourist" only has one "r". I realize that since you're a buncha bucktooth foulmouth backwoods cretins you pronounce "terrorist" the same way as "tourist", but believe me, they're not the same thing. "Terrorists" bring bombs. "Tourists" bring money. Money good. Bombs bad. See? Terrorist bring bomb, terrorist bad. Tourist bring money, tourist good. Got it? Alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin