Despite what the Bush Administration wants us to believe, the failures that led up to the events of 9/11 weren’t a problem with the gathering of intelligence, but rather the analysis of evidence that had already been gathered. Although the investigation of these failures has begun, it is being criminally underfunded. The $3 million allocated may seem like a lot, but it’s nothing compared to the $50 million probe into the space shuttle disaster or the $65 million to probe Bill Clinton’s marital problems. Testimony only begun a couple weeks ago, but already fingers are being pointed at the the FAA, NORAD, the INS, and the SEC :

On the Chicago Board Options Exchange during the week before September 11, put options were purchased on American and United Airlines, the two airlines involved in the attacks. The investors who placed these orders were gambling that, in the short term, the stock prices of both airlines would plummet. Never before on the Chicago Exchange were such large amounts of United and American Airlines options traded. These investors netted a profit of at least $5 million after the September 11 attacks.

But the FBI and CIA aren’t in the clear either. There were countless warnings that were ignored prior to 9/11. The sensible thing to do in a situation like this would be to admit there were intelligence failures and launch a massive independent investigation to find out the weaknesses in the system. Instead we got Tom Ridge’s color chart, PATRIOT Act’s 1 & (possibly) 2, and the wars in Iraq & (possibly) Syria. Am I the only one who’s been wondering how things would be if (as Robin Cook put it) “the hanging chads in Florida had gone the other way”?

Pat Robertson has a few words to say about Syria (aka. the Sammy Hagar of the Axis of Evil) :

Did you know that Pat Robertson can leg-press 1500 pounds! How does he do it? Where does Pat find the time and energy to host a daily, national TV show, head a world-wide ministry, develop visionary scholars, while traveling the globe as a statesman?

Whoops, wrong quote. That was from a page about Pat’s Age-Defying Shakes (Not to be confused with his Age-Defying Protein Pancakes) Pat’s musings about Syria are here :

Syria is a creation of one of the big powers just like Iraq was. Iraq was a keystroke of Winston Churchill. He formed Iraq. It used to be Mesopotamia. And now it’s Iraq. And the same thing with Syria. There was a big fight over whether the British or the French would get it, and the French got it. Syria has a ba’athist regime just like Saddam Hussein.

Third grade sentence structure aside, Pat’s contention is that the invasion of Syria will somehow fulfill a Biblical prophecy. Of course like every other prophecy in the Bible, his “evidence” is quoted out of context and is really sketchy. I’m sure this will be used as the latest evidance that the Bible is full of prophecies and that Jesus is the fulfillment of those prophecies (despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary). The Old and New Testaments have been bundled together for many hundreds of years and the authors of the New Testament were clearly writing a book whose goal was to fulfill the percieved prophecies of the Old Testament. There’s nothing prophetical about that. Maybe Pat Robertson needs to learn the word “foreshadowing”.

And speaking of Pat, how are fundies not able to put two and two together and see the clear paralells between televangelism and the story of Jesus getting pissed at the money changers in the temple? The money changers weren’t Coinstar machines, they were assholes like Pat trying to make money off religious people. By the way, you can go to Pat Robertson’s site and get the great new book “The Bible Cure for Candida & Yeast Infections”.

I just got a tip from a friend of mine who was watching CNN that on Inside Politics they illustrated a piece on the senate presidential candidates by using a deck of cards. I’m going to keep an eye on CNN’s transcript page until they post the transcript of today’s show. This isn’t like John Kerry making a reference to regime change, this is a major news outlet drawing a comparison between senate leaders and wanted war criminals (the ones in Iraq, not the ones in the White House). You can email Judy Woodruff’s boss here and let him know what you think of this one-sided bullshit they call “news”. Like Alterman says, “What Liberal Media?”

PETA have once again pissed off a bunch of people in the hopes of getting attention. This time they’ve attracted the ire of Christian leaders for their Easter ad that features a picture of Jesus with his halo replaced with an orange slice under the heading “Jesus was the prince of peas” :

But Rabbi David Ostrich of Temple Beth-el, said historical evidence indicates that Jesus, like other Jews of the time, was a meat eater. He said a ritual part of the Passover meal was a lamb slaughtered in the Temple in Jerusalem.

I guess we can put this one in the same file as “French fries are from Belgium”.

Remember this the next time a liberal is blamed for waging “class war” when criticizing the president : American Airlines has been facing the possibility of bankruptcy recently. In order to cut costs and prevent layoffs, they’ve been trying to convince their workers to take a pay cut between 15 and 23 percent. The day after most of the unions approved pay cuts, it was revealed that the top executives had been hiding plans to secure millions of dollars in bonuses for themselves. The company has responded to the outrage by saying the executive bonuses were “necessary to prevent senior executives from taking better offers elsewhere”. What the hell?! Why would the airline want to reward the people who are responsible for the airline’s failure in the first place? They shouldn’t be given more money. They should be tarred and feathered. Of course now the company is saying they’re backing away from the bonus program, but considering the millions these executives make in salaries, stock options, and pensions, that’s not saying much. It still doesn’t excuse the deceptive tactics management was willing to go to in order to screw their employees without actually having to make any sacrifices themselves. Why is it that an executive that works at a failing company is still treated like the goose who laid the golden egg while his/her employees are expected to pay for this failed leadership in the form of pay cuts, benefit reductions, and layoffs?

Did you guys hear the one about Saddam Hussein starring in a gay porn film?

In the newly uncovered 86-minute prison flick, Saddam, then just 34, plays a naive young peasant who is wrongly convicted and sent to jail. He is initiated into homosexuality by a series of older and more experienced cons.

“Saddam’s acting in the picture is actually quite good,” al-Sabah notes. “One scene, in which he buries his face in a pillow and cries, is so touching you almost can forget you’re watching a low-budget sexploitation film.”

This is obviously fake (courtesy of the Weekly World News), but that didn’t stop some fools from actually believing it’s true. Then again, if George Bush can convince Americans that he’s interested in liberating the Iraqi people, then I guess they can be convinced of anything.

Well, I finally removed the Iraq Body count because a) we’ll probably never know how many civilians were killed and b) our goverment obviously doesn’t care enough to even count the number of innocent people they killed. Iraq Body Count’s numbers were based on reports from the media and we all know how reliable the embeded reporters have been. As great as IBC has been, I think we’re likely to get much more reliable information in the months to come from the Red Cross, UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the World health Organization :

“At the moment in Iraq the biggest public health problem is the level of civilian causalties, there is no question about that,” Iain Simpson, a spokesman for the World Health Organisation (WHO) told journalists Friday.

“The reports from Baghdad, Karbala and Hilla are very worrying indeed,” he said, insisting that aid agencies needed access to Iraq to help the wounded.

I bet humanitarian relief would go much more smoothly if the U.S. military would spend more time cleaning up all the unexploded cluster bomb shells before they kill any more kids and less time blocking access to people in need :

U.S. forces have refused a Save the Children plane permission to land in northern Iraq to deliver aid, breaching the Geneva Convention and “costing children their lives,” the British aid agency said on Thursday.

Save the Children said in a statement it had been trying for more than a week to land a plane in Arbil carrying enough medical supplies to treat 40,000 people and emergency feeding kits for malnourished children.

A U.S. official told the charity no aid flights would be allowed until the area was safe but the U.N. has already declared Arbil a “safe and secure” area, the charity said.

When the Murray, Utah city council decided they wanted to have a prayer at city meetings, rather than fight the policy on constitutional grounds, a local atheist decided to test the limits of this new religious policy. When Tom Snyder wasn’t allowed to say his prayer, he took them to court :

He and his lawyer have been pursuing the lawsuit since 1994, when Snyder filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Salt Lake City suburb for allowing other pre-meeting prayers but refusing to let him offer a prayer addressed to “Our Mother, who art in heaven.”

Among other things, the prayer asked for deliverance “from the evil of forced religious worship now sought to be imposed upon the people … by the actions of misguided, weak and stupid politicians, who abuse power in their own self-righteousness.”

Focus on the Family, one of the most outspoken anti-gay groups this side of Rev. Phelps, is slashing its budget by $5 million and laying of employees. Among other things, they’re one of the groups that likes to promote the insane notion that gays can be “cured”. It’s too bad nobody has found a cure for “self-righteous asshole” yet :

?Love Won Out? an FOC sponsored program that claims to convert gays to heterosexuality has been scaled back. The program, discredited by psychiatrists, has traveled across the US and Canada over the past year but attracted only small audiences.

Earlier this week FOC announced John Paulk who had headed up its Homosexuality and Gender Department, was leaving the ministry but did not say why. Today a source at the ministry did not deny that FOC’s money troubles was a large part of the reason.

Paulk who was touted for years as a successful example that gays can be ‘cured’ led FOC’s ex-gay movement. Three years ago though he was spotted and photographed in a well known Washington gay bar. The ensuing publicity led to his removal as chairman of ex-gay group Exodus although he retained a key post at FOC until this week.

Fred Phelps (of godhatesfags.com, godhatesamerica.com, and various funeral protests) has a couple new crusades :

We’ve been [up to New York] three times since Sept. 11 picketing with big signs that say “Thank God For Sept. 11″ and that the FDNY is a fag fire department because they’re laced with fags and their fag agenda and their chaplain was fag priest named Mychal Judge. And any outfit that’s that dumb or evil — I mean an out-of-the closet fag priest?! And they bragged about it! And they need to be picketed. And they’re not heroes and we got signs that say all that. When St. Patrick’s Cathedral was honoring them on a Sunday not long after Sept. 11 and they had all those fire trucks lined up there and they’re praising them to the high heavens then we were over there with signs saying that they’re not heroes and they’re all bound for hell. Now, that’s the way you preach.

Well, I don’t know if [Mr. Rogers was] gay or not but he’s one of the foremost proponents of ‘It’s OK to be Gay.’ And from the church he got ordained by and the Presbyterian church he goes to in Pittsburgh which is one of the few boldly fag-promoting churches, that’s one of the few.

You’ve got a guy (Mr. Rogers) who has got millions of children’s ears and he says he’s gonna shoot straight to them about the weighty matters of life, death, divorce — and then he steps gingerly around the fact that if you mess with that fag lifestyle you gonna split hell wide open.

Look, he went straight to hell. If everybody in the world is holding some candlelight vigil and catawalling about what a wonderful guy he was using the event of his death to preach propaganda lies from the devil and hell, why should it seem strange for an old time Baptist preacher to say ‘Wait a moment please?”?

He’s in hell. And if you’re putting out cartoons depicting that he’s in heaven, you’ve got no basis for it. Do you want to make the argument that he’s in heaven?

Needless to say, the views of Fred Phelps are another example of people taking religion too seriously. Although the mainstream (ie. sane, normal, loving, etc.) religious folks would argue that the religious fervor of Fred Phelps (and his spiritual brethren the KKK) is based on misinterpretation of the bible, it seems to me that Phelps is doing what any other religious leader does : taking parts of the bible literally and out of context in order to further their own religious goals.

There is no definitive interpretation of the bible. God never sent Moses down the mountain with a study guide (or a translation guide for that matter). It’s ludicrous to think that a book that has many different authors and was written thousands of years ago would have a specific interpretation. If the bible can’t even get the details of the crucifixion correct (Did Jesus or Simon carry the cross? What was written on the sign on the cross? What time was Jesus crucified? What were Jesus’s last words?), then why is it proclaimed to be the literal word of god by its followers? For a book that’s hundreds of pages long, it’s rare to see more than 2-3 lines being quoted at a time. Of course the reason for this is there’s enough crazy bullshit in the bible to support any radical agenda.