Sunday Drive: The King of Love My Shepherd Is

For the victims of terror and violence in New Zealand and everywhere: based on the Twenty-third Psalm.

The King of love my Shepherd is,
Whose goodness faileth never,
I nothing lack if I am His
And He is mine forever.

Where streams of living water flow
My ransomed soul He leadeth,
And where the verdant pastures grow,
With food celestial feedeth.

Perverse and foolish oft I strayed,
But yet in love He sought me,
And on His shoulder gently laid,
And home, rejoicing, brought me.

In death’s dark vale I fear no ill
With Thee, dear Lord, beside me;
Thy rod and staff my comfort still,
Thy cross before to guide me.

Thou spread’st a table in my sight;
Thy unction grace bestoweth;
And O what transport of delight
From Thy pure chalice floweth!

And so through all the length of days
Thy goodness faileth never;
Good Shepherd, may I sing Thy praise
Within Thy house forever.

Westminster Attack

Map from the BBC report; click to enlarge.

A crazed terrorist plowed through pedestrians on Westminster Bridge in London today, then tried to enter Parliament.  Your Head Trucker has once upon a time walked across that very bridge, and up and down the Thames embankment there in the shadow of Big Ben, so he feels this as a rather personal affront.  My heart goes out to all the victims and their families, and to the British people.

This grievous outrage, this demonic disregard for human life is beyond horrifying.  I don't know how Western society can ever rid itself of the murderous microbes it is infected with, without suppressing all civil liberties for the rest of the population, but something has to be done.  This cannot go on.

BBC report on the attack.

Telegraph report.

Guardian report.

Prime Minister Theresa May was in Parliament at the time of the attack and was quickly taken to safety by her security guards.  She later made a statement to the press in front of Number 10 Downing Street:




Update, 3/23/17, 4:20 p.m.: I am pleased to see that the old indomitable British spirit is still very much alive, as witness this computer-generated Underground notice now making the rounds of social media over there:

The Prime Minister and others praised it in Parliament, as the Guardian reports here.

Horror, Again

This time on the French Riviera, where a cowardly, insignificant, worthless little POS has blighted hundreds of lives and sent himself straight to hell.  I'm not the only one who thinks so, as the Guardian reports:

The Nice attacks have been condemned, by religious and political leaders across the Muslim and Arab world on Arabic-language and English social media.

Egypt’s Grand Mufti lambasted “saboteurs who follow Satan (who will) be damned in this life & in the hereafter.”

Similar sentiments were expressed by the popular Saudi cleric, Sheikh Salman al-Auda, who said the killer would be cursed by “god, his angels and all human beings.” His remarks came after many comments on social media attacked Muslims.

Egypt’s Al-Azhar university, Sunni Islam’s leading centre of learning, said that the “vile terrorist attack” contradicted Islam and called for “uniting efforts to defeat terrorism and rid the world of its evil.”

Tunisia said that the attacker, who police said held joint French-Tunisian citizenship, had committed an act of “extreme cowardice” and expressed solidarity with France against the “scourge of terrorism”.

Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbours issued a joint statement saying that they “strongly” condemned the “terrorist” act in Nice. “The Gulf Cooperation Council states stand in solidarity with the French republic following this cowardly criminal incident whose perpetrators have been stripped of all moral and human values,” the bloc’s secretary general, Abdullatif al-Zayani, said.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi condemned “in the strongest terms the vile terrorist attack”, his office said.

Arab League chief Ahmed Abul Gheit denounced the “craven terrorist attack”, according to his spokesman.

Live coverage from France 24 in English:

Horror in Orlando

Your Head Trucker slept late this afternoon and is just now taking in the grievous news of what is the deadliest shooting in American history, according to President Obama:



Full text of the President's remarks here.

The President has also ordered U. S. flags to be flown at half-staff for the next three days.

I have no words, only thoughts of sympathy and condolence for the wounded and the families of the dead.


New York Times account of the massacre.

Washington Post account.

Los Angeles Times account.

Orlando Sentinel account.


Queen Elizabeth II issued a statement of sympathy:

Prince Philip and I have been shocked by the events in Orlando. Our thoughts and prayers are with all those who have been affected.

Pope Francis condemned the massacre:

The terrible massacre that has taken place in Orlando, with its dreadfully high number of innocent victims, has caused in Pope Francis, and in all of us, the deepest feelings of horror and condemnation, of pain and turmoil before this new manifestation of homicidal folly and senseless hatred. Pope Francis joins the families of the victims and all of the injured in prayer and in compassion. Sharing in their indescribable suffering he entrusts them to the Lord so they may find comfort. We all hope that ways may be found, as soon as possible, to effectively identify and contrast the causes of such terrible and absurd violence which so deeply upsets the desire for peace of the American people and of the whole of humanity.

Time magazine reports reactions from other world leaders and notables here.


From Reuters:

Via Reluctant Rebel:

Obama: "Freedom Is More Powerful than Fear"

Last night, the President addressed the nation from the Oval Office for only the third time in his presidency, speaking about the threat of terrorism and the means to overcome it:




As might be expected, prominent Republicans immediately denounced the speech.

Full text of the President's remarks here.


Update, 7 p.m.: Adam Glopnik writes about Obama's speech and Republican double-talk in the New Yorker, concluding:

If the gun lobby ever spoke honestly, what they would say is that of course we are broadly responsible for these killings, but regular mass killings of innocent people is the price we pay for the liberty to own whatever guns we want, in order to be protected from a phantom threat we cannot name. That is their actual belief, although one sees, on examining it, why they never want to state it quite so clearly. So there will be ever more mass gun murders, some to be accepted blankly as the cost of liberty, others to become the occasion for surrendering liberty to a militarized state. Like the song says, only in America.

The New York Daily News front page referred to in Gopnik's article:
who is a terrorist, exactly?

Je Suis Paris

The Telegraph and the Guardian are providing extensive English-language coverage of developments in France.

Et pour mes lecteurs français, je dit:  Lafayette, nous sommes avec vous.

Attack on Canadian Parliament

Map of Ottawa shootings from the Globe and Mail.

Shortly before 10 a.m. Eastern time this morning in Ottawa, a gunman with a rifle shot a soldier standing guard at the National War Memorial, then raced the short distance to the Center Block of the Canadian Parliament, where he gained entry and a gun battle ensued within the halls of Parliament, as seen in the video above. Security forces from the police and RCMP are blocking streets and responding to various points in the vicinity.

Reports are that more than one shooter is active, and government offices as well as downtown Ottawa buildings are on lockdown. Prime Minister Stephen Harper as well as opposition leaders are reported to be safe and out of danger. Police are also investigating reported shootings at the Rideau Centre shopping mall near Parliament Hill.

On Monday, a radicalized Canadian convert to Islam ran down two Canadian soldiers in St.-Jean-sur-Richelieu, 30 miles southeast of Montreal, killing one of them.

The CBC has live coverage of events on Parliament Hill here.

The Globe and Mail has ongoing coverage here.

CTV also has live coverage here.


Update, 4:20 p.m.: Canadian news organizations are now reporting that the soldier killed in this morning's cowardly attack at the War Memorial was 24-year-old Cpl. Nathan Cirillo from Hamilton, Ontario, who when off duty worked with an animal rescue outfit.

R. I. P.

How Gay Obama Is Destroying America

From Free Press Houston via Joe.My.God.: anti-immigration protesters in Houston last week sound off about that homosexual boyfriend-killer Obama in league with the flood of gays, Chinese, Mexicans, and Muslim jihadists coming across the border to destroy America. A few pro-immigration protesters are also interviewed.




Why, even our embassies abroad fly the rainbow flag, and we have a bunch of queer ambassadors - isn't that terrible?! So God just might nuke America into oblivion any day now, says Houston pastor Rick Scarborough, for the evil, wicked, detestable sin of loving the gays:




Funny how all those liberty-loving, flag-waving, right-wing patriots, as soon as you take the whip and the rod out of their hands, they want to destroy "this great country" that they have always professed to love so dearly - isn't it? If they don't control it, they want to see it smashed to pieces, and then gloat over the smoldering ruins. A fine Christian attitude, ain't it boys?

The Voice of a Girl, the Hope of the World

Reuters reports:

Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban last year for demanding education for girls, marked her 16th birthday with an emotional speech at the United Nations on Friday in which she said education could change the world.

"Let us pick up our books and pens. They are our most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one pen and one book can change the world. Education is the only solution," a confident Yousafzai said to cheers from the podium. Wearing a pink head scarf, Yousafzai told U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and nearly 1,000 students from around the world attending a Youth Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York that education was the only way to improve lives.

Yousafzai was shot at close range by gunmen in October as she left school in Pakistan's Swat Valley, northwest of the country's capital Islamabad. She was targeted for her campaign against the Islamist Taliban efforts to deny women education. "They shot my friends too. They thought that the bullets would silence us. But they failed and out of that silence came thousands of voices," she said in Friday's speech. "The terrorists thought they would change my aims and stop my ambitions, but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born," Yousafzai said.

She wore a white shawl draped around her shoulders that had belonged to former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated during a 2007 election rally weeks after she returned to Pakistan from years in self-imposed exile. "I am not against anyone, neither am I here to speak in terms of personal revenge against the Taliban or any other terrorist group. I'm here to speak up for the right of education for every child," she said. "I want education for the sons and daughters of the Taliban and all terrorists and extremists," she said. "I do not even hate the talib who shot me. Even if there is a gun in my hand and he stands in front of me, I would not shoot him."

Your Head Trucker also recommends this 2009 documentary about Malala, her family, and her home town from the New York Times - caution, some scenes are gruesome:

The Pope and the Atheists

Pope Francis, in a homily he gave today in Rome (found via Andrew Sullivan):

"The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart: do good and do not do evil. All of us. ‘But, Father, this is not Catholic! He cannot do good.’ Yes, he can. He must. Not can: must! Because he has this commandment within him. Instead, this ‘closing off’ that imagines that those outside, everyone, cannot do good is a wall that leads to war and also to what some people throughout history have conceived of: killing in the name of God. That we can kill in the name of God. And that, simply, is blasphemy. To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy.”

“Instead,” the Pope continued, “the Lord has created us in His image and likeness, and has given us this commandment in the depths of our heart: do good and do not do evil”:

"The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone! And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class! We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all! And we all have a duty to do good. And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”

This does sound like a different kind of Pope.


A further thought: Turning from the contemplation of these high and lovely thoughts to the utterly barbarous and demonic beheading of a British soldier in the streets of London in broad daylight, your Head Trucker finds no room in his heart to countenance any further shilly-shallying with the violent and the malign among us. This sickening act, like that of the bombing in Boston last month, is beyond all decency, a crime against humanity, and it must be stopped now - by whatever means necessary.

The crazies and the fanatics must not be allowed to roam freely among us and kill us at their whim; the Constitution is not a suicide pact.

.

Manhunt in Boston

Photo of the two men the FBI says planted the bombs that killed three and
maimed or wounded dozens at the Boston Marathon on Monday.
The black-hatted Suspect #1 is now dead, and white-hatted Suspect #2
is at large, the subject of an intense search in the Boston area.

Friday, 5:30 a.m. - The wheels of justice are turning swiftly in Boston. Overnight, two law enforcement officers have been shot, one fatally, and one of the prime suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings is dead, with the other being tracked by a massive manhunt in the suburbs of the city.

Authorites have ordered residents in those areas to stay indoors, businesses have likewise been ordered not to open, and the entire Boston transit system has been shut down across all of Boston - something completely unprecedented. I'm sure the news is all over cable TV, but for folks like your Head Trucker, who doesn't have cable (by choice) and for my overseas truckbuddies, here are a couple of good sources for news, frequently updated, which I've been following all night as the story has progressed:

NBC news videos

The Guardian's live blog (A sign of the times - a British newspaper has some of the most up-to-date info on an American crime scene)

Boston.com, the online presence of the Boston Globe, also updates its main story from time to time, but overnight not as quickly as the other two.

I hope they catch Suspect #2 shortly, and no police officers or innocent bystanders get hurt.


Update, 6:45 a.m., Texas time - The two suspects are said to be brothers originally from the Chechnya region of Russia, but have lived in the Boston area with their family since 2002. WTF??


Update, 6:00 p.m. - After sleeping all day, woke up to find the suspect is still at large - how, with so many thousands of cops and troops combing the area? The whole of Boston has been locked down all day until finally about the time I woke up, the Governor said people could go out and about again. I can't second-guess the cops but I wonder if shutting down an entire metropolitan area was really necessary for one 19-year-old on the run - even with a gun and a bomb.

But just now, there's been another volley of gunfire in Watertown, so I'm watching the live NBC report as cops and paramedics swarm on a location there. Hope they have the little bastard and can bring an end to all this fear and worry.

This week's New Yorker cover by Eric Drooker is well done:

6:30 p.m. - NBC reports suspect has been found in a boat, apparently in someone's back yard. Helicopter view confirms he is moving, not dead. Cops waiting around for something, not sure what. This is too much like a Hollywood movie - I'm sure somebody in California is writing a new screenplay right now, you know they will make a million billion on the film when they get it made. Calling Ben Affleck, Matt Damon.

7:45 p.m. - NBC reports wounded, bloody suspect has been taken alive, no police hurt, medic called for, cheers going up on the sidewalks of Watertown. A peaceful end to this terrible week, thanks be to God. Now the doctors can mend him, the cops can interrogate him, the courts can try him. And then, I sincerely hope, the hangman will swing him high.

8:45 p.m. - Governor Duval, Mayor Menino, police chiefs, FBI head agent, U. S. Attorney, others give news conference. Suspect is in serious condition at Massachusetts General, the huge regional hospital Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston. Ecstatic crowds applauded and cheered police, firefighters, troops, paramedics, etc., as they left the area following the suspect's capture. I'm sure all my fellow Americans feel relieved and proud too. Way to go, Boston!

For the historical record, Rachel sums up the happenings of the last two days:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Adam Gopnik reflects on this week's events in the New Yorker:

Surprises surely await us as we go on, but an intuitive scenario—in which an older brother who had struggled with the promise and disillusion of American life and turned to extremist Islam for comfort, dominated and seduced a younger brother not born or made for violence—seemed plausible. But all of our experience suggests that it is not “fundamentalism” alone but an aching tension between modernity and a false picture of a purer fundamentalist past that makes terrorists. And it was an American story, too, in what could only be called a hysterical and insular overreaction that allowed it to become the sole national narrative. I happened to be in London on 7/7—a far more deadly and frightening terrorist attack—and by 7 P.M. on that horrible day, with the terrorists still at large (they were dead already, but no one knew that) the red double-decker buses were rolling and the traffic was turning and life, though hardly normal, was determinedly going on. The decision to shut down Boston, though doubtless made in good faith and from honest anxiety, seemed like an undue surrender to the power of the terrorist act—as did, indeed, the readiness to turn over the entire attention of the nation to a violent, scary, tragic, lurid but, in the larger scheme of things, ultimately small threat to the public peace. The toxic combination of round-the-clock cable television—does anyone now recall the killer of Gianni Versace, who claimed exactly the same kind of attention then as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did today?—and an already exaggerated sense of the risk of terrorism turned a horrible story of maiming and death and cruelty into a national epic of fear. What terrorists want is to terrify people; Americans always oblige.

Saturday, 7:20 p.m. - Massachusetts State Police have released this amazing (to a non-techie like your Head Trucker) photo of the boat that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was hiding in, taken by a heat-imaging camera in a police helicopter.  Unfuckingbelievable.

 

 

Horror in Boston

 

Two bombs went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon today; three bystanders, including an 8-year-old boy, were killed and over a hundred others wounded, some losing a limb or suffering severe burns.



Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis gave details at a press conference:



President Obama spoke at a press conference in the White House, vowing that the perpetrators will be found and brought to justice:



I hope they catch the cowardly bastards quickly - and it would be very pleasing to see them hanged in Copley Square.

Read continuing local coverage at Boston.com.


Update: Rachel Maddow reports from Boston this evening:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Tutu Speaks Truth to Power

In a letter to the editor of the New York Times:

I am deeply, deeply disturbed at the suggestion in “A Court to Vet Kill Lists” (news analysis, front page, Feb. 9) that possible judicial review of President Obama’s decisions to approve the targeted killing of suspected terrorists might be limited to the killings of American citizens.

Do the United States and its people really want to tell those of us who live in the rest of the world that our lives are not of the same value as yours? That President Obama can sign off on a decision to kill us with less worry about judicial scrutiny than if the target is an American? Would your Supreme Court really want to tell humankind that we, like the slave Dred Scott in the 19th century, are not as human as you are? I cannot believe it.

I used to say of apartheid that it dehumanized its perpetrators as much as, if not more than, its victims. Your response as a society to Osama bin Laden and his followers threatens to undermine your moral standards and your humanity.

DESMOND M. TUTU
Aboard MV Explorer, near Hong Kong
Feb. 11, 2013

The writer, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, is archbishop emeritus of Cape Town.

See also this article in the New Yorker, "Torture and Obama's Drone Program":

Nick Gillespie suggested that liberals’ lesser outrage at Obama’s drones than Bush’s “enhanced interrogations” amounted to a kind of intellectual corruption. “This isn’t ultimately about ideological hypocrisy—of liberals changing their tune once their guy is in office—but something much more basic and much more disturbing. It reveals that for all their crowing about being watchdogs of all that is good and decent in society, when push comes to shove, too many journalists are ready and willing handmaidens to power—including the power to kill.”

And this article in the Miami Herald, "On Use of Drones, Obama Overreaches":

But in its memo, which surfaces as the Senate ponders confirming John Brennan as director of the CIA, the Justice Department says its definition of “imminent threat” doesn’t require “clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.”

In other words, “imminent” doesn’t mean “imminent.” And if U.S. intelligence — which we all know is infallible, right? — determines you to be a member of al Qaida, that determination, absent any evidence of a planned attack, gives the government the legal pretext to vaporize you. Worse, the government contends this may be done without oversight, judicial or otherwise. The president becomes, quite literally, your judge, jury and executioner.

Cf. Targeted killing - and for a further thrill, National security letter.

And this chart. And this quote.

There is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not.

--Ecclesiastes 7:20

Honk to Mimi, who first posted Tutu's letter on her blog.

That Horrible Day - Ten Years On

1. Remembering Mark Bingham and the passengers on Flight 93:

2. Andrew Sullivan, "Did Osama Win on 9/11?":

It took months for this initial trauma to ebb, years for my psyche to regain its equilibrium. And it took me close to a decade to realize just how slickly Osama bin Laden had done his evil work, how insidiously his despicable performance art had reached into my mind and altered it, how carefully he had set the trap and how guilelessly I—we—had walked right into it.

We need to understand that 9/11 worked. It worked as a tactic to induce American self-destruction, even if it failed spectacularly as a strategy to advance Al Qaeda—and its heretical message of suicidal warfare—across the globe. It worked because this was not just another terror attack. The emblems were clear: the looming towers of Western capitalism in New York, the cradle of Western democracy in Washington. When the third plane crashed into the Pentagon and the fourth (United 93) was brought down by its passengers, the drama didn’t cease. We saw the symbol of America’s military preeminence lying with its side opened like a tin can. And we imagined the panic and courage in the air over Pennsylvania as people just like us finally found their bearings and fought back. . . .

The simplicity of the plot made it even scarier. On that day the West’s own airplanes, which had taken off peacefully, were transformed into makeshift weapons of mass destruction; the only actual weapons deployed were a handful of box cutters you could find in any office-supply store. The rest was merely human will and the advantage of surprise. More to the point, the people murdered that day, charred in the remains of the towers or jumping from windows in the sky only to thud onto the pavement below, had only that morning been just like us: settled complacently in airline seats or beginning their day at the office. At some point some of them must have looked out a window—in the plane or the World Trade Center—and saw what seemed like the apocalypse coming. There are times when I think of those people who saw, in their final seconds of life, the nose of an airplane hurtling toward them at inhuman speed. Their terror ended quickly. Ours had just begun.

3. Part I of a documentary about the "Saint of 9/11," the gay Franciscan priest and beloved FDNY chaplain, Father Mychal Judge. You can watch the rest of this deeply moving film on YouTube.

Lesbian Couple Rescued Dozens from Norway Massacre

Hege Dalen and Toril Hansen

 From Towleroad:

Hege Dalen and her partner Toril Hansen were eating supper in the camping area opposite Utoya island when they started hearing gunshots and screaming....

Dalen and Hansen drove their boat to the island, and fished out of the water people who were in shock and young people who were injured and transported them ashore. Every now and then bullets almost hit the boat.

Since they couldn't fit everyone into the boat all at once, they returned to the island four times. They might have saved as much as forty people from the clutches of the killer.

Other campers rushed to the rescue too, bringing about 150 kids to safety.

Today's Quotes

Norwegian flags and flowers left in mourning for the slain at Oslo Cathedral

1.  From Truth Wins Out, about suspected Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik:

This passage from the suspect’s postings to an anti-Muslim website struck me though . . .

I dare not even think of how many Norwegian children who have been suicide because of these experiences (assault, robbery, rape, psychological terror committed by Muslim youths). There are probably several hundred in the last 15 years. . . .

Non-Muslim youth in Oslo aged 12-18 are in a particularly vulnerable situation in terms of harassment [from] Muslim youth.

This from a man who (it is said) methodically killed 80 kids at a youth camp, some while they were swimming away for their lives. Always, the monster the bigot sees in others is themselves. And they are right to fear that monster.

2. From Box Turtle Bulletin, about New York state clerks refusing on religious grounds to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples:

It goes without saying that many churches, the Catholic Church in particular, oppose the very existence of medical clinics which offer abortion services. Yet they do not suggest that the County Building Inspector refuse to issue a building license or that the city Clerk refuse to process a Business License. None of this administrative process is considered to be a part of, or the administrators culpable for, the abortions that will be conducted at the site.

There simply are no religious beliefs held by any of these public employees, sincerely or otherwise, which forbid them to administer the paperwork involved with any other businesses, marriages, divorces, or other vital statistics which they find morally objectionable. And if there were, their argument is a bit specious considering that they’ve been violating those beliefs with regularity for years.

3. From AmericablogGay, on the Vermont resort that turned down a gay couple who wanted to hold their wedding there:

Catholic beliefs strictly prohibit them from having a gay wedding on the premises. But they're okay with gay couples staying the night in their rooms, they say, and presumably having gay sex. . . .

In addition to married couples who refuse to sign a document promising they won't use contraception and won't have sex unless it's for the express goal of having a child, and single people would need to promise that they won't masturbate.

I'm tired of bigots trotting out the religion card when they actually couldn't care less about enforcing the actual tenets of their religion when it affects anything other than the gay.

4. From Andrew Sullivan, on "America's Cold Civil War":

The Republican refusal to countenance any way to raise revenues to tackle the massive debt incurred largely on their watch and from a recession which started under Obama's predecessor makes one thing clear. They are not a political party in government; they are a radical faction that refuses to participate meaningfully in the give and take the Founders firmly believed should be at the center of American government. They are not conservatives in this sense. They are anarchists. . . .

They are clearly calculating that the economic devastation their vandalism could create will so hurt the economy that it could bring them back to power through the wreckage. And they will use every smear, every lie, every canard possible to advance this goal. The propaganda channel dreamt of by Roger Ailes in the Nixon era will continue to pump poison into the body politic, until they defeat the man whose legitimacy as president they have never truly accepted.

Coming from abroad, this country seems as if it is beyond dysfunctional. It looks like a banana republic on the verge of economic collapse. Now that Nixon's dream has come true and the GOP is fundamentally the party of the Confederacy, it was perhaps naive to think they could ever accept the legitimacy of this president, or treat him with respect or act as adults in the governing process.

But this is who they are.

5. The President in yesterday's press conference:

The Twin Threats to Freedom

Andrew Sullivan hits the nail on the head:

9/11 was a call, in my mind, to defend the Enlightenment from the nihilistic forces of murderous theocratic fanaticism. What it demanded was a rediscovery of secularism and freedom in a war against the forces of Islamism and despotism. I still believe that those who instinctively responded to the attacks by blaming America were morally lost. But I equally believe that those who showed they were willing to throw away America’s values in fighting Jihadism were wrong as well. And those who use religious extremism as a tool to get elected in America are pale reflections of the evil of Islamism - not the equivalent, as I have always insisted, but related. Christianism and Islamism are twin pincers against our freedom and against freely chosen, freely witnessed Christian and Muslim faith. Islamism is far more dangerous. But Islamism will never defeat America’s core values. Christianism has already made a dent.