No, I do not believe that the magazine “Inspire” is real.  How can it be?  Nobody puts out an article entitled “How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom” — do they?  Then again, there might be cultural differences I don’t understand regarding the pscyhotic.

The magazine itself has a hefty feature well, reports The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, consistent with what any ambitious editor would want to see in a roll-out issue.  Osama bin Laden himself offers his thoughts on “How to Save the World”: Blow stuff up when people disagree with you about what’s Islamic! His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, shares his insights on what’s going down in Yemen.

But the anchor is a message from Anwar al-Awlaki, the New Mexico-born preacher who’s become al-Qaida’s biggest draw as an online propagandist. So much so that the Obama administration reserves unto itself the right to kill Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, without due process of law.

And then there are some promising front-of-the-book experiments. “What to Expect in Jihad” is self-explanatory. “The AQ Chef” gives you a step-by-step on how to “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.” And that threads the needle for the apparent purpose of launching Inspire: getting frustrated Muslim youth to buy into al-Qaida’s holistic conspiracy theory that the crises of the modern era are attributable to a nefarious American-Jewish alliance against True Islam, and then giving them the tools to murder people.

 

The twist is to get Muslims living in America and other Western countries to subscribe — Najibullah Zazi, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (educated in Britain), Faisal Shahzad, Major Nidal Malik Hasan — in order to send the message that nowhere is safe for the Americans. That’s a huge, preoccupying concern for John Brennan and the rest of the Obama counterterrorism team. […]

Which makes Inspire look anomalous. It’s not, apparently, online yet. Ambinder reports that a virus corrupted an attempted upload on extremist websites on Wednesday. And it’s not apparently an as-Sahab product: It bears a banner of al-Malahem Media, the publishing arm of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, a franchise of al-Qaida that trained Abdulmutallab on putting bombs in his underwear. And that’s even more fishy: Al-Jazeera’s Gregg Carlstrom tweets that it’s not al-Malahem’s typical logo.

“It is difficult at this point to confirm its authenticity,” says Marc Lynch, a George Washington University political science professor who specializes in Arabic-language media.

It’s a Print Magazine that is going to be distributed in the United States — how?  Subscription service is pretty easily:  Heavily vetted in a plain brown paper bag and a generic company name, like pornographic and sex toy companies? deal with their mailings.  I imagine any subscribers would be hauled off to Gitmo in, like, 5 minutes upon delivery.

In other words, don’t cancel your subscription to Technical Mujahid just yet. That magazine, at least, is not afraid to be service-y.

I imagine this is true:
the Internet Haganah reasonably points out that owning a copy of it might get you in trouble in some countries, so don’t.

I have pondered this idea of a voter’s guide for these United States.  It is a bit depressing, but Rand Paul puts its usefulness in stark relief — and he is not the first politician I’ve seen have trouble with this issue.
I’m gonna pass on the age of the earth. I think I’m just gonna have to pass on that one.

My voters’ guide idea starts with the base-line question “How old is the Earth?”  The candidate who answers 4 and a half billion years, and I am not a stickler for exactitude, will get the endorsement over the candidate who answers 6,000 years.  If they both answer 6,000 years, nobody gets the endorsement.  If they both answer 4 billion years, we go on to the next answer with a smidgeon of satisfaction.

I am not sure what the next question would be.  Maybe I’ll ask to guage a level of outrage at efforts to remove “under God” from the Constitution, but that feels like a bit too much like a trick question.  I do think I need a bridge question of some sort to get to my next Voter’s Guide item: a rapid fire succession of queries about whether various scenarios fall under “God’s Will“, an idea prompted by Sharron Angle and her exchange?  The endorsement goes to the person who answers “yes” the fewest number of times.

Then again, for overall Party Choice to fill out the ballot beyond the reach of politicians I can’t finangle to answer this voter’s guide questioneer, I can go to the Chair Person of the Party and see how he (she, theoretically) defines the Afghanistan mission.

But the thing about Michael Steele —

I remember seeing this tv show, a cheap Summer temporary replacement deal, with the premise of having two contestants given a retail job, the goal of which was to get fired as close to the end of the workday as possible.  It’s a premise that sets up some interesting dynamics — you can’t get fired too early, but have to start collecting negative chits toward the direction of being fired, against co-workers and management who are prone to be patient for a launch.  I think Michael Steele just may be on a show like that one.

Now what am I supposed to do on Independence Day? Why, I might just have to, like, go out and do some actual activities of some kind.

SyFy (formerly Sci-Fi) has opted to replace its annual Fourth of July Twilight Zone Marathon with a Greatest American Hero marathon. First, I hadn’t realized there were enough GAH episodes for which to justify a “marathon, ” (pathetically, there are). And second, WHY?! Don’t they want people to stay on the channel for longALF too, make it a full-out Guantanamo Bay-style retreat. periods of time? They might as well have rolled out

I am crushed. For more than a decade I have settled in with family to watch the bi-annual event: Twilight Zone on New Year’s, again on the Fourth of July. Yes, a marathon of viewing, through the ham-handed and the sublime, the silly and the profound. Rod Serling, a corny but cool guide through the dimensions, signposts ahead. War, paranoia, love and fear. Superstition and weakness, bravery and resolve. This was the time to reflect, holed up in air conditioning with a thousand familiar archetypes: the key character who always loses it when a nuclear strike is imminent or he crash lands on a planet. The misfit. The hero. The shrill wife. The comely naif. The vexed soldier. The greedy fool. The old man. The insufferable snob who gets his. The cynical man who gets to go back. The astronaut who never will.

I have watched swatches of these things in comfortable company.  I have watches swatches of these things in aggravated and insulted company.  And so it goes.

I hear someone’s putting on a firework’s display somewhere.  Maybe I’ll see that thing?

I post this with some trepidation.  The original source material is long gone, a proposed “Big Plan” in his career of false starts.  The man it references has, reportedly, re-emerged to his familiar perching bounds — but is close to being a situation where he no longer a threat to anyone but himself.

I have known a couple of people in this religion.  One was a little weird, but I suppose we all are –  and he may fit some stereotypes you might imagine for someone seeking somewhat esoteric religious terrain.  The other can explain her basic cultural desire to claim some Jewish customs within her Christian religion.  Overall, I’m not all that impressed with this religious purview — google it and I see an end of world purview that makes allusions to current events in the Middle East and Israel — which is a problem.

But he was a Narcissistic figure with Delusions of Grandeur more than anything else.  Basically I thought I had lost this clever bit of creative writing, and am surprised to find it, and can now stick it alongside the “Leander Revival” item.

…………………………………………………

A preview of Daniel at his “FIRST ANNUAL MESSIANIC TORAH BASED CAMPUS PREACHERS CONFERENCE”

Daniel stands at the podium. Conference room is full of about 400 seats. 2 dozen people are scattered toward the front. Daniel is going through a mock – preaching, and has asked anyone with any questions to raise their hands.

“For Yeshua said ‘Not one jot or tittle of … yes, Brother Tim?”

Brother Tim: “Whenever I preach and reach that part I have this problem. The crowd starts chanting ‘tittle tittle tittle’, and it throws me off. I’m wondering if you know how to get back on track when this happens.”

Daniel, laughs and smiles. “Oh, that’s no problem at all. Basically you just treat the morons for the morons they are and keep on talking. [Tim jots this down in his notebook.] They’ll give in, and stop shortly, and it’ll draw a crowd that will have a seed planted that may spring them forward to conversion.”

Brother Tim: “How do you do that?”

Daniel: “Okay, I’ll tell you what. Let’s do a demonstration. I want the crowd to start chatting ‘tittle tittle tittle tittle’ when I reach the part of the sermon where I say ‘not one jot or tittle’, I want everyone to start the assault of ‘tittle tittle tittle.’ Okay?

Daniel clears his throat. “For in Matthew 5:17, Yeshua says ‘not one jot or tittle shall pass from the law’. What more do you – ”

Everyone in the crowd: “Tittle Tittle Tittle Tittle Tittle Tittle Tittle…” The room echoes with the sound of ‘tittle’. Daniel keeps going, and while one can make out the words he is saying, the echo drowns it out.

Meanwhile, the janitor walks in during his lunch break, with a half-eating BLT sandwich, and sits in the back of the room. He looks up quizzically at his seat, shakes his head, and chomps his sandwich down.

Daniel: “and then Yeshua said, “I have come not to abolish but to fulfill…”

Tittle Tittle Tittle Tittle… they fade off, each person quits chattering ‘tittle’.

Janitor walks out.

Daniel ends his sermon, by saying “As you were saying ‘tittle’, the janitor walked in and listened to my preach intently. He is the one I have reached today, and I am absolutely certain I have blessed him.”

Janitor walks back in, and yells “Are you expecting a bigger crowd for the next meeting, because I can maybe remove a few of these excess chairs for you.”

Daniel: “No. That won’t be necessary. I’m expecting a huge crowd. In fact, bring in a few more chairs if you would.”

Janitor shrugs, and walks out, muttering “That’s what he said the last time.”

Daniel: “Okay, I’ll now pass the collection plate around, money donated will be used to help Torah Restoration Ministries get off the ground.”

Brother Anthony mutters to his wife “Didn’t he pass the plate around at the start of this session?”

Daniel: “Don’t forget, tomorrow Brother Rood will come in and discuss prophecy, describing what the latest barley harvests in Israel mean to the coming Armeggedon. A few of our lecturers haven’t shown up tonight, they fell through, so as a replacement I will do a lecture on how to divine the messages that Yah sends through voices in the head at 2:00, and at 6:00 tonight I will explain how to calculate reprobation percentages. Thank you, and Yah bless you.”

Alabama is Alabama.  The wacked out Theatrical political stars of the provocative political ads circulating about youtube, for mockery by parts of the national electorate and I suppose accepted as god’s message by their local constituency, are teaming up for Fun and Merriment.  The Intense guy barking out about his stolen lawn signs makes an appearance after 2 and a half minutes of the Re-enactment Guy‘s latest —

— getting some mileage for Abe Lincoln answering “Slavery” to something other than what these images portray.

I note that when I search the name of this Alabama Congressional candidate Critter in google, this pops out at me.

Okay, Rick Barber, freak.  Here’s what I want you to do.  For your next ad, I want you to conjure up a few less obvious Presidents.  (Granted, in the Mount Rushmore Mafia, you can’t bring out Theodore Roosevelt.)  I want you to bark about “gathering  your armies” with a conversation with three of the following four presidents:  Chester A Arthur, Gerald Ford, Grover Cleveland, and Martin Van Buren.  Let’s get the show on the road!

Given that practicularly every Federal Project in the state of West Virginia is named after the man who procured the funding, Robert Byrd, I think the state is best referred to as “Byrdland”.

From IF Stone, April 15, 1968, upon the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  Placed in historical context of time and place, he could certainly have been worse.:

Privately many white Southerners rejoiced, and their influence was reflected in the scandalous failure to declare a holiday in the District the day Dr. King was buried.  Though stores closed, government offices were open and Negro mailmen delivered the mail as usual.  This is still, despite its black majority, a Southern-ruled town; it shuts down on Washington’s birthday, but not Lincoln’s.

The most powerful of the District’s absentee rulers, Senator Robert C. Byrd (D. W Va.), went so far as to imply in a Senate speech April 5, that Dr. King was to blame for his own death.  Byrd said those who organize mass demonstrations may “in the end … become themselves the victims of the forces they set in motion.”  While Dr. King “usually spoke of nonviolence,” Byrd went on smugly, “violence all too often attended his action and, at the last, he himself met a  violent end.”  This should make Byrd the South’s favorite criminologist.

Byrd is the Senator to whom the blacks of Washingon must come for school and welfare money.  As chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the District of Columbia budget, Byrd wields far more power than the city’s figurehead Negro “Mayor.”  He has used this key position to block liberalization of welfare rules not only in the District but in the country, since the federal government can hardly apply elsewhere rules more liberal than those he will allow in the District.  Byrd has become the national pillar of the “man in the house” rule.  This, as the report on the Commission on Civil Disorders protested, makes it necessary for the unemployed father to “abandon his family or see them go hungry.”  In this sense not a few of the child looters in our gutted ghettoes can trace their delinquency to Robert C. Byrd.

Byrd likely played a bit of footsey as he entered Congress in the 1950s with his history in the Klan, and shaved it off in later biographical retellings.  Regarding his stances and speeches that made him a hero to opponents of the War in 2003, his record with Vietnam is less so — so says George McGovern.:

I came to greatly admire him for speaking out against these unconstitutional wars that we’ve gotten into since World War II. On Vietnam, his record is not particularly impressive. He supported it for many years, as did many senators. But he learned from Vietnam. It was Sen. Byrd’s capacity for growth, wisdom and judgment that won my admiration. There’s no sin for anybody in public life to make a mistake. It’s how you learn from them that’s important.

As he was at the time he jumped up the ranks in the Democratic Caucus in the Senate, beating Edward Kennedy for Whip in 1971.

Eventually, his Precious view of his Precious Senate and its rules and nostrums, never mind the hindering powers of it, became annoying, an excuse to wax eloquent on his role as personification of what the Founding Fathers had in mind.  While it put him in good spirits to joke about being, along with Senator Dan Quayle, members of the “Feathered Caucus”, and let him rip about the Presidential perogatives regarding war, its steadfastness empowered this:

The facts on the Ground Change:

That attention to detail eventually got him elected party whip, and then majority leader. Sen. Howard Baker, who led the Republicans when Byrd led the Democrats, once told me that he cut a deal with Byrd on his first day in office. If you never use the rules to surprise me, he told Byrd, I’ll never use them to surprise you. Byrd thought it over till the afternoon. Then he agreed.

Round up the clips, enough to digest.

News about Rand Paul’s Donations listings.

Ten months ago, Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul said he would not accept campaign donations from U.S. senators who voted for the 2008 financial institutions bailout.

But on Thursday evening Paul, now the Kentucky GOP’s nominee as well as a tea party favorite, will benefit from the Republican Party’s fundraising machine at a Washington event hosted by senators, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who voted for the bailout.

Reading some comments in this story, I suppose there is something in the Defense of Transactional Politics, stringing along grass-roots supporters and admirers and leaving an ends justify the means Rationalization even if the means tell us all about the ends.  In this sense, Rand Paul’s campaign — and his defenders — remind me of some moments during the Obama Presidential Campaign where some — er– “strategic political shifts” were defended with a “You want to win, don’t you?”

Rand Paul is just another Neo-Conservative Pro-Military Industrical Complex Stooge and Corporate Puppet, sucking at the teet and with the teet of sucking at him the Big Bailout Banksters.  He’s come to take the Government Back from the Republican Policy Strategy Visionary Jim Bunning by advocating the same policies.

Maybe Rand Paul has a harder edge.  Where some Republicans advocate and demand a Fense on the Southern Border with Mexico, he is calling for something more intense.

Border fence proposals are a dime a dozen among Republican candidates, but Rand Paul’s is different: it’s underground, and it’s electrified. “My plans include an underground electric fence, with helicopter stations to respond quickly to breaches of the border,” state the Kentucky senatorial hopeful’s website—although Republican officials approached by the Huffington Post seemed baffled by the proposal.

“I have not heard that,” said National Republican Senate Committee Chair John Cornyn. “Underground? What would happen? How would that work?” Paul’s aides declined to elaborate on his fence plans, which, the Post notes, would likely cost well over $1 billion to implement and require the seizure of some private land, a move sharply at odds with Rand’s libertarian philosophy.

But Rand Paul is not so much Libetarianish, as he is Constitution Partyish.  And even there, he is not even the most Constitution Partyish politician out there.  That would be Sharron Angle.  Shouldn’t that anti- New World Order contingency be pumping up Sharron Angle instead of the watered-down New World Order Hack Rand Paul?

Interesting to note — I have long held that Reid will end up beating Angle.  There’s enough in the improbability of Harry Reid winning anything, even these circumstances, that I can envision the scenario developing that he loses — Rory Reid is running as Rory — a break from the typical first campaigns of political sons who tend to run with their forebear’s name highlighted — that we may end up with the classic low turnout large group of the electorate stretching the level at arm’s length with nose plugged to avoid the stench of this race.
What is interesting is that Angle’s “Disappearing Act” is her best road to election.  I sense something in the same genre with Jack Conway against Rand Paul, though with different reasonings.  Conway has to maintain a bit of a blank slate and come across as respectable and hope that Rand Paul ends up too insane.  Or so it seems to me.  (Note: I do predict, for the moment, Rand Paul wins the election.)

Sometime this week, for the sake of hearing Phil Hendrie, I turned on “Freedom 970”, the Suburban Barbecue Clip Art station, and they play a montage of a station promo that has a familiar ring.  It’s a bizarro version of the type of promo I’ve heard over the years on 620 KPOJ.  A bunch of Republicans, suggestions of bad tidings for the Democrats, paint a picture of Revolutionary Forment for a Congressional party switch in November.  All of which is pretty damned stupid.  The stranger thing is a promo with Nancy Pelosi calling out some hecklers, and a quip, “Spekaer Pelosis Under Fire on the Stump.  You’ll hear about it on Freedom 970.”  This was a terribly dull and uninteresting and unimportant story to hear about, but I guess it excites some audience… still rambling about it weeks later?