The True Blue Liberal Twitter Poll of the Week

Why is the current resident of the White House ignoring the most obvious and deadly group of terrorists in America?

Which of the following seem to you to be a more likely agents of terrorist violence in North America?

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) February 8, 2017

The Tweet of the Day for January 30, 2017

The True Blue Liberal Tweet of the Day came from @TeaPainUSA who distilled two important events into a truth bomb of less than 140 characters: 1) Donald Trump's illegal and chaotic ban on refugees and people from seven countries, and 2) The terrorist attack on the Quebec City Islamic Cultural Center yesterday, where six were killed and 17 were injured, by Alexandre Bissonnette, who seems from early information to be an anti-immigrant activist who was inspired by Marine Le Pen speeches and the timing of Donald Trump's Muslim ban.

More Muslims have been killed by Trump supporters in the past 24 hours than Americans killed by refugees from banned countries in 30 years.

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) January 30, 2017

As a bonus, I also have a True Blue Liberal word of the day that came from Twitter. Tonight there were massive anti-Trump demonstrations all across the U.K. inspired by Trump's draconian immigration policy alterations. I saw photos online of massive crowds in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Brighton, and elsewhere, but this photo from Scotland in a tweet from @TotallyCarolyn stood out for the poster it featured. It had nothing to do with the artistry of the hurried black scrawl on cardboard, but the words are priceless, especially the last one, which was new to me: "Yer Maw Was An Immigrant Ya Fucken Bawbag."

A message to @realDonaldTrump from Edinburgh #MuslimBan #ScotlandAgainstTrump pic.twitter.com/m0OdQvDlMQ

— Carolyn Scott (@TotallyCarolyn) January 30, 2017

Bawbag, n. Scots. Literally a scrotum (i.e., a "ball bag") and figuratively used for any annoying, useless, or stupid person. It should be used regularly in sentences about the half-Scots Donald Trump.

Brussels :"Pulvérisés sur l’autel de la violence éternelle "

In regard to today's terrorist attacks in Brussels, I don't have any pronouncements as important as the prescriptions for more torture from Donald Trump or Muslim-neighborhood harassment from Ted Cruz, but I can't get this song from 2002 out of my mind, so I'll share this.

"Manhattan-Kaboul" was specifically about one anonymous victim of the 9/11 attacks in Manhattan and another young victim of the violent US response against Afghanistan, but today's events are an extension of the continuous cycle of violence that Renaud and Axelle Red sing about here. The fact that Renaud is a Parisian and Axelle Red is Belgian only adds to the fact that this seems the essential song for the day (at least for me, but I've been an Axelle Red fan for for a long time).

"J'ai dit que je préfère les fleurs"

I think one can watch and appreciate this follow-up to last week's best viral video even if one does not speak a word of French:

ça va mieux

If nothing else, watch at the 2'30" mark...

Un week-end avec les Parisiens - Le Petit Journal du 16/11

AND NOW THE FULL SHOW AVAILABLE WITH SUBTITLES!!
Simply click the CC button for English subtitles.

Paris Attacks November 2015 - Le Petit Journal... by CANALPLUS

"Peace For Paris" by Jean Jullien via @Banksy

Peace for Paris pic.twitter.com/Lh1PQ91ncY

— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) November 13, 2015

Though I originally saw it from Banksy, it seems its creator is actually Jean Jullien.

What a loss the loss of Jon Stewart's nightly voice is going to be...

On Tuesday night Jon was shoot-milk-out-your-nose-because-you're-laughing-so-explosively funny when Fuckface von Clownstick joined the Presidential race, but on Thursday night he gave us this, the most succinct and truthful statement about the Charleston racial terrorism of the night before, and our predictable and insufficient response to it.

The Daily Show
Daily Show Full Episodes,  More Daily Show Videos,  Comedy Central Full Episodes

I'm going to miss him and I no longer even get Comedy Central on my television; I just watch (and share) these clips.

"What transpired in Charleston, South Carolina last night was not just a tragedy, it was an act of terror." --Senator Bernie Sanders

I've been raving all day on Twitter about the fact that the terrorism in Charleston needs to be called terrorism. I'm not good at checking all my email boxes though, so I just found this email from Bernie Sanders from over six hours ago. I get a lot of political emails and I've never shared one before (honestly, I don't even read the vast majority of them). If nothing else, read this for Bernie's first sentence and the last. His first sentence is the clearest statement I've seen from a major politician that this was terrorism. His final sentence contains a link for donations to the Mother Emanuel AME Church (even though he needs the money as the only major party candidate rejecting money from billionaires and SuperPACs)...

Dear ------ -

What transpired in Charleston, South Carolina last night was not just a tragedy, it was an act of terror.

Nine of our fellow Americans were murdered while praying in a historic church because of the color of their skin. This senseless violence fills me with outrage, disgust, and a deep, deep sadness.

This hateful killing is a horrific reminder that, while we have made important progress in civil rights for all of our people, we are far from eradicating racism.

The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is one that has been attacked, burned, and rebuilt throughout its 200 year history. While their community mourns now, they will rebuild, and they will emerge stronger than before.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and their congregation. But we can add our actions to our prayers. The families and the community that have been hurt so very badly by this brutality need our help. Let us stand with them in their time of mourning.

You can help by making a donation to the Emanuel AME Church community today.

Thank you,

Bernie Sanders

Clementa C. Pinckney, Pastor of Mother Emanuel A.M.E.

Rather than focusing on the terrorist who shot and killed nine people, including Clementa Pinckney, inside Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church last night, please watch this video from 2013 in which this Pastor and South Carolina State Senator tells the history of the church to a group of visitors...

Rest In Peace.

Bill O'Reilly n'est pas Charlie (and neither is anyone else at Fox News claming a sudden infection with Francophilia)

Bill O'Reilly dot com may be out of stock for this popular item from the days of "Freedom Fries" and the "Axis of Weasel," but his Boycott France bumperstickers are still on display there a week after the Charlie Hebdo attack:

Screen grabbed on 13 January 2015.

Speaking of the attack, it's worth learning to read French (a.k.a., the "Freedom Language") just to experience this heartbreaking first-person account from Charlie staffer Sigolène Vinson featured in Le Monde this morning: «C’est Charlie, venez vite, ils sont tous morts».

Viewing Charlie Hebdo artists as cartoonists rather than victims.

This was recorded two days after the murders of Charb, Cabu, Tignous, Wolinsky, Honoré, and others in the Charlie Hebdo offices. Even if you don't understand a word of French, this video from On n'est pas couché will give some idea of how well known and well respected these artists and their profession were -- and are:

#JeSuisCharlie

"...no faith teaches people to massacre innocents." Has Barack Obama read the Bible?

President Obama was perfectly correct today to condemn the Islamic State murderers who executed American journalist James Foley, but I have to take exception to some lines in his remarks:

... They [the group known as ISIS, ISIL, or The Islamic State] have murdered Muslims -- both Sunni and Shia -- by the thousands. They target Christians and religious minorities, driving them from their homes, murdering them when they can for no other reason than they practice a different religion. They declared their ambition to commit genocide against an ancient people. So ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just God would stand for what they did yesterday, and for what they do every single day. ...
--Barack Obama, 20 August 2014 [emphasis added]

We don't have to search further than the unread books sitting in every American hotel room to find a "faith that teaches people to massacre innocents":

Deuteronomy 13:6 If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers;

7 Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth;

8 Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him:

9 But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people.

10 And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.

11 And all Israel shall hear, and fear, and shall do no more any such wickedness as this is among you.

12 If thou shalt hear say in one of thy cities, which the Lord thy God hath given thee to dwell there, saying,

13 Certain men, the children of Belial, are gone out from among you, and have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which ye have not known;

14 Then shalt thou enquire, and make search, and ask diligently; and, behold, if it be truth, and the thing certain, that such abomination is wrought among you;

15 Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword.

16 And thou shalt gather all the spoil of it into the midst of the street thereof, and shalt burn with fire the city, and all the spoil thereof every whit, for the Lord thy God: and it shall be an heap for ever; it shall not be built again.

17 And there shall cleave nought of the cursed thing to thine hand: that the Lord may turn from the fierceness of his anger, and shew thee mercy, and have compassion upon thee, and multiply thee, as he hath sworn unto thy fathers;

18 When thou shalt hearken to the voice of the Lord thy God, to keep all his commandments which I command thee this day, to do that which is right in the eyes of the Lord thy God.
--King James Version [emphasis added]

We have to stop paying lip service to this god of the three Abrahamic faiths as if he were nothing but a benign and peaceful poltergeist.

Flip Flopping on Gitmo is the Mavericky® Thing to Do

Watch John McCain from 2008 give all the reasons why Guantanamo Bay's prison camp should close:

"So, I'm for closing Guantanamo Bay. It may be one of the nicest places in the world to live in, but it has become a symbol and we need to close Guantanamo." 

So why has this ex-Prisoner of War decided now, six years later, that Gitmo is A-OK with him?

I'm sure that this new John McCain would be perfectly OK with it if North Vietnam had decided in 1967 that the enemy combatants bombing their country could be held indefinitely without trial in an offshore extra-legal prison camp and grilled for information, wouldn't he? 

The Word of the Day is (once again) "Terrorism"

Is there any doubt that a person with hundreds of rounds of ammunition and a semi-automatic rifle entering an international airport to kill as many TSA agents as possible should be labeled a terrorist? Apparently there is, because I saw the ABC news story about this murderer tonight and have been looking at many other videos online and I have yet to see any reporter refer to this "shooter" or "gunman" or "assailant" or "suspect" or "perpetrator" as a "terrorist".

Is there any doubt that the t-word would be used immediately if the LAX shooter's name were Abdul Muhammad rather than Paul Anthony Ciancia and if he were carrying a Koran rather than a note that included references to Janet Napolitano and the New World Order and talked about how he wanted to attack TSA officers and "instill fear into their traitorous minds"?

This is about more than language, and it's a pattern. Here's a link to a post from February 18, 2010 about another white male Christian terrorist suicide bomber who flew his plane into a building containing an IRS office in Texas. He, of course, was not a "terrorist" to the government or the press, but simply a troubled 53-year-old businessman with tax problems. Why? Simply because his name was Joseph Andrew Stack III rather than Mohammed Atta. But if we don't use the word terrorism for terrorist acts carried out by our home-grown murderous right-wing nuts, then we shouldn't use it for anyone. It becomes a word devoid of meaning.

Language Matters: Redefining "Eco-terrorism"

Why should we just sit back and let Fox News, the American FBI, and the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research define "eco-terrorism", when it's obvious that the real eco-terrorists are those who would poison our pristine Catskill water with fracking fluids or hunt endangered marine mammals or contaminate the Gulf Coast with millions of barrels of oil or ... well, the prize has to go to those who would remove entire mountains in West Virginia to get to the coal underneath.
The following ABC News story is from last July, but it presents this barbaric eco-terroristic practice of mountaintop removal in a concise horrifying summary.


Note that mountaintop-removing Representative Nick Rahall (D-WV) is a prime example of why I am NOT a registered Democrat, and fracking profiteer Dan Boren (D-OK), who made this recent appearance in the Times is another. While the GOP may be more predictably anti-environment, many -- if not most -- representatives of both parties are consistently more interested in "serious" issues like money and cost-effective energy procurement than in the "frivolous" issue of protecting our earth.
Despite government-sanctioned definitions of eco-terrorism, ask the next generations looking at a flat "reclaimed" West Virginia landscape of toxic ponds, Walmarts, and Waffle Houses if the real eco-terrorists were the short-sighted people in suits who removed the mountains, or the people of ELF and ALF who torched the occasional Hummer and released lab rats.
"Eco-terrorism," in the TrueBlueLiberal dot org Style Guide, is used to describe those who would HARM the ecosystem, not those who attempt to protect it.

Words Matter when talking about Terrorism and the Austin Suicide Bomber

Even without having cable, I'm well aware of the fact that the Fair and Balanced Fox News Network has absolutely no problem throwing around the words "terror," "terrorism," or "terrorist," when discussing the actions of dedicated extremists with malfunctioning explosives in their shoes or underwear (especially if those misguided souls are men of color with non-Anglo names). So why am I not surprised that I can't find any word with that terror- root used in any of the online Fox News articles about yesterday's Austin Suicide Bomber, the terrorist (and "normal, right down the middle kind of guy") Joe Stack?

The farthest their language seems to go when discussing this cowardly terrorist murderer is "tax protestor" or "domestic extremist." Their lead online article on him this morning ends with an attempt to understand to poor misunderstood criminal and put him into a larger historical context with which many of their viewers might empathize:

"Thursday was not the first time a tax protester went after an Austin IRS building. In 1995, Charles Ray Polk plotted to bomb the IRS Austin Service Center. He was released from prison in October of last year.

The tax protest movement has a long history in the U.S. and was a strong component of anti-government sentiments that surged during the 1990s. That wave culminated in the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people. Several domestic extremists were later convicted in the plot."

Terrorism is terrorism. Corporate styleguides matter. Corporate styleguides help form the opinions of those who get their news from the channel of Cheney and Beck and O'Reilly and Palin. How many Teabaggers will feel free to take the next step and consider the Austin Suicide Bomber a hero, along with the murderers of abortion doctors and other criminal heroes of the radical right?

The Word of the Day is "Terrorism"

I'm just seeing the news now that a disgruntled taxpayer and private pilot (not usually an economically disadvantaged group) purposely flew his plane into a building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas, killing himself and possibly others. Though he may have failed in his attempt to take out IRS agents and employees, certainly the intent is there to kill other people when flying a plane loaded with fuel into the side of an office building. Some other suicide terrorists certainly expected to kill other people when they did the same thing by flying their planes into office buildings in New York City and Arlington, Virginia in 2001.

"We do not yet know the cause of the plane crash," the Department of Homeland Security said in a release. "At this time, we have no reason to believe there is a nexus to terrorist activity. We continue to gather more information, and are aware there is additional information about the pilot's history." (FROM CNN.com)

If a 53-year-old white American male cannot be called a suicide terrorist bomber just because his name is Joseph Andrew Stack III rather than Mohamed Atta, then the language has no meaning.