Clipmarks | ratilfar's clips

Larry Harmon, longtime Bozo the Clown, dead at 83

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:43:33 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar
clipper's remarks: I remember seeing him on WGN.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Larry Harmon, who appeared as Bozo the Clown for decades and licensed the name to other Bozos around the world, has died at age 83.

Harmon died Thursday at his home of congestive heart failure, his longtime publicist, Jerry Digney, told The Associated Press.

Although not the first person to play Bozo, Harmon took on the famous clown's persona and, as an entrepreneur, he licensed the character to others, particularly TV stations. Those stations then recruited their own Bozos for local shows.

Harmon met his alter ego after answering a casting call to make personal appearances as a clown to promote records. He got the job and eventually bought the rights to Bozo.

Along the way, he embellished Bozo's distinctive look: the orange-tufted hair, the bulbous nose, the outlandish red, white and blue costume.

H. G. Wells Quotes

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:00:37 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar

Clip Source: www.brainyquote.com

A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.

H. G. Wells

Heresies are experiments in man's unsatisfied search for truth.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.

If we don't end war, war will end us.

Leaders should lead as far as they can and then vanish. Their ashes should not choke the fire they have lit.

Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.

You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

Ex-Agent Says CIA Ignored Iran Facts

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 22:59:54 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar
clipper's remarks: "On five occasions he was ordered to either falsify his reporting on WMD in the Near East, or not to file his reports at all," Krieger said in an interview.

Clip Source: www.washingtonpost.com

A former CIA operative who says he tried to warn the agency about faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs now contends that CIA officials also ignored evidence that Iran had suspended work on a nuclear bomb.

The onetime undercover agent, who has been barred by the CIA from using his real name, filed a motion in federal court late Friday asking the government to declassify legal documents describing what he says was a deliberate suppression of findings on Iran that were contrary to agency views at the time.

The former operative alleged in a 2004 lawsuit that the CIA fired him after he repeatedly clashed with senior managers over his attempts to file reports that challenged the conventional wisdom about weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. Key details of his claim have not been made public because they describe events the CIA deems secret.

The consensus view on Iran's nuclear program shifted dramatically last December

Tags: iran, nukes, intelligence cia, spies, war

U.S. officials condoned Kurdish oil deal

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:37:56 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar
clipper's remarks: From the article....

"Kurdish officials have clashed with Baghdad over the national oil law, which will determine how contracts are awarded and how revenues are distributed. The northern Iraqi region has signed several exploration deals with foreign firms, which Baghdad says are illegal."

Clip Source: www.msnbc.msn.com

WASHINGTON - U.S. officials condoned Hunt Oil Co. efforts to obtain an exploration deal with Iraq’s Kurdish regional government, contrary to public statements discouraging it, according to documents cited by a congressional committee.

When the agreement was announced in September, it was criticized as undermining efforts to strengthen Iraq central government, which still had no national oil revenue-sharing law.

Bush administration officials expressed public concern and denied any knowledge of the contract.

On Wednesday, U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman released e-mails and letters obtained by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that appeared to show the opposite.

“Contrary to the denials of administration officials, advisors to the president and officials in the State and Commerce Departments knew about Hunt Oil’s interest in the Kurdish region months before the contract was executed,” Waxman, a California Democrat, wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Tags: oil, iraq, kurdistan, empire, u.s.

15 hostages freed as FARC is fooled in cunning operation

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:35:18 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar
clipper's remarks: I'm glad their ok, that their nightmare is finally over.

Clip Source: www.latimes.com

Colombian former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three U.S. defense contractors are among those rescued by Colombian commandos who infiltrated the rebel group.

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- Armed forces disguised as rebels Wednesday rescued former Colombia presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three U.S. defense contractors and 11 other hostages held by leftist insurgents, in a daring operation that delivered the latest in a series of blows to the country's largest anti-government force.

The 46-year-old Betancourt, who was held for more than six years, called the rescue operation impeccable and told reporters that she planned to run for the presidency again.

Colombian forces apparently infiltrated the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and duped them into grouping Betancourt and the other hostages in a remote jungle location about 200 miles southeast of Bogota and putting them aboard a helicopter, supposedly for a meeting with new FARC commander Alfonso Cano.

Tags: colombia, farc, hostages, freedom

Risk to U.S. troops seen if Israel strikes Iran

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:28:48 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar
clipper's remarks: And I found this tidbit interesting:

"American military analysts familiar with Israel's thinking said the government there remained uncertain whether an attack on Iran made strategic sense and whether such a strike would prove a decisive blow against Tehran's nuclear program. The subject is controversial in Israel, and many Israelis strongly oppose a strike."

Clip Source: www.latimes.com

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. military's top officer warned Wednesday that an Israeli airstrike against Iran would make the Middle East more unstable and could add to the stress on overworked American forces in the region.

The comments by Navy Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came days after he visited Israel and amid growing international concern that Jerusalem is actively considering such an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

"I have made it very clear to all parties that the first option ought to be to solve this problem diplomatically," Bush said.

The comments appeared to reflect a strain within the administration as it grapples for a way to address Iran's nuclear program, which Tehran says is peaceful but Washington and its allies suspect is intended for developing atomic weapons.

Tags: israel, u.s.iran, iraq, afghanistan, troops, war, nukes, strike

U.S. spies on Iraqi army, sources say

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 01:05:18 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar
clipper's remarks: Oh boy!

Clip Source: www.latimes.com

WASHINGTON -- Caught off guard by recent Iraqi military operations, the United States is using spy satellites that ordinarily are trained on adversaries to monitor the movements of the American-backed Iraqi army, current and former U.S. officials say.

The stepped-up surveillance reflects breakdowns in trust and coordination between the two forces. Officials said it was part of an expanded intelligence effort launched after American commanders were surprised by the timing of the Iraqi army's violent push into Basra three months ago.

The use of the satellites puts the United States in the unusual position of employing some of its most sophisticated espionage technology to track an allied army that American forces helped create, continue to advise, and often fight alongside.

Military officials and experts said the move showed concern by U.S. commanders about whether their Iraqi counterparts would follow U.S. guidance or keep their coalition partners fully informed.

Tags: military, spying, allies?, war, iraq, wtf

China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:17:34 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar
clipper's remarks: Swell, just swell, borrowing techniques from communist dictatorships. Well done!

Plus:

"In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners."

Brilliant!

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From the Air Force Prisoners of War (pdf)

Documents Released at Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing on SERE Tactics(pdf)

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay

by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Tags: china, u.s., torture, creeps, cowards, gitmo, abu ghraib

Note to the religious right: auto-replace is not your friend

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 03:15:19 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar
clipper's remarks: To funny by far!

Clip Source: www.crooksandliars.com

The American Family Association’s OneNewsNow website, for example, takes its AP articles and replaces the word “gay” with the word “homosexual.” I’m not entirely sure why, but it seems to make the AFA happy. The group is, after all, pretty far out there.

That means

Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials and seemed to save something for the final later Sunday.

Homosexual didn’t get off to a particularly strong start in the first semifinal, but by the halfway mark he had established a comfortable lead. He slowed somewhat over the final 10 meters-nothing like the way-too-soon complete shutdown that almost cost him Saturday. Asked how he felt, Homosexual said: “A little fatigued.”

Dept. of You Can't Make This $!&# Up!: Craig and Vitter Team Up!

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:50:06 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar
clipper's remarks: Yep, they team up to support the Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution!

Clip Source: www.crooksandliars.com

Just this week, a group of Republican senators re-introduced the Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution, which, as we know, would ban gay marriage.

But the funny part is looking over the list of the 10 original sponsors. Most of the names are predictable — Brownback and Inhofe, for example — but there are two others whose names stand out: Sens. David Vitter (R-La.) and Larry Craig (R-Idaho).

Yes, two of the principal sponsors of a constitutional amendment to “protect” marriage include one far-right Republican who hired prostitutes and another far-right Republican who was arrested for soliciting gay sex in an airport men’s room.

As my friend Kyle put it, these two are “not exactly the poster boys of the family values crowd or particularly upstanding examples of the supposed sanctity of the ‘union of a man and a woman.”‘

Tags: vitter, craig, you, can't, make, this, $^!&, up!

Evidence Faulted in Detainee Case

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:54:55 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar
clipper's remarks: This is what the Republicans feared, that their flimsy reasoning would be blown out of the water!

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

In the first case to review the government’s secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal appeals court found that accusations against a Muslim from western China held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims. The unclassified parts of the decision were released on Monday.

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Tags: courts, law, detainees, justice, war, war on terror, gitmo

Defending Wes Clark

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:33:40 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar
clipper's remarks: Cont...

"Is what Wesley Clark said true? Let's check some other facts: John McCain made claims about progress in security by walking through the streets of Baghdad. But as I recall, he was protected by at least a platoon of American soldiers and helicopters lying overhead. In matters of national security, as General Clark pointed out, "it's a matter of understanding risk," and it's "gauging your opponents;" and it's also a "matter of being held accountable."

Clip Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

I have known General Clark for many years: we served in the same Army and for the same country. He's a patriot. So to suppose that somehow Wesley Clark would denigrate John McCain's service to his country, while praising his bravery during the time that Senator McCain spent in an enemy prison, is absolutely ludicrous. So let's check the facts.

On CBS's Face the Nation, General Clark said that he believed John McCain was "untried and untested." Journalist Bob Schieffer asked him to explain what he meant. How could Clark make such a claim when "you're talking about somebody who was a prisoner of war? He was a squadron commander of the largest squadron in the Navy. He's been on the Senate Armed Services Committee for many years. How can you say that John McCain is un-untested and untried?"

Tags: wes clark, mccain, mclame, truth, soldiers, worshipping, empty, uniforms, swiftboating

Pinball never died in this arcade

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:50:07 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar
clipper's remarks: The only really good thing to come out of the 70s, well that and the Who, the Ramones and KISS!

Clip Source: www.latimes.com

Tim Arnold, 52, has about 800 pinball machines stored in his backyard hangar in Las Vegas. About 200 more machines reside in his Pinball Hall of Fame, where anyone with quarters can play them. What's the use of having cool games, he figured, if you play them alone?

Players can spend hours in the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas reliving childhood memories with their favorite games. It's a memorial to a pop culture touchstone.

LAS VEGAS -- Tim Quintana hunches over a pinball machine and stares down Spider-Man's archenemies: Kingpin, Lizard and Scorpion. He pulls the plunger and a silver ball shoots onto the playfield, a maze of brightly lit bumpers and targets.

The ball darts over a comic-book-style drawing of Spider-Man reaching for his lady love, Mary Jane. The machine beeps: Blip-blip-blip-blip. The ball clangs off two mushroom-shaped bumpers. It plows into three square targets. Blip-blip-blip-blip.

"It makes you feel like a kid for an hour,"

Tags: tag, pinball, arcade, fun, vegas, 70s

McCain Uses Swift Boat Vet Bud Day To Rebut Wesley Clark

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 01:07:41 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar

Clip Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Sen. John McCain's campaign on Monday launched the McCain "Truth Squad" - a group of political and Vietnam contemporaries who would counter attacks on the Senator's military record.

In hopes of nipping any criticism in the bud, the campaign brought on board a man quite familiar with how these types of attacks gain legs: Bud Day, a fellow POW who was part of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that worked so hard to defame Sen. John Kerry's own Vietnam record.

That Day would politicize Vietnam in his defense of McCain is not surprising. During the 2004 campaign, he said of Kerry: "My view is he basically will go down in history sometime as the Benedict Arnold of 1971." And after appearing in a national advertisement for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign, Day formed the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation, an extension of the Swift Boat effort.

Tags: veterans, war, iraq, vietam, swift, boating, truth

Al Qaeda In Pakistan: A Rising Threat

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:09:51 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar
clipper's remarks: Yeah, everything is going swell.

Clip Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Today's New York Times leads with a report that Al Qaeda is strengthening their organization in Pakistan. With US resources heavily invested in Iraq, focus on the hunt for Al Qaeda in outlying regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan suffered.

Publicly, senior American and Pakistani officials have said that the creation of a Qaeda haven in the tribal areas was in many ways inevitable -- that the lawless badlands where ethnic Pashtun tribes have resisted government control for centuries were a natural place for a dispirited terrorism network to find refuge. The American and Pakistani officials also blame a disastrous cease-fire brokered between the Pakistani government and militants in 2006.

American intelligence officials say that the Qaeda hunt in Pakistan, code-named Operation Cannonball by the C.I.A. in 2006, was often undermined by bitter disagreements within the Bush administration and within the C.I.A.

Tags: pakistan, afghanistan, war, war on terror, al-qaeda, tribal areas

Clipmarks | ratilfar's clips

Larry Harmon, longtime Bozo the Clown, dead at 83

H. G. Wells Quotes

Ex-Agent Says CIA Ignored Iran Facts

U.S. officials condoned Kurdish oil deal

15 hostages freed as FARC is fooled in cunning operation

Risk to U.S. troops seen if Israel strikes Iran

U.S. spies on Iraqi army, sources say

China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo

Related

Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From the Air Force Prisoners of War (pdf)

Documents Released at Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing on SERE Tactics(pdf)

Note to the religious right: auto-replace is not your friend

Dept. of You Can't Make This $!&# Up!: Craig and Vitter Team Up!

Evidence Faulted in Detainee Case

Defending Wes Clark

Pinball never died in this arcade

McCain Uses Swift Boat Vet Bud Day To Rebut Wesley Clark

Al Qaeda In Pakistan: A Rising Threat