I actually think this is pretty funny. I can’t think of a better place to take a piss than on the dead skulls of our enemies. But like most things America does, the Marine piss video is causing an uproar around the globe. Afghan President Hamid Karzai called it “completely inhumane and condemnable in the strongest possible terms.” Sec. of Defense Leon Panetta called the conduct “utterly deplorable.” I expect that kind of hyperbole from the Afghans, but it’s a shame Panetta has to join in. I know we have to condemn it for political reasons, but we should not get carried away.

It’s not like we’re talking about taking trophies. So they took a leak on some dead enemy. Good for them.

This article titled “Too many people were willing to believe lurid slurs about Amanda Knox” was written by Deborah Orr, for The Guardian on Wednesday 5th October 2011 19.29 UTC

Many aspects of the Meredith Kercher case have never made sense. For a start, Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox had no motive for murdering Knox’s young English flatmate, unless you bought the outlandish idea that they had, for some reason, conspired with Rudy Guede (the only person still in prison for the crime) to force Kercher into a “sex game” that “went wrong”. An astonishing number of people around the world were keen to believe this scenario, although there is no evidence to support it. Some still are.

Even Guede, who claims the four of them had been together that night, makes no claims of “sex games”. He says he had been “making out” with Kercher, and came back from the loo to find that she had been killed. There is hard, grisly, forensic evidence refuting his ludicrous story. Yet nothing puts Sollecito and Knox in the room with him, apart from the newspaper reports that Guede would have seen during the fortnight that passed before his arrest in Germany.

Implicating Knox and Sollecito was surely a handy distraction for a guilty man. Guede’s possible motive for lying seems astonishingly clear.

But why dwell too long on that, when a far more singular story can be kept alive, if only a motive for Knox can be confected? Happily, a motive now appears to have emerged. Knox, some people seem to want to believe, killed her flatmate, and inveigled two other men into helping her out, in order that she would be arrested, convicted, spend four years in prison, become a cause célèbre, be released on appeal, and, as the Daily Mail so charmingly put it, start “a new life as a professional martyr to injustice”. Why not? The woman is capable of anything, after all. Or so the entire planet has been told.

There are many deeply troubling facets to this case. But an important one, surely, is the degree to which it exposes so many humans as only too happy to believe lurid and destructive slurs served up by a tabloid media culture that they all know – or should know – exists to make money from peddling damaging sensation, the more outrageous the better.

That same debauched editorial process will deliver the much-resented payday to Knox. The sum she receives will be a fraction of what will have been “earned” by others from building her up as a she-devil in the first place, and turning her into a scandalous household name. Yet, somehow, even though it is the media who are providing the filthy cash, while simultaneously stoking the outrage about it so that more people will consume the new stories they are desperate to run, this all just proves – in some foolish minds – that Knox herself has a terrible character, and is clearly somone who will stop at nothing.

The internet teems with those who are reluctant to part with their beloved tale of an unspeakably depraved creature disguised as a pretty US student. They are determined to cling to the idea that there is something twisted and cruel about her. No wonder. The demolition of this idea suggests there is something twisted and cruel about them, or at least that they have been markedly credulous and prurient. They therefore point to the crime for which Knox’s conviction still stands – her naming of Diya “Patrick” Lumumba, the man who owned the bar where she worked, as a suspect during her initial police interrogation.

Now, naming an innocent party in an attempt to get yourself out of trouble is certainly a dreadful act, one for which got Knox three years in jail. However, if I had discovered the body of my murdered flatmate, then been badgered for hours by hostile police insisting they could prove I had been there, and wanting to know who was this Lumumba whom I’d texted “See you later” – well, I’m not certain I would have resisted the temptation to confirm what they wished to hear, then retract it hours later. Yet the world is full of people, it seems, who are convinced of their own ability to be scrupulously honest under all circumstances, and who condemn others for not being so.

Also, it seems preferable to place all the blame for Lumumba’s wrongful arrest on Knox, once again, rather than on the people who actually made the wrongful arrest so quickly and so carelessly.

Weirdly, I have never come across anyone suggesting that Guede is a bit of a reprobate even for fleeing the scene of a murder he didn’t commit, as he claims, let alone pointing the finger at two innocent people who served eight years in prison between them, partly on the strength of his evidence. I have, however, come across suggestions that it is pretty typical that the poor, black man is in prison for murder, while the rich, white people are walking free. Yet, Guede was known to have broken, entered and robbed, very probably armed with a knife, on three recent occasions previously, and was the only person tied by hard evidence to the scene.

So it would appear to me that skin colour is among the less relevant of circumstantial defences. In fact, it would seem to me that any prejudice in this case has been directed against privileged white flesh. It is wrong to think ill of people simply because they are black and poor, of course. But deciding to turn the tables and think ill of people simply because they are rich and white is hardly a sound, sensible, or helpful remedy. That self-consciously topsy-turvy mindset, exploited by the media, has played a large part in this terrible saga.

All that remains of the case against Sollecito and Knox is their “atypical phone activity”. Sollecito’s phone was either turned off or simply inactive – it’s hard to tell which, from conflicting reports of translated evidence – from 8.42pm until 6.52am. Knox’s was off or unused after her text to Lumumba, until she called Kercher’s phone at 12.07. She called Kercher, she says, having returned from Sollecito’s flat to find the front door of her own house open, the place ransacked and Kercher’s door locked. Yet it is straightforward explanations such as these that have been discounted and disbelieved all along.

The people most appallingly served by this long and terrible farrago – and it is by no means over yet – have been the grieving Kercher family. They have been served up this tripe by the Italian criminal justice system, and by the world’s media. They believed in the guilt of Sollecito and Knox, painful as that belief was. Now, as they say, they are “back to square one”. A lot of people share blame for the mental torture this family have been through. Amanda Knox is not one of them.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

This doesn’t need any commentary. I think the video speaks for itself.

On second thought I will say this. It sickens me to hear all those blacks cheering after he says such a vile thing. It’s horrifying and sad if they actually believe the Tea Party wants to lynch them.

This article titled “Muammar Gaddafi is nowhere to be seen, but his era is over” was written by Lizzy Davies, Peter Walker, for The Guardian on Monday 22nd August 2011 19.43 UTC

For 42 long years, from the moment he came to power in a bloodless coup, Muammar Gaddafi did all he could to become ubiquitous. He made his Green Book of political philosophy required reading and ensured his portrait was hung in homes, plastered to buildings and engraved on the gold watches he gave as gifts.

On Monday, however, the “brother leader and guide of the revolution” was nowhere to be seen. Nor was he heard, unlike on Sunday when he issued a series of audio messages calling on supporters to fight back against rebels.

“We have no confirmation of Gaddafi’s whereabouts,” said David Cameron, who has returned early from holiday for the second time this summer, to deal with the rapid pace of change in Tripoli.

Mahmoud Nacua, Libya’s new diplomatic envoy to London, told the Guardian: “We don’t know exactly where he is, but the fighters will look to find him. Maybe it will be hours or days, I don’t know, but his era is over.”

As details emerged of the battle raging around his Bab al-Aziziya compound, the million-dollar question – where is the Gaddafi? – sparked a series of conflicting rumours and reports. A rebel spokesman in London was reported to have claimed that Gaddafi, who was last seen in public in May, could have fled to neighbouring Algeria, which opposed Nato intervention in Libya. However last night his son Saif al-Islam who rebels said had been captured, appeared in front of western journalists and claimed his father was still somewhere in the Libyan capital.

South Africa was forced to refute rumours it had sent planes to fly the 69-year-old to an undisclosed location. There was no mention of Venezuela, the country to which foreign secretary William Hague said in February the dictator had fled, and with whose leader, Hugo Chávez, Gaddafi is old friends. An arrest warrant from the international criminal court would limit his choice of destination.

Pentagon officials, however, said they believed he remained in Libya. “We do not have any information that he has left the country,” a spokesman said.

This idea is supported by Gaddafi’s previous statements. He declared last month in an audio broadcast: “I will never leave the land of my ancestors or the people who have sacrificed themselves for me.” On Sunday, as the rebels swept into the capital, he insisted: “I am in Tripoli … I am with you until the end.”

The possibility that Gaddafi remains in his huge Bab al-Aziziya compound was supported by an unnamed diplomat who, quoted by AFP, said the embattled leader was still in the city and could be in the rabbit warren of tunnels and rooms that has been the target of repeated Nato airstrikes. Others suggested that Gaddafi might have retreated to one of the two places closest to his heart: Sirte, the coastal town where he was born, or the desert town of Sabha, which has been one of his strongholds.

Whatever the truth, speculation abounded, with the ghosts of other fallen leaders never far away.

“I think it’s impossible that he’ll surrender,” said Abdel-Salam Jalloud, a former Libyan prime minister and presidential right-hand man who fled to Rome at the weekend. He added, in an interview on Italian TV: “He is not like Hitler, who had the courage to kill himself.” Jalloud said his former friend had “no means of leaving Tripoli” and would most likely end up dead.

While the man himself remained elusive, his previously all-powerful family – seven sons, a daughter and an adopted son – was rapidly fragmenting. According to a spokesman for the rebels’ National Transitional Council, Gaddafi last week asked neighbouring countries, including Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia, to offer shelter to his family. This could not be confirmed, but what was certain was that his efforts were too little, too late for some of his sons.

One of the most startling turn of events was the saga of the arrest of Saif al-Islam, the second son and the man widely seen, until several months ago, as his likely successor. Rebels said they had detained Saif al-Islam on Sunday as they moved into Tripoli. This was later confirmed by the international criminal court, but in a suprising turnaround he appeared at the Rixos hotel last night and told western journalists the rebellion’s back had been broken.

With his doctorate from the London School of Economics, the 39-year-old had, until the uprising, been regarded by many in the west as the friendlier face of the regime. But his iron-fisted response to the rebellion revealed his true inclinations and, in June, the ICC issued a warrant for his arrest on charges of crimes against humanity.

While one NTC envoy said it was possible Saif could be tried in Libya, the UN chief, Ban Ki-moon, called on rebels to hand him and, if captured, his father to authorities in The Hague.

The future of Muhammad Muammar Gaddafi, the oldest son, was also unclear after rebels placed him under house arrest. Muhammad, who is believed to live in Tripoli with his children, wife and mother – Muammar Gaddafi’s first wife, who he divorced 40 years ago – was conducting a live telephone interview with al-Jazeera TV when rebel fighters entered the building. Before the eruption of gunfire, Muhammad had insisted on his own “honesty and integrity” and praised the rebels for their “cordial” approach. “They have not harmed me,” he said. Then, he added: “I’m being attacked right now. There is gunfire inside my house. They’re inside my house.”

Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the head of the NTC, said Mohammad, who heads Libya’s state-run telecommunications firm, had not been hurt. There were rumours last night that he had fled from custody.

Then on Monday afternoon came reports that Saadi Gaddafi, best known abroad for a brief and spectacularly unsuccessful stint as a footballer in Italy, had been arrested.

Of the rest of the Gaddafi clan there was little news. Video footage emerged purporting to show a rebel attack on a compound said to belong to Ayesha, Gaddafi’s youngest natural child, but this could not be confirmed. Ayesha’s whereabouts, like her father’s, were unknown.

Even less is known of Gaddafi’s other sons: Khamis, the youngest and commander of the Libyan army’s feared 32nd Brigade; Hannibal, notorious for a string of alleged assaults on servants and female companions at hotels around Europe; and Mutassim, another career military officer and a close adviser to his father. Saif al-Arab Gaddafi died in March during a Nato air strike. The clan is completed by Milad, the nephew adopted by Gaddafi as a son who has a low public profile.

The Libyan leader’s other adopted child, Hanna, was reportedly killed as an infant in 1986 when the US bombed Tripoli but some reports have speculated she remains is alive and is now a doctor.

What is certain is that the Gaddafi family’s power is at last on the wane.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

This article titled “Lockerbie bomber al-Megrahi seen at pro-Gaddafi rally in Tripoli” was written by Ben Quinn, for The Guardian on Wednesday 27th July 2011 00.07 UTC

Libyan state television has broadcast footage apparently showing Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, at a gathering in support of Muammar Gaddafi.

Still alive almost two years after he was released from prison in Scotland and sent home on compassionate grounds due to terminal cancer, Megrahi appeared to be frail and was sitting in a wheelchair.

A Libyan television presenter introduced Megrahi at the rally and, after the national anthem was played, said his conviction was the result of a “conspiracy”.

The footage of the event in Tripoli was reportedly broadcast live.

The former Libyan intelligence agent had been expected to live for only three months when he was released from a Scottish prison after serving nearly eight years of a 27-year sentence for killing 270 people.

Four days before Christmas in 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 travelling from London to New York was targeted in a bomb attack, causing it to crash over Lockerbie, in Dumfries and Galloway.

He has rarely been seen since he returned to a hero’s welcome in Libya. One of Gaddafi’s sons, Saif, was by his side amid scenes of jubilation after an aircraft touched down in Tripoli while Megrahi later appeared on television alongside the dictator himself.

It was reported in December that he had slipped into a coma and was not expected to recover. “Everyday is expected to be his last,” a source close to his family was said to have told Sky News at the time.

David Cameron came under fresh pressure earlier this year to order an independent inquiry into the release of Megrahi after US senators accused the UK of “cutting deals” to set him free.

The prime minister said that an exhaustive review had showed there was no need for an inquiry into allegations that Megrahi was freed by Scottish ministers to further an oil deal for BP.

Cameron told the Commons in February that a report by Sir Gus O’Donnell, the head of the civil service, had found no proof that UK ministers or BP had directly put pressure on the Scottish government to release the Libyan.

Four US senators dismissed his assurances, insisting that new evidence showed that ministers and officials in London worked to get him released to further the UK’s commercial and political interests in Libya.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

On the season finale of American Idol last night, finalist Lauren Alaina got a chance to perform with country superstar Carrie Underwood. I thought it was the best performance of the night.

It’s still very much in the beta stage of testing, but I would like everyone to check out a brand new site I launched this week. It’s called Contwit and it’s a live stream of conservative chatter on Twitter. The standard hashtag that conservatives tag their tweets with is #TCOT (Top Conservatives On Twitter).

What Contwit does is show a live stream of every tweet tagged with #TCOT in real-time. In the coming weeks their will be additional features added as well.

Anyway, take a look at the site and let me know what you think.

http://contwit.com

Sorry for not updating yesterday, but I was out with the flu. I’m feeling better today.

If you’re wondering why labor unions are so committed to passing Obama’s health care reforms — here’s why.

It’s all about the money.

A man who certainly knows a thing or two about protesting for freedom is Russian chess champion Gary Kasparov.

Vladimir Putin has no greater foe in Russia than Kasparov. He’s been arrested too many times to count for leading marches in Russia against the authoritarian regime that Putin has created.

If Kasparov were not famous the world over, he would have been killed long ago. His fame is the only thing that has kept him alive under a regime that routinely murders journalists and jails people who speak out against the government.

Therefore, when Kasparov speaks out on issues like the protests in Iran he has a certain amount of credibility.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Kasparov has an excellent Op-Ed about the protests in Iran and offers an interesting perspective.

Mr. Putin has a great deal riding on the outcome in Iran. With the Russian economy teetering, he needs a steep increase in oil prices to stave off the collapse of his government. So he has been working to increase tension in the Middle East and now sees the Iranian crisis as potentially helpful — if Ahmadinejad comes out on top.

…For Mr. Putin, the unknown factor in all of this is how the West will respond to what’s happening in Iran. It could give him pause if Iran faces penalties of real significance for using lethal force against nonviolent protestors. Surprisingly, European leaders are showing unusual assertiveness in condemning the Iranian regime.

Kasparov goes on to say that president Obama is wrong to sit on the sidelines while everything plays out.

He says the president’s warning that “the world is watching” is meaningless, because the behavior of the Iranian regime over the last 30 years proves they don’t give a damn who’s watching.

Sen. Richard Lugar and CNN’s Fareed Zakaria are singled out by Kasparov as well for supporting president Obama’s timidity.

Kasparov concludes by saying there’s no reason for America to hold back if we can do something that would potentially tip the balance inside Iran.

There is no reason to withhold external pressure that can tip the balance inside Tehran. Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi is not an ideal democrat. But should he and his supporters win power they will owe their authority to an abruptly empowered Iranian electorate. It is reasonable to expect that the people will hold a Mousavi government accountable for delivering the freedoms that they are now risking their lives to attain.

Millions of Iranians are fighting to join the Free World. The least we can do is let the valiant people of Iran know loud and clear that they will be welcomed with open arms.

Unlike many on the right, I actually thought president Obama’s statements at the beginning of this crisis were correct. I think his measured response in the beginning was appropriate.

However, as images and video of Iranian citizens being brutalized and killed by Iran’s Nazi brownshirts are being broadcast around the world, America has a moral responsibility to throw our support behind the protesters.

We should be condemning in the strongest possible language the treatment of protesters.

This is a chance for president Obama to go on national television and ask the Ayatollahs of Iran to let their people have freedom.