I Ran With the Devil, Left a Trail of Excuses News

Good day to all on 'A Small Band of Whackos In a Midwestern Hellhole of a State Decide Your Future' Day

Republican Round-Robin
This short article detailing the serial destruction of various Republican campaigns is hilarious.

It also reeks of the desperation the Republican elites feel at this point, trying to find ANYONE but Huckabee to win their nomination.

Source: Raw Story

Top US Senator? Only In His Fragile Little Mind
Biden takes the opportunity to remind the world he's still breathing by denouncing that the Bush administration approved the sale of a bunch of F-16s in late December amidst the madness of the Bhutto assassination.

Yeah. The Bush administration did something stupid. Big surprise. But the timing isn't really relevant, Senator "Bankruptcy Bill" Biden. It's actually never a good idea to sell high tech military hardware to small, highly unstable countries full of internal strife and religious fanatics, armed with nukes and run by an inept yet brutal dictator.

So, please... just go crawl in a hole somewhere and die already.

Source: Raw Story

Orwellian America
Much like 1984, it's both scary and ludicrous at the same time.

A report out blasts the US for slipping into the worst group of surveillance happy societies, and reminds me of a hilarious story I had forgotten, where the FBI had been using their access to your supermarket purchasing records (from those handy discount cards they give you) to try and track terrorists... by what they eat.

However, according to Jeff Stein in Congressional Quarterly, the FBI "sifted through" grocery store data around San Francisco in 2005 and 2006.

"The idea," Stein writes, "was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area."

I have several boxes of falafel mix in my kitchen cabinet, but the last time I checked I'm not an Iranian secret agent.

Though if, you know, Iran is hiring, they could send me an offer...

Source: Raw Story

Reasons Not to Bother With The Mainstream Press
A former reporter for NBC's Dateline is making the rounds attacking them for being grossly stupid and obsessed with fitting the news into their profit model.

Some of this stuff is hilariously tragic. Tragilarious, if you like.

In another instance, Hockenberry claimed a story he did about a Weather Underground member wouldn't appear on the Sunday edition of "Dateline" unless its lead-out, the 1960s family drama "American Dreams," did a show about "protesters or something."

See? News programs should only serve as advertising for our family drama crap!

Then of course there's this tidbit:

Another bombshell is Hockenberry's claims that General Electric, NBC's parent company, discouraged him from talking to the Bin Laden family about their estranged family member. Hockenberry asked GE, which does business with the Bin Laden family company, to help him get in contact with them. Instead, a PR executive called Hockenberry's hotel room in Saudi Arabia and read a statement about how GE didn't see its "valuable business relationship" with the Bin Laden Group as having anything to do with "Dateline."

Yes, god forbid someone ask the BIN LADEN FAMILY about, err, their ties to terrorism. Or an American corporation not, err, line their pockets.

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh.

Source: Reuters

Bhutto's Secret File
Seems like Bhutto was about to accurse Musharraf of completely rigging the election immediately before her violent death. Wow, not the least bit suspicious.

According to CBS News, which has obtained a copy of the report, it "alleges widespread plans to stuff ballot boxes, rig voting lists, and intimidate, even kill, opposition voters."

CNN quotes the document more specifically as saying, "Where an opposing candidate is strong in an area, they have planned to create a conflict at the polling station, even killing people if necessary, to stop polls at least three to four hours."

...

CNN analyst Peter Bergen noted, "There's no reason to believe that she was killed because of this dossier, because the people behind her killing almost certainly are al Qaeda and the Taliban, and they've got nothing to do with this election." That is the official Pakistani position, based primarily on allegations of intercepted phone calls from a pro-Taliban warlord who has denied any involvement.

Honestly, CNN. Do you even try any more?

Cui Bono

(For the illiterate pagans out there)

So everyone's heard about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan, recently returned from exile, survivor of another attempt on her life during her welcome home celebration about a month ago. Bhutto's family has been involved in Pakistani politics much the same way the Kennedys have been in the United States, the difference being, our dynastic clan offs themselves, hers gets murdered.

She's the fourth Bhutto since Pakistan's independence to die as a result of politics. Her father and two brothers preceded her.

So, obviously, there are two ways to look at this assassination. One: It's another internal Pakistani thing, or Two: The All-Powerful Terrorists are behind it.

Cynicism aside, apply the aforementioned principle from the title and ask yourself, "Who Benefits?"

Well, in this case, it's a little muddy. Everyone seems to benefit from her death. Musharraf's political party has just seen its chief opposition die in a hail of... something (more on that in a moment), and is now a shoe-in to win the upcoming parliamentary elections. Which are, hence, a joke. Al-Queda supposedly hates her, but I think it's more of a pragmatism thing with them; Bhutto would have to be more competent at controlling those cave dwelling loons than Musharraf, who turns a blind eye.

So, who killed her, and why?

Bhutto certainly had her suspicions. She sent CNN an email to be opened only in the event of her death a short time ago. In the email, she lays the blame squarely at the feet of Musharraf.

"I wld [sic] hold Musharaf [sic] responsible," Bhutto wrote to her US spokesman, Mark Siegel, in the October e-mail, which was reported Thursday afternoon by CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "I have been made to feel insecure by his minions, and there is no way what is happening in terms of stopping me from taking private cars or using tinted windows or giving jammers or four police mobiles to cover all sides cld [sic] happen without him."

Blitzer told viewers he received the e-mail soon after it was sent two months ago, but he agreed not to report on it unless Bhutto was assassinated. "It's a story I was asked to report to the world in -- if Bhutto were killed," he said.

Source: Raw Story

It's like something out of a TV drama, isn't it?

The official timeline for the death goes something like this. Bhutto was leaving a rally and got into her bulletproof car. She stuck her head out of the sunroof to wave to admirers, and it all went to hell.

Depending on your version of events, she was shot twice and then the shooter blew himself up; there were no shots, and she died from blunt force trauma, her head hitting part of the car when the attacker blew himself up; she was shot AND riddled with shrapnel when the guy blew himself up.

She was quickly flown home for burial without an autopsy, which complicates matters.

As Bhutto's letter indicates, the state provided security has proven to be utterly useless in keeping her alive, and never seemed to try that hard to begin with. Musharraf certainly had no interest in keeping his chief rival around and operaating, and he made that abundantly clear.

But something more sinister than, well, pretty fucking sinister activities may be going on here.

Police abandoned their security posts shortly before Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto's assassination Thursday, according to a journalist present at the time, and unanswerable questions remain about the cause of her death, because an autopsy was never performed.
...
"Police officers had frisked the 3,000 to 4,000 people attending Thursday's rally when they entered the park, but as the speakers from Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party droned on, the police abandoned many of their posts," wrote Saeed Shah in an essay published by McClatchy News Service. "As she drove out through the gate, her main protection appeared to be her own bodyguards, who wore their usual white T-shirts inscribed: 'Willing to die for Benazir.'"

The reason no autopsy was performed was, as it turns out, a governmental one as well.

Whatever the case, Bhutto's precise cause of death may never be known because of the failure to administer an autopsy. The procedure was not carried out because police and local authorities in Rawalpindi did not request one, according to IBNLive, but the government plans a formal investigation why this was the case.

This does conveniently leave no one in a secure position to challenge the government's Al-Queda sunroof head smack hypothesis, though.

Earlier in the day Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz told a Pakistani news channel, “The report says she had head injuries – an irregular patch – and the X-ray doesn’t show any bullet in the head. So it was probably the shrapnel or any other thing has struck her in her said. That damaged her brain, causing it to ooze and her death. The report categorically says there’s no wound other than that," according to IBNLive.

Source: Raw Story

So what precisely does this mean for Pakistan, the region, and our colossal continuing failure abroad? Hard to say.

Currently the country is being gripped by waves of violence and chaos; the upcoming elections are now a complete farce and will put Musharraf back in power just as he always intended; and whether Al-Queda actually killed Bhutto or not, it's clear that Musharraf wanted to give them every opportunity to do so. The letter from beyond the grave is just icing on the cake.

This is one seriously messed up situation, folks.

(For more details on the aftermath, see this handy Telegraph article)