Month: May 2013

A trip down memory lane

by digby

October 7, 2009:

Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) is one of the few Senators with enough moxie to stand up to the Obama administration’s effort to gut a federal law protecting reporters who maintain the confidentiality of their sources.

Some 49 states have “shield laws” of some kind that in most cases protect reporters from being compelled by courts to reveal the identities of confidential sources. But there is no federal statute protecting the “reporters’ privilege.” The House passed such a bill by a wide 398-21 margin in 2007.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, both President Barack Obama and GOP candidate John McCain promised to support a federal shield law.

Obama stunned media groups this fall when he reversed field, broke his campaign promise, and opposed a strong shield law, insisting that faceless “security” bureaucrats inside the executive branch be the ones to decide when reporters’ privilege was in the national interest — rather than courts, as he had promised during the campaign. Obama had gotten a lot of media coverage the first day of his administration, when he made a big display of his claims to support open government and a free press.

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Down the rabbit hole again: now were seriously parsing the word “terror”

by digby

So the brilliant Darrell Issa went on Fox yesterday and charged president Obama with some kind of crime or malfeasance for using the words “act of terror” instead of “terrorist attack.” Yes, they really are still hanging their hats on that nonsense.

But leave it to the “Fact Checker” to give this idiocy more oxygen:

During the campaign, the president could just get away with claiming he said “act of terror,” since he did use those words — though not in the way he often claimed. It seemed like a bit of after-the-fact spin, but those were his actual words — to the surprise of Mitt Romney in the debate.

But the president’s claim that he said “act of terrorism” is taking revisionist history too far, given that he repeatedly refused to commit to that phrase when asked directly by reporters in the weeks after the attack. He appears to have gone out of his way to avoid saying it was a terrorist attack, so he has little standing to make that claim now.

Indeed, the initial unedited talking points did not call it an act of terrorism. Instead of pretending the right words were uttered, it would be far better to acknowledge that he was echoing what the intelligence community believed at the time–and that the administration’s phrasing could have been clearer and more forthright from the start.

Oh for crying out loud. This is navel gazing at its worst. The reason he said “act of terror” instead of “terrorist act” is that he didn’t know what had happened yet! Clearly, killing a bunch of people is an “act of terror” no matter what the motivation while while an “act of terrorism” is, by definition, a politically motivated killing. I have no idea if the president would have used that phrase if he’d known who the perpetrators were in the early days of the event, but I do know that the entire intelligence community was still sorting out what happened and that it wouldn’t have made one bit of difference to the president’s political campaign if he’d said “terrorist attack” or “act of terror” in those early days.

Nobody with any sense gives a damn about that distinction. He was being careful. Normal people consider that to be a good thing. Only the idiot wingnuts want the president howling about revenge and screaming at the top of his lungs that he’s “gonna get ’em dead or alive” before he even knows what happened.

This sort of “fact-checking” myopia is how stupid scandals with no basis get traction. There is no context or perspective in this silly item and so it ends up making it look as though the administration was trying to cover up something even though all the evidence suggest otherwise. The only way it makes sense is if the press decides that the Obama administration really, truly decided instantly that this attack was going to ruin their record as terrorist fighters so they had to cover it up or lose the election. If anyone really believed that they are idiots. No more than four people in this country even knew where Benghazi was much less thought that an attack against an embassy in the middle of a war zone constituted some huge, disqualifying defeat in the Great GWOT. I’m pretty sure the administration was well aware of that. If there’s one thing they’re good at, it’s campaigning.

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RNC’s Florida Hispanic Outreach Director Leaves the GOP

by David O. Atkins

When the Republican National Committee wanted to improve its fortunes among Hispanics in Florida, they picked acclaimed National Guardsman and veteran Pablo Pantoja to help them out. It doesn’t look like they’ll be able to count on his help anymore. An excerpt from his letter:

Yes, I have changed my political affiliation to the Democratic Party.

It doesn’t take much to see the culture of intolerance surrounding the Republican Party today. I have wondered before about the seemingly harsh undertones about immigrants and others. Look no further; a well-known organization recently confirms the intolerance of that which seems different or strange to them.

Studies geared towards making – human beings – viewed as less because of their immigrant status to outright unacceptable claims, are at the center of the immigration debate. Without going too deep on everything surrounding immigration today, the more resounding example this past week was reported by several media outlets.

A researcher included as part of a past dissertation his theory that “the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ.” The researcher reinforces these views by saying “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”

Although the organization distanced themselves from those assertions, other immigration-related research is still padded with the same racist and eugenics-based innuendo. Some Republican leaders have blandly (if at all) denied and distanced themselves from this but it doesn’t take away from the culture within the ranks of intolerance. The pseudo-apologies appear to be a quick fix to deep-rooted issues in the Republican Party in hopes that it will soon pass and be forgotten.

The complete disregard of those who are in disadvantage is also palpable. We are not looking at an isolated incident of rhetoric or research. Others subscribe to motivating people to action by stating, “In California, a majority of all Hispanic births are illegitimate. That’s a lot of Democratic voters coming.” The discourse that moves the Republican Party is filled with this anti-immigrant movement and overall radicalization that is far removed from reality. Another quick example beyond the immigration debate happened during CPAC this year when a supporter shouted ““For giving him shelter and food for all those years?” while a moderator explained how Frederick Douglass had written a letter to his slave master saying that he forgave him for “all the things you did to me.” I think you get the idea.

When the political discourse resorts to intolerance and hate, we all lose in what makes America great and the progress made in society.

Although I was born an American citizen, I feel that my experience, and that of many from Puerto Rico, is intertwined with those who are referred to as illegal.

We all know political fortunes can change, realignments happen, no party is dominant for long, etc. But so long as Republicans continue to depend on racism for their base votes (and they can’t really do without it), their electoral hill is going to become steeper and steeper. Because of gerrymandering they’ll have a good shot at keeping the House for the next 8 years. But 2022, the first election after the next census and redistricting, looms over them menacingly.

The last 40 years may well have belonged to conservatives. But the next 40 should provide a pendulum swing back toward sanity, and not a moment too soon.

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It’s one of those days



by digby

An orphaned polar bear cub is preparing for a long flight from Anchorage to Buffalo, N.Y

Alaska Zoo officials say the cub named Kali (KUL’-ee) will leave Tuesday for the Buffalo Zoo.

The bear’s mother was killed March 12 by a subsistence hunter near Point Lay, an Inupiat Eskimo whaling community 300 miles southwest of Barrow and 700 miles northwest of Anchorage.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regional redirector Geoff Haskett says the Buffalo Zoo was picked as Kali’s temporary home in part because it already has a six-month old polar bear cub that can socialize with Kali.

Alaska Zoo executive director Pat Lampi (LAM’-pee) says Kali has more than tripled in weight from 18.6 pounds to almost 66 pounds.

UPS will fly the cub to Buffalo.

Ok, here are a few more:

 Feel better?  I knew you would …

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The horror show in Syria

by digby

This is the worst thing I’ve read in a long time — and I read some bad stuff:

The video featuring the man believed to be Abu Sakkar is symptomatic of the blend of brutality and technology on the Syrian battlefield. According to several rebels interviewed by TIME, fighters from both sides no longer simply brag about their exploits on the battlefield; they film them and share them, competing in gruesome games of one-upmanship. 

This trading in trophy atrocities, played up for the camera and passed from phone to phone, has a desensitizing effect, says Rami Abdel Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a pro-opposition U.K.-based organization that tracks fatalities and human-rights abuses in Syria. When a 13-year-old boy is filmed beheading a man and when footage of rape, torture and amputations are passed like trading cards, it escalates the cycle of honor-driven revenge, as each atrocity, so publicly shared, demands a response from the opposing side, according to Nadim Houry of Human Rights Watch. “When people see these acts of brutality and mutilation, it leaves deep scars, and there will be a temptation to replicate it in revenge,” says Bouckaert. “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. Quite a few fighters in Syria interpret that literally.”

The apparent rise of such incidents — or at least their documentation — is an indication that the Syrian conflict is going in a very dark direction. And it could get worse. Many Syria scholars say the regime — and the war — could last for years.

That’s a mild description of what’s going on. The details of what’s in these videos are so gruesome I literally got queasy reading them. It makes you want to do something, anything, to stop it. But …

There are no good options for the international community. Western intervention on behalf of the rebels could exacerbate sectarian tensions. Foreign boots on the ground could incite an Iranian response in support of the regime, which it backs, sparking a wider regional proxy war. Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has encouraged all jihadists to join in the fight against the Syrian regime; further instability, with its rich recruitment pool and increased lawlessness, is the terrorist group’s ideal incubator. And as more horrific videos emerge, the rebels may find it harder and harder to persuade the international community that they represent the best bet for a country descending ever further into chaos.

My God this is a horror show. And there’s not a lot we can do about it.

And yet, there’s a sense that something like this was an inevitable consequence of all that’s come before, isn’t it? Once that ball of violence gets rolling, it’s very hard to stop it and it just picks up speed and goes out of control.

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The wingnut media machine can only persuade about 17%

by David Atkins

Public Policy Polling took a look at the latest numbers on gun background checks, and it appears that support for them has fallen from around 90% to around 73%:

The finding, shared in advance with TPM, was that 73 percent of registered American voters support “requiring background checks for all gun sales, including gun shows and the internet,” while 21 percent oppose it.

“The 90 percent support we were seeing for background checks earlier in the year isn’t there anymore,” PPP director Tom Jensen told TPM by email.

The party-line split for background checks was 87-8 percent among Democrats, 63-30 among Republicans and 62-31 among independents.

“With the NRA and most Republican Senators opposing Manchin/Toomey that opposition has trickled down to some conservative voters as well,” Jensen said. “But we continue to see more than 70 percent support overall and 60 percent support from Republicans, and that’s still pretty remarkable for any controversial issue in this political climate.”

That’s actually not a bad thing. If after major partisan and public litigation of an issue, the dial on such a universally supported issue only drops by a mere 17%, it shows that the power of the wingnut outrage machine to manufacture opinions out of whole cloth is not actually all that great.

Neither the NRA nor Fox News are as powerful as many politicians give them credit for. The biggest problems is money in politics, and a system of government (especially the filibuster) that prevents passage of commonsense laws. As far as media goes, the suffocating, plutocrat-friendly conventional wisdom in the more traditional press is a bigger problem than Fox News.

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Department of Justice asks, “what is this First Amendment you speak of?”

by digby

The AP has a bit of a bone to pick with the Department of Justice:

Last Friday afternoon, AP General Counsel Laura Malone received a letter from the office of United States Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. advising that, at some unidentified time earlier this year, the Department obtained telephone toll records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to the AP and its journalists. The records that were secretly obtained cover a full two-month period in early 2012 and, at least as described in Mr. Machen’s letter, include all such records for, among other phone lines, an AP general phone number in New York City as well as AP bureaus in New York City, Washington, D.C., Hartford, Connecticut, and at the House of Representatives. This action was taken without advance notice to AP or to any of the affected journalists, and even after the fact no notice has been sent to individual journalists whose home phones and cell phone records were seized by the Department.

There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.

I don’t know for sure what the specific reasons for this were but Emptywheel pointed out immediately the the DOJ has claimed a right to do warrantless surveillance since 2011. And it’s likely that the case she discusses in her post is the one that precipitated this AP surveillance:

The CIA thwarted an ambitious plot by al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen to destroy a U.S.-bound airliner using a bomb with a sophisticated new design around the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden, The Associated Press has learned.

The plot involved an upgrade of the underwear bomb that failed to detonate aboard a jetliner over Detroit on Christmas 2009. This new bomb was also designed to be used in a passenger’s underwear, but this time al-Qaeda developed a more refined detonation system, U.S. officials said.

The FBI is examining the latest bomb to see whether it could have passed through airport security and brought down an airplane, officials said. They said the device did not contain metal, meaning it probably could have passed through an airport metal detector. But it was not clear whether new body scanners used in many airports would have detected it.

The would-be suicide bomber, based in Yemen, had not yet picked a target or bought a plane ticket when the CIA stepped in and seized the bomb, officials said. It’s not immediately clear what happened to the alleged bomber.

White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said President Barack Obama learned about the plot in April and was assured the device posed no threat to the public.

“The president thanks all intelligence and counterterrorism professionals involved for their outstanding work and for serving with the extraordinary skill and commitment that their enormous responsibilities demand,” Hayden said.

The operation unfolded even as the White House and Department of Homeland Security assured the American public that they knew of no al-Qaeda plots against the U.S. around the anniversary of bin Laden’s death. The operation was carried out over the past few weeks, officials said.

“We have no credible information that terrorist organizations, including al-Qaeda, are plotting attacks in the U.S. to coincide with the anniversary of bin Laden’s death,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said on April 26.

On May 1, the Department of Homeland Security said, “We have no indication of any specific, credible threats or plots against the U.S. tied to the one-year anniversary of bin Laden’s death.”

The AP learned about the thwarted plot last week but agreed to White House and CIA requests not to publish it immediately because the sensitive intelligence operation was still under way. Once officials said those concerns were allayed, the AP decided to disclose the plot Monday despite requests from the Obama administration to wait for an official announcement Tuesday.

U.S. officials, who were briefed on the operation, insisted on anonymity to discuss the case, which the U.S. has never officially acknowledged.

Not that it matters, since the government spying on the press this way is clearly antithetical to the principles of the first amendment, but I’m going to guess that we’ll see a scandal unfold that asserts this was entirely political and that the real motive was that the White House was looking for pay back for the AP ruining its terrorism marketing plan rather than a scandal based on legitimate outrage that the DOJ conducted a witchhunt for leaks. At this point I assume the latter was the real motive, but the former is what fits in with the Benghazi! narrative. (You know — the one that says the administration that would stop at nothing to protect its false image as a scourge of terrorism?) That’s what will get the right wing lizard brain jumping and the left wing on full defense. But the real issue here is the fact that the DOJ has claimed these unilateral powers to shut down leaks — and is using them.

Either way, this is a mess and I think it’s entirely possible that it could take down Eric Holder. Hard to know, but in this overheated atmosphere, heads inevitably start to roll.

Update: It appears that an administrative subpoena was issued for the records rather than a national security letter. In case you are wondering what an administrative subpoena is, Wikipedia has an excellent definition:

An administrative subpoena under U.S. law is a subpoena issued by a federal agency without prior judicial oversight. Critics claim that administrative subpoena authority is a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution while proponents state that it provides a valuable investigative tool.

Update II:

Actually nobody knows at this point what the legal mechanism was. 
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Under pressure (cooker)

by digby

This is not from The Onion. Really.

A Saudi Arabian man was arrested in Detroit and charged with making a false statement about why he brought a pressure cooker with him on a flight from Amsterdam, according to a criminal complaint filed on Monday.

Hussain al-Khawahir, 33, arrived at the Detroit airport on Saturday and was questioned about why he had brought a pressure cooker with him. The man’s name was spelled al-Khawahir in the criminal complaint, while a spokeswoman at the U.S. attorney’s office had earlier said it was al-Kwawahir.

He initially said the pressure cooker was for his nephew, a university student in Toledo, Ohio.

“The Defendant then changed his story and admitted his nephew had purchased a pressure cooker in America before but it ‘was cheap’ and broke after the first use,” the complaint said.

Because if you’re going to make a pressure cooker bomb, it’s very important that it doesn’t break after the first use …

I hope they understand that if they outlaw our pressure cookers … outlaws will be forced to braise slowly in a dutch oven.

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Let’s do the time warp again

by digby

This polling on Benghazi is hilarious:

While voters overall may think Congress’ focus should be elsewhere there’s no doubt about how mad Republicans are about Benghazi. 41% say they consider this to be the biggest political scandal in American history to only 43% who disagree with that sentiment. Only 10% of Democrats and 20% of independents share that feeling. Republicans think by a 74/19 margin than Benghazi is a worse political scandal than Watergate, by a 74/12 margin that it’s worse than Teapot Dome, and by a 70/20 margin that it’s worse than Iran Contra.

And yet:

One interesting thing about the voters who think Benghazi is the biggest political scandal in American history is that 39% of them don’t actually know where it is. 10% think it’s in Egypt, 9% in Iran, 6% in Cuba, 5% in Syria, 4% in Iraq, and 1% each in North Korea and Liberia with 4% not willing to venture a guess.

You know why Benghazi has taken off as a patented GOP scandal? It’s a good name. Nobody knows what it means, where it is or what happened. But, by God, it’s memorable.

And it’s got all the right elements, even a Clinton, to take us back to those glory years of the 1990s:

At any rate what we’re finding about last week’s Benghazi focus so far is that Republicans couldn’t be much madder about it, voters overall think Congress should be focused on other key issues, and Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers aren’t declining on account of it.

Sounds pretty typical for a 90s era scandal.

God, I feel so young. Anyone care for a little Alanis and Seinfeld fest?

Update: Hahahaha. We have our first shooting-watermelons-in-the-backyard moment:

Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the GOP’s Benghazi Oversight Committee, has a new theory:

They began being attacked, and were attacked for more than seven hours and we’re to believe that no response could even be started that could have helped them seven hours later? Quite frankly, you can take off from Washington, DC on a commercial flight and practically be in Benghazi by the end of seven hours. You certainly can take off from areas in the Mediterranean and bring at least some support in less than seven hours.

As Jed Lewison points out, there is nobody on the planet who believes the marines could have gotten there in time, including George W. Bush’s (and Obama’s) former secretary of defense who called it a “cartoon fantasy.”

But that’s not what’s Dan Burton-esque about this:

Yeah, it’d take 27 hours to fly commercial on the shortest available commercial flight from Washington to Benghazi, not seven.

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Rand Paul and Pierce’s five-minute rule

by digby

A stopped clock may be right twice a day but that also means it’s wrong the rest of the time. This past week-end Rand Paul proved it. First there was this lovely letter on behalf of the National Association for Gun Rights:

Dear fellow Patriot, 

Gun-grabbers around the globe believe they have it made.
You see, only hours after re-election, Barack Obama immediately made a move for gun control… 

On November 7th, his administration gleefully voted at the UN for a renewed effort to pass the “Small Arms Treaty.” 

But after the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut — and anti-gun hysteria in the national media reaching a fever pitch — there’s no doubt President Obama and his anti-gun pals believe the timing has never been better to ram through the U.N.’s global gun control crown jewel. 

I don’t know about you, but watching anti-American globalists plot against our Constitution makes me sick. 

This Spring, the United Nations went back into session to finalize their radical so-called “Small Arms Treaty.” 

With the treaty finalized, a full U.S. Senate ratification showdown could come any time President Obama chooses and there will be very little time to fight back. 

If we’re to succeed, we must fight back now.
That’s why I’m helping lead the fight to defeat the UN “Small Arms Treaty” in the United States Senate. 

And it’s why I need your help today. 

Will you join me by taking a public stand against the UN “Small Arms Treaty” and sign the Official Firearms Sovereignty Survey right away? 

Ultimately, UN bureaucrats will stop at nothing to register, ban and CONFISCATE firearms owned by private citizens like YOU. 

So far, the gun-grabbers have successfully kept many of their schemes under wraps. 

But looking at previous attempts by the UN to pass global gun control, you and I can get a good idea of what’s likely in the works. 

You can bet the UN is working to FORCE the U.S. to implement every single one of these anti-gun policies:***  Enact tougher licensing requirements, making law-abiding Americans cut through even more bureaucratic red tape just to own a firearm legally; 

***  CONFISCATE and DESTROY ALL “unauthorized” civilian firearms (all firearms owned by the government are excluded, of course);
***  BAN the trade, sale and private ownership of ALL semi-automatic weapons;
***  Create an INTERNATIONAL gun registry, setting the stage for full-scale gun CONFISCATION.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this is NOT a fight we can afford to lose.
Ever since its founding 65 years ago, the United Nations has been hell-bent on bringing the United States to its knees. 

To the petty dictators and one-world socialists who control the UN, the United States of America isn’t a “shining city on a hill” — it’s an affront to their grand designs for the globe. 

These anti-gun globalists know that as long as Americans remain free to make our own decisions without being bossed around by big government bureaucrats, they’ll NEVER be able to seize the worldwide power they crave.
And the UN’s apologists also know the most effective way to finally strip you and me of ALL our freedoms would be to DESTROY our gun rights.
That’s why I was so excited to see the National Association for Gun Rights leading the fight to stop the UN “Small Arms Treaty!” 

Will you join them by going on record AGAINST global gun control and sign the Official Firearms Sovereignty Survey today? 

The truth is there’s no time to waste.You and I have to be prepared for this fight to move FAST.

The fact is the last thing the gun-grabbers at the UN and in Washington, D.C. want is for you and me to have time to mobilize gun owners to defeat this radical agenda. 

They’ve made that mistake before, and we’ve made them pay, defeating EVERY attempt to ram the UN Small Arms Treaty into law since the mid-1990s. 

But now time may not be on our side. 

And worse… the UN Small Arms Treaty is no longer the only UN scheme threatening our gun rights. 

More and more of the UN’s radical agenda is slipping through covertly, under the cover of domestic legislation. 

Not long ago, Obama told Sarah Brady from the anti-gun Brady Campaign, “I just want you to know that we are working on [gun control].  We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.” 

In fact, Hillary Clinton’s State Department recently bragged that Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious are implementations of the UN’s anti-gun agenda! 

And I’d place a wager that Obama’s M1 Rifle Re-importation Ban was also the UN’s agenda dutifully executed by his administration. 

Anti-gun UN policy that NEVER received a single vote in the United States Congress!The UN met recently to pass a final version of the “Small Arms Treaty” to be sent for ratification by the Senate. 

So if you and I are going to defeat them, we have to turn the heat up on Washington now before it’s too late!
1.  Do you believe the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Second Amendment are the supreme law of the land?
2.  Do you believe any attempt by the United Nations to subvert or supersede your Constitutional rights must be opposed?
If you said “Yes!” to these questions, please sign the survey the National Association for Gun Rights has prepared for you. 

But I hope you’ll do more than just sign your survey today.
With your help, the National Association for Gun Rights will continue to turn up the heat on targeted Senators who are working to implement the UN “Small Arms Treaty.” 

Direct mail.  Phones.  E-mail.  Blogs.  Guest editorials.  Press conferences.  Hard-hitting internet, newspaper, radio and even TV ads if funding permits.  The whole nine yards. 

Of course, a program of this scale is only possible if the National Association for Gun Rights can raise the money. 

But that’s not easy, and we may not have much time.
In fact, if gun owners are going to defeat the UN’s schemes, pro-gun Americans like you and me have to get involved NOW!
So please put yourself on record AGAINST the UN Gun Ban by signing NAGR’s Firearms Sovereignty Survey.
But along with your survey, please agree to make a generous contribution of $250, $100, $50 or even just $35.
And every dollar counts in this fight so even if you can only chip in $10 or $20, it will make a difference. 

Thank you in advance for your time and money devoted to defending our Second Amendment rights. 

For Freedom, 

Rand Paul
United States Senator 

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the guy who wrote his father’s famous newsletters needed some work. You don’t get much kookier than that.

And then he went to Iowa. I’ll let Charlie Pierce take it from here:

Senator Aqua Buddha, son of Crazy Uncle Liberty (!), and filibusterin’ darling of brogressive Democrats everywhere, had a helluva weekend. He went to Iowa and got treated like the pope on parade, so to speak. A young man from NBC was particularly impressed by the fact that a rookie senator from Bug Tussle had the gumption to take on a former Secretary Of State in a campaign that hasn’t really started yet in front of an audience full of Bible-banging hayshakers.

On Friday, Sen. Rand Paul put his stake in the ground for a possible run in 2016 by mocking the Obama administration and delivering a blistering critique of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s handling of the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. 

The administration has been criticized for failing to provide security during the attack and for its characterization of the incident afterward. Speaking at the Iowa GOP’s annual Lincoln Dinner, Paul questioned the initial response to the attacks and asked, “First question to Hillary Clinton: Where in the hell were the Marines?…It was inexcusable, it was a dereliction of duty, and it should preclude her from holding higher office,” the Kentucky Republican added to loud applause.

Short answer: They were in Tripoli. Libya is a big place. And you’re Mickey The Dunce.

Click over to see him take down the simpering sycophants at Politico too, all of whom apparently see the nascent Paul campaign as a reincarnation of McCain 2000. It’s a thing of beauty.

As Pierce says, there’s a five minute rule with anyone in the Paul family:

…you can listen to any politician from the Paul family for precisely five minutes and agree with pretty much everything that person says. But that at exactly the 5:00:01 mark, the conversation will be Raptured up into the Izonkosphere and the CAPITAL LETTERS will starT to Come OUT.

Like clockwork.

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