The crumbling GoOPer republican candidates and their minions just can't help but to diminish the sacrifices of America soldiers who have given their lives in Iraq when it serves their ends...

Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson has never been one to linger too long shaking hands. He is a deliberative man, who campaigns in short bursts, and enjoys his private time as much as anyone. So when he finished speaking here Wednesday night, in the cramped back room of a restaurant, he never stopped working his way to the exit door. ...
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Nearly a dozen of his potential supporters remained, however. They circled around Thompson's state chairman, Rep. Steve King, the man who just might lift the struggling campaign to a halfway decent finish in the nation's first caucus state. A popular state conservative, King was holding court, as he often does, on the issue of illegal immigration, which he speaks of as a crisis on par with the war in Iraq.

"The casualties in America are greater on average by far than they are in Iraq," he announced, citing dubious back-of-the-envelope estimates about the number of American homicides committed by people without citizenship.

If any Democrat had made a similar statement you know that the wingnut manufactured outrage machine would be howling at full volume and the candidate responsible would be conducting a ceremonial and very public shit-canning of some flunky followed by endless media "mea culpas".

It will be interesting to see if Thompson says anything about King's assertion, but given that he's running on the dog-whistle politics of immigration, magic 8-ball says "doubtful".

In the movie "V is for Vendetta" the police chief inspector replies to his co-worker who asks what's going to happen when all the Londoners congregate to see Westminster Abbey blown up..."What usually happens when people without guns stand up to people with guns". I suspect that the chaos is only beginning in Pakistan, a country we can not afford to have in chaos because unlike Iraq and Iran they actually have working nukes and delivery systems.

Angry protesters burned cars and shops into the night following the assassination Thursday of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

"It's all mayhem everywhere," Shehryar Ahmad, an investment banker in Karachi, told CNN by telephone Thursday night. "There's absolutely no order of any kind. No army on the streets. No curfew."
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In Sindh province, where Karachi is located, police said demonstrators had burned a dozen banks and set two train stations on fire, along with three trains. Since Thursday, 240 vehicles have been burned.

Because of the violence, paramilitary forces in Sindh were told to "shoot on site" anyone causing civil disturbances, a spokesman for the Pakistan Rangers said.

Beloved Glorious Leader is always invoking the Terrarists™ to make his case against anyone who will stand up to him, but his enabling of Musharraf and his cronys by feeding them over Five Billion Dollars in no-strings attached aid has to count as one of the all-time foreign policy disasters in history. Now the waiting begins to see how long it will be before all the bad people we have been warned about take over Pakistan, funded in large part by the our tax dollars.

Thanks, you miserable failure... you've done it again.

Seems that St. Rudy of 9/11 and his magic lobbying'n'law firm, Giuliani Partners might have themselves a bit of a PR problem. See, Rudy! was a "consultant" for Purdue Pharma the company that made Oxycontin. Pretty much seems he was selected by Purdue for his expertise not in pharmaceuticals but in being "America's Mayor", that and being the only living person to make a living out of being able to use a noun, a verb and 9/11 twenty-four seven.

In western Virginia, far from the limelight, United States Attorney John L. Brownlee found himself on the telephone last year with a political and legal superstar, Rudolph W. Giuliani.

For years, Mr. Brownlee and his small team had been building a case that the maker of the painkiller OxyContin had misled the public when it claimed the drug was less prone to abuse than competing narcotics. The drug was believed to be a factor in hundreds of deaths involving its abuse.
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As a celebrity, Mr. Giuliani helped the company win several public relations battles, playing a role in an effort by Purdue to persuade an influential Pennsylvania congressman, Curt Weldon, not to blame it for OxyContin abuse.
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Dennis Lee, the Virginia state prosecutor for Tazewell County, an area hard hit by OxyContin abuse, said he was stunned several years ago to learn that Mr. Giuliani was working for Purdue. He had a favorable impression of Mr. Giuliani, he said, and a poor opinion of the company, which he said had played down and dissembled about its drug’s problem.

"I was shocked,” Mr. Lee said, “that he would basically become a mouthpiece for Purdue."
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Asa Hutchinson , the director of the Drug Enforcement Administration in 2002, hardly needed an introduction to Mr. Giuliani. So it was perhaps not surprising that Purdue chose Mr. Giuliani as the person to meet with Mr. Hutchinson at a time when the drug maker was under intense scrutiny by the D.E.A.

A noun, a verb and 9/11 is not a qualifier for the presidency. An outstretched hand is even less of one.

1. Demogogues4Ever
   
2. The Benazir Aftermath beigns
   
3. This is gonna leave a mark (I hope)