Last Call, Eh?

Meanwhile, our neighbors to the north continue to calmly and rationally treat terrorism as primarily a law enforcement function, leaving the detective work to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who have busted up a plot to bomb commuter trains in Toronto.

Canadian police say they have arrested two men and thwarted a plot to carry out a major terrorist attack on a Via passenger train in the Greater Toronto Area.

In a press conference that followed an exclusive report by CBC's Greg Weston, police named the two accused as Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, of Montreal, and Raed Jaser, 35, from Toronto. They have been charged with conspiracy to carry out a terrorist attack and "conspiring to murder persons unknown for the benefit of, at the direction of, or in association with a terrorist group."

The two men arrested are not Canadian citizens, police said Monday, but would not provide any details about their nationalities.

The RCMP accused the two men of conspiring to commit an "al-Qaeda-supported" attack.

The plot was apparently not related to the Boston Marathon bombing, but the Mounties decided to pull the trigger on these two anyway, just in case.  Can't blame them for that, frankly.

Highly placed sources tell CBC News the alleged plotters have been under surveillance for more than a year in Quebec and southern Ontario.

The investigation was part of a cross-border operation involving Canadian law enforcement agencies, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The arrests Monday morning were co-ordinated and executed by a special joint task force of RCMP and CSIS anti-terrorism units, combined with provincial and municipal police forces in Ontario and Quebec.

Gosh, a joint operation with provincial and local cops and help from us Yanks through CSIS.  Solid police work resolves this issue, got good intelligence, and led to an arrest.  What's not happening?  Canadian lawmakers screaming about deporting all Muslims, bugging mosques, and instilling fear in the populace for political gain.

Those Canadians must be insane, right?

Always The Political Operative, Our Rand

Please tell me again how Rand Paul is so different from DC politicians and how he doesn't play stupid Republican political games to score cheap points.  Please.

Losing Paul's support for the legislation could doom the Gang of Eight's legislation. Earlier this year the Tea Party favorite came out in support of comprehensive reform, including a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented workers in the country. His support has given cover to a number of other conservatives who have come out in support of tackling the issue this year.

But Paul made clear he would not be comfortable moving legislation without additional hearings on Boston, and new provisions.

"I respectfully request that the Senate consider the following two conditions as part of the comprehensive immigration reform debate: One, the Senate needs a thorough examination of the facts in Massachusetts to see if legislation is necessary to prevent a similar situation in the future. Two, national security protections must be rolled into comprehensive immigration reform to make sure the federal government does everything it can to prevent immigrants with malicious intent from using our immigration system to gain entry into the United States in order to commit future acts of terror," Paul wrote to Reid.

Please tell me again how my junior senator is a supposed champion of civil liberties and small, effective federal government when he's basically saying we need more "national security protections" in immigration reform and in America in general.

Go on, I could use the laugh.

Once again, Rand Paul is just another red state conservative GOP Senator who doesn't actually care about civil liberties or smaller government, because he just threw both principles away to give himself and other Republicans cover to keep on being racist bigots towards Latinos.

Awesome.

And It Begins

Bush-era Attorney General Michael Mukasey wastes no time today calling the Boston Marathon bombing "jihad" as the Islamophobic ghouls from the last administration offer their unsolicited advice.  Above all YOU MUST BE AFRAID OF MUSLIMS.

But if your concern is over the larger threat that inheres in who the Tsarnaev brothers were and are, what they did, and what they represent, then worry—a lot.

For starters, you can worry about how the High-Value Interrogation Group, or HIG, will do its work. That unit was finally put in place by the FBI after so-called underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up the airplane in which he was traveling as it flew over Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009 and was advised of his Miranda rights. The CIA interrogation program that might have handled the interview had by then been dismantled by President Obama.

At the behest of such Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups as the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America, and other self-proclaimed spokesmen for American Muslims, the FBI has bowdlerized its training materials to exclude references to militant Islamism. Does this delicacy infect the FBI's interrogation group as well?

Will we see another performance like the Army's after-action report following Maj. Nidal Hasan's rampage at Fort Hood in November 2009, preceded by his shout "allahu akhbar"—a report that spoke nothing of militant Islam but referred to the incident as "workplace violence"? If tone is set at the top, recall that the Army chief of staff at the time said the most tragic result of Fort Hood would be if it interfered with the Army's diversity program.

Mukasey, his hatred for Islam (and Democratic presidents, with not much space between them apparently) is saying torture and waterboarding could have saved lives.  He dares to say this a mere week after an independent report and review of Bush-era "enhanced interrogation" confirmed that yes, we did torture suspects for information and no, it got zero useful intelligence.

As a result of the Bush administration’s green-lighting of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the report says, “U.S. forces, in many instances, used interrogation techniques on detainees that constitute torture. American personnel conducted an even larger number of interrogations that involved ‘cruel, inhuman, or degrading’ treatment.”

“Both categories of actions violate U.S. laws and international treaties. Such conduct was directly counter to values of the Constitution and our nation,” The Constitution Project report said.

To recap, we committed war crimes under Bush, and not only are the people responsible for that running free, they are writing op-eds in the Wall Street Journal complaining we're not committing more war crimes.

Let that sink in for a bit while we have FOX News trolls suggest we should be bugging all mosques.



It's 2003 all over again for these idiots any always will be.

StupidiNews!

• Chinese officials are saying that the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that rocked Sichuan province on Saturday has killed at least 186 people and injured hundreds more.
• Paraguay voted Sunday on a replacement for now impeached ex-President Fernando Lugo, most likely resulting in the return to power of the country's conservative Colorado Party.
• Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel arrived in Israel Monday to begin his week-long tour of the Middle East, where he's expected to deliver new air power for America's allies in the region.
• The latest media mega-merger may be Time-Warner and CBS, creating an $85 billion company in the wake of Comcast's recent buyout of NBC Universal.
• Boston Police say surveillance cameras, crowd photos, and eyewitness accounts helped pinpoint bombing suspects, but facial recognition software came up noticeably short.