Last Call For A Play In Three Acts

A man argues about the facts of his past in Act I:

The man who recently led a group of armed protesters outside a Texas mosque says that he's being "attacked and smeared" for posting local Muslims' home addresses to Facebook earlier this week.

David Wright, who leads a group of anti-Muslim protesters that calls itself the Bureau of American Islamic Relations (BAIR), listed "the name and address of every Muslim and Muslim sympathizer that stood up for Sharia tribunals in Irving TX" on his Facebook page Tuesday. The list of names appeared to be copied from a document showing which residents urged the Irving City Council to vote against a bill they said was motivated by baseless rumors that a local mosque housed a "Sharia law court."

Wright told local TV station KDFW that the anyone could access the information he posted through the city's website.

He claims in Act II that it wasn't his fault, you see.

But The Dallas Morning News, which first reported the list, noted Thursday that the list of names had disappeared from BAIR's Facebook page. The newspaper also noted that the personal Facebook profile Wright posted the list of names on had disappeared, although he appears to have created a replacement page. Wright posted the list of names again Wednesday afternoon on that new page.

"I am being attacked and smeared by the liberal media for legally exercising my 1st and 2nd Amendment rights and for using public data to defend my credibility when they make accusations against me," Wright wrote on Thursday.

And in Act III, we reveal he has learned nothing.

Wright went on to describe his group as "self defense only" and wrote that none of its members had killed any Muslims.

"You know as well as I do if it was my intention to use this as a hit list then it would have already happened," he added in a comment on the post.

Exeunt actors, Fin.

Cause And Defects

In Paris today, President Obama told a gathered climate change conference of world leaders that the US was partially responsible for increasing global warming through carbon emissions, and that it was America's job to do something about it.

President Obama told world leaders who gathered northeast of Paris on Monday for a climate conference that the United States is at least partly to blame for the life-threatening damage that environmental change has wrought, and he urged world leaders to join him in fixing the problem.

“I’ve come here personally, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and the second-largest emitter,” Mr. Obama said, “to say that the United States of America not only recognizes our role in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it.”

In a speech interrupted by repeated beeps warning that he had exceeded his time limit, Mr. Obama said in Le Bourget that the climate conference represented an important turning point in world history because the leaders attending the meeting now recognize the urgency of the problem.

“No nation — large or small, wealthy or poor — is immune,” he said.

The greatest threat to reaching a binding climate accord may be a loose coalition of developing nations, led by India, who argue that they should not be asked to limit their economic growth as a way of fixing a problem that was largely created by the others, and Mr. Obama conceded that point.

“We know the truth that many nations have contributed little to climate change but will be the first to feel its most destructive effects,” he said.

He promised money to help the poorest nations transition to economies that depend less on burning fossil fuels, but he said a delay was not acceptable.

“For I believe, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that there is such a thing as being too late,” Mr. Obama said. “And when it comes to climate change, that hour is almost upon us.”

Imagine any of the GOP 2016 clown car crew saying this.  You'd be far more likely to have the official position of the US government be that climate change is a fraud, that scientists have to be investigated and prosecuted, and that America needed to level sanctions against countries that did believe in the science.

Needless to say, the right will go insane over this.  Watch.

 

Not The RIght Kind Of Terrorism To Be Terrorism

If you're somehow curious as to what Ted Cruz's response would be as President to abortion clinic violence, it's exactly what you'd expect it to be, as he displayed at a campaign stop in Iowa yesterday.

Speaking to reporters after a stop here Sunday afternoon, Cruz rejected a potential connection between anti-abortion activism and the shooting, instead taking issue with "some vicious rhetoric on the left blaming those who are pro-life.” The shooting, which happened Friday in Colorado Springs, left a police officer and two civilians dead, and a suspect, Robert Dear, has been taken into custody.

"The media promptly wants to blame him on the pro-life movement when at this point there’s very little evidence to indicate that," Cruz said.

When a reporter reminded Cruz it has been reported Dear made a comment about "baby parts" while being apprehended, Cruz retorted, "It’s also been reported that he was registered as an independent and a woman and a transgendered leftist activist. If that’s what he is, I don’t think it’s fair to blame on the rhetoric on the left. This is a murderer.”

Cruz's claim appeared to be based on a voter registration form that lists Dear's gender as female. "We know that he was a man who was registered to vote as a woman," Cruz said.

Asked if we could call the shooting an act of domestic terrorism — as former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has — Cruz again urged caution about drawing conclusions from the shooting at this point.

“I would call it a murder, and we’ll see what the facts are," Cruz replied. "It was a multiple murder of what appears to be a deranged individual. And it was horrific, it was evil, and we’ll find out more out about the facts, but I don’t think we should jump to conclusions.”

Cruz is a couple hash browns short of a Waffle House on the best of days, but this is calculated.  Just days after Republicans started screaming that Democrats couldn't protect us from scary brown Muslims who would shoot us up and kill us all at shopping centers on Black Friday, the people actually killing folks (including cops) in places of business are Christian right-wing anti-abortion soldiers.

Ergo, the right can't have this reality be reality. It reminds voters that there might be people more dangerous to average Americans than ISIS, and that our terrorism problem isn't with Muslim fundamentalist nutjobs, but the Christian ones.

That would mean the threat to America is white Christian guys with guns, and we can't have that, hence Cruz's bonkers assertion that the guy is a "transgendered leftist murderer" and not a right-wing white guy with an AK-47.

Voters might ask questions about the kind of rhetoric the GOP has been using in the wake of those Planned Parenthood videos earlier this year, you see.  And we can't have that.

The terrorists we have aren't the right kind of terrorists, you see.  People who kill Iraq War vets, campus cops, and married mothers of two have to be Muslim terrorists on a rampage (or worse, liberals) not right-wing Christian conservatives blasting people in abortion clinics.

And they will deny Colorado Springs forever.

StupidiNews!

• As 150 world leader meet in Paris for climate change talks, 200 protesters have been arrested by Paris police as security has been tightened in the wake of earlier attacks this month.
• Planned Parenthood locations across the country are reassessing security measures after Friday's deadly shooting at a Colrado Springs abortion clinic.
• GOP 2016 frontrunner Donald Trump has canceled a Monday event with black pastors after several black leaders asked them to reconsider endorsing him.
• Five-time NBA champion Kobe Bryant will retire from the Los Angeles Lakers at the end of his 20th season, citing injuries and limited playing time.
• Newly declassified documents reveal that a Soviet computer analysis program's response to NATO exercises in 1983 very nearly started World War III.