The suspect brags about the killing

UPDATE: Here is footage of the suspected killer speaking to passerby moments after the killing. WARNING: Highly disturbing images

From the Independent:

A man believed to be a soldier has been beheaded in an attack on a street near the Woolwich barracks in London, witnesses report.

The Guardian has an eyewitness account of the murder:

Julia Wilders,51, a local resident, said that she saw a car had crashed into a lamppost when she went to investigate. “My husband said there’s two people trying to resuscitate someone. We parked and walked back to have a look and all of a sudden a tall black bloke come up with a gun. My husband said, ‘Get back, get back’ and we called the police.”

She said that one man was dressed all in black with a black cap whilst the other was dressed in a green jumper.”They looked like they were on drugs,” she said.

She said the black hand gun was pointed down and a crowd soon gathered.

Her husband Graham, 50 called the police to alert them to what they believed was an accident.

“After we called the police I went over to the school to let the school know so the kids wouldn’t come out,” she said.

“I walked back up there and the tall black bloke had changed the gun to the other guy and he had two meat cleavers in his hand. And the response police turned up and he’s ran towards them with meat cleavers before I could even get out of the car so they shot him. And then the other one lifts the gun up and they shot him as well.

She did not know how many shots the police fired but said both assailants fell to the ground after being hit.

She didn’t believe the assailants weapons were fired. “He looked like he was going to, sort of like he was going to lift it up towards the police.”

Her husband said that it looked like the two men were trying to revive the man they’d run over. “They looked like they were pumping his chest but they said that they were trying to cut his head off.”

“A guy in a car told people to ring 999 and then taller guy started waiving the gun at him.”

It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who famously said that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Applied here, it would work something like this: Fox News isn’t a legitimate news organization and it should in no way be afforded any of the benefits or considerations normally given to legitimate news organizations, up to and including the umbrella of unequivocal constitutional protection real journalism outlets can expect; that said, the Department of Justice and the White House are 100% wrong in their seizing of Fox News phone records, monitoring of Fox correspondent James Rosen’s comings and goings, and their naming of him as a potential co-conspirator in the leaking of national security information.

Of all the horseshit scandals President Obama’s enemies on the right have attempted to float since he took office four years ago, the persecution and threatened prosecution of newspeople allegedly involved in reporting on state secrets is the only one that has any actual merit. Drones are nonsense; Benghazi is the most ado about a non-story in recent Republican memory; the IRS looking into conservative political groups potentially trying to scam the government shouldn’t surprise a soul; and of course birth certificates, teleprompters, and Marines-holding-umbrellas are just fucking laughable. But the notion of the U.S. government monitoring journalists for doing the very jobs that make them who and what they are is frightening and it should anger just about everyone, regardless of his or her political affiliations.

It’s ironically no big secret that Fox News will do anything to bring down the Obama administration and prop up its confederates in the Republican party proper, to the point of even creating stories and scandals out of thin air; it’s for this reason that no one with a brain ever should have had a problem with Obama refusing to treat Fox as if it were just like any other news operation. But that doesn’t mean the DOJ should have wide latitude to make a reporter — any reporter — worry about being prosecuted for treason and doing prison time simply for being a reporter. Obviously, it’s important that even journalists understand that they have to behave responsibly, particularly when they’re reporting on sensitive subjects — however, it’s impossible to overstate how unwise it is for the U.S. government and the Obama administration in particular to make threats against the messengers in their quest to stamp out what they claim is an illegal message.

Collecting phone logs from the AP and closely watching James Rosen at Fox, all without contacting either outlet during the respective investigations, is something entirely new for the government, and something undeniably chilling. While national security is important and that shouldn’t be diminished, journalists do generally have special dispensation simply by virtue of their constitutional protection and what’s supposed to be their often adversarial relationship with those in power. Sure, the White House can behave as if that adversarial relationship works both ways and can treat journalists as hostile, but it had better be prepared to face the consequences of that tack. Fox News’s audience and its stable of frothing-at-the-mouth contributors don’t need a legitimate reason to loudly proclaim that the right is being persecuted by the Obama administration, but likewise the White House should be smart enough to understand that it doesn’t need the image of real journalists suddenly siding with Fox News and coming to the network’s defense. Just because Glenn Greenwald and his insufferable ilk are going to be claiming villainy at every turn regardless doesn’t mean Obama should give them any ammo.

On that note, another dichotomy at work here is the outrage from Obama’s enemies over what the White House and the Justice Department have been doing with regard to plugging leaks. Again, the White House is wrong here and has no viable excuse, but it’s laughable to watch the very same people who took state security so seriously during the Bush years that they engaged in the despicable politics of personal vendetta — outing Valerie Plame, leaving any journalist not willing to get onboard the Iraq crazy train out in the cold — now railing with righteous indignation against some of the very tactics they would’ve once applauded. Fox News, in fact, played right along with the Bush-era policy of manipulating and demonizing the legitimate media. Conservatives as a whole, meanwhile, would’ve happily strung up, say, Julian Assange and absolutely considered Daniel Ellsberg an enemy of the state, but the government sets its sites on the official news service of Red State America and suddenly there’s hell to pay.

The problem is, this time those coming to the defense of Fox News — be they conservative or liberal or none-of-the-above — are right. James Rosen’s a sniveling little turd and he works for a news outlet that’s anything but. Still, he needs to be free to report the word of whistleblowers because it’s not simply his freedom that’s at stake.

It’s the freedom of all journalists to do their jobs. And when those jobs are done correctly, it serves the freedom of all of us.

Should we tolerate Dr Ben Carson’s intolerant views?

Dr. Ben Carson, the head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins was penciled in to deliver the commencement speech at the Hopkins School of Medicine last month. After going on Fox News and equating pedophilia and bestiality with homosexuality, students at the university drafted a petition to have him removed as commencement speaker. Carson apologized for his comments and voluntarily withdrew, writing in an email to the dean of the Johns Hopkins medical school, Paul Rothman, saying:

“Given all the national media surrounding my statements as to my belief in traditional marriage, I believe it would be in the best interests of the students for me to voluntarily withdraw as your commencement speaker this year.”

The email was largely graceful, but Carson also added he felt discriminated against for his beliefs:

“Someday in the future, it is my hope and prayer that the emphasis on political correctness will decrease and we will start emphasizing rational discussion of differences so we can actually resolve problems and chart a course that is inclusive of everyone,”

While conservatives have rallied around Carson, blasting the university for criticizing the esteemed doctor and accusing them of discrimination, Carson also received some unlikely support in Michael Kinsley, the (mostly) liberal editor of The New Republic.

“My analysis is that, at a crucial moment, the dean failed to defend a real core value of the university: tolerance,” wrote Kinsley.

“Carson didn’t murder millions of people. All he did was say on television that he opposes same-sex marriage—an idea that even its biggest current supporters had never even heard of a couple of decades ago,” he went on. “Does that automatically make you a homophobe and cast you into the outer darkness? It shouldn’t. But in some American subcultures—Hollywood, academia, Democratic politics—it apparently does. You may favor raising taxes on the rich, increasing support for the poor, nurturing the planet, and repealing Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, but if you don’t support gay marriage, you’re out of the club.”

While people who don’t support gay marriage might not believe that they are intolerant, those of us who do beg to differ. To believe that gays do not have the right to marry means you do not accept them as being equal to heterosexuals. It means that you ignore the science that says homosexuality is as natural as heterosexuality and subscribe to Bronze age mythology that states killing your wife for adultery is God’s law. You are free to believe in whatever you want to in America, but that doesn’t mean your views should be considered legitimate or tolerant just because you think they are.

Viewed in that light, Carson and Kinsley’s argument can be boiled down to the following logic: It is intolerant to not tolerate someone else’s intolerance. And that simply doesn’t wash.

Carson has done huge amounts of good in his field (he was the first doctor to successfully separate co-joined twins) and donates large sums of money towards educating children. But his views on homosexuality are wrong and discriminatory. The fight for Gay Rights is as important as the Civil Rights movement in the 1960′s, and reverting to religious scripture as some sort of moral reasoning against it is akin to arguing that blacks are not equal to whites because of the ‘Curse of Ham‘ (the Biblical story used by whites to justify segregation  in America and apartheid in South Africa).

If someone stated today that society should be more tolerant of their biblical based racist views, they would never be allowed near a television or students at a prestigious university like Johns Hopkins.

Nobel prize winning DNA pioneer Dr James Watson, who alongside Francis Crick discovered the double helix, stated that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”. As a result of his comments, Watson has been shunned from public life and disowned by much of the scientific community (it’s also worth remembering that ironically, Watson’s own DNA revealed he was 16% African).

Most people reacted with horror at Watson’s statement, and rightly so. Homophobia is unfortunately still fairly mainstream in America, so coming out against gay marriage is still viewed as an acceptable position. And yes, being anti gay marriage is homophobic, just as believing blacks shouldn’t be entitled to the same rights as whites is racist.

No one is saying that Carson does not have the right to have, or express his views. In that regard, Carson is the beneficiary of a great deal of tolerance. But Carson’s views directly oppose the legal rights of homosexuals, and America’s constitution exists to protect those rights. When African Americans refused to tolerate intolerance, they paved the way for a more inclusive nation. And as society continues to shun those opposed to gay rights, they too pave the way for a country that respects the rights of everyone, regardless of sexual orientation.

As  Karl Popper once stated, “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society… then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them… We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.”

I went on the Thom Hartmann show again last night to get into it with Tim Cavanaugh, Senior Online Editor at The Daily Caller and Conservative Hughey Newsome of the National Advisory Council-Project 21, and MoveOnUp.org. We debated Sen. Tom Coburn’s pledge not to fund disaster relief in Oklahoma, more Benghazi cover up conspiracies, Apple not paying tax, and whether the IRS hates the Tea Party. I was up against a couple of nut cases last week, but last night’s debate was far more interesting as Cavanaugh and Newsome are bright guys. It starts at the 14min 58s mark (video should start there automatically):

By Richard Tofel

ProPublica’s job is to report the news rather than to make news ourselves, but sometimes we find an article of ours to be itself a subject of public debate. Last week was such a time, when two articles we had published back in December and January became the subject of significant attention in light of the uproar over IRS oversight of the process for granting tax exemption to so-called “social welfare” groups under section 501(c)(4). We triggered that attention, with a third article we published on May 13, setting out everything we knew about the circumstances of our previous stories.

Largely ignored in a public outcry last week—radio rants, Twitter storms, congressional, presidential and prosecutorial posturing– were the following:

Our pieces in December and January raised very serious questions about whether six different “dark money” political groups seeking tax exemption had made false statements on their applications. Those applications are signed under penalty of perjury . If any false statements were made knowingly, the groups— including Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS —may have committed a crime. There is no indication, however, that either the IRS or the Department of Justice has done anything since January to investigate whether such crimes were indeed committed. The groups in question happen all to be conservative. Not one congressional Republican has, to my knowledge, expressed any concern about this possible criminality.

Even more remarkably, leading public figures have asserted as fact that they know how we came to receive nine documents in the mail—statements that appear to have little basis (and in some cases, no basis at all).

The former acting Commissioner of Internal Revenue said on May 17 that the agency’s inspector general had found that the disclosure to us was “inadvertent”—we had requested the applications, but they should not have been sent to us before they were approved. The IRS followed later the same day with a statement to the same effect—but then refused to answer questions about who had made the mistake, and why they should be believed when they denied having acted intentionally (and thus likely denied committing a crime).

What really seems to have happened at the IRS in Cincinnati, across the last three presidencies (a Democrat, then a Republican, then a Democrat), and across two turns of the partisan screw in the House of Representatives, from Republicans to Democrats to Republicans again, is that the agency has been starved of resources, and badly mismanaged.

But while it took the IRS four long days to tell people about their conclusion of “inadvertence” and the same four days for ProPublica to report out the dysfunction , people like Rush Limbaugh, and their followers and fellow travelers on Twitter and in the fringe press, rushed headlong to judgment. Here’s what Limbaugh said about the mid-level federal employees at the IRS in Cincinnati on Tuesday: “The people at these government agencies have been stocked with leftists for decades now, and they’re all activists.” What evidence did he offer for this? None. How could he know that someone in a large bureaucracy, shuffling thousands of pieces of paper, didn’t make a mistake? He couldn’t, and he didn’t.

Well, you might say, that’s Limbaugh. But it wasn’t just Limbaugh. Stephen Moore writes for the Wall Street Journal (where I worked for 15 years, and where Mr. Rove also writes). Yet, he called the documents we were sent “ illegally leaked .” He knew nothing more than Limbaugh. “What is the motivation,” Moore asked, “for leaking these documents? The answer is that the left is trying to dry up the money of tea party and conservative groups by intimidating donors.” He noted that another group, in another case, had its donor list released. But in our case, there were no donor lists, and we had redacted the limited financial information on the forms we published. Moreover, these applications are completed with the expectation that they’ll eventually be made public—because they are when they are approved. Never mind all that; presumably no need to mention it.

And what of the investigators? Congressional committees leapt into action. The inspector general for the IRS had apparently already investigated. The President demanded another investigation; the Department of Justice said it had commenced a criminal inquiry.

Knowing that such is the way in Washington, we waited at ProPublica for someone to send us a subpoena, show up on our doorstep, or maybe just call. Nothing. Nothing since December 13, when we told the IRS we had these documents they weren’t supposed to have sent us—or since the next day, when we published that fact. Nothing before the inspector general reached his conclusion, nothing before the congressional hearings started televising their demands for answers and their righteous indignation, nothing since.

In point of fact, the investigators would have found out that we have nothing of value to them. But the fact that they didn’t even ask tells you a lot. And it reinforces the point that much of the heat generated last week on this subject is just the latest expression of Washington cynicism and its consequences—that the talk show hosts and their fellow travelers, and the representatives and senators and officials in the executive branch, aren’t really looking for answers here. They’re just putting on a show.

Well, it didn’t take long for Alex Jones to poop out a ridiculous conspiracy theory surrounding the monster tornado that ripped through Moore, Oklahoma on Monday.

Did you know the government has “weather weapons” capable of not only creating tornadoes but moving them around? It’s also possible that these so-called weapons were used in Oklahoma to deliberately murder dozens of citizens — you know, with a tornado. If the government wanted to annihilate a population of citizens, there are easier and more subtle ways to do it than literally creating a massive tornado. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

This is what Alex Jones said on his radio show yesterday when a caller asked him whether the tornado was “artificial” and “man-made” due to “technology.” Just as this caller, who’s obviously suffering from severe paranoid delusions, ended her rant, Jones launched into a paranoid rant of his own which included, as it always does, a random string of official names of organizations potentially involved. Bill Gates Weather Modification, Geo-Engineering, AP, Reuters, Department of Energy. (Other frequently blurted names include IBM, Raytheon, Bechtel, FEMA and The Illuminati.) Then, totally unrelated to the tornado, he tossed in a bit about the U.S. Code relating to biological and chemical warfare, and the apparent ability of the government to kill us with chemicals agents under the guise of experiments and law enforcement. In fact, he named a U.S. Code title by number, chapter number, subsection number — all the way down to the paragraph letter. Because it sounds official and therefore authentic.

Word salad. You’d expect to hear this from a guy wearing a tunic made of plastic bags and used diapers while shouting at invisible enemies on the street corner. But it’s just the kind of gibberish, delivered with the slick fluidity of a televangelist, that paranoid schizophrenics eat for breakfast. Millions of them nationwide.

However, unlike his Boston Marathon “false flag” theory, he left himself some wiggle room when he said:

“I don’t know if this was a weather weapon or not, but they can, with the right conditions — they can create and steer groups of tornadoes.”

Yes, the U.S. government can not only create and steer a tornado, they can steer entire groups of tornadoes. Given the monstrous power of the Oklahoma storm, this means the U.S. government could effectively contain and move the explosive power of the detonated Hiroshima bomb — several of them evidently. Jones wasn’t clear about precisely how they’d accomplish this but it would presumably involve force-fields and tractor beams of some sort, which begs the question: why don’t we have floating cars and Back to the Future hoverboards yet?

This is as close as he came to defining how it’s done:

“The question is, were their helicopters and small aircraft seen… in and around the clouds, spraying and doing things. If you saw that, you better bet your bottom dollar they did this, but who knows if they did. You know, that’s the thing, we don’t know.”

Spraying things and doing things? Just enough ambiguity to dig him out of the hole, while offering up a physical explanation to his sociopathic listeners. See, if there are helicopters in the sky, they must be there to spray “things” and do “things” to the weather because of the New World Order and the Illuminati — and not because there are such things as rescue helicopters, police helicopters, news helicopters and so forth which are typically deployed whenever a natural disaster is taking place. This is the core of Jones’ scam. He takes every day things (see also juice boxes) and spins them with nefarious intent for the digestion of mentally ill followers who need to feel as if they’re special because they’re aware of what’s really happening out there. Jones is manufacturing for his own personal wealth the antithesis to Occam’s Razor: there aren’t any simple explanations for anything. We’ll call it Bidondi’s Razor. Alex Jones weaves these complicated scenarios and therefore creates a perpetual, addictive need for… Alex Jones… to guide and protect his disciples through the twisted labyrinth of what’s really happening.

The irony, of course, is that there’s an obvious and actual conspiracy circulating around all of this: the economic and political effort to exacerbate the climate crisis. And yet Alex Jones rejects the entire idea of the climate crisis and, with it, the solutions for mitigating it. In this case, the corporate and political manipulation and abuse of our climate is happening in plain view, threatening to decimate the human species (among others) and Alex Jones believes it’s all fake. He believes global warming is a Ponzi scheme and a plot to collect carbon taxes. The ability to create and move groups of tornado funnel clouds is actually happening while the calculated, scientific consensus that the Earth is growing hotter due to human-made pollution is a hoax.

Weird.

Someone as allegedly in-the-know as Alex Jones doesn’t realize that the government and corporate America has been exchanging billions of dollars and colluding for decades, if not more, to rape the natural world, risking the future health and longevity of humanity. That’s totally not a conspiracy. But the effort to stop it is clearly a plot. Welcome to the fucked-up parallel universe of Alex Jones. Everything is a scam, except for the things that actually are. And this explains Alex Jones himself: as he rattles off these preposterous theories to his gullible followers, he himself is the true scam artist — inventing conspiracies to exploit the naivete of his audience, handed down from a position of booming authority and sheer profit motive.

I’m 35, which some people still count as kind of young but sort of old, but watching the GOP do its dance with the mainstream media over fake scandals, I end up sighing like an old man. I’ve seen this show before. Democratic president with a recovering economy, just re-elected over the latest next great hope of the right (in 1996 it was a war hero, in 2012 it was a capitalism hero), so of course they turn to scandal.

The problem for them is that the left isn’t as stupid and naïve as it once was. Where the Clinton era left approached the GOP House’s claims as if they had some legitimacy to them and stupidly gave in to them (most egregiously with the appointment of an independent counsel), the Obama White House has veterans of the Clinton Wars both from the Clinton administration and from America.

There is an entire generation of Democrats – me included – who saw the right persecute the Clinton family, then go on to attain the White House and run roughshod over America. Any pretense they may have once had to doing what they do out of love of country over political gain is dead in the water.

We know how badly they want to negate President Obama’s power, and the mainstream press’ dutiful water-carrying that is part and parcel to the entire operation.

Been there, done that.

Of the three issues at hand – Benghazi, the DOJ leak probe, and the IRS, only one is of any serious concern. The abuses at the IRS have been roundly condemned from all quarters, and in many ways they are an outgrowth of concerns liberals have repeatedly made about the role unlimited financing has in politics.

As usual, the right is taking a legitimate concern and perverting it into kooky conspiracy theory. Conservative groups are now citing increased web visits and statistically unremarkable IRS audits as evidence of evil Obama ordering a crackdown on his political opponents. Presented with the fact that Obama had no knowledge or connection to the abuses, they’ve begun rolling out what I call the “Professor X Theory” of his presidency, insisting that his desires were essentially communicated telepathically to IRS officials.

They have a legitimate issue, but because the paranoid style is as much a part of the right as inhaling oxygen now, they’re going to squander it (and probably stymie much needed reforms).

I’ve discussed the other two issues, and besides the actual military/law enforcement operations to catch the Benghazi attackers, the right’s obsession with talking points has all the resonance of Al Capone’s vault.

There will be more attempts to breathe life into Benghazi and other fake scandals – as we’ve seen since practically the day of Obama’s first inauguration – will come up and be given life by the mainstream media (“scandal” is the closest thing they’ve got to horse race coverage and they’d rather cover either over actual policy that affects the lives of millions directly and billions indirectly).

But I doubt much of the left will be the willing dupes they once were. The era of the Ken Starrs of the world being given carte blanche to attempt to incite a Constitutional crisis are long over. We know they don’t have America’s security or integrity in mind, just a frustrated rage that America rejected them at the polls yet again and nothing more.