2010-05-09 08:59:40

PAKISTANI TALIBAN: Attorney General Says Times Square Bomb Attempt Prompted And Financed In Pakistan

Filed under: Terrorism
Posted by: Purple State of News

Attorney General Eric Holder has gone on the record to say that Pakistani Taliban aided and abetted the planned terrorism attack on Times Square last week. Faisal Shahzad wasn’t acting alone. He was a pawn in a gambit that also involved members of Al Qaeda.

One upshot: Holder is asking for more legal “flexibility” in the handling of terrorism cases. Echoing the Bush administration, he wants a bit more wiggle room when it comes to Miranda rights. When the history of the era is written, the continuity in security and defense questions that runs from Bush 1 through Obama will become clear. This is one more piece of evidence that the differences between administrations from party to party and era to era are wildly overstated.

Here’s an excerpt from the Reuters story:

Holder said it was important the government have the flexibility it needs to counter acts of terrorism but that any changes have to meet constitutional requirements.

“It is looking like the TTP (Pakistani Taliban) is responsible for this attempt,” Brennan said.

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2010-05-03 06:57:24

TIMES SQUARE TERROR, LAURA BUSH’S HAIR, BLIGHTY AND FERTILITY: The Week In Purple

Filed under: Books, Culture, Featured, Politics, Purple, Terrorism
Posted by: Purple State of News

So much happening this week it’s hard to know where to begin, so why not choose the top of the news? As of this hour, 8:40 EST, Times Square video camera images are making the rounds of the cable news shows. A tall man who looks balding and carries a briefcase or bag walks into the frame, stops, removes his shirt, stuffs the shirt in the bag and keeps walking.

A car is parked behind him, but it doesn’t appear to be the intended murder weapon. This scene shows a person of interest in the case, but it’s not clear yet who he might be or why else he’s under suspicion. Here’s the video.

That story will unfold all week, as will the ongoing struggle to cap the well beneath the Deepwater Horizon, but otherwise Tuesday and Thursday offer two of the bigger events.

First, we have the publication of the new Laura Bush autobiography Spoken From The Heart. And from the hair, which remains the same after all these years. For those looking for continuity in this conflicted country, look no further than the cover of the book, which features that signature coiffure on top of a face that can’t remotely compare in vigor and conviction. Was she poisoned in Germany? The hair believes she was.

Second, on Thursday, citizens of the United Kingdom go to the polls, and we find out just how deep an impression Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg made in recent televised debates. Conservatives have the edge in polls, but it’s beginning to look like a hung parliament. Will it be well hung? That’s always the question.

Finally, speaking of well hung, this week Christie’s is expected to auction off the Edvard Munch painting Fertility for an estimated $30 million. Other pieces in the auction are by Picasso, Warhol, Johns and Matisse. If you’re an art lover, and you enjoy a good Munch, and you have the money, why not but the painting? The New York city and state tax on the sale will be serious and help to defray the cost of finding the suspect in the terror case. Do your part!

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2010-04-23 10:26:08

CONCILIATOR OF THE WEEK: MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch Takes On Keith Olbermann And Gets The Boot!

Filed under: Media, Politics, Pop Culture, Purple, Terrorism
Posted by: Purple State of News

Three cheers for Donny Deutsch for saying what some liberals can’t bear to admit. Keith Olbermann’s approach to the news is every bit as damaging to American politics as the work of the people he hates.

Here’s a sampling.

Did you catch that line about the Tea Party people not being “the sharpest tools in the political shed”? Down to the smug delivery, this self-serving sanctimony is vintage.

Pauline Kaul was writing about the “new sanctimoniousness” way back in 1977, when Hal Ashby’s wearying Coming Home was released to general Hollywood gushiness, a soft focus portent of all the political correctness to come.

Now the sanctimony is really, really old, and few things smell quite as awful as that particular rotten egg. If there is anything worse, maybe it’s the rancid milk of conservative outrage, but when you get right down to it, both those smells linger and merge in the same hot, dirty American street these days.

I’m thinking West 57th Street, Manhattan, late August. You know the reek.

So Olbermann is the Left’s Glenn Beck. He has more hair, and his goods have a slightly better mouthfeel (he shops organic), but his nastiness walks hand in hand, and a lot of people get off on it. He gets the highest cable rating on his end of the political spectrum, and he makes beaucoup d’argent for MSNBC as a result. Audiences love the sex appeal of the well-dressed ranter with a hard-on for the stupid baddies of the right.

But it’s all getting as fatuous and stupid as anything over at Fox, and Deutsch had the temerity to say so by putting Olbermann in a video sequence with Olbermann’s despised nemeses, O’Reilly, Beck and Limbaugh. Word at The New York Times is that it led to the immediate cancellation of the weeklong series “America The Angry”, hosted by Deutsch.

Here’s Olbermann’s response: “In a reply to an e-mail message from The New York Times, Mr. Olbermann said: “Your account is entirely untrue. Your e-mail is the first I am hearing of any of this. What I know of what happened is this: Phil Griffin phoned me yesterday enraged at what was on that show and I didn’t disagree with him.” Mr. Griffin is the president of MSNBC.

The segment in question also included clips of Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck. One of the guests, the radio host Hugh Hewitt, said that Mr. Olbermann and another MSNBC host, Ed Schultz, are “the biggest hate-mongers in television.”

What a crock, MSNBC! And Olbermann, if you’re reading, shame on you for being every bit the mealy-mouthed tyrant you appear to be on your show. You need be the biggest advocate Donny Deutsch ever had. You need to storming into executive suites and hurling furniture.

What an eye-opener.

Or as Deutsch put it to the Times, though much more diplomatically, “I was disappointed because I think I’m on to something really special here that needs to be done.” He meant “something that is neither red nor blue in terms of its politics”, he told the Times. “It’s time the purple voice is out there,” Mr. Deutsch then said. “Enough already.”

A purple voice? Really? But isn’t that like saying America needs to eat its spinach? Isn’t that like watching Doris Day movies with the sound turned down? Isn’t that like having bad sex? Boring and sterile and lame? Isn’t it much sexier, much wilder, much cooler to hate with a pure hate, to vilify with a tight-assed zeal, to spit on the ground at the feet of the enemy and saunter away with a high-five from your fellow travelers?

Or is all that stuff the opposite of what it appears? A sign of complete intellectual and political exhaustion at the polar ends of the spectrum? (And the weird sisters may be heard to whisper in the background, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”)

Deutsch obviously thinks so, and that’s why Purple State Of Mind is naming him Conciliator Of The Week.

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