I'm still concerned about those dirty Mexicans out-breeding us. Man my xenophobia is so last week.

Once again, I have to wonder that people who publically rail in this country about the dangers of the implementation of Islamic law in America seem to be mostly in support of American soldiers dying to uphold it in Iraq.

"People like glenn and these other liberal wingnuts are vastly underestimating the battle we are in.

People, we have spent almost half a trillion dollars and spent many lives fighting against fundamentalist islam. And we have barely made a dent. That should tell you what we are up against.

God has chosen this moment in time as a pivotal battle against good and evil. I personally feel no greater goal than to fight and die for this great cause. All REAL americans should feel the same.

"

No the problem is that Christian fascists just don't want any competition in taking away REAL American's freedoms.

Sign up right now PICNIC and fight the good fight. No one is holding you back. god will protect you. And I think you will discover that all the money we've thrown at this problem has less to do with how difficult the problem is and more to do with how incompetent the idiots in charge of our county are.

Benito Giuliani whipped up a frenzy to cut off funding for the Brooklyn Museum. When you have that kind of civic power, you don't have to threaten bombs or murder.

In the end it's the same shit, different Messiah.

Oh come on. All kinds of films and pieces of art, novels & etc offend many Xians. They had seizures over The Last Temptation of Christ. But no one is afraid to show those films or sell those books, unlike the film Theo van Gogh made detailing Islam's treatment of women (and for which he was brutally murdered). (I'd wager Salman Rushdie would prefer that Giuliani had pressured stores not to carry his book, than to have a bounty placed on his head and some of his translators murdered.) Virtually everyone is scared to death of airing van Gogh's movie, and the sequel had to be made at an undisclosed location under tight security.

I'm as critical as anyone of the Christianists in the U.S., but they do not represent the terror threat which chills speech as some Muslims in various parts of the world do.

Of course! Where have you been? They already have ONE congressman and FOUR American recruits.

If this keeps up, I figure, and if the rate of population growth stays the same, the muslims will have a majority .. roughly ... by the time ... HELL FREEZES OVER!!!

Cheers

I can no longer sit back and allow Islamist infiltration, Islamist indoctrination, Islamist subversion and the international Islamist conspiracy, to sap and impurify all our precious bodily fluids!

(Reaches for another slug of rain water and grain alcohol, and fulminates against the creeping and menacing hegemony of couscous in the supermarket deli aisle)

"If there was one chance in a billion that the US could be taken over by any type of radical Islam, "leftists" would be on the frontline of the war against them."

Then presumably the fate of our gay brothers and our sisters in lands that have been taken over by radical Islam are worth less to western leftists since most of us won't even put ourselves on the ideological frontline against them.

Could just as easily have been targeted by Mohammed Bouyeri who killed Theo Van Gogh. He is connected to Takfir wal-Hijra and their ideology is so extreme that in 1996 this group even plotted to assassinate Osama bin Laden."

Takfir wal-Hijra (Arabic تكفير والهجرة - Excommunication and Exodus) is a Khawarij (extremist Muslim) group which emerged in Egypt in the 1960s. Today Takfir wal-Hijra has members or supporters in several other countries, allied to Al-Qaeda [citation needed]. In Spain the group is also known as Martyrs for Morocco.

Members of the group are radical Islamists who are not bound by the usual Islamic religious constraints. They adopt non-Islamic appearances such as shaving their beard and wearing a tie in order to blend into crowds and make themselves hard to detect even to other Muslims. They can drink alcohol and even eat pork to deceive their enemies. They believe that any means justify the end and, that killing other Muslims can be justified in their cause and that Western society is heathen and it is their duty to destroy it.

Little is known about the current organization or hierarchy of the group. Several groups which adhere to the same ideology have possibly used the name independently of each other...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takfir_wal-Hijra

I believe different Christian sects were still trying to kill one another as recently as the trouble in Northern Ireland not too many years ago.

is how Bushco is most tightly allied with the most fundamentalist of Islamic regimes - Saudi Arabia and the other oil states (UAE etc.), and has succeeded in creating a new one in Iraq. Bushco has been the avowed enemy of 'secular' Arab states like Syria and over-threw the strongest - Iraq. We've spent decades fighting secular Arab nationalism (Baathism, the PLO) and allied ourselves with and actively supported the most fundamentalist elements in the middle east (including the mujahedeen in Afganistan, which led directly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda). There has been such a thing as a liberal/progressive muslim community in the Middle East (I know many in it) - but the US right-wing has always shunned it in favor of amoral capitalists like Chalabi or oil-rich Kings.

Via Dan Froomkin, this from Jonathan Alter, at Newsweek, "I Know What You Did Last Summer." An excerpt:

So members of Congress are legitimately afraid that they and their families will get blown up this summer. Fair enough. But then they lost their heads and sold out the Constitution to cover their political rears while keeping the rest of us mostly in the dark. The reason we don't know more about what happened is that the United States has moved sharply in recent years from legitimate secrecy—regarding sources and methods—to the bogus kind the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and others warned will wreck democracies. For instance, the abstract legal arguments used by the shadowy FISA court to strike down Bush's surveillance program are secret. Why? Because they might be politically embarrassing.

Here's what we do know. We know that the Democratic leadership rightly conceded to Adm. Michael McConnell, the once widely respected director of National Intelligence, to allow eavesdropping on foreigner-to-foreigner communications routed through American phone companies (no biggie; we've always spied on foreigners). We know that the Democrats thought they had a deal until McConnell, who is supposed to be nonpartisan, went back to the White House and got fresh marching orders to squelch reasonable judicial oversight by the FISA court. And we know that the administration's new position was that the attorney general (the disgraced Alberto Gonzales) should have the sole authority to spy without a warrant on any American talking to a foreigner, even if it's you and the guy from Mumbai fixing your printer. [A farewell gift from Rove?] [All emphases mine!]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20226453/site/newsweek/page/0/

What can we safely assume when something political comes out of the White House that is too hot to touch? That some how Karl Rove is involved. (Maybe Cheney, too.)

There has been a lot of speculation today about why Rove's really leaving, including why there is not more speculation from members of the M$M who probably know something. Spending more time with his wife and a college-bound son are just not that convincing. However, numerous Bush administration officials have left prior to something big breaking in the news.

The only thing that has ever made sense to me about Ashcroft, Comey and the rest of the DOJ senior leadership threatening to resign... is that they objected to the admin spying on either American citizens, in general, or Republican and/or Democratic members of congress, in particular, (and maybe even using the info to blackmail). Who would possibly have thought there'd be the most to gain by that? My first thought is Rove. Followed by Cheney.

Froomkin has more on both Rove and FISA:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html

[I'll have to weigh in on the Muslim threat later on...]