Religious right uses Bin Laden’s death to display tasteless homophobia 6MAI11

PATHETIC YES, but I really want to know if jmattbarber is expressing, in his tweet, a personal fantasy about leathermen or is just being a "Pferd in den Arsch"? I like the way the author ends his post on AlterNet....
Comments are coming in from all over regarding Osama Bin Laden’s death. Probably the most repugnant comes from a familiar source to the lgbt community:

To those not familiar with him (and you should thank God for that), this man is Matt Barber, Director of Cultural Affairs with Liberty Counsel & Assoc. Dean of Liberty University School of Law. Liberty University is the college started by the late Jerry Falwell, who infamously blamed the gay community for 9/11.
The lgbt community can always count on Barber to show the true face of the religious right because he consistently abandons the “love the sinner, hate the sin” junk to go full throttle on the crazy train of exploiting homophobic fears.
Among other things, Barber:
criticized Home Depot for daring to acknowledge that same-sex households exist,
slurred the name of an Obama appointee in a pitiful attempt to be clever,
defended countries that persecute lgbts,
told a highly dubious story about a gay man sexually assaulting men in his military unit, and
compared lgbts and progressives in general to idol worshippers and child sacrificers of Biblical times.
But it is in the area of “criticizing,” i.e. talking about gay sex where Barber has made a, shall we say, niche for himself.
He made this tweet on the night of President Obama’s State of the Union address:

It would be easy to say something about Barber’s obsession with gay sex, but something else needs to be said.
It’s really sad when someone who claims to represent Christianity and the “love of Jesus” exploits this occasion to make a crass joke about the lgbt community.
Granted this is the same guy who whines about how the lgbt community are anti-Christian bullies.
Barber’s conduct leaves me to ask him a question:
The lgbt community are not anti-Christian bullies, but if we were, what would it have to do with you because if one were to judge you on your behavior, you are as Christian as the man whose recent death led to your crass comment.
Hat tip to Truth Wins Out.

Alvin McEwen is the blogmaster of Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters. In addition, he is also a contributor to Truthwinsout.org, Pam's House Blend,and the Huffington Post.

We're Still at War: Photo of the Day for 6MAI11 from MOJO

IN spite of the killing of bin laden we are still at war, though we should be bringing the troops from Iraq and Afghanistan home now.....from MOJO....

Fri May. 6, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

As a dismounted patrol of U.S. soldiers from A Battery, 1st Battalion, 84th Field Artillery Regiment, 170th Infantry Brigade Combat Team walks through the village of Chil Gazy; Staff Sgt. Jordan Cruz provides security. Afghans in the village voiced their opinions to International Security Assistance Forces troops during their visit in an effort to improve the security situation in the village and throughout the area. Photo via US Army.

Canadian Socialists Show Unprecedented Gains 6MAI11

AN interesting look at the recent Canadian election and the rise of the NDP to become the opposition party in Parliament. From Tikkun Daily.....

by: Ralph Seliger

I’m not a Canadian, but I’ve lived in Canada and was an enthusiastic supporter of the New Democratic Party, the perennial third (sometimes fourth) party in that country until a few days ago. I don’t wish to steal Peter Marmorek’s thunder as an actual Canadian and I look forward to his post-election analysis, but I would like to share some reflections of my own.
When I was a student at McGill in the early ’70s, I campaigned for an NDP candidate in Montreal. Naturally, he finished a distant third (if not fourth). But I understand that dramatic NDP gains in Quebec (where it nearly wiped out the separatist Bloc Québécois, down from 47 seats to four) have catapulted it into a respectable and unprecedented second place finish nationally–up from 37 to 102 seats, with the Liberals crashing from 77 to 34.
The ruling Conservative Party won a majority of the seats but only 40% of the vote. The key to the election strategically seems to be that a close split between Liberal and NDP voters in Canada’s most populous province, Ontario, allowed the Conservatives to win a decisive number of seats there.
I was drawn to the NDP out of a sense of international solidarity as a young American socialist who was a member of the Socialist Party-USA and later its successor organizations, the Social Democrats-USA and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. DSOC, a left-wing split-off from the somewhat rigid and surprisingly hawkish SD-USA, was led by the brilliant democratic socialist thinkers and writers, Michael Harrington and Irving Howe. In 1982, I was present when DSOC merged with the New America Movement to form the Democratic Socialists of America.
I also vaguely recall seeing Michael Lerner on that occasion, who was one of NAM’s key leaders. Unfortunately, although the DSA enrolled an impressive number of stellar thinkers and activists–including Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornell West, Jerrold Nadler and many others–it was clearly not successful in moving the United States in a social democratic or democratic socialist direction (I like to think of these two terms as basically synonymous). The DSA still exists, yet it cannot be said to be truly influential.
American socialists had reason to envy Canadians for its NDP, even though it was not one of the two major parties contending for national power. It generally elected 20-40 Members of Parliament and would occasionally win power in a province or two (it has actually governed five of Canada’s ten provinces, including Ontario, plus the Yukon Territory). With these new elections, however, this pattern has changed, as the NDP is now the official opposition in Canada’s parliament, having decisively displaced the Liberals, historically that country’s most successful political party.
Whether the NDP remains a major force and even forms the government one day, largely depends upon how well it navigates what might be called the challenge of utopianism, or “making the perfect the enemy of the merely good.” I refer back to Michael Harrington to explain my meaning: I recall him saying that a utopian vision is of value because it defines the direction in which you want to move society; but he warned that if you ever thought that you’ve actually arrived at this ideal state, then you (actually, we) are in trouble, because you’ve probably established a totalitarian order. Still, a movement devoid of idealism, rots from within and is corrupted by the allure of power.
Hopefully, the NDP can do a lot of good despite these potential pitfalls. Mind you, even when only a third party, it left an indelible mark on our neighbor to the north by modeling on a provincial level Canada’s one-payer health care system.

Small Business Owners Demand Repeal Of Bush Tax Cuts For The Rich 4MAI11 & Taking Mom And Pop To The Cleaners: How The Small Business Lobby Hurts Small Business 23JAN11

A great article from HuffPost outlining the way the repiglicans and tea-baggers are representing the greed of the wealthy and corporate America and not small businesses or the working or middle classes.....

WASHINGTON -- Michael Teahan, like his father, mother, and uncles before him, is a small business owner. The 52-year-old has spent most of his adult life running his own businesses: a restaurant, a coffee bar and various companies involved in the espresso machine business.
"I was the only person in my family to go to college, because that’s not what we did -- we all opened up businesses," Teahan says. "For some people, that’s a big hurdle ... for us, it was like having lunch."
Teahan currently operates Espresso Resource, a company that imports espresso machine parts from Europe to sell to U.S. restaurants and coffee shops. And he’s doing very well for himself: The two-man operation clears about $1 million a year in total sales, Teahan says -- enough to secure himself annual income in excess of $250,000.
That makes Teahan one of the few small business owners to actually benefit from the Bush administration's tax cuts for the wealthy. He says the cuts save him about $12,000 a year, compared to what he paid before they were enacted. But as debates over the federal budget deficit have intensified, Teahan has found the political discussion increasingly divorced from the reality of his experience as a small business owner.
Tax cuts for the wealthy, according to Teahan, will do nothing to bolster his firm. They won’t affect his hiring decisions, they won’t encourage him to buy new equipment or help him move into a bigger warehouse. He says all of those decisions -- the nuts and bolts of actually running a small company -- depend on the his customers' economic conditions, not his personal tax rate.
"What we do in business, how we spend our money, how we allocate our resources -- that has very little to do with tax policy," Teahan says. "I map my business based on my customers, and what my customers want to buy, and what they can afford to buy."
It’s a common complaint from small business owners. While congressional Republicans and entrenched corporate lobbying groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- which is holding a Wednesday meeting on small business priorities -- and the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) have been pushing hard to preserve the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy by touting the interests of small firms, much of the small business community is demanding that those very tax cuts be repealed. The tax breaks for the wealthy will add $700 billion to the debt over the next 10 years, according to the White House's Office of Management and Budget. And many small firms say that money would be better spent on direct aid to the middle class.
"We are fed by our consumers, not by our tax breaks," says Rick Poore, owner of Designwear, Inc., a screen-printing business based in Lincoln, Neb. "If you drive more people to my business, I will hire more people. It's as simple as that. If you give me a tax break, I'll just take the wife to the Bahamas."
Poore emphasizes, however, that -- like the vast majority of small business owners -- he isn't among the elite class of taxpayers making $250,000 a year or more. He and his wife take in a combined $80,000 a year from their business. Teahan is an outlier, because most small businesses don’t make nearly enough to benefit from the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
"Most small business owners make less than $250,000 and so the tax cuts don’t benefit most of us, and they’re really taking important valuable resources away from the federal budget," says ReShonda Young, corporate vice president and operations manager for Alpha Express, a Waterloo, Iowa-based company that specializes in transportation services and snow removal.
Young also serves on the executive board of Main Street Alliance, a coalition of small firms. Main Street Alliance notes that 98 percent of small businesses will not be affected by the Bush tax cuts in any way.
"The reality is that most businesses don’t pay the top marginal tax rate,” notes John Irons, an economist with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. "Most small businesses won’t be affected at all by a reversal of Bush tax cuts for the rich.”
For his part, Poore, the screen-printer, sees some dark humor in the entire notion of wealthy small business owners. He says that any accountant "that allows $250,000 in profit to get through to my bottom line would be fired."
Teahan emphasizes that even the few firms that do qualify for the Bush tax cuts don't boost their hiring in response to the Bush tax cuts. For decades, small companies have been able to secure tax breaks on the expenses that actually affect their bottom line -- labor, rent, equipment and other necessary costs. The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, by contrast, only affect how much of a firm's total profit owners keep for themselves.
"The economic premise, that people won’t hire because they might have to pay more taxes if they make more money, is beyond laughable,” says Lew Prince, owner of the Vintage Vinyl record store in St. Louis, Mo. "You hire when you think there’s a way you can make more money with that hire. The percentage the government takes out of it has almost nothing to do with it.”
So what really affects small businesses? High health care costs, which will likely be ameliorated by President Barack Obama’s health care reform, and limited access to credit in the wake of the financial crisis. Just as important to Teahan, Poore, Prince and other small business owners are federal economic policies that directly benefit their middle class customers. If extending tax breaks to millionaires means denying aid to the middle class, their firms will suffer.
"My customers work for a living,” Teahan says. "They’re working on espresso machines and selling coffee. They’re not these uber-rich Wall Street bankers. [My customers] need the money. If they’ve got money, then I'm doing great."
The upper-end Bush tax cuts are not corporate taxes -- they’re taxes on wealthy individuals. Many small firms are not corporations, and owners report their profits as the individual income of their owners. Some firms, like Teahan’s, choose to incorporate, though they never officially report a profit because all excess earnings are paid out to the owners.
The U.S. Chamber and the NFIB say that, because these business profits are reported as individual income, allowing tax hikes for wealthy individuals will hurt small business. The U.S. Chamber declined to comment for this story but NFIB spokesman Kevan Chapman says his organization has repeatedly polled its members and found that they favor the Bush tax cuts.
"We have over 300,000 members who would disagree with the notion that we don’t represent small business. The last time we balloted this measure was in November, and 89 percent said the federal government should extend those tax breaks," Chapman said.
There were 26.9 million small businesses in the United States in 2008, according to the Small Business Administration, though that figure includes millions of people who work on contract for employers but have no business, in the traditional sense, of their own. There were 6 million small firms with at least one employee.
Another small business groups beg to differ with the NFIB. The American Sustainable Business Council, which represents 70,000 small firms and social groups, maintains that "there is a strong business case for letting the tax relief for the wealthiest expire,” noting that doing so would "reduce the federal budget deficit and lessen the crisis with state and local budgets around the country.”
Frank Knapp, president and CEO of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce has written on the Bush tax cuts issue for The Huffington Post. He emphasizes that many of the people who report business income on their personal income tax returns are bond traders, partners in corporate law firms, lobbyists and hedge fund managers -- not the kind of activity that most people think of as "small business.”
These alternative small business groups say that the debate over the Bush tax cuts has been heavily skewed by talking points from the NFIB and the Chamber. The Chamber has a long track-record of backing the economic priorities of corporate elites, while the NFIB has increasingly become a partisan wing of the Republican Party, as HuffPost detailed in January.
While the NFIB continues to support the indefinite extension of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, it opted last year not to fight for a bill that would expand lending to small firms.
"Any small businessman who is in the NFIB is paying his enemies to stab him in the back,” says Prince, the record store owner.
Alpha Express VP Young agrees. "It's the corporate interests and the wealthy stealing our name to further their agenda," she argues.
While the upper-end Bush tax cuts would increase the federal debt by $700 billion over the next 10 years, the broader class of Bush tax cuts, which affect many middle-class taxpayers, would cost $3.1 trillion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
"We should have learned from the last decade that slashing taxes for the richest Americans is a great way to grow the national debt –- not jobs," says Holly Sklar, the executive director of Business for Shared Prosperity, a non-partisan small-business group funded predominantly by the Ford Foundation. "Few small businesses benefit from the top rate tax cuts, but many lose from a shrinking middle class and deepening budget cuts in everything from the Small Business Administration and education to vital infrastructure repair and modernization. The tax cuts are like termites, eating away at our economy and our nation’s future.”

Taking Mom And Pop To The Cleaners: How The Small Business Lobby Hurts Small Business

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/23/inside-the-small-business-lobby_n_812831.html?page=4
Throughout Wednesday's House floor debate over the repeal of President Barack Obama's signature health care overhaul, Republicans frequently claimed that the 2010 law will cost the U.S. economy 1.6 million jobs if it isn't rolled back. They were citing a statistic from an organization that -- on the surface -- is as unimpeachable a source in Washington as can be found: The National Federation of Independent Businesses, a lobbying heavyweight which dubs itself "The Voice of Small Business."
Yet for the past two years, the NFIB has been less an advocate for small businesses than an arm of the Republican Party. When the interests of the GOP and the needs of small firms have collided, the NFIB has repeatedly sided with Republicans, jeopardizing billions of dollars in credit, tax benefits and other federal subsidies that are critical to the small enterprises that form the backbone of the U.S. economy. Key legislative priorities for small businesses were delayed, diluted or abandoned -- including a major small-business bill -- while the NFIB spent its resources on legislative battles with only tangential connections to small firms, battling climate-change legislation, pushing to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy or opposing a stimulus offering tens of billions in giveaways for, yes, small business.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, NFIB's bigger brother of sorts, has received greater attention for its outright political warfare against Democrats. The NFIB has maintained a lower national profile, and is still routinely referred to in the media as "the small business lobby." But inside the Beltway, the NFIB's raw partisanship is increasingly isolating it from key policy circles, as lobby groups such as the National Small Business Association, the Main Street Alliance and others expand their influence among entrepreneurs and mom-and-pop enterprises.
By yoking itself to the GOP, the NFIB is employing a strategy routinely embraced by the Chamber on one side of the aisle and labor unions on the other. The strategy makes sense for labor and major corporations in that their competing interests neatly fit atop the platforms of their respective parties. It makes less sense for U.S. small businesses, whose interests are often served by either party.
Democrats who deal with the NFIB regularly, even those on the business-friendly end of the spectrum, find it extremely difficult to get any traction with the group. In an interview, Senate Small Business Committee Chair Mary Landrieu (D-La.) fully extended her arm to the right to demonstrate just where on the spectrum the NFIB positions itself. "The small-business lobby is a broad coalition that ranges, I guess, from the right, by the NFIB, the Chamber of Commerce coming -- still right, but closer to the center -- and then you have more of your progressive and left-leaning small business groups," she said.
"Sometimes the NFIB cuts off their nose to spite their face," Landrieu said of the lobby's decision to obstruct the small-business bill to win points with Republicans.
On Capitol Hill, the NFIB has been associated with the GOP since the Reagan era, and enjoyed a particularly close relationship with the party during the presidency of George W. Bush. But in 2006, the organization made a significant leadership change, bringing on Todd Stottlemyer as president and CEO just as Democrats appeared on the cusp of a major victory in that November's midterm elections.
When Stottlemyer arrived, he found an organization that had drifted a long way from its small-business base. The NFIB's highest priorities included items with little relation to the way firms operate, efforts such as abolishing the estate tax and fighting cap-and-trade legislation.
"The first thing he did when he got there is he looked at their top-priority issues -- estate tax, and a couple other things -- he sat down with the board and said, 'I don't really understand why these are your priorities. I've actually been in business, run a small-to-midsize business. I don't really think about any of these things, ever,'" recalled a top Senate Democratic aide who has worked closely with Stottlemyer and the NFIB. "There was some friction with the board, but I think they respected his background and the fact that he was a good spokesman for small business."
Stottlemyer was an atypical Washington lobbyist. He came up through the business world, rather than political channels, having run a technology startup and chaired a Virginia county Chamber of Commerce. He worked to win over Democrats, earning praise from several liberal and centrist lawmakers.
"Todd did the best he could to be fair and nonpartisan and focus on what it was that his association members felt was good for them -- and not in a partisan way, but in a policy way," Allen Boyd told HuffPost. Boyd, a former Blue Dog Democrat from Florida who lost his reelection bid in November, is a close ally of House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), a key Democratic liaison to business.
As health care policy became a central campaign issue during the 2008 elections, Stottlemyer not only backed reform, he led the creation of a new reform coalition called Divided We Fail. According to people involved with the group, Stottlemyer reached out to AARP chief Bill Novelli to form the coalition, which expanded to include a longtime NFIB nemesis, the Service Employees International Union.
"Todd was a problem solver interested in exploring new options that met his members' goals -- even if it was contrary to past decisions," then-SEIU President Andy Stern, now with the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute, told HuffPost. "He brought a small-business can-do mentality, and was more a watchdog for his members' interests rather than an adjunct to any political party." (Novelli is now at Georgetown's business school.)
Health insurance is a major expense for businesses of all sizes, but it is particularly hard on small firms, which are unable to leverage a large base of employees to secure lower pricing from insurers. Many small-business owners can't break into the group health-insurance market at all -- forcing them into an individual insurance market ripe with ripoffs, improperly-denied claims and customer-service havoc -- driving up the cost of doing business and making hiring and retaining workers more difficult than such processes are for big firms.
"Today it's not enough to say 'no.' We want to be part of the solution," Stottlemyer said in a May 20, 2008 interview with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a health care think tank established by the Kaiser Permanente founder. "We're participating in a coalition called Divided We Fail with some uncommon organizations that we don't have a lot in common with historically ... There are a lot of things we don't agree on, but we do agree very much that health care needs to be on the agenda for the next President of the United States ... We need to do something about health care, because it's strangling our small-business owners."
So long as the government did not place the burden for universal health coverage on employers by forcing all companies to offer their workers a group health-insurance plan-- the so-called "employer mandate" -- Stottlemyer was open to negotiations. He pooh-poohed concerns about the cost of fixing what he called a "crisis" in health care, noting that it was a question of who paid to correct the imbalances in the system, not whether the country could afford it.
"The United States today, as a western industrialized nation, [health care is] 16 percent of our gross domestic product. It's higher than in any other country," he said. "The dollars are there, it's how we spend the dollars."
The NFIB's flirtation with bipartisanship didn't last. After seeing the interplay between the federal government and private health-care companies close up, Stottlemyer headed back to the private sector, taking a position at Virginia-based Inova Health System. He is currently CEO of Interactive Technology Solutions LLC and told HuffPost that he wasn't pushed out of the NFIB.
Whatever the terms of his departure, Stottlemyer was replaced by Dan Danner -- a career lobbyist and former operative for President Ronald Reagan.
The top Senate aide was worried that the NFIB would revert to form following Stottlemyer's departure. "I called their lobbyist and said, 'What's the deal? Why's he leaving? He's great.' She said, 'I don't know, he just wanted to do something else,' and assured me Dan Danner wanted to carry the same mantle that Stottlemyer did. And I was skeptical, because he's a partisan hack," the aide said.
As Obama took office, Danner wasted no time in coming out full force against two of the administration's top priorities, the economic stimulus package and the health care bill -- even though both ended up taking positions the NFIB had long supported.
"We caved on everything they wanted in the health reform bill. Literally, everything," said the aide. "Right now they have no pooling arrangements in order to spread risk. We did that. We did it the way they wanted it done. The tax credits to purchase insurance. No employer mandate for small businesses. All these things that they really asked for, and then some, and they still wouldn't sign on the bill. And then filed the lawsuit."
Small-business groups were divided on the bill. Some, like Main Street Alliance, were full-throated supporters of the full package. Others, like the National Association of Small Businesses, ultimately opposed the legislation but reserved praise for several provisions, such as tax credits focused on small firms. No lobby group, however, went as far to oppose the final bill as the NFIB, which filed a lawsuit challenging it as unconstitutional -- a move deemed too extreme even for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Today, the NFIB is run mostly by and for Republicans. Of the 11 lobbyists currently employed by the NFIB, nine are former staffers for Republican lawmakers (one is a former Democratic staffer and another is an academic with ties to JPMorgan Chase and the New York Federal Reserve). The organization endorsed 319 politicians in the 2010 elections, 310 of them Republicans. And 93 percent of the $745,051 that the NFIB deployed in campaign contributions went to GOP candidates. The group's independent arm spent an additional $1 million, all of it on behalf of Republicans.
The NFIB is merely an extreme example of a Washington phenomenon symptomatic of a diseased system: A group of people form an organization to represent their interests in Washington -- exercising their First Amendment rights -- but over the years, the lobby is captured by partisan politics.
That's fine for the GOP, but the NFIB's partisan orientation is not always as beneficial to its ostensible clients. This conflict was most fully realized during the months-long debate over The Small Business Jobs Act. The bill was was first introduced in the House in mid-May and breezed through the lower chamber, developing into a package rife with benefits for small firms. There were tax breaks for firms that had capital, measures to supply capital to firms that didn't, and lending programs to make everyday operations cheaper.
Politically, the legislation's wheels were greased early on; an aid package for small firms carried popular appeal during a deep recession. The bill had the strong backing of Obama and the Treasury Department, while 15 of the bill's 16 major provisions had a Republican cosponsor. Business loved it: the legislation basically consisted of a set of tax breaks for small firms, plus efforts to provide credit to firms on favorable terms, and encourage investment by eliminating all capital-gains taxes on purchases of stock in small firms.
With hordes of supporters and no natural enemies, the legislation should have run wild through Congress like political kudzu. But that's not how Washington works, especially not in an election year when Democrats are in need of a political victory. Last summer, the bill found itself nearly wiped out. It eventually passed, but was not signed into law until Sept. 27, due in part to the NFIB's own resistance. That delay made it much harder, if not impossible, for small firms to take advantage of some of the bill's major tax and investment sweeteners before year-end deadlines.
Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), the top Republican on the Senate small business panel, had written or coauthored half of the legislation's major initiatives -- more than any other lawmaker. When it came time to vote, however, Snowe refused to back the package, successfully urging other Republicans on the panel to vote against it as well.
Landrieu opened negotiations with Snowe, but the effort proved futile. Republicans even began publicly bashing the program as "Son of TARP," due to a provision which would have diverted Wall Street bailout funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program to community banks and provided incentives for those banks to extend loans to small businesses. Republicans had decided that handing the Democrats a bipartisan legislative victory was too high a price to pay for a few thousand jobs and a host of handouts for major campaign contributors.
The NFIB's objection wasn't coming from businesses, said Landrieu, but from political elements of the right that were ideologically opposed to having Treasury involved in expanding access to credit.
"It was an objection, not even really [from] the business groups. It was an objection from sort of the right, nonbusiness groups, about the government creating the Treasury program, the loan program," Landrieu said. "It was more of an ideological objection."
Outside a small cadre of D.C. insiders, the story of the nation's most powerful small-business lobby resisting the year's biggest piece of small-business legislation is virtually unknown. That's because the NFIB made as little noise as possible about the bill.
The NFIB sustained its formal support for the Small Business Jobs Act throughout the congressional debate. But to align themselves with Republican political strategy, the group decided not to "score" a vote on the bill as part of their lobby's small business ratings -- the kind of statistics featured in TV ads during an election season, like: "So-and-so has a 98-percent approval rating from the National Federation of Independent Businesses."
Those statistics only measure what the lobby group considers "key" votes, things that dramatically affect small firms. Things like, say, the only piece of legislation from the past two years that exclusively targeted small businesses. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill closely watch whether a vote is scored by major lobby groups -- if powerful lobbies "score" a vote, it often means the difference between a bill's passage and its defeat.
This profound lack of urgency from the NFIB on small-business lending flew in the face of the group's own research on the subject. In a survey published last February, the lobby group found that 55 percent of small businesses were looking for loans, and most were unable to have all of their credit needs met by market conditions. A full 23 percent of small firms seeking credit were unable to get any loan at all.
By refusing to score the bill, the NFIB was providing direct cover to Republicans, who could vote "no" without damaging their standing with the small business community. And small firms paid the price. With the legislation's chief private-sector champion sitting out the fight, Republicans were able to stall the vote until September, when Sen. George LeMieux (R-Fla.) finally agreed to support the bill, bringing another Republican, Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) along with him. Neither was running for election when their terms expired at the end of the year, and both were less receptive to GOP leadership promises or threats.
Snowe never voted in favor of the bill on the Senate floor, nor did Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who wrote much of the bill's tax-cut language. The delay limited the impact of key tax provisions in the bill, which expired at the end of 2010. For capital looking to invest in small firms under the favorable terms provided by the legislation, the window of opportunity was less than three months.
"We just had to push through that objection," Landrieu said. But pushing through Senate objections takes time. Several leading Democrats were eager to have a story written about the partisan nature of the lobby, but declined to go on the record for fear of drawing fire from the powerful lobby. Landrieu added that despite the NFIB's opposition to her bill, she has "a good relationship with them and respect them a lot."

For the NFIB, the Small Business Jobs Act wasn't a top priority -- the group was much more focused on extending the Bush tax cuts, and since the small-business bill didn't do that, they weren't going to put their full support behind it.
"We wanted Congress to address all the tax rates, and they finally did that in December," NFIB lobbyist Chris Walters told HuffPost, referring to the separate tax deal Obama later cut with Republicans. "We were excited they were doing something and focusing on small businesses with the SBJA, but why are you just going to do this small bill while leaving out the '01 tax cuts?"
NFIB Senior Vice President for Federal Policy Susan Eckerly insisted that NFIB's key votes are guided by polling that the group does of its dues-paying members. The organization claims to represent 300,000 businesses, and considers a 7-percent response rate to a survey to be statistically significant, in line with general polling standards.
However many businesses the NFIB represents, there's no doubt that a good chunk of them are run by rabid Republicans. If the more energetically-partisan business owners end up filling out the survey and mailing it back, the NFIB could get a skewed reading of its members' everyday priorities -- but a reading that fits neatly with the agenda of the lobby shop's GOP executives.
The NFIB has amassed a big coalition, but its membership represents only a small slice of the U.S. small-business community. The definition of "small business" is open to interpretation, but according to the Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy, there were 26.9 million small businesses in the United States in 2008 -- though that figure includes millions of people who work on contract for employers but have no business, in the traditional sense, of their own. Indeed, of the 26.9 million firms, only 6 million actually employ at least one worker besides the principal owner. According to 2004 Census data, 5.2 million businesses employed between one and 100 workers.
"Our members only approved of half the [small business] bill," Eckerly told HuffPost. "There's about $12 billion in tax cuts that they support. There was also more than $30 billion in government loans, and our members are not fans of [Small Business Administration] loans, and they want the SBA loans to be privatized and not part of the federal government."
The SBA covers losses for banks that issue certain kinds of loans to small firms, making small-business loans less risky, thus encouraging banks to lend. The Small Business Jobs Act eliminated fees on existing lending programs, making those loans cheaper, and authorized the SBA to guarantee bigger loans. Other small business lobby groups, like the National Association of Small Businesses, are ardent supporters of SBA lending and frequently push to expand SBA programs. The bill also included a major small-business lending program that did not involve the SBA, diverting Wall Street bailout funds to community banks.
It's not as if the lobby wasn't busy. It was working on two major fronts: extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and opposing a campaign-finance bill that would have restricted the way the NFIB could engage in elections -- the source of its power. Those two efforts, the NFIB insisted, were key to small businesses.
The Disclose Act is the most significant legislative salvo to date against the U.S. Supreme Court's deeply-unpopular ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission -- a decision which freed corporations to spend unlimited sums from shareholder coffers on political advertising. NFIB was firmly against the bill, and sent a letter to Capitol Hill telling members of Congress that voting to rein in corporate spending on elections would count against their small business record.
While much of the outrage over Citizens United has coalesced around the unseemliness of corporate cash in politics, the decision also vastly empowered groups like the NFIB. When companies spend political money indirectly through front groups, including the NFIB, they are granted varying degrees of anonymity, depending on the type of front group and expenditure. Companies give money to the NFIB, which in turn runs television ads blasting specific politicians. For businesses that don't want to be associated with buying elections, independent operations can provide both a valuable cloak of anonymity and a popular mom-and-pop brand.
It's unclear how much new revenue Citizens United has secured for the NFIB, but the group spent an astounding $1,006,345 on television ads and communications support for the 2010 elections -- enough to make NFIB one of the 50 biggest spenders in the 2010 ad wars, an amount roughly equal to Tea Party heavyweight FreedomWorks, abortion-rights advocates Emily's List and the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage combined. Every penny of the NFIB's ad expenditures went to aid Republican candidates. The NFIB's ad money came from a separate pool of money than the $745,051 the group gave directly to candidates. The Disclose Act would have required the firms who paid the biggest shares for NFIB's political advertisements to be specifically named in the ads, negating the NFIB's lucrative function as a conduit for politically active firms.
It's easy to see why the lobbyists who worked for the NFIB would oppose the Disclose Act. But it's harder to see why most actual small businesses would find it so problematic. To spend unlimited sums of money, a firm must first have unlimited sums of money available, and small businesses, by definition, have less money than big corporations. When the interests of big business and small business come into conflict, big business can almost always outspend its adversaries.
"Disclose would have made it a lot harder, maybe impossible, for a group like NFIB to act as a conduit for others," said Lisa Rosenberg, a lobbyist for the Sunlight Foundation, a government transparency group.
NFIB's Eckerly acknowledged the point. "Our members pay dues and pay dues to our PAC to represent them, and we feel this would have limited our right to represent them."

The remainder of NFIB's lobbying has been almost exclusively dedicated to opposing the Democratic policy agenda. The group forcefully opposed the 2009 economic stimulus package and financial-regulatory reform legislation, even though all three included major political wins for small businesses.
Economists, and some of the NFIB's own statements, challenge the organization's stated rationale for opposing the stimulus.
"The primary problem facing small business owners right now in terms of job creation is not access to credit; it's a lack of sales, customers and confidence," NFIB Vice President Brad Close said in a June 18 statement. "Small business owners are unlikely to invest in hiring or expanding their businesses when sales and profits remain weak. In order for these business owners to start hiring, demand must pick up first."
But economists who are sympathetic to this NFIB argument emphasize that Obama's economic stimulus package was entirely an effort to boost demand in the economy, which lead to more customers and higher revenues for small firms. The goal of a stimulus, after all, is to stimulate demand.
It's not uncommon for business lobbies to oppose government spending. Business elites are wealthy by definition, and whether they work for large corporations or run their own profitable enterprises, they frequently identify with conservative political and economic philosophy -- until that philosophy hits their bottom line. When the federal funds are targeted directly at an industry, ideological concerns about spending can be set aside.
And yet, the stimulus actually did directly target small business -- and the NFIB still fought against it. Over 30 percent of the federal contracts awarded under the stimulus have gone to small businesses -- more than $10 billion, according to the SBA. The bill also lowered the costs for SBA loans, allowing small firms to access $30 billion in credit. And the legislation featured no less than six tax cuts that could be savored by small businesses.
As policy wrangling gave way to election season this fall, NFIB used the stimulus as a central focus of its airwaves agenda, running ads calling it a "failed" bill that "wasted" taxpayer money on useless government spending.
The lobby's position on the Wall Street reform bill was nearly as aggressive. Large numbers of small establishments are financed by credit cards, and even Danner's NFIB had supported stronger regulations on credit cards, backing a new slate of consumer protections in early 2009. But after the NFIB backed the legislation, a cadre of 22 GOP lawmakers led by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, now the fourth-ranking Republican in the House, wrote the lobby group a letter saying they were "disappointed" that NFIB chose to score the credit card overhaul and urged the lobby group not to support further financial overhauls. That House Republicans felt free to instruct a lobby shop on what positions it should and should not take -- indeed, to lobby it -- demonstrates just how upside-down the system operates.
If NFIB "key votes" are determined by member balloting, Hensarling's letter was a useless gesture.
But the Republican opposition to credit card reform set the tone for the NFIB's position on broader financial reform. When the Small Business Committee advanced a bill to expand the consumer protections on credit cards to a broader class of cards used by small firms, the NFIB chose not to fight for it. By the time the Wall Street overhaul came up for a vote in the summer of 2010, NFIB was full-on against the package. Most of the bill targeted giant Wall Street firms, and the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau it created will write and enforce rules to prevent predatory lending -- abuses that often target small businesses.
Two years into the Obama administration, small businesses are still struggling to obtain credit and hire new workers, while big businesses withhold payments from them, horde cash and enjoy record profits. But if the top small-business goal for the past two years was to elect Republicans, the NFIB has done its job.
In the run up to the election, Danner pushed all pretense of bipartisanship aside, cribbing straight from the Tea Party to whip up support for the GOP. "Like [Benjamin] Franklin and his freedom-loving 18th-century peers, you are now being challenged to stand up and oppose a government intent on taxing and regulating many of your nation's job-creating, income-producing enterprises out of business," Danner told his small business clients. "On November 2, our voice and our vote will change the direction of America."
Sam Stein contributed reporting

When the Wicked Perish from SOJO 4MAI11

“Do not rejoice when your enemies fall, and do not let your heart be glad when they stumble." Proverbs 24:17

If I had been in a baseball stadium on Sunday night, I would have been chanting “USA! USA!” My first reaction when I read the news in the minutes leading up to the President’s announcement was that of elation. The man who had masterminded the slaughter of thousands could never hurt anyone again. For that, I was and am happy.
By the time the President formally made the announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed, I was trying to sort out many more feelings. What I was feeling wasn’t simple, and I thought back to my senior year in high school, when I first heard the name Osama bin Laden.
I remember the jammed phone lines. One of my friends was going to school in Manhattan. I wasn’t sure exactly how close his college was to the Twin Towers, but I was worried when I couldn’t get through to him. I remember how hard it was to accept that it wasn’t all just an accident; how angry I got when I realized this group had intentionally targeted civilians; how scared I felt when I realized that no place and no one was truly safe from another attack.
Soon, we were going into Afghanistan, and the next year, Iraq. When I was a kid a Purple Heart was something my grandfather and elderly people in nursing homes had. The human toll of war was long ago and far away. While I was applying for college, friends were signing up for the armed forces. Our country was attacked and they wanted to serve. By the summer of 2002, they were off to basic training. Within a few years, Purple Hearts were things my grandfather and my friends had in common. Osama bin Laden killed people, and now many more were dying in pursuit of him.
By the end of the president’s announcement, I was sad. I hurt for those who had died in those senseless attacks 10 years ago, for the American’s who were killed during combat, for the innocent Iraqis and Afghans who had suffered and died. I felt sorrow that the world was such a broken place, that we hadn’t been able to find a better way. I was angry because I thought that maybe if a different choice had been made, or if different actions had been taken, maybe fewer people would have perished.
I felt conflicted. More than one impulse flowed inside me at the same time. I read Proverbs 11:10 that says, “When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices; and when the wicked perish, there is jubilation.” I read Proverbs 24:17, “Do not rejoice when your enemies fall, and do not let your heart be glad when they stumble.” I felt one naturally and I felt admonished by the other.
At first I thought, I was just confused, but now I think my divided response is, if not the right response, one that makes a lot of sense. Osama bin Laden, a twisted man who did many evil things, will never kill again, and for that I rejoice. It’s not that he was killed, it was that he will never kill again that makes me happy. But, the fact that Bin Laden is gone doesn’t mean that the evil he promoted is finished. It doesn’t mean that lives weren’t senselessly ended over the past 10 years. It doesn’t mean that more lives won’t be lost that shouldn’t be. It doesn’t mean that we can declare victory over the sin and violence that infects us all.
Death is what Christ conquered on Easter morning. Death is never an unqualified good thing. It is a tragic testament to how the deeply world is broken that we ever breathe easier because of the death of another. And yet this week many of us do. I don’t believe these mixed feelings come from theological error, but from the complexity of the human condition.
While our feelings might be conflicted, I hope our resolve is not. All of us must learn from the mistakes of the past and work together for a more peaceful future — a future in which it becomes more and more rare to have feelings of joy at the death of the wicked.
Tim King is communications manager and special assistant to the CEO at Sojourners. Follow Tim on Twitter @TMKing.

Former CIA Interrogator: Painstaking Intelligence Work, Not Torture, Responsible For Bin Laden Capture 4MAI11

All the wanna-bes, you know, those who thing they are tough enough and smart enough to be in the Special Forces and covert intelligence ops but pee their pants when a car back-fires near them, are already claiming torture allowed us to find bin laden. Well, this CIA vet says it aint necessarily so......From ThinProgress...

Shortly after President Obama announced that U.S. military forces killed Osama bin Laden, right-wing torture apologists seized the opportunity, stating, without any definitive evidence whatsoever, that information gleaned from torturing Al Qaeda detainees led to bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan. While reliable sources, such as Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said this week that the information did not come from torture (or to use the Bush administration’s term “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”), at this point it is at best unclear how this information was obtained.
What if a tiny piece of information that led to bin Laden came from torture or EITs? Today, Glenn Carle — who served 23 years in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and for a time led the interrogation of a high value detainee — told ThinkProgress that if it the answer is yes, the right-wing will use that and say, “See torture works.” While Carle said it’s possible that EITs might provide information, that doesn’t mean they should ever be used:

CARLE: Well I change the tense and say not that they will use that but that they are using that within I think four hours of the announcement that bin Laden’s death.
Ultimately you get to an ends means debate. … The ends does not justify the means and you don’t build a policy, in this instance with regard to acceptable legal procedures, based upon the hypothetical, theoretical case which is five or ten standard deviations from the norm which happens one time in 5 million. What you do is you base your policies on an ever-changing calculus of probability likelihood and what is considered liked and works. And the answer to all of those questions should quite clearly exclude EITs. Is it possible that a specific piece of information from time to time would come from EITs? The answer is yes. To be fair the answer is yes. Does it justify using them? A categorical flat no.

Carle also said that during his time at CIA, “almost all the information obtained from EITs was recalled…because it was viewed as unreliable.”
Those on the right justifying torture argue that “harsh techniques played a small role at most in identifying Bin Laden’s trusted courier,” as the New York Times noted this morning. But the initial information on the courier is minuscule in comparison to the wider effort that led to bin Laden. “The critical point,” Carle noted, “is that intelligence is a painstaking slow process of building a mosaic. Little pieces of which are meaningless by themselves and together may paint a useful picture which is what happened in this case.”
When asked if any of the information that led to bin Laden could have been obtained without torture, Carle said, “Yes,” adding, “EITs are wrong, illegal, and they don’t work.”
Cross-posted at the Wonk Room.

Obama Had Multiple Options But Didn't Hesitate & John Brennan: We Would Have Taken Osama Bin Laden Alive 2MAI11

More on the action of Pres Obama and the fraudulent "actions" of george w bush in the hunt for bin laden.....
President Obama had several options for assassinating Osama bin Laden, but did not let preference for one or the other delay an attack, an administration official told The Huffington Post.
The morning after covert U.S. forces killed bin Laden in a compound Abbottabad, Pakistan, ABC News reported that Obama had passed on a chance to bomb that same compound back in March. According to the report, the president was wary of attacking the location with two B-2 stealth bombers out of concern that it would reduce the building (and all evidence inside) to rubble. The potential for collateral damage -- 22 people were inside the compound, including women and children -- was also a deterrent, ABC reported.

An administration source did not refute that such an operation was conceived and scrapped. Politico's Mike Allen also reported on Monday that the “original plan for the raid was to bomb the house, but President Obama ultimately decided against that.”

The official did, however, push back against the notion (which could be inferred from either piece) that the president had a chance to kill bin Laden and didn't pull the trigger.

“It’s wrong to say it was delayed because of a decision by Obama,” the official said. “They were constantly revising the intelligence and military planning until it was finally ready.”

In addition to being potentially destructive of both evidence and civilian life, attacking the compound with B-2 stealth bombers was also determined to be operationally risky. The president and his team, instead, asked that the plan be revised to allow for a Navy SEALs unit to be transported in via helicopter. Training for that took time. The Navy SEALs unit “replicated the one-acre compound at Camp Alpha, a segregated section of Bagram Air Base. Trial runs were held in early April,” Marc Ambinder of the National Journal reported.

John Brennan: We Would Have Taken Osama Bin Laden Alive 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/02/brennan-we-would-have-taken-bin-laden-alive_n_856541.html 

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's chief counterterrorism adviser John Brennan said Monday that U.S. military operatives were prepared to capture Osama bin Laden alive but were "absolutely" ready to kill him when he fought back.
"If we had the opportunity to take him alive, we would have done that," Brennan said during an uncharacteristically candid exchange with reporters at a White House briefing.
Intelligence officials and Obama “extensively” discussed the prospect of capturing bin Laden alive during the U.S. military raid on his compound Sunday, Brennan said, but were “certainly were planning for the possibility … that he would likely resist arrest.” In the end, the al Qaeda leader fought back and was “therefore killed in a fire fight,” Brennan said.
The bottom line, said Brennan, was that “we were not going to put our people at risk.”
Brennan painted a dark scene of bin Laden's final moments. He said the al Qaeda leader used one of his wives as a human shield while he was being shot at. “From a visual perspective, here is bin Laden ... living in this million dollar-plus compound ... hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield. I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years," Brennan said. "Looking at what bin Laden was doing hiding there while he’s putting other people out there to carry out attacks again just speaks to, I think, the nature of the individual he was."
Brennan declined to say whether bin Laden went down shooting, but an AP report cites an official familiar with the military operation indicating that bin Laden fired on U.S. forces.
Questions remain as to how the fallen al Qaeda leader was able to stay in one place for so long -- he was known to switch locations every few months, but he remained at the luxury compound outside of Islamabad for six months -- and how much information Pakistani officials had concerning his whereabouts. Brennan said U.S. intelligence officials are talking with Pakistani officials “on a regular basis now” to learn more about how bin Laden went undetected.

“We are pursuing all leads in this issue,” he said. “It’s inconceivable that bin Laden did not have a support system in the country that allowed him to remain there for an extended period of time. I am not going to speculate about what type of support he might have had on an official basis inside of Pakistan."
Brennan described a “very tense” scene at the White House on Sunday, where Obama and intelligence officials gathered to monitor the military operation in real time. He wouldn’t say whether or not they watched a video feed of the attack.
The time between the beginning of the attack and confirmation that bin Laden was presumably killed was “probably one of the most anxiety-filed periods of time” for those assembled, Brennan said. “The president was very concerned about the security of our personnel. That is what was on his mind throughout.”
In the lead-up to the attack, Brennan said officials did not have 100 percent confirmation that bin Laden was at the compound. Given that uncertainty, Brennan said Obama's decision to authorize the attack based on the growing pool of intelligence they did have "was one of the most gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory."
Asked about the president’s reaction to the news of bin Laden being killed, Brennan said only, “We got him.”
Brennan noted that U.S. officials had consulted with experts on Islam to ensure that, if bin Laden were killed, his remains would be buried in strict accordance with Islamic requirements. One of those stipulations meant the body needed to buried within 24 hours. He said officials are still mulling whether to release photos of bin Laden’s final moments. The most important thing, he said, is to protect sources that may be used in the future.
Ultimately, bin Laden’s death is “a strategic blow to al Qaeda,” Brennan said, but “not necessarily sufficient to lead to its demise.” He compared the group to "a mortally wounded tiger that may still have some life in it." Still, he painted a picture of a faltering terrorist organization with a weakened leadership.
“I think you’re going to see them start eating themselves from within more and more,” said Brennan.

Obama Succeeded Where Bush Failed: Osama Bin Laden Rhetoric And Reality 2MAI11

THE revisionist historians will try to use the death of bin laden to bring some sort of honor to the presidency of george w bush. He had nothing to due with this operation, and his policies delayed this day for years. If bush is to be remembered for anything it is his decision to logistically abandon the American troops in Afghanistan in the war against the taliban and al-qaida, leaving them short of troops, life saving body armor, weapons and all other vital material for the war effort. He will be remembered for his decision to turn his back, and take away the nation's military and intelligence resources from the effort in Afghanistan to crush the taliban and al-qaida and waste them on his illegal and immoral war in Iraq, a war for which he and many of his cabal are guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity as well as an assault on the freedoms and civil liberties of all Americans. He too will be judged so day for all the blood on his hands, for the death and destruction, the pain and suffering he brought to so many in the world. This from HuffPost...
WASHINGTON -- As he announced the death of infamous terrorist Osama bin Laden on Sunday night, President Barack Obama struck an extraordinary contrast with his predecessor, George W. Bush.
That was to some degree unavoidable. Bush’s consistent failure to respond appropriately to bin Laden -- as a potential threat, as a fugitive, or as a public enemy no. 1 -- represents one of the greatest shortcomings of his presidency.
Obama has now succeeded where Bush failed. And it was impossible to hear Obama declare that "justice has been done" without thinking about how long it went undone.
But Obama also went out of his way to draw distinctions between how he approached the problem and how Bush did.
For instance, as the months and years went by after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- and Bush’s initial bluster about capturing the al Qaeda leader “dead or alive” became a source of embarrassment -- Bush began to insist that bin Laden himself wasn’t so very important.
"I truly am not that concerned about him," Bush said at a White House press conference on March 13, 2002. And of course the following March, he shifted America’s focus to Iraq, which proved to be a gigantic diversion.
Obama took a different tack."Shortly after taking office," the president explain Sunday night, "I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network."
Obama's comments on Sunday night were clearly directed not just to the American public but to the world, evoking images of the horror of 9/11 in an effort to dampen any possible al Qaeda propaganda value from bin Laden’s death.
By contrast, the tactics and the rhetoric of Bush’s “war on terror” -- most notably his decision to invade Iraq and the torture of Muslims in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere had served as al Qaeda’s most potent recruiting tools.
And to a nation of people who, nearly ten years after the terrorist attacks in America, are overwhelmingly despondent about both of the wars launched by Bush, Obama was at long last able to deliver something that, at least for a moment, seemed like victory: "The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda,” he said.
Ironically, Obama’s announcement came eight years to the day after Bush famously and prematurely declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq after landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier.
And if all that weren’t clear enough, Obama made an explicit appeal to set the clock back to those days of national and international unity right after Sept. 11 -- before Bush took the nation to war in Iraq, subverted historical prohibitions against torture and domestic surveillance, and used fear of terror to achieve partisan goals.
"[T]onight, let us think back to the sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11,” Obama said. "I know that it has, at times, frayed."
As Obama noted, the U.S. was virtually a different country then.
"On September 11, 2001, in our time of grief, the American people came together," the president reminded the nation on Sunday night. "We offered our neighbors a hand, and we offered the wounded our blood. We reaffirmed our ties to each other, and our love of community and country. On that day, no matter where we came from, what God we prayed to, or what race or ethnicity we were, we were united as one American family.”
The Bush record on bin Laden, of course, starts with him failing to prevent the attacks in the first place. As has been exhaustively documented by now, during the summer of 2001, his White House waved off repeated warnings of an imminent attack from former counterterrorism director Richard A. Clarke and then-CIA director George Tenet.
Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, were said to be more focused on their pet issue, missile defense, and the hunt for a reason to attack Iraq. Bush, according to Bob Woodward, said he wasn't interested in "swatting flies."
The unsuccessful attempts to engage Bush culminated in a briefing he got while vacationing on his Texas ranch. As investigative reporter Ron Suskind reported in his book, "The One Percent Doctrine," an unnamed CIA operative flew to Crawford to call the president's attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."
"All right," Suskind reported Bush saying after hearing out the operative. "You've covered your ass, now."
Former President Bill Clinton in 2006 notably complained that he came close to killing bin Laden in a 1998 missile strike, while Bush and the "right wingers ... had eight months to try [before 9/11]. They did not try. I tried. So I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke, who got demoted."
Bush’s post-9/11 swagger may go down as one of history’s worst examples of false bravado. After the invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban government quickly fell and al Qaeda retreated into the hills. But in December 2001, when bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora, Bush didn’t pull the trigger.
Then for more than three years, Bush treated bin Laden a lot like the wizards in the Harry Potter books treat He Who Must Not Be Named.
In the summer of 2005, Bush started invoking bin Laden again -- but this time, to win support for his Iraq policy, which was very much on the ropes.
"Hear the words of Osama bin Laden," Bush said, "'This Third World War is raging' in Iraq."
By 2006, on the stump for his fellow Republicans, Bush was citing bin Laden extensively. The president cast bin Laden as the oracular leader of a global movement, and warned of the possibility of an Islamic caliphate "stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia" -- an unsubstantiated fantasy with only one thing going for it: It served the political agendas of both men.
Meanwhile, in an Oval Office session that same month, Bush told to a group of conservative columnists that focusing on bin Laden didn’t fit with his military plans. Putting "100,000 of our special forces stomping through Pakistan in order to find bin Laden is just simply not the strategy that will work," he explained.
Yet, in his attempts to persuade the voting public of the dangers it faced, Bush gave bin Laden exactly the attention he seemed to crave.
After the 2008 presidential election, during which politicians from both parties publicly renounced him, Bush finally admitted some regret in an ABC News interview.
"Do I wish we had brought Osama bin Laden to justice? Sure," Bush said. "But he's not leading a lot of parades these days."
Bush stalwarts are now trying to make the case that their president deserves some, if not most, of the credit for dispatching bin Laden.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor on Sunday night called bin Laden’s death "a victory for the United States and a tremendous achievement for the military and intelligence professionals who carried out this important mission." As for Obama’s role? "I commend President Obama who has followed the vigilance of President Bush in bringing Bin Laden to justice," Cantor said in a statement.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney similarly credited "the military and intelligence professionals who carried out this important mission,” citing their "tireless work since 9/11." It was those years of effort, the majority of which were during the Bush administration, that "made this achievement possible, and enabled us to capture or kill thousands of al Qaeda terrorists and many of their leaders,” Cheney said in a press release.
A small group of young fans gathered outside Bush's house in Dallas Sunday night with a sign that read, "President Obama forgot to say... THANK YOU PRESIDENT BUSH."
Bush himself issued a brief statement congratulating Obama and declaring, "[t]he fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done."




************************* Dan Froomkin is senior Washington correspondent for The Huffington Post. You can send him an email, bookmark his page; subscribe to his RSS feed, follow him on Twitter, friend him on Facebook, and/or become a fan and get email alerts when he writes.

Bin Laden is Dead. We Remember Those Lost on Sept. 11, 2001 2MAI11

When I heard the news this morning I thought about Mary Jane Booth, an American Airlines employee who worked at Dulles (IAD) with my brother-in-law, a lady I met a few times.....a happy, cheerful, lady who was on the AA flight that was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. I am not sorry bin laden is dead, but I do not feel any joy in his death either, because Mary Jane is still dead, and so are almost 3000 others from that horrible day, as are thousands of other Americans who have been killed and wounded in the war in Afghanistan. osama bin laden died the way he lived, violently, the war in Afghanistan continues, and so it goes. God Bless and have mercy on the world.

A memorial site for the victims of 9/11 and their friends and families...

By now, we've all heard the news that Osama Bin Laden, the notorious leader of Al Qaeda and mastermind of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, was killed last night in a firefight with United States forces in Pakistan.
This doesn't end the wars or make us safe at last, but President Obama and his national security team deserve credit for finding Bin Laden after all this time and carrying out this mission without the loss of innocent lives -- American or otherwise.

Today we remember the families who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001, and in all of the years of war that followed. We earnestly and fervently hope that these events mean we are one step closer to an end.

Here at USAction/TrueMajority, we're taking the day to remember those who have been lost, honor those who fight to keep us safe and reflect on the meaning of this day. And we'd like to know what you're thinking too: How does this affect your feelings about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the broader "war on terror"?

If you'd like to share your thoughts, or send sympathy and well-wishes for the families of 9-11 victims, please join us on our facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/usaction

Sincerely,
Darcy Scott Martin
USAction / TrueMajority

Osama Bin Laden Dead PRESIDENT OBAMA'S STATEMENT TO AMERICA 1MAI11

Posted by Macon Phillips on May 02, 2011 at 12:16 AM EDT

Tonight, President Obama addressed the Nation to announce that the United States has killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda.  Watch or read his full remarks below, and learn more from the transcript of the White House briefing call afterwards.

Remarks by the President on Osama Bin Laden
East Room

11:35 P.M. EDT
     THE PRESIDENT:  Good evening.  Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.
It was nearly 10 years ago that a bright September day was darkened by the worst attack on the American people in our history.  The images of 9/11 are seared into our national memory -- hijacked planes cutting through a cloudless September sky; the Twin Towers collapsing to the ground; black smoke billowing up from the Pentagon; the wreckage of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where the actions of heroic citizens saved even more heartbreak and destruction.
And yet we know that the worst images are those that were unseen to the world.  The empty seat at the dinner table.  Children who were forced to grow up without their mother or their father.  Parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s embrace.  Nearly 3,000 citizens taken from us, leaving a gaping hole in our hearts.
On September 11, 2001, in our time of grief, the American people came together.  We offered our neighbors a hand, and we offered the wounded our blood.  We reaffirmed our ties to each other, and our love of community and country.  On that day, no matter where we came from, what God we prayed to, or what race or ethnicity we were, we were united as one American family.
We were also united in our resolve to protect our nation and to bring those who committed this vicious attack to justice.  We quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda -- an organization headed by Osama bin Laden, which had openly declared war on the United States and was committed to killing innocents in our country and around the globe.  And so we went to war against al Qaeda to protect our citizens, our friends, and our allies.
Over the last 10 years, thanks to the tireless and heroic work of our military and our counterterrorism professionals, we’ve made great strides in that effort.  We’ve disrupted terrorist attacks and strengthened our homeland defense.  In Afghanistan, we removed the Taliban government, which had given bin Laden and al Qaeda safe haven and support.  And around the globe, we worked with our friends and allies to capture or kill scores of al Qaeda terrorists, including several who were a part of the 9/11 plot.
Yet Osama bin Laden avoided capture and escaped across the Afghan border into Pakistan.  Meanwhile, al Qaeda continued to operate from along that border and operate through its affiliates across the world.
And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network.
Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden.  It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground.  I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan.  And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.
Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.  A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability.  No Americans were harmed.  They took care to avoid civilian casualties.  After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.
For over two decades, bin Laden has been al Qaeda’s leader and symbol, and has continued to plot attacks against our country and our friends and allies.  The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda.
Yet his death does not mark the end of our effort.  There’s no doubt that al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us.  We must –- and we will -- remain vigilant at home and abroad.
As we do, we must also reaffirm that the United States is not –- and never will be -– at war with Islam.  I’ve made clear, just as President Bush did shortly after 9/11, that our war is not against Islam.  Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims.  Indeed, al Qaeda has slaughtered scores of Muslims in many countries, including our own.  So his demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity.
Over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear that we would take action within Pakistan if we knew where bin Laden was.  That is what we’ve done.  But it’s important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding.  Indeed, bin Laden had declared war against Pakistan as well, and ordered attacks against the Pakistani people.
Tonight, I called President Zardari, and my team has also spoken with their Pakistani counterparts.  They agree that this is a good and historic day for both of our nations.  And going forward, it is essential that Pakistan continue to join us in the fight against al Qaeda and its affiliates.
The American people did not choose this fight.  It came to our shores, and started with the senseless slaughter of our citizens.  After nearly 10 years of service, struggle, and sacrifice, we know well the costs of war.  These efforts weigh on me every time I, as Commander-in-Chief, have to sign a letter to a family that has lost a loved one, or look into the eyes of a service member who’s been gravely wounded.
So Americans understand the costs of war.  Yet as a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed.  We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies.  We will be true to the values that make us who we are. And on nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved ones to al Qaeda’s terror:  Justice has been done.
Tonight, we give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who’ve worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome.  The American people do not see their work, nor know their names.  But tonight, they feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice.
We give thanks for the men who carried out this operation, for they exemplify the professionalism, patriotism, and unparalleled courage of those who serve our country.  And they are part of a generation that has borne the heaviest share of the burden since that September day.
Finally, let me say to the families who lost loved ones on 9/11 that we have never forgotten your loss, nor wavered in our commitment to see that we do whatever it takes to prevent another attack on our shores.
And tonight, let us think back to the sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11.  I know that it has, at times, frayed.  Yet today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people.
The cause of securing our country is not complete.  But tonight, we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to.  That is the story of our history, whether it’s the pursuit of prosperity for our people, or the struggle for equality for all our citizens; our commitment to stand up for our values abroad, and our sacrifices to make the world a safer place.
Let us remember that we can do these things not just because of wealth or power, but because of who we are:  one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Thank you.  May God bless you.  And may God bless the United States of America.
       
                        END               11:44 P.M. EDT

Seated from left, James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, CIA Director Leon Panetta, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Vice President Joe Biden listen as President Barack Obama makes a statement on Osama Bin Laden in the East Room of the White House May 1, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)