Archive for August, 2011

The Center for Inquiry’s Living Without Religion campaign has reached Grand Rapids, Michigan, where a new billboard now displays this message: You don’t need God — to hope, to care, to love, to live. I like that. It’s a positive message, better than some of the alternatives I’ve seen in such campaigns. Below the fold, a picture of the billboard along with two friends, Jeff Seaver and Jennifer Beahan, who run the CFI Michigan chapter that I’ve long been involved with. Read more

Actor Michael Moriarty’s warped mind has belched forth another love letter to Sarah Palin that is breathtaking in its lunacy. Or have they become that nervous as a result of Sarah Palin’s possible entry into the Republican race? She is making The New World Order Establishment profoundly nervous. Hysterical actually. Read more

Michele Bachmann got into the act of blaming recent natural disasters on God sending us a message. This time it’s about spending. Or it might be. She doesn’t make that clear. In fact, she quite obviously changes her argument around right in the middle of it. Speaking at a campaign rally in Florida, Bachmann said: “I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’ Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we’ve got to rein in the spending.” Read more

If you don’t know who Ali Soufan is, you should. He is a former FBI interrogator who played a vital role in the war on terrorism before he became an even more vital opponent of the government’s torture regime. He’s trying to publish a book that reveals even more, but the CIA is preventing him from doing so — even with information that is already in the public domain. Glenn Greenwood has the details: He has written a book exposing the abuses of the CIA’s interrogation program as well as pervasive ineptitude and corruption in the War on Terror.  He is, however, encountering a significant problem: the CIA is barring the publication of vast amounts of information in his book including, as Scott Shane details in The New York Times today, many facts that are not remotely secret and others that have been publicly available for years, including ones featured in the 9/11 Report and even in Soufan’s own public Congressional testimony. Read more

The Center for American Progress has issued a detailed report on the foundations and individuals who have been funding the self-described anti-jihadists. It focuses particularly on five people: • Frank Gaffney at the Center for Security Policy • David Yerushalmi at the Society of Americans for National Existence • Daniel Pipes at the Middle East Forum • Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch and Stop Islamization of America • Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism Read more