Mark Udall Not a Truther in My Book

I'll make no bones about it; I am a Republican, and nothing would make me happier than to see the GOP take over the Senate this November.  It would help quite a bit if they could oust Democratic Senator Mark Udall from Colorado.

But fair is fair.  Apparently some conservative operatives are trying to claim that Udall is a 9-11 Truther moron, using this video:

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This is selectively edited to indicate that Udall was claiming there was evidence of explosives planted in the Twin Towers. Of course, if you've ever attended any of these townhall meetings, you'll realize that what Udall was doing was repeating the comments of the 9-11 Truther audience member, so that everybody would know what he was responding to. If you watch this other video (slightly less edited), you'll see that in fact, Udall's response got the Truthers angry:



To me the key point in there is when he states (around 2:45) "When conspiracy theories surface, I almost always go to the stupidity theory.  Or, more eloquently stated, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."  To me, that's a terrific retort to a conspiracy nutbar.

Further evidence that Udall has never been claimed by the Truthers as one of their own is evident.  Look at the fruitcake site Patriots Question 9-11.  Their home page lists many government nutbars, including definite Truthers like Jesse Ventura, Dennis Kucinich, and Cynthia McKinney.  Do you really think that Udall, who would be the highest-ranking federal official to date to endorse the fruitcake theories, just somehow slipped under their radar?

Should Udall get an involuntary retirement from the voters?  Count me as hoping it happens. But let's make it happen because of his real positions on the issues, not some fantasy BS.

Hat Tip to Consdemo from the comments section.

Willie Rodriguez Addresses A Few Small, Intimate Gatherings

Hey, this is not the focus of the blog, but I do love twisting Brian's nose, so:

Can you imagine the gatherings that William could be addressing, had it not been for Brian Good?  He could have been speaking before thousands, err, hundreds, err, scores, well, dozens of stoners at the Las Vegas Hookah Lounge.

By the way, here's the gal who introduced Willie at a recent event in Monterrey:

More pics of her here.

Anatomy of a Truther Moron

The film Anatomy of a Great Deception is being pushed lately by Truthers; the fact that Box Boy's clown posse gets 5% of the sales is probably a big reason why.

The film is much more personal than Loose Change or 9-11 Mysteries; it might well be subtitled, "How I Became a Truther" because that is the theme.  Of course, in essence it's the same old CT crap in a new wrapper.

The auteur, David Hooper, starts with a simple question.  Why did Bush stay in Booker Elementary so long after the first two plane crashes?  He concludes (like most idiot Truthers) that he or his Secret Service detail must have known it was safe.  He emphasizes that it was known that two other planes had been hijacked and yet Bush stayed there.

This is, of course, wrong.  Bush left Booker at about 9:34 or 9:35, before it was known that AA Flight 77 or UA Flight 93 had been hijacked.  As I have pointed out several times, it would have been reasonably difficult to target Booker Elementary from the air.  Sarasota is not a small town, and there were 42 different elementary schools in the city back then.  Hitting the Pentagon or the Twin Towers was pretty easy; all three are enormous buildings, easily visible from quite a distance away and very distinctive.

It doesn't get any better.  After that he goes on to talk about WTC-7.  He expresses astonishment that Shyam Sunder discounted the use of explosives bringing down the building.  Why would Sunder even bring that up? Very suspicious. Of course, Hooper is taking advantage of the argument that he was discovering this circa 2011-2012, and therefore he didn't know that the Truthers had been claiming WTC-7 was a controlled demolition well before Sunder's analysis of the building collapse was complete.

He also is amazed to learn that some 9-11 families are requesting a new investigation  of WTC-7.  Why?  Good question, David!  Nobody died in that building.  And of course, the family members shown are all the goofball Truther family members like Lorie Van Auken, Mindy Kleinberg and Bob McIlvaine.

He flashes some books and films at us; I particularly love seeing 9-11 the Ultimate Truth by one of my favorite nutbars, Laura Knight Jadczyk.

This was Laura Knight-Jadczyk and her channelled material came from a mysterious source: "We transmit "through" the opening that is presented in the locator that you represent as Cassiopaea, due to the strong radio pulses aligned from Cassiopaea, which are due to a pulsar from a neutron star 300 light years behind it, as seen from your locator. This facilitates a clear channel transmission from 6th density to 3rd density."

These beings apparently communicated with Ms Knight-Jadczyk through the means of a Ouiji board and with the help of another individual, Fred Irland, whose name, curiously enough, can be found nowhere in the published Cassiopaean material. At first, the communications were the ordinary sort of thing expected from ouiji aliens. But as they got better at it, the answers began to take on a life of their own.

He also shows 9-11 Evil, where Victor Thorn blows the yarmulke off Israeli involvement in 9-11; no link on that bit of slime, but you can find it easily.

There's also 9-11 Finding the Truth, which is written by a Judy Wood devotee named Andrew Johnson.  I mean, seriously.

He makes the usual ridiculous claims, like that WTC-7 fell almost as fast as a bowling ball, and into its own footprint.  Well, if its footprint included the Verizon Building and Fiterman Hall. He says that the destruction of the building crippled the investigations of Enron and Worldcom; that would be news to Kenneth Lay, Jeff Skilling and Bernie Ebbers.

I would dread to continue with this ridiculous movie; fortunately it was only up for a day or two at YouTube before Mr Hooper had it taken down with a copyright claim.  Apparently he only wants to wake up the sheeple at $14.95 per shearing.

Truthers Finally Acknowledge Reality

Granted, it's in service to their desperate attempt to keep their cruddy little Highrise Safety Initiative on the ballot, but it's certainly refreshing to see this:

Specifically, members of the Office of Emergency Management and the Fire Department were present at the site of WTC 7 where they determined several hours in advance that WTC 7 would very likely collapse, and, based on this determination, made the decision to remove firefighters from the building and to establish a “collapse zone” where no one was permitted to enter until after the collapse.

 I've been following the Truthers for 8 years and I don't think I've ever heard any of them acknowledge that FDNY knew WTC-7 was doomed hours before it actually collapsed.

More on the 28 Pages

Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower writes on the current press to get the pages released:

“There’s nothing in it about national security,” Walter Jones, a Republican congressman from North Carolina who has read the missing pages, contends. “It’s about the Bush Administration and its relationship with the Saudis.” Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat, told me that the document is “stunning in its clarity,” and that it offers direct evidence of complicity on the part of certain Saudi individuals and entities in Al Qaeda’s attack on America.

 Philip Zelikow is not convinced:

 The questions raised by the twenty-eight pages were an important part of the commission’s agenda; indeed, its director, Philip Zelikow, hired staffers who had worked for the Joint Inquiry on that very section to follow up on the material. According to Zelikow, what they found does not substantiate the arguments made by the Joint Inquiry and by the 9/11 families in the lawsuit against the Saudis. He characterized the twenty-eight pages as “an agglomeration of preliminary, unvetted reports” concerning Saudi involvement. “They were wild accusations that needed to be checked out,” he said.

On the other hand, even the Saudis want the information released:

The Saudis have also publicly demanded that the material be released. “Twenty-eight blanked-out pages are being used by some to malign our country and our people,” Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was the Saudi Ambassador to the United States at the time of the 9/11 attacks, has declared. “Saudi Arabia has nothing to hide. We can deal with questions in public, but we cannot respond to blank pages.”

As does 9-11 Commission co-chair Thomas Kean:

Thomas Kean remembers finally having the opportunity to read those twenty-eight pages after he became chairman of the 9/11 Commission—“so secret that I had to get all of my security clearances and go into the bowels of Congress with someone looking over my shoulder.” He also remembers thinking at the time that most of what he was reading should never have been kept secret. But the focus on the twenty-eight pages obscures the fact that many important documents are still classified—“a ton of stuff,” Kean told me, including, for instance, the 9/11 Commission’s interviews with George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Bill Clinton. “I don’t know of a single thing in our report that should not be public after ten years,” Kean said.

 I'm with Kean on this one; sunlight is the best disinfectant.  As an example of the problems with keeping the 28 pages secret, consider the buffoonish Justin Raimondo, who claims they are being withheld to conceal Israeli involvement:

Graham has been explicit in accusing the Saudis of financing at least some of the 9/11 hijackers, as well as facilitating their entry into the United States. However, the Joint Inquiry indicates that more than this was involved: the phrase "foreign support for some of the September 11 hijackers while they were in the United States" jumps out at me, at least implying that it wasn’t just financing – after all, how much did the 9/11 attacks actually cost Al Qaeda in terms of dollars and cents? – but also that operational assistance was given on the ground.
Given – by whom?
In the wake of 9/11, while the smoke from the downed World Trade Building was still clouding the skies over Manhattan, I noticed a news item in the Washington Post that rang all kinds of alarm bells, or at least it should have – although our vaunted Fourth Estate was too busy signing on to the newly-minted "war on terrorism" to notice. The story was headlined "Government Calls Several Cases ‘of Special Interest,’ Meaning Related to Post-Attacks Investigation." Reporter John Mintz related that at least 60 Israelis "of special interest to the government" had been rounded up and that several of these had training in counter-terrorist techniques.

Of course, the operational assistance referred to has nothing to do with the Israelis; it's the Omar al-Bayoumi story as mentioned by Wright:

Bayoumi later told investigators that, while eating there, he happened to overhear two men—Hazmi and Mihdhar—speaking Arabic with Gulf accents. He struck up a conversation with them and soon invited them to move to San Diego. He set them up in the same apartment complex where he lived. Because the hijackers-in-training did not have a checking account, Bayoumi paid their security deposit and first month’s rent (for which they immediately reimbursed him). He also introduced them to members of the Arab community, possibly including the imam of a local mosque, Anwar al-Awlaki—later to become the most prominent spokesperson for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

BTW, I should add that I'm not 100% convinced the Saudis want the information released; it is quite possible they are taking a PR stance secure in the knowledge that the pages will not be published.

Troofer Slapdown Imminent

New York City's response to the Truther's legal brief in support of the High-Rise Safety Initiative is pretty brutal.  The HRSI people crowed about how they hired a great election lawyer; it turns out they should have hired an accountant, because the plan they propose is not in accordance with GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles). 

Basically, because the financing provision in the HRSI is to have a fund set aside for investigating building collapses, it creates the possibility that the fund might sit dormant for a few years, and then be expended.  However GAAP requires that current year expenditures be funded from current year revenues.  And the city can't avoid the problem because the state requires that the city's budget be balanced according to GAAP.

(See in particular attachment #2, the Levine Affadavit).  I'm afraid we won't have the High Rise Safety Initiative to kick around much longer.

Huffpo Hires "Former" Truther and Football Player as National Security Blogger

Of course, the Trutherism is being highlighted by critics:

Stallworth, a wide receiver in the NFL since 2002, is currently an unsigned free agent and has not played in any games since 2012. As a 9/11 truther, he has publicly stated that Osama bin Laden was not responsible for the attacks and that the Pentagon was not hit by a plane.
"NO WAY 9/11 was carried out by 'dying' Bin Laden, 19 men who couldn't fly a damn kite. STILL have NO EVIDENCE Osama was connected, like Iraq," Stallworth tweeted in 2009. Stallworth also tweeted, "Gggrrrrrrrrrrrrr @ ppl who actually believe a plane hit the pentagon on 9/11... hole woulda been ASTRONOMICALLY bigger, God bless lost lives."

The Huffpo claims all that is in the past.  Reading between the lines of this Washington Post piece, it appears that the real attraction of Stallworth to the Huffpo was his support for gay football player Michael Sam.

Vis-a-vis Stallworth’s qualifications, Grim said that “his LGBT work brought him to our attention and impressed us.”

One would think that a more basic qualification for a national security blogger would be a rudimentary understanding of the worst terrorist attack in US history.

Child Abusers for 9/11 Truth

Now I'm opposed to revisionist history in any form, but a truther children's book? Seriously?

There was one day that changed everything. Two hijacked planes brought down - not two skyscrapers - but three. Building 7 collapsed in almost perfect free-fall in what appeared to be a classic demolition. This is the story of that day, and how they huffed and puffed and pulled the baby building down (For kids with adult supervision).