World News Korner

I have often in my life felt unsure of myself. Especially when I took on a new job or task that was outside of my comfort zone or required a skill set that I was not sure I possessed.

I can remember starting jobs and worrying that my employers would soon discover I was a fraud and that I could not accomplish what was being asked of me.

In all of those cases I did in fact manage to rise to the challenge despite my misgivings or insecurities. And in fact often the jobs evolved to fit my personality so well that finding a replacement for me when I left was a real challenge.

When I started The Immoral Minority I felt much the same way. After all who cared what some dude in Alaska thought about politics, religion, and world affairs? But then I discovered that quite a lot of people did.

And when this job evolved into one that required actual reporting, and conducting interviews, all of those insecurities came right back.

In many ways I lack the essential component that makes a good reporter. I am not all that nosy.

Part of that is undoubtedly from living in Alaska where we tend to have a live and let live philosophy, and part of it is that I am kind of shy and not very aggressive when it comes to talking to people I don't know.

However I have discovered that I am in somewhat of a unique position so I have attempted to put my insecurities and self doubts aside in the interest of getting the story.

All of the above may seem a little off topic, but in fact it is background to help explain why I have not posted the stories that I talked about starting way back in September.

You see at that time I was quite confident that we would be getting all of the information out before Halloween. And besides that I was pretty sure that Korey Klingenmeyer was about to press charges.

Obviously things did not work out quite that way.

Bringing everybody up to speed.

To be honest I don't know what happened with Klingenmeyer, but I can explain what happened with my source and the story we were working on.

Essentially I lost contact with her.

The first thing that happened was that work responsibilities for both of us kept making it hard to get together, and then she had a training to attend out of state, and then, to be honest, I simply lost track of her.

Suddenly my e-mails and text messages were not being returned, and phone calls went to voice mail. This started at the end of October, and I did not hear from her again until the beginning of this month and only had a real conversation with her just last night.

Right up until last night I was beginning to worry that I had been left hanging. (Something which has happened more than once in my blogging career.) And due to my reticence to badger this person or pursue her more aggressively, as a trained journalist might do, I sort of let things slide.

Ultimately I came to believe that I had somehow blown it and that I might not get the really gritty stuff that I had been promised.

In response I started to construct a post of the information that she had already shared with me over lunch that day at The Outback, and in text messages and e-mails afterward.

So I wrote up most of that, picking through it carefully so that it would not reveal her identity (The one journalistic trait that IS firmly part of my DNA is that I NEVER burn a source.), only to realize that there was no way to trim it down to the point where the Palins themselves would not be able to figure out who I must be talking to. Or at least narrow it down to a handful of suspects.

So I decided that I simply could not write the post without letting her know that she might be outed, even if I didn't mention her by name.

After I sent that e-mail I received this one back in response:

Not opposed at all to working with you- just got busy it's the crazy time of year for me! What do you need? I'm Not focused on them right now- work has my undivided attention.

After that we had several e-mail conversations back and forth, and last night we talked on the phone for forty plus minutes where she assured me that she is still gung-ho to get her story out there and is also committed to coming out publicly so that the Palins cannot simply dismiss it as based on anonymous sources. (Which by the way is great news, as she was not sure about that earlier.)

There is one hitch however, and that is that though she is determined to reveal her identity, she wants to wait until after a certain legal issue has been sorted out.

She also explained some of the things that she has been dealing with and by comparison the blog post is simply not as important as the other real life things that she currently has on her plate. (As it turned out I was only one of several people who she was not responding to while dealing with her difficulties.)

So what we agreed to is for me to go ahead and publish that post that I was working on before (The one with the information from our previous conversations.), and keep her identity secret enough so that Palin supporters cannot track her down and start harassing her (Though as I said the Palins will still likely have a pretty fair idea who is talking to me.), and then continue to post new information based on conversations we will have moving forward, as well as photos and documents that she will share, until finally she is in a place where she feels comfortable in stepping completely out of the shadows.

That first post, as somebody already guessed earlier, will show up Monday.

And what can you expect from that post, and the ones that will follow?

Drinking, drug use, family fights, dark secrets, and "I don't know whose baby that is, but it is NOT Sarah's."



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Courtesy of AOL:

The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee released new information on Thursday that he claims is evidence that the Bush administration misled the nation in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

In a speech on the Senate floor, retiring Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., outlined a 2003 CIA cable that warns George W. Bush administration officials against making references to claims that Mohammad Atta - the man who led the 9/11 hijackers - met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in the Czech Republic before the Sept. 11, 2011, attacks. Levin claims Bush officials used the unconfirmed meeting to link Iraq to 9/11 to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

"There was a concerted campaign on the part of the Bush administration to connect Iraq in the public mind with the horror of the Sept. 11 attacks. That campaign succeeded," said Levin, who cited opinion polls from that time showing many Americans believed former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks. "Of course, connections between Saddam and 9/11 or al-Qaida were fiction."

He referenced a Dec. 9, 2001, appearance by Vice President Dick Cheney on "Meet the Press." Cheney said: "It's been pretty well confirmed that he (Atta) did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack."

"Far from 'pretty well confirmed,' there was almost no evidence that such a meeting took place," Levin said. "Just a single, unsubstantiated report, from a single source, and a mountain of information indicating there was no such meeting. ... Travel and other records indicated that Atta was almost certainly in the United States at the time of the purported meeting in Prague."

Of course I am relatively certain that all of you already know that the Bush Administration lied us into the Iraq War. (And if you don't know that you need to drop everything and watch Hubris right now.)

However with all of the hubbub over the Senate report on torture right now it is a good time to remind ourselves that virtually everything we think we know about why we went to war in the first place is a lie.

And speaking of the torture report as I am sure many of you have heard, there is a concerted effort to convince the American people that President Bush himself was out of the loop when it came to the harshest interrogation techniques, but the CIA Director wants you to know that is all bullshit.

Courtesy of the Daily Mail:

The CIA's enhanced interrogation technique program was authorized by President George W. Bush, the bureau's current director John Brennan said on Thursday, and it had his full support.

Brennan, who worked at the CIA at the time as a deputy to a high-ranking CIA official, told reporters that Bush ordered up the program six days after al Qaeda attacked America, despite the fact that the spy agency did not have adequate space to house detainees nor did it have the correct training to interrogate them.

'In many respects the program was uncharted territory for the CIA, and we were not prepared,' he said, later stating that officers 'inadequately developed and monitored' the program and 'the agency failed to establish quickly the operational guidelines needed to govern the entire effort.'

Brennan also said that whether or not these "enhanced interrogation techniques" provided any intelligence that could not have been gathered without them is "an unknowable fact."

So to sum up, the Bush Administration lied us into a war that cost thousands of American lives, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Iraqi lives. Bush ordered the use of torture techniques even before we had captives on which to use them. And yet to hear the conservatives tell it President Obama is the one who has tried to "fundamentally change this country."

Simply put, George W. Bush is a criminal and a traitor to his country.

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Courtesy of 3 Chics Politico:

Redditt Hudson a former police officer with St Louis County police says Darren Wilson processed his own evidence. Reddit also says he was in the room when Ferguson police chief Tom Jackson told them, Darren Wilson had no knowledge of Michael Brown being involved in a store robbery before the encounter with Wilson.

Hudson also wrote a rather incredible piece for the Washington Post about how being a cop taught him about racism within law enforcement.

I think Chris Hayes is one of the last television hosts still digging into Ferguson, for which I admire him greatly.

It seems since the Eric Garner situation hit the front pages, with incriminating video and everything, that the shooting of Michael Brown has been permanently pushed to the side.

And that is too bad, because in my opinion there is still much to learn about the Ferguson case, and it will never be uncovered now that most news outlets have moved on to the next hot story.

However Michael Brown remains dead, Darren Wilson remains free, and justice remains unserved.

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Sarah Palin's ghostwriter helped her compose a rather meandering post which included a bit about her friend Juanita's first moose kill, an article her brother wrote about hanging out with the Duck Dynasty dipshits, and this:

Running joke among the family is “we never win anything!”, so what a cool surprise today that Willow won the Wasilla High School Swim Team fundraiser raffle – a Remington with a sweet scope! (I know... only in Alaska.)

I have to mention that I am a life long Alaskan and have never heard of a high school affiliated raffle giving away a hunting rifle, but let's face it Wasilla marches to its own tone deaf drummer.

I have also never heard of Willow wanting to go hunting, so one has to wonder just how useful of a prize a Remington with a "sweet scope" really is to the budding hair stylist.

What I do know is that Willow tends to hold a grudge, so I will make sure that my curtains are closed at night just to be on the safe side.

Considering what I am about to share I think I will be moving up the list of people who the Palins would like to see eliminated.



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Veronica Dunnachie supporting Open Carry in Tarrant County

Courtesy of The Dallas Morning News:

An Arlington woman faces a charge of capital murder Wednesday after two people were discovered dead in her home, police said.

Officials said they were treating the slayings as a domestic homicide. Veronica Dunnachie, 35, is being held in the Arlington City Jail, said Sgt. Jeffrey Houston, a police spokesman. Bail had not yet been set.

The victims had not been identified and the cause of death had not been released.

Since this article the bodies were identified as her estranged husband Russ Dunnachie and his adult daughter.

After the slayings the suspect drove herself to Millwood Hospital, a mental health facility, where she was taken into custody. She was uninjured.

Separations, divorces, child custody battles, happen everyday in this country. Usually there are harsh words, recriminations, and lawyer fees.

But when you see the world as a dangerous place, and carry a gun on your person for protection, a verbal confrontation can escalate into something far more dangerous than simply hurtful words.

Despite what the NRA might want all of us to believe, in this case at least the presence of a gun is directly responsible for the taking of life, not the protection of life.

The equation is simple; no gun = no death.

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Courtesy of Real Clear Politics:

GOV. RICK PERRY: I think over the course of the last two years, people, you know, they realize that what they saw in 2011 is certainly not the person they're looking at in 2013, 2014, 2015.

KASIE HUNT, MSNBC: And are you smart enough to be president of the United States?"

PERRY: I think the standpoint of life's experiences. Running for the presidency is not an IQ test. It is a test of an individual's resolve. It's a test of an individual's philosophy. It is a test of an individual's life's experiences. And I think Americans are really ready for a leader that will give them a great hope about the future.

Yeah but she asked a question, and he never answered it.

You know a smarter person might have been able to do that.

And no running for the presidency is NOT an IQ test. But as Sarah Palin learned to her great consternation IQ does in fact play a significant role in preparing a candidate to answer reporter's questions.

And she also demonstrated that wearing glasses in not enough to project an air of intelligence.




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Courtesy of Mashable:

An anonymous Wikipedia user from an IP address that is registered to United States Senate has tried, and failed, to remove a phrase with the word "torture" from the website's article on the Senate Intelligence Committee's blockbuster CIA torture report.

The unknown individual has attempted on at least two occasions — first on Dec. 9 and then on Dec. 10 — to remove a line describing the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques as "a euphemism for torture."


Gee it looks like somebody REALLY doesn't like it when we call torture done by the United States "torture."

Perhaps somebody should have thought of that before they, you know, tortured people.




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Boy ain't that the truth!

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