Flap's Blog – FullosseousFlap's Dental Blog

Dick Cheney released a statement responded to CIA Director Leon Panetta’s suggestion that the former vice president’s criticism of Obama administration policies means Cheney is wishing for another attack.

“I hope my old friend Leon was misquoted. The important thing is whether the Obama administration will continue the policies that have kept us safe for the last eight years.”

Panetta was quoted in a lengthy profile by Jane Mayer in this week’s New Yorker.

“I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue,” he told me. “It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics.”

David Letterman admitted pangs of regret over jokes he made last week about Sarah Palin’s daughter.

He may be regretting them a little more now.

A Web site called FireDavidLetterman.com is organizing a rally outside Letterman’s show at the Ed Sullivan theater on Tuesday June 16 at 4:30 p.m.

And while Letterman has repeatedly reminded viewers his comments were jokes, the campaign’s organizers seem dead serious about getting the late-night stalwart canned.

David Letterman’s comments about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and one of her daughters has prompted a hotel chain to pull its advertising on CBS’ website — and spawned a campaign to fire the Late Show host that includes a planned protest outside his studio.

Embassy Suites, part of the Hilton Hotels Corp., pulled advertising on CBS’ site because of complaints, company spokeswoman Kendra Walker told TVGuide.com. The company was not an advertiser on Letterman’s show.

“We received lots of e-mails from concerned guests and we assessed that the statement that he made was offensive enough to our guests and prospective guests that we elected to take the ads down,” Walker said. She declined to release the cost of the ads.

CBS declined to comment Tuesday.

David Letterman re-addressed the controversy surrounding his jokes about Sarah Palin’s family during the taping of CBS’ “Late Show” on Monday.

Letterman said he had no idea Palin was at the Yankees game with her 14-year-old daughter, Willow, when he joked about her getting “knocked up” by player Alex Rodriguez last week.

“I had, honestly, no idea that the 14-year-old girl, I had no idea that anybody was at the ball game except the governor, and I was told at the time she was there with Rudy Giuliani,” Letterman said. “It’s not your fault that it was misunderstood, it’s my fault. … So I would like to apologize, especially to the two daughters involved, Bristol and Willow, and also to the governor and her family and everybody else who was outraged by the joke.”

In a massive outpouring reminiscent of the Islamic Revolution three decades ago, hundreds of thousands of Iranians streamed through the capital Monday, and the fist-waving protesters denounced President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s claim to victory in a disputed election.

Standing on a roof, gunmen opened fire on a group of protesters who had tried to storm a pro-government militia’s compound. One man was killed and several others were wounded in the worst violence since the disputed election Friday.

Angry men showed their bloody palms after cradling the dead and wounded who had been part of a crowd that stretched more than five miles (nearly 10 kilometers) supporting reform leader Mir Hossein Mousavi.

The huge rally – and smaller protests around the country – reinforced what has become increasingly clear since the election: the opposition forces rallying behind Mousavi show no signs of backing down. Their resolve appears to have pushed Iran’s Islamic establishment into attempts to cool

Iranian leaders will probably take decisive action to quell opposition protests against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election, said Richard Bulliet, an Iran expert at Columbia University.

Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated today in downtown Tehran at a rally led by Ahmadinejad’s defeated opponent, Mir Houssein Mousavi, who charges widespread fraud in the June 12 vote.

A pro-government militia fired at opposition protesters, killing at least one person, the Associated Press reported, citing one of its photographers, who was a witness. There was no immediate confirmation. The rally took place in defiance of an official ban on public protests.

“The regime will quell the discontent,” Bulliet, a professor of history at Columbia’s Middle East Institute, said by phone today from New York. “It will be dampened down and the U.S. and foreign governments will have to resign themselves to dealing with the Ahmadinejad regime.”

Iranian demonstrators called for more mass protests on Tuesday, a day after hardline Islamic militiamen killed a man during a march by tens of thousands against a presidential election they say was rigged.

The Iranian capital has already seen three days of the biggest and most violent anti-government protests since the 1979 Islamic revolution after hardline incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared winner of last Friday’s vote.

“Tomorrow at 5 p.m. (8:30 a.m. EDT) at Vali-ye Asr Square,” some of the crowd chanted at Monday’s march, referring to a major road junction in the sprawling city of some 12 million.

Protestors in Iran on Monday used Twitter for battle cries and to spread word about clashes with police and “hard line supporters” of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Twitter messages, some with links to pictures, streamed from Iran despite reported efforts by authorities there to block news of protests over Ahmadinejad’s claim of having been fairly re-elected.

Pictures of wounded or dead people that senders claim were Iranian protestors ricocheted about Twitter and wound up posted at online photo-sharing websites such as Flickr.

BBC audiences in Iran, the Middle East and Europe may be experiencing disruption to their BBC TV or radio services today. That is because there is heavy electronic jamming of one of the satellites the BBC uses in the Middle East to broadcast the BBC Persian TV signal to Iran.

Satellite technicians have traced that interference and it is coming from Iran. There has been intermittent interference from Iran since Friday, but this is the heaviest yet.

It seems to be part of a pattern of behaviour by the Iranian authorities to limit the reporting of the aftermath of the disputed election. In Tehran, John Simpson and his cameraman were briefly arrested after they had filmed the material for this piece. And at least one news agency in Tehran has come under pressure not to distribute internationally any pictures it might have of demonstrations on the streets in Iran.

The White House has not issued a statement expressing support for the protestors declaring the election illegitimate. But neither has anyone in the Obama administration said a public word accepting the legitimacy of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection.

“We’re reacting to concrete facts,” a White House official tells ABC News. “We’re collecting them still.”

That said, the primary concerns the White House has about Iran are not about free and fair elections. The concerns are: Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and its support for terrorism.

“We have to deal with the Iran that we have rather than the Iran that we wish we had,” says the official.

I have had it with Letterman! I used to defend this guy to all of my friends who liked Leno better. I would say from a comic stand point that Jay was a great comic but Letterman was more original and had more style and class than Leno. Two recent events have changed my mind: Jay’s classy departure from the “Tonight Show” and Letterman’s classless left-wing attacks on the kids of politicians.

John Bailey thought it was great when his neighbor was elected to the House of Representatives in 2007.

“Not everyone lives next door to a congresswoman,” he said.

But two years later, he doesn’t feel so lucky. The congresswoman’s house is abandoned and in disrepair, “a blight on the neighborhood,” Bailey said.

He thinks the way that Rep. Laura Richardson (D-Long Beach) has treated her Sacramento home tells far more about her than her voting record.

“I wouldn’t want anyone that irresponsible to represent me,” said Bailey, like Richardson a liberal Democrat. “What I don’t get is how she has the time to visit with Fidel Castro but doesn’t have time for her own house. If you can’t manage your own household, you probably shouldn’t get involved in international affairs.”
+++++++
Rep.Richardson is a disgrace and should be forced to fix up the property by the City.

Binyamin Netanyahu threw down the gauntlet to the US last night, grudgingly agreeing to a limited Palestinian state that would be demilitarised and not in control of its airspace or borders.

The hawkish Prime Minister insisted that Israel would never give up a united Jerusalem as its capital, and said that established Jewish settlements in the West Bank would continue to expand — despite explicit objections from Washington.

In a keynote speech that referred to a Palestinian “entity” far more frequently than an actual state, Mr Netanyahu tried to advance elements of his economic peace plan — whereby the Palestinians would get increased investment but only limited sovereignty — while still conceding to US insistence on the creation of an independent Palestinian country.
+++++++
Obama and Jimmy Carter are not going to be allowed to sell Istrael down the river.

CIA director Leon Panetta says it’s almost as if former vice president Dick Cheney would like to see another attack on the United States to prove he is right in criticizing President Barack Obama for abandoning the “harsh interrogation” of terrorism suspects.

“I think he smells some blood in the water on the national security issue,” Panetta said in an interview published in The New Yorker magazine’s June 22 issue.

“It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point.”
+++++++
Leon Panetta is a Democrat HACK who is out of his element being CIA Director

Biden tells “Meet the Press” that “everyone guessed wrong” on the impact of the stimulus, economy was worse off than anyone thought.

Backs away from the estimate that the funds could create or save 3.5 million jobs, instead promises 600,000 by the end of the summer.

The mayor of Hiroshima — one of the two Japanese cities obliterated by US atom bombs during World War II — on Sunday denounced North Korea for threatening to build more nuclear weapons, a report said.

“I am furious, with them (North Korea) for defying strong protests from the international community, including Hiroshima, the city attacked in an atomic bombing,” mayor Tadatoshi Akiba said in a statement, as reported by Jiji Press.

“This means a grave challenge for the international community, which can never be forgiveable,” Akiba said.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said this weekend that he opposes a public option plan for consumers in a healthcare reform plan to emerge from the Senate.

“I don’t favor a public option,” Lieberman told Bloomberg News in an interview broadcast this weekend. And I don’t favor a public option because I think there’s plenty of competition in the private insurance market.”

Lieberman’s decision joins several other centrist Democrats’ decision to have publicly refused to back the plan, derided as a “government-run” plan by Republicans.

Centrist Democrats like Sens. Mary Landrieu (La.) and Ben Nelson (Neb.) have also been skittish to back the public option, which is favored by liberal Democrats and the Obama administration. If Republicans are able to pick off enough Democrats, they may be able to muster enough votes to filibuster any legislation that includes the public option.

Mitt Romney, a once and maybe future presidential candidate, calls Iran’s presidential results “a fraud” and urged President Barack Obama to speak out against the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Obama, Romney said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” should “indicate that this has been a terribly managed decision by the autocratic regime in Iran.”

The former Republican Massachusetts governor also used the Iranian results to broaden his indictment of Obama, saying “it’s very clear that the president’s policies of going around the world and apologizing for America are not working.”

Romney cited the belligerence of Iran, North Korea and Russia and the refusal of European countries to offer significant troop increases for Afghanistan.

Tens of thousands of people have joined a rally in central Tehran to celebrate the re-election of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Crowds thronged the main thoroughfare, Vali Asr street, waving Iranian flags and chanting in jubilation.

The president’s closest opponent in the election, Mir Hossein Mousavi, has lodged an official appeal against the result amid continuing angry protests.

Mr Ahmadinejad denied any vote-fixing, saying the result was “very accurate”.

Photo of the year-
“Iranian Courage”
Threats Watch found this.

The regime is shooting at and beating the Iranian democracy protesters:

Kamangir has news on a Toronto protest.

Iranian blogger Winston is following the developments.

Michael Totten is continually updating on the fraudulent election.

As the Iranian election aftermath unfolded in Tehran–thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to express their anger at perceived electoral irregularities–an unexpected hashtag began to explode through the Twitterverse: “CNNFail.”

Even as Twitter became the best source for rapid-fire news developments from the front lines of the riots in Tehran, a growing number of users of the microblogging service were incredulous at the near total lack of coverage of the story on CNN, a network that cut its teeth with on-the-spot reporting from the Middle East.

For most of Saturday, CNN.com had no stories about the massive protests on behalf of Mir Hossein Mousavi, who was reported by the Iranian government to have lost to the sitting president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The widespread street clashes–nearly unheard of in the tightly controlled Iran–reflected popular belief that the election had been rigged, a sentiment that was even echoed, to some extent, by the U.S. government Saturday.