Flaps Blog Links for 2009-06-14

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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.