In a Jan. 30 Google-sponsored "video chat," President Barack Obama gave the first public acknowledgment of what has been a very open secret—the use of US drones against militant forces in Pakistan's tribal areas. Obama responded to a question from a young man in Brooklyn, who noted that the president had ordered more drone attacks in his first year in office than his predecessor George Bush. Saying the attacks cause "a lot of civilian casualties," he asked if they were worth it. Obama responded (rather disingenuously, in light of some recent horrific news accounts): "I want to make sure that people understand that actually, drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties. For the most part, they have been very precise precision strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates. And we are very careful in terms of how it has been applied." Asked by another participant in a follow-up question whether drone strikes "send a message" that the US is interfering in other countries' affairs, Obama responded with the kind of downright Orwellian logic that he has already proved himself capable of:

Could everybody just stop and think, please? Rand Paul won applause from basically freedom-loving folks when he was blocked from boarding a flight by the Transportation Security Administration last week in Nashville, after refusing to submit to a full body pat-down. Carl Gibson on Huffington Post points out a salient little irony to the situation: Paul was headed for Washington DC to participate in an anti-choice event, the "March for Life"! So much for personal freedom! This cuts to the heart of the bogus pseudo-libertarianism of Rand and his old man Ron Paul. Gibson astutely writes:

From AP, Jan. 29:

Florida highway pileup kills at least 10 people
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A long line of cars and trucks collided one after another early Sunday on a dark Florida highway so shrouded in haze and smoke that drivers were instantly blinded. At least 10 people were killed.

The New York Police Department, under fire from New York City Muslims, has announced that it is ending its program of NYPD-CIA collaboration launched after 9-11. Commissioner Raymond Kelly says the CIA officer working as a special assistant to the department's intelligence program will leave his post in April after nine months. The program has been under scrutiny since it was revealed in a series of stories by the Associated Press, prompting the CIA's own Inspector General to conduct an investigation. The Inspector General's probe found there was insufficient oversight of the program, which included sending plainclothes "rakers" into mosques and Muslim communities. Muslims not suspected of any wrongdoing were put in intelligence databases.

President Obama in his State of the Union address Jan. 24 said: "We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy." On Jan. 27, he effused before a crowd in Las Vegas: "We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly a hundred years, Developing it could power our cars, our homes and our factories in a cleaner and cheaper way. And experts believe it could support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade... We, it turns out, are the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. We've got a lot of it.... We only have about 2% of the world's oil reserves. So we've got to have an all-out, all-in, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every source of American energy." While Obama did not explicitly invoke hydraulic fracturing, this amounts to an endorsement of the controversial practice. The Bureau of Land Management estimates 90% of natural gas drilling on public lands involves "fracking," in which a mixture of chemicals, sand and water is injected into shale formations to open fissures and allow gas to come to the surface. (Bloomberg, LAT, Gannett, Jan. 26)

NewsOne now brings to light a YouTube video in which Ron Paul gives a "South was Right" speech to an evident gathering of Confederacy nostalgists. No date or place is offered, but this supposed "libertarian" is speaking against the backdrop of a giant Confederate battle flag! The video was apparently first placed on YouTube by a neo-Confederate channel with the slightly ironic name "Patriot Review." In it, Paul regurgitates several of the usual revisionist tropes—he dismisses slavery as an "excuse" and "rabble-rousing issue" that "really wasn't the issue of why the war was fought"; he suggests differences over "protectionism" and the "banking system" were really behind the war; he points out that other countries "got rid of slavery without war" through "legislation" (as if the abolitionists hadn't fought generations for that!) or (of course, the free-market solution) "literally buying slaves' freedom." Et cetera. NewsOne adds:

The Zionist propaganda machine (e.g. Palestinian Media Watch, Arutz Sheva, Christian Broadcasting Network, FrontPageMag) is having the predictable field day with the latest indiscretions from Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, who at a celebration (presumably in Ramallah) marking the 47th anniversary of the founding of Fatah, said (apparently quoting a hadith): "The hour [of resurrection] will not come until you fight the Jews. The Jew will hide behind stones or trees. Then the stones or trees will call, 'O Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him.'"

Big kudos to the African American-oriented NewsOne website for relentlessly calling out Ron Paul's ties to the white supremacist radical right. Now they have dug up an unseemly affair covered by the New York Times in 1981—today disgracefully ignored by the supposed "liberal media"!—that implicates the supposed "libertarian" presidential hopeful in an attempted mercenary invasion and coup d'etat to establish a white separatist homeland in the Black-majority Caribbean nation of Dominica. No, we aren't kidding. It seems that one of Paul's more ugly contemporary supporters, Don Black of the neo-Nazi outfit Stormfront, at that time a Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, was indicted by US federal authorities in the plot, dubbed "Operation Red Dog." The scheme called for hiring mercenaries to overthrow then-Prime Minister Eugenia Charles and restore the previous prime minister, Patrick John—and then creating an Aryan paradise on the island, funded through casinos, cocaine and brothels. On the day the mercenary force was to set out for Dominica in a small ship on the Louisiana coast, they were busted by BATF agents—who found over thirty automatic weapons, shotguns, rifles, handguns, dynamite, a confederate flag and a Nazi flag. In a brief flurry of coverage, the media dubbed the plan the "Bayou of Pigs." Prosecutors tried to subpoena then-congressman Paul and ex-Texas governor John Connally after mercenary leader Mike Perdue said they were in on the plot. The request was turned down by a federal judge. David Duke—also now an outspoken Paul supporter (check out his website)—was called to testify before a grand jury, but took the Fifth Amendment.