From feminism, Fukushima, reading to exploding manure. Which reminds me... and Trump.

What you read matters more than you think.

One way to identify potential mass killers: domestic violence and grievances against women.

Women activists around the world.

My new hero, Mary Beard.

A doctor who sees how climate change is affecting our health.  Records shattered.

Climate change in a nutshell: Heatwave leads to ice cream theft, flying cockroaches and exploding manure

Radiation Along Fukushima Rivers Up to 200 Times Higher Than Pacific Ocean Seabed

Pakistani doctor saves a Christian patient and has to flee for his life to the US.  Where Muslims are hated. Welcome to America.

Are we in a rerun of the 1930s?

What forced-birthers are like.

The making of Donald Trump.

Most Muslims think this

The Islamic religion attracts all sorts, just like being a "Christian" covers the Westboro Baptists and the KKK to the Puritans and Catholics.

A Dump Truck of News

The GOP debate from several viewpoints.  Fact checking. Lack of presidential qualities. And how much nuking and bombing do they want?  Because fear works... or at least it did during the Bush era.  Will it work again? Because the GOP really really really wants to start WWIII because that's what they're good at.  War.  Because it's good business.

Tom Tomorrow.

Who let the fascist dogs out?  The GOP thought they could contain them....kept feeding them raw meat... encouraging them to distrust government...

(And why AREN'T we talking about the Saudi role in terrorism?)

If everyone is going to carry a gun, we need this new invention to stop bleeding to be a mandatory item too.

Homes on Mars.

This El Nino seems to be extra special.

Badass women of WWII.

Liberals live in their own bubble too.

George Bush ignored several pre-9/11 warnings to avoid a paper trail... but we knew this.

The melting of the permafrost brings all sorts of things to light.

The Bible?  Or the Koran?

Mr. Rogers was truly an excellent man.

George Takei takes on mayor who thought interment was a good idea.

British Muslims tell off Daesh.

Cats v Aquarium and other such matters

Cat v aquarium.

A cure for Alzheimer's?

Gary Younge:  be careful of a polarizing debate over the causes of terrorism.  Nothing is that simple.

Ahmed Merabet's eulogy of his policeman brother:

One must not confuse extremists with Muslims. Madness has neither color nor religion. I want to make another point: stop painting everybody with the same brush, stop burning mosques or synagogues. You are attacking people. It won't bring back our dead, and it won't appease our families.

How long would you survive on other planets without a spacesuit?

BooMan: Why we are not Norway.  (Excellent list of questions)

Does there have to be historical accuracy in movies?

Sleepy time.

How to react to the killings in Paris

Juan Cole has excellent advice.  Apparently getting incensed and invading the wrong country is not the way to do it.  Overreacting and blaming innocent and law abiding Muslims is not the way either because it plays straight into Al-Qaeda's plans.

What happened in Paris.  The supposed reasons.  How the cartoonists are reacting.  French police have zeroed in on three men responsible for the attack.

Usual Thursday....

First the parrots...They are plotting to take over the world!

What can happen to women denied abortions.

Scary muslim pictures.

Mass shooting for the last 30 years... brought to you by the NRA, the gun companies, and a cowardly Congress.

High Fructose Corn Syrup... apparently not even related to corn anymore:

While “trans-fat free” and “no MSG” are widely misused in the food world, nothing seems to come close to the ultra popular “natural.” With no definitive guidance from the FDA as to the meaning of the term, food manufactures slap it on products with abandon. Author and blogger Bruce Bradley, a 15-year veteran of the food product marketing world, says, “There is no FDA definition of ‘Natural,’ and in that vacuum, processed food companies have filled the void with their own, self-serving interpretations.” As an example, Bradley cites high fructose corn syrup, which he describes as “anything but natural…the result of an extraordinarily intensive process involving a series of enzymatic and chemical reactions. In fact, as one pro-HFCS group states, ‘the corn undergoes so much processing, and the products of the processes are so removed from corn that there is no detectable corn DNA present in HFCS.’” As the litigation lingers on, it will hopefully have the side effect of informing all those still clueless shoppers out there that what they see advertised about a food may bear little or no relationship to what they actually get – and in that way, can and will “benefit the public” after all.

Belly buttons.

Doggies and video game dragons.

Teaching girls to become engineers.

President Barack Obama is not a Muslim

Nor a Christian! (Ignore all that rumpus about Reverend Wright, that was a clever diversion!) He's a ... a... PASTAFARIAN!!!11! He worships the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

Here is proof!



Update: Two articles somehow appropriate: Obama's mother's history. And how to build a pirate cave.

We are the UNITED States of America

Scary Muslims wearing scary clothes

Be afraid!

There is NO GROUND ZERO MOSQUE

Just how stupid are these people?

It would be like denying the Quakers a meeting house

Near where the KKK firebombed a building. But nuance is not a teabaggery strength.

Newsmax:

A New York City panel has denied landmark status to a building near ground zero, freeing organizers to build an Islamic center and mosque there.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission's decision allows organizers to transform the 152-year-old building into an Islamic community center blocks from the site of the Sept. 11 attacks.

National and New York politicians and the Anti-Defamation League have come out in recent weeks against plans for the mosque, saying it disrespects the memory of Sept. 11 victims. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has supported the mosque.

The commission voted 9-0 against granting landmark status to the building. Commissioners said the building didn't meet historic criteria to qualify as a landmark.

The mosque would be part of an Islamic community center to be operated by a group called the Cordoba Initiative, which says the center will be a space for moderate Muslim voices.

But opponents say building a mosque near ground zero would be an insult to the memory of those who died at the hands of Muslim extremists on Sept. 11, 2001.

How is refusing a peaceful and religious group of Muslims an area to build a community center a 'Christian' action? What have they to do with 9/11?

Nothing.

Will the wingnuts and teabaggers ever acknowledge the difference?

No. It's too comforting to hate and too profitable to reeducate the haters.

Update: I love to be proved wrong. Go Temecula!

The teabaggery party is giving Bin Laden what he wants

By hating Muslims as if they were a monolithic entity:

This seems like such an obvious point, but it is apparently not obvious to the many people who oppose the Cordoba Initiative's planned mosque in lower Manhattan, so let me state it as clearly as possible: The Cordoba Initiative, which is headed by an imam named Feisal Abdul Rauf, is an enemy of al Qaeda, no less than Rudolph Giuliani and the Anti-Defamation League are enemies of al Qaeda. Bin Laden would sooner dispatch a truck bomb to destroy the Cordoba Initiative's proposed community center than he would attack the ADL, for the simple reason that Osama's most dire enemies are Muslims. This is quantitatively true, of course -- al Qaeda and its ideological affiliates have murdered thousands of Muslims -- but it is ideologically true as well: al Qaeda's goal is the purification of Islam (that is to say, its extreme understanding of Islam) and apostates pose more of a threat to Bin Laden's understanding of Islam than do infidels.

I know Feisal Abdul Rauf; I've spoken with him at a public discussion at the 96th street mosque in New York about interfaith cooperation. He represents what Bin Laden fears most: a Muslim who believes that it is possible to remain true to the values of Islam and, at the same time, to be a loyal citizen of a Western, non-Muslim country. Bin Laden wants a clash of civilizations; the opponents of this mosque project are giving him what he wants.

Blog sprinkles

The pope attack! I'm not laughing. Honest. Really...



Bryan of Why Now? explains how to deal with terrorism.

Think Progress: Mary Matalin claims President Bush ‘inherited’ the September 11th terror attacks. Just wondering....Mary, are you really buffing Georgie's legacy all by yourself or did someone encourage you to do so?

Just wondering... but if the Catholics bishops can demand that no federal money is ever used for abortions because they are evil, why can't we demand that no federal money is ever used for war because it is evil?

Via JJ of the Unrepentant Old Hippie, a final solution to the Muslim 'problem'. And another cracked pot is heard from.

Why are we letting Israel block aid to Gaza?

Republicans want to repeal the just voted for Health Care bill! Or something!

AmericaBlog: ABC: Two al Qaeda Leaders Behind Northwest Flight 253 Terror Plot Were Released by Bush in 2007.

The Jokerization of media figures.

Mustang Bobby wants to know whether you will say Twenty ten or Two thousand ten...

I get comments....

On this post about Thomas Jefferson not being a Christian:

"Thomas jefferson was a a secret muslim and practised polygamy. They just found out that his ancestors were arabs."

Hmm.. This is either someone incredibly stupid or hilariously prankish. So... a quick google. This company: The Wellcome Trust funded this college: University of Leicester to have their geneticists do a DNA check on the DNA of Thomas Jefferson. One of the projects is:

Sequencing of the human genome at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

Ok, so far so good. So, what is this about Jefferson?: (my bold)

Almost 10 years ago, the University of Leicester team, led by Professor Mark Jobling, together with international collaborators, showed that Thomas Jefferson had fathered at least one of the sons of Sally Hemings, a slave of Jefferson’s.

The work was done using the Y chromosome, a male-specific part of our DNA that passes down from father to son. Jefferson carried a very unusual Y chromosome type, which helped to strengthen the evidence in the historical paternity case.

Now, new techniques have been brought to bear on Jefferson’s Y chromosome, in a study reported in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. The presidential chromosome turns out to belong to a rare class called ‘K2’, which is found at its highest frequency in the Middle East and Eastern Africa, including Oman, Somalia and Iraq. Its closest match was in a man from Egypt. Could this mean that the President had recent ancestry in the Middle East? A careful survey revealed a few K2 chromosomes in France, Spain and England. Together, the K2s form a diverse group that may, in fact, have been in western Europe for many thousands of years.

Further evidence for Jefferson’s British origins come from the finding that two out of 85 randomly recruited men named Jefferson share exactly the same Y chromosome as the President. Prof Jobling said: ‘The two men have ancestry in Yorkshire and the West Midlands, and knew of no historical connection to the USA. They were amazed and fascinated by the link, which connects them into Thomas Jefferson’s family tree, probably about 11 generations ago.’

The ultimate origins of K2 chromosomes remain a mystery, however, and need further investigation: while they may have been present in Europe since the Stone Age, another possibility is that K2s came to Europe with the Phoenicians, an ancient maritime trading culture that spread out across the Mediterranean from their home in what is now Lebanon. The US media has taken up a different theory, leading to the New York Times headline, ‘Jefferson – the first Jewish president?’: European K2 chromosomes may originate in Sephardic (Spanish) Jewish populations, who have their ultimate origins in the Middle East.

Prof Jobling said: ‘When we look closely at large collections of British Y chromosomes we find surprises, like this rare K2 lineage, and the African chromosome that we recently found in a Yorkshireman. These exotic chromosomes remind us of the complexity of British history and prehistory.’

So the poor benighted fool who frothed at the thought that Jefferson had 'impure' blood most decidedly has 'exotic DNA' in his lineage as well. In fact we ALL have African blood.

Welcome to the gene pool, pal!

Get your goggles, umbrella, and a bottle of bleach

It's going to get fugly out there.

Josh Marshall:

But you need to play close attention to the McCain campaign's final weeks' strategy under and just above the radar. McCain's final strategy relies on two pillars. The first is aggressively playing to voters' fears of electing a black president. Make no mistake: not just his campaign in a general sense, but McCain himself and his top handful of advisers, are banking on the residual racism in a changing America to get them over the finish line. The second is an aggressive use of innuendo to convince casual voters that Obama is in league with Islamic terrorists bent on killing Americans.

(Notice how they've tried to keep Bridget McCain out of the conversation?)

Roy Edroso of the Village Voice:

But there was one area in which this drive to lower the tone was a resounding success: among the Republican candidates themselves.

On the stump, both McCain and Palin suggested that Obama's plans for America amounted to "socialism." Palin also said she loved visiting the "pro-American parts of the country," presumably more than she enjoyed the anti-American parts. And a McCain advisor told MSNBC that only the Republican parts of her home state were the "real Virginia," because they were "more southern in nature, if you will."

Rightbloggers were beside themselves with glee. "McCain finally calling Obama what he is… a Socialist!" crowed Tennessee Talk. They rushed to defend their newly wised-up champions. Michelle Malkin explained what Palin meant, showing shots of obnoxious protests in San Francisco, Chicago, and Portland, Oregon. (Don't worry, she still hates New York, too.)

Mustang Bobby of Bark Bark Woof Woof notes Bill Kristol's denial of anti-Islamic rhetoric:

That right there should tell you that Mr. Kristol has obviously taken leave of his senses. The anti-Islamic rhetoric, demagoguery, and hysteria that took over this country after September 11, 2001 is not only well-documented in case after case of vandalism, threats, physical assaults, terror alerts, and other acts of mindless hysteria, it has never stopped. It is still going on today and is playing a major role in the presidential campaign -- Obama is a Muslim! His middle name is Hussein! For Mr. Kristol to say that there was no "Islamophoba or xenophobia" is pretty much the same as saying that there was no popular hysteria or scapegoating of the Japanese after Pearl Harbor.

The political rhetoric of the McCain campaign has loosed the rabid hounds:


The Right Wing Smear Machine going after ACORN has led to very predictable violence. David Neiwert:

John McCain has played a leading role in whipping up this frenzy of hatred. In Wednesday's debate, he charged:

We need to know the full extent of Sen. Obama's relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.

This is consistent with the hateful language being spewed from the right by the likes of Lou Dobbs, who has taken to routinely characterizing ACORN as a "radical left-wing activist group" as well as "a Democratic Party adjunct".

In fact, the hysteria's being generated across a broad spectrum of the Right, from Outer Malkinite Wingnuttia to Inside Beltway Villagers, from McCain and Palin to the frothiest freepers.

And we can see what's coming, too: We're being set up for a running yammer from the right after Obama wins questioning his legitimacy because of a supposedly "tainted" vote. Conspiracy theories and talking points from the right will circulate, driving up the temperature and feeding the right-wing populist frenzy.

Neiwert points out why this hateful focus on ACORN:

Sometimes you have to wonder what Republicans have against democracy.

Because that's what this whole "voter fraud" foofara is about. John McCain and Sarah Palin and Lou Dobbs and the rest of the right-wing torch brigade that have been after ACORN and the Ohio Secretary of State aren't concerned about protecting people's right to vote -- and in fact, their efforts largely go toward directly stripping citizens of their legitimate voting rights.

Glenn Greenwald discusses Colin Powell's disappointment over John McCain's demonizing Muslims and makes this observation:

A major enabling factor in convincing the population to support unnecessary and brutal wars -- and to perceive the "need" for endless expansions of federal surveillance and other police powers -- is the demonization of large groups of people both inside and out of the country. The Right's ongoing, intense obsession with demonizing Muslims and Arabs is, for that reason, not only repulsive but also quite destructive. The core of the Republican Party has degenerated into the unrestrained id of its worst impulses, and it was good to see Powell specifically cite (and condemn) those elements as a principal reason why he is turning away from the party he has served for so long, and instead supporting the Democratic nominee.

Via Morse of the Media Needle:


Remembering the good old days of McCarthyism, Rep. Michele Bachmann:

In a television appearance that outraged Democrats are already describing as Joseph McCarthy politics, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann claimed on Friday that Barack Obama and his wife Michelle held anti-American views and couldn't be trusted in the White House. She even called for the major newspapers of the country to investigate other members of Congress to "find out if they are pro-America or anti-America."

Appearing on MSNBC's Hardball, Bachmann went well off the reservation when it comes to leveling political charges against the Democratic nominee.

Take hip-waders to the polls, but vote. Vote as if your life depended on it!

Update: A horrific example of voter intimidation.

So now there's an angry Christian pastor

Who is connected to Barack Obama.... does that finally shoot the moronic rumor about Obama's secret Muslim past in the foot?

Or will he now be called an angry Sorta-Christian Islamomuslim terrorist wannabe presidential candidate?

August Pollak has the answer.

There's a really good acreage out in Owen's Valley in California

They used to call it Manzanar, the Japanese internment camp during WWII. Because it looks like that's where we're headed:

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- The Los Angeles Police Department announced a mapping program used by its anti-terrorism bureau to identity likely terrorist breeding grounds in Muslim areas.

Michael P. Downing, a deputy Los Angeles police chief, detailed a joint program with the University of Southern California to compile mapping data demarcating Muslim areas deemed "at-risk communities," the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.

"We are looking for communities and enclaves based on risk factors that are likely to become isolated," Downing said.

Civil liberties and Muslim groups decried the project saying it is "nothing short of racial profiling."

"When the starting point for a police investigation is 'let's look at all Muslims,' we are going down a dangerous road," said Peter Bibring, a lawyer with the ACLU of Southern California, in an interview with The New York Times.

Hussam Ayloush, the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Los Angeles, said the project "turns the LAPD officers into religious political analysts, while their role is to fight crime and enforce the laws."

Downing said the Muslim Public Affairs Council accepted the program "in concept."

"We will work with the LAPD and give them input, while at the same time making sure that people's civil liberties are protected," Salam Al-Marayati, the group's director, said in the Los Angeles Times.

Or maybe we should make every Muslim wear a red crescent on their clothes.

Does anybody else get this weird deja vu feeling? Is this what we get to do because our preznit was a failure in college? Repeat every fucking bad idea through history just because he wasn't paying attention in class?

I have an idea, instead of making our own citizens hostile, hurt and disassociated from the larger community, how about we educate everyone on different religions? How about we have a Muslim open Congress with a prayer? How about we learn how tolerance and understanding lets disparate communities and religions live together in peace?

Then how about we address the real problems that create terrorism in the first place? How about we take a look at WHY people think it's a good idea to bomb a federal building in Kansas or send bombs through the mail to scientists or go on a shooting rampage on the east coast? Timothy James McVeigh, Dr. Theodore John Kaczynski, and John Allen Muhammad all had completely different reasons for the horror they worked to produce. The Muslim community on the whole is pacifistic, as is the Christian community. Should we infiltrate the enclaves of fundamentalist Christians because of the bizarre rantings of Pat Robertson?

Find disaffected youth willing to cause harm, find hate-filled diatribes against the Constitution and the American way of life, and you will pretty much need to go to every part and every section of society in this country. The forementioned terrorists were all educated, and two were white, two were ex-military, all three were male.

Hmmmm. Maybe we need to profile every single male in this country. Starting with the twit in the White House....

Representative Sali suddenly realizes he has cooties

Because a Hindu was allowed to pray aloud on the floor of the House and we have an actual breathing Muslim member of Congress. Who has been there since this session started. Which was in January. Of this year. Not too quick off the mark is he?

PZ Myers:

Last month, the U.S. Senate was opened for the first time ever with a Hindu prayer. Although the event generated little outrage on Capitol Hill, Representative Bill Sali (R-Idaho) is one member of Congress who believes the prayer should have never been allowed.

"We have not only a Hindu prayer being offered in the Senate, we have a Muslim member of the House of Representatives now, Keith Ellison from Minnesota. Those are changes -- and they are not what was envisioned by the Founding Fathers," asserts Sali.

Sali says America was built on Christian principles that were derived from scripture. He also says the only way the United States has been allowed to exist in a world that is so hostile to Christian principles is through "the protective hand of God."

Maha of Mahablog:

In fact, one of the Founders did speak to this. Thomas Jefferson wrote about this in his autobiography, discussing the adoption of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom:

The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason & right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that it’s protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion.” The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.

Seems pretty clear to me. It’s a shame we elect people like Bill Sali who doesn’t share America’s true founding values, huh?

David Neiwert of Orcinus:

But what we do know about them is that they believed in the freedom of religion. It's one of America's true founding values. See, e.g., the First Amendment.

If you talk to most Christians, actually, they get this. They understand that the freedom of religion -- the absolute freedom to find and practice any belief system you like, whether it's Abyssynian fire worship or atheism -- is what keeps us all together as Americans. It's our national glue. That's because it prevents any one belief system from imposing its values on any of the others. It implies an automatic respect for others' private religious beliefs.

This is true of a number of fairly conservative belief systems, including Mormonism (see the onrunning battle within the Republican religious right over Mitt Romney's candidacy), Catholicism (which has a long history of facing outrageous discrimination and demonization in America, e.g., the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s), and, for that matter, Islam, which behaviorally speaking is generally quite conservative, especially by Western standards.

People who come from these faiths instinctively understand that what enables them to practice their faiths as they wish is the freedom of religion. And Keith Ellison's presence in the House, and the saying of a Hindu prayer in the Senate, are crystalline examples of that freedom in action.

No one can say whether the Founding Fathers could have envisioned a day when international trade and communication were daily commonplaces in American lives; when immigrants would come to our shores from around the globe, bringing with them not just industry and creativity but also their various religious beliefs; when Muslims would become Americans and Americans Muslims. But that day certainly has come to pass. And in a competitive global economy fueled by the high technology we produce, we are the better for it.

Moreover, it's important to understand that Sali's words amount to hatemongering: He is arguing that Muslims do not belong in American society. This kind of exclusionism is not just profoundly antidemocratic, it's incredibly counterproductive in the 21st century.

Nor can Sali say legitimately that Muslims do not deserve representation on the floor of Congress. By definition in our democracy, Muslims have earned representation in the House by electing one of their own there.

Sali also clearly suggests that allowing Muslims to say prayers in Congress would at best alienate what he thinks is the Christian God, and at worst perhaps bring down His wrath on them. If that isn't an argument for excluding them, I don't know what it is.

Pastordan of Street Prophets has the last word:

Amidst the obvious intolerant jackass fireworks, Sali's use of scripture is easy to skip over. But the Matthew text he cites is not to be missed:

‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Wouldn't this say, you know, the exact opposite of what Sali intended?

Little wonder then that Right Wing Watch follows up the blockquote with this summary:

Sali, with the backing of the Club for Growth and a following of social conservatives, won a divisive Republican primary in his GOP district last year, despite warnings from fellow Republicans that Sali was “an absolute idiot.”

Sounds about right to me.

Amen!

Convert or Die!

I believe this game being sent to our soldiers in Iraq will not really send the wrong message to those who we are attempting to subjugate: (via Hecate)

The United States Pentagon has endorsed sending a Christian supremacist religious warfare video game to United States troops in Iraq, a predominantly Muslim nation.

Osama Bin Laden himself could hardly hardly have hatched a better plot to incite widespread war between Christianity and Islam, and the Pentagon's endorsement of "Operation Straight Up" and that ministry's plan to bring the bigoted, hateful religious ideology inherent to Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins' "Left Behind" book series to American troops in the front lines casts into question the basic competence, not to mention the sanity, of every Pentagon official involved in the decision to endorse such mind boggling idiocy. Once again: "Left Behind: Eternal Forces", a game depicting fundamentalist Christians religious warfare will be distributed to US troops. Courtesy of the PENTAGON. Here's Max Blumenthal, for the Nation:

As an official arm of the Defense Department's America Supports You program, OSU plans to mail copies of the controversial apocalyptic video game, Left Behind: Eternal Forces to soldiers serving in Iraq. OSU is also scheduled to embark on a "Military Crusade in Iraq" in the near future.

"We feel the forces of heaven have encouraged us to perform multiple crusades that will sweep through this war torn region," OSU declares on its website about its planned trip to Iraq. "We'll hold the only religious crusade of its size in the dangerous land of Iraq."

*********

Now, American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan will be able to unwind by playing out a sanitized version of what in reality may the most savage type of war humans wage.

So nice to see we really have a deft touch with diplomacy and tolerance for other religions ...

Somebody needs to send Georgie a memo

Because we've known this for a while now: (my bold)

WASHINGTON — Suicide bombers in Iraq are overwhelmingly foreigners bent on destabilizing the government and undermining American interests there, two independent studies have concluded.

The studies report that the number of suicide bombings in Iraq has now surpassed those conducted worldwide since the early 1980s. The findings suggest that extremists from throughout the region and around the world are fueling Iraq's violence.

"The war on terrorism — and certainly the war in Iraq — has failed in decreasing the number of suicide attacks and has really radicalized the Muslim world to create this concept of martyrs without borders," said Mohammed Hafez, a visiting professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City and the author of one of the two studies.