Different Day, Same Shit.

The above video (sadly dead as of 2014) serves as a recap of the events surrounding the five-hour attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Criticisms surrounding the attack included the claimed lack of sufficient security at the compound, as well as why additional Army forces were nowhere to be found when the consulate needed help most.* Some claimed that not only did the White House delay their response to the attack, officials also seemed reluctant to immediately pin responsibility on the usual suspect in the region (Al Qaeda). Republicans attempted to parlay these criticisms into a scandal that would hopefully leave the Obama administration tarred and feathered.

This was supposed to be an impeachable moment for the president. In Benghazi, the GOP saw Barack Obama finally meeting his very own Watergate or better still, Iran Hostage Crisis. So far, that seems about as likely as New Coke being reintroduced on the soft drink market. So Republicans simply changed targets - instead of striking at a lame duck with a seemingly unimpeachable image, they're focused on scuttling Hillary Clinton's possible 2016 presidential candidacy, notably by returning a favor:

The brief period of bipartisan peace initiated by 9/11 ended for good in May 2002. CBS News reported that the president had received an intelligence briefing in early Aug. 2001 that "specifically alerted him of a possible airliner attack in the US."

Th CBS report left much open to question, but that mattered little to Democratic leaders in Congress. They saw an opportunity to attack the president's strong suit--his leadership in the war on terrorism.

The Democrat who most aroused the ire of the White House was Hillary Clinton. She declared, "Bush had been informed last year, before 9/11, of a possible al Qaeda plot to hijack a US airliner." She held up a newspaper headline, "BUSH KNEW." "The president knew what?" Clinton asked.

To the White House, Clinton's remarks seemed calculated to manipulate the narrative concerning who should be blamed for 9/11, trying to shield the legacy of her husband's presidency by shifting blame for overlooking available intelligence away from him & onto his successor.

GOP talking heads suggest that the president had prior knowledge of an impending attack and, for whatever reason, decided to sit on that intel and let the chips fall where they did. Of course, few people asked the magic question: exactly how would the Obama administration profit by allowing such an attack to happen? Even the talking heads over at Fox & Friends are backing away from the conspiratorial mayhem surrounding Benghazi:

On Monday, the morning show hosted cable news all-star Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), for his latest in a long string of attempts to prove that the U.S. government engaged in a massive cover-up of the September 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya. Although hosts Gretchen Carlson, Steve Doocy, and Brian Kilmeade are normally happy to promote a good conspiracy theory — for example, they recently seriously questioned whether or not NBC is replacing Jay Leno on The Tonight Show because he made a joke about President Obama — even they’re fed up with Chaffetz’s unsupported claims that “we were certainly misled every step of the way.”

“Are you saying that admirals Pickering and Mullen are complicit because they did the review board?” Kilmeade asked of Chaffetz’s suggestion that the government manipulated the findings of the Accountability Review Board report on the attack. “Are you saying that the CIA is complicit because they allowed their talking points to be edited?”

“What were they trying to cover up?” Doocy asked.

“You had the former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta — who was revered by both sides of the fence — coming out and saying, ‘Hey, we couldn’t have gotten anybody there.’ So you have him on the line. You have former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, President Obama, Admiral Mullen. Would all of these people go to bat just to get President Obama re-elected?” Carlson asked.

- Muammar Gaddafi is dead, after being wounded and captured by Libyan rebels in his hometown of Sirte.

A spokesman for the National Transitional Council (NTC) in Benghazi, Jalal al-Galal, said a doctor who examined the fallen strongman in Misrata found he had been shot in the head and abdomen. Jerky video obtained from Sirte showed a man looking like Gaddafi, with distinctive long, curly hair, bloodied and staggering under blows from armed men, apparently NTC fighters.

The brief footage shows him being hauled by his hair from the hood of a truck. To the shouts of someone saying "Keep him alive", he disappears from view and gunshots are heard.

"They captured him alive and while he was being taken away, they beat him and then they killed him," one senior source in the NTC told Reuters. "He might have been resisting."

- If you plan on attending an Occupy Wall Street protest, you might want to find out if it'll get you canned from your day job. Because that's what happened to Lisa Simeone, producer and host of NPR's "World of Opera" after attending an "occupation" at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C.

That same day, NPR persuaded a company for which Simeone worked to fire her, cutting her income in half and purging from the so-called public airwaves a voice that had never mentioned politics on NPR.

About three and a half hours after the above email was sent, Simeone had been fired by a show called Soundprint as punishment for having been "unethical." Here is her bio on that show's website. And here she is on NPR's.

Soundprint is a show that does touch on politics and includes political viewpoint in Simeone's ledes, but it is not an NPR program and not distributed by NPR. It is, however, heard on public radio stations. Despite the title "NPR World of Opera," that show is produced by a small station called WDAV for which Simeone contracts. Simeone was not an NPR employee. WDAV has not expressed any concern over Simeone's "ethics."

Simeone told me: "I find it puzzling that NPR objects to my exercising my rights as an American citizen -- the right to free speech, the right to peaceable assembly -- on my own time in my own life. I'm not an NPR employee. I'm a freelancer. NPR doesn't pay me. I'm also not a news reporter. I don't cover politics. I've never brought a whiff of my political activities into the work I've done for NPR World of Opera. What is NPR afraid I'll do -- insert a seditious comment into a synopsis of Madame Butterfly?

It makes you wonder why NPR would take such drastic steps to have a freelancer on a show that was merely broadcast on some of NPR's affiliate stations given the boot just hours after she attended the protest. The whole thing reeks of an over-reactive legal department -- or someone who had a grudge and found the perfect excuse to give her the boot.

NPR hasn't done much, if anything at all, to cover OWS. It seems NPR feels more comfortable staying in the good graces of corporate donorship than covering one of the most important and game-changing events in the history of the United States.

BTW, when conservatives parrot claims of how "50% of Americans don't pay taxes," remember that those claims are just that. Over 86% of Americans pay their taxes, a damn sight better than what the Wall Street boys are doing.

Next time you decide to send a care package to the troops stuck in a remote Afghan outpost, try sending them stuff that's actually worth using (i.e. toiletries, snacks, etc).

The last thing they need is political proselytization via conservative blowhard, in hardback form. But at least it's good for heating fuel.

Hat tips to Everqueer and Military.com.

Courtesy of the Sydney Morning Herald:

Four hundred people have been killed and 2,000 wounded in three days of fighting between rebels and forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi in the Libyan capital Tripoli, the head of the rebel council said on Wednesday. 

Mustafa Abdel Jalil, chairman of the National Transitional Council, told France-24 television that some 600 pro-Gaddafi fighters had been captured but the battle would not be over until the Libyan leader himself was a prisoner. 

"According to our information, the number of those killed during the operation which has lasted three days is just over 400, with 2,000 wounded," he said, without specifying if he was talking of both sides. 

"We captured up to 600 Gaddafi soldiers," he added. Jalil said he thought that Gaddafi himself had fled Tripoli, saying he was not brave enough to stay and fight, but "God alone" knew where he was. "I hope that he will be captured alive and tried so the world can know about his crimes," he added.

There are rumors flying around that Gaddafi's taking the very last nap he'll ever take, but nothing substantial. Other reports state he's beat a hasty retreat to Algeria.