Day: July 13, 2012

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Featured

Man Gets 15 Years In Prison For Plotting To Kill Obama

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama (AP) – An Uzbek man was sentenced Friday to more than 15 years in U.S. prison for plotting to kill President Obama.

Ulugbek Kodirov, 22, had faced up to 30 years in prison.

Defense attorney Lance Bell argued that Kodirov had accepted responsibility for his actions and was trying to straighten out his life. He said Kodirov wasn’t a “big, bad terrorist.”

“I’m not calling him a victim, but he’s a victim to a degree of social media,” Bell said.

Kodirov pleaded guilty in February to threatening to kill Obama, providing material support to terrorism and unlawfully possessing a firearm. He said he came up with the plan to kill the president as he campaigned for re-election after communicating online with a man he believed to be a member of an Uzbek Islamic group the United States classifies as a terrorist organization.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Whisonant said Kodirov would have tried to kill Obama, and a foreign group would have taken credit, if he had not been arrested a year ago.

“This case is an example of how our youth can be radicalized by the propaganda and lies on the Internet,” Whisonant told the judge.

With limited proficiency in English, Kodirov worked seven days a week in a kiosk at a shopping mall in Alabama before his arrest, the defense said.

A complaint said Kodirov contacted an unidentified person trying to buy weapons in early July 2011, and that person became a confidential source for the government. Accompanied by the witness, Kodirov bought an automatic rifle from an undercover agent and made a final threat against the president, authorities said. The agent also gave Kodirov four hand grenades with the powder removed.

Authorities said Kodirov was in the country illegally because he obtained a student visa but never enrolled in school. He faces deportation after his release from prison.

Categories
Politics

Scott Brown – “Oil Companies Don’t Get Subsidies…I’m Positive”

Freshman Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA), notorious for his close ties to the Koch brothers, doesn’t believe that oil companies get subsidies. Walking in an Independence Day parade in Plymouth, MA, the senator declared his allegiance to the oil industry, which receives $7 billion in subsidies a year:

 BROWN: Oil companies don’t get subsidies. . . . I’m positive. They’re able to take deduction like every other business. If we’re going to reform the tax code, we should do that.

Refresher: Here are CEO’s of Oil Companies, admitting to Congress that they do get oil subsidies from the American government. Although they claim they don’t need these subsidies.

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Dick Cheney Mitt Romney Politics Terrorism

Dick Cheney Says Mitt Romney Is The “Only” Candidate To Trust On Foreign Policy

Mitt Romney – the man whose only foreign experience has to do with his offshore bank accounts betting against the United States dollar and his marvelous ability to ship American jobs overseas – got the seal of approval from Dick Cheney as America’s only hope to deal with foreign crisis.

This approval, coming from the same Dick Cheney who was part of the Bush Administration that allowed the biggest terrorist activity on American soil and who plunged America into debt by starting a trillion dollar war with a country on the guise of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

David Edwards writes: During a Wyoming fundraiser, the former vice president said that his experience in Washington taught him that every president would have to deal with an international crisis that could mean sending U.S. forces into harm’s way.

“When I think about the kind of individual I want in the Oval Office in that moment of crisis, who has to make those key decisions, some of them life-and-death decisions, some of them decisions as commander-in-chief, who has the responsibility for sending some of our young men and women into harm’s way, that man is Mitt Romney,” Cheney said, according to The Associated Press.

For his part, Romney called Cheney a “great American leader,” but avoided mentioning to former President George W. Bush until a question-and-answer session when he contrasted President Barack Obama’s policies with Bush’s “freedom agenda.”

While Cheney has not been a vocal presence during the 2012 campaign season, he may have good reason to trust that Romney will be hawkish on foreign policy.

“Of Romney’s forty identified foreign policy advisers, more than 70 percent worked for Bush,” The Nation’s Ari Berman pointed out in May. “Many hail from the neoconservative wing of the party, were enthusiastic backers of the Iraq War and are proponents of a US or Israeli attack on Iran.”

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