Some EPA drone nails ex-Rep. Giffords to a tree while blood and water pour from Dumbo's* side.

He's being replaced by Barabbas J. Zealot...

From The Lookout at Yahoo! News:

Official: EPA should 'crucify' polluters

 Al Armendariz, the Environmental Protection Agency official at the center of a budding scandal surrounding a 2010 video in which he said the EPA should "crucify" polluters, has resigned.

 Armendariz, head of the EPA's South and Southwest region in Dallas, sent a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson late Sunday informing her of his decision to step down.

"As I have expressed publicly, and to you directly, I regret comments I made several years ago that do not in any way reflect my work as regional administrator," he wrote. "As importantly, they do not represent the work you have overseen as E.P.A. administrator."

Samuel Coleman, who served as the EPA's senior federal official in New Orleans during the agency's response to Hurricane Katrina, will replace Armendariz as acting administrator.

Republicans, already critical of what they call the Obama administration's war on energy, seized upon the video when it surfaced last week, calling for Armendariz to resign.

According to the Associated Press, Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe led the charge, pointing to Armendariz's May 2010 speech as proof of the "EPA's assault on energy, particularly the technique of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking." 

Inhofe's office uploaded the clip, shown above, [Go search for it yourself, kiddies. I'm not in the mood. - F.G.] to YouTube.


Armendariz was appointed regional chief by President Barack Obama in 2009.

But "before SMU prof Al Armendariz had even warmed the seat at his post as EPA regional chief," Brant Hargrove wrote in the Dallas Observer, "he was pilloried as an activist whose research into the air pollution caused by fracking operations made him unfit to run a five-state office overseeing some of the industry's most important drilling grounds."

* Dumbo the Presiphant is an Asian presiphant, of course. An African presiphant would be racist.

Is Wanda Sykes doing "Killa O" jokes now?

The Atlantic Wire [via Yahoo! News] provides evidence that ol' jug-ears Okhrana has shored up his commie base and is now running to the right.

Ex-CIA interrogator: Obama's war on terror more brutal than Bush's

 The former head of the CIA's Clandestine Service Jose Rodriguez says President Obama is waging the nation's war against radical Islam in a far more brutal manner than his predecessor President George W. Bush.  

 "We don't capture anybody any more," Rodriguez told 60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl on Sunday. "Their default option of this Administration has been to ... take no prisoners ... How could it be more ethical to kill people rather than capture them? I never understood that one."  

 Those remarks by Rodriguez have been largely overshadowed by his more controversial defense of "enhanced interrogation techniques," which is laid out in his new book out today called Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives. But what was interesting to observe last night was the overlap in views by advocates of enhanced interrogation (a.k.a. torture) such as Rodriguez and opponents of such tactics, like your Glenn Greenwalds and Ron Pauls, who essentially agree on one important point: It's better to capture suspected terrorists and draw out information from them than assassinate them without due process.  

 The latest high-profile case to raise this issue was the assassination of American-born YouTube preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by Hellfire missiles fired from a drone in September. There wasn't a move to attempt to interview al-Awlaki, he was just blown to smithereens. And to many civil libertarians, that exercise of power against an American citizen is far more threatening than what we saw from the Bush administration. "How can anyone who vocally decried Bush’s mere eavesdropping and detention powers without judicial review possibly justify Obama’s executions without judicial review?" Greenwald wrote at the time. "How can the former (far more mild powers) have been such an assault on Everything We Stand For while the latter is a tolerable and acceptable assertion of war powers?" 

 It's a valid point and will likely continue to gain traction as Rodriguez launches his book tour. Clearly, however, it's not the focus of Rodriguez's spiel, which is a larger defense of enhanced interrogation. On that front, he's got more of an uphill battle. As Reuters reported Friday, Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats are about to end their almost three-year-long investigation of "enhanced interrogation" and will report that it had little success in eliciting intelligence. "One official said investigators found 'no evidence' such enhanced interrogations played 'any significant role' in the years-long intelligence operations which led to the discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden last May by U.S. Navy SEALs," reported Mark Hosenball. While that report doesn't bode well for Rodriguez's case, neither did his vague pronouncement that the enhanced interrogation "saved lives." With the lack of specifics in his 60 Minutes interview, supporters of torture had probably better hope there's more in his book to make the case.