Wor At Home

Two of the most popular liberal news sites are calling for violence against Republicans for obstructing the radical agenda of President Barack Obama.
CNN and Huffington Post have each published op-eds this past week by regular contributors with headlines that explicitly call for Obama to use violent gangland tactics against his political opponents.

CNN published a column by Roland Martin on February 11 with the headline, Time for Obama to go ‘gangsta’ on GOP.

Martin concluded the article with a plea for Obama to emulate the violent tactics of the Prohibition-era Chicago mob boss Al Capone.

The Huffington Post followed-up with their own call for gangland violence against Republicans with the publication on February 14 of a column  by David Bourgeois with the title, Obama Better Start Breaking Kneecaps.

Bourgeois concludes his article with this call for gangland violence.

Huffington Post publisher Arianna Huffington recently excoriated Fox News chief Roger Ailes for allegedly provocative rhetoric by Fox host Glenn Beck.

    HUFFINGTON: Well, Roger, it’s not a question of picking a fight. And aren’t you concerned about the language that Glenn Beck is using, which is, after all, inciting the American people? There is a lot of suffering out there, as you know, and when he talks about people being slaughtered, about who is going to be the next in the killing spree…

    …It’s not about the word police. It’s about something deeper. It’s about the fact that there is a tradition as the historian Richard Hofstetter said, in American politics, of the paranoid style. And the paranoid style is dangerous when there is real pain out there.

Ailes defended Beck, saying he was accurately talking about the governments of Hitler and Stalin.

Violent rhetoric such as that espoused by CNN and the Huffington Post is usually found in the bowels of Internet discussion forums, not as sanctioned op-ed headlines on news sites with White House press passes.
CNN and Huffington Post would be well-advised to retract the calls to violence and issue apologies to Republicans before Obama supporters are incited by their violent rhetoric and start going gangsta and break kneecaps of Republicans.
If they won’t do that of their own volition, then White House press secretary Robert Gibbs should shame them into doing so. Surely the Obama administration does not countenance violence against their domestic political opponents.

VIENNA – Russia joined the U.S. and France in urging Iran to stop enriching uranium to higher levels in a statement shared Tuesday with The Associated Press, suggesting the project reinforced suspicions that Tehran is seeking to make nuclear weapons.

Shrugging off international concerns, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced the country was moving ahead to expand its enrichment capacities by installing more advanced machinery at its main enrichment facility.
Ahmadinejad told reporters in Tehran the centrifuges are not yet operational but are five times more efficient than the model now in use at its Natanz enrichment plant.
Because enrichment can produce both nuclear weapons as well as reactor fuel, Iran is under three set of U.N. Security Council sanctions for refusing to stop its program. Its determination to expand such activities had been criticized worldwide even before an announcement earlier this month that Tehran would enrich to a higher level.
In a confidential letter to the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the three world powers questioned Tehran's assertion that it had started the higher enrichment project to provide fuel to a research reactor providing medical isotopes for cancer patients.
The one-page letter was significant in reflecting unified Russian and Western opposition to Iran's move. Russia in the past has often put the brakes on Western attempts to penalize Tehran for defying U.N. Security Council demands that it freeze its enrichment program, which can produce both nuclear fuel and the fissile core of warheads.
"If Iran goes ahead with this escalation, it would raise fresh concerns about Iran's nuclear intentions, in light of the fact that Iran cannot produced the needed nuclear fuel in time" to refuel the research reactor, said the letter.

Iran's decision to enrich to the 20-percent level is "wholly unjustified, contrary to U.N. Security Council resolutions and represent(s) a further step toward a capability to produce highly enriched uranium," said the letter to IAEA chief Yukiya Amano.
The 20-percent mark represents the threshold between low-enriched and high-enriched uranium.
Although warhead material must be enriched to a level of 90 percent or more, just getting its present stockpile to the 20 percent mark would be a major step for Iran's nuclear program. While enriching to 20 percent would take about one year, using up to 2,000 centrifuges at Tehran's underground Natanz facility, any next step — moving from 20 to 90 percent — would take only half a year and between 500-1,000 centrifuges.
Since its clandestine enrichment program became known eight years ago, Iran has insisted it is meant only to generate nuclear fuel. But its secrecy and refusal to cooperate with an IAEA probe of allegations that it experimented with aspects of a weapons program had increased fears about its nuclear ambitions even before President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Feb.7 announcement that Iran will raise the enrichment bar.