Current Events and the Psychology of Politics
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Archive for October, 2010

Oct 31st, 2010

Summary: At least 58 Iraqi Catholics died and more than 70 were wounded when police stormed a Baghdad church where gunmen were holding dozens of parishioners hostage, threatening to kill them if al-Qaida-prisoners were not released. Since the war began, Iraq has lost half of its 1.5 million Christians. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on October 31, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that Microsoft Network (MSN.com), promoting its new Bing! search engine, featured a demo search of “angry Americans.” It caught my attention, because history has shown that times of economic uncertainty — as we’re currently experiencing while bogged down in two wars in the aftermath of 9/11 — can be a fertile breeding ground for extremist ideologies, as we saw in Germany during the Great Depression following a humiliating defeat in World War I.



Summary: Investigators believe the same al-Qaida-affiliated group responsible for the Christmas Day underwear bomb were behind the PETN-based devices hidden in packages sent from Yemen. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on October 30, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, on her first official visit to Pakistan, faced sharp rebukes from Pakistani audiences brimming with resentment toward U.S. foreign policy, including one woman who accused the U.S. of conducting “executions without trial” in aerial drone strikes, equating it to terrorism.


Oct 29th, 2010

Summary: Election Day 2010 will test the mettle of every Minnesotan tired of business as usual: Will we have the courage of our conviction to vote for the moderate in the middle, or will we fall back into the tired old pattern of voting our fear by casting a ballot for “the lesser of two evils” on the far left or the extreme right? Vote Tom Horner for Governor of Minnesota. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on October 29, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that the New York Times published a poorly researched, superficial, misleading, mostly puff piece on U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, titled “A G.O.P. agitator not named Palin.”


Oct 28th, 2010

Summary: Weekly report of U.S. military deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, compiled from U.S. Department of Defense news releases. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on October 28, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that Taliban militants wearing suicide vests and armed with assault rifles and grenades attacked a residential hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan, killing five U.N. staff members, including an American. Meanwhile, a car bomb coinciding with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s first official visit to Pakistan struck a busy market in Peshawar, killing 100 people, mostly women and children.


Oct 27th, 2010

Summary: Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden threatens in a new audiotape to kill French citizens to avenge France’s support for the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan and a new law that will ban face-covering Muslim veils. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on October 27, 2009, Aubrey Immelman provided his weekly report of U.S. military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.


Oct 26th, 2010

Summary: Minnesota 6th Congressional District (MN-06) voters have two fiscally conservative options on the Nov. 2, 2010 general election ballot as sane, rational alternatives to the paranoid extremist neocon Michele Bachmann — Independence Party nominee Bob Anderson and unaffiliated, independent conservative Aubrey Immelman. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on October 26, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that two helicopter crashes killed 14 Americans in Afghanistan — 11 troops and three drug enforcement agents — in the deadliest day for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan in more than four years.


Oct 25th, 2010

Summary: Amid fears its nuclear enrichment activities are aimed at developing nuclear weapons, Iran has begun loading fuel into the core of its Bushehr nuclear power plant, built with the help of Russia. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on October 25, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that two powerful car bombs exploded outside the Justice Ministry and city government offices in downtown Baghdad, killing 155 and wounding at least 500 in Iraq’s worst mass-casualty bombing in more than two years.


Oct 24th, 2010

Summary: Tom Horner is receiving endorsements from all of the major newspapers in Minnesota, including the Star Tribune, the Duluth News Tribune, and the St. Cloud Times, and from many smaller local papers across the state. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on October 24, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that the White House forcefully rejected criticism by former Vice President Dick Cheney that President Barack Obama was “waffling” and “dithering” on his Afghanistan war strategy.


Oct 23rd, 2010

Summary: The real problem with Michele Bachmann is not her self-centeredness, her unresponsiveness to the needs of her constituents, her meager legislative accomplishments, or even her voting record; it’s her delusion-like paranoia, her shameless conspiracy-peddling, and her incessant fear-mongering. Now it has been revealed that Bachmann’s contact with reality is even more tenuous than previously thought, with the discovery that Bachmann had asked the Minnesota Secretary of State to remove her name from the publicly available voter registration records under a legal provision designed to protect past or potential victims of domestic abuse. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on October 23, 2009, Aubrey Immelman, in a public service announcement, provided information about the upcoming 2009 St. Cloud-area Veterans Day Parade.



Summary: Today marks the 21st anniversary of Jacob Wetterling’s abduction on October 22, 1989 in St. Joseph, Minn. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on October 22, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported on the 20th anniversary of Jacob Wetterling’s abduction in St. Joseph, Minn.