Learning about different cultures is an interesting experience. Just today I was telling my wife how I found salgados - the tasty treats Brazilians snack on in the hours before and after their big lunches - to be terrific and something that the U.S. didn’t really have.
A police officer involved in the fatal shooting of an innocent Brazilian man in London last year has been selected for promotion to one of the most senior policing jobs in the city.
Cressida Dick was in charge of the operation that led to Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, being shot seven times in the head on the underground after he was mistaken for a suspected suicide bomber.
Campaigners representing the family of de Menezes have previously said they wanted officers involved in the case, along with London’s police chief Ian Blair, to face action.
Blair himself was part of the five-strong panel that decided to promote Dick.
I’m not sure if Dick would have gotten the promotion had de Menzes been an actual terrorist, or if the promotion was given due to the possibility that it was payback for Brazil’s thwarting of England in the 2002 World Cup. Different cultures, you know?
Still, it would be strongly advised for any and all Brazilians in the London area to avoid any law enforcement types showing any signs of ambition.
As Democrats stand shattered like deer in the headlights immobilized whenever the silly line “soft on terrorism” is bandied about, some old-school conservatives have started to make their case - George W. Bush and his neo-con dream team are not one of them.
Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham cornered their partner, Senator John W. Warner, on the Senate floor late Wednesday afternoon.
Mr. Warner, the courtly Virginian who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, had been trying for weeks to quietly work out the three Republicans’ differences with the Bush administration’s proposal to bring terrorism suspects to trial. But Senators McCain, of Arizona, and Graham, of South Carolina, who are on the committee with Mr. Warner, convinced him that the time for negotiation was over.
The three senators, all military veterans, marched off to an impromptu news conference to lay out their deep objections to the Bush legislation. Mr. Warner then personally broke the news to Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, and the next day the Armed Services Committee voted to approve a firm legislative rebuke to the president’s plan to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions.
It was a stinging defeat for the White House, not least because the views of Mr. Warner, a former Navy secretary, carry particular weight.
This is great news for the many Americans worried that Bush would ram through two bills — Bush’s plan to reinterpret the Geneva Convention and Arlen Specter’s FISA bill — that would both give him unprecedented power, as well as further diminish the U.S.’s reputation both home and abroad.
“There are three branches of government, not one,” said Graham.
Earlier in the day, Joe Scarborough jumped into the fray, and, no matter how much it obviously pained him, came to the realization that a House divided is most likely what is necessary for the U.S. Congress, as spending under the current Republican regime has made Bill Clinton look like George Costanza.
When The Washington Monthly reached me at my office recently, a voice on the other side of the line meekly asked if I would ever consider writing an article supporting the radical proposition that Republicans should get their brains beaten in this fall.
“Count me in!” was my chipper response. I also seem to remember muttering something about preferring an assortment of Bourbon Street hookers running the Southern Baptist Convention to having this lot of Republicans controlling America’s checkbook for the next two years.
Democrats should well take a lesson from these two separate items: when you believe in something and/or were voted in for those beliefs, then have the balls to stand up for them. Listen to the will of the people.
[TV Presenter:] Hello boys and girls
Today we’re gonna talk about President and media relationships
Do you have a Georgie?
I’ll bet you do
[Door opens] who’s your Georgie?
[Cheney:] Georgie, what’re you doing?
[Beat starts]
[Georgie:] Haha
[Georgie & Cheney:] Ok then! everybody, listen up!
[Georgie:] I’m goin to hell, who’s comin’ with me?
[Cheney:] Somebody, please help him!
[giggle]
i think Georgie’s gone crazy!
[Verse #1:]
There’s no mountain i can’t climb
There’s no power too high,
No law I won’t learn how to defy
What do i gotta do to get through to you, to show you
There’s no Islamofascist I won’t take this chainsaw to
[Rove Makes Chainsaw Sound]
Fuckin’ U.S. brawn got Saddam’s balls
I cut ‘em off, i got ‘em pickled and bronzed in Reagan’s jelly bean jar
Inside of a hall, with my framed autographed,
Sunglasses with John Kerry’s name, on my drag wall
I’m out the closet, i been lying my ass off
All this time, me and Osama been fucking with hats off
[Osama:] Suck it Georgie
[Eminem:]
So tell the David Gregory and the rest to back off
Before i push this motherfucking button and blast off
And launch one of these newculears, and that’s all
[Rove Makes Explosion Sound]
Blow every fucking thing, except afghanistan on the map, off
When will it stop? When will I knock the crap off?
[Knocking] Cheney, tell ‘em baby
[Cheney:] Georgie has lost it
[Georgie:] There’s really nothin’ else to say, I… I can’t explain it
[Cheney:] I think Georgie’s gone crazy
[Georgie:] A little help from Dick Cheney, won’t you tell ‘em baby
[Cheney:] I think Georgie’s gone crazy
[Georgie:] There’s nothin’ you could do or say that could ever change me
[Cheney:] I think Georgie’s gone crazy
[Georgie:] There’s no one on earth that can save me, not even Cheney
[Cheney:] I think Georgie’s gone crazy
It’s like the liberals always told me
[Georgie Impersonates Liberals]
Rana Rana Rana Rana Rana Rana Rana Rana Rana Rana,
and liberty and goddamit, you little motherfuckers
If you aint got nothin’ nice to say then don’t say nothin’
[Cheney:] Uh, George
[Georgie:] There’s really nothin’ else to say, I… I can’t explain it
[Cheney:] I think Georgie’s gone crazy
[Georgie:] A little help from Dick Cheney, won’t you tell ‘em baby
[Cheney:] I think Georgie’s gone crazy
[Georgie:] There’s nothin’ you could do or say that could ever change me
[Cheney:] I think Georgie’s gone crazy
[Georgie:] There’s no one on earth that can save me, not even Cheney
[Cheney:] I think Georgie’s gone crazy
[Verse #3:]
My speeches can make you cry, take you by surprise
And at the same time, make scratch your head after the same lies
See what you’re seeing is Karl Rove at work
Which to him isn’t work, so it’s easy to misinterpret it at first,
Cuz when i speak, it’s to tell you it’s bleak
I’d yank my fuckin teeth before id ever bite my tongue
I’d raise taxes, and give gay’s rights twice at once
And die and come back as Al Gore’s son
And walk around the rest of my life spit on
And kicked and hit with shit, every time i spoke
And that’s pretty much the gist of it, liberals are pissed, but my base love
it
[Georgie:] There’s really nothin’ else to say, I… I can’t explain it
[Cheney:] I think Georgie’s gone crazy
[Georgie:]
A little help from Dick Cheney, won’t you tell ‘em baby
[Cheney:] I think Georgie’s gone crazy
[Georgie:] There’s nothin’ you could do or say that could ever change me
[Cheney:] I think Georgie’s gone crazy
[Georgie:] There’s no one on earth that can save me, not even Cheney
“We truly believe math can prove anything, and that as long as we stay in Iraq, our need for better mathematicians will continue to grow,” said the spokesman. “And everyone knows that U.S. mathematicians are 123rd best in the world.”
Later today or early tomorrow, bill H.T. 1721 is likely to pass along party lines. The bill will permanently change the meanings of the words “erroneous” and “misleading” to “true” and “Islamofascism.”
Quiting isn’t enough. Suicide is truly the only honorable way out now. Sorry, it’s just how it is. If you really wanted to be a whore that desperately, you knew how to get to downtown.
What have the graduate schools of education ever contirbuted to the learning of America’s children? Do we really need “innovative” or “cutting edge” techniques to teach that which has been successfully passed from generation to generation for millenia? Why has per capita spending on public education nearly doubled in real dollars, while achievement has been tanking?
Sept. 10, 2001: Thousands of conspiracy nuts, praying they could find some minute, undiscovered detail in a NASA moon-landing picture, spent most nights crying themselves to sleep. Their future looked bleak.
Sept. 11, 2001: Before the second tower hit the ground, the first Sept. 11 conspiracy theory was born, and thousands of unemployed guys living in their parents’ basements suddenly had a reason to live again. And make some money while they were at it.
Bush wants Congress to support new legislation the White House drafted for prosecuting suspected terrorists for war crimes. A new plan was needed after the Supreme Court ruled in June that an earlier plan violated U.S. and international law.
Translation: The President has, and continues to break the law in this case, one of several laws he’s broken as President. Now, he again needs to change the law.
The president’s new plan for trying detainees would authorize the defense secretary to convene military tribunals to prosecute terrorism suspects and omit rights common in military and civil courts, such as the defendant’s right to access all evidence and a ban on coerced testimony.
This is basically the “guilty until we prove you guiltier, even if it requires torture” plan.
Gulags, torture, eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without warrants or any oversight whatsoever, and then changing laws to make them fit your illegal actions after the facts.
Is this the U.S. we were taught to be so proud of?
Fahrenhiet 9/11: Disney refuses to distribute in movie theaters.
Path to 9/11: Disney hosts on free TV, with no commercials, and appears to be including a speech by George W. Bush in the middle of it.
