I want to thank you directing the teachers at Wide Hollow Elementary to distribute the Child Evangelism Fellowship's flyers to their students during class time. I bet the kids are very excited about the Christian Bible classes the Fellowship is offering in the school library on Wednesdays. I know my grandson is. Maybe the other kids will stop calling him "Jewboy" now.
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Update: Via Duncan, I see that Ezra wonders why the Village isn't writing about the fact that the GOP front runner is a barking madman. I think it's simple. They don't think he is. They also don't think Ann Coulter is a shrieking lunatic or that Rush Limbaugh is a lying sack of offal or that one should find anything morally objectionable about torture or indefinite detention or invading countries on false pretenses. They believed for years that Tom Delay was a regular guy and that James Dobson is full of good ideas.
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Biden: “…And the irony is, Rudy Giuliani, probably the most under qualified person since George Bush to seek the presidency, is here - talking about any of the people here. Rudy Giuliani. I mean think about it, Rudy Giuliani, there’s only three things he mentions in a sentence — a noun and a verb and 9/11 and I mean, there’s nothing else. There’s nothing else.”
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But even as the specific event blurred into unspecific politics and symbolism over the years, it continued to affect individuals in concrete ways — ways that Fremont resident Hamid Sayadi claims he paid a price for.
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"Oh, NUMMI hires terrorists now?" was the sort of remark he says he heard commonly. His presence among co-workers invariably brought about mention of jihad or terrorism. One day, he was told by a superior that his lunchbox needed to be searched. When he asked why, he said he was led to believe he was considered a possible suicide bomber.
"I just opened the lunch box. I was dumbfounded. I was so shameful. I didn't know what to say. That was the point when I should have said something to the media — 'Look what happened to me.' But I was so ashamed. I thought, maybe he's right. I'm from (that region), I deserve this."
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What he first dismissed as ignorance gradually came to wear away at him. He grew depressed over what he describes as a barrage of insults. His son's art was removed from a wall where paintings and drawings from the children of other employees hung, he says. His tires were slashed one day. And, always, the insults.
Sayadi says he complained in writing to management, but that the only response was further humiliation. In one letter he still has, he took issue with a toilet-cleaning assignment he was given — retaliation for complaining, he says, and because someone from a "carpet-flying area" surely couldn't handle anything more complex. He came to internalize the contempt hurled at him.
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Whatever you’re hoping to accomplish, George — besides high oil prices — I don’t think you’re getting it.
Various branches of the United States armed forces have issued directives to their members to use the "Arabian Gulf" when operating in the area. This is claimed to be due to increased cooperation with Arab states of the Persian Gulf, but also to follow local laws that ban the use of "Persian Gulf". In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which consists of seven emirates - Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah and Umm al-Quwain, public use of the name "Persian Gulf" is illegal.
The UAE is an exceptional example of gender inequality and barbaric economic exploitation; it's one of the last states in the world devoid of an electoral system, and it's a point of entry for US military expansion in the Gulf.
Since the Gulf War of 1991, Jebel Ali port in Dubai has become crucial to US naval operations in the Gulf; it is the safest liberty port in the region and the only harbor in the Gulf deep enough to berth an aircraft carrier. [5] And the showcase UAE army, originated by the British-educated top brass, is a major financial lubricator of the military industy in the United States. [6]
US policy towards this super-wealthy stain of inequality and inhumanity is clear from the manner in which US institutions, from its military to its universities, play the naming game.
Why don't we call it the "Hindu Gulf", or the "Gulf of The Unknown Worker"? Let's pay respects to the millions of South Asian enslaved workers in the UAE and other members of Gulf Cooperation Council [9]; who's going to recognize them when their drained corpses are vomited back to the sub-continent?
Let's call it "Gulf of Central Command", or simply the "Gulf of America". Let's recognize the reality of the complete occupation of this invaded body of water by the 100-plus warships and missile-armed nuclear submarines, the bases and the Air Warfare School. But then, the old British name for the UAE was Pirate Coast, so how about "Gulf of Captain Hook"? In this way, American children's culture is memorialized as well.
Playing the inverted naming game, thinking of the Filipino domestic workers raped by Arab desert princes, and evoking an Iranian suggestion, "Islamic Gulf", and using a Koranic term, let's call it: "Gulf of a Thousand and One Kaniz [10]"! It is exotic, real and Islamic.
Already facing enough problems with the wild fires that have swept California, the state's governor Arnold Schwarzenegger may have stepped into a new row by claiming that marijuana is not a drug. In an interview with GQ magazine, the Hollywood star turned governor of California insisted: "I didn't take any drugs."
The interviewer, former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan, put it to the star that he had admitted smoking marijuana in the past. In Pumping Iron, the bodybuilding documentary which launched his career 30 years ago, he was shown taking a drag on a spliff.
"That is not a drug. It's a leaf," said Austrian-born Mr Schwarzenegger, 60. "My drug was pumping iron, trust me," he added.
The president's warmongering remarks on the Iranian threat suggest he is psychotic. Really.
Forget impeachment.
Liberals, put it behind you. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney shouldn't be treated like criminals who deserve punishment. They should be treated like psychotics who need treatment.
Bush Wants Another $46 Billion for Wars
Dems pledge to whine “even louder” before giving it to him.
Rice Asks Former Presidents Clinton, Carter for Advice on Middle East
They advise her to cut down on war crimes.
REMINDER
We only torture when our values are threatened.
Ex-spook cult now running most of Russian politicsFull story here.
Russian political life has been usurped by "siloviki" -- ex-spies -- who have apparently seized power from the small network of hyper-rich plutocratic "bankers" who rose to power after the Wall came down. The siloviki are a tight mafiyeh whose methods include high-profile international assassination of defectors (the assassins walk free and then run for high office).
Virtually all key positions in Russian political life -- in government and the economy -- are controlled by the so-called "siloviki," a blanket term to describe the network of former and current state-security officers with personal ties to the Soviet-era KGB and its successor agencies. The unexpected replacement of former Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov by former Federal Financial Monitoring Service Director Viktor Zubkov is the latest consolidation of this group's grip on power in Russia. Although Zubkov is not an intelligence officer by background, he has become one de facto during his years at the Financial Monitoring Service, and he has intimate knowledge of where the country's legal and illegal assets are to be found.
The core of the siloviki group, led by former KGB officer and Federal Security Service (FSB) Director Vladimir Putin himself, comprises about 6,000 security-service alumni who entered the corridors of power during Putin's first term. Now, as Putin's second term winds down, their clout is virtually unassailable. Their locus of power is in the presidential administration: deputy chief of staff Igor Sechin cut his teeth in the KGB's First Main Directorate, which oversaw foreign intelligence operations and has since been transformed into the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). Fellow deputy chief of staff Viktor Ivanov worked for the KGB's main successor organization, the FSB, which is responsible for counterintelligence operations.
StormWorm botnet lashes out at security researchersFull story here.
The Storm Worm botnet (thought to be the largest network of compromised machines in the world) has begun to figure out which security researchers are trying to disrupt its command-and-control systems and knock them offline with unmanagable crapfloods from its zillions of zombie machines.
The worm can figure out which users are trying to probe its command-and-control servers, and it retaliates by launching DDoS attacks against them, shutting down their Internet access for days, says Josh Korman, host-protection architect for IBM/ISS, who led a session on network threats.
"As you try to investigate [Storm], it knows, and it punishes," he says. "It fights back."
As a result, researchers who have managed to glean facts about the worm are reluctant to publish their findings. "They're afraid. I've never seen this before," Korman says. "They find these things but never say anything about them."
And not without good reason, he says. Some who have managed to reverse engineer Storm in an effort to figure out how to thwart it have suffered DDoS attacks that have knocked them off the Internet for days, he says.
As researchers test their versions of Storm by connecting to Storm command-and-control servers, the servers seem to recognize these attempts as threatening. Then either the worm itself or the people behind it seem to knock them off the Internet by flooding them with traffic from Storm's botnet, Korman says.
WATERTOWN, New York - Iraq war veterans now stationed at a base here in upstate New York say that morale among US soldiers in the country is so poor, many are simply parking their Humvees and pretending to be on patrol, a practice dubbed "search and avoid" missions.
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[Phil] Aliff [an active duty soldier with the 10th Mountain Division] said he participated in roughly 300 patrols. "We were hit by so many roadside bombs we became incredibly demoralized, so we decided the only way we wouldn't be blown up was to avoid driving around all the time."
"So we would go find an open field and park, and call our base every hour to tell them we were searching for weapons caches in the fields and doing weapons patrols and everything was going fine," he said, adding, "All our enlisted people became very disenchanted with our chain of command."
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... "One of my buddies is in Baghdad right now and we email all the time," he explained, "He just told me that nearly each day they pull into a parking lot, drink soda and shoot at the cans. They pay Iraqi kids to bring them things and spread the word that they are not doing anything and to please just leave them alone." ...
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We kid ourselves a lot, you know. We tell ourselves that what we know is our moment really isn't, that somebody else should do it, that it's somebody else's job, but come on. You know. You know what you have to do and how you have to do it, and all you really have to do about it is listen to yourself, listen to yourself, and avoid the story in the future being about how you should have done something but didn't.
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But a review of the 88 criminal cases Thompson handled at the U.S. attorney's office in Nashville, from 1969 to 1972, reveals a different and more human portrait -- that of a young lawyer learning the ropes on routine cases involving gambling, mail theft and, in one instance, talking dirty on CB radio.
There were a few bank robbers and counterfeiters. But more than anything, Thompson took on the state's moonshiners and a local culture, rooted in Tennessee's hills and hollows, that celebrated the independent whiskey maker's battle against the government's revenue agents.
Twenty-seven of his cases involved moonshining -- more than any other crime.
On Friday, while former Defense Sec. Donald Rumsfeld was visiting France, human rights groups based there and in the United States filed complaints against him, charging him with approving torture:
French prosecutors were said to have the power to pursue the case while Rumsfeld was in the country.
One source cites unconfirmed reports that Rumsfeld was abruptly whisked away from a breakfast meeting on Friday in order to avoid his arrest:
The report said Rumsfeld fled to Germany because similar charges were dismissed against him there in the spring.The German court ruled that Rumsfeld’s criminality was an internal matter for the United States.
The Air Force has been forced to use Russian commercial cargo jets to rush mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles from the U.S. to Iraq because it does not have enough C-5 and C-17 planes to do the job, the service’s top civilian official said recently.
Now for the even better news. In the subsequent hours, as you consume more and more clear fluid, you will be experiencing many, many openings of your own personal anal dam valve. All this will be taking place many hours after you have stopped eating any solid foods whatsoever. Think of yourself becoming progressively hungry, weak and totally evacuated.
It is as if some ingenious person has figured out a way to connect a hose to a fire hydrant and feed it directly into your gut, and then opened the hydrant up repeatedly. Talk about a terrorist suspect spilling their guts!
Now tell me, can’t you imagine the impact of this experience on a stubborn, silent terrorist?
