Pentagon: 1 in 7 Freed From Gitmo Return to Terrorism
Other six are cab drivers or work in convenience stores.
90 Senators Vote Against Closing Guantanamo, Relocating Detainees
Since we have no prisons here.
Geithner: No Plans to Cap Executive Pay
Or he’d never play squash in New York again.
Study: Perfectionists Die Sooner
Conclusion: don't sweat the detales.
It has been confirmed that former [South Korean] President Roh Moo-hyun committed suicide on May 23.
According to a briefing from the South Gyungsang Police Agency, former President Roh Moo-hyun fell from a hill in the mountain near his home between 6:30 a.m and 6:40 a.m. while hiking with his secretary. He was rushed to a hospital and was declared dead at 9:30 a.m. A fracture of his skull was cited as the medical cause of his death.
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Ron Reagan, son of President Ronald Reagan, had this to say about Rush Limbaugh and his comments about Nancy Pelosi's looks:
"Limbaugh hasn't had a natural erection since the Nixon Administration; think he's compensating for something? Now, I wouldn't pick on him for any of this stuff, not his blubbiness, not his man-boobs, not his inability to have a natural erection—none of that stuff—to me, off limits until! until! Mr. Limbaugh, you turn that sort of gun on somebody else—once you start doing that, you're fair game, fat boy. Absolutely, you jiggly pile of mess. You're just fair game, and you're going to get it, too."
PARAMOUNT, Calif. — At least one well-known American vehicle manufacturer is rolling out vehicles as usual. But before a Zamboni can take the ice, it hits the pavement on Colorado Avenue.
The neighbors are used to it by now, seeing one of the blocky ice-resurfacing machines rumble out of the low-slung Zamboni factory and trudge down the block — top speed: 9 miles per hour — toward the corner KFC. It whirls and comes back, is checked for leaks and fitted with studded tires.
Then the Zamboni is sent someplace like Dubai or Prague or Milwaukee. [...]
And, in this day, it may be comforting to know that Frank J. Zamboni & Company, still family owned and operated, is not asking for a government bailout.
“Not yet,” [...]
Charlie Brown once said there are three things in life that people like to stare at: a flowing stream, a crackling fire and a Zamboni clearing the ice.
The company also asks that Zamboni not be used as a noun (as it has been throughout this article) or a verb. The ice does not get Zambonied, then, and the vehicle is a Zamboni brand ice-resurfacing machine. Good luck with that.
Frank Reckard on the dazzling guitar work
[...] The Palomino Club was notable because in addition to being the San Fernando Valley’s premiere night club, it was a neighborhood working class bar (opening at 6am with a happy hour from 8am to 10am!) [...]
[...]The Palomino’s dressing rooms and backstage areas were generally open to the public. Fans could ask if the artists were receiving visitors and most artists welcomed them, gladly signing autographs, etc. [...]
The Palomino Club was an amazingly unique venue the likes of which will never be seen again.
Tough guy conservative Chicago radio host Erich "Mancow" Muller had himself waterboarded today to prove it isn't torture. Well....now he says it is torture.
From Raw Story:
Chicago radio host Erich "Mancow" Muller decided he'd get himself waterboarded to prove the technique wasn't torture.
It didn't turn out that way. "Mancow," in fact, lasted just six or seven seconds before crying foul. Apparently, the experience went pretty badly -- "Witnesses said Muller thrashed on the table, and even instantly threw the toy cow he was holding as his emergency tool to signify when he wanted the experiment to stop," according to NBC Chicago.
"The average person can take this for 14 seconds," Marine Sergeant Clay South told his audience before he was waterboarded on air. "He's going to wiggle, he's going to scream, he's going to wish he never did this."
Mancow was set on a 7-foot long table with his legs elevated and his feet tied.
"I wanted to prove it wasn't torture," Mancow said. "They cut off our heads, we put water on their face...I got voted to do this but I really thought 'I'm going to laugh this off.' "
The upshot? "It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that's no joke," Mancow told listeners. "It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back...It was instantaneous...and I don't want to say this: absolutely torture."
"Absolutely. I mean that's drowning," he added later. "It is the feeling of drowning."
"If I knew it was gonna be this bad, I would not have done it," he said.
The 42-year-old radio host is no stranger to controversy. In 2005, he was maligned for saying that then-Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean was "vile," "bloodthirsty," "evil" and "should be kicked out of America."
Defense Secretary Robert Gates says American soldiers have more than their military might and training on their side in the war in Afghanistan. Some have pink underwear.
Gates told an audience in New York about Specialist Zachary Boyd, routed from sleep by enemy fire on his post in eastern Afghanistan.
"He immediately grabbed his rifle and rushed into a defensive position clad in his helmet, body armor, and pink boxer shorts that said 'I Love New York,'" Gates said Thursday night.
"Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your perspective, an AP photographer was there for a candid shot," Gates continued.
The photograph by David Guttenfelder ran on the front page of the New York Times.
"Any soldier who goes into battle against the Taliban in pink boxers and flip-flops has a special kind of courage," Gates said, adding that Boyd may have hit on a new kind of psychological warfare. "I can only wonder about the impact on the Taliban. Just imagine seeing that — a guy in pink boxers and flip-flops has you in his crosshairs."
American newspapers don't use the word "lied" as a matter of form -- preferring the more innocuous "false statements," which is supposed to be less biased. But a McClatchy newspaper article Friday says myriad elements of Cheney's terrorism speech Thursday were tantamount to lies -- positing that the former Vice President was guilty of "omissions, exaggerations and misstatements."
Cheney is on a media tour to taint the jury pool of his future prosecution for war crimes and crimes against humanity and nothing more.
Fear of prosecution caused Cheney to speak out, daughter says
You have never before seen -- nor will you ever see again -- FBI director Robert Mueller so thoroughly humbled in a discussion about drug policy before the United States Congress.
In this instance, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) gets Mueller to admit that marijuana has never killed anybody, then smashes into tiny bits the decades-old "gateway drug" argument with a unique analogy of milk and bourbon.
On May 21, 2009, the RNC tweeted an out of context quote from Barack Obama regarding a flaw in the constitution. The "fundamental flaw" Barack Obama was referring to was slavery.
... There's very little worth saying about the speech Dick Cheney delivered after Obama's ...
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The Bush presidency is thankfully over... but the damage he and Dick Cheney did continues to press on the nerve of the American people like an impacted wisdom tooth. And until the questions surrounding arguably the most arrogant and perhaps most corrupt administration in our history are addressed, the pain won't go away.
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...Obama spoke today at the National Archives to say, more or less, "Stop acting like the other guy is still President, you poor, traumatized bastards."
[...] So there he was, slapping down the bases for torture, for Gitmo, for the prosecution of the retarded "war on terror," saying that he didn't run the car off the cliff, but he sure as fuck is gonna pick up the glass and mop up the blood: "In other words, the problem of what to do with Guantanamo detainees was not caused by my decision to close the facility; the problem exists because of the decision to open Guantanamo in the first place." [...]
Most stunning, though, was his assertion of how the government should deal with the crimes of the past administration, and it ain't a Truth Commission: "I have opposed the creation of such a Commission because I believe that our existing democratic institutions are strong enough to deliver accountability. The Congress can review abuses of our values, and there are ongoing inquiries by the Congress into matters like enhanced interrogation techniques. The Department of Justice and our courts can work through and punish any violations of our laws."
Do you get that? President Obama is telling the Congress not to be punk ass bitches about investigating, that the legislative branch should keep the executive branch honest, that punishing crimes is what we're supposed to do. Obama used this speech on national security to say that the way to be safe is to defend what makes America American and for everyone to do their fucking jobs.
Finally, he kicked Bush and Cheney in their taints at the close of his speech: "We will not be safe if we see national security as a wedge that divides America - it can and must be a cause that unites us as one people, as one nation. We have done so before in times that were more perilous than ours." Now that's how to stand tall and say, "C'mon, fuck with me."
Cheney, Briefly: Dick Cheney, wheezing his way through his speech, opened by talking about how he was cowering in a bunker on 9/11 and his horribly scarred psyche changed how he thought about the world. The fact that Cheney admitted that he was a PTSD sufferer and that's how he responded to the world pretty much negates everything he said after. Fuck him. He's not worthy to be called Cthulu or Satan anymore.
Back after El Dicko is done.
Damn you kids! What with your hormones and your brazen sexual curiosity and your lithe nymphomaniacal little bodies that shine like gorgeous devil candy and mock Jesus as you lure unsuspecting politicians and religious leaders onto the sharp rocks of adultery and fantasy and doom!
When will the right wing insist the NYC synagogue bombers are ‘too dangerous’ for U.S. prisons?
[...] Given conservatives’ recent hysterical declarations that U.S. prisons are unfit to handle terrorist suspects, Hilzoy challenges the right wing’s talking points in regards to the imprisonment of these “homegrown” terrorists:
This raises the difficult question: what should we do with these would-be terrorists while they await trial? And if they are convicted, what then? I assume that if it’s too dangerous to move people at Guantanamo to the United States, it must be much too dangerous to allow these jihadists to run loose in our prisons. After all, they might provide financing for other jihadists from their supermax cells, or radicalize other prisoners, or use special Terrorist Mind Control Techniques to create a whole army of brainwashed convicts under their complete control.
Four men have been arrested and charged in a plot to detonate explosives near at least one synagogue in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and to shoot down military aircraft, authorities said Wednesday night.
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Three of the suspects are U.S. citizens and one is Haitian, Gov. David A. Paterson said last night, adding that the plot was considered "a serious threat."
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There is no problem with closing Gitmo. If there's admissible evidence (not coerced through torture), try them in a U.S. court and sentence them. If there's evidence inadmissible in the U.S., take them somewhere far away and kill them (quietly, and make sure the bodies are never found). If there's neither, let them go. Period.
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To be honest, it’s getting to the point where about the only thing that makes me proud to be a Democrat is the fact it proves I’m not a Republican.
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I just have to laugh at the sight of Republicans defending our good clean All American killers against some SuperVillain Afghan farmer who "killed Americans or tried to kill Americans." I'm sure the American killers will happily vote Republican with that kind of endorsement (if they are ever let loose and Americans are "exposed" to them. )
This isn't even a debate. It's a pageant. A sick, stupid pageant
The "debate" over all the bad and scary things that will happen if Obama closes Guantanamo and we then incarcerate those detainees in American prisons is so painfully stupid even by the standards of our political discourse that it's hard to put into words, and it also perfectly illustrates the steps that typically lead to America's National Security policies ...
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90 lily-livered pantywaists in the US Senate ...