If you get into the business of committing U.S. forces on the ground in Iraq, to occupy the place, my guess is I’d probably still have people there today instead of having been able to bring them home…The bottom line question for me was: How many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? The answer: not very damn many.
-Dick Cheney – 1992
The question, then, is does Bush hate gay people more than he loves defense spending? The defense spending bill was recently approved, but had a hate crimes bill attached to it. It scares me that I can’t say, ‘of course the president will sign it!”
A picture of the fence outside of Laramie Wyoming where Mathew Shepard (the namesake of the hate crimes bill) was found – he had been beaten and tied to the fence and left to bleed to death.
Bill O’Reilly says that his recent comments about African Americans were taken out of context – which leads one to wonder if he actually knows what the word ‘context’ means. In any case, Gawker.com has put together a great little chart of O’Reilly’s contexts when speaking of African Americans.
Mark Frauenfelder’s daughter’s preschool class was asked to write what they currently felt and why they felt that way. He enjoyed the answers and took photos of all of them. I enjoyed the answers too, so am therefore sharing them with you. Here’s his flickr site.
Last week Bill O’Reilly had this to say about having dinner at a restaurant in Harlem:
There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, ‘M-Fer, I want more iced tea.’ You know, I mean, everybody was — it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there and they were ordering and having fun,” he said. “And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.
Here‘s the link to the NYT article. Here‘s a link to the MediaMatters article.
Kathy Griffin won an Emmy for her reality TV show, and had this to say in her acceptance speech:
I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus. So, all I can say is, ‘suck it, Jesus.’ This award is my god now.
The topper of the cake is that a religious theatre group (I know, what’s the point of theatre if you bias it with religion) posted a full page ad in a daily paper (priced at 90k) condemning her words.
The worst part is that the E! network censored her remarks. Again, even to the liberal Hollywood type, nothing is sacred, except Jesus. Read about it at the Washington Post.
I recently went to Washington DC on business, and for some of the time stayed at the Holiday Inn, Georgetown. Inside the informational binder that was in the room, was this little book – “This was your Life!” As you can guess, I was both offended and entertained. Read the full book, after the jump.
In what can only be seen as bad news for pirates everywhere, Joseph Estrada was sentenced to 40 years in prison after being convicted of plunder. From the NYT:
A Philippine anticorruption court on Wednesday convicted a former Philippine president, Joseph Estrada, of illegally acquiring wealth while in office and sentenced him to a maximum of 40 years in prison.
The court found Mr. Estrada guilty of plunder, but acquitted him on a perjury charge.
Parts of it anyway. From the Huffington Post:
A federal judge struck down a key part of the USA Patriot Act on Thursday in a ruling that defended the need for judicial oversight of laws and bashed Congress for passing a law that makes possible “far-reaching invasions of liberty.” . . .
The ACLU had challenged the law on behalf of an Internet service provider, complaining that the law allowed the FBI to demand records without the kind of court supervision required for other government searches. Under the law, investigators can issue so-called national security letters to entities like Internet service providers and phone companies and demand customers’ phone and Internet records.
Finally. The Patriot Act has been, and always will be, a bad idea. The Chinese government reserves the same rights as this portion of the bill allowed the US government . . . and lets just say they’re not the ones to be copying governance from.
And this from The Onion:
Larry “Wide-Stance” Craig may not be stepping down now that Sen. Arlen Spector is defending him. The bad news is that we’re going to have to keep hearing about this for a while yet, the good news is that this story broke because Craig called a complete stranger and left it on their voicemail.
That’s right, he called the wrong phone number and left a message saying that he might not step down after-all. The person who got the message promptly gave it to a newspaper. You can read all about it here.
Dear god, if you’re in the middle of a scandal, and you’re a US senator, don’t leave voice-mails unless you’re sure you’ve got the right one. This is the lesson we learn from this.
From Expatica:
A man cut off his own penis and threw it in a toilet ‘so he would stop sinning’.
I wish I was a christian so I could feel such shame. I’m really missing out. I tried to find a picture of a penis floating in a toilet for this post – but you’ll just have to use your imagination.
From the AP:
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — A Belgian prosecutor on Tuesday recommended that the U.S.-based Church of Scientology stand trial for fraud and extortion, following a 10-year investigation that concluded the group should be labeled a criminal organization.
Scientology said it would fight the criminal charges recommended by investigating prosecutor Jean-Claude Van Espen, who said that up to 12 unidentified people should face charges.
Van Espen’s probe also concluded that Scientology’s Brussels-based Europe office and its Belgian missions conducted unlawful practices in medicine, violated privacy laws and used illegal business contracts, said Lieve Pellens, a spokeswoman at the Federal Prosecutors Office.
“They also face charges of being … a criminal organization,” Pellens said in a telephone interview.
Scientology shouldn’t be a religion, it’s not even a word.
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