- image by a.s. at Blah3.com: Free Speech for the New Century
SCOTT !
Scott at AMCGLTD.com created a very cool banner for this page! The black helicopter kills me - 
Thanks so much, Scott !!
IDEA OF THE WEEK:
From Bev Conover at Online Journal: 'A reader has launched a campaign to send balls to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Said JM, "Yes folks, buy a superball and send it good old Tom. They're small, so the shipping is cheap. Maybe he can glue two on and pretend to be a man."'
CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE
"Respected conservatives are actually suggesting that Enron and WorldCom cooked their books because Bill Clinton lied about a blow job. It's not an argument that takes a lot of deep thinking to rebut. First of all, corporate fraud wasn't invented on Clinton's watch. The United States endured a wave of financial scandals in the late '80s as well, at the end of the last Wall Street boom. When Ivan Boesky was arrested for insider trading, Michael Milken was busted for market manipulation, Charles Keating was running a fraudulent savings and loan, and Gordon Gekko was declaring that "greed ... is good," Bill Clinton was an obscure Southern governor, and the man setting the moral tone "at the top" was Ronald Reagan. Maybe Boesky and Milken lost their moral bearings because the Gipper was a divorcé who neglected his children.
"In 1995 Newt Gingrich and the newly elected Republican Congress--having vowed to restrict lawsuits in the Contract with America--pushed through a bill making it much harder to sue companies for misleading their investors. Clinton vetoed the 1995 bill that shielded corporate executives from shareholder lawsuits, and his SEC chief, Arthur Levitt, proposed barring accounting firms from consulting for firms they were simultaneously auditing. Unfortunately, Clinton's veto was overridden-a slight majority of Democrats voted to uphold it, but virtually every congressional Republican voted to override. Levitt's proposal was torpedoed as well. By my count, 33 of the 37 members of Congress who signed public letters protesting his reform were Republicans. And the lobbyist who spearheaded the accounting industry's campaign against the Levitt proposal was none other than Harvey Pitt, President Bush's pick to head the SEC. In other words, the '90s moral tone that made Enron and WorldCom possible wasn't Clintonism; it was Gingrichism." - From Peter Beinart at The New Republic.
QUOTE OF THE DAY:
"Bush was elected on a promise to end the contradiction between presidential rhetoric and presidential rationalization. So far, all he's done is change the subject from sex to money." - William Saletan at Slate.
NOOZEWEAK COLUMNIST AUDITIONS FOR TIGER BEAT, N'SYNC, DALLAS COWBOYS CHEERLEADERS
Howard "Whoreward the Hormone" Fineman at PMSnbc leaves more slimy goo in his wake than an army of snails. Here he is in his latest rhapsodistic orgiasta over Il Presidorque's corruption twaddle: "Bush gave an earnest speech in Manhattan the other day. It contained a fair number of reasonable, and tough, proposals for reform, including doubling criminal penalties, lots of new money for SEC enforcement, and a new Justice Department task force to attack 'bad apples' in the barrel of Big Business. The president didn’t go far enough for the Democrats, of course. But they are easy to dismiss as donation-grubbing insiders eager for a way to cover their rears and find an issue for the fall."
Excuse me?? WTF was he watching? I've said it before and I'll say it again, how the hell did he ever get to become anybody's "chief political analyst"? And 'donation-grubbing insiders'?? Isn't it GW who's spent more time fundraising than Rush Limpbag at an all-you-can-eat moonie festival?
Little Whoreward is obviously living in the same soggy, sticky alternate universe as Peggy "Wet Spot" Noonan. Hey, Mr Get Me My Dry-Cleaner, STAT! - Bunnypants' speech bombed. The real analysts and ecomomic pundits made themselves dizzy with all the eye-rolling they did.
Every time your pathetic hero Squinty McSquirtypants opens his mouth, the stock market tanks. At this point I won't be able to retire until I'm 98, you f*cking bonehead. Have a nice day. Jerkoff.
July 11, 2002
July 10, 2002
BUSH, IN TOUGH WALL STREET SPEECH, VOWS TO MAKE MORE TOUGH WALL STREET SPEECHES
"President Bush said all the right words," Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-MO) told reporters. "The question is, is he prepared to back up those words with more words?"
The President's angry Wall Street speech came just moments after the SEC's startling revelation that 85% of the companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange do not really exist.
Many Wall Street insiders were shocked by the news, in particular, that AOL-Time Warner was a fictitious "dummy" corporation run out of the Evanston, Illinois basement of a convicted scam artist named Bud Hobey.
Longtime customers of AOL were stunned to discover that their Internet service provider was merely an accounting fabrication and did not actually exist.
"I just can't believe it," said Lynn Carlson, 32, a Manhattan hair stylist. "On the other hand, it really explains why no one ever seems to get my email." - LOL. From Andy Borowitz's column.
News You Won't See on TV
When asked about the recent upset in Bush's filings, this was the quote that came out of the White House:
"These types of late filings are not out of the ordinary," Bartlett told The Washington Post in Wednesday's editions. "It would be like doing a 60 in a 55" speed-limit zone, he said.
I would like to respectfully remind the Administration that speeding is speeding, and it's against the law. We normal folks get a ticket for speeding. I guess the next time I get pulled over, I have a ready-made excuse - the President says it's OK to speed. - Christopher Wing, in the BuzzFlash Mailbag
Just how low will Bush and Gang go to divert the attention from his crooked administration? Unbelievable what Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfwitz said on national television (NBC-Today) this morning. He point blank said that there was an al-Queda terrorist cell working in Jacksonville, Florida. This sure came as a surprise to the Mayor and Law Enforcement officials in the city, so they called Washington and spoke with every agency they could...and guess what? No one had any idea what Wolfwitz was talking about. They knew nothing about any terrorist cell operating in Jacksonville....Talk about crying wolf to divert attention from the growing heat about Bush's illegal stock trading deals. - Cary Lindsey
Remember the story of the Saudi princess who pushed her maid down the stairs in Florida? The maid was denied a visa to return to the U.S. and testify:
"Why in the world wouldn't they give her a visa?" Russell Troutman, Suryono's attorney said. "I'm speculating that it was an attempt on the part of the administration to do a favor for the royal family."
And here's the New York Times' account: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/02/national/02SAUD.html. - CR
George W. Bush's attempt to explain away his failure to timely file the legally-required Form 4 regarding his insider sale of Harken stock - and place the blame on "the lawyers" - fails to deal with the fact that the law says such filing is the legal obligation of the individual director, not the corporation or its lawyers.
Mr. Bush was a member of the Harken board of directors' AUDIT committee. I think assignment to such a post implies at least SOME responsibility on the part of the director so appointed. - Lois Erwin
According to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission records, on four separate occasions Gov. George W. Bush disregarded federal statutes by failing to file insider stock trade reports on a timely basis, back-dating one trade by some four months. Moreover, one key trade just a few weeks before Iraq invaded Kuwait -- but reported some eight months late after the Gulf War was over -- netted Bush close to $1 million in profit as he sold stock in Harken Energy, an oil company doing business in the Middle East wherein some of his father's largest contributors also maintained substantial positions… The governor also did not reveal the blatant conflicts of interest involved, since the chairman of the SEC was Richard Breedon, former lawyer with Houston firm Baker [as in Bush consigliere James] "and Botts and deputy counsel to Bush's father when he was vice president. Breedon received his SEC appointment after the elder Bush became president." - (via email from Democrats.com)
Quote: "The primary effect is to help Bush deflect charges he was asleep at the switch," - the chairman of the Cato Institute, William Niskanen. He said Bush's crackdown on bad business practices would do little to restore investor confidence, noting that stock values sank after the president's speech.
Run away!
Robert Kuttner writes, "Bush's New York speech on corporate accountability was one of the weakest of his presidency. It was long on platitudes, short on structural reforms. The Dow Jones responded to his call for restored confidence in America's financial markets by plunging 189 points. Ever since he took office, Bush's short run political strategy has been to blur differences with Democrats... But America's corporate meltdown is real, and Bush is way behind the curve. It's more than a little ironic that Bush's mandateless presidency was rescued by a foreign policy crisis that is now being upstaged by what could be the most serious economic threat since the Great Depression. For Bush's own rise to fame and fortune in Texas was a small-bore version of the Enron and WorldCom scandals. There is no way that Bush can do a Nixon-to-China on this issue and get back ahead of the curve because Bush's closest cronies epitomize precisely the kind of capitalism that is imploding." (via email from Democrats.com)
LOL - Check out Bushspeak's Bush Speech Generator: "Yes, He Really Did Say All Of These Things!"
Quotes: "[I]t's becoming increasingly difficult to find anyone but the truest I-believe-everything-Ari-Fleischer-says jingoists who actually believes this "war" has become anything but a grand excuse, a marvelously leveragable plaything which the Bush cadre can point to as their very own personal holy shroud, some sort of sacrosanct shield to protect them from criticism and claims of blatant impropriety and selling the nation's soul for pennies on the barrel." - Mark Morford, The San Francisco Chronicle.
"Why didn't Bush address the issue that's at the root of the present corporate mess? Isn't the answer obvious? Like Bush's plan to deal with the Middle East crisis, he's not really interested in solving the problem, he's interested in papering it over until he's out of office, mouthing some vague words about the situation and appealing to a targeted voting base." - Politex, at Bushwatch.
Did he or didn't he? There's a new Dumb-ya story going around the internet: the Baroness Williams of Crosby recently recounted to an audience in Brighton that "my good friend Tony Blair" told her the following anecdote: "Blair, Bush and Jacques Chirac were discussing economics and, in particular, the decline of the French economy. 'The problem with the French,' Bush confided to Blair, 'is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur.' "
Ow !!
"The unelected regime of George W. Bush sits at the supreme position of power in the world, placed there by an extra-legal act of a corrupt, partisan Supreme Court, which accomplished the deed by stopping the counting of votes, the most essential activity of a democratic society. Once in power, Bush proceeded to contemptuously defy the will of the majority at every turn, transparently serving only the interests of the small minority that forks over the cash at election time.
"Prince George, who has said repeatedly that he would prefer being a dictator, and who has forced through legislation that gives him dictatorial power over his subjects, now sits on his would-be throne smirking at America and the world."
- From HeadBlast.
'And they called Willie slick - Oil boys spin themselves into hypocritical frenzy'
From Molly Ivins' column: Pardon my rant, but I have had it with the Blame Bill Clinton First crowd. Since the day George W. Bush took office, the Clinton-haters, whose monomaniacal nastiness wasted untold amounts of everybody's time and money in the 1990s, were determined to carry their hyperbolic vendetta into this century. We are sitting here looking at a huge mess in corporate governance, and before anyone can even get out a useful suggestion, some Republican leaps up and says, "It's all Bill Clinton's fault."
It is not Bill Clinton's fault that George Bush's business career reeks. From Arbusto to Spectrum 7 to Harken Energy to the baseball deal, all of it smells—and the efforts to perfume it with spin are embarrassing. Will someone inform Ari Fleischer that after Bush unloaded his Harken stock at $4 a share, the price promptly slid to $1.25. Perhaps this will prevent more misleading statements.
Perhaps I am too cynical, but I believe there is a separate class of people in this country called Too Rich to Go to Prison. With the peerless John Ashcroft at the helm of the Justice Department, I don't think any of the now-infamous CEOs need to lose sleep over the prospect. It's not exactly like Bobby Kennedy going after Jimmy Hoffa.
Quote of the Day: "I don't have a clue as to where the Democrats are coming from and where they are going. How do they expect to win in November? Do they think people will vote for them because they were kind to GW? Hitler got the same kid gloves treatment and look what happened. Those that refused to stand up and be counted ended up standing up in lines and being counted. - rereynolds
STUFF I'M READING: I'm in my end-of-the-world mode these days. I started with Left Behind, whose premise alone ordinarily would have merited three stars, but I couldn't get past wanting to slap the sorry sh!t out of every one of the characters. I then turned to one of my favorites, Lucifer's Hammer. In this one civilization ends by comet - there are some nail-biting pages of people trying to outrun the oncoming tsunamis. The follow-up, which I'm reading now, is Footfall, when aliens shaped like elephants attack! Actually, it's pretty hokey, and why elephants, fer petessake?? As a plus, though, the president of the US is looking like a complete boner. After that will come another of my favorites, Swan Song - death by nukes. Another one where the numbnuts in DC are totally wiped out.
"Bush was on Wall Street today attacking accounting fraud. Wait a minute. Isn't that how he got elected?" - Letterman
"Last week doctors discovered some blockage in Bush's colon: his head." - Leno - really!
Ouch
Maureen Dowd slams the Bushies: "they are hounded by the same old question they have designed their lives to avoid: Can a Bush — born on third base but thinking he hit a triple — ever really understand the problems of the guys in the bleachers?
"How can Mr. Bush crack the whip on Big Business when he's a wholly owned subsidiary of it? His dynastic ties to business gave him his career in oil and baseball, provided the record-breaking $100 million that made him president, and spawned his C.E.O. administration. How can Mr. Bush lecture companies on setting a moral tone, getting tough on accounting practices and ending "malfee-ance," as he calls it, when there are pesky questions about his own windfall at Harken Energy?
"The president's speech on Wall Street yesterday was a Karl Rove production, making all the right noises, with the reassuring blue "Corporate Responsibility" backdrop. But TV viewers who looked lower on the screen could see the Dow arrow sliding down steadily, off 178 points for the day.
Mr. Rove pushed W. out to the White House press room on Monday so he would not seem to be evading corporate responsibility for himself while preaching it for others. But the president was acting petulant."
"Bush was on Wall Street today announcing that penalties will be doubled for white collar crime. Now they'll get slapped on both wrists."
"Bush now has a formal plan for attacking Iraq. The only question is timing. We'll attack as soon as Bush's popularity falls below 52%." - Leno
Driving Mr Dumbass
Relations between the White House and black American leaders slumped to a new low yesterday after pResident Clueless gave a dismissive answer when asked why he was not addressing the convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured Peoples, the most respected black pressure group in the US.
At his press conference on Monday night, Mr Bush answered: "Let's see. There I was sitting around the table with foreign leaders looking at Colin Powell and Condi Rice... " His voice then trailed away, he shook his head and moved on to the next question; the implication being that two black people in his inner circle was a substitute for outreach to the rest of the community.
July 9, 2002
Packers Player Poops in Closet! screams the headline at the drudgereport.
Green Bay fullback Najeh Davenport was arrested Monday, accused of breaking into a university dormitory and defecating in a woman's closet. According to police, Davenport crept into a dorm room at Barry University around 6 a.m. on April 1. A woman sleeping in the room, Mary McCarthy, told police she was startled by a strange sound and saw Davenport squatting in her closet. Davenport then allegedly defecated in a laundry basket, McCarthy told detectives.
"This whole thing is a misunderstanding. Najeh had nothing to do with the situation," said Richard Sharpstein, Davenport's attorney. Ohhhhhhhhh-kay.....
'I'm ready for my close-up, Mr DeVille...'
Sony hit back at Michael Jackson yesterday, accusing him of playing the race card to cover the flop of his latest record. Michael Jackson has ruined his own career with his bizarre antics and reputation as an accused child molester, a top honcho at the pop superstar's record company said yesterday. "He's trying to wage this bizarre campaign to rearrange his financial obligations," said the Sony executive, who asked not to be identified. "It's not going to happen."
"A renewed sense of [personal] responsibility" - stop it, my sides hurt!
Joe Conason has a new daily online journal at Salon.com for Premium subscribers. A sample: "the ordinarily docile White House press corps, while chuckling appreciatively at the president's wisecracks, wasn't entirely buying that line. 'This is recycled ... stuff,' he said in response to the first question about his 1990 sale of Harken Energy stock, and the reporters laughed. The questions continued, however, and the answers weren't impressive.
"What the president didn't mention -- perhaps because nobody asked -- was that his father's appointees and his own personal attorney were running the SEC when he was investigated. The agency's chairman was an ardent loyalist named Richard Breeden, who had served as a top domestic policy aide to George Herbert Walker Bush. (He is now the court-appointed overseer of WorldCom.) Its general counsel was James Doty, the laywer who had handled the sale of the Texas Rangers baseball team to Dubya's syndicate only two years earlier.
"A few years ago, such obviously compromised presidential relationships would have provoked exclamations of outrage on the editorial pages of the nation's great newspapers, culminating in demands for a congressional investigation and even an independent counsel. Reporters would have camped out at the SEC to ambush the chairman with arms outstretched, harassing him to deliver those files about the president. The laughter in the press room and the newsrooms and the TV studios would have been anything but friendly, and the chatter would soon have turned to dark musings about the character of the man inhabiting the Oval Office. But that was when the president's name was Clinton, not Bush."
Bunnypants Opens Mouth, Stock Market Tanks
The stock market plunged for a second straight session Tuesday, as Wall Street shrugged off Laura's Little Loser's proposal to increase the penalties for corporate fraud.
Analysts said that after months of accounting and ethics scandals, more than a speech was needed to restore public faith. "Little fratboy snot should start by sh!tcanning himself and his whole crooked administration," one analyst said under condition of anonymity.
By midafternoon, the Dow Jones industrial average had slipped 50.33, to 9,224.57.
- Mostly from salon.com.
"Say, could you send an ambulance in here? I'm so fucking full of bile I think I'm going to have a stroke!" - Will Tomlinson, from Salon's Table Talk: "What do you think of GW Bush?"
Quotes of the Day from TAPPED: "BUSH'S BAD PRESS DAY. Forget Dubya's baloney proposal for accounting reform, and check out his disasterous press conference defending his role at Harken. This was a real turning point for him. Yesterday, for the first time in his presidency, Bush needs the press to play nice. But they won't, because Bush has treated most of them like crap from day one. Now it's payback time. "
"You can also get a sense of what a disaster-in-the-making Bush will be when he starts having to defend himself more often at unscripted press conferences. He's a walking gaffe. Best detail: How the assembled reporters "tittered" when Bush claimed, preposterously, that the SEC's inquiry into Harken amounted to an "honest disagreement about accounting procedures." Remember that phrase. It'll come back. "
We can only hope!
UK to Relax Laws for Millions of Dope Smokers
Hail Britannia! The Brits will respond this week to a dramatic surge in cannabis use by easing laws and allowing millions of dope fans to smoke without fear of arrest.
Pressure from police, medical experts and politicians for Britain to take a less punitive approach has swayed Home Secretary David Blunkett, who is expected Wednesday to downgrade it to a low risk category C drug.
The downgrade -- making cannabis a Class C rather than Class B drug -- will put the drug in the same category as anabolic steroids and growth hormones and make possessing small amounts of it or smoking it in private a non-arrestable offence. - Yahoo News
Headline of the Day:
BREAKING NEWS: Bush Wants To Fight Corporate Corruption By Making Tax Cuts To The Richest 1% Permanent.
Bush Ushers In His "Responsibility Era" By Blaming His Lawyers
Excuse me????? - we revisit W the Whining Wartface's outrageous dissembling at his 'news conference':
"Sometimes things aren't exactly black and white when it comes to accounting procedures" - WHAT??? They damn well better be! If I tried stuff like that with my income taxes I'd be in jail, you flaming imbecile!
Faced by a barrage of questions about his failure to disclose stock sales, the Crook of Crawford smirked "I still haven't figured it out completely."
Oh, there's a good defense. And the whore media let him get away with it.
'Some of my best friends are negroes!': "There I was sitting around the leader -- the table with foreign leaders looking at Colin Powell and Condi Rice."
....thud....
Quotes
"After all this time it is George Junior himself whose credibility is on the line. Not Fleischer’s whom everybody knows is a paid liar anyway. In the past the traditional response in such circumstances – when the media wolves have been baying at the White House doors - has been to announce a gross and imminent security threat to the US public of the "dirty bomber" variety." - Alastair Thompson, in Scoop.
"For President Bush to pretend to be shocked that some of the nation's top executives deal from a stacked deck is akin to a madam feigning surprise that sexual favors have been sold in her establishment. Dubya may have gaps in his education, but ignorance of 'aggressive accounting' techniques and other scams they don't teach in Biz 101 is not one of them." - Robert Scheer, in the LA Times.
More Moments in Churchilliana
"Well, let me start by telling you that I think by far the vast majority of CEOs in America are good, honorable, honest people who have nothing to hide and are willing the true facts speak for themselves. It's the few that have stained the, have created the stains that we must deal with. And tomorrow I'm going to talk about some specifics and I'd rather kind of save those for tomorrow." - the Oaf of Office, 7/8/02.
"In the future, start -- we start with calling on people's -- calling on people's better nature, and I'll do some of that tomorrow as well" - ditto.
"No malfeance, no attempt to hide anything. It was just an accounting firm making a decision, along with the corporate officers, as to how to account for a complex transiction. - yep.
Jeezum K. F*ck -
"It is the stated policy of this government to have a regime change and we use all the tools at our disposal to do so." The Menace of Midland dismissed as hypothetical whether he would make the move to 'get Saddam' in his first term.
Who was the diphead whore reporter that asked him that one??
'Can Bush scold Wall Street with a straight face?'
Not only was the prez and ex-businessman himself a pro at milking failed corporations he made look good on paper, but too many family members, friends and members of his administration have been implicated in scandals of the sort he now condemns. For Bush to argue that the unraveling of corporate America is the work of a "few bad apples" is a dangerous line of reasoning for him because an embarrassing number of those apples have fallen very close to the tree of his presidency.
George W. was saved from repeated financial disaster by one merger after another, business maneuvers that made no economic sense to the new partner beyond the acquisition of the presumed clout of the son of a Central Intelligence Agency chief turned vice president turned president.
How can Bush now, with a straight face, tell the nation that he will order the SEC to brand as criminals those guilty of the same sorts of actions? As a matter of consistency, he should in the very least demand that Martha Stewart, a comparative innocent when judged by Bush family standards, be treated no more harshly than he was.
- More of Robert Scheer's column here.
Last Night on Crossfire
Tucker "Whitewater Wang-puller" Carlson Misses Irony Completely - "This whole, you know, chase after President Bush's business dealings many, many years ago because he didn't file something on time? This was transparent partisan political witch hunt, is it not?"
Congresswoman Maxine Waters: "If he has not done anything that he needs to hide, then come forward, and stop the journalists from all the speculation. Come forward with the facts, and then we won't have to worry about anything. If he's got something to hid, they're going to find out it anyway. That's the way it's supposed to be."
Not able to find anything coherent to say, Tucker falls back to the old standby: "Wait a minute. Let's reopen Whitewater while we're at -- while we're at it."
Question from Audience: My name is Linda Gerbitz. I'm from Clearwater, Florida. And this question is for anyone. Actually, it is a comment. All this talk about attacking Saddam Hussein sounds a lot to me like the movie "Wag the Dog," getting everyone's attention away from the fact that we haven't been able to track down Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda or even find out who was putting anthrax in people's mailboxes. What do you think about that?
Tucker the Loser: Klintoon! Xlinton! Klintoon!
Paul Begala: "I worked for President Clinton when he bombed Osama bin Laden, the example that Tucker was referring to. It was the right thing to do. And if Bush had enough guts, he would have done it a long time ago too."
July 8, 2002
From Mr Mumbles' press conference today:
"The SEC found no malfeee-ens and okayed it."
"People should hold people accountable."
When asked to respond to the NAACP's feeling that he has slighted the group, and to general criticism that his civil rights record has been lackluster: "Let's see - there I was sitting around the table with foreign leaders, looking at Colin Powell and Condi Rice.''
Crusader palace unearthed in Cyprus
Workers clearing the site for a new town hall for the Cypriot capital stumbled across the remains of a massive Crusader palace dating from the early 13th century, archaeologists believe.
"It's not every day you find a royal palace," a jubilant Pavlos Flourentzos, curator of antiquities, said. "This is a rare find in the context of mediaeval Cyprus, it is very important because in all probability we have discovered the first Lusignan palace."
The French Lusignan dynasty ruled Cyprus from 1192 to 1489, and the palace was completed in 1211.
When signs of ruins emerged as bulldozers in Nicosia began work to clear a former car park and outdoor market area, an excavation team was hastily sent in with a two-week mission to collect evidence and prove the site should be preserved. Crusader palace unearthed. At the site itself scores of archaeologists are sifting through the soil. In one corner workers are excavating what they believe to be the main building, while elsewhere patches of crumbling ruins suggest a large and impressive network of structures.
- More at News.com.
Top 50 Movie Death Scenes
1. Goodfellas - Stamped, kicked, glassed, stabbed and shot
2. Casino - Baseball Batted and buried alive
3. Blade - Frost turns into a blood blister
4. Deer Hunter, The - Russian Roulette
5. Man Bites Dog - Old Woman shouted to death
6. Platoon - left on ground and drilled with bullets
7. Omen, The - Decapitated by Glass
8. American History X - Head Stomp
9. Apocalypse Now - Hacked to death by Machete
10. Big Trouble in Little China - exploding man
11. Godfather, The - Toll Booth Shooting
12. Thelma and Louise - Off a cliff
13. Seven - Fed to Death
14. Pulp Fiction - Accidental Face Shot
15. Psycho - Stabbed in Shower
16. Alien - Gestating Alien
17. Battle Royal - Exploding Collar
18. Leon - Grenades
19. A Nightmare on Elm Street - Hollowed Out by Freddy
20. Hannibal - Disembowelled and Hung
21. Wicker Man, The - Burnt inside a wicker man
22. Rock, The - Melted to death by poison gas
23. One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest - Suffocated by Huge Indian
24. Dr Strangelove - Ridding a Nuclear Bomb
25. Braveheart - Hung Drawn and Quartered
26. Mission, The - Crucified and over a waterfall
27. Trainspotting - Toxoplasmosis (Brain pops from Cat Shit)
28. Untouchables - Connery Machine Gunned to Death
29. White Heat - 'Made It ma, to the top of the world'
30. Grosse Point Blank - Pen to the throat
31. Deliverance - Shot by Arrow
32. Hellraiser - skin ripped apart by fishing hooks
33. Raiders of the Lost Ark - Melted by Angels
34. Timecop - Doppelgangers Merged to death
35. Mummy, The - Flesh eating Scarabs
36. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - Shot by the Bolivian Army
37. Jaws - Bitten in Half
38. Starship Troopers - Dina clawed in the back
39. Robocop - Melted by Toxic Waste
40. Warlock - Salt Water Death
41. Taxi Driver - Killed by Lone Gunman
42. Running Man - Chainsaw Balls
43. Kiss of the Dragon - Head Blood Rush
44. Deep, The - Conger Eel bites head off diver
45. Scarface - Shot by Columbians
46. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer - head crushed by TV
47. Fargo - The Wood-chipper
48. Godfather - Michael Corleone kills 3 men in restaurant
49. Single White Female - Stiletto through the eye
50. Seven - Kept alive for months
- For the Close - but no cigar... (the runners up) category, go here. I can't believe getting killed by phantom lepers (The Fog) didn't make the list. And # 44 should be moray eel, shouldn't it?
In Other News...
U.S. Sets Conditions for Peacekeeping Missions
We get top billing, our own trailer, and immunity from prosecution.
Temperature Hits 200º in Boston
Symposium on global warming forced to move inside.
No CEO's, CFO's Caught Stealing Today
But it's still early.
Fossett Will Write About Successful Solo Balloon Trip Around Earth on Sixth Try
Working title: "Some People Have Way Too Much Money."
News Quiz
Which of the following international agreements has the United States NOT abrogated or refused to sign: International Criminal Court Treaty, Kyoto Global Warming Treaty, Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Biological and Chemical Weapons Treaty, Land Mine Treaty, Small Arms Treaty, Rice Krispies Treaties. Hint: agreement does not limit the deployment of marshmallows.
Quotes, Part II
"Mr. Bush had filed disclosures of his stock trades in Harken Energy, where he was a director, as much as eight months late. The ethical call? Blame Harken's lawyers. A presidential spokesman assured us that this infraction amounted to nothing more than driving 60 in a 55-mile-per-hour zone. That will surely bring good cheer to those Harken shareholders who were left holding the stock that Mr. Bush sold, with no insider's knowledge, of course, just before it tanked." - Frank Rich in the NY Times.
"So, in the end, the younger Bush was cleared of insider trade wrongdoing by his personal attorney and by his father's vice-presidential counsel, a virtual impossibility for the average U.S. citizen." - Tom Flocco in Scoop.
'My lawyer ate my disclosure forms'
As if.
Senate Majority Leader Tom "Isadora" Daschle remembered that he once had testicles and called on the Securities and Exchange Commission to release the file of its decade-old investigation into insider trading by the Crook from Kennebunkport when he was a corporate director of a Texas energy company. [T]he White House blamed a "clerical mistake" by lawyers for Bunnypants' failure to disclose an $848,560 stock sale in a timely manner, as required by federal law, when he was on the board of Harken Energy Corp.
The explanation was at odds with an earlier statement by Daddy's Widdle Doofus that he had filed all the required disclosure forms about the transaction, but the government had "lost the paperwork."
"The SEC took a look at (the sale) and concluded there's nothing there," White House spokes-tool Ari "the Liar" Fleischer said last week, not mentioning that the SEC at the time was owned by Poppy Bush and his cronies, while Bush-the-only-slightly-smarter was president.
The Bush-league misadministration also faces a potentially embarrassing probe by the SEC into accounting irregularities at the energy firm Halliburton, based in Dallas, when Vice President "dick" Cheney was the firm's chief executive. - Zachary Coile at the San Francisco Chronicle, and Tom Flocco, WND.
Springtime for Hitler, cont.: BFEE piece in UK paper angers US shareholder/crybaby
The Daily Mirror editor, Piers Morgan, has vowed to go on publishing articles critical of George Bush despite "concern" from an American shareholder.
Last Thursday's paper carried a trenchant article by John Pilger which called the United States a "rogue state" guilty of undermining international law. It referred to Bush's administration as a criminal gang which had killed twice as many people as died at the World Trade Centre.
Next day one of the major US shareholders in Trinity-Mirror, the group which owns the Daily Mirror, phoned chief executive Philip Graf to express disappointment at the tone and content of Pilger's polemic. Tom Shrager of the New York-based fund manager Tweedy Browne, which owns 4% of Trinity, began by stating that he respected the concept of freedom of the press. He did not threaten to sell Trinity stock, but he went on to say, in the most forthright terms, that his company was very unhappy with the Mirror for publishing Pilger's piece.
He was not available for comment yesterday, although he was reported in the Mail on Sunday as saying: "We made our views known as shareholders. We felt that management should know how we view such editorial material."
Morgan said yesterday: "We will continue to run articles by John Pilger in the current climate, but these shouldn't be misconstrued as anti-American."
- Reprinted from The Guardian. Pilger article: the Mirror.
Silly Cat Stories
Russ and Sandy Asbury of Whitewater, Wis., told an Associated Press reporter that their two cats, Boots and Bandit, now each 2 years old, have driven up the couple's water bill recently because they have learned to flush toilets. Said Russ, "We have to shut the bathroom door when we go to bed. Otherwise one or the other of the cats are in there flushing away all night." - From News of the Weird and the Los Angeles Times/AP, 2-19-02.
Jaffa somehow knocked over the huge finch cage while we were away, snagged himself a zebra finch, and ate it in the master bathroom. I found the room covered in little finch feathers, but at least there weren't any gory bits lying around. As I flushed the feathers down the toilet, he tried to catch them as they spiraled by. Rrrrrrrrrrrrr.
The hot 'n' humid holiday weekend found me at the BF's family's place at the beach. It should've been relaxing, but between all the brownouts due to the weather, and AOHell being slower than _______ (fill in name of your favorite BFEE member!) at an ethics roundtable, trying to use the computer was an exercise in futility. Plus the AC blew up during one of the power surges caused by the brownouts, the 2-year-old started screaming at 6:00 every morning, the older dog spent all night every night panting her fool head off, and the damn green flies were all over you every time you tried to go outside. I need a vacation.
I can't believe how big the kittens got in only four days! The friend who took care of them for us said they ate like piglets. Catrina goes to her new home today : ( , and the news on Elsa is that she's doing well and won't stop purring : ) .
Quotes
"The problem that Bush has is that, I think, to some extent he wants to be the anti-Clinton, but he's not....he doesn't believe in anything and he hasn't made a strong stance." - as told to Matt Welch by a republican strategist, in the National Post.
"This nation is reeling from shock at the dishonesty and greed of so many of its corporations, and the stock market is taking a beating because people are no longer trusting anyone's information. That's nothing compared to the shock we all should share: that our vaunted 'watchdog press' is all too often a lapdog that, whether for political or budgetary reasons, or from stupidity, fails to bark when there's an intruder." - Alice Cherbonnier, in the Baltimore Chronicle.
"As we learned all too well in Korea, Vietnam and Somalia, it is dangerous to present Congress and the American people with a fait accompli on important matters of foreign affairs...I have not seen such executive arrogance and secrecy since the Nixon administration, and we all know what happened to that group." - Sen. Robert Byrd.
"When I survey the current crop of journalists, I see a fawning herd of patriotic but stupid stenographers, decorating White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer's fantasy prose with red white and blue bunting. The pressroom flag flappers dutifully report the Generalissimo's 'great victory over evil' in Afghanistan, as if something had actually been accomplished, something besides the replacement of one gang of warlords with a more pipeline friendly team of tyrants." - GeorgeLewandowski, @ YellowTimes.org.
"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger." - Hermann Goering, Nazi leader, at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II.
July 3, 2002
When 'President' Bush was at the West Point commencement on June 1st he pulled aside Army Secretary Tom White and told him: "As long as they're hitting you on Enron, they're not hitting me. That's your job. You're the lightning rod for this administration."
So says a dynamite new article in the soon-to-be-released new issue of the Washington Monthly. Ari, this is Houston. We have a problem ...
-- Josh Marshall
Hot hot hot and humid. Blehhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
More Moments of Churchilliana: "They should celebrate heartily because we have freedom and we love freedom," - the Oaf of Office, Wisconsin, 7/2/02.
How to win friends and influence people
Do the opposite of the following examples:
- To the open dismay of its allies, the United States appears prepared to paralyze U.N. peacekeeping operations from the Middle East to Central Africa unless it secures a guarantee that American personnel will be protected from the new International Criminal Court - a condition that backers of the court consider legally and politically untenable.
- US military officials in Afghanistan have refused to apologise following the mistaken bombing of an Afghan wedding party on Monday which killed at least 30 people, insisting that aircraft had come under sustained and hostile fire.
- President Junior has kept at least one campaign promise: he said he'd run the country like a business, and that he has surely done. The Bush administration looks more like Enron or WorldCom everyday: all smoke and mirrors economic projections, make-believe accounting, bigshots cashing in while everybody else's savings vanish, and zero accountability.
- When someone tells you they're fighting for freedom of religion, there's a good chance they're really fighting for their freedom to make you follow their religion. Post 9-11 the Bushies decried Taliban fanaticism (after sucking up to them, after funding them), but Mullah Omar looks nearly enlightened in light of the recent paroxysm of Bible-thumping among American leaders. The United States is substantially more religiously diverse than Afghanistan, not that you could tell by watching Bush, his Cabinet, the Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court.
Quotes of the Day: "Our personal trainer the president, up and running after his colonoscopy (I did not need to know about that), is trying out a new role - Scourge of Corporate Misbehavior. This has approximately the same effect as opening the refrigerator door and finding Fidel Castro inside. Smoking a cigar. 'Hard to believe' barely begins to hint at the surrealism of this development." - Molly Ivins.
WorldCom Call Center - Phone Script #238
Dealing with phone calls from those pricks at the SEC:
IMPORTANT
Items to avoid:
It is extremely important that you never say the following lines when on the phone with an investigator from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC):
* I'm sorry, I can't hear you. (yelling into the background) Hey Walt! Can you please stop shredding papers for a minute so I can hear this bastard from the SEC?!
* We couldn't possibly accept charges for this collect call. This place is fucking bankrupt.
* Wait, I gave that $3.2 billion deposit to Uncle Billy.
* I'm sorry, we seem to have a bad connection - or - it could be on account of the fact that my phone's earpiece is stuffed with cash.
* I've temporarily stopped the state-required recording of this phone call because I'd now like to engage in some illegal activity.
* FDIC? We don't need NO stinking FDIC!
* Ha! ENRON? Buncha lightweights!
* Yes, Martha Stewart did stop by to have lunch with the CFO.
* Yes, I am interested in changing my long distance plan to Sprint.
* Please wait while I transfer you to my rectum.
* Oh hey, yo it's the SEC! Listen, can I give you a call back? My mom is like, dying, or something like that on the other line.
* Go ahead, talk, it's your 3.8 billion.
Note: Some of the above lines may be appropriate when on the phone with representatives of the Republican National Committee (RNC).
From Lost Brain News.
July 2, 2002
The Crooks in the White House
'This is exciting. Will Dick Cheney keel over from his fifth heart attack before he becomes the first veep since Spiro Agnew to resign in the face of charges of financial crookery? Or will Bush fire him to divert attention from his own scummy past? n Over the weekend President Dumbo poked his head above the rubble of the WorldCom scandal and made a stand: "No violation of the public’s trust will be tolerated... Executives who commit fraud will face financial penalties and, when they are guilty of criminal wrongdoing, they will face jail time."
'Of course, anyone with a memory longer than the day before yesterday would have doubled over with laughter at the spectacle of Bush calling for jail time for corporate crooks.'
- Holy CRAP! Alexander Cockburn in the NY Press must have testicles the size of watermelons, God bless him.
A massive solar eruption, more than 30 times the length of Earth's diameter, blasted away from the Sun on Monday at 9:19 a.m. EDT. The ESA/NASA SOHO satellite captured this image of the spectacular eruptive prominence escaping the Sun.
Prominences are loops of magnetic fields with hot gas trapped inside. Sometimes, as the fields become unstable, the they will erupt and rise off of the Sun in just a few minutes or hours. If eruptions like these are directed toward the Earth they can cause a significant amount of aurora and other geomagnetic activity. - -From Cosmiverse.
". . . as for why Bush was sedated, a colonoscopy is really not all that painful. The problem was that the doctors had to pull his head out before they could do the procedure." - anon @ the BuzzFlash mailbag
MediaWhoresOnline has some great stuff, including an in-depth expose' on the Bush stock scandal.
"If Martha Stewart is sent away, we can be sure prison food is going to get a lot better." - Tom Brokaw
Business as usual - Congress will put off a reorganization of the FBI and CIA (to improve the performance of the intelligence community) until it establishes a Department of Homeland Security, according to Bush administration and congressional sources. The decision will delay any significant revamping of the nation's intelligence system until at least next year. - (The Washington comPost)
More Moments in Churchilliana: "Over 75 percent of white Americans own their home, and less than 50 percent of Hispanos and African Americans don't own their home. And that's a gap, that's a homeownership gap. And we've got to do something about it." - the Oaf of Office, Cleveland, Ohio, July 1, 2002.
The hypocrite-in-chief
'President' Bush is talking tough about pinstriped rip-off artists -- ignoring the skeletons in his and Cheney's own corporate closets. Although Bush evaded most of the political fallout from the Enron debacle despite his adminstration's close ties to that company, the growing scandal of corporate irresponsibility is threatening to engulf the business-friendly White House. And with every move Bush makes to respond, his own corporate past, and that of Vice President Dick Cheney, the former Halliburton CEO, may well come back to haunt him. - Anthony York, in Salon.
"Bush says that if they're removing 'under God' from the pledge of allegiance, they should also remove that hard word, 'indivisible.'" - Kilborn
'Administration Mauled by Own Dog Of Double Standards'
Remember Whitewater - that two-bit, failed Arkansas real estate deal that dominated much of the Clinton's eight years in the White House? Republicans felt it represented such a serious ethical marker that it required six years of investigating costing some $65 million.
GOP leaders like Dan Burton and Tom DeLay regularly climbed in front of TV cameras and worked themselves up into moralistic hissy fits over Whitewater. They justified their non-stop investigations by saying that a President who conducted himself badly in business was capable of, well, who knows what!
While Bill Clinton is gone, Dan Burton and Tom DeLay are still in office. But their views on business ethics must have softened. We have heard nary a peep out of either man about the current Vice President's now suspect behavior while CEO of Halliburton (1995-2000.) Halliburton is under SEC investigation for cooking its books, a la Enron, under Cheney's command.
The money involved in the Whitewater deal would not have been enough to buy a fixer-upper in Hope, Arkansas. But the Halliburton deals now under investigation can be measured in the tens of millions of dollars.
So, where is the outrage? Maybe it's "different." Let's see:
- Clinton's Whitewater business deal occurred before he was elected President
- Cheney's Halliburton deals occurred before he was elected Vice President
Check.
- The accounting for Clinton's Whitewater loans raised questions
- Halliburton's accounting methods under Cheney have raised questions
Check.
- The Whitewater loans to Clinton were part of a regulatory (S&L) investigation
- Halliburton's financial statements are part of a regulatory (SEC) investigation
Check.
- During Whitewater, Republicans argued that Executive Branch agencies could not be trusted to investigate their own boss.
- SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt, a Bush/Cheney appointee, is now investigating Halliburton and its former accounting firm, Arthur Andersen. (Andersen was one of Pitt's law clients before he was appointed to the SEC.)
Check.
- The Clintons lost money on the Whitewater deal.
- Cheney profited handsomely since his salary and bonuses were based on Halliburton's now-suspect financial statements.
No Check. Except for Dick Cheney - who received very large bonus checks for what is now alleged to have been artificially inflated Halliburton profits.
So, some enterprising reporter might want to ask Dan Burton and Tom DeLay to explain the differences - as they see them - between Whitewater and Halliburton.
- - Snipped from The Daily Enron.
Hey! Partisan politics! The politics of personal destruction! The "president" and vp can't be distracted at a time like this! Don't you know there's a war on?!
Quote of the Day: "Read our lips: The judge who wrote the opinion on the Pledge was a Republican, appointed by Richard Nixon. Is this really so hard?" - TAPPED
"The FBI is checking the library records of people they consider suspicious. Bush has always been suspicious of people who use libraries." - Conan.
Corporate Fraud in the White House
Arthur Levitt, Bill Clinton's choice to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, crusaded for better policing of corporate accounting - though he was often stymied by the power of lobbyists. George W. Bush replaced him with Harvey Pitt, who promised a "kinder and gentler" S.E.C. Even after Enron, the Bush administration steadfastly opposed any significant accounting reforms. For example, it rejected calls from the likes of Warren Buffett to require deduction of the cost of executive stock options from reported profits.
But Mr. Bush and Mr. Pitt say they are outraged about WorldCom.
The president's supposed anger was particularly hard to take seriously. As Chuck Lewis of the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity delicately put it, Mr. Bush "has more familiarity with troubled energy companies and accounting irregularities than probably any previous chief executive." Mr. Lewis was referring to the saga of Harken Energy, which now truly deserves a public airing.
The Crooked Cretin of Crawford was on the board of directors and audit committee of Harken when the SEC slammed them for 'phony transactions'. Only a few weeks before bad news that could not be concealed caused Harken's shares to tumble, the Moron of Midland sold off two-thirds of his stake, for $848,000. Just for the record, that's about four times bigger than the sale that has Martha Stewart in hot water. Oddly, though the law requires prompt disclosure of insider sales, he neglected to inform the S.E.C. about this transaction until 34 weeks had passed. An internal S.E.C. memorandum concluded that he had broken the law, but no charges were filed. This, everyone insists, had nothing to do with the fact that his father was president. - Paul Krugman, in the New York Times.
"Arafat likes Bush's idea of new elections - as long as they do the counting in Florida." - Letterman
Cool stuff in Today in History:
1881: President James Garfield is shot by Charles Julius Guiteau, a man who had wanted to be Ambassador to France. It takes Garfield two months to die. Hmmmm.
1937: Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared over the Pacific.
1947: A craft of 30 meter diameter crashes on the Foster Ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. By July 8, the U.S. Army had cleared the land and declared it off limits. An Army press conference asserts the debris to be that of a weather balloon, but that explanation does not mesh well with witness observations.
1998: The eternal flame at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which has burned continuously since 1921 to commemorate the dead of World War I, is extinguished by a drunken soccer fan with his beer-enriched urine. Mexican national Rodrigo Rafael Ortega is subsequently arrested for public drunkenness and offending the dead.
And these are the polite Brits speaking...
'It took the Bush administration a good deal of internal negotiation to come up with its ringing endorsement of the Sharon line, but leading British civil servants I spoke to about last week's speech by Mr Bush regarded it as - I quote - "puerile", "absurdly ignorant" and "ludicrous'....There is, for instance, a rooted dislike of the "arrogance" - not my word, but that of a senior and much respected civil servant - that enables President Bush ("a bear of very little brain" - ditto) to announce to the Palestinians who should and shouldn't be their leader. And there is a parallel impatience at the "stupidity" (ditto) which will unquestionably ensure that Palestinians of all kinds will now feel obliged to support Yasser Arafat as their leader, for better or worse.' - John Simpson, in the London Telegraph.
July 1, 2002
Elsa just went to her new home :(
Wag it, Shoot it...
George Michael releases a new song, Shoot The Dog, this week. The single's cover includes a front page of the Daily Mirror, headlined Howdy Poodle, criticising the Prime Minister's apparent sucking up to President Bush. The song mocks Tony Blair's poodle-style relationship with Bunnypants, with lyrics such as "So Cherie, my dear, could you leave the way clear for sex tonight? Tell him: 'Tony, Tony, Tony, I know that you're horny but there's somethin' bout that Bush ain't right'."
"People were just not talking about it properly and anyone who raised concerns was being branded a traitor or unpatriotic." George bristles at the potential accusation of treachery. "I'm an extremely patriotic person," he snorts. - - From The Mirror.
This came to me via email this morning, and I'm still LMAO: Actual Quotes From Sports Commentators
Pat Glenn - Weightlifting Commentator: "This is Gregoriava from Bulgaria. I saw her snatch this morning and it was amazing."
Ted Walsh - Horse Racing Commentator: "This is really a lovely horse - I once rode her mother."
Murray Walker: "The lead car is absolutely unique, except for the one behind it which is identical."
Greg Norman: "I owe a lot to my parents, especially my mother and father."
Alan Minter: "Sure there have been injuries and deaths in boxing - - but none of them serious."
Terry Venables: "If history repeats itself, I should think we can expect the same thing again"
Ron Atkinson: "He dribbles a lot and the opposition doesn't like it -- you can see it all over their faces."
Harry Carpenter - BBC TV Boat Race 1977: "Ah, isn't that nice, the wife of the Cambridge president is kissing the cox of the Oxford crew."
Metro Radio: "Julian Dicks is everywhere. It's like they've got eleven Dicks on the field."
David Coleman at the Montreal Olympics: "There goes Juantorena down the back straight, opening his legs and showing his class."
US TV Commentator: "One of the reasons Arnie [Arnold Palmer] is playing so well is that, before each tee-shot, his wife takes out his balls and kisses them - oh my God, what have I just said?"
The Toxic Tinhorn to taxpayers: "tough tamales!"
The Bush misadministration has cut the funds necessary to clean up 33 toxic waste sites in 18 states under the Superfund cleanup program, according to a new report to Congress by the inspector general of the EPA, The NY Times reported today.
The cuts will mean work will come to a halt at some of the most contaminated grounds in the country - sites that pose a level of health and environmental hazards to their communities.
The administration wants to reduce the payments from the fund by covering fewer sites. To do that it would shift the costs of further work to the taxpayers. Congressional critics have said this amounts to abandoning the precept that "the polluter pays," on which the Superfund program was founded. Again, the report makes clear that under the administration's approach the costs of cleaning up these sites would eventually shift to all taxpayers, and that in the meantime the whole program would be slowed down.
We taxpayers, especially here in NJ, will show our thanks in November, you drooling sockpuppet.
The BF found a set of woodchuck legs in the driveway yesterday morning. He said from the paw prints it looked as though it was a fox kill. I would've gone for the legs first, myself.
Napoleon Bonehead Uniting World Against the US...
Senior officials in the British Prime Minister's office have delivered an astonishing attack on America's handling of the hunt for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda fugitives.
They say that troops conducting house-to-house searches in tribal areas of Pakistan along the Afghan border were "blundering", with a " march-in-shooting" approach. The US action was "backfiring", increasing support for terrorism and making it harder to catch bin Laden and his henchmen.
"The Americans think they and the Pakistanis can just march in shooting," an official closely involved in the war said. "They don't understand the sensitivities. We have years of experience in the tribal areas and we know using force will just backfire and increase sympathy for al-Qaeda." The comments will further strain Anglo-US relations after a week of tensions over Middle East policy and Washington's introduction of steel tariffs.
The scale of the divide was shown by scathing comments by one British minister involved in steel negotiations. "You have to remember that this is a rather unpleasant administration," the minister said. "... A full-blooded attempt to forge a relationship with it hasn't changed its fundamental nature - protectionist and self-interested."
- - Snipped from The Sydney Morning Herald.
...Even the Austalians!
The world outside the US is now getting used to the fact Americans have a fraudulently elected nitwit as their president, but George W. Bush excelled himself this week with a "long-awaited" definitive speech on Middle East policies that stretched even the weirdest imaginations.
US embassies around the world moved to "explain" the batty future Bush saw for Israel and Palestine, but nothing could disguise that the bedbug was running the White House and anything could happen next.
On this side of the Atlantic he is seen as a kind of strange joke. Britons try to understand him, but in Europe they simply think of him as a sort of circus act. The Middle East pronouncement was so absurd they didn't know whether to laugh or simply ask the US senior political attache over for a commiserating drink.
These concerns are based on the belief - that seems to be proven - that Washington itself is a divided city. Colin Powell, in State, is trying to plead reason over the clamouring voices in Defence, led by Donald Rumsfeld, clearly a man not always entirely in control of his senses.
Bush is listening to Rumsfeld, and other strange voices - not least the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. And, as he does, the US looks more and more to be a long way away from the rest of the world. - - Snipped from The Australia Daily Telegraph.
Jak at SmirkingChimp.com writes "I would like to strongly disagree with the sentence "Britons try to understand him". Here in the UK I would say that most people gave up trying to understand George Bush long ago. Even right-wing Tories don't take him too seriously here, realising that if they tried to forge an ideological political alliance between conservatism in Britain and conservatism in the USA they would,quite simply,be laughed at!"
'A time for dissent in America'
The presidency seems to be going to George Bush's head. With each morning's paper or evening's news, depending on your preference, our leader is jumping up and saying truly extraordinary things, some of them preposterous, some stupid, some terrifying.
Ariel Sharon, he says, is "a man of peace." I must have missed something. If Yasser Arafat, that other sometimes man of peace, wins an election, the election doesn't count. Nothing counts unless we like it. We are now in the first-strike business, ready to launch pre-emptive or preventive strikes against countries or groups judged hostile to our interests by someone at Central Intelligence or the Republican National Committee.
We are, since Sept. 11, a nation without dissent -- and a little weak on common sense, too. If the president says it, it must be true. Whether you agree with his pronouncements or not, you are supposed to keep your mouth shut in the name of patriotism and solidarity. Among other things, you have to pretend we actually have the capability to do what we say we're going to do to the axis of evil or anyone else, including corporate America, who gets bad numbers in Republicans' polls.
Snipped from Richard Reeves' column here.
Presidential Colon Procedure Offered Welcome Break From Grueling Vice-Presidential Schedule
Vice-President Dick Cheney, having briefly assumed President Bush's duties while the President underwent a routine colon procedure on Saturday, told reporters today that he "enjoyed the downtime immensely."
Invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution Saturday morning, Mr. Bush transferred to Mr. Cheney all of his presidential responsibilities, which meant that Mr. Cheney spent Saturday jogging, going to the gym, and hitting a ball for Mr. Bush's dog to retrieve.
In addition, Mr. Cheney called the nations of East Timor and Luxembourg "evil," stumbling briefly over the pronunciation of Luxembourg.
Finally, as Mr. Bush's colon procedure was winding down, Mr. Cheney made some remarks about the Japanese economy, mistakenly using the word "devaluation" instead of "deflation," sending the NIKKEI stock market into a tailspin.
As for the President, Mr. Bush's doctors pronounced his procedure a success, but said that they were having difficulty determining whether or not the President's anesthesia had fully worn off.
Mr. Bush's doctors indicated that when they asked the President the standard post-operative questions - such as, "What is the capital of the United States?" - Mr. Bush got only two out of five correct.
"Before the operation, he got three out of five right," one doctor said.
- - Snipped from The Borowitz Report.
Too Stupid to be President
Bush's news conferences have certain imperial qualities. These events are held on his terms. He will often say in advance: "I'll take two questions." Then he will designate the reporters permitted to ask those questions. The foreign potentates are also limited to answering two questioners, which leaves a roomful of other reporters frustrated.
Bush simply ignores follow-up questions, and reporters are quickly shooed out of the room. Just so there are no hard feelings, Bush shows his down-home friendly side by calling out his pet nicknames for the regular correspondents on the White House beat.
Pinning down this chief executive on difficult issues is becoming a lost cause in the security-driven White House, where officials focus on diminishing, not facilitating, access to him. Bush, obsessing over news leaks and keeping his aides mum, offers little explanation of his vision for the nation and the world. Undoubtedly, he has created the most secretive administration in modern times.
But he should realize that the full-fledged news conference is a two-way street. Not only can reporters learn what he thinks about big-picture issues, but he can often learn from their questions what people in various parts of the nation are worried about -- what issues they care most about.
The American people have the right to know where the president is taking the country. Bush can make all the speeches in the world, but his policies have to be probed, and only the press is positioned to do that.
- - Read more of Helen Thomas here.
Our chickensh!t clueless incompetant idiot-in-chief and his lapdog bushsmootching kneepadded propaganda spewers? That's a laugh -
Q: "'Scuse me, Mr 'President', what are your thoughts on the latest shenanigans concerning Wall Street?"
W: "Hey there, Stretch! How's the ol' bald spot comin' along, pardner?"
Shit.
Quotes of the Day: "Muzzling reporters and blacklisting anyone who asks a tough question isn't enough for this dipsh*t... he just doesn't answer questions, period" - BlazingDragon, at SmirkingChimp.com.
"Typically, though, 'democracy' means the people get to pick their leaders. George W. Bush doesn't seem to get it . But we guess that's what happens when you're elected by the Supreme Court instead of the people." - TAPPED.
