Category: Political

Current Events, Political

Idiots on parade

Sheik Al Hilaly comparing rape victims to abandoned meat:

“If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it … whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat

“The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.”

“She is the one who takes her clothes off, cuts them short, acts flirtatious, puts on makeup, shows off, and goes on the streets acting silly. She is the one wearing a short dress, lifting it up, lowering it down, then a look, then a smile, then a word, then a greeting, then a word, then a date, then a meeting, then a crime, then Long Bay Jail, then comes a merciless judge who gives you 65 years,”

The idiot sheik spoke at the end of Ramadan and lamented the fact that Muslim men who perpetrated a series of vicious gang rapes against white women in Sydney, Australia were sent to prison. It’s the women’s fault you see.

NY State Controller Alan Hevesi during a debate with his opponent J. Christopher Callaghan:

“I have no reason to resign…”

“I make no apology for it…”

“That’s my family — and they come first…”

The idiot controller stated this when pressed about resigning based on a State Ethics Commission report noting that he used public employees for private errands, that he had no intention of repaying the State for that work, and that he had no basis for using public employees in that manner.

…and speaking of his family coming first, he was quick to detail his wife’s illnesses and maladies, including her attempts at suicide. She now rests in a nursing home, allegedly unable to communicate.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to critics of the ‘war in Iraq’

—Just back off—

—Relax—

“You’re looking for some sort of a guillotine to come falling down if some date isn’t met. That is not what this is about.”

Hey, idiot Defense Secretary, how about the U.S. back off and bring the troops home? How about telling the tens of thousands of maimed soldiers and the families of the dead, and the killed and maimed in Iraq to ‘relax’?

By the way, the date should have been met a couple years back —“ now what did that sign on the aircraft carrier say? The only effective guillotine left is impeachment.

…and what is it all about anyway?

  • WMD —“ Nope, none there;
  • Saddam —“ lunatic leader, but it is not like we don’t have one right in our back yard;
  • Terrorist tie-in —“ hmmm, none there, but we’ve created plenty;
  • Oil riches —“ nope, the Iraqi facilities are rusting into garbage heaps. They won’t be able to squeeze a barrel of oil out in a year or so.
  • Domestic safety —“ nah. But hey, why not bring the troops home to protect us and our borders;
  • Global domination —“ hehehe… like people with one track minds could understand the intricacies of the world. They couldn’t even put the right number of troops on the ground.

If anybody knows, hey, clue us in.

Current Events, Political

NY State Controller Hevesi – out of the frying pan…

For those who follow my blog, you will know that I have been commenting on NY State Controller Alan Hevesi and his repeated use of a State employee as a personal servant. The NY State Ethics Commission has now cited him for illegal activities and has referred the matter to the Legislature. He may be impeached.

It appears that the panel raised many of the issues I previously raised, including the fact that the State employee he used was his aide when he was NY City Controller. The employee provided the same services for him when they both worked for the city.

It appears that the aide, Mr. Nicholas Acquafredda, and yet another unnamed State employee both provided personal services to Mr. Hevesi on State time. In addition, the investigation alleges that Mr. Acquafredda had someone else entering his time records, and couldn’t perform the job he was supposed to be doing, because he was too busy being an errand boy.

Here’s a snippet from the NY Times article: Ethics Panel Says N.Y. Comptroller’s Use of Drivers Broke the Law

ALBANY, Oct. 23 —” The State Ethics Commission accused Comptroller Alan G. Hevesi on Monday of breaking the law by using state employees to chauffeur his wife, and sharply disputed his contention that his wife needed a driver for security reasons.

The accusation against Mr. Hevesi, the state’s chief fiscal watchdog, marks the first time that the commission has ever charged a statewide official with wrongdoing, officials said. The commission’s referral of the case to the Legislature left lawmakers scrambling to figure out how to discipline the guardian of the state’s finances.

The Legislature has a range of options, from doing nothing to fining Mr. Hevesi to removing him from office, possibly by impeachment, an action that has not been taken in decades. But the law for what comes next is murky, so the official accusation had officials in the Legislature and the governor’s office rummaging through their law books to figure out what to do.

The commission’s 26-page report sent shock waves through state politics and dealt a serious blow to Mr. Hevesi, a Democrat who is running for re-election in two weeks…

Mr. Hevesi should resign.

Current Events, Political

Advocate of ethnic cleansing moves in

The AP reports: Olmert Brings Hard-Liner Into Government

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Monday brought into his government a hard-liner who wants to rid Israel of Arabs – a move that would shore up his shaky coalition but could hinder efforts to renew peace talks with the Palestinians.

Avigdor Lieberman, who leads the Yisrael Beiteinu party, said he hoped the deal to join Olmert’s governing coalition would be signed by Tuesday.

Yisrael Beiteinu, or “Israel Our Home,” brings 11 lawmakers into the coalition, giving Olmert control of 78 of 120 seats in the Knesset, or parliament…

Lieberman, 48, has a long record of hawkish positions toward the Palestinians…

He has also taken a tough line toward Israel’s own Arab minority.

He advocates trading Israeli Arab towns for West Bank settlements – in effect stripping Israeli Arabs of citizenship – and recently called for the execution of Israeli Arab lawmakers who met with leaders of Hamas, the ruling Palestinian group sworn to Israel’s destruction. Such positions have drawn accusations of racism.

But with his coalition weakened by infighting and harsh criticism of his handling of the Lebanon war, Olmert had little choice…

I know, I know, what are a few Arabs (including many Christian Arabs) and a little racism in comparison to holding on to power? These folks are expert in turning politics into an immoral exercise.

Many of history’s most notorious mass murderers also said that they had little choice.

Current Events, Political

Union pokes U.S. in the eye

The AP reports on more union terrorism, and the requisite trouncing of the U.S. in front of the whole world. What Soviet and Chinese Communists couldn’t accomplish the homegrown ones are.

See: AFL-CIO files complaint with U.N. labor group: Protest is aimed at ruling on role of supervisors

WASHINGTON – Organized labor is filing an international protest about a federal decision redefining which workers are supervisors exempt from legal protection to join unions.

The AFL-CIO, a federation of about 50 labor unions with 9 million members, said it would file a complaint today with the International Labor Organization of the United Nations about a decision this month by the National Labor Relations Board.

The decision, covering a series of cases known as the Kentucky River cases, involved the role of a supervisor.

The board ruled that nurses who regularly run shifts at health care facilities should be considered supervisors and exempt from federal protections that cover union membership. The decision potentially has major implications for workers in other fields.

While the U.N. committee of labor law specialists from around the world has no enforcement power, the AFL-CIO is looking for support in efforts to restore the more traditional view of what makes a supervisor.

“This will demonstrate how far outside the mainstream of accepted international law the U.S. is moving,” said Craig Becker, a legal counsel to the AFL-CIO.

NLRB decisions cannot be directly appealed in the U.S. courts, although those issues might reappear in the courts in other labor cases, he said.

Workers classified as supervisors under the ruling would not be protected by the National Labor Relations Act. Dissenting members of the NLRB said the decision “threatens to create a new class of workers under federal labor law: workers who have neither the genuine prerogatives of management, nor the statutory rights of ordinary employees.”

Current Events, Political

From bad to worse

Monsters and Critics is carrying a story on the Iraq situation. See Eye on Iraq: What is going wrong in Iraq? which includes the following statement:

For it was those elections so eagerly pushed and hyped by the White House that gave the Sunni insurgents in central Iraq the great strategic goal for which they had previously been striving in vain for more than two-and-a-half years. It was those elections that transformed the Iraq conflict from a limited insurgency supported by a relatively small minority within an ethnic minority of only 5 million Sunni Iraqis — less than 20 percent of the total population — into a burgeoning full scale civil war between the two largest religious groups in the country comprising 80 percent of the population, or 22.4 million people between them.

For the elections led to a consolidation of Shiite political power in Baghdad and then to the empowering of Shiite militias by Shiite political parties dominating the new parliament. Shiite militia influence within the new Iraqi police and army rapidly grew.

Well today, the Shiite insurgency captured and took over an entire city, a provincial capital nonetheless. The NY Times reports on the situation in Attack on Iraqi City Shows Militia’s Power.

What’s wrong in Iraq is that we are there. What’s wrong is that we are powerless to stop the on-going civil war. What’s wrong is that the British, the national police, and the U.S. cannot stop a militia from doing these sorts of things.

It cannot be fixed, nor will it be right, so the very least we can do is to extricate ourselves, the sooner the better.

Vietnam again indeed… Another war skillfully avoided by George W. Bush.

Current Events, Media, Political

Well now that I know I’ll shut-up

From Yahoo News: Top US general says Rumsfeld is inspired by God

MIAMI (AFP) – The top US general defended the leadership of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying it is inspired by God.

“He leads in a way that the good Lord tells him is best for our country,” said Marine General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff…

The ‘good’ Lord: Get Saddam.
Rumsfeld: Why?
The ‘good’ Lord: He dissed your boss’ dad. Remember, Honor Thy father…
Rumsfeld: What will we tell the people?
The ‘good’ Lord: Lie.
Rumsfeld: What?
The ‘good’ Lord: Lie! Make up a story, Saddam is evil.
Rumsfeld: You mean do an evil to achieve a good?
The ‘good’ Lord: Sure.
Rumsfeld: OK

The REAL Word of God tells us:

Therefore, God is sending them a deceiving power so that they may believe the lie,
that all who have not believed the truth but have approved wrongdoing may be condemned.
(2 Thessalonians 2:11-12)

Current Events, Media, Political

You’ll never see him again

Do you get the feeling that one day Keith Olbermann will suddenly disappear from MSNBC? Of course, with the President’s signing of the Military Commissions Act and with the commensurate loss of our Habeas Corpus rights there would be little if any chance of ever seeing or hearing from him again if he did disappear.

Maybe the President’s evangelical friends would assume he was taken up in the rapture?

A transcript from Crooks and Liars of Keith Olbermann’s commentary on the Death of Habeas Corpus: —Your words are lies, Sir.—

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare anything this country has ever done, to anything the terrorists have ever done.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has insisted again that “the United States does not torture. It’s against our laws and it’s against our values” and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison and the stories of Waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens “Unlawful Enemy Combatants” and ship them somewhere —” anywhere —” but may now, if he so decides, declare you an “Unlawful Enemy Combatant” and ship you somewhere – anywhere.

And if you think this, hyperbole or hysteria… ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was President, or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was President, or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was President.

And if you somehow think Habeas Corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an “unlawful enemy combatant” —” exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this Attorney General is going to help you?

Habeas Corpus? Gone.

The Geneva Conventions? Optional.

The Moral Force we shined outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal protection? Snuffed out.

These things you have done, Mr. Bush… they would be “the beginning of the end of America.”

And did it even occur to you once sir —” somewhere in amidst those eight separate, gruesome, intentional, terroristic invocations of the horrors of 9/11 —” that with only a little further shift in this world we now know —” just a touch more repudiation of all of that for which our patriots died —”

Did it ever occur to you once, that in just 27 months and two days from now when you leave office, some irresponsible future President and a “competent tribunal” of lackeys would be entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of “Unlawful Enemy Combatant” for… and convene a Military Commission to try… not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?

Christian Witness, Current Events, Political

State trumps Church

The New York State Court of Appeals rules that State interests trump religious faith. The beginning of a very slippery slope (just imagine Quakers and the Amish marching off to war).

This follows along with rulings from the IRS as to what ministers may or may not preach, and other New York State rulings that could require Catholic hospitals to perform abortions.

The ball is now in the Church’s court.

Will they shut down services and allow the state to pick-up the slack, hold their nose and provide coverage, privatize their outreach services spinning off hundreds of not-for-profits that will have to fend for themselves? There’s a hundred other iterations as to what could happen (imagine making people sign an election stating that they do not want the coverage – people would win any lawsuit filed based on such a measure) None of it clean, none of it good.

The Bishops of the Roman Church need to get on the same page and strategize. Otherwise you will see scandal caused by Bishops going in a hundred different directions in opposition to Church teaching.

Let the teachers teach.

From the Albany Times-Union: Court of Appeals defends health care law: Mandatory group insurance coverage of prescription contraceptives ruled constitutional:

ALBANY — The 2003 law requiring employers that provide group insurance coverage for prescription drugs to include coverage for prescription contraceptives is constitutional, the state’s highest court ruled today.

The Court of Appeals rejected a request by Catholic Charities of Albany and others for an injunction that would have forced the state Insurance Department to allow them an exemption from the Women’s Health and Wellness Act, like other religious institutions whose employees all share the same faith.

“Plaintiffs believe contraception to be sinful, and assert that the challenged provisions of the WHWA compel them to violate their religious tenets by financing conduct that they condemn,” Associate Judge Robert S. Smith stated in an 18-page decision. “The sincerity of their beliefs, and the centrality of those beliefs to their faiths, are not in dispute.”

What is at issue, Smith said, is the balance between an interest in adhering to the tenets of the organizations’ faith and the state’s interest in “fostering equality between the sexes, and in providing women with better health care.”

In the debate before the law was enacted, legislators found that granting a broad religious exemption like that which Catholics Charities sought would leave too many women outside the statute, Smith said, “a decision entitled to deference from the courts.”

“Of course, the Legislature might well have made another choice, but we cannot say the choice the Legislature made has been shown to be an unreasonable interference with plaintiffs’ exercise of their religion,” Smith wrote. “The Legislature’s choice is therefore not unconstitutional.”

Current Events, Political

Irrefutable logic slaps him in the face

From the Irish Examiner: Bush compares Iraq to Vietnam:

US president George Bush has compared the intensifying violence in Iraq to the Tet offensive in Vietnam 38 years ago.

The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese armies undertook a series of attacks that shook America’s confidence about winning the war and eroded political support for then president Lyndon Johnson…

While elsewhere scientists work diligently on Mr. Bush’s post presidential business suit

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Scientists create cloak of invisibility:

WASHINGTON — A team of American and British researchers has made a Cloak of Invisibility. Well, OK, it’s not perfect. Yet. But it’s a start, and it did a pretty good job of hiding a copper cylinder…

If you can hide an inanimate object you can hide Mr. Bush.

Current Events, Perspective, Political

Not a Knight of Malta

Excerpts from the NY Times article Catholic Priest Claims Relationship With Foley:

A Catholic priest told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune on Wednesday that he had an intimate two-year relationship with former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley when the congressman was a teenage altar boy.

Mr. Foley resigned from Congress last month after his suggestive electronic messages to young male pages surfaced. Soon after, he said he was an alcoholic and said he had been molested as a boy by a clergyman.

From his home on the island of Gozo, a part of Malta off the Italian coast, the priest, Anthony Mercieca, described a series of encounters that he said Mr. Foley might perceive as sexually inappropriate. Among them: massaging Mr. Foley while the boy was naked, skinny-dipping with him at a secluded lake and being naked in the same room on overnight trips.

Father Mercieca said he was in a drug-induced stupor one night and cannot clearly remember what happened but that it may also have been inappropriate.

—I have to confess, I was going through a nervous breakdown,— he said. —I was taking pills —” tranquilizers. I used to take them all the time. They affected my mind a little bit.—

He’s still in denial about the fact he’s an abuser. ‘Hey, look, I drink because people are mean to be, not because I’m an alcoholic’ doesn’t work.

Father Mercieca said he taught Mr. Foley —some wrong things— related to sex, though he wouldn’t specify what he meant. He also said they were naked together in a sauna twice.

Father Mercieca said that, at the time, he considered his relationship with Mr. Foley innocent. But he now says he sees that his actions may have been inappropriate.

I think more like ‘were inappropriate.’ And what type of sexual behaviors were you to teach as a priest?

Father Mercieca said his encounter with Mr. Foley was an aberration, and that the Catholic Church never had to send him for counseling during his 38 years in the priesthood in Florida.

—I have been in many parishes, and I have never been— accused, he said.

So what! Perhaps your position, people’s fear of disgrace, etc. etc. resulted in your not being accused. Still, you are an abuser. To Mr. Dreher’s oft talked about position – you just don’t get it.

Father Mercieca said during his two years in Lake Worth, he ate dinners with Mr. Foley’s family and that Mr. Foley’s grandmother —was delighted to see me all the time.—

Perhaps one of the reasons you were not ‘accused.’

Father Mercieca said he is confused about why Mr. Foley has decided to come forward after almost 40 years.

—Why does he want to destroy me in my old age?— Father Mercieca said.

Because you destroyed his innocence? Perhaps? What do you think Father?

And as a former boss once told me, “There is no perfect justice in the world, but sometimes we hit 85%.”

—He took us to the movies and would tell us to call him ‘Tony.’ He taught us to drive in his ’57 Chevy,— Mr. Ombres said. —He taught us to drive a stick-shift in a light-blue Volkswagen, driving around the church parking lot.—

Ending in ironic tragedy…