Monday, May 30, 2005

CNN photo Dick and Lynne Cheney give Larry King a hilarious interview in Washington on Friday. The interview is to be aired on CNN tonight. Uncle Dick is funny! Dick Cheney is in the news today, proving that, despite his Grinch-like reputation, he has a great sense of humor. (His heart isn't two sizes two small; it just needs a little juice from that pacemaker to help move that ice water along.) From AFP today: U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney launched a personal attack on North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, calling him an irresponsible leader who "doesn't take care" of his people amid his drive for nuclear power status. The comments, made in an interview with CNN's "Larry King Live" program due to be aired late [today], marked an escalation of U.S. rhetoric toward Pyongyang as the administration of President George W. Bush is stepping up diplomatic pressure to make Pyongyang return to six-party talks focused on North Korea's nuclear ambitions. North Korea has refused to attend a fourth round of these talks that was to have taken place last September because of what it described as a "hostile" U.S. attitude toward it. The negotiations that in addition to the United States and North Korea involve China, Russia, South Korea and Japan have been stalled since then. A Russian delegation that returned from Pyongyang earlier this month said North Koreans wanted the Bush administration to apologize for publicly branding Kim a "tyrant" and their country "an outpost of tyranny." But according to excerpts of the interview released by the TV channel, Cheney made clear Pyongyang should not expect any softening of the U.S. tone, let alone an apology. "I am concerned about it," Cheney said of the stalled negotiations, "Partly because of Kim Jong Il, who's the leader of North Korea, is -- I would describe as one of the world's more irresponsible leaders." The vice president accused Kim of running "a police state" and one of the most heavily militarized societies in the world while the bulk of the North Korean population lived "in abject poverty and stages of malnutrition." "He doesn't take care of his people at all," Cheney continued. "And he obviously wants to throw his weight around and become a nuclear power." ...Cheney's attack appeared to echo comments made by Undersecretary of State John Bolton in Seoul two years ago, when he called Kim Jong Il a "tyrannical dictator" who has made life "a hellish nightmare" for many North Koreans. In response, North Korean diplomats refused to deal with Bolton during the talks, and the remarks have been seen as a major contributing factor to their breakdown.... Cheney calls Kim Jong Il "one of the world's more irresponsible leaders" as though the Bush regime were a shining example of leadership. Crazy Kim Jong Il has yet to attack another nation without cause and against world opinion -- but the Bush regime has.  Cheney calls North Korea "a police state" when here in the United States, I have had people advise me to be careful about what I say about the Bush regime. Cheney criticizes North Korea's level of militarization when the United States is the most militarized nation on the fucking planet. Plenty of Americans live "in abject poverty and stages of malnutrition" while Cheney's Halliburton stands to make as much as $18 billion in Iraq; it has one no-bid contract estimated at $7 billion alone. Those billions of dollars are coming from the typical American taxpayer, and, instead of going to things like improvements in health care, education, infrastructure, environmental protection and the like, are going to war profiteers like Dick Cheney's Halliburton and other subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp. It is largely because of Halliburton and the other subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp that the United States has the largest federal budget deficit in its history. Not only do our children have inadequate health care and education, when they are born they already are in debt. But what a bad man that Kim Jong Il is for stealing from his own people! I told you: Dick Cheney is fucking hilarious! (And the irony of us Americans saying how important it is that other nations don't get nukes and "throw [their] weight around" when we remain the only nation in the history of the planet to have thrown its weight around by nuking another nation keeps me in fucking stitches. When we Americans do something, God is on our side and it's for freedom and democracy and love and butterflies, blah, blah, blah; when someone else does the same exact thing, they're evil.) But Dick isn't done cutting up! This is from the Associated Press today: Vice President Dick Cheney says he's offended by a human rights group's report criticizing conditions at the prison camp for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay. The report Amnesty International released last week said prisoners at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba had been mistreated and called for the prison to be shut down. Cheney derided the London-based group in an interview set to be broadcast [tonight] on CNN's "Larry King Live." "Frankly, I was offended by it," Cheney said in the videotaped interview. "For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don't take them seriously." Cheney is the latest Bush administration official to object to the report. [Yesterday], Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers called the Amnesty International report "absolutely irresponsible." Washington's defense of its detention and interrogation practices comes after weeks of international criticism and violent protests by Muslims outraged at reports -- which the Pentagon says are false -- that an interrogator at Guantanamo had flushed pages of the Koran down a toilet. Cheney said detainees at Guantanamo "have been well treated, treated humanely and decently." "Occasionally there are allegations of mistreatment," Cheney said. "But if you trace those back, in nearly every case, it turns out to come from somebody who had been inside and released to their home country and now are peddling lies about how they were treated." Some of the scores of prisoners who have been released from Guantanamo have said they were mistreated, while others have said they were not. Other allegations have surfaced in FBI reports and transcripts of review hearings the military held for the prisoners. Pentagon officials say they have substantiated five cases where copies of the Koran, the Muslim holy book, were mistreated, although the military has refused to offer details other than to say none was ever flushed down a toilet. OK, here are some of the pictures that were taken inside Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq: (More such photos here and here.) But Uncle Dick is offended -- offended! -- that Amnesty International would "suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights," and "frankly, [he] just [doesn't] take them seriously." Let's see: Iraqi detainees were denied clothing, were sat upon, had objects shoved up their rectums, were forced to simulate homosexual acts, were piled into nude human pyramids, had dogs sicced on them, had dog collars and leashes put on them, etc., etc. -- and Dick Cheney, whose corporation is making billions of dollars in Iraq, is offended! (What? Don't you see the humor in all of this? Are you for the terrorists or something?) And you know, from the photos above, that there's just no fucking way that the U.S. military or contractors working for the U.S. military would put a Koran in a toilet! No, they would do the things photographed above, but desecrating the Koran -- that's where they would draw the line! Could it be that there just isn't any photographic evidence of desecration of the Koran? (Uh-oh! A seditious thought! I'd better report myself to Homeland Security...) Dick's lesbian novelist wife (I'll leave it you to decide whether she is a lesbian and a novelist or whether she wrote a novel about lesbians -- or both) is a comedian, too. Reports Reuters today: First lady Laura Bush would defeat U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton if the two were to face each other in the 2008 presidential contest, Vice President Dick Cheney said [today]. Cheney made the prediction after his wife, Lynne Cheney, suggested the matchup in an interview on CNN's "Larry King Live." Mrs. Cheney noted the rampant speculation that the former first lady, now a senator from New York, would make a bid in the next presidential go-around. President Bush cannot seek a third term in office. His father, former President Bush, was defeated after one term by former President Bill Clinton. "You know, people are thinking of Mrs. Clinton running for president. I think Mrs. Bush ought to run for president," Mrs. Cheney said. "If we want to have a Bush dynasty, let's get Laura Bush." The vice president, who again ruled out making his own run for president when Bush's term ends, agreed. "It's a great idea," Dick Cheney said. "And I think I know who would win too." "If we want to have a Bush dynasty"? "If"? Hey, I have an idea: How about if we never, ever, never, ever have another president surnamed Clinton or Bush again? Definitely not another fucking Bush, but not another Clinton, either? How about we pretend that we have a democracy and not a plutocracy, not an aristocracy? How about when we tell our little children that when they grow up they might be president one day (and when our surname is not Bush or Clinton, I mean) we are not lying through our fucking teeth? But I have no fucking sense of humor, 'cause wouldn't it just be funny if Laura Bush ran against Hillary Clinton in 2008? I sure wish that I could be just like the carefree lesbian novelist Lynne Cheney, thinking that a dynasty in a so-called "democracy" is a laughing matter. P.S. This interesting graphic is from halliburtonwatch.org (and I don't believe that Dick Cheney does not have presidential aspirations): Hey, how about that Kim Jong Il? He sure is a bad man! 5:18:38 PM    Comments []

Associated Press photos "President" Bush today at Arlington National Cemetery lies again that Iraq had something to do with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. I can't think of a better way to honor our Iraq war dead than to continue to lie about why they died. On Memorial Day, the Bush regime wants you to remember it differently  He should be executed for his treason and for his war crimes, but instead, today, on Memorial Day, "President" Bush was lying to the nation yet again about why his unelected fascist regime invaded Iraq in March 2003, resulting in the unnecessary and unjust deaths of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans and the looting of billions of dollars from the U.S. treasury and from the Iraqi people that continue long after Bush announced "mission accomplished" in May 2003. Reports the Associated Press today: ARLINGTON, Va. -- Quoting letters of the fallen from the war in Iraq, President Bush vowed [today] to a Memorial Day audience of military families and soldiers in uniform that the nation will honor its dead by striving for peace and democracy, no matter the cost. "We must honor them by completing the mission for which they gave their lives; by defeating the terrorists," the president told a supportive crowd of several thousand people at Arlington National Cemetery. Bush's remarks come as the U.S. military supports a massive weekend show of force in Baghdad by Iraqi forces aimed at halting attacks by insurgents. The violence has killed more than 700 people since Iraq's new government was announced April 28. The sweep of Baghdad was answered by counterattacks by insurgents; and south of the city, two suicide bombers blew themselves up in a crowd of police officers, killing up to 30 people and wounding dozens. The president's tribute at Arlington came in sharply different circumstances from the Memorial Day visit Bush made to the cemetery's Tomb of the Unknowns two years ago, just as the nation's problems stemming from the Iraq war were becoming apparent. Before his Memorial Day remarks in 2003, Bush had declared major combat operations at an end, the U.S. government confidently predicted that weapons of mass destruction would be found and American generals said troops were in the process of stabilizing Iraq. At that time, some 160 American soldiers had been killed in Iraq. Today, the total is over 1,650. [Today] Bush evoked the memories of American soldiers who have died, reading excerpts from the letters they wrote, in some cases letters that were to be opened only in the event that the soldier didn't make it home. "My death will mean nothing if you stop now," Louisiana National Guard Sgt. Michael Evans wrote in a letter home. Evans died Jan. 28 while on patrol in western Baghdad, part of a major security operation to protect the first free Iraqi elections in more than 50 years. "I know it'll be hard, but I gave my life so you could live, not just live, but live free," Evans wrote. Bush's nine-minute address was punctuated eight times by applause from a crowd of military families, some of whom were accompanied by soldiers in wheelchairs recovering from their wounds. As he has done since U.S. forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, the president said the war is part of a greater conflict necessitated by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives, toppled the World Trade Center and heavily damaged the Pentagon, which is near the cemetery where Bush spoke. "Two terrorist regimes are gone forever, freedom is on the march and America is more secure," Bush said of the end of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq. But it was excerpts from the letters that Bush read to the audience that drew tears from some, along with the strongest applause. "Realize that I died doing something that I truly love for a purpose greater than myself," Marine Capt. Ryan Beaupre of St. Anne, Ill., wrote to his family. Beaupre was killed when the helicopter he was helping to pilot crashed in Kuwait in the early hours of the war.... Maybe it's better that the soldiers from whose letters Bush selectively read believed that they were about to die for a just cause; the truth these days seems more often than not to be pretty fucking painful. Of course, Bush read only excerpts from letters that are supportive of his unjust and illegal war on Iraq. You'll never hear Bush read an excerpt from an angry letter from a U.S. soldier in Iraq who opposes the U.S. occupation or an angry letter from a mother whose child was killed in Iraq not for anything like "freedom" or "democracy" or "peace" -- words that the members of the Bush regime throw around so much that they can't possibly mean anything to them anymore, if they ever did mean anything to them -- but for the lies and for the obscene profiteering of the members of the Bush regime and their corporate, campaign-contributing cronies. And it's easy for the Vietnam War-dodging, flightsuit-donning Bush to say that the United States will continue its illegal and immoral imperialism no matter what the cost, because neither his precious rich white ass nor the precious rich white ass of any of his beloved family members will ever have to pay the cost. It's so easy to be "patriotic" with someone else's blood, so easy to say "Bring it on" when you know that it will never be your ass that it is brought upon. The United States is like an alcoholic family, pretending that the war in Iraq is OK even though it isn't. George W. Bush would be the alcoholic father and we Americans would be the cowering, enabling wife whom he slaps around regularly, who, if she would just stand up to him for once, would quickly see what a fucking coward he really is. Neither Iraq nor Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Saudi Arabia, the elite of which the Bush elite is buddy-buddy, had a helluva lot more to do with 9/11 than did Iraq, as 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudis and not one of them was an Iraqi. Still, we Americans allow Bush and his cabal of fellow traitors and fellow war criminals to repeat the lie that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. We allow Bush and his cabal of war-profiteering cronies to continue to profit obscenely from the deaths of innocent Iraqis and well-meaning but misguided* young U.S. soldiers, who in Iraq are not fighting for freedom or for democracy or for peace or for anything that noble, but are fighting so that Dick Cheney's Halliburton and other war-profiteering subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp can continue to steal billions and billions of our tax dollars (note that simultaneously the members of the Bush regime ensure that the rich pay as little in taxes as possible) and the Iraqi people's wealth because we are too stupid and/or afraid to stop them. Mainly, what we are, I think, is a bunch of intellectually lazy pussies. It's so much easier to wave a plastic flag made in China and to slap a "Support Our Troops" magnet on our gas-guzzlers than it is to hold our government to account, so much easier to mouth "patriotic" bullshit than it is to question why the only ones who are profiting, figuratively and quite literally, from the U.S. occupation of Iraq are a handful of rich white Americans who support the Bush regime. Even many, if not most, of those of us who are fully aware of the treason and the war crimes of which the members of the Bush regime are guilty are too afraid to publicly point them out, for fear of government surveillance and government retaliation. This is what we are reduced to: Being afraid of our own fucking government, which is supposed to be of, by and for the people. We, the people, are supposed to call the shots. The government is supposed to exist for us and to be held accountable to us -- not vice-fucking-versa. It's clear-cut that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, et. al., are traitors and war criminals, and if there were any justice in the world, all of them would be tried for their treason and for their war crimes, of which surely an impartial international panel** would find them guilty, and they should suffer the same fate that they would gladly, giddily impose on someone outside of their cabal who were found guilty of treason that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Americans: Execution. I, for one, am not too pussy to state the truth. I, for one, want my government and my country back. I, for one, am willing to die for publicly stating the truth. I, for one, would rather die standing on my feet than die on my knees, which is where the members of the Bush regime have the intellectually lazy, cowering American people on this Memorial Day. *Misguided because the U.S. military no longer fights for freedom and democracy and peace, blah, blah, blah, but has been reduced to a tool paid for by U.S. taxpayers for non-tax-paying U.S. corporations to get what they want. Except perhaps for lack of other employment, no one who is aware of what's really going on in this nation would join the U.S. military. **This is why the Bush regime so vehemently rejects the United States being held accountable to an international judicial body -- because it might actually be held -- gasp! -- accountable. 1:20:52 PM    Comments []

The Associated Press These two high-school graduation ads were placed by 18-year-old Scott Moody's family members in the May 24 edition of the Bellefontaine (Ohio) Examiner. Yesterday Scott Moody shot and killed all of them -- with the exception of his sister, Stacy, who was critically wounded when he shot her in the neck -- and then he shot and killed himself. The NRA is perfectly OK with this Because guns don't kill people -- people kill people with guns From the Associated Press today: TOWER, Minn. -- A 4-year-old boy was fatally wounded when he wandered behind a paper target while family and friends were practicing shooting, authorities said. Evan Davis Klassen, of Chisago City, was shot around 1:45 p.m. [yesterday] at Lake Vermilion, where a group of about a dozen people had gathered for the Memorial Day weekend. "They thought they had the kids under control," said Sgt. James McKenzie of the St. Louis County Sheriff's Department. While the paper target didn't completely obscure the child, he was wearing camouflage pants that made him difficult to see against the foliage, McKenzie said. A 40-year-old man fired a handgun about 30 feet through the target and into the boy, he said. McKenzie called the shooting as "a pretty straightforward accident" and said no charges were likely to be filed. The man's name and relationship with the boy were not released. After the shooting, people rushed the boy to a nearby lodge. Emergency medical workers arrived, but there was nothing they could do, McKenzie said. Why in the fuck was a 4-year-old boy wearing camoufuckingflage around gun-toting adults? No, really, that was a fucking bright idea, to have a little boy wear camouflage around adults shooting firearms, and those right-wingers are right: We fags and dykes shouldn't be allowed to raise kids because surely we'd do a much worse job than do those genius heterosexuals. And this from the Associated Press today: An 18-year-old who was about to graduate from high school is believed to have fatally shot his grandparents, mother and two family friends before killing himself, authorities said [today]. Logan County Sheriff Michael Henry said he was unsure if authorities would ever find out why Scott Moody committed the shootings early [yesterday] morning, "but we're going to try." The rampage at neighboring farmhouses came just hours after a party to celebrate the pending graduation. Moody's younger sister was wounded and was in critical condition on Monday. Sheriff Michael Henry identified the victims as Moody's grandparents Sharyl Shafer, 66, and Gary Shafer, 67, who were found dead in one farmhouse; and Moody's mother, Sheri Shafer, 37, and two friends, Megan Karus, 19, and Paige Harshbarger, 14. They were found dead in the other home along with the wounded survivor, 15-year-old Stacy Moody, and the body of Moody himself. The victims were shot with a .22-caliber rifle, Henry said. Henry said Stacy Moody called a friend on her cell phone and the friend then called authorities at 10:46 a.m. [yesterday]. Scott Moody and Karus were to have graduated [yesterday] afternoon from Riverside High School in nearby De Graff, the sheriff's office said. The school held commencement as scheduled, and school officials announced the shootings to the crowd afterward. The two farmhouses are about a quarter-mile apart along a two-lane state route northwest of Columbus, and the same family owns both, authorities said. Fields where corn and soybeans are grown surround the white-paneled, two-story homes, each of which was marked by a "no trespassing" sign. Detectives were interviewing friends and family members of the victims. "I've being doing this for 35 years and I've never seen anything like this," Logan County Sheriff's Lt. Chuck Stout said. People in the community of 13,000 drifted in and out of the sheriff's office, hugging and crying, throughout the afternoon. One woman nearly collapsed moments after arriving and speaking with people at the office. Deputies had to help her inside. "Dealing with a small community like this, everyone knows everyone," the sheriff said. I want credit for not saying anything about the 18-year-old shooter being moody. 10:31:22 AM    Comments []

8:46:49 AM    Comments []