San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has agreed to personally pay $15,000 per month to his former campaign manager, who abruptly quit last week after learning his wife had had an affair with Newsom.
Hey, Mayor Newsom, wanna have an illicit affair with my partner, too?
The Washington Post is maintaining an archive of evidence submitted in the Libby trail.
Rush Limbaugh on global warming:
Now, I’m just telling you that this picture is a total misrepresentation of the current state of circumstances for polar bears. It’s as though they wandered out on this ice floe, and it broke off, and it’s fading off now toward the equator and the polar bears cannot do anything about it and they’re going to melt and they’re going to die.
Or, if they do jump off they may have to swim hundreds of miles and expend lots of energy because ice is all melting around them. Of course, this picture has all the ingredients of the fraud and the deception. We just went through what we went through with Barbaro. Now we’ve got polar bears, stranded polar bears, animals, essence of innocence, so cute, so lonely, so frightened, so panicked, bellowing out for hope from the nearest human. Meanwhile, the Canadian film crew is just content to let them float off to their deaths for the sake of grabbing the photo to mislead you and your kids, who will no doubt be shown this by a bunch of worthless teachers who are promoting a political agenda.
This whole thing is totally misleading. They’re not even stranded on an ice floe that’s broken apart. They’re just out there just playing around. They’re just out there. You know, just like your cat goes to its litter box. When’s the last time your cat got stranded in its litter box? Just like your pit bull attacks and kills the neighbor’s baby horse, whatever, I mean these things happen. It’s called nature.
Um, yeah. Pit bull kills baby horse. Whatever.
The Rev. Ted Haggard has gone through three weeks of “intensive counseling” and as a result he has come to the realization that he is “completely heterosexual”.
Haggard said in an e-mail Sunday, his first communication in three months to church members, that he and his wife, Gayle, plan to pursue master’s degrees in psychology. The e-mail said the family hasn’t decided where to move but that they were considering Missouri and Iowa.
Another oversight board member, the Rev. Mike Ware of Westminster, said the group recommended the move out of town and the Haggards agreed.
“This is a good place for Ted,” Ware said. “It’s hard to heal in Colorado Springs right now. It’s like an open wound. He needs to get somewhere he can get the wound healed.”
It was also the oversight board that strongly urged Haggard to go into secular work.
From the 1/31/07 installment of The Daily Show, after a montage of clips of Bush and other Republican officials reciting what is evidently a new Talking Point, that any disagreement with how Bush is handling the war only serves to “embolden” the terrorists:
JON STEWART: It seems that critics of the war have no recourse that does not embolden al-Qaida or our enemies.
JOHN OLIVER: Yes, they are an emboldenable bunch.
JON: But the word “embolden” — such an odd word, such an unconventional word.
JOHN: Well, this is an odd, unconventional war. This isn’t like World War Two where there were winners and losers. It’s a new kind of war, where enemies can either be emboldened or beweakened. So we have to enscare them to the point where they rebecave themselves. We must disimagine the very thinkment of misunsuccessiveness. That is what we have to bedo.
This is horrifying. According to BBC News:
Germany has ordered the arrest of 13 suspected CIA agents over the alleged kidnapping of one of its citizens.
Munich prosecutors confirmed that the warrants were linked to the case of Khaled [e]l-Masri, a German national of Lebanese descent.
Mr Masri says he was seized in Macedonia, flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan and mistreated there.
He says he was released in Albania five months later when the Americans realised they had the wrong man.
Mr. Masri was a victim of “extraordinary rendition”, whereby the United States flies prisoners to other countries to be “interrogated” there — countries where torture is allowed.
Mr. Masri was tortured for five months, for fuck’s sake, including being forceably sodomized in order to get him to ‘fess up to being a terrorist, before the CIA noticed that they had kidnapped the wrong fucking guy. They were looking for a suspected terrorist named Khaled al-Masri, and the guy who they’d kidnapped and shipped off to Afghanistan to be beaten to a pulp and have broom handles shoved up his ass was an innocent German citizen named Khaled el-Masri. (Even some of the media are getting the names mixed up in their coverage, as above.)
Oopsie!
This has got to be the understatement of the day:
The US government is not assisting the German authorities with the case.
Another step closer to bringing back the good old Soviet Union, only this time on our side of the planet.
Someone on the WELL was lamenting just now how unjust it was that Molly Ivins is dead and George W. Bush lives on.
It seems to me that Bush’s continuing good health is no less that what we as a nation have coming to us. I can’t see how justice would be furthered if God were to smite down GWB and allow us, the people of the United States, to avoid the consequences of our greed and arrogance and short-sightedness in electing him not just once but twice. This is the nation that was seduced with tricks straight out of Stalin’s and Mussolini’s playbooks, the nation that responded to 9/11 by putting its hands over its ears and declaring war on the wrong country, the nation that learned about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and Fallujah and in response just shrugged as it dropped its ballots into the box voting for more of the same. There’s a saying: Be careful what you ask for, because you might just get it. We are getting exactly what we asked for.
Looks to me like God is making us Americans write “We will stop choosing cruel and unjust people to lead us” 10,000 times on the blackboard, and I figure we’re only up to about seven thousand so far.
Just read on the WELL the sad news that Molly Ivins is near death, from the cancer she’s been fighting for so long.
Later: Rest in peace, Molly Ivins.
Still later: Quite a tribute on the front page of the Texas Observer‘s website.
Ooh, I just found out about the bloggers covering the Libby trial at firedoglake. Doing a good job, too.
From Eugene Robinson’s Washington Post column the other day:
Cheney acts as if he’s willing to go to any lengths to keep people from learning that on the subject of homosexuality, he’s probably pretty enlightened.
(Context: In a television interview a few days back, Wolf Blitzer asked Dick Cheney how he could oppose equal rights for same-sex couples at the same time his lesbian daughter and her partner are expecting a baby. Cheney replied that the question was “out of line” and he wasn’t going to answer it.)
Scratchings 