RoguePlanet

Oblivious presidential irony

Bush today:

On another foreign policy issue, Bush said he expressed concerns with Russian President Vladimir Putin about legal proceedings against former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Once the richest man in Russia, Khodorkovsky was convicted Tuesday of fraud and tax evasion and sentenced to nine years in prison following a trail widely denounced as politically motivated.

Bush did not comment directly on the verdict, but said, "it looked
like he had been judged guilty prior to having a fair trial."
The president said he has questioned whether the case shows a
backsliding away from the rule of law and democracy in Russia and said
it will "be interesting to see" how Khodorkovsky's expected appeal is
handled by the government.

"Here, you're innocent until proven guilty and it appeared to us, at
least people in my administration, that it looked like he had been
ajudged guilty prior to having a fair trial," Bush said.

Bush, July 18, 2003

Terrorist suspects held at the US naval base in Cuba are "bad people"
who aided and abetted the Taliban in Afghanistan, US President George
W Bush said today at a joint news conference with British Prime
Minister Tony Blair.
******

At a joint White House news conference today, Bush responded to a
reporter's question on the issue, saying, "the only thing we know for
certain is that these are bad people and we look forward to working
with the Blair government to deal with the issue".

When pressed that such an assertion would do little to assuage British
concerns that the men should be viewed as innocent until proven
guilty, the president responded, "Let me just say, these were illegal
combatants. They were picked up off the battlefield aiding and
abetting the Taliban".

Cheney offended by Amnesty International report

Dick Cheney's tender fucking sensibilies were offended by an Amnesty International report alleging mistreatment of prisoners held by the United States at Guantamo Bay:

WASHINGTON - 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 Monday night 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."

Apparently he said that with a straight face.

Update: The Rude Pundit notes that the White House takes Amnesty International seriously when it suits the WH's agenda:

Of course, the worst was the way Cheney attacked Amnesty International for daring to say that torture is bad and judicial process is good. Cheney's reaction to the Amnesty report on abuses at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp was breathtaking in that Cheney essentially set out to discredit the organization. Dick was "offended by it . . . For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don't take them seriously." Which is stunning, if for no other reason than Amnesty International was cited copiously in White House background papers on how fucked up Iraq was under Saddam Hussein.

And more at Think Progress: "The White House was for Amnesty International before it was against it"

Go! And never darken our towels again!

Another self-proclaimed disaffected liberal stalks off from the left in a huff. He can go commiserate with Michael Totten, the Margaret DuMont of the ex-lefties.

(Via Alicublog)

Update: More mockery from Tbogg.

New to the illustrious Rogue Planet blogroll

Steve at Distance blog kindly linked to this blog; go check out his blog. Via the SC links on Steve's blogroll I found several new (to me, anyway) South Carolina blogs: Progress for South Carolina and Sanfraud, focussing on Governor Richie Rich; About Henry Brown, chronicling the dullardly U.S. representative for my district; and Myrtle Beach Insider, which provides entertaining purely local snark.

I'm back! Did you miss me?

Hello, readers! I have returned! I'm all rested and refreshed, except for my legs, which are really sore.

So. No newspapers, TV news, or Internet for a week - did anything interesting happen? The United States government overthrown or anything like that? No? Damn . . .

Going on vacation!

Be back next weekend.

Use of anonymous sources

Newsweek uses anonymous source: Bad.

Bush uses anonymous source: Good.

What's the difference? Well, about 99,081 more people died as a result of Bush's use of the anonymous source.

Norm Coleman likes anonymous sources, too:

Coleman, a former district attorney, told Galloway before his sworn testimony that "senior Iraqi officials have confirmed that you, in fact, received oil allocations and that the documents that identify you as an allocation recipient are valid."

Newsweek has DESTROYED America's sterling reputation in the Middle East!

Things were going so well until this! Now all our freedom bombs will have fallen for naught. If we lose this war it'll be Newsweek's fault . . . Curse you, Newsweek!

A thing of beauty

Go here (Crooks and Liars) and watch George Galloway deliver a righteous ass-whuppin' to that himbo, Norm Coleman.

Who, us? Desecrate a Koran? Why, we would NEVER . . .

So. I see the lieberal traitors at Newsweek have retracted their story about GITMO interrogators desecrating copies of the Koran. It seems Newsweek's source said that he read about the alleged Koran desecrations in a report other than the report in which he originally said he read it. Ergo, Newsweek lied.

American interrogation specialists desecrating a holy book? US? As IF. As if anyone could believe that a country that could condone water boarding and stress positions for prisoners of war(and for people designated by the executive as "enemy combatants), a country that could justify the indefinite detention without trial of thousands of Bush-admin-designated "enemy combatants," a country that could do this and this and this would EVER stoop so low as to desecrate the holy book of Islam! To even suggest such a thing is treasonous!

I'm sure if any American at GITMO were to be so audacious as to even suggest such a thing he would be met with a chorus of indignant disapproval.

INTERROGATION SPECIALIST A: "Hey, the beatings, the isolation, the sexual humiliation - none of that shit is working. These guys aren't giving us anything good. Why don't we take one of those Koran books and, like, flush it down a toilet or something? They love those books. That might get'em going."

INTERROGATION SPECIALIST B: "Desecrate a Koran? That would be wrong! Why, that's their holy book - to desecrate it would be profoundly offensive to these prisoners and to the entire Islamic community. We can't do that! That goes against all the principles we as Americans hold dear!

Now, hold Osama's feet there so I can attach these electrodes to his balls . . ."

Sheee-IT.

Motorcycles good. Harleys bad.

It's bike week - pardon me, Harley week - in Myrtle Beach and I'm surrounded by assholes on obnoxiously, needlessly loud Harleys. Most of these people couldn't ride their way out of a paper bag (maybe that's why so many of them tow their bikes here on trailers) but ooohhh, they're so rebellious. So wild and free, in their Harley (TM) leather vests and their Harley (TM) do-rags and their Harley (TM) leather chaps and their Harley (TM) boots with their Harley (TM) saddle bags and their Harley (TM) jewelry. Soon we'll have a Harley (TM) theme restaurant to amuse them.

Harleys suck. For all the reasons enumerated here, and more.

New to the illustrious Rogue Planet blogroll

Lo Ryder, formerly of South Carolina. He says he found this blog by accident when he clicked on the "next blog" button at the top of the page. Have you ever tried the "next blog" button? You should. You never know what you might come across. Stuff like this, for example.

Anyhoo, welcome to the blogroll, LoRyder. Your hit count will SKYROCKET when my global readership finds its way to your blog. ;)

Satan's good name cleared

Satan exonerated in goat decapitation case:

Good news on severed goat heads: Satan not involved Tue May 10,12:09 PM ET

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - A lazy worker, not a satanic cult, was responsible for severed goat heads that caused a scare at a Vancouver-area school, Canadian police said on Monday.

Police were called in after goat heads were twice found on a bench outside a school in nearby Chilliwack, British Columbia, prompting fears in the suburban community that it had been targeted by a satanic animal killing.

A 19-year-old worker at a local slaughterhouse has admitted he took the two heads with the intention of having them mounted, but then changed his mind and left them at the school in hopes a janitor would dispose of them.

Now that the cloud of suspicion has lifted maybe he'll return to blogging.

Like I needed an excuse

TUESDAY, May 10 (HealthDay News). -- In a finding that runs counter to conventional wisdom, researchers have found that consuming moderate amounts of alcohol -- about one drink a day -- may prevent kidney function decline in men.

Oh . . . "in men." Damn.

Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital, in Boston, stressed, however, that the finding does not mean individuals should take up drinking -- especially heavy drinking -- as a means of protecting their kidneys.

Hey, wait just a dadgum minute - why are reseachers at Brigham and Women's Hospital conducting studies on the health effects of alcohol on men?

Shorter Dennis Prager

"Jews really need to get with the pogr - er, program."

Was that unfair of me? OK, try this one:

"Some Jews are just too Jewy."

(Prager: "The bottom line is that the less Jewish a Jew is, the more he is likely to feel he has a mission to humanity, and the more Jewish he is, the less likely he is to feel such a mission." )

(via Roger Ailes)

Score another one for the terrorists

National ID passes the Senate.

The blame America first crowd

strikes again.

More here (via Jack O'Toole)

This sucks

A federal court judge has granted the NAACP's request for an order enjoining the city of Myrtle Beach for routing traffic differently during black bike week than it does during (mostly white) Harley-Davidson week.

I'm not an NAACP-basher by any means, but anyone who lives here will attest that traffic patterns ARE different between the two weeks. They're both basically clusterfucks as far as traffic and noise are concerned, but black bike week is a much bigger clusterfuck because the black bikers tend to, well, cluster, in a smaller geographic area. I'm not sure that the city's plan of routing traffic one way on Ocean Boulevard is the best solution to the black bike week traffic, but I think the city can justifiably point to a race-neutral reason for doing it.

The plaintiffs and the NAACP also sued a number of local businesses, motels and restaurants, alleging that their practice of closing during all or a part of black bike week is discriminatory. Again, as someone who lives here, I don't think that's the case; at least not for all the businesses. The traffic is so bad that their employees simply can't get to work. And many of them were getting no business from the black bikers anyway - staying open was a guaranteed money-losing proposition. Some years back, just when black bike week started to take off and draw masses of people, some friends of mine who play in a band had a gig at a club on the north end of Myrtle Beach. They drove up there, sat in traffic for HOURS, and when they finally got to the club (very late), no one was there. The owner told them most of his employees couldn't get to work, and he didn't have any customers, so he decided to shut down.

Now you know how I feel about white people (they suck, in my opinion), so if I thought the closings were motivated by racism, I wouldn't hesitate to say so. And I wouldn't be surprised if plenty of people in Myrtle Beach are stone racists. But I don't think that's the reason black bike weekend is viewed differently by many of the residents.

When I first came to Myrtle Beach, black bike week wasn't such a big deal. It was, as I recall, just a bunch of middle-aged black guys from motorcycle clubs in neighboring states. They'd come to Atlantic Beach, the erstwhile "Black Pearl," and race their bikes up and down the main drag and eat barbecue. They didn't inconvenience anyone. But shortly after I came here black bike week somehow metastasized into a massive Freaknik-type event with hundreds of thousands of young black kids on rice-burners, shrieking up and down Highway 17. And then when the traffic got too thick, creeping slowly up and down Highway 17. I remember going with a friend to a Memorial Day cookout in North Myrtle Beach a few years ago; this might have been the same year my musician friends found their gig cancelled. Anyway, it was early afternoon, and we got stuck in traffic. It took us two hours to go three miles in North Myrtle Beach. It was a fantastic spectacle - the bikes were beautiful and colorful, and so were the women. Every other bike sported a gorgeous babe in neon hot pants or a bikini and high heels. That's right, high heels, on a motorcycle. It was entertaining as hell, but still: Nobody wants to sit in a car, going nowhere, for two or three hours. That was the last time we ever tried to go anywhere north of Surfside Beach during black bike week.

Black bike week's never bothered me - I live in Murrells Inlet, and we don't get that many black bikers down this way (the Harleys are another story; I'm sick of them and their status-conscious meathead unskilled riders). But the new young crop of black bikers quickly got a rep among locals for being jackasses to waitresses and waiters, not tipping, and making a huge mess. Restaurant owners decided in advance to close that week, rather than deal with the hassle. A friend of mine who owned a motel in the middle of Myrtle Beach found that he had to spend entire weekends policing the property - unless someone actually STOOD there the whole weekend, the bikers would park on the property and block the motel guests' cars. And they'd have sex on the motel pool's lounge chairs. In broad daylight. Then they'd whiz in the pool. Without getting in it.

I think it was around about this time that the local paper, The Sun News, stopped calling it "black bike week" and started calling it "Memorial Day Biker Weekend."


It is true that some Myrtle Beach residents, in my experience, are all too willing to chalk up all this behavior to the race of the bikers. In other words, yes, we have plenty of racists here. (More than our share, perhaps - we get a few Northern racists who retire down here and then are surprised and disappointed to find that we let black folks use the regular drinking fountains and restrooms.) I myself always thought the raucous behavior was a function of the youth of the new group of black bikers. Anytime you get 300,000 21 - 24-year-olds of any race crowding into a beach town, well, you're going to have some unseemly behavior. Behavior that would make the Bush twins blush. Unfortunately, it gives the racists an excuse to bash black people, and it turns off the people who wouldn't otherwise give a damn what color the bikers are. In my humble white-person-hating opinion, if the black bikers would just clean up their act a little, and TIP THEIR DAMN SERVERS, they'd meet a much warmer welcome here. The one color that everyone in Myrtle Beach can appreciate is green.

Hey, it worked for the Harley riders, back in the days when they were actual grizzled relics of biker gangs and not the bunch of burr-headed Harley-Davidson-trademark-gear-wearing goatee-sporting steroid-pumped don't-know-how-to-ride trailer-their-bikes-here-behind-their-SUV assholes. Back when Harley week was just "bike week" and before it became completely Harley-branded and yuppified, it was viewed with apprehension by some people who remember the police getting into a shootout with some Hell's Angels years ago. But the bikers were for the most part on their best behavior; even the most raggedy and frightening-looking ones were unfailingly polite and tipped generously. I know, because I was tending bar. I loved the bikers because we made lots of money off them, and they were easy to deal with. OK, there was the occasional drunken bar brawl, but it wasn't a constant thing. I would take a biker over a Shriner any day (bike week used to fall at the same time as the Shriner convention and the hairdresser's convention. For a week, the town would be full of old-style bikers, Shriners in their fezzes, and hairdressers. The place has gotten so big now that those people would just get lost in the crowd now . . .)

So. My point, and I DO have one, is that the gang-fighting scary white bikers ingratiated themselves with the locals by behaving, and by dropping a lot of money here, and I believe the black bikers could do the same thing. Just TIP, fellas. Tip your hard-working server. If you can't affort to tip, you shouldn't go to a restaurant. Just eat a ham sammich out of your cooler. IMHO, as they say on the Net.

Oh, and stop banging on the chaise lounges, in front of the chirren, for the love of Bejus.

Disclaimer: When I refer to "black bikers" generally in this post, I don't mean, of course, EVERY SINGLE black biker. Some of them, the majority in fact, are perfectly law-abiding nice people who might even be good tippers. It's just that the substantial numbers of jerks are what people tend to remember, alas.

Speaking of holidays

This speaks for itself.

Happy Orgasm Day!

My first de-linking!

The other day I was perusing the weblog of Velociman, alpha male and scourge of the Red Hat Society ladies, when I realized that my blog no longer appears on his blogroll. Velociman de-linked me, without a word as far as I can see.

Now I know I'm still kind of new to this blogging thing, but I thought that it was customary for the de-linker to accompany the de-linking with a powerful denunciation of the de-linkee; or at least with an I-am-now-delinking-[fill in the blank]-more-in-sadness-than-in-anger kind of post. Complete with a link, of course, so the de-linker's readers can follow it to the de-linkee's site and then proceed to taunt and deride the de-linkee and generally make trolls of themselves until they lose interest.

I mean, that's how I discovered Acidman's blog.

And it was through Acidman's blog that I found Velociman's. So I was a little hurt at his lack of blogging courtesy.

But I'll always remember my first de-linking, unceremonious as it was, much as I'll always fondly remember my very first blogrolling (by the excellent-despite-being-mostly-libertarian Catallarchy)

Update: Velociman has re-linked me. He was clearing out dead blogs, he said, and mine got caught up in the carnage. I can see how someone might mistake this blog for a dead one . . . Anyway, thanks, Velociman; you're a gentleman and a scholar.

I hope this horse loses

Because he's owned by George Steinbrenner. And because the horse is a hothouse flower. Only two races as a three year old?

My hero

I should disapprove of people shouting obscenities at speakers. I do, almost always. But when you think about it, what more appropriate response could there be to Ann Coulter, professional clown and psychopath? Here's an open letter from Ajai Raj, the student who recently got himself arrested for talking dirty to Ann Coulter. An excerpt:

From the beginning I was yelling obscenities along with my friends, roaring at Ms. Coulter's right-wing bullshit festival the way no one else had the balls to. Mr. Sampath writes in his article that (and this is my take) the protestors were told to be good all along. They were told to sit in the back and hold their signs and leave quietly. No wonder hippies get such a bad rap nowadays; protestors today might as well be ornaments on the Rightmobile. When I want someone to know I'm pissed off, I'm going to throw down and give them a good shit-ruining. I wanted to show Ms. Coulter that people are down if she wants to hold a circle-jerk, but we're not gonna do it her way. Not me, at least.

So yes, the Q&A session came around, and it was pathetic. Her slack-jawed fans got up and licked her face so she could pat them on the head--one schmuck offered to be her bodyguard, and she smiled, doubtlessly making a mental note that she wouldn't touch his nether regions if she were King Midas. Liberal protestors posed well-intentioned but woefully timid questions and got shot down in a hail of ignorant shitfire from the She-Dragon. Standing in line awaiting my turn, I watched her send a moderate Republican, who had questioned the sheer incendiary magnitude of her rhetoric, walk away in tears when she tore him apart for daring to question her.

So yes, I saw my "opportunity to say something lewd and offensive." And I took it.

She had just said something about gay marriage, the typical rightwing bullshit spiel that is still convincing people that the Bible is really the Constitution. Knowing that taking the time to say something insightful, specific, or even slightly critical would get me a lame comeback and a ticket back to my seat, I realized that the only way to win this battle was to fight fire with fire. Or bullshit with bullshit. So, as reported in yesterday's Texan, I fired:

"You say that you believe in the sanctity of marriage," said Ajai Raj, an English sophomore. "How do you feel about marriages where the man does nothing but fuck his wife up the ass?"

Read the whole thing. My favorite part is the one where he made wanking gestures as he exited the building. Mr. Raj, that is. Not Mr. Coulter.

Personally I think the entire nation should make wanking gestures whenever Mr. Coulter opens his mouth.

Scary catblogging

They're called the Ten COMMANDMENTS

not the Ten Suggestions!

Help
I've lost my will to blog.