I’m in D.C. to visit my sister who lives on Capitol Hill and to do a little businsess in my real life. I had a C-Span level “celebrity” sighting this morning. Pam Hess, who covers the Pentagon for somebody. She was caffienating at a place called Murky Coffee.
The last time I was here, I saw Barbara Olsen getting out of an SUV near the building where C-Span and others broadcast their shows. (It’s the building from which you can see the Capitol Building in the background.)
Rick Perry’s next job will likely be head of mall security.
The Republican Texas governor has announced a plan that will solve the problem of illegal immigration: install web cameras at the border.
Under the plan, announced on the eve of the state GOP convention, cameras and other equipment would be supplied to willing landowners and placed along some of the most remote reaches of the border. The live video would be made available to law enforcement and anyone else with an Internet connection.
Viewers would be able to call day or night to report anything that looks like trespassing, drug smuggling or something else suspicious.
Plus, it will only cost $5 million.
The Border Patrol already has lots of its own surveillance cameras along the border, but the images are not made available to the public.
For good reason, many say.
”This leaves the door open to anyone who has a vindictive state of mind or a racial motive,” [Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund attorney Luis] Figueroa said. ”Anyone down there could easily be mistaken and falsely accused of something they didn’t do.”
Other possible glitches include people figuring out where the cameras are and adjusting travel accordingly, law enforcement agencies being overwhelmed with bogus information, and the possible illegality of inviting the public to view searches of innocent-until-proven-guilty people.
But Perry’s not concerned with such details.
”This isn’t our first rodeo,” he said.
One of the players in the case of Katrina Leung, a Republican who is accused of spying for the Chinese, has pleaded guilty to lesser charge and will receive a light sentence:
In a deal with the government, [former FBI agent] Denise K. Woo, 47, will be sentenced to a year of probation and a $1,000 fine. She had faced five felony counts, including revealing the identity of an FBI informant, telling a friend that he had been wiretapped and lying to the FBI about the leaks…
According to [her attorney, Michael] Camuñez, Woo was an FBI agent working in white-collar investigations when the bureau discovered in 1999 that she was a friend of a target of the Chinese counterintelligence squad.
Woo tried to tell supervisors that her friend, who has not been charged, was innocent, but her “substantial concerns” were ignored, her lawyers said. She told him about the informant only after she determined that he wasn’t really a spy, her lawyers said.
The FBI’s Chinese counterintelligence squad during these years was in disarray. Its lead agent, James J. Smith, retired in 2000.
Three years later, Smith was indicted after his longtime lover, an FBI informant named Katrina Leung, was accused of being a double agent for China.
If you have never heard of Katrina Leung, you may be scratching your head about now, wondering how this Chinese spy case flew under your radar.
The reason you haven’t seen the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Chris Matthews spewing spittle all over their anchor desks over this breach of security by the Red commies is simple: Leung was a Republican.
BuzzFlash published a great overview of the politics of the Leung spy case in 2003. (I’ll add the punchline at the bottom):
Disgruntled sky cops: On Wednesday, a House committee released a report about how federal air marshals say their jobs could be improved. One recommendation was to end the requirement that has marshals board with the airline flight crew instead of boarding with passengers.
“We need to be more secretive and blend in more,” said one air marshal, whose name was redacted in the Judiciary Committee report.
Marshals have to identify themselves to up to 10 airline employees on a flight, which could pose a security risk, the marshal said. “Many of these employees are not discreet and state out loud what we do,” the comment, dated Aug. 28, 2002, stated.
Maybe if they took off the 10-gallon hats, chaps and spurs they might blend in a little better.
Marshals also cited health issues and fatigue — hey, that just goes with air travel nowadays. “Sinus and ear problems are becoming a major concern,” the summary stated, citing headaches, vertigo, nausea, joint pain and muscle cramps as recurrent problems, which is an accurate description of what most airline passengers traveling in coach experience on flights of greater than two hours’ duration.
Great — our last line of defense against airline terrorists are marshals suffering from sinus infections, vertigo, nausea and cramps whose cover was blown by Bambi the flight attendant. The vaunted Transportation Safety Administration rides again!
Upon news this morning of the death of Iraqi terrorist leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Republicans were out in force, calling into C-SPAN’s Washington Journal to proclaim the military’s successful strike against Zarqawi as a sign that President Bush is a messianic military leader. “He said it would take time and that we should be patient,” said one caller, “and he was right.”
Another Republican caller said, “only 2,000 of our soldiers have died.”
The Republican callers charged that Democrats are in league with terrorists and were in mourning over the loss of their ally.
While President Bush will take full credit for the successful operation — even though he has repeatedly refused to take blame for criminally negligent war planning — the strike against Zarqawi appears to have been based on a tip provided by local citizens to the Iraqi military, who forwarded the intelligence to U.S. forces.
In reality, all Americans should take the strike as an optimistic sign that the Iraqis are one step closer to being able to police their own security — to “stand up” their own forces. President Bush has repeatedly said that when the Iraqis stand up, the U.S. will stand down and pull troops out of Iraq.
Currently, the war in Iraq is costing U.S. taxpayers $250 million per day. Nearly 3,000 service personnel have died in the war, and over 10,000 have been maimed or wounded. Tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed.
If only: The crowing over the military assassination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is distasteful and unseemly. It changes nothing. U.S. soldiers will continue to be maimed and killed, Iraqi civilians will continue to suffer and die, and the military-industrial complex will continue its dominance and ascendancy. Let’s remember to revisit this event a year from now and assess its significance from that perspective.
Imagine if a liberal said something like this:
“These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband’s death so much.”
Rightwingers like Ann Coulter get away with everything, no matter how heinous. Her book will probably be at the top of the best-seller list within two weeks.
Let’s get this straight, so to speak. Pres. Sanctity is Only for Straight People won’t allow my cousin and his partner of more than 20 years or my friends Joe and Julio, who have been together almost 10 years, to marry. But he wants these two clueless idiots to be able to have at it.
They’re too stupid to so much as spell the word matrimony if you put them together in a room with a dictionary open to the page that starts with marshmallow and ends with matzo. Read this and see if I’m wrong:
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt denied Wednesday that wedding bells are in the air, saying they want to concentrate for now on their newborn daughter and Jolie’s two adopted children.
“There is nothing in the air. The focus is the kids, and we are obviously extremely committed to the children and as parents together,” Jolie [said]. “So that kind of says it for us, and to have a ceremony on top of it is nothing.”
If only. If only a ceremony between you two could be ignored. So…Brad’s adopted the kids you adopted and changed their last names to Jolie-Pitt, plus now you’ve had another child together. But you don’t want to like, be committed or anything.
Pitt and Jolie sold rights to images of Shiloh Nouvel through Getty Images photo agency, saying proceeds would be donated to a charity, not yet named.
People magazine paid a reported US$4 million for the right to release the pictures in North America, while Hello! obtained British rights.
Quick, somebody hand me a loaded firearm.
Brad and Angelina began their affair while he was still married to Jennifer Anniston. If he and the Beautiful One wed, it will be his second marriage. But he is 42, after all.
She, of course, is only 30 and was previously married to Billy Bob Thorton, whose name is presumably still tatooed on her person, although the vial of his blood she used to wear around her neck is no doubt bobbing in the waves somewhere. She was also married to the less famous Jonny Lee Miller. With Brad having only two names and the fact that their marriage will be her third, I can see why he’d be a little hesitant. If he had a brain.
So these two defective-in-every-way-except-looks people would have Pres. 30% Approval and Sinking’s blessings but none of my gay friends are fit? If I weren’t already divorced, I might get one just to protest.
In the diplomatic ranks, trained professionals toil,
To keep the peace and tamp down foreign turmoil.
But for Greek ambassador,
Trump picked an artful dodger —
The grifting, drunken blackmailer Kimberly Guilfoyle.
