Author: Trish

Become a Minuteman Without Leaving Home

Trish

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.

The live video would be made available to anyone with an Internet connection.

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.

Brad and Angelina: World’s Stupidest Attractive Straight People Turn Up Their Nose at Marriage

Trish

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?

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.

Keillor Defends San Francisco

Trish

Garrison Keillor is outraged that the best argument Republicans can make for people to vote for them this fall is to keep Nancy Pelosi from becoming Speaker of the House.

Because she’s from San Francisco.

The iPod was not developed by Baptists in Waco, Texas

…it does draw attention to the large, shambling galoot who is House speaker now, Tom DeLay’s enabler for years, a man who, judging by his public mutterances, is about as smart as most high school wrestling coaches. For the past year, Dennis Hastert has been two heartbeats from the presidency. He is a man who seems content just to have a car and driver and three square meals a day. He has succeeded in turning Congress into a branch of the executive branch. If Mr. Hastert becomes the poster boy for the Republican Party, this does not speak well for them as the Party of Ideas.

People who want to take a swing at San Francisco should think twice…the Bay Area is the cradle of the computer and software industry, which continues to create jobs for our children. The iPod was not developed by Baptists in Waco, Texas.

…Meanwhile, the Current Occupant goes on impersonating a president…And one of the basic assumptions of American culture is falling apart: the competence of Republicans.

You might not have always liked Republicans, but you could count on them to manage the bank…To see them produce a ninny and then follow him loyally into the swamp for five years is disconcerting, like seeing the Rolling Stones take up lite jazz. So here we are at an uneasy point in our history, mired in a costly war, a supine Congress granting absolute power to a president who seems to get smaller and dimmer, and the best the Republicans can offer is San Franciscophobia?

And flag burning amendments, and 700-mile border fences, and bans on gay weddings, singing the national anthem in Spanish and abortion in South Dakota.

Did George Bush Really “Explore Alternative Lifestyles?”

Trish

Boy, have we been getting some interesting email since Editor-in-Chief Jon asked you to send in your own candidates for his list of hypocritical Republicans who disrespect marriage by fornicating with people to whom they are not.

Some of the most interesting are allegations that Monkeyboy is himself gay, or at least that he tried to be back in college, when he stayed so messed up he could have eaten babies and not remembered it later, save for the pacifier dangling from his lips.

Bush on tape: “I’m not going to kick gays, because I’m a sinner.”

The idea that Georgie might himself be of questionable heterosexuality would explain a lot, according to the emailers. Jeff Gannon, for one thing. Flirting with the Canadian prime minister’s press secretary, for another.

“Well, you got a pretty face,” he told the surprised Mr. Reid. He wasn’t done. “You got a pretty face,” he said again. “You’re a good-looking guy. Better looking than my Scott anyway.”

But what really leaps to mind is when Bush, so uncharacteristically, was supposedly caught on tape doing the right thing. Remember when his old pal Doug Wead appeared with recordings from when W. was still Texas governor, where he discussed his impending run for the White House? Why did Bush for once refuse to whip up the base?

Mr. Bush appeared most worried that Christian conservatives would object to his determination not to criticize gay people. “I think he wants me to attack homosexuals,” Mr. Bush said after meeting James Robison, a prominent evangelical minister in Texas.

But Mr. Bush said he did not intend to change his position. He said he told Mr. Robison: “Look, James, I got to tell you two things right off the bat. One, I’m not going to kick gays, because I’m a sinner. How can I differentiate sin?”

Um, I think that’s only one thing, W., but how exactly did you mean it? Really intriguing…

Newspaper Sues to See 2008 Republican National Convention Bid

Trish

Update: The Tampa Tribune is now reporting that the cost of the convention will be $124 million, with about $85 million coming from public sources. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush will be honorary chair.

The Tampa Tribune had to sue to see the city’s bid to host the 2008 Republican convention. And even though the city — which had outsourced the bid work to the Tampa Bay Convention & Visitors Bureau — caved, they still didn’t exactly throw open the gates to the information.

The Tribune’s lawsuit, filed in Hillsborough County Circuit Court, states that Tampa delegated to the visitors bureau the governmental function of preparing the bid and, therefore, the bid is a public record.

Dianne Jacob, senior vice president of marketing for the bureau, said the bid is in a 2.5-inch-thick binder. The bureau will allow reporters to view the document but not photocopy it.

“That’s just our policy,” Jacob said.

What would there be to hide in the bid? If you answered, “Republicans trying to bill the taxpayers for another lavish party,” go to the head of the class. St. Petersburg Times:

According to supporting documents from the city, the convention would cost the city and other governments $12.7-million in direct expenses and in-kind services.

A majority of the expense would be for security, including $5.5-million for police and $3.7-million for barricades.

Tampa is competing with three other cities for this “honor” — Cleveland, Minneapolis, and New York. Tampa was first runner-up for the 2004 convention. New York’s smarm factor, however, was irresistible to Rove and the other 2004 puppet masters, who envisioned Bush wrapping himself in a flag atop smoldering World Trade Center rubble. But rarely are conventions held in the same city twice in a row, especially when New York is becoming more associated with Hillary Clinton.

Republicans stole the 2004 election with help from Ohio’s secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, so Cleveland might well be rewarded this time.

“It comes down to Ohio and Florida because they’re the battleground states,” [chairman of the Ohio Republican Party Robert] Bennett said.

Florida’s got one thing Ohio doesn’t, though — hurricanes, especially in September, when the convention is set. And how would it look if Republicans had to evacuate, just as they’re practicing their speeches on the lack of proof of global warming?

Republican Consultant Needs to Consult Dictionary on Meaning of “Integrity”

Trish

File this under, “Too Good to Pass Up,” right next to, “Shots We Just Have to Take.”

A prominent Republican consultant is facing a huge $950,000 in fines for violating Florida election laws. He has admitted misusing an issues-oriented political organization — known under Florida law as an “electioneering communication organization — which is not allowed to ask for votes.

And the name of the sham grassroots group? The Committee to Restore Integrity in Politics. Miami Herald:

Rocky Pennington, chairman of the Committee to Restore Integrity in Politics…is well-known in political circles as both a campaign consultant for the Republican Party of Florida and Republican candidates as well as being the owner of a direct-mail firm in Clearwater…

Pennington’s committee spent more than $300,000 with Pennington’s direct-mail firm to send two fliers in October 2004 to nearly 500,000 voters urging them to vote against the amendment being pushed by South Florida dog and horse tracks…

The money for the committee’s effort came almost entirely from companies that offer cruises-to-nowhere that feature gambling, including $475,000 from Palm Beach Casino Line…

In a separate case against Pennington, the commission also ruled there is probable cause that the same committee broke the law when it also paid for fliers urging voters to defeat an amendment to the city charter of Fort Myers.

Reid Email Calls Out Republican Pandering

Trish

Did you get the email from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, signed by Harry Reid, with a link to sign a petition asking the Senate to get real? If not, here’s the gist:

…it’s election season and down-in-the-polls Republicans are turning to their same old playbook – fear and division. Later this week, Bill Frist, in an attempt to appease extreme right wing elements of the Republican Party, has promised that the Senate will vote on the Federal Marriage Amendment and attempt to write discrimination into the Constitution for the first time in 230 years.

…We don’t need another Terri Schiavo moment where we spend valuable time away from the important work…

…Senate Republicans and their big oil friends have forced more than ten votes to drill for oil in ANWR, but not a single vote to lower gas prices…

We need a President and a Congress that doesn’t play divisive politics. At a time of war, Republicans should unite the country and focus on the real issues, not divide and undermine its founding principles.

Go here to sign the petition.

The Fundamental Flaw in the Bush Policy

Trish

Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Jay Bookman had an Iraq epiphany after reading a blog by former Air Force intelligence officer John Robb, who is now a security and anti-terror consultant. “The problem,” Robb wrote at Global Guerillas, “has become bigger than our will to fix it.”

Bookman says that, in fact, was always the case.

Since the American people wouldn’t buy a big war, we got sold a tidy war, a war in which “mission accomplished” could be declared quickly and Iraq could fund its own reconstruction.

The truth is, the gap between the problem and our will to fix it has existed from the moment this invasion was conceived. It was the fundamental flaw in the Bush policy, the single thing that doomed it to failure.

If we were going to invade and occupy Iraq, we should have done so with hundreds of thousands of troops, after months of intensive planning. We should have committed ourselves to spending as much money as it took, as much time as it took, as many lives as it took to ensure Iraq’s security.

But that level of national will did not exist, and the Bush administration knew it. Even in the wake of Sept. 11, they knew that the American people would never buy an optional war that large and expensive. They also knew that without a draft, they lacked the manpower that Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki and others told them they needed.

Yet they wanted this war so badly — they yearned in their bones to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein and establish American military power in the heart of the Middle East — that they went ahead and did it anyway.

Since the American people wouldn’t buy a big war, we got sold a tidy war, a war in which “mission accomplished” could be declared quickly and Iraq could fund its own reconstruction. It was a fake war, an illusion of war, a war deceptively downsized to fit political will and not reality.

No wise leader does that. No wise leader commits his nation to a war he suspects it is not prepared to win, and we will pay a heavy price for that miscalculation.

Bookman predicts we will be in Iraq for years, defending our military outposts while the rest of the country grinds into increasingly violent decline. It’s not a very optimistic picture but is there anyone who thinks it’s not a possibility?

American-on-Iraqi Violence Up Startlingly in 2006

Trish

[Editor’s Note: I did not know about the post that follows by Jon Editor in Chief when I wrote this. I think we’re all waking up this morning and coming to the same conclusions.]

Things are going to hell in a handbasket in Iraq.

Pres. Butthead sounds the same wooden note he always does: “If in fact laws were broken, there will be punishment.”

More than 4,000 Iraqis — many of them civilians — have been killed in war-related violence this year, including at least 936 in May alone, according to an Associated Press count. That makes May the second deadliest month for Iraqis over the past year…

The figures show that civilians, not Iraqi security forces, are increasingly the casualties of violence. Eighty-two percent of the war-related Iraqi deaths recorded in May were civilians, compared with 61 percent in May 2005, when 746 Iraqis were killed.

Before we go blaming the victim, we should know suicide bombings are down.

During May 2005, about 36 suicide bombings killed at least 331 Iraqis and wounded 962.

This May, by contrast, 11 suicide attacks killed at least 98 Iraqis and wounded 283 — about one-third of the casualties of 12 months earlier.

Meanwhile, amid reports of the Marine massacre at Haditha, Pres. Butthead sounds the same wooden note he always does. And it means no more now than when he said it after Abu Ghraib or the investigation of his staff because someone exposed a CIA agent.

“If in fact laws were broken, there will be punishment.”

Whatever. I can guess the rest. “It’s just an aberration, this is not how Americans are, if we say we didn’t do it then it didn’t happen.” When does this nightmare end?