Dangerous peacenik bumper stickers sternly examined!

Via email from StopUSwars.com

“Traveling to San Fransico Saturday night, an LA peace activist was detained at LA International Airport as authorities reviewed each of 500 anti-war buttons and bumper stickers one at a time, in the name of “national security”.

After diverting his luggage for x-ray scanning just before walking on the a Southwest flight to the Bay Area,  Andrew Liberman, of Coffee House Teach-Ins was detained as airport security asked for permission to open one pack. In it they located what they decided was the threat to national security– and one at a time perused the items like “Peace is Patriotic” stickers, and the red, whiite, and blue “Are You Willing to Die For Exxon” buttons and stickers. When Liberman asked what all the concern was about,  and remarked that he couldn’t understand what all the concern was about–with printed matter, the supervisor responded, “That’s good that you don’t understand. Our security system is then working”.

Sharp thinking there pal, and you have the thanks of a grateful nation for your deeply intelligent actions in examining 500 bumper stickers one by one. God only know what fiendish spawn of Al-Qaeda might have been lurking inside them.

No Comments »

Bush calls Lott comments ‘offensive’

Bush has gone from being noncommittal about Trent Lott to openly criticizing him. This is a clear signal from Bush that the damage is getting serious - and that Lott may be expendable.

“President Bush sharply rebuked incoming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott for comments that some have called racist, saying any suggestion that segregation was acceptable is “offensive and it is wrong.”

Recent comments by Sen. Lott do not reflect the spirit of our country,” Bush said. “He has apologized and rightly so. Every day that our nation was segregated was a day our nation was unfaithful to our founding ideals.”

The president did not call for Lott to resign, but other conservative say Lott must offer a fuller explanation of his comments, despite his apology.

“On their face, the recent comments of Sen. Trent Lott are offensive, repugnant and inimical to what the Republican Party stands for,” said William Bennett.”

No Comments »

This is what Trent Lott is defending

From Boing Boing

Thurmond’s stump-speech video-clip.

“So, how inexcusable is it for Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott to have avowed his support for Strom Thurmond’s last presidential bid? Here’s clip from the Daily Show with an excerpt of one of Thurmond’s stump-speeches:

“What I want to tell you…Ladies and Gentlemen…That there’s not enough troops in the Army…to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theatres, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches.”

Link (25.1MB QuickTime)

No Comments »

Democrats May Halt Senate.

“Emboldened by Sen. Mary Landrieu’s (D-LA) win last week, Democrats are prepared to prevent the Senate from organizing in January unless Republicans agree to near-equal committee funding in the 108th Congress,” Roll Call reports.

No Comments »

Phoenix 0.5 is out

Phoenix is a quicker, faster, souped up version of the open source Mozilla browser. It is highly tweakable, so if you are like me, and enjoy like bashing about with browsers, Phoenix is for you.

It is packed with cool features that no other browser has. After playing with some of the advanced config tweaks, web pages now load noticeably faster (and they already did load fast!)

No Comments »

U.S. lay group may join Boston church revolt

A Roman Catholic lay group will formally decide Wednesday whether to join priests’ calls for Cardinal Bernard Law to resign, possibly deepening a revolt in the Archdiocese of Boston.

Voice of the Faithful, which claims more than 25,000 mainstream practicing Catholics as members, will take up the issue of Law’s future at a meeting of its executive council Wednesday evening in the Boston suburb of West Newton, Massachusetts.

Catholic theologians and historians have used terms like “revolt” and “rebellion” to describe the situation in the archdiocese after a letter was delivered to Law’s residence Monday in which 58 priests asked him to step down.

And now, of course, Cardinal Law is at the Vatican, and recent documents have shown conclusively that the Pope ordered the coverups and the Cardinals followed those orders.

This could, and probably should, rock the Church to its foundations.

No Comments »

Chavez now appears to be winning in Venezuela!

Venezuelan Oil Strike Springs Leak as Ships Load

“Strike-breaking workers loaded Venezuelan oil tankers on Wednesday as a 10-day-old stoppage aimed at forcing leftist President Hugo Chavez to quit sprang a leak.
At least two ships have been loading and another two were due to load, according to shipping agents, loosening the anti-Chavez strikers’ stranglehold on the world’s fifth-largest oil exporter.
“We are overcoming the crisis and showing great strength,” said a beaming Chavez, blaming the strike on upper-class “coup-mongers” who he said were behind an uprising which briefly overthrew him in April. He said they were intimidating ordinary oil workers.”

Comments Off