Letter Never Sent

I love Barry Crimmins too. He’s the king of incisive one-liners.

• Marijuana is a very dangerous drug. Some people smoke it just once and go directly into politics.
• The Pentagon’s so greedy it has an extra side on its building.
• An angry audience member asked, “If you don’t love this country, why don’t you get out?”

  Barry replied, “Because I don’t want to be victimized by its foreign policy.”

• There’s a nickel’s worth of difference between Democrats and Republicans. If you put a nickel on the table, a Democrat will steal it from you.. and a Republican will kill you for it.
• What a coincidence, Kaiser Ashcroft endorses the FBI de-emphasizing white collar crime right when the court-appointed Bush Administration is up to its armpits in charges that it consists of nothing more than fixers and apologists for obscenely corrupt corporations.
• Look at the bright side, if Bush and Cheney wrap themselves any more tightly in the flag, they’ll suffocate.
• On Memorial Day John Ashcroft is going to lay a wreath at the grave in which he recently buried the Bill of Rights.
• What’s more shocking? The fact that Bush knew something or the fact that Bush knew anything?
• Bush’s shamelessness is boundless. He lectures Cuba, speaking from a stolen office in which he stonewalls vital information, is at the beck and call of nefarious special interests and works as a cheesy hawker of photos commemorating a disaster that might have been averted had he half a brain, even a mild work ethic or a staff interested in doing anything but furthering his corrupt regime’s dastardly assault on peace, environmental sanity and human rights. Yet he feels not an inkling of embarrassment as he browbeats a country he’s trying to starve about how it can become moral enough to find its way into his good graces. Trouble is, George W. Bush is neither good nor gracious.
• In a Sunday FOX NEWS appearance Cheney said, “I’ve got a real problem with the suggestion that somehow my president had information and failed to act upon it to prevent the attack of Sept. 11.” Well at least he finally admitted to whom Bush belongs.
  

If you don’t read Al Martin’s website you should. He’s a former government insider turned crusader. I try to drop by once every few weeks. He doesn’t update very regularly, but its always wonderful and ironic.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, the TNT channel had what they called the “Salute to George Bush Movie Marathon.” Included in the list of movies they played as a salute to George Bush was “Enemy of the State,” Conspiracy Theory,” “Air America” and “Double-Crossed.” The over-arching theme was that TNT was obviously trying to be tongue in cheek. The underlying message is that George Bush is linked to all sorts of nasty illegal covert deeds. Here are the movies, in other words, that portray the Bushonian form of government — movies about the surveillance society (Enemy of the State), mind control (Conspiracy Theory), State-sponsored drug trafficking (Air America) as well as fraud and backstabbing (Double Crossed).

Found via the ever wonderful Ethel the Blog:

In a just-released report, the General Accounting Office informed Congress that its auditors found a number of “seemingly unneeded expenditures” made by the Air Force and Army in 2000 and 2001.
…

The Air Force was also criticized for an array of what the GAO deemed unjustified and excessive spending, including:

• At al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, the service bought a $2,200 coffee table.
• At Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, it bought a $24,000 loveseat and arm chair and $9,800 worth of Halloween decorations.
• At al Jaber Air Base in Saudi Arabia, the questionable spending included an $1,800 “executive high-back” pillow, a $3,000 computer tutorial titled “The Intelligent Investor” and $19,000 worth of decorative “river rock.”
• At various Air Force installations in the Persian Gulf region, the service bought a $35,000 golf cart, a $16,000 corporate golf membership and $5,333 in golf passes.

Military experts claim that such recreational items can be a useful tool for building good relations with officials of a host country, whom base officers can invite for, say, a friendly round or two of golf.
…

Apparently, while Dick Cheney was at the helm of oil exploration giant, Halliburton, raking in the dough his company engaged in the same economic strategy as Enron. In fact, the toothless SEC is investigating the ‘fuzzy math’ Halliburton used when cooking its books.

In a statement Tuesday night, Halliburton said the S.E.C. was investigating a change in its accounting practices that enabled the company to postpone possible losses of hundreds of millions of dollars. Halliburton did not reveal the change to investors for more than a year after instituting it.

This is too funny. I forgot Rev. Sun Moon owns the conservative The Washington Times. This is kind of like how Rupert Murdoch owner of right-wing Fox News is a big supporter of the oppressive Communist Chinese government.
All I want is some consistency. Is this too much to ask?

At Tuesday night’s celebration of the Washington Times’ 20th anniversary, its founder, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, gripped a podium at the Washington Hilton and delivered an impassioned, hour-long evangelical sermon in Korean saying he established the newspaper “in response to heaven’s direction.”

During the sermon, he set the course for the Times’ next 10 years: “The Washington Times is responsible to let the American people know about God.” Later, he added: “The Washington Times will become the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world.” …

The charges were not helped by allegations of former reporters, who say stories were changed to favor conservatives; by editors who quit, claiming church tampering; or by obscurity surrounding the paper’s finances. It has been years since many of those incidents, though, and five years since Moon’s last mass wedding in Washington, which inevitably pulled the Times into scrutiny. For the past few years, the Times has enjoyed a relatively Moon-free zone.

Obviously, objectivity is nearly impossible. The best course is to dislike both sides.

“The above figure represents U.S. military spending since the start of Fiscal Year 2001. Every minute the United States spends another $589,802 on the military, 51.3% of the discretionary federal budget.”

When I just checked it, it was up to 504 billion and counting. Watch money being pissed away on better ways to kill poor and innocent folk. View the Military Spending Clock.

Found a few good things you can read for free online. Sometimes it’s hard to find good stuff.

• The Best of Extra! from Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting Read some choice selections online from their bi-monthly magazine. Right now you can get a year’s subscription for 21$.
• Read Gore Vidal’s The Decline and Fall of the American Empire in its entirety online.

From here:

So, you thought you would help the cause by going out and registering to vote on election day. You’ve been patting yourself on the back ever since,until the day you got called up for jury duty. Now you’re asking yourself, why in the world did you do it? Nobody wants to serve juror duty, right? I mean, you may actually have to send someone to jail, or something worse, and regardless of the charges, you’ll be aiding and abetting our unfair justice system. Right?

Wrong! This may be the best opportunity you’ll ever get to directly make a difference. Jurors not only have the duty to decide guilt or innocence, but also the “equity”, or “inequity”, of the law for which the defendant is accused. This means you have the RIGHT to acquit a defendant based upon YOUR ideas of right and wrong, fairness, and your own conscience. If you feel that the laws against marijuana possession are unjust and unfair, and you are summoned for jury duty to determine the fate of someone accused of possession, then it is your RIGHT to vote for acquittal, regardless of the judge’s instructions.

Found at Etheltheblog via Buzzflash:

Mr. Rumsfeld has no intention whatsoever of firing General White over this phony Crusader flap. Mr. White did exactly what he was supposed to do and trained to do – he shilled for corporate America. The Carlyle Group, the corporate entity where old Republican war mongers (including George Bush Sr.) go to die, bought United Defense Industries. This purchase would and could only be valuable if the Army bought the Crusader system, price tag 11 billion and counting. General White then hyped the Crusader and its likelihood of being commissioned. This caused United Defense Industries stock to jump. The Carlyle Group then sold a huge block of the stock and netted over 200 million dollars. After that, Carlyle, nor White, nor Rumsfeld could care one way or another about whether the Crusader was built or not. Their buddies had already made their dough and some other suckers were left holding the bag. A move straight out of the Enron playbook.