Well, the federal government's National Drug Threat Assessment for 2009 is out, and — who'dda thunk it? — "Marijuana availability is high throughout the United States." This is despite record seizures of marijuana plants in 2007, as well as an all-time record number of marijuana arrests, over 872,000. Indoor cultivation — often in converted homes and other dubious locations — has increased "because of high profit margins and seemingly reduced risk of law enforcement detection."
It was a little before 8 at night when the breaker went out at Emily Milburn's home in Galveston. She was busy preparing her children for school the next day, so she asked her 12-year-old daughter, Dymond, to pop outside and turn the switch back on.
As Dymond headed toward the breaker, a blue van drove up and three men jumped out rushing toward her. One of them grabbed her saying, "You're a prostitute. You're coming with me."
Dymond grabbed onto a tree and started screaming, "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy." One of the men covered her mouth. Two of the men beat her about the face and throat.
As it turned out, the three men were plain-clothed Galveston police officers who had been called to the area regarding three white prostitutes soliciting a white man and a black drug dealer.
All this is according to a lawsuit filed in Galveston federal court by Milburn against the officers. The lawsuit alleges that the officers thought Dymond, an African-American, was a hooker due to the "tight shorts" she was wearing, despite not fitting the racial description of any of the female suspects. The police went to the wrong house, two blocks away from the area of the reported illegal activity…
So you'd think that after the police figured out they had the wrong house, they'd apologize, and possibly even compensate the girl and her family. According to the lawsuit, you'd be wrong:
After the incident, Dymond was hospitalized and suffered black eyes as well as throat and ear drum injuries.
Three weeks later, according to the lawsuit, police went to Dymond's school, where she was an honor student, and arrested her for assaulting a public servant. Griffin says the allegations stem from when Dymond fought back against the three men who were trying to take her from her home. The case went to trial, but the judge declared it a mistrial on the first day, says Griffin. The new trial is set for February.
http://www.theagitator.com/2008/12/18/another-isolated-incident-26/
Sphere: Related Contentby John Byrne
Say you got a ten billion dollar loan to shore up your finances, and you paid your employees $10.9 billion, and you raked in $2.3 billion for the year.
What would you say you owed in taxes? One percent?
That's what you'd pay if you were Goldman Sachs, Inc. The high-flying brokerage -- and former home of Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson -- has announced it's paying just $14 million in taxes this year.
Last year, their tax bill was $6 billion, or 34.1 percent. That represents a year-over-year tax rate drop of 33.1 percent, and an actual percentage drop of 97 percent.
Goldman attributed its lower tax rate to "more tax credits as a percentage of earnings" and "changes in geographic earnings mix."
Tax accounting advisor Robert Willens told Bloomberg News the rate drop seems "a little extreme."
"I was definitely taken aback," Willens told the business wire. "Clearly they have taken steps to ensure that a lot of their income is earned in lower-tax jurisdictions."
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Goldman_Sachs_tax_rate_drops_to_1218.html
I met a chef from Texas who was like an oak tree with tattoos, and made a mean barbecue sauce. He'd been in the 101st Airborne and was about to be deployed to Iraq, but destroyed his knee in a training exercise and wound up getting discharged. He knew the war was nonsense and thought the Bush guys all deserved to rot in jail, but he still wanted to go to Iraq, and wept whenever a soldier he knew died over there because he should have been there and maybe could have saved that person if his knee hadn't buckled.
I met a woman in Texas who sat down in a fire-ant-infested mud puddle because her son died in Iraq. Everything was "Mission Accomplished" and high approval ratings, but she didn't get it and wanted an explanation from the man who'd sent her son to die for a banner on a ship and a bump in the polls. So, she sat in a mud puddle outside his house and waited for an explanation, and by doing so, began the final and inexorable turning of popular opinion against the war. The mothers of dead soldiers all had a face after this one mother sat in that mud and waited for an explanation that never came.
I met a journalist, a fourth-generation American of Lebanese descent, whose horror and disgust at the mainstream media's insipid cheerleading coverage of the Iraq war in 2003 compelled him to travel to Iraq and do some reporting on his own. Through his unfiltered and most decidedly unembedded perspective, we learned of the Iraqi hospitals overflowing with feces and urine, of villages targeted by Coalition forces for reprisal attacks, about bodies rotting in the streets of devastated towns, about dogs feasting on those corpses as they bloated in the sun, about gas lines lasting two days and about what America's war really looked and smelled like when the media's self-serving airbrush treatment was not applied.
I met a tank driver who had served along the Berlin line during the cold war, who marched next to me at antiwar demonstrations carrying an upside-down American flag. Whenever some outraged patriot challenged him, this man would reel off his service number, his billet, his AO and his record, and then dare his challenger to say something about his love of country. "The flag like this means 'Distress, Send Help,'" he would always say. "This country needs help."
I met a kid from upstate New York who was slinging burgers with this perplexed look on his face because he didn't know what to do with himself, so he was slinging burgers until he figured out what to do. For as long as he could remember, he had wanted to be a soldier and had bent his whole life towards that end. He ran the farthest, worked the hardest and even joined a competitive shooting league so his aim would be the best. He got himself into one of the best military schools in the country, and then Bush and Iraq and everything else happened and he knew it was wrong, and knew he could not devote his life and honor to all that, so he quit the military academy and abandoned his dream of military service, and was flipping burgers until he could figure out what else he could do.
Now in their 17th year, the P.U.-litzer Prizes recognize some of the nation's stinkiest media performances. As the judges for these annual awards, we do our best to identify the most deserving recipients of this unwelcome plaudit.
And now, the P.U.-litzers Prizes for 2008:
HOT FOR OBAMA PRIZE - MSNBC's Chris Matthews. This award sparked fierce competition, but the cinch came on the day Obama swept the Potomac primary in February - when Chris Matthews spoke of "the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama's speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often."
BEYOND PARODY PRIZE - Fox News. In August, a FoxNews.com teaser for the "O'Reilly Factor" program said: "Obama bombarded by personal attacks. Are they legit? Ann Coulter comments."
GUTTER BALL PUNDITRY AWARD - Chris Matthews of MSNBC's "Hardball." In program after program during the spring, Matthews repeatedly questioned whether Obama could connect with "regular" voters - "regular" meaning voters who are white or "who actually do know how to bowl." He once said of Obama: "This gets very ethnic, but the fact that he's good at basketball doesn't surprise anybody. But the fact that he's that terrible at bowling does make you wonder."
STRAIGHT SKINNY PRIZE - Wall Street Journal reporter Amy Chozick. In August, the Journal's Chozick went beyond the standard elitist charge to offer yet another reason that average voters might be wary of Obama. Below the headline "Too Fit to Be President?" she wrote of Obama: "Despite his visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them." Chozick asked: "In a nation in which 66 percent of the voting-age population is overweight and 32 percent is obese, could Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability?" To support her argument, she quoted Hillary Clinton supporters. One said: "He needs to put some meat on his bones." Another, prodded by Chozick, wrote on a Yahoo bulletin board: "I won't vote for any beanpole guy."
By Joe Conason
From the kooky obsession with his place of birth on WorldNetDaily to insinuations about his Chicago pedigree by the Associated Press, all of the attacks launched lately on Barack Obama give off the same familiar smell. Even a quick sniff is enough to bring back memories from a decade ago, when no perfidious accusation against Bill or Hillary Clinton was too crazy to deserve attention.
The madness that was eventually classified under the quasi-clinical rubric of "Whitewater" began, in no small degree, with the dubious idea that Arkansas, the Clintons' home state, was a peculiarly corrupt place -- and that any politician from Arkansas by definition was suspect (but only if he or she happened to be a Democrat).
The West is indirectly funding the insurgency in Afghanistan thanks to a system of payoffs to Taleban commanders who charge protection money to allow convoys of military supplies to reach Nato bases in the south of the country. By Robert Evans
GENEVA (Reuters) - Ice volume around the Arctic region hit the lowest level ever recorded this year as climate extremes brought death and devastation to many parts of the world, the U.N. weather agency WMO said on Tuesday.
Although the world's average temperature in 2008 was, at 14.3 degrees Celsius (57.7 degrees Fahrenheit), by a fraction of a degree the coolest so far this century, the direction toward a warmer climate remained steady, it reported.
"What is happening in the Arctic is one of the key indicators of global warming," Michel Jarraud, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), said. "The overall trend is still upwards."
A report presented by Jarraud at a news conference showed Arctic ice cover dropping to its second lowest extent during this year's melt season since satellite measuring began in 1979.
However, the Geneva-based agency said, "because ice was thinner in 2008, overall ice volume was less than in any other year." It added: "The season strongly reinforced the 30-year downward trend in the extent of Arctic Sea ice."
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE4BF31120081216
BUSH: One of the major theaters against al Qaeda turns out to have been Iraq. This is where al Qaeda said they were going to take their stand. This is where al Qaeda was hoping to take–The mind of a fool. Is he that dumb to not know? He's beyond cognitive dissonance.
RADDATZ: But not until after the U.S. invaded.
BUSH: Yeah, that's right. So what? The point is that al Qaeda said they're going to take a stand. Well, first of all in the post-9/11 environment Saddam Hussein posed a threat. And then upon removal, al Qaeda decides to take a stand.
In this guest essay, Brent Budowsky examines how secrecy has contributed to the crisis – and is now threatening a resolution:
The public is angry – and that anger is rising.
The dangers to our economy are escalating while confidence, trust and credibility are collapsing for both government and business institutions.
Whatever else Wednesday's mammoth action by the Fed suggests, we know this: After $8 trillion of support for financial institutions by multiple federal agencies, the Federal Reserve Board has concluded that the program has not worked, and much more is needed.
I emphasize this: I do not oppose bailouts; I oppose bailouts that are poorly managed, poorly structured and, far too often, conducted with secrecy.
I have warned since 2007 about the cascading financial crisis that would spread from sector to sector, bank to bank, and consumer to consumer. I have called, repeatedly, for direct action to benefit real people such as a temporary freeze on foreclosures.
What I continue to most strongly oppose are top-down bailouts, where $8 trillion goes to financial institutions that continue to raise their interest rates and cut credit lines for even their most creditworthy consumer and business customers.
As for disclosure, the banks and investment houses must be far more direct, comprehensive and honest in disclosing information to Congress, to regulators, to the public, and to investors.
In olden days, markets were based on prices applied to entities with ascertained value and trading was done as the value of those very ascertainable assets would rise and fall.
Today we have a new, and in my view vile, phenomenon: the securitization of everything, where clusters of mortgages, credit card accounts, etc. are bunched together and traded like Nasdaq stocks.
This removes the value proposition and makes these securitized instruments impossible to value, and they are traded based on whims, rumors and mindless speculation until some dumb slob is the last guy buying overvalued and bubbled assets.
This last guy is the slob holding the bag at the end, and now the bag is being handed to taxpayers.
Even as the auto industry teeters on collapse, union-bashing continues as the mainstay of a GOP propaganda war against organized labor. With three million jobs at stake, potentially costing taxpayers $150 billion in unemployment insurance, Medicaid, other aid and lost tax revenues, unions remain the primary targets of the GOP blame game for the troubled auto industry and the failed bailout deal. The Bush Administration, while dithering over the scope of any bailout with federal funds, has faced mounting pressure from Republicans to impose the same sort of union-wrecking conditions that scuttled a deal in the Senate last week.
The hostile response to a bailout, even though some form of rescue package is still likely this week, is doubtless fueled by recent polls confirming that a majority of the public is opposed to an auto industry bailout and doesn't believe that its collapse would significantly hurt the economy.
So far, it's right-wing demagoguery 1, progressives zero in the battle over the bailout. Public support was further harmed, of course, by the plutocratic PR blunders of the auto industry executives' initial jet-setting appeal to Congress. In fact, the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll reveals, the conservative propaganda campaign against an auto bailout has even hoodwinked some union members: "Union households are no more apt than those without a union member to favor the plan, 44 percent compared with 42 percent. However, the union householders who support the plan are more likely to be strongly behind the bailout, " the Washington Post reports.
All this should serve as a wake-up call for all unions, the broader progressive movement and allied media outlets: Will they be able to launch a truly effective counterattack against the propaganda blitz, ads and misinformation spread by conservatives, corporate-funded front groups and the mainstream media? Meanwhile, right-wingers are using the bailout mess to lay the groundwork to defeat the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) needed to secure organizing rights and allow the American middle class to grow.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/art-levine/is-gop-risking-the-econom_b_151326.html
About 20 people have protested the war in Iraq by tossing shoes at a fellow demonstrator wearing a prison uniform and mask of President George W. Bush outside the White House.
Last month the birds were segregated after they were caught placing stones at the feet of parents before waddling away with their eggs.
But angry visitors to Polar Land in Harbin, northern China, complained it wasn't fair to stop the couple from becoming surrogate fathers and urged zoo bosses to give them a chance.
Who's the daddy? The segregated penguin couple, right, are seen here in their own enclosure quarrelling with another male over stolen eggs
In response, zookeepers gave the pair two eggs laid by an inexperienced first-time mother.
'We decided to give them two eggs from another couple whose hatching ability had been poor and they've turned out to be the best parents in the whole zoo,' said one of the keepers.
'It's very encouraging and if this works out well we will try to arrange for them to become real parents themselves with artificial insemination.'
Wildlife experts at the park explain that despite being gay the three-year-old male birds are still driven by an urge to be fathers.
'One of the responsibilities of being a male adult is looking after the eggs. Despite the fact that they can't have eggs naturally, it does not take away their biological drive to be a parent,' said one.
Mumbai's terrorist outrage of November 26 has found a response truly matching it in madness. A call for a nuclear war - and nothing less - has come as the culmination of warped and warlike reactions to the traumatizing tragedy, which has claimed a toll of 200 lives.
The demented call, which still cannot, unfortunately, be dismissed as inconsequential, is not only a regional war of the said, scary description. It is also one for a global conflict of the kind.
Fittingly, the call has emanated from the real fuehrer of India's far right. He may be relatively unknown to the outside world, and less known even in his country than political leaders of the "parivar," as the far-right "family" labels itself. But Kuppahalli Sitaramayya Sudarshan is the supremo of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the misleading name meaning the National Volunteers' Association.
By David Morgan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. military operations, including the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, have cost $904 billion since 2001 and could top $1.7 trillion by 2018, even with big cuts in overseas troop deployments, a report said on Monday.
A new study released by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, or CSBA, said the Iraq conflict's $687 billion price tag alone now exceeds the cost of every past U.S. war except for World War II, when expenditures are adjusted for inflation.
With another $184 billion in spending for Afghanistan included, the two conflicts surpass the cost of the Vietnam War by about 50 percent, the report said.
CSBA said U.S. military operations have already reached $904 billion since 2001, including the two wars as well as stepped-up military security activities at home and the payout in war-related veterans' benefits. The estimate includes allocated spending into 2009.
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE4BE6LN20081216
But this is Dubya we're talking about. Worst. President. Ever. Surely he deserves better. Surely he deserves something a bit more ... thoughtful? Profound? Ironic? After all, while a shoe is nice, it's also terribly cliched. Boring, even.
Of course, I officially endorse none of the following far more appropriate, delightfully hurl-able options. Do not ever throw anything at President Bush, because you could get shot or perhaps go to jail for a very long time, which, despite how you'd be hailed a hero worldwide forevermore, would just be no fun at all. Don't do it. Throwing is wrong. OK?
1) Rainbow flag
Obvious, but effective. What better way to say, "Thanks for keeping the last fundamental civil right in hateful lockdown for another 20 years by kowtowing to the sexually ignorant and the religiously malformed, you sad lump of homophobic lint."
Bonus suggestion: Attach small photo of Bush's new son-in-law and Rove sycophant, Henry Hager, to the flag. Implied rumor: Henry's secretly gay! Just like half the GOP and all televangelists and John Travolta! The AP photogs will eat it up.
Note: Be sure to fold flag tightly for ideal trajectory, lest it unravel mid-flight and accidentally land on the head of the Saudi Arabian reporter, inducing horrified screams and spontaneous combustion. No one wants a scene.
2) Book about science
Clever! Something this president has actually never seen before: A real book full of complex ideas written by people who actually understand that humans didn't ride on the backs of dinosaurs, the Earth is not a giant litter box made of Cheez-Whiz and Jesus spittle, and that the Bible is basically a violent little children's fable. Amazing. Make it a soft paperback, because those hardbacks are a bitch and you don't want to hurt anyone. Remember, science is your friend.
3) Birth control pills
Turns out those little pink plastic saucer things actually soar quite well when hurled like little Frisbees o' Female Empowerment. It's a nice way to thank Bush for sucking the sour teat of the sexist religious right and Catholic church, front-loading the nation's courts with misogynist judges and stabbing at the heart of women's rights for nearly a decade.
Alternative: Load individual RU-486 pills into a large straw and blast them at Bush's head like Divine Spitwads of Cervical Righteousness. It's more sustained fun, and might get you in less trouble overall. Don't forget to aim a few at Jenna, in the honest hope she will never, ever breed. Hey, it's for her own good. Didn't you know her husband is secretly gay? I swear I just read that somewhere.
4) Crayons
Back in the early days of the Worst Presidency Ever, Bush used mostly Burnt Sienna with the occasional Purple Pizzazz. But lately Dubya's been turning to Mango Tango and Beaver, with a bit of Neon Carrot -- saying that one aloud always makes him giggle -- to sign all those laws, last-minute enviro rollbacks, sweetheart deals to Big Oil, final bitch-slaps and FUs to the conscious and the hopeful.
Did you know the Crayola company officially replaced Teal Blue with a color called "Wild Blue Yonder"? That makes George feel proud to be an American. He says to himself, "You think that damn Al Qaeda would ever use a color like that? You're gul-dang right they wouldn't! They're use some stupid America-hating color like Terrorism Turquoise or Suicide Bomber Sepia. Jerks!"
5) Dick Cheney
Cheney, thought to be made up entirely of black tar, razor blades and cold, glowering evil, certainly looks like he weighs as much as a tumescent water buffalo, and therefore would be just impossibly difficult to raise over your head and heave at Bush with any sort of accuracy or distance.
Turns out, however, that Dick is merely a phantasm, a collective nightmare, a little smear of something slimy and gray and unidentifiable, like you find on a dark road after it rains. Deeply unpleasant, but also nearly weightless. Easy to fling, after all! Warning: Do not to get any on your fingers or anywhere near your eyes or other mucus membranes. He may be an ephemeral hellbeast, but he's still one enormously toxic Dick
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/12/17/notes121708.DTL
Mohamed Makhafa, a retired school teacher, says he considers the size 10s a 'medal of freedom and more valuable than everything he owns', Al Jazeera news channel reported.
Muntazer al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who became famous overnight in the Arab world, had thrown his shoes at President Bush during a joint press conference of the US leader with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Baghdad.
"It is more precious than all my property. I will bequeath it to my children and display it in a museum and call it the Medal of Freedom," Makhafa told AlArabiya.net.
http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Saudi-man-bids--10-mn-for-shoes-hurled-at-Bush/399684/
Sphere: Related Content
They hate us for our shoes. Somewhere in what passes for the deeper regions of President Bush's mind might come that reassuring giggle of a thought as he once again rationalizes away Iraqi ingratitude for the benevolence he has bestowed upon them. Ever at peace with himself, despite many obvious reasons not to be, Bush quipped, "I didn't know what the guy said but I saw his sole." But the lame jokes no longer work.
The shoe-throwing Iraqi journalist is now a venerated celebrity throughout the Mideast, and his words to the president - "this is the farewell kiss, you dog" - will stand as the enduring epitaph in the region on Bush's folly, which is the reality of his claimed legacy of success in the war on terror. That and the shoe-thrower's devastating follow-up as he threw his second shoe, "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq," a reminder that we have used much deadlier force than a shoe in the shock-and-awe invasion once celebrated in the American media as a means of building respect for democracy.
This was more than a presidential photo-op gone wildly awry. One might suspect that the weekend event was designed originally to draw attention from the Friday release of the long awaited Senate Armed Services Committee's report on Bush's torture policy. A report that unanimously concluded that it was the White House and not a few bad apples that "damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority." The report, endorsed by all Republican senators on the committee, including ranking minority member Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., cited former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora's testimony that "the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq - as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat - are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo."
Not only has the Bush administration subverted the image of the United States' commitment to the rule of law and justice, but it has done similar damage to our reputation for economic efficiency. On Sunday, the New York Times reported on an unpublished 513-page federal history of the Iraq reconstruction that it termed "a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure."
This invasion, which according to then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, was supposed to be financed by Iraqi oil money, but instead has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $1 trillion. The results, as the Times' account of the report put it, are abysmal: "The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed."
No wonder then that we are perceived as blundering bullies by so many in the region that we claimed to be interested in modernizing. That an Iraqi journalist, whose family had been victimized by Saddam Hussein and who was kidnapped by insurgents while attempting to work as a journalist, came to so loathe the American president, as does much of the world, should serve as the final grade on the Bush administration. It should also serve as a caution to President-elect Barack Obama, as he seeks to triangulate withdrawal from Iraq with an escalation of the far more treacherous attempt to conquer Afghanistan.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/16/EDHB14OLK5.DTL
The man who chucked a shoe at President Bush missed -- twice! -- but Press Secretary Dana Perino wasn't so lucky. She got a black eye when Secret Service agents scrambled to stop the angry Iraqi journalist -- and she was smacked with a microphone! Perino showed off her shiner at today's White House briefing and joked, "The shoe check-in and check-out policy will begin tomorrow."
http://extratv.warnerbros.com/2008/12/bush_gets_boot_shoe_throwing_b.php
BAGHDAD, IRAQ -- President George W. Bush's trip to Baghdad was supposed to underscore recent progress in Iraq, and mark the conclusion of a long-term security deal between the United States and Iraq. But with a well-aimed pair of loafers, an Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi managed to upstage the president's tightly scripted visit.The shoe-heard-around-the-world is particularly ironic, because of the absolutely massive security operation surrounding Bush's trip here. On the day of the president's visit, U.S. and Iraqi troops were out in force, and patrols were stepped up in Baghdad's Sadr City to block any potential attacks against the International Zone, where the president and his entourage would visit.
Earlier this year, Sadr City served as the launching point for a wave of rocket and mortar attacks against the IZ (a.k.a. the Green Zone). U.S. and Iraqi forces reclaimed the southern quadrant of Sadr City in a brutal street-by-street fight; while that battle raged, combat engineers built a concrete security wall that effectively pushed insurgent rocket teams beyond the range of the Green Zone. After a cease-fire was concluded, Iraqi Army units were able to take up checkpoints inside the rest of Sadr City.
Still, forces were on high alert. I accompanied Lt. Col. Michael Pemrick, deputy commander of the Third Brigade Combat Team, Fourth Infantry Division, as he inspected the Iraqi Army checkpoints near the security wall. He also stopped outside a few shops to chat with some young men hanging out on the sidewalk: How's security in the neighborhood? Do you have any community workers around here? Did you watch the game last night -- Barcelona-Madrid?
"You used to hear a lot of noises around Sadr City -- a lot of stuff blowing up," he told them. "You don't hear that anymore."
COSTA DO SAUIPE, Brazil (AP) — President Hugo Chavez said Tuesday that an Iraqi journalist was acting for his country's people when he tossed his shoes at President George W. Bush.
Chavez said he doesn't favor throwing shoes at anybody, but that the incident could be called "the shoe toss of a people's dignity."
"One must remember that Bush has not thrown shoes at the people of Iraq — but bombs, death, destruction," he said.
Earlier, Chavez had a more jovial response to the incident — laughing and calling it "funny." Referring to the shoe-tosser, he said, "What courage!"
The leftist Venezuelan leader then hedged those remarks, however, adding: "At least it didn't hit him."
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hz7R0j3P4KG158DF1rOnEWwlpJLQD9543MI00
Durgham al-Zaidi said he had been told his brother, Muntazer, 29, had appeared privately in the high security Green Zone in the heart of Baghdad.
"That means my brother was severely beaten and they fear his appearance could trigger anger at the court," he said.
It was not clear whether Mr al-Zaidi had been allowed any legal representation at the hearing.
Although he has not yet been formally charged it is expected he will face trial for "offending the head of a foreign state".
But legal experts disagreed on the length of sentence allowed under Iraqi law for the crime. One source said the maximum sentence was two years while another suggested is could be as much as seven.
Mr al-Zaidi has not been seen in public since he was manhandled out of the press conference where he threw both his shoes at President Bush while cursing.
Durgham said his brother was so badly beaten he had to be taken to the Ibn Sina hospital within the Green Zone for treatment broken ribs, a broken arm and facial injuries.
Sphere: Related Content
WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 (Xinhua) -- The United States would have condemned the beating of Muntazer al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist who hurled shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush if that happened, State Department deputy spokesman Robert Wood said on Tuesday.
"Obviously, we condemn any kind of unnecessary force used against the reporter. I don't know that that happened," Wood told a news briefing when asked to comment on the allegations.
"But, certainly, if that did take place, we would condemn that," the spokesman said.
Zaidi, 29, was immediately tackled by security guards on Sunday night after throwing his shoes on Bush at a press conference in Baghdad, Iraq.
The Iraqi Interior Ministry has issued an arrest warrant against Zaidi for "committing a misdemeanor for throwing his shoes on President Bush."
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-12/17/content_10515440.htm
The cartoon-like toy, which stands six-inches tall, is giving the likes of the popular Tickle Me Elmo doll a run for its money.
And some New York stores report selling out of the likeness of the President-elect in the run up to Xmas.
An action figure we can believe in: This Barack Obama toy has become the unlikely Christmas hit among kids, say American retailers
Tickle Me Elmo was a runaway hit among children - until the launch of the Obama doll
"They are literally flying off the shelves," said one worker at the Scholastic Store in Manhattan's SoHo area.
"The kids see Obama, and they just want to grab him."
Store manager Denys Ramos said they have sold more than 200 of the $12.95 figurines, which features the future White House resident with oversized ears and fingers, since the beginning of the month.
"This holiday season Barack Obama has been our Tickle Me Elmo," Ramos told the New York Daily News.
"We did have the John McCain figure but we had to discount it."
Yes, I am blistered like many concerning the corruption that surrounds the Illinois Governor, Rod Blagojevich as I suspect many Americans are since they despise their elected officials acting badly. Not to support the governor in any way shape or form, one would think he committed acts of treason with the wall-to-wall coverage of this corruption case.
In listening to the coverage of this "Sad and sobering" event as expressed by President-elect Barack Obama, I did hear that the Illinois state legislature may begin impeachment proceedings against him. They are allegedly doing so to wrest the power from Blagojevich so he cannot appoint someone to the senate seat recently vacated by President-elect Obama.
As the media covered this event and where impeachment was brought up, I did not hear any laughs or negative comments made of those state officials, as was done when others brought up any impeachment process directed at President Bush. Both Cynthia McKinney and Congressman Dennis Kucinich have been marginalized in calling for Bush's impeachment. I guess everyone is on board when it comes to impeaching Blagojevich instead of Bush.
As I listened to U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and others express their outrage directed at this governor, you would have thought his acts of corruption caused the deaths of American soldiers and innocent Iraqi victims.
As Fitzgerald bleeped out the precise words coming from Blagojevich because it would offend a sensitive listener, one must ask: Why isn't the media showing images of our dead soldiers and innocent Iraqis? They act as if foul language coming from an elected official is an assault upon us all instead of a war of lies that cost the lives of human beings.
By Mark Morford
