meehawl

They are, after all, rank amateurs when it comes to boycotts, an Irish invention.

“More than half of U.S. consumers say they would take into account whether a company is from a country that did not support the U.S. invasion of Iraq before buying stock, according to a Fleishman-Hillard/Wirthlin Worldwide poll of 1,000 adults,’ O’Dwyer’s PR Daily reports. “Consumers who advocate and have taken part in boycotts of goods made in those countries were found to be white, mid- to upper-income, conservative Republicans, according to the survey.’ There is some confusion, however, among those surveyed as to country of origin of many brands. For example, 64 percent said Grey Poupon mustard is French (it’s from the U.S.). Despite its well-chronicled PR efforts, French’s mustard was identified by 29 percent of respondents as French. Seventy-eight percent said Universal Pictures is a U.S. company (it’s owned by France’s Vivendi). Then there’s the 42 percent who said Saab is German (originally from Sweden, it was bought by General Motors), the 55 percent who said Bayer is from the U.S. (German), and the 70 percent who said Heineken is German (it’s brewed in the Netherlands).

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You have promised healthcare for all Iraqis. We could use the same thing here. Far too many of us are without health insurance and adequate access to good healthcare facilities. You have also promised to rebuild the schools in Iraq. We too have schools that need rebuilt and that need more funding.

Certainly you can find a justification for attacking us. We have weapons of mass destruction. Just go inspect the former uranium enrichment plant near Piketon, Ohio. You will still find all sorts of radioactive waste on and around that site. Test our waters. Test our ground. Test our air. You will find an abundance of chemical and biological agents that could be used as weapons. We literally live among them.

After all, Appalachia is America’s third world. Terrorists are breeding everywhere. Where there is poverty there is unrest. Where there is poor education there is suspicion. Where there is neglect there is anger. As far as potential dangers go, Appalachia should be near the top of your list. Stomp out the bad before it turns thoroughly evil. Pre-emptively strike us now before it becomes too late. Do it before we make something else out of our fertilizer ingredients.

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So Ashcroft, in his divinely inspired wisdom, has ruled that the Feds can imprison “illegal” immigrants in the US “indefinitely”. I think this move was probably prompted by personal envy at discovering how efficiently the old Saddamist regime in Iraq could imprison its populace. Of course, this just levels the playing field between US citizens and non-citizens, seeing as how the Bush Gang decided last year that it could detain US citizens indefinitely without trial or habeus corpus.

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, putting into effect a sweeping change in US immigration policy, has ruled that immigrants who enter the country illegally may be held in detention indefinitely if the government deems their release would pose a national security risk. Even if an individual does not personally pose a security threat, Ashcroft ruled, that illegal immigrant can be denied release if he or she raises national security fears among US government agencies … In the past, denial of release on bond of illegal immigrants generally has required a court ruling that that person was dangerous, or would flee if released.

Earlier here, or here.

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Is nothing sacred? Apparently not.

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They seek them here… They seek them there… This is a good roundup of the absurdity of the present “WMD Search” in Iraq… which actually seems to consist of the US doing nothing and hoping everyone forgets about the claims of “450 tons” of WMDs ready to be launched “within 45 minutes”. I note that the former Saddamist regime in Iraq had to be forced through the will of the international community to admit the UN weapons inspectors, and in a weird echo that the current US occupation regime is similarly banning the mandated UN weapons inspectors from completing their survey of Iraq. My interpretation of the UN weapons inspection process is that it was tied to the territory of Iraq and not any particular regime… because if it was that simple then a quick Government shuffle in Iraq in the 90s would have invalidated the UN inspection mandate. Of course, the Bush Gang are desperately trying to rewrite the international law books to somehow manage to arbitrate debt negation, UN mandate negation, and economic sovereignty and tie them to specific political actors, rather than countries. This smacks so much of the “right of kings” and an Imperial Presidency that it’s unsettling, and profoundly anti-democratic. These people really are trying to carve out an Empire and plunge the world back to the gross, militaristic instability of the early 20th century. This is government through anger, and right through force. Hmmm, let me think, what was the definition of fascism again?

Fascism
Etymology: Italian fascismo, from fascio bundle, fasces, group, from Latin fascis bundle & fasces fasces
1 : often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
2 : a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control

And then of course, there was that other political fad popular during the Progressive Era of the 1890s, the seed for fascism, corporatism:

corporatism
: the organization of a society into industrial and professional corporations serving as organs of political representation and exercising some control over persons and activities within their jurisdiction

It’s all becoming clear to me now, as I see how Iraq is a being “restructured” as a beta-test for 21st century corporatism.

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So Richard Delgaudio, a notoriously loud Republican activist fundraiser who raised money to defend felon Oliver North and other notorious Reagan-era miscreants from justice, plead guilty to possessing child porn. This was part of a plea bargain, because the photos showed him having sex with a teenager and he wanted to avoid the stat rape charge, among others. This is the same guy who led the deranged attack on Clinton’s sex life in the mid-90s, calling Clinton “a lawbreaker and a terrible example to our nation’s young people”. Right.

Delgaudio was charged with taking sexually explicit photographs of a 16-year-old girl. He paid the girl — a single mother and high school dropout — by the hour for photo shoots at the Deluxe Plaza Motel … Delgaudio’s attorneys issued a statement saying that their client “acknowledges the acute moral shortcomings of his conduct and he will continue intense self-examination, and professional and spiritual counseling.” … [He] heads an array of conservative activist groups … He is listed as president of Legal Affairs Council Inc., which had $2.6 million in revenue in 2001 … Delgaudio also is listed as chairman and director of the United States Intelligence Council and president of National Security Center Inc.

Well that’s a relief, who knows what would happen if he didn’t carry on his self-examination.

[He] admitted to taking lewd photographs of a 16-year-old girl he met in East Baltimore’s Patterson Park in 2001. In some of the photos, he was engaged in sex with her … He is president of the Legal Affairs Council, a group that helped pay the legal bills of former Reagan administration officials Oliver L. North and Caspar W. Weinberger after they were charged in connection with the Iran-contra affair … In his pornography case, there was additional evidence that Delgaudio took erotic images of at least one other, younger teen-ager, but that evidence was not admissible in court … [He] was arrested in November 2001 with a book of obscene photographs he had taken of 15- and 16-year-old girls, according to court documents. The teen-agers went with him on several occasions to a hotel on Pulaski Highway, where they had sex and he paid them to pose in erotic positions for his camera.

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police arrested a couple for inappropriate sexual acts allegedly performed Wednesday afternoon in a booth at a fast food restaurant. Charged each with one count of public indecency, a misdemeanor, are a 70-year-old New Philadelphia man and a 59-year-old Dover woman … this wasn’t the first time police received reports about the same two people performing lurid acts in the parking lot or inside the restaurant.

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It seems as if the breastfeeders are indeed in league with OsamaSaddam in a nefarious bid to undermine homeland security, or something. This Canadian woman was breastfeeding her baby on a plane as a USian passenger complained about her ever more vociferously. Eventually, the doofus complained that he felt her breastfeeding making him a victim of international terror and the cabin crew warned her to stop otherwise she’d be detained for attacking a USian within international airspace.

She says the man got out of his seat, walked over to hers and stood staring at her. She says she approached him afterward and twice asked if he had a problem with her feeding her son.

“He marched past me and to the very back of the cabin to talk to the flight attendant,” she wrote. “He told her, ‘This woman just assaulted me.’ … He then explained that the asking of two questions by a ‘foreign national’ in international airspace made him feel the victim of terror and as such he wanted to file an assault charge.”

She says the flight attendants also began to call her and her travelling party “foreign nationals in international airspace on an international flight during a time of war.” And she was informed both of the complaint and that it could be upgraded to a Level 3, which meant possible mandatory detainment by U.S. authorities for 24 hours, RCMP involvement and criminal charges for an act of war upon an American.

Earlier here.

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As Iraqi Shiite demands for a dominant role in Iraq’s future mount, Bush administration officials say they underestimated the Shiites’ organizational strength and are unprepared to prevent the rise of an anti-American, Islamic fundamentalist government in the country. The burst of Shiite power — as demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands who made a long-banned pilgrimage to the holy city of Karbala on Tuesday — has U.S. officials looking for allies in the struggle to fill the power vacuum left by the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

With Huey and Cobra helicopters swooping low overhead, protesters at the bridge chanted “Go home, America,” while Marines, some with bayonets fixed to their M-16 rifles, faced them … After more than four hours on the bridge, the Iraqi men heard one of the detained men had been released. They let the convoy pass. As the protest disbanded, one Iraqi man hysterically called out to U.S. troops, telling them “Leave!” and saying “We need freedom!” Another man rubbed his index fingers together and shouted “Saddam and U.S.A. – they’re friends!” Capt. Samuel Bakion reached under his flak vest to pull out his dogtag chain, which was also strung through his wedding band. He showed it to the Iraqis, telling them his wife was waiting for him back home in Minneapolis. “I want to leave,” Bakion told the protesters. “I want to go back to America.”

Earlier here.

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So I read this with some astonishment. A woman leaves in some photos for developing and among the four rools of typical family snaps there are several of her breastfeeding her baby, and some of naked toddlers playing. Photo technician calls the cops, couple gets arrested. Now, after many months, the charges of child pornography against them have been dropped but they have to attend sexual dysfunction counsellling and child welfare zealots are still keeping the toddlers in foster care, away from their parents.

The real issue here is the bizarre thought processes at work within the minds of the photo developing technician and some police, and the DA, who can look at toddlers at breastfeeding and derive sufficient sexual stimulation from their experience to judge the photos arousing. What is going on? The wrong people were sent for counselling, that’s for sure.

A half-dozen others recorded the kids at bath time. Fernandez took several photos of the boys “playing around,” naked and innocent, with the oldest flashing a big smile. Mercado, who says she often bathed with the kids, is in several of the shots unclothed from the waist up, holding her arm modestly across her bare chest. In one–the photo that would threaten to send Mercado and her boyfriend to prison–the infant Rodrigo is suckling her left breast. After Mercado dropped off the film for processing, a technician viewed the images and decided they were “suspicious,” according to a police report.
…
To Richardson police, who arrived at the store that afternoon and apparently made up their minds from the content of the pictures alone, this was nothing short of a felony case of child pornography. “We thought they contained sexuality,” says Sergeant Danny Martin, a Richardson police spokesman, explaining why two Richardson police detectives began pursuing a criminal case. “If you saw the photos, you’d know what I mean.”

With nothing else to support their contention that the photos were related to sex or sexual gratification, the police and the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office presented the photos to a grand jury in January and came away with indictments against Mercado and Fernandez for “sexual performance of a child,” a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison. The charges centered on a single photo, the breast-feeding shot.

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