FYI, this is what it looks like when an ACTUAL oppressive, totalitarian theocracy crushes dissent.
Iran has sentenced five people to death over the unrest that followed the country’s disputed June presidential election, state television reported Tuesday.
[...]
Iran began a mass trial in August of prominent opposition figures and activists, accusing them of a range of charges from rioting to spying and plotting what authorities have called a “soft revolution” to topple the country’s Islamic rulers.
But yeah, don’t let that get you down, you were all so terribly brave in speaking out against Bush. Have a cookie.
Shit, have a Nobel Prize.
It’s a little long. Not Bill Whittle long. I present below a brief excerpt, and I suggest that you read the rest.
You might like it.
Americans—remember them?—should be asking themselves what it means that a woman of traditional American values can be so reviled, so relentlessly, so unscrupulously, so take-no-prisoners viciously. She doesn’t need to become president to perform an invaluable role. Why is she so popular in the heartland? Because she is us. A good-hearted ambitious American doing her best to offer her best. If they—and who are they, exactly?—hate her so much, then it has to be the case that she’s only a symbol of the hatred they feel for all the rest of us. If ordinary average Americans ever figure this part of the equation out, the ‘liberals’ are done forever. I’m thinking Sarah Palin is making that outcome more likely.
[ 56% of 1,502] Americans [ polled by the AP ] don’t want to shoulder the cost of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul themselves. They think
the richsomebody else should pay for it....
$1,591,200
Total Personal Staff members for other first ladies paid by taxpayers:
Jackie Kennedy: 1
Roseline Carter: 1
Barbara Bush: 1
Hilary Clinton: 3
Laura Bush: 1
Michele Obama: 22
Melissy in Texas
Judge Orders Lynne Stewart to Prison Immediately
Disbarred radical lawyer Lynne Stewart is going to jail - maybe for a lot longer than she thought.
A federal appeals court Tuesday upheld her conviction for smuggling messages to her jailed terrorist client, and said she deserves more than the 28 months she got because she may have lied at her trial.
no - don’t jump to conclusions
Rule 1: what is said in session stays in session.
[Unless it’s about present/future harm to someone else—then it’s damned sticky]
Nidal Malik Hasan sought to have some of his patients prosecuted for war crimes based on statements they made during psychiatric sessions with him, a captain who served on the base said Monday.
Other psychiatrists complained to superiors that Hasan’s actions violated doctor-patient confidentiality, Capt. Shannon Meehan told The Dallas Morning News. ...
ABC News, citing anonymous sources, reported that his superiors rejected the requests, and that investigators suspect this triggered the shootings....
...killed
1314 and wounded 29… remains in a San Antonio military hospital, paralyzed from the waist down by police gunfire and facing premeditated murder charges. and a noose ...one little-known consequence of the massacre is that Hasan’s colleagues must re-evaluate every case he handled. Another challenge, he said, is persuading patients to keep opening up to therapists.
11/17 at 10:38 AM •
(10) Extra Credit • Pass it on...
Sarah Palin talked tough about the father of her grandson on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” that aired Monday—and
Levi JohnstonRicky Hollywood is giving it right back.Johnston watched with cameras from “The Insider” rolling as Palin was interviewed by Winfrey........
Claire in comments
lite beer?
Investigators told ABC News Hasan became a regular at Stan’s Outdoor Shooting Range in Florence, Texas, as the day of the shooting neared. He was last at the range two days before the Nov. 5 rampage, reportedly firing off more than 200 rounds.
Investigators also said Hasan frequently was seen in the company of an older man and an 18-year-old teenage boy at the Golden Coral restaurant. The parents of the teen, identified as Duane Reasoner Jr., work at Fort Hood, where Hasan is accused of killing 13 people.
The day after the shooting, Reasoner told the BBC ...
“I’m not going to condemn him for what he did, I don’t know why he did it. I will not, absolutely not, condemn him for what he had done, though.”
Well - that tells ya a lot about the guy’s Values, eh?
“The last time he was here, I remember checking his military ID at the door, and he paid his $15 cover and stayed for six or seven hours,” Matthew Jones, general manager of Starz, told the Web site of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. ...
“He preferred the blondes,” said Jenner [stripper] ..."He asked us why we were working at the strip club, if we liked the lifestyle, if we had any kids,” she said. “It was right before Halloween so he asked what our kids were dressing up as. He just wanted to know a lot about us.”
11/17 at 10:37 AM •
(6) Extra Credit • Pass it on...
jaw::floor
Doesn’t this sound less like the US Justice system and more, oh, I dunno, Banana Republic-y? [@2:28-32]
OR *clicky*clicky*
“Those things that are the province of the AG, all he needs is to be informed.”
["Who did you consult...” @ 5:10 ....6:40]
11/17 at 09:02 AM •
(9) Extra Credit • Pass it on...
A federal appeals court on Tuesday ordered a disbarred civil rights lawyer convicted in a terrorism case to go to prison and said a judge must consider whether her sentence of a little more than two years behind bars was too lenient.
Lynne Stewart, 70, has been free on appeal since she was sentenced in 2006. The three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued its nearly 200-page ruling almost two years after hearing arguments in the case.
Stewart was sentenced to two years and four months in prison after she was found guilty of passing messages between her client, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, and senior members of an Egyptian-based terrorist organization.
It’s a start, I guess.
Pirates freed 36 crew members from a Spanish trawler Tuesday after holding them for more than six weeks. A self-proclaimed pirate said the hostage-takers were paid $3.3 million in ransom, while Spain’s prime minister said the country did what it had to do.
I’m sure $3 million worth of huge win won’t encourage the “self-proclaimed pirates” to come back to the well for more. Nice work, Andalusia.
The good news: questions about how health care reform will negatively effect the budget are finally coming from a source Obama pays attention to.
The bad news: it ain’t Americans.
It turns out the Chinese are kind of curious about how President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform plans would impact America’s huge fiscal deficit. Government officials are using his Asian trip as an opportunity to ask the White House questions. Detailed questions.
In a preview of labor’s contribution to Obama’s December jobs summit, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program could be lent directly to small- and medium-sized businesses at commercial rates.
All your biz are belong to us.
1989 brought a domino effect of revolutions. Timothy Garton Ash remarked: “In Poland the transition [from communism to democracy] lasted ten years, in Hungary ten months, in Czechoslovakia ten days.” Those ten eventful days fell between November 17th and 27th, 1989. After the failure of the Prague Spring, many Czechoslovaks rightfully held doubts about the possibility of revolution, but as events starting in with Solidarity in Gdansk, Poland and continuing in the other Bloc countries seemed hopeful, the revolution in Czechoslovakia became inevitable.
The Velvet Revolution would not have been possible were it not for the monumental events unfolding in the other Communist Bloc countries. The Estonian Singing Revolution was well on its way in Estonia, not to mention the election of Solidarity members to Poland’s government. On August 23rd, 1989, two million people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined hands along a 600km stretch of road between Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius. Finally, November 9th, 1989 brought the fall of the infamous Berlin Wall. Also, on December 4th the border to Austria was opened, effectively ending the Iron Curtain division of East and West.
I think a hilarious thing would be to make a television sitcom of characters based on all of us and the Lympians and have everyone talk to each other exactly how we do on the internet as we go about our daily lives.........
Palin’s 413-page book, “Going Rogue,” will be released Tuesday and she begins a book tour Wednesday in Grand Rapids, Mich.
The new memoir doesn’t mention Johnston, who has sparred repeatedly with his former mother-in-law-to-be. Johnston and Palin’s daughter Bristol Palin are parents to son, Tripp.
When Winfrey asked about Johnston, Palin said she didn’t think “a national television show is the place to discuss some of the things he’s doing and saying.”
But Palin went on to say she finds it “a bit heartbreaking to see the road that he is on right now” and that “it’s not a healthy place to be.”
Bristol Palin and her son live at Palin’s home, she said, and have much family support.
“(Johnston’s) quite busy with his media tours and he hasn’t seen the baby for a while,” Palin said. “But we will let that be the discussion between Bristol and Levi as they work out their relationship.”
Palin also said Johnston remains a member of the family and that they can work out any troubles. She said she prays for him and that he has an “open invitation” to Thanksgiving dinner.
“He’s a teenager,” Palin said. “I don’t think he realizes quite yet what it is that he is being handled and orchestrated around.”
I’d call that pretty damned admirable restraint, all things considered.
This year has been a bit of a bust for meteor showers. For the normally good Perseids, back in August, a third-quarter moon hindered a mediocre shower. But what could prove to be the best meteor shower of the year comes Nov. 17 with the Leonid meteor shower.
Meteor showers occur when Earth passes through the debris baked off a comet. Comets are dirty iceballs 10 miles across or so. When a comet comes into the inner solar system, the sun’s tremendous heat vaporizes the surface layer of the comet, releasing any trapped dust and rock chunks.
When that debris trail slams into Earth’s atmosphere, it creates a meteor shower. Earth reaches the same spot in its orbit on the same day each year, so meteor showers are annual events.
Some readers may remember the Leonid meteor storms in 1999 and 2001. A meteor storm is defined as 1,000 or more meteors per hour.
“On Nov. 17, we expect the Leonids to produce upward of 500 meteors per hour,” says Bill Cooke of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. “That’s a very strong display.”
