CrimQuips
CrimQuips 6/20/03 Friday, June 20, 2003
Commentary by Barry Crimmins
http://www.barrycrimmins.com "I think that the amount of money that candidates raise in our democracy is a reflection of the amount of support they have around the country." -- White House Chief Prevaricator Ari Fleischer
By speaking of reflections, Fleischer is counting on the fact that the people who own Bush cannot be seen in mirrors. All money reflects is the ownership of the candidate. If Bush were a racing car he'd have more corporate logos on him than the rest of his competitors combined. He'd also wear other logos that represent authoritarianism, environmental destruction, religious zealotry, bigotry, unbridled greed and imperialism.
If we had publicly financed elections then the public would own the candidates and it would be the public to whom the candidates were beholden. A step towards this can made by signing up for the poll at http://www.moveon.org where you can vote for one of eight Democrats (or Joe Lieberman) in an upcoming on-line primary. Participate, make your grassroots might known to those who would be mighty.
********
The United States continues to seethe with outrage over a European ban on American biotech food. The standoff has given US parents a new argument to employ in the battle to get their kids to clean their plates. "Finish your corn! There are children in Europe who never get any mutated grain to eat."
It only took three months of "secret arrest" to get the latest "al Qaeda operative" to admit he was planning to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. This confession came right after federal interrogators got the suspect to admit he had purchased the bridge early last year. I wonder how many Diehard batteries they wore out helping this guy remember his crimes? I'd hate to pay the Justice Department's "testicular conductant" bill.
The Bushists are actually trying to privatize much of the Federal Aviation Authority. This is for efficiency -- no one can overwork people in life and death jobs like the private sector.
Once Bush privatizes the FAA, he will be happy to subsidize it. He loves funneling money to private profiteers; it's spending it on the public good and safety that he can't handle. The court-appointed Bush administration has severely censored an EPA report that detailed the environmental perils inherent in global warming. A few unread words on a global warming report here, a few uncounted votes in Florida there? What's the difference? Considering what they have done to the Bill of Rights, whittling a couple paragraphs from a global warming report is nothing to these guys.
Donald Rumsfeld suggested that Americans are willing to "pay the price" necessary to continue to occupy Iraq. Oh really? The same Americans who want a cell phone that can simultaneously make unlimited local and long distance calls, take digital pictures, browse the internet and bake a potato for a flat monthly fee are going to happily exchange uncounted human lives for the assuagement of George W. Bush's megalomaniacal ego? Well, maybe, but only if their service isn't interrupted and only if war bulletins don't cut into "Survivor."
"Hello, America? This is the overseas operator; we have a collect war with a growing death toll and no sane purpose or end in sight. Will you accept the charges?"
Do we have rollover war minutes? Because it appears those not used in April are desperately needed in June.
The way things are going the next country Bush invades may well end up being Iraq.
Just imagine how bad things would be between the Israelis and Palestinians had Bush not traveled to the Middle East to bath the troubled area in his soothing presence.
Operation Desert Scorpion? Bush and his cronies are spending all their time trying to pick names that sound like cool video games while devoting nary a moment to considering how insane it is to play those games with live ammo.
The Bushists bragged when they caught Saddam's Ace of Diamonds the other day. They are less forthcoming when they club deuce after deuce to death. Humanity's only hope is to remove the joker from America's deck. Apparently the "Mission Accomplished" sign on the Abraham Lincoln was there to lull Iraqi civilians into a state of complacency prior to the next surge of massacres of them by US troops.
You have to say this much for the occupation of Iraq: when the US lets lawlessness rule, it doesn't screw around. Had baseball immortal Lou Gehrig lived he would celebrated his hundredth birthday this week. We now know that he considered himself "the luckiest man on the face of the Earth" because he understood that his early demise meant he wouldn't have to hang around and watch his slightly older contemporaries, Strom Thurmond (pterodactyl- SC) and Bob "Glamorize the Vietnam War for Texaco" Hope, live for another sixty -plus years. They are going to lay the corner stone of the new World Trade Center during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York and unless we smarten up they'll keep on screwing America and the world for another four years. They should honor Bush and rename it the "World Betrayed Center."
If the exploitation of the victims of the 9/11 massacres for venal political purposes at the 2004 Gluttonous Old Party Convention in New York City goes well, the Republicans will hold their 2008 confab at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. US troops have admitted that they regularly shoot civilians in Iraq, which may have a bit more to do with the armed resistance they have been encountering than the idea that only Saddam loyalists are disgusted with the occupying force. If things get any worse for the US troops occupying Iraq, they may begin taking R&R on the West Bank.
Suddenly Bush doesn't seem very concerned for his buddy Tony Blair as the Brit leader twists in the wind over the phony premises used to get into the Iraqi quagmire. But I'm sure Bush would be very upset were his dear friend driven from office and replaced by a Tory.
The Italian Parliament passed a law sparing Prime Minister Silvio Burlosconi from prosecution for corruption so long as he remains in office. This underscores why maintaining a Republican majority in the legislature is nearly as important as actually winning the '04 race to the Bushists. The Court-appointed Bush administration's handy thumbnail guide to evaluating protesters: Protesters in Iran are wonderful patriots Protesters in America are traitors Protesters in Europe are invisible Protesters in Iraq are shot on sight White House chief of staff Andrew Card says US troops may serve as peacekeepers in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Considering the Iraqi precedent, this makes a lot of sense. You have to figure just a few days of American military presence will so enrage the locals that Palestinians and Israelis will unite just to drive the oafish foreign force from their land.
Canada -- home of gay marriage, decriminalized pot, national health care and leaders who actually consider whether or not it is prudent to enter into war. Bush better act quickly or he'll run the peril of permitting civilization to creep southward and begin to infect Americans.
Dubyahoo has issued a federal ban on racial profiling, except for use by properly trained Republican officials.
This means the ban will not apply to the hiring of extras for the 2004 Republican Convention. GOP officials will still be able to seek only people of color to play convention delegates.
It will also not apply to Justice Department officials who need to make quick and distracting headlines at times when the fraudulence of the Court-appointed Bush administration becomes dangerously transparent to all but the seriously deluded.
But the ban is rather comprehensive. For example: it is now illegal to say, "Those white guys running this country sure have no qualms about rounding up Muslims."
And no one is allowed to ever again draw the conclusion that the death penalty is racist.
A recent report indicates that more and more Americans are seeking relief from depression. But so long as Bush remains in power there is little chance of genuine economic turnaround.
The Bush economy has recovered about as much as the Bush Iraqi mission has been accomplished.
Coke has admitted to manipulating the results of marketing tests at Burger King restaurants. The responsible executives were immediately given raises and loaned to the Committee to Reappoint the President. Microsoft has filed lawsuits against 15 organizations for spamming its clients with over 2 billion unwanted messages. A company official remarked, "Unwanted operating systems are one thing but unwanted e-mail is quite another." United Airlines said that it would soon begin making e-mail access available to its passengers. Unfortunately unless you plan your e-mail at least thirty days in advance, each message will cost you more than a super-saver roundtrip ticket. Early estimates are that each United e-mail message should only cost about $17,000 in federal subsidies.
Oh great, now we can receive Viagra spam from 35 thousand feet.
HBO's "The Sopranos" will go into production next year for a sixth season. It had been thought that people couldn't stand watching the machinations of organized crime for that long but when the producers considered how George W. Bush has managed to avoid tar and feathers for all these years, they decided to extend the series.
Pentagon officials have received word that they are the hands-down winners of this year's Nationalist Fiction Award for their boldly creative "Saving Private Lynch" story.
W says he will not tolerate Iran developing nuclear weapons. Yeah, who do those Iranians think they are? North Koreans? It's not that Bush hates nuclear arms, it's that he loves being intolerant. Dismissing the significance of the relentless attacks on the occupying force in Iraq, Doomsday Don Rumsfeld said, "You've got to remember that if Washington, D.C., were the size of Baghdad, we would be having something like 215 murders a month."
At that rate they'd run out of innocent people in Washington pretty darned fast. You'd almost settle for 215 Washington corpses per month so long as they started at the White House (preferably on a day when Bush was meeting with both his cabinet and the Republican congressional leadership) and then began eliminating members of the oil, weapons and manufacturing lobbies before drawing a bead on the Democratic Leadership Council....
Hey, just because I am opposed to killing doesn't mean I can't fantasize now and then!
And the fool marched on...Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a congressional hearing that the military is "still in a phase where we need some significant combat power to take on these remnants of the old regime." " W," it turns out, stands for "quagmire."
Rumsfeld defended the intelligence used to justify attacking Iraq as "imperfect but good." Yeah -- good enough to foist this war on the American people and inflict it upon the Iraqi people. Officials from the Justice Department and CIA are considering a proposal to offer leniency to captured Iraqi officials in exchange for information about weapons of mass destruction or Saddam's whereabouts, Rumsfeld said." Leniency" now includes a Mediterranean Villa, a private jet and a tractor-trailer full of bales of unmarked hundreds, certified untraceable by Karl Rove himself.
American General Ray Odierno said "Although major combat operations have concluded, our soldiers are involved in almost daily contact with noncompliant forces, former regime members and common criminals," Court-appointed Bush administration officials Elliot Abrams and John Poindexter bitterly complained about Odierno's derisive comments toward common criminals.
They have a point. Common criminals are the backbone of the court-appointed Bush administration.
"We are seeing military activity throughout our zone, but I really qualify it as militarily insignificant," said Odierno. Insignificant unless it's your kid or spouse they are zippering into the body bag.
They should snip off Rumsfeld's tail and hang him with it. (OK,no more fantasizing today.) Kodak's earnings projections were truncated so much this week that Kodak Moments have been downsized to Kodak Instants. Congratulations to my friend Randy Credico, Director of the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, for his tireless work that helped spearhead the campaign that finally brought justice to the victims of outrageous bigotry in the racially motivated railroading of dozens of people on trumped-up drug charges in Tulia, Texas. The last of the victims were freed from Texas prisons this week. This was a tremendously successful endeavor and it would have never triumphed without Credico's dogged devotion to justice. Way to go, Randy!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Please click to sign up for the e-mail version of :CrimQuips List.
© 2003
http://www.barrycrimmins.com "I think that the amount of money that candidates raise in our democracy is a reflection of the amount of support they have around the country." -- White House Chief Prevaricator Ari Fleischer
By speaking of reflections, Fleischer is counting on the fact that the people who own Bush cannot be seen in mirrors. All money reflects is the ownership of the candidate. If Bush were a racing car he'd have more corporate logos on him than the rest of his competitors combined. He'd also wear other logos that represent authoritarianism, environmental destruction, religious zealotry, bigotry, unbridled greed and imperialism.
If we had publicly financed elections then the public would own the candidates and it would be the public to whom the candidates were beholden. A step towards this can made by signing up for the poll at http://www.moveon.org where you can vote for one of eight Democrats (or Joe Lieberman) in an upcoming on-line primary. Participate, make your grassroots might known to those who would be mighty.
********
The United States continues to seethe with outrage over a European ban on American biotech food. The standoff has given US parents a new argument to employ in the battle to get their kids to clean their plates. "Finish your corn! There are children in Europe who never get any mutated grain to eat."
It only took three months of "secret arrest" to get the latest "al Qaeda operative" to admit he was planning to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. This confession came right after federal interrogators got the suspect to admit he had purchased the bridge early last year. I wonder how many Diehard batteries they wore out helping this guy remember his crimes? I'd hate to pay the Justice Department's "testicular conductant" bill.
The Bushists are actually trying to privatize much of the Federal Aviation Authority. This is for efficiency -- no one can overwork people in life and death jobs like the private sector.
Once Bush privatizes the FAA, he will be happy to subsidize it. He loves funneling money to private profiteers; it's spending it on the public good and safety that he can't handle. The court-appointed Bush administration has severely censored an EPA report that detailed the environmental perils inherent in global warming. A few unread words on a global warming report here, a few uncounted votes in Florida there? What's the difference? Considering what they have done to the Bill of Rights, whittling a couple paragraphs from a global warming report is nothing to these guys.
Donald Rumsfeld suggested that Americans are willing to "pay the price" necessary to continue to occupy Iraq. Oh really? The same Americans who want a cell phone that can simultaneously make unlimited local and long distance calls, take digital pictures, browse the internet and bake a potato for a flat monthly fee are going to happily exchange uncounted human lives for the assuagement of George W. Bush's megalomaniacal ego? Well, maybe, but only if their service isn't interrupted and only if war bulletins don't cut into "Survivor."
"Hello, America? This is the overseas operator; we have a collect war with a growing death toll and no sane purpose or end in sight. Will you accept the charges?"
Do we have rollover war minutes? Because it appears those not used in April are desperately needed in June.
The way things are going the next country Bush invades may well end up being Iraq.
Just imagine how bad things would be between the Israelis and Palestinians had Bush not traveled to the Middle East to bath the troubled area in his soothing presence.
Operation Desert Scorpion? Bush and his cronies are spending all their time trying to pick names that sound like cool video games while devoting nary a moment to considering how insane it is to play those games with live ammo.
The Bushists bragged when they caught Saddam's Ace of Diamonds the other day. They are less forthcoming when they club deuce after deuce to death. Humanity's only hope is to remove the joker from America's deck. Apparently the "Mission Accomplished" sign on the Abraham Lincoln was there to lull Iraqi civilians into a state of complacency prior to the next surge of massacres of them by US troops.
You have to say this much for the occupation of Iraq: when the US lets lawlessness rule, it doesn't screw around. Had baseball immortal Lou Gehrig lived he would celebrated his hundredth birthday this week. We now know that he considered himself "the luckiest man on the face of the Earth" because he understood that his early demise meant he wouldn't have to hang around and watch his slightly older contemporaries, Strom Thurmond (pterodactyl- SC) and Bob "Glamorize the Vietnam War for Texaco" Hope, live for another sixty -plus years. They are going to lay the corner stone of the new World Trade Center during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York and unless we smarten up they'll keep on screwing America and the world for another four years. They should honor Bush and rename it the "World Betrayed Center."
If the exploitation of the victims of the 9/11 massacres for venal political purposes at the 2004 Gluttonous Old Party Convention in New York City goes well, the Republicans will hold their 2008 confab at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. US troops have admitted that they regularly shoot civilians in Iraq, which may have a bit more to do with the armed resistance they have been encountering than the idea that only Saddam loyalists are disgusted with the occupying force. If things get any worse for the US troops occupying Iraq, they may begin taking R&R on the West Bank.
Suddenly Bush doesn't seem very concerned for his buddy Tony Blair as the Brit leader twists in the wind over the phony premises used to get into the Iraqi quagmire. But I'm sure Bush would be very upset were his dear friend driven from office and replaced by a Tory.
The Italian Parliament passed a law sparing Prime Minister Silvio Burlosconi from prosecution for corruption so long as he remains in office. This underscores why maintaining a Republican majority in the legislature is nearly as important as actually winning the '04 race to the Bushists. The Court-appointed Bush administration's handy thumbnail guide to evaluating protesters: Protesters in Iran are wonderful patriots Protesters in America are traitors Protesters in Europe are invisible Protesters in Iraq are shot on sight White House chief of staff Andrew Card says US troops may serve as peacekeepers in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Considering the Iraqi precedent, this makes a lot of sense. You have to figure just a few days of American military presence will so enrage the locals that Palestinians and Israelis will unite just to drive the oafish foreign force from their land.
Canada -- home of gay marriage, decriminalized pot, national health care and leaders who actually consider whether or not it is prudent to enter into war. Bush better act quickly or he'll run the peril of permitting civilization to creep southward and begin to infect Americans.
Dubyahoo has issued a federal ban on racial profiling, except for use by properly trained Republican officials.
This means the ban will not apply to the hiring of extras for the 2004 Republican Convention. GOP officials will still be able to seek only people of color to play convention delegates.
It will also not apply to Justice Department officials who need to make quick and distracting headlines at times when the fraudulence of the Court-appointed Bush administration becomes dangerously transparent to all but the seriously deluded.
But the ban is rather comprehensive. For example: it is now illegal to say, "Those white guys running this country sure have no qualms about rounding up Muslims."
And no one is allowed to ever again draw the conclusion that the death penalty is racist.
A recent report indicates that more and more Americans are seeking relief from depression. But so long as Bush remains in power there is little chance of genuine economic turnaround.
The Bush economy has recovered about as much as the Bush Iraqi mission has been accomplished.
Coke has admitted to manipulating the results of marketing tests at Burger King restaurants. The responsible executives were immediately given raises and loaned to the Committee to Reappoint the President. Microsoft has filed lawsuits against 15 organizations for spamming its clients with over 2 billion unwanted messages. A company official remarked, "Unwanted operating systems are one thing but unwanted e-mail is quite another." United Airlines said that it would soon begin making e-mail access available to its passengers. Unfortunately unless you plan your e-mail at least thirty days in advance, each message will cost you more than a super-saver roundtrip ticket. Early estimates are that each United e-mail message should only cost about $17,000 in federal subsidies.
Oh great, now we can receive Viagra spam from 35 thousand feet.
HBO's "The Sopranos" will go into production next year for a sixth season. It had been thought that people couldn't stand watching the machinations of organized crime for that long but when the producers considered how George W. Bush has managed to avoid tar and feathers for all these years, they decided to extend the series.
Pentagon officials have received word that they are the hands-down winners of this year's Nationalist Fiction Award for their boldly creative "Saving Private Lynch" story.
W says he will not tolerate Iran developing nuclear weapons. Yeah, who do those Iranians think they are? North Koreans? It's not that Bush hates nuclear arms, it's that he loves being intolerant. Dismissing the significance of the relentless attacks on the occupying force in Iraq, Doomsday Don Rumsfeld said, "You've got to remember that if Washington, D.C., were the size of Baghdad, we would be having something like 215 murders a month."
At that rate they'd run out of innocent people in Washington pretty darned fast. You'd almost settle for 215 Washington corpses per month so long as they started at the White House (preferably on a day when Bush was meeting with both his cabinet and the Republican congressional leadership) and then began eliminating members of the oil, weapons and manufacturing lobbies before drawing a bead on the Democratic Leadership Council....
Hey, just because I am opposed to killing doesn't mean I can't fantasize now and then!
And the fool marched on...Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a congressional hearing that the military is "still in a phase where we need some significant combat power to take on these remnants of the old regime." " W," it turns out, stands for "quagmire."
Rumsfeld defended the intelligence used to justify attacking Iraq as "imperfect but good." Yeah -- good enough to foist this war on the American people and inflict it upon the Iraqi people. Officials from the Justice Department and CIA are considering a proposal to offer leniency to captured Iraqi officials in exchange for information about weapons of mass destruction or Saddam's whereabouts, Rumsfeld said." Leniency" now includes a Mediterranean Villa, a private jet and a tractor-trailer full of bales of unmarked hundreds, certified untraceable by Karl Rove himself.
American General Ray Odierno said "Although major combat operations have concluded, our soldiers are involved in almost daily contact with noncompliant forces, former regime members and common criminals," Court-appointed Bush administration officials Elliot Abrams and John Poindexter bitterly complained about Odierno's derisive comments toward common criminals.
They have a point. Common criminals are the backbone of the court-appointed Bush administration.
"We are seeing military activity throughout our zone, but I really qualify it as militarily insignificant," said Odierno. Insignificant unless it's your kid or spouse they are zippering into the body bag.
They should snip off Rumsfeld's tail and hang him with it. (OK,no more fantasizing today.) Kodak's earnings projections were truncated so much this week that Kodak Moments have been downsized to Kodak Instants. Congratulations to my friend Randy Credico, Director of the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, for his tireless work that helped spearhead the campaign that finally brought justice to the victims of outrageous bigotry in the racially motivated railroading of dozens of people on trumped-up drug charges in Tulia, Texas. The last of the victims were freed from Texas prisons this week. This was a tremendously successful endeavor and it would have never triumphed without Credico's dogged devotion to justice. Way to go, Randy!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Please click to sign up for the e-mail version of :CrimQuips List.
© 2003