Welcome to the Obama justice system where you can be found “not guilty” and still stay imprisoned for as long as the president wants. Now it’s hard for me to believe that Obama, with all of his legal training, does not understand the inherent dangers and inconsistencies in this position. But, like with the War in Afghanistan, Obama’s policy is completely based on political expediency — to prove he’s a tough guy and appease American blood lust and childish anxieties — and not on the validity of the policy.
Benzema = 35m
Kaka = 65m
C. Ronaldo = 96m
Screwing Laport [president of FC Barcelona], priceless.
For everything else, Florentino [president of Real Madrid] !
Especially considering that Laporta has been complaining to the press about how much Real Madrid has spent, and even the Spanish President, Zapatero, has publicly criticized Florentino, it is all the more priceless. Real Madrid has indeed spent an offensive amount on these new players, and will most likely spend more, but still Zapatero, as an avid and vocal Barcelona supporter, has once again proven himself to be a total buffoon.
The incredibly powerful lobby, the NRA, is constantly reminding us, especially when there is yet another senseless murder, that guns don’t kill, people do.
That is true. But it is also true that while alcohol doesn’t drive a car into an accident, people who drive under the influence of alcohol do. We therefore heavily regulate the consumption of alcohol to save lives. But unlike alcohol, which is not specifically designed for driving, guns are made to kill.
Guns and people just don’t mix because while guns don’t kill, people with guns do.
Ever since I was a kid I always loved the Fourth of July. At first, of course, I liked the fact that my grandmother let us play with minor pyrotechnics (i.e., sparklers) that we’d put out in the pool with a sizzle. But, even at a young age I had an appreciation for the central figure of the holiday, the Declaration of Independence. And as I got older, I grew even more impressed with our founding document.
With such efficiency of language, the Declaration of Independence beautifully sets forth — what I believe to still be true up to the present day — the fundamental underlying relationship that ties the state to the people its governs. And being the inherently legal document that it was, the Declaration lists the ways in which the King of England had violated that bind, and therefore the people had a “[right and duty] to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Sarah Palin’s resignation speech was even quirkier than Governor Sanford’s recent M.I.A. speech, and perhaps as embarrassingly unskilled as her interviews with Katie Curic. In less than a year, Sarah Barracuda, the self-proclaimed pit bull in lipstick, has gone from the realm of the cynical to the purely bizarre.
My first reaction after hearing Sarah Palin’s speech at the 2008 Republican Presidential Convention was that it was cynical, aggressive, arrogant, and mean spirited. The virtually unknown Alaskan governor got up on stage and delivered a series of boastful one-liners about her own superior toughness while ridiculing her opponent’s professional record.
If Judge Sotomayor thinks that she has an advantageous perspective over white men, well, Sarah Palin’s entire argument (and the image that McCain ticket ran on) was that as a gun-tooting, small town Christian hockey mom, she was tougher and more qualified than a mere city dwelling organizer with an All American education. And while Palin was on tour denouncing Obama for not being American enough, she was arguing behind the scenes with the McCain campaign to cover up her husband’s seven year membership in the Alaskan secessionist party. Interesting that the anti-Palin liberal press never reported on any of the two inconsistencies.
Now less than a year later, Sarah Barracuda is crying that the mainstream press is not nice, proving the old adage true that the pit bull, with or without lipstick, is all bark and no bite.
At the end of the day, though, I feel sorry for Sarah Palin. She was thrust into the national spotlight and, much like Susan Boyle, was completely unprepared intellectually or emotionally for Prime Time. Of course, her original lack of humility didn’t help.
I have been to Rabat twice and, for “family” reasons, I will be spending much more time there in the future. So on Tuesday morning when I found an op-ed in the Washington Post about Rabat (by Anne Applebaum) I was very interested.
Applebaum’s article, “In Morocco, an Alternative to Iran”, contrasted how the Iranian government suppressed protestors in Tehran with how citizens freely and peacefully protest in Morocco’s capital. Typical me, I immediately wrote an email to Applebaum criticizing the comparison as absurd and untenable, complaining about the media’s childish obsession with categorizing a vast cultural and geographic expanse as a single unified group. It is like, as I wrote to Applebaum, comparing Berlin, Germany to La Paz, Bolvia or Mexican Catholics to Romanian Orthodox Christians. Yes, both Rabat and Tehran have majority Muslims populations (as well as Jewish minorities, although that comparison wasn’t made), but they share little else culturally, historically or linguistically. And religiously, they are as different as Catholics and Protestants.
Much to my surprise, Applebaum promptly wrote me a very kind email in response. Continue reading →
I can’t tell you how many times I read confident press reports about the fate of the May 31st Air France flight from Rio to Paris. Remember the story “Air France Crash Autopsies Suggest Flight Broke Up in Air” that was picked up by just about everyone and the mothers? Well, breaking news, the press got it wrong again. The plane crashed intact into the sea, and the sensors were not the cause of the accident. I shouldn’t have been surprised, I was forewarned.
Meanwhile, the press gave comparably almost no coverage whatsoever to the plane that crashed into the sea yesterday near the Comoros Islands, except for mentioning the number of French passengers on board. The doomed flight of 150 Africans must not seem newsworthy, at least that was until they found one miraculous 14 year old survivor the press could sell.
If you’re not going to call it torture, but over 100 detainees died during the process, then what do you call it? And if this isn’t torture, then what is torture? We know when other governments commit human rights violations, but what can our government not do?
In the meantime, it all — the continued indefinite detention without trial, the secrecy, and impunity — has become Obama policy.
In the U.S. we have this game we play. Some major violation of our fundamental values occurs and instead of blaming the system or society at large, we blame the Bad Apple.
In the case of Abu Ghraib, we blamed a few bad apples — even though it was obvious then and even more obvious now that bad apples were simply following orders. But God forbid that we ever point any blame at the system. Even President Obama now has made it his policy that any information that may reveal extreme government abuse be kept secret lest it damage our national image.
Take the most recent and obvious example: Bernard Madoff. This one Bad Apple gets a 150 year prison sentence and we are expected to believe and accept that he acted alone in a vacuum, regardless of the fact that he ran a sizable operation. He even maintained office space in the building where I work in Madrid. Earlier this year, 60 Minutes ran “The Man Who Figured Out Madoff’s Scheme” about how Harry Markopolos discovered Madoff’s fraud within five minutes of looking at the numbers. Between 2000 and 2008, Markopolos on five separate occasions sent detailed materials to the SEC revealing Madoff’s fraud. Of course, the SEC did absolutely nothing. Nevertheless, the moral of the story is that Madoff gets his punishment — 150 years for being the Bad Apple.
Sigh relief. Once again, the rest of society is off the hook.
Grave Error 