Saturday Hodgepodge

August 5, 2006 in Life, the Universe, and Everything | 2 comments

  • Amazing. There is a report that just before the invasion of Iraq, the Fratboy-in-Chief had to be hipped to the fact that there’s more than one flavor of Islam:
    A year after his “Axis of Evil” speech before the U.S. Congress, President Bush met with three Iraqi Americans, one of whom became postwar Iraq’s first representative to the United States. The three described what they thought would be the political situation after the fall of Saddam Hussein. During their conversation with the President, [Former Ambassador to Croatia Peter] Galbraith claims, it became apparent to them that Bush was unfamiliar with the distinction between Sunnis and Shiites.

    Galbraith reports that the three of them spent some time explaining to Bush that there are two different sects in Islam — to which the President allegedly responded, “I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!”
  • “Artist Brian Springer spent a year scouring the airwaves with a satellite dish grabbing back channel news feeds not intended for public consumption. The result of his research is SPIN, one of the most insightful films ever made about the mechanics of how television is used as a tool of social control to distort and limit the American public’s perception of reality.

    Take the time to watch it from beginning to end and you’ll never look at TV reporting the same again.”
  • The recently established happy|agenda keeps an eye on the antics of the religious right in Ohio:
    In our great state, elected officials and candidates for elected office must be held accountable when they embrace religious radicalism. We believe the manipulation of religious texts to further extremist political agendas is a threat to all Ohioans. Ohio’s voters deserve to know with whom candidates are aligned so that they can make informed decisions in the voting booth.
  • The incongruously-named “Justice” Department wants to exempt US military personnel from the law — because they might be, you know, actually guilty of crimes:
    An obscure law approved by a Republican-controlled Congress a decade ago has made the Bush administration nervous that officials and troops involved in handling detainee matters might be accused of committing war crimes, and prosecuted at some point in U.S. courts.

    Senior officials have responded by drafting legislation that would grant U.S. personnel involved in the terrorism fight new protections against prosecution for past violations of the War Crimes Act of 1996. That law criminalizes violations of the Geneva Conventions governing conduct in war and threatens the death penalty if U.S.-held detainees die in custody from abusive treatment.

    In light of a recent Supreme Court ruling that the international Conventions apply to the treatment of detainees in the terrorism fight, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has spoken privately with Republican lawmakers about the need for such “protections,” according to someone who heard his remarks last week.
  • Steve Pavlina explains how to discover your life purpose in about 20 minutes.

  1. Bill from Dover on August 5, 2006 at 11:25 pm

    it became apparent to them that Bush was unfamiliar with the distinction between Sunnis and Shiites.
    I suppose it really doesn’t make much difference when everybody will be throwing rose petals at your feet anyway.

  2. Not_Z on August 6, 2006 at 4:09 pm

    Spin?

    The media manipulating the American public like that is shocking. It looks more like a put on.