Only in America (cont)

30,000 Cuban cigars seized at O'Hare - Chicago Breaking News

U.S. customs officials say they've seized 30,000 Cuban cigars shipped from Europe to O'Hare International Airport in the past two weeks and are inspecting another 70,000 they also suspect are from Cuba.

The flood of the "popular contraband" is the biggest seen at the Customs and Border Protection's Chicago field office, which typically seizes 10 to 12 cigars a week at the O'Hare international mail facility, officials said.

It's illegal to import any Cuban product into the United States without a license from the U.S. Treasury Department (wonder how hard it is to get one of dose, is it as hard as getting a marijuana stamp? - ed).

"Our officers stationed at (Customs and Border Protection) mail facilities routinely discover and seize a variety of contraband arriving from all over the world, but this is the first time in Chicago we have seen this level of activity involving illegal cigars," said David Murphy, director of field operations for the Chicago field office.

Customs officers have confirmed that 30,000 cigars are of Cuban origin and are still sorting through 70,000, said Brian Bell, a Customs spokesman.

The seized cigars will be destroyed, officials said (what a phokking waste, unless, of course, they are destroyed one at a time - ed).

Apprently the spike was due to some sort of rule change the gubmint made because of something the terrists did - maybe that toner cartridge thing. So once again, the terrists have won.

Annudder Gift Idea

Playboy releases not-so-discreet 250GB 'cover to cover' hard drive -- Engadget

Only in America (cont)

First Black Friday desperadoes in line at Best Buy | Technically Incorrect - CNET News

Because if someone's ahead of you for doorbuster savings, the terrists have won.

Iraq War Milestone

Check out our cost ticker over deres...---->

I'll take two cups (get it? ha, ha...)

Topless coffee shop opens in central Maine

VASSALBORO, Maine—A topless coffee shop that raised the ire of many residents of a small central Maine town is open for business.
The Grand View Topless Coffee Shop, located at the site of the former Grand View Motel, opened its doors Monday on busy Route 3 in Vassalboro. A sign outside says, "Over 18 only." Another says, "No cameras, no touching, cash only."
On Tuesday, two men sipped coffee at a booth while three topless waitresses and a bare-chested waiter stood nearby. Topless waitress Susie Wiley said men, women and couples have stopped by.
Dozens of residents objected to the shop when the Vassalboro planning board meeting took up the matter last month. But town officials said the coffee shop met the letter of the law.
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We are living in a golden age (cont)

Or, It's always someone eles's fault (cont)

Will this lawsuit fly?
Can you get drunk on a flight, then sue the airline for giving you the booze?

Well, of course you can sue, it's the American way! The question is can you sue successfully? And if alcohol can cause this, shouldn't it be illegal? This whole going to work thing is the sucker's way out. I need to find something to sue on to get me meeeeeeeeelions. Any suggestions Mr. Lawyer?

Anudder heartwarming holiday tale...

Hey kids: BLAMMO!

Motive still unclear in Toys "R'' Us fatal shootings

Moreno and Meza apparently shot each other, as evidenced by two guns recovered near their bodies and eyewitness accounts. The store reopened Saturday with extra security on hand.

Witnesses said the men were with two women who got into a fight that escalated into the fatal shootings, which sent terrified shoppers and their children scrambling for safety.

“I think the obvious question everyone has is who takes loaded weapons into a Toys R Us?” Ferguson said. “I doubt it was the casual holiday shopper."
~

A Nation Unhinged

Election spurs 'hundreds' of race threats, crimes

Cross burnings. Schoolchildren chanting "Assassinate Obama." Black figures hung from nooses. Racial epithets scrawled on homes and cars. Incidents around the country referring to President-elect Barack Obama are dampening the postelection glow of racial progress and harmony, highlighting the stubborn racism that remains in America.

From California to Maine, police have documented a range of alleged crimes, from vandalism and vague threats to at least one physical attack. Insults and taunts have been delivered by adults, college students and second-graders. There have been "hundreds" of incidents since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes....
~

Electoral College - The Tie

The US election nightmare scenario

A tie? Isn't that like, kissing your sister or something? Though 538 has the chances of a tie at just uder 1%. Wouldn't it be simple enough to give the rest of the US Territories like 3 electoral votes so we can get to an odd number and not have a tie? That way they have a stake in the election as well? Make everyone happy? Nope, that would be way too easy. So let's just leave things the way our Gods I mean Founding Fathers created them.

Also, can we find some Founding Mothers to add to the story? So we can have Founding Parents or something? You know, something a little more PC?

What's wrong with this picture?

News item: New Minneapolis bridge opens, 13 months after collapse, on budget, ahead of schedule.
News item: Seven Years After Attacks, No Memorial In NYC.

That's So America (cont)

League bans 9-year-old pitcher because he's too good

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) _ Nine-year-old Jericho Scott is a good baseball player — too good, it turns out.The right-hander has a fastball that tops out at about 40 mph. He throws so hard that the Youth Baseball League of New Haven told his coach that the boy could not pitch any more.

"He is a very skilled player, a very hard thrower," Noble said. "There are a lot of beginners. This is not a high-powered league. This is a developmental league whose main purpose is to promote the sport.

"Noble acknowledged that Jericho had not beaned any batters in the co-ed league of 8- to 10-year-olds, but say parents expressed safety concerns.

"Facing that kind of speed" is frightening for beginning players, Noble said.

Now, Fung remembers back in the day when he first started playing cricket. Or Rugby. Or any other damned sport. Everybody was bigger than me. Sometimes you played someone and that ball came whizzing thru way faster than the guys we played last week. Or they were so much bigger that they just crushed you. Now, did we quit? No! We strove to make ourselves better. We didn't go and ask them to take that guy out coz he bowled too fast or crushed the phokk out of the ball.

This is why everybody's just gonna blow by us. This is why we are in decline. This is why we need to move to New Zealand.

America's struggle to be Number One is paying off!!!

If black America were a country, it would rank 16th in the world in the number of
people living with the AIDS virus, the Black AIDS Institute, an advocacy group, reported Tuesday.

Go America! You can do it! Be Number One! Woof! Woof! Woof!

I'm sure all that abstenence-only sex-ed promoted by W will get us there too!

Woof! Woof! Woof!

Remember Kids, Condoms are for Nerds and only Homosexuals get HIV.

Alternative Fuels, Shmalternative Fools

Gas crunch: Jatropha, kudzu, algae and magic to rescue
American ingenuity and exceptionalism transforms weeds into, er, pork

So what about Jatropha, a pest tree that produces seed pods, as an oil source for biodiesel? Literally hundreds of stories have been written about it, all generally the equivalent of counting chickens before hatching. All of these stories must contain a line like "The plants require an occasional watering and virtually no fertilizing." This is to plant the idea that one is getting a lot of something for virtually nothing.

But problems of scale aren't mentioned, nor the complication of separating oil from seeds and converting it to usable diesel at some reasonable return on energy input. It does no good to mention that all of, let's say Florida, Texas or a couple other states, would need to be turned over to it. Theoretically, of course. Any reasonable discussion of processing cost is also off the table.

Both the jatropha and kudzu hypes are partially, hmmm, fueled by Brazil's reliance on sugar cane-to-ethanol for automobiles running on blends of fuel. Sugar cane won't grow in most of the US, ergo the casting about for a cheap equivalent from the plant world, one that needs little water. This almost seems reasonable until one compares the scale of Brazil's vehicular use to that of the United States. In terms of miles-per-vehicle-per-capita, in a country to country comparison, Brazil isn't even on the chart of the US Department of Transportation. If it suddenly acquired the auto-load and driving habits of, for example, southern Californians, Brazil's energy strategy would collapse under the weight.

So, are we willing to take the land of 2-3 states to grow the weeds to fuel our affluent lifestyles? I don't know, if we had to devote more land to farming we may have to squeeze into cities like dem Yurupeans do. That's so not America - we're all about spreading out, and independence, and baseball and apple-pies and barbecues and such. Cars are part of that - they give us freedom that trains and planes just can't compete with. And you can pry my air conditioner(s) from my cold, dead hands.

And, of course, this ignores that we're still burning fossil fuels, all we've really done is made our energy source renewable. The article linked to some charts, and what I found the most amazing was that 76% of workers drove to work alone. Mebbe we should try and fix that instead of all these alternative fuels & car batteries & all that stuff. Just that one thing.

Winning Hearts and Minds! (WHAM!) (cont'd!), or, it's just that perception thingy again

Exams Back Up Reports of Detainee Abuse, Group Says

The first extensive medical examinations of former detainees in U.S. military jails offer corroboration for prisoners' claims of physical and psychological abuse at the hands of their American captors, a Boston-based human rights group said in a report released yesterday.

The assessments of 11 men formerly held in U.S. detention camps overseas revealed scars and other injuries consistent with their accounts of beatings, electric shocks, shackling and, in at least one case, sodomy, according to the report by Physicians for Human Rights. Most also had symptoms of long-term psychological damage, including post-traumatic stress disorder, the group said.

The evaluations backed up the men's stories of physical and sexual assault and documented psychological damage that had left many of them severely impaired, the report said. For example, exams and X-rays of one of the former detainees showed scars and joint injuries that supported his description of being suspended for hours by his arms at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

All 11 men were eventually released from custody without being charged with crimes.

In a statement accompanying the report, retired Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who led the Army's first official investigation on Abu Ghraib, said the new evidence suggested a "systematic regime of torture" inside U.S.-run detention camps.

CIA Played Larger Role In Advising Pentagon

Torture "is basically subject to perception," CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman told a group of military and intelligence officials gathered at the U.S.-run detention camp in Cuba on Oct. 2, 2002, according to minutes of the meeting. "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong." (Ha! Good one! He's here all week! -- Ed.)

General who probed Abu Ghraib says Bush officials committed war crimes

WASHINGTON — The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account.

The doctors and experts determined that the men had been subject to cruelties that ranged from isolation, sleep deprivation and hooding to electric shocks, beating and, in one case, being forced to drink urine.

Bush has said repeatedly that the United States doesn't condone torture.

If we can try children for war crimes, why can't we try retards (like you-know-who)?

UN scolds U.S. for detaining children

GUANTANAMO BAY – A United Nations committee has reprimanded the U.S. for trying Omar Khadr for war crimes and detaining hundreds of children in Iraq and Afghanistan, when international law requires that they be rehabilitated.

Khadr, who was 15 when he was shot and captured in Afghanistan in 2002, and Afghan detainee Mohammed Jawad are on trial here for allegedly attacking U.S. troops.

Their trials are believed to be the first war crime prosecution of juveniles, which civil rights groups warn will set a dangerous precedent.

Theme of the Trip

The last Daily Show before I went abroad had this wonderful part where they interview a few people from West Virginia to find out why they voted for Hillary and not for Obama. Now, of course they cherry picked the absolute worst ones, but the absolute worst ones were scary in the absolute worst way. One lady "doesn't like the Hussein thing. I've had enough of Hussein." That quote was our theme. Started making us think of silly ideas, like needing to be qualified to vote or something. There probably should be qualifications to be interviewed on camera as well, because those 3 women were, ugh, honest?

Are we living in Russia? No, we're way worse off than that

Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners... (woo-hoo! USA! USA! USA!... ed.)

“Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year...

Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States “a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach.”

oh! to be a merry plutocrat (cont'd)

Most Republicans Think the U.S. Health Care System is the Best in the World. Democrats Disagree

Source: Harvard School of Public Health

A recent survey by the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and Harris Interactive, as part of their ongoing series, Debating Health: Election 2008, finds that Americans are generally split on the issue of whether the United States has the best health care system in the world (45% believe the U.S. has the best system; 39% believe other countries have better systems; 15% don’t know or refused to answer) and that there is a significant divide along party lines. Nearly seven-in-ten Republicans (68%) believe the U.S. health care system is the best in the world, compared to just three in ten (32%) Democrats and four in ten (40%) Independents who feel the same way.

keeping America safe from Americans

Record-High Ratio of Americans in Prison

More than one in 100 adult Americans is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year, in addition to more than $5 billion spent by the federal government... With more than 2.3 million people behind bars at the start of 2008, the United States leads the world in both the number and the percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving even far more populous China a distant second, noted the report by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.

The ballooning prison population is largely the result of tougher state and federal sentencing imposed since the mid-1980s. Minorities have been hit particularly hard: One in nine black men age 20 to 34 is behind bars...

what a flip-flop: McCain NOW FOR torture

Just pathetic... and this may lead one to ask: what did McCain give up to the Viet Cong as a result of torture? Must have worked, huh? 

Who’s Your Maverick? John McCain Votes In Favor Of Torture

The Senate voted today to ban the CIA from using torture on suspected terrorists and the most famous POW in the Senate voted against the bill. The Maverick is now most assuredly dead and the betrayal is complete. The blogosphere was all over this issue, and thankfully the measure passed, but for McCain, it was a show of pure cowardice. In other words, the Senator who himself was tortured for years and has previously spoken out against it, voted to allow the use of torture on others to save his political hide and pander to a party base that despises him. Shame on you, Senator. Is this the sort of weakness you want from your Commander in Chief?

Tell me again how this no jobs, more wars, pro-torture, pro-Bush tax cuts, anti-choice, pro-surge Republican is going to draw Independents and Democrats to his side this fall? As a side note, would it surprise you that alleged Democratic caucus members Senators Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman also voted for torture today?

Senate Roll Call Vote