Monday, June 12, 2006

Random News & Views Roundup

- David Horowitz had a really bad case of wankeritis tonite on Laryy King's show when he tried to defend Ann Coulter's slanderous comments about the 9/11 widows. Crooks and Liars has the video and you can read the entire show's transcript here. Find a wall to bang your head on afterwards and Horowitz should find a rock to hide under after that display of absolute insanity.

- Actual good news from the US Supreme Court:

The Supreme Court opened the door Monday for death-row inmates to challenge the way most states carry out executions by lethal injection.

In its unanimous opinion, the court expressed no view on the constitutionality either of lethal injection in general or of the specific procedures and combination of chemicals that a Florida inmate, Clarence E. Hill, and numerous others around the country have recently challenged in federal court.

The justices addressed themselves solely to the procedural route that such lawsuits must take, and chose the route that is by far the more inmate-friendly from the two options that the case presented.

This wouldn't even be an issue if the US would just finally scrap the venegful death penalty.

- Violent crime is on the upswing in the US bucking a 5 year trend. Heckuva job, Bush.

- No bump in the polls for Bush, despite Zarqawi's death. Let's see...who an they find to kill next that might improve Bush's approval numbers? I doubt at this point that even bagging bin Laden would make much of a difference.

- Jordanian intelligence had a hand in tracking down Zarqawi.

- Robert Fisk asks if racism has invaded Canada.

If this seems finicky, try the following sentence from the Globe and Mail's front page on Tuesday, supposedly an eyewitness account of the police arrest operation: "Parked directly outside his ... office was a large, gray, cube-shaped truck and, on the ground nearby, he recognized one of the two brown-skinned young men who had taken possession of the next door rented unit..." Come again? Brown-skinned? What in God's name is this outrageous piece of racism doing on the front page of a major Canadian daily? What is "brown-skinned" supposed to mean--if it is not just a revolting attempt to isolate Muslims as the "other" in Canada's highly multicultural society? I notice, for example, that when the paper obsequiously refers to Toronto's police chief and his reportedly brilliant cops, he is not referred to as "white-skinned" (which he most assuredly is). Amid this swamp, Canada's journalists are managing to soften the realities of their country's new military involvement in Afghanistan.

Ouch. And a well-deserved 'ouch' it is.

For Fisk's information, Canada wasn't recently invaded by racism. It's been here all along.

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