Ninja Monkie Bacchanal

Holy Shit! Satan is potentially going to have to take the stand?!?!?

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former top aide told prosecutors that his boss said President Bush authorized the leak of sensitive intelligence information about Iraq, according to court papers filed by prosecutors in the CIA leak case.

Before his indictment, I. Lewis Libby testified to the grand jury investigating the CIA leak that Cheney told him to pass on information and that it was Bush who authorized the disclosure, the court papers say. According to the documents, the authorization led to the July 8, 2003, conversation between Libby and New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

There was no indication in the filing that either Bush or Cheney authorized Libby to disclose Valerie Plame’s CIA identity.

Immigration has been in the news a lot lately.  With the Senate debating various proposals and the House passing a very tough enforcement bill, protestors in the streets, and the Catholic church even weighing, I thought it was time I got in the act.

Basically, we are nation of immigrants.  If my history serves, each wave of immigrants was reviled as a pox on the country (I am thinking of the Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants of the last century) until they were assimilated (sounds sort of Borgish, huh?).  So it goes with this current wave of immigrants.  The difference is that a significant portion of these current arrivals are here illegally.  Yes, that is bad.  But why are they here?  Two reasons:  to find a better life for themselves and their families and because there is a demand for them.  Basic economic law.  And now fence will change that. 

Therefore I guess I favor an amnesty program.  Anyone here longer than three years should be offered the chance to pay a fine (afterall, currently being here illegally is civil infraction) and then offered the chance to obtain a green card.  In America, a green card is a path to citizenship.  After five years with a clean record, green card holders are converted to naturalized citizens.  No other country does that and it speaks to the strength of America that we do that.

All of this talk about guest worker cards is retarded.  This is what Europe has and we can see it has worked so well.  And the issue of immigrants suppressing wages is true.  But again, it is basic economics.  We need to find a more constructive way of dealing with it than not allowing people into the country.

Anyway, that is just my two cents.  Fareed Zakaria has a great commentary in Newsweek about it, BTW.

As some of you may have noticed, my Tigers’ box scores are not functioning/updating.  Therefore, I get the pleasure of telling you that the Tigers SPANKED the Royals in a two-game series.  I will probably not get to tell you that often, so I am taking my opportunity to gloat.

Sigh...

A leading spokesman for the Homeland Security Department was put on unpaid leave Wednesday after being charged with preying on a child through online sexual conversations with an undercover detective who was posing as a 14-year-old girl.

This is what faith alone will get you.  I am all for expanding church-programs that help people.  I could even be persuaded to allow federal funds to help.  However, favoring faith rhetoric over concrete assistance and evidence is retarded, Mr. President.

The U.S. government’s emphasis on abstinence in a program to fight AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean is hampering prevention efforts in the countries it aims to help, congressional investigators said on Tuesday.

CALLER 1: Why is it, do you think, that you haven’t heard hardly anything from Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton about the whole immigration thing? I mean, the silence is deafening from --

LIMBAUGH: Well, they’re busy.

CALLER 1:—the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] and the --

LIMBAUGH: They’re—they’re busy. They’re busy. The Reverend Jackson is in New Orleans. He’s leading a big march there tomorrow. The march is—what is it called? The—the march for the right to return a protected vote and reconstruction. He’s trying to—they got problems down in New Orleans. They don’t have voter base, and Sharpton’s working on a New Orleans deal, too. He’s trying to figure out how he can get involved in the deal down there at Duke where the lacrosse team --

CALLER 1: Yeah.

LIMBAUGH:—uh, supposedly, you know, raped, some, uh, hos.

Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-what?!? Did Rush Limbaugh just call an alleged rape victim a Ho? OMG! Yes he did.  And it was captured in all of its glory by Media Matters.

I don’t even know what to say...I am fighting an urge to do a little dance in my chair though.  Is the witch really dead?  Or will he simply come back through Washington’s infamous revolving door?  We shall wait and see, I guess.

Succumbing to scandal, former Majority Leader Tom DeLay said Tuesday he will resign from Congress in the face of a tough re-election race, closing out a career that blended unflinching conservatism with a bare-knuckled political style.

My friend Andy mentioned this to me: On Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.  That won’t ever happen again.

Cowards!

A divided Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from a man held until recently as an enemy combatant without traditional legal rights, in effect sidestepping a challenge to Bush administration wartime detention powers.

Interesting Op-Ed by Kevin Phillips:

Now that the GOP has been transformed by the rise of the South, the trauma of terrorism and George W. Bush’s conviction that God wanted him to be president, a deeper conclusion can be drawn: The Republican Party has become the first religious party in U.S. history.

The guy who played the Kurgan in The Highlander is the voice of Mr. Krabs on Spongebob Squarepants.  His name is Clancy Brown.

I love looking at the people making the decisions and pulling the strings.  It intrigues me.

Consider the following scenario: It’s Saturday, and you feel like going to the movies. You see the latest installment of The Chronicles of Narnia advertised in your local Examiner newspaper, part of a chain whose name has been trademarked in more than seventy cities. You decide to go to your local theater—a Regal, Edwards, or United Artists. You sit through twenty minutes of advertising, followed by the film itself, which has been delivered from studio to theater by a fiber-optic line.

The underlying theme? Every stage of your moviegoing experience—from production to promotion to distribution to exhibition—was controlled by one man: sixty-six-year-old religious conservative Philip Anschutz.