News You Might Have Missed

Lately, there’s been a lot of news that inquiring minds like mine find stimulating and thought-provoking.  I especially enjoyed the Thanksgiving tribute to Sarah Palin posted at http://hotair.com/archives/2008/11/24/video-thank-you-sarah-palin/. That message of Thanksgiving caused me to reflect on the number of really stupid people we have in our great country.  The good, simple folk at OurCountryPac.org, who created and funded the “Thank you Sarah” message, are probably also thankful that Sarah has just signed a $7 million book deal, which will allow them to experience even more of Sarah’s “articulate common sense” (assuming they can read).  The book is untitled at this point, but I’ve got my money on “A Pitbull With Lipstick, The Sarah Palin Story”.  In addition to the good, simple folk at OurCountryPac, (who I suspect comprise a chunk of the 31.7% of McCain-Palin voters who continue to believe that Barack Obama “used to be a Muslim and still has too many connections to Islam”), others
eagerly awaiting Gov. Palin’s literary debut include David Letterman, Bill Maher, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.  It should be quite a read. I’m sure she will include a chapter about Todd – – how they met and decided – single-handedly – to populate the earth: (“Oh, Todd, I love it
when you crank up your big snow machine.”)  And I hope she includes a chapter on “The Faith Of Sarah Palin”, in which she expounds on her belief that people and dinosaurs roamed the earth together around 6,000 years ago, shortly after the week when God created everything.  What a week that was!!!

Also giving thanks for Sarah Palin was the turkey she pardoned in Alaska, while Joe the Turkey Strangler, working in the background, ran several less fortunate birds through a turkey-chipper machine.  (Search YouTube for “Sarah Palin Turkey”.)  At the time, the interviewer asked Sarah if she was OK with all the turkey-slaughtering going on in the background.  “Oh sure”, quoth the slayer of moose and wolf; who could care about a few stupid turkeys.  But after the blogosphere shifted into high gear and Gov. Palin realized that she had become an object of ridicule (again), she denied having any idea about what was going on behind her.  This would have been hard to believe even if she wasn’t already on record saying it didn’t bother her, since the turkey-chipper machine made a hideous noise as it sucked the blood out of the turkey carcii.  At last report, Sarah was down in Georgia campaigning for that blowhard putz, Saxby Chambliss.  We haven’t heard the last of Sarah Palin, the New Face Of The Republican Party!!

But, returning to the Old Face Of The Republican Party, President Bush got drunk again, this time in Peru while pounding several piscos, the Peruvian national drink.  While there are some still photos of him tossing back a pisco and posing in a poncho while looking seriously shit-faced, we don’t have a slide show of him falling down drunk, like we do for the Beijing Olympics.  (This is also worth a YouTube detour.) Some guys just know how to polish a legacy.

The National Inquirer, which broke the John Edwards story earlier this year, has disclosed that Cindy McCain recently ended a three year affair with Dino, a 56 year old used-car salesman.  Apparently she had to call it off once John got the Republican nomination because all the secret service protection made sneaking around difficult.  The mainstream press has not picked up on this, so it may be BS, although the Inquirer article did contain a photo of a woman with hair like Cindy McCain’s kissing a guy named Dino.  I also heard a guy on the radio whose friend knows Dino well say that Dino is afraid for his life and is writing down a lot of stuff that would be embarrassing to John McCain if anything happens to him.  This is pretty strong evidence of hanky-panky – – even stronger than the evidence that Obama is not really a “natural-born U.S. citizen” and, therefore, ineligible to be President. (This claim is the subject of a pending lawsuit that has obsessed several of the Fright Wing talk radio loonies I tune into every so often.)

On the religious front, Malaysia’s top Islamic body just issued an edict that prohibits Malaysian Muslims from practicing yoga, citing the potential for corruption.  This may sound ridiculous, but it simply follows the precedent set by Egypt’s top Islamic body, which issued a similar ruling in 2004.  The Malaysian Islamic Council isn’t just a copycat, however, since it also recently decreed that girls who act like boys violate the tenets of Islam and forbade non-Muslims from using the word “Allah”.  I wonder if this was what King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia had in mind when he stood before the United Nations’ Conference on Interfaith Dialogue last week to proclaim his opposition to “religious intolerance.”  Unlikely, since last summer, Saudi Arabia banned the ownership of cats or dogs because walking pets encourages pet owners of opposite sexes to speak to each other.  But maybe this doesn’t qualify as religious intolerance – – just mind-blowingly ignorant intolerance. Other actions by the Saudi government, however, seem to constitute the kind of “religious intolerance” that King Abdullah so deplores, e.g., the beheading of an Egyptian pharmacist working in Saudi Arabia for taking a copy of the Quran to the bathroom to read while defecating; (reading the Quran while defecating is forbidden); or the Indian mother of four who was convicted of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning for getting pregnant after her husband died.  Based on my understanding of the situation in Saudi Arabia, engaging in “interfaith dialogue” – if you are a Saudi – can get your head chopped off.

Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh blame Obama for the “Obama Recession” and spend their shows inciting hatred and fear of Obama. Michael Savage warns that once Obama is inaugurated, “there’s gonna be a wholesale firing of competent white men in the United States government.”  Actually, there should be a wholesale firing of INcompetent Bush appointees, i.e., all of them, but they are switching their job status so as to get civil service protection, a procedure called “burrowing”.  The idea is to fill the bureaucracies with opponents of the Obama administration who will be in a position to sabotage efforts to clean up the mess left by Bush.  This is also the motivation behind the flurry of regulations and executive orders being rammed through by the Bush Administration before it slinks out of Washington.

I read that the nine banks that have already received $125 billion in taxpayer bailout money (before the recent supplemental bailout of Citibank) plan to pay year-end bonuses to their top executives of $108 billion.  Goldman Sachs received $9.8 billion and had scheduled bonus payments of $11.4 billion.  (Then Henry Waxman asked all the banks to provide him with bonus information and the top six executives at Goldman Sachs said they would take a bonus this year; what nobility.)  But what about the others?  Can this be true?

Well, that’s it for now.  If off to get a delicious sandwich made with turkey from Alaska.  Yumm!!