Category: Politics

Portland City Councilman Randy Leonard plays Scott McClellan to Mayor Sam Adams’s “Dick” Cheney in the new mayor’s sex/cover-up scandalé:

Leonard also feels that Adams used him to strengthen Adams’ lie.

“I feel disturbed that Sam allowed me to say the things I did as part of his campaign to deceive people,” Leonard says. “I’m not understanding how he took advantage of my friendship and my loyalty.”

“I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby,” McClellan wrote.

“There was one problem. It was not true.

“I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president’s chief of staff and the president himself.”

Just a matter of time until The Daily Show gets hold of this one….

From a New Yorker article last week (the full text of which is not online unless you’re registered) by Samantha Power, about Christian lawer Gary Haugen who runs the somewhat-controversial International Justice Mission, providing legal services to clients in Third World countries.

According to a report published by Afrobarometer, a public-opinion research group, only fifty-three per cent of people surveyed in sub-Sarahan Africa expressed confidence that senior government officials would be brought to justice if they committed a serious crime.

Considering the current attitude of “don’t look back” being expressed by the soon-to-be-POTUS and his aides — and a rather shocking lack of accountability for crimes executed under previous administrations in the US — would the American public even break into the forties?

Everybody else is doing it.

Two years ago, after his letter of resignation was finally accepted by President Bush, former Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld opened an office near the Pentagon so that he could shuffle papers, write his memoirs, and presumably keep his monkey’s paw in the mix. According to the Washington Times via Think Progress on 25 January 2007:

On Jan. 4, Mr. Rumsfeld opened a government-provided transition office in Arlington and has seven Pentagon-paid staffers working for him, a Pentagon official said.

The Pentagon lists Mr. Rumsfeld as a “nonpaid consultant,” a status he needs in order to review secret and top-secret documents, the official said.

I wonder if he’ll still be there come January 21st? “Consulting.”

Perhaps to make slight amends for screwing Portland over by making 2003’s The Hunted here, Benicio del Toro showed up to talk to Stephen Colbert on Thursday wearing a vintage Portland Trailblazers t-shirt under his jacket.

Oddly enough, that was the second appearance by the Trailblazers on Comedy Central’s “news” shows this week. Tuesday, Jon Stewart — talking about the section of Illinois’ Senate designee Roland Burris’s mausoleum with a list of his many accomplishments headed “TRAIL BLAZER” — put up a picture of Burris as a member of the 1977 NBA champion team.

I wish I could have just watched the movie:

After being sworn in, the new leader declares an unremitting war on terror, ushering in a decade-long reign marked by violence, corruption and controversy.

Oh, wait, that’s just the last sentence on the sleeve of the 2006 documentary The Fall of Fujimori, about the Peruvian president/international fugitive wanted for corruption, kidnapping, and murder.

Gawker, from a description of what many take to be the snubbing of outgoing Democratic National Committee chair Dr. Howard Dean by the Obama transition team, specifically Chief of Staff (and former Illinois Congressman) Rahm Emanuel:

Emanuel is famous for ritualistically cursing his enemies by slamming a steak knife into the dinner table. He does this constantly, with his freak horror hand, which is missing a digit he once broke off, in someone’s eye socket.

A few years back I saw reviews for a German film set during the fall of the Berlin Wall called Good Bye Lenin! It’s quite a sentimental movie about a young man whose mother — a staunch believer in the East German state — is injured and becomes comatose just before the Wall falls, and the efforts he and his friends go to to preserve her from the shock of the swift fall of the DDR when she awakes many months later. I loved it. I bought a copy.

What can I say? I’m a sucker for movies about guys who love their mom.

A couple of years later, hoping for a similar gem, I rented The Edukators (also known as Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei or The Fat Years Are Over) which also starred Good Bye Lenin!‘s Daniel Brühl, about a couple of roommates who spend their spare time breaking into mansions, rearranging the furniture, and leaving behind notes fortelling the end of the capitalist system, signed by “The Edukators.” It’s not nearly as successful a film as Good Bye Lenin! — despite its attempts to be somewhat polemically even-handed — but still it’s worth a viewing if that sort of thing is your cup of tea.

Apparently, it was for these folks.

Stolen Madoff statue returned with note attached

Thu Jan 1, 2009 2:54pm EST

NEW YORK, Jan 1 (Reuters) – A statue stolen last month from Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff’s Florida home has been returned undamaged, and with a note attached, to a country club where the accused swindler is a member, Palm Beach police said on Thursday.

The attached note read: “Bernie the Swindler, Lesson: Return stolen property to rightful owners. Signed by The Educators,” according to police.

Happy New Year!

This brief excerpt is from Hooman Majd’s very interesting book The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran, when he looks back at what he felt was the mood in the country in the days immediately after the election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who had defeated the reform ticket candidates favored by the outgoing president, Mohammad Khatami (emphasis is mine).

Khatami was the first true liberal (by the standards of Iran, or indeed the Middle East) to become president, and under his leadership noticable changes occurred in Iranian society. …

The kinds of changes to Iranian society that were made under Khatami have proven very difficult to undo, even when conservatives have tried their utmost. … It is probably safe to say that a majority of Iranians, perhaps commensurate with the percentages that voted for him, share a political philosophy with Khatami—that is to say, a philosophy of moderation and real political change that doesn’t subvert the Islamic underpinning of the state. (It should be noted that the Revolutionary Guards, thought of in the West as monolithically and ideologically hard-line, also voted for Khatami with about the same percentages, over 70 percent, as the general population.) Naturally, the more left-leaning and liberal Iranians were greatly disappointed by the pace of change and by Khatami’s unwillingness to take on the real hardliners when it most counted, and there are those in the diaspora who are reluctant to countenance anyone who works within the Islamic system, but leaving aside economic factors (which Ahmadinejad played to his advantage), few Iranians, including members of the Guards, would describe themselves as being pholosophically much to the left or the right of Khatami.

This version of the conversation between clueless everyEarthMan Arthur Dent and Megreathean world-designer and oligarch Slartibartfast is from the third episode of the BBC-TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy.

SLARTIBARTFAST: You seem ill at ease.

ARTHUR DENT: Actually, I don’t think we expected anyone to be about, in fact. No disrespect, but I gathered you were all dead.

SLARTIBARTFAST: Dead? No! We have but slept. For five million years. Nothing much seems to have changed.

ARHUR: Slept?

SLARTIBARTFAST: Yes. Through the economic recession.

ARTHUR: Economic recession?

SLARTIBARTFAST: Well, you see five million years ago the galactic economy collapsed. And seeing that custom-built planets are something of a luxury commodity — you know we built planets, do you?

ARTHUR: Well, I’d sort of gathered that.

SLARTIBARTFAST: Fascinating trade. Doing the coastlines was my favorite. Use to have endless fun doing all the little fiddly bits around fjords. Well, anyway, the recession came and we thought — thought it would save a lot of bother if we just slept through it. So we programmed the computers to revive us when it was all over.

ARTHUR: Hunh?

SLARTIBARTFAST: They were index-linked to the galactic stock market prices, you see, so that we’d all be revived when everybody else had rebuilt the economy enough to be able to afford our rather expensive services.

ARTHUR: Isn’t that rather unethical behavior?

SLARTIBARTFAST: Oh, is it? I’m afraid I’m a bit out of touch.