Saturday, May 23, 2009

Nigerian Pimping, Iranian Elections, Cairo Calling Not So Fast...


Dina Guirguis


"Resolved, that we the members of the Republican National Committee recognize that the Democratic Party is dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals." - RNC


"The special forces guys - they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus ... we hunt them down," - Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan,


First, there were the Nigerian email scams that asked Americans to send money for a bribe so that they could receive millions in a money laundering deal, then our local Episcopalians withdrew from the official church to join one headquartered in Nigeria, and now there is this highly creative style of pimping from the NY Times: "The Spanish police say they have broken up a human trafficking ring that forced Nigerian women into prostitution by threatening them with voodoo curses.

The police said Thursday that they arrested 23 people this week in raids in several Spanish cities after a Nigerian woman in Seville claimed she was a victim of the ring and reported its activities to the police in February. The traffickers lured their victims with promises of a better life in Europe and took them to a voodoo priest before departure, the police said in a statement. The traffickers then smuggled them to Spain, where they told the victims they had to become prostitutes to repay a hefty debt for their journey or face the wrath of voodoo spirits."


Good article on the upcoming Iranian elections in the Washington Post: "Ahmadinejad's main challengers advocate better relations with the United States. They promise to ensure that Iran's nuclear program will have strictly peaceful purposes, and they say the Holocaust should not be an issue in Iranian politics.

"Ahmadinejad's comments on the Holocaust were a great service to Israel," Mehdi Karroubi, a cleric and the most outspoken opposition candidate, told a group of students in April. "What has happened that we now have to support Hitler?" he asked. "This is none of our business."
There are going to be televised presidential debates, interviews, and campaign mudslinging very much like what happens here, except the real winner has to obey the Ultimate Khomeni, the top dog in religious marketing... There is a lot of national pride when Ahmadinejad stands up to the US, but the many opponents he has this time tells that folks are also getting fed up with the crazy-ass posturing and don't want to be isolated as a country anymore.

Yesterday I found the story that the White House had leaked its Mideast peace plan, and it had gotten mostly bad marks from all over for being naive and not understanding the nuances of the region more. So, today, the Jerusalem Post reports: "The White House denied on Friday that details of a new Middle East peace plan will be publicly revealed by President Barack Obama during his upcoming trip to Cairo next month.

Speaking to reporters during a briefing at the White House, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that although remarks about the peace process will be impossible to avoid, the main thrust of the president's speech will be America's relationship with the Muslim world.

"The goal is to be - I guess, partly to clear some of this up, this is a - this will be a broader speech about our relationship with Muslims around the world," he said. "I know there has been some conjecture that included in this speech will be some detailed comprehensive Mideast peace plan, and that is not the intention nor was it ever the intention of this speech."


"As I said a few days ago, I mean, obviously it would be difficult to give a speech and not touch on this subject," Gibbs continued. "But the notion that it will be the sole focus of the speech is not the case." There has been a lot of criticism for Obama choosing Cairo as the site for his speech because Hosni Mubarak has been a thuggish dictator more along the lines of a Saddam Hussein instead of being a dictator claiming fake royalty for his family like many other countries in the area... Dina Guirguis represents a group wanting more democracy in Egypt, click on the link at the top for the argument. Of course, the US pressured the Palestinians into having democratic elections and look what happened - Hamas won, Israel pulled out of Gaza, and now the world has to deal with Hamastan in all of its bluster and bombed out glory. These guys are still lobbing the occasional bomb over into Israel... Ahh, well, Mubarak may use the death of his poor grandson as an excuse to cancel the whole thing...


Back in the Dallas suburbs, TPM reports on George Bush's transition back to being a normal guy: "It was a humbling moment for the former commander in chief: President George W. Bush was walking former first dog Barney in his new Dallas neighborhood when it stopped in a neighbor's yard for relief.

"And there I was, former president of the United States of America, with a plastic bag on my hand," he told a group of graduating high school students in New Mexico on Thursday. "Life is returning back to normal."

Bush, in one of his few public appearances since leaving office in January, told the students that leaving office lifted a heavy burden.

"I no longer feel that great sense of responsibility that I had when I was in the Oval Office. And frankly, it's a liberating feeling,"
And there is the difference between George Bush and Dick Cheney; George can let go while Cheney is still obsessed and throwing himself against the fence like a mad guard dog...

Late night jokes:

"Today, President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney gave speeches on torture. Now, is it me or have we seen more of Dick Cheney in the last week than we did in the past eight years? Anyway, the President spoke out against torture, while Cheney's speech was more of a how-to discussion." --Jay Leno

"Yesterday, during a speech, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said the CIA misleads us all the time. You know, unlike Congress." --Jay Leno

"Hey, did you know we had another earthquake the other night? You know, California is the only state where you don't know what is going to bounce first, the ground from the earthquake or your check from the state government." --Jay Leno

"I tell you, the economy's in bad shape. Oh, the economy's hurting; economy is so bad, Joe Biden was outside the White House, selling maps to politicians' secret locations." --Jay Leno

"Economy's so bad, I saw an illegal immigrant deport himself. That's how bad it's gotten." --Jay Leno

"Well, a bankruptcy judge has denied a chapter 11 proposal submitted by former NFL star, Michael Vick, after he filed a bankruptcy plan that allowed him to keep three cars and two houses. The judge argued you can't keep three cars and two houses if you're really bankrupt. And several AIG executives said, 'Oh, yeah?'" --Jay Leno

"Well, here is a shocking statistic. This is shocking. One in four Americans admit to texting while driving. The other three are illegal immigrants who are texting while driving." --Jay Leno

"How about that Dick Cheney. I mean talk about a guy who's gone crazy, you know? Talk about a bearcat, a bulldog. I mean, he's -- he gave a big speech today on terror in the United States and how the Obama Administration better be careful, they don't want to go soft on terror. And the speech was, I don't know, I guess it was well-received. And Cheney was so excited, at the end of the speech he goes out into the lobby and he waterboarded folks." --David Letterman

"But the speech went over pretty well. I mean, Cheney was interrupted five times by applause and 50 times by people screaming, 'Stop! I'll tell you everything! What do you want to know? Just stop, please! Don't go on!'" --David Letterman

"The National Archives lost a hard drive with massive amounts of valuable data from the Clinton Administration. It contained Bill Clinton's to-do list, 500 people long." --Jimmy Fallon

"Michelle Obama's on the cover of Time magazine this week. She says she has dinner with Barack and the kids every night, and then -- oh, it's so cute -- Joe Biden jumps up and tries to lick the plates." --Jimmy Fallon

"Former Vice President Dick Cheney has been in the news a lot this week, attacking President Obama. For eight years, this Dick Cheney never said two words, now all of a sudden he's like Regis, all over the place. He's been making so many speeches lately I'm starting to think he's not really dead." --Jimmy Kimmel



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