Mayberry Machiavellis

I just like the phrase.

The Supreme Court will hear a case this week in which the Bush admin will defend police who shot a guy 5 times (he is now blind and paralyzed) and then questioned him in an ambulance and the ER while he screamed for medical treatment. And didn’t even recite Miranda. The Bushies want to gut the Miranda ruling. The cops didn’t want information about a crime, there wasn’t one, they wanted him to say he’d tried to grab the cop’s gun before he was shot, and use this in any civil suit.

FAIR comments about a remark of Rummy Rumsfeld that the press never picked up, on his abortive attempt at a domestic spy agency: "And then there was the Office of Strategic Influence. You may recall that. And 'oh my goodness gracious isn't that terrible, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall.' I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing fine I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have."

A piece in the NY Times in a slow news day, about various cost-benefit studies on banning the use of cell phones while driving. Some astonishing quotes from shills saying that people like and find a benefit from using cell phones which may balance out the hospital and funeral costs of the victims of cell-phone-created crashes.

The British government has put out another of its famous dossiers, on why Saddam Hussein is evil evil evil. In the middle of bringing it out, Foreign Minister Jack Straw says that Iraq probably has nukes; his staff revoke this comment later. Odd. They chose an Iraqi dissident to present the report, a nuclear scientist who was tortured. He turned out not to be as tame as they’d hoped, and denounced the forthcoming war, and noted that the handcuffs the Iraqis used were British, as were the drills they used to torture people. There was no new evidence; most of it came from old Amnesty International and Human Watch Rights Reports; those organizations noted that the British gov hadn’t given a shit when they’d released the original reports. Then Straw played for the press a video of various acts of brutality, with the most hilariously over-the-top ominous music (I saw it on the BBC).

In a land grab in Hebron, Israel is to seize 60 buildings and properties, ethnically cleanse them of Palestinians, and give the land to settlers to link up settlements. They’ve posted maps all over showing in red which buildings are to be seized--or they say they’re in red, but it’s a black and white xerox. This is a plan Sharon enunciated back in 1996, long before Intifada II.

There is a book by a NY Times reporter on the connections between the Bushes and anti-Castro Cubans, including $75,000 paid to Jeb by one Cuban, now a fugitive for Medicare fraud, for doing nothing, and various terrorists who got Get Out of Jail Free Cards. How did I not know that Jeb nominated Batista’s grandson to be a Florida Supreme Court justice? Cantero, the grandson, has long ties with anti-Castro types and terrorists, including Orlando Bosch, who did things like blowing up planes-- possibly while he was on the CIA payroll, whose director at the time was one George Herbert Walker Bush. Actually Bosch was a pioneer, since it was the first act of terrorism involving the blowing up of a civilian plane (73 dead). As president, Bush senior released him from prison; he now lives in Miami. Justice Cantero didn’t just defend Bosch, but talked about his heroic fight against Castro.
, and more to come, I’m sure.