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a personal repository for my own news junkyness.
In what’s been described as the "American Ding Dong goes to Hong Kong" by astute international posters, Mrs. Sarah Palin (failed beauty contestant, failed VP candidate, and aborted first term Governor) has been asked to speak at the CLSA Investment Convention in Hong Kong, where she will give a speech on a topic such as geopolitics.
Let that sink in for a few minutes, and if you're not cringing yet, here's some Sarah Speak to jog your memory:
“Oil of coal, of course, is a fungible commodity and they don't flag, ya know, the molecules where, where it's going to, where it's not, but and in the, in the sense of the Congress today they know our very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first. So I believe that what Congress is going to do also is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it's Americans who get stuck holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here; it's gotta flow into our domestic markets first.”
That, of course, was her “answer” to a question regarding ….oh, well, it doesn’t really matter what the question was, does it? Wink, wink. It’s worthy of a luminary, no? That person can talk about geopolitics, sure, no problem, you betcha!
“Our keynote speakers are notable luminaries who often address topics that go beyond traditional finance such as geopolitics,” CLSA company spokeswoman Simone Wheeler said in a statement.
However, The Asia Sentinel wasn’t quite as generous:
“Former US Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who is viewed with equal fervor as an ignorant fool or the voice of the common man by those who either loathe or love her, is coming to Hong Kong to seek international street cred.
The decision to bring in Palin as keynote speaker has been met with incredulity from many among the business community in Hong Kong.
"Honestly? This isn't a hoax?" asked the managing director of a Hong Kong business chain. "It's entertaining perhaps, in a road accident sort of way! Now I've seen everything."
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Download these ANTI REPUBLICAN signs. Print them out. Hand them out. Put them in your car's back window, or you home's windows. Put them up on telephone poles. Tell your neighbors how you feel about the criminals in the GOP who have been running our country into the ditch for all these years! - Reaganomics Has Failed Big Time!
Tell everyone you know about RepublicansAreADisease.com. Let them, and their friends get their signs here too! The more we are in "their" face the better. Republicans are a disease AND THEY KNOW IT. If any Reublicans don't like your sign(s) tell them to go make their own country. Call it Torture-Land.
Like Glenn, I write a lot about civil liberties, which have been at the heart of the national conversation since the beginning of the War On Terror and the expansion of the national security state. But my interest in civil liberties predates 9/11 and until then was usually pointed at the far more prosaic issues of police and prosecutorial misconduct (and the inevitable conclusions any study of those things brings to the issue of the death penalty). Nowadays, the theme of civil liberties seem to be a sub-plot to a James Bond flick rather than "To Kill A Mockingbird." And yet, I think the two are intertwined much more closely that we think. In our apparent acceptance of torture as a legal method of interrogation, the bar of civilized official behavior has been lowered to the point where we are accepting torture in everyday life as if it's nothing. Indeed, we are using it as a form of entertainment.I'm speaking of the ever more common use of the Taser, an electrical device used by police and other authorities to drop its victims to the ground and coerce instant compliance. The videos of various incidents make the rounds on the internet and you can see by the comments at the YouTube site that a large number of Americans find tasering to be a sort of slapstick comedy, the equivalent of someone slipping on a banana peel, with a touch of that authoritarian cruelty that always seems to amuse a certain kind of person. "Don't tase me bro" is a national catch phrase.
Tasers aren't benign however. They kill people. Nobody knows exactly why some people die from being tasered, and they certainly don't know how to tell in advance which ones are at risk. But there have been hundreds of deaths similar to the one below, which nobody can adequately explain:
Dylan was in Long Branch, about a two-hour drive south of New York City, on July 23 as part of a tour with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp that was to play at a baseball stadium in nearby Lakewood.
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