BottleOfBlog

Cheney Booed At Yankee Stadium

The joke last night, other than the Red Sox, was that it wasn't Vice President Dick Cheney who needed all the Secret Service protection he received at Yankee Stadium, along with an old-fashioned Bronx cheer as old as the Grand Concourse.

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You bet Cheney got booed while Ronan Tynan sang "God Bless America." Cheney - close to the action for a change - had been down in a box seat next to the Yankee dugout with Rudy Giuliani and Gov. George Pataki. Now Cheney was upstairs in George Steinbrenner's box, and when they put his face on the big screen in the outfield, there was plenty of booing. It was about the only thing that stopped the real cheers for the Yankees at Yankee Stadium as they kept pouring it on against the Red Sox.

Real game story last night? Cheney got booed. Yankees got even with the Red Sox, for one night, and maybe the rest of the way.

Cheney, of course, responded in his usual classy way: he told the Yankee fans to fuck themselves.

Extra Hookers Needed For GOP Convention

With thousands of Republicans set to invade the city this summer, high-priced escorts and strippers are preparing for one grand old party.

Agencies are flying in extra call girls from around the globe to meet the expected demand during the Aug. 30-Sept. 2 gathering at Madison Square Garden.

"We have girls from London, Seattle, California, all coming in for that week," said a madam at a Manhattan escort service. "It's the week everyone wants to work."

"It's going to be big," agreed one operator at a midtown escort service.

Iraqi Deconstruction

WASHINGTON — In a few key areas — electricity, the judicial system and overall security — the Iraq that America handed back to its residents Monday is worse off than before the war began last year, according to calculations in a new General Accounting Office report released yesterday.

The 105-page report by Congress' investigative arm offers a bleak assessment of Iraq after 14 months of U.S. military occupation. Among its findings:

• In 13 of Iraq's 18 provinces, electricity was available fewer hours per day on average last month than before the war. Nearly 20 million of Iraq's 26 million people live in those provinces.

• Only $13.7 billion of the $58 billion pledged and allocated worldwide to rebuild Iraq has been spent, with $10 billion more about to be spent. The biggest chunk of that money has been used to run Iraq's ministry operations.

• The country's court system is more clogged than before the war, and judges are frequent targets of assassination attempts.

• The new Iraqi civil-defense, police and overall security units are suffering from mass desertions, are poorly trained and ill-equipped.

• The number of what the now-disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) called significant insurgent attacks skyrocketed from 411 in February to 1,169 in May.

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"The picture it paints of the facts on the ground is one that neither the CPA nor the Bush administration should be all that proud of," said Peter Singer, a national-security scholar at the centrist Brookings Institution. "It finds a lot of problems and raises a lot of questions."

One of the biggest problems, Singer said, is that, while money has been pledged and allocated, not much has been spent. The GAO report shows that very little of the promised international funds — most of which are in loans — has been spent or can be tracked. The CPA's inspector general found the same thing.

Oh, why can't the GAO just be happy for the free Iraqis?

Cheney To Red Sox: Fuck Yourselves!

Senate Majority Leader Frist downplays remarks. Attributes them to heated passions of "baseball season".

Baby Peacocks

They grow up into this:

In case you didn't know.

Bush's America Blows

While I hate to admit it, not everything bad that happens is actually George W. Bush's fault. In fact, based upon what I know about him--that he doesn't read anything, he's bored by policy, and that he's lazy and delegates almost all actual work to other people--probably remarkably little is his fault.

We can blame him. But, come on, be honest. Not even Republicans really think he's running the country. Even they wouldn't keep on voting for him if they thought he was.

That'd just be nuts. Just courting disaster.

But it does seem like an inordinate amount of bad things happen in George Bush's America. If "malaise" summed up Jimmy Carter's administration, then "Dude, that's fucked up" sums up the Bush administration.

Yes, there's been election fraud, and war, and the looting of our national treasury, and the illegal outing of CIA covert operatives. There's been cronyism, and war profiteering, and the erosion of civil rights.

There have been many horrors. Some large, like the above. But there have also been smaller horrors, which, while probably coincidental, still suck and still happened under Bush's watch. And if Bill Clinton can be held responsible for Vince Foster's death, then George Bush can be held responsible for:

a) the death of Joe Strummer;

b) Penn State going 3-9;

c) the new Star Wars movies and The Lord Of The Rings; and

d) a car hitting my house.

Sure, I know Bush didn't have anything to do with these events. But then Republicans knew that Bill Clinton didn't have anything to do with the collapse of the Madison Guarantee Savings and Loan. But that didn't stop them from spending 70 million dollars on investigating it.

So, as Cheney would probably say, fuck 'em.

And all that's bad. But Bush went a little too far this week. Yesterday, I stopped at my local beer distributor and discovered to my personal horror that Rolling Rock beer no longer comes in returnable bar bottles.

No explanation. No argument. No warning. No hope of repeal.

People, when will our long national nightmare finally end?

Historic Bush Doctrine Success Requires Emergency Measures

Despite the end of the occupation, about 160,000 foreign troops — most of them Americans — remain in Iraq to provide security and train Iraq's new security services. Many Iraqis believe genuine sovereignty won't resume until foreign troops leave.

Also Tuesday, a police officer and a civilian were killed when assailants attacked a police station in Mahmoudiyah, 30 kilometres south of Baghdad. Witnesses said gunmen recited verses from the Qur'an before the attack.

A roadside bomb exploded Tuesday in the northern oil centre of Kirkuk as a Kurdish district police chief was heading to work. The police chief and two others were wounded and his bodyguard was killed, police said.

Insurgents fired five mortar rounds Tuesday at a U.S. base near Balad, 80 kilometres north of Baghdad, wounding five Iraqis, said Sgt. Wayne Marlow, a military spokesman.

In Baghdad, Mr. Allawi told his news conference since the transfer of sovereignty that the Iraqi cabinet was discussing emergency measures to cope with the security crisis. He said he would announce details later this week.

Are we still pretending yesterday's transfer of sovereignty actually meant something? Or have we recognized that this is just a transfer of blame for the upcoming election?

I was out most of the day. So I'm catching up.

The Great Diplomat Pisses Off Europe, Again

President George W. Bush yesterday angered some European leaders with a ringing endorsement of Turkey's bid to join the European Union as part of a call for democracy throughout the Middle East.

Clowns. Amateurs. Incompetents.

Bush Condemns Bush

"Any nation that compromises with violent extremists only emboldens them and invites future violence," Mr. Bush said. "Suppressing dissent only increases radicalism."

Suppressing dissent only increases radicalism? This from the president whose Press Secretary advised the American people that they needed to watch what they say? This from an administration which herds protesters into "First Amendment Zones" miles from the President? This from the President whose Republican party accused Americans who, rightly, opposed a stupid, stupid war of sedition and treason?

How does this guy sleep at night? Someone should ask Condi.

Your "Liberal" Media, Part 500

Pollsters tell me people tune in to radio conservatives to be entertained and to be informed, and, more often than not, to be hardened even more firmly in their views.

All this makes it all the more amusing to me that so many people are trying desperately hard to put a muzzle on Moore's little movie simply because they don't like its politics. First, the Walt Disney Co. blocked its Miramax division from distributing the film. Disney did not want to offend its family-oriented audience with divisive politics, a spokesman said at the time. Yet Disney doesn't appear to mind broadcasting conservative voices such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity on its stations, like WABC radio in New York.

Then, as Moore found new distributors and a lot of free publicity, a new group called "Move America Forward" drummed up a campaign to harass theater owners into dropping the film. Created by a Republican public relations firm, the effort grew out of the same letter-writing campaign that nagged CBS into dropping its TV movie "The Reagans." In response, the liberal group MoveOn.org is encouraging people to support the movie.

Then yet another conservative group, Citizens United, found another target, the movie's ads, claiming they're political enough to violate new campaign-finance laws. Granted, the ads don't make Bush look like the brightest bulb in the scoreboard. And Citizens United, headed by David Bossie, author of an anti-Bill Clinton book, knows a lot about negative ads. Citizens United produced the famous "Willie Horton" ads against Michael Dukakis in 1988 and "Gennifer Flowers" ads against Bill Clinton in the '90s.

It is hilarious, isn't it? For like the past ten days, all I've heard from nearly every news source, from every pundit, from every talk show host is that Moore's movie isn't likely to influence anyone who doesn't already agree with Moore. I even heard this before the movie came out.

And yet, the GOP has been trying furiously to stop the public from even hearing about this movie, which, according to our "liberal" media, isn't likely to influence anyone.

And this same "liberal" media accuses Moore of producing propaganda. Hilarious.