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"I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky."

--Bill Clinton, later impeached.

All opinions here are the brain-wrackings of And hAm Productions, unless otherwise credited. If you cite them, please give credit where due.

I confess I'm mystified...  7/25/05

There are some places you expect to find a lot of police brutality. Brazil, for example, where the police are often more feared and hated than the criminals--indeed, often more criminal than the criminals. You expect such things in the slums of Rio, where the Third World encroaches around the fringes of the First. Until recently, though, London wasn't one of them.

Yes, I said London. Where most police officers don't carry service revolvers and seldom even need to use their nightsticks. Until recently, London was a truly first-rate First World city, and the British bobbies were the gold standard of good police conduct: civil, helpful, exceptionally kind. And all the same effective at their job. Which was to keep a peaceful, civilized city eminently so...so much so, in fact, that exiles from Brazil's hated military dictatorship of over 20 years often took refuge in London. One, the great Caetano Veloso, even wrote a song praising the peacefulness of it...

Now, thanks to the shooting of an innocent man--a Brazilian--all that has changed. We see that the gold standard has feet of the same Third World clay as any brutal raider of the suburbs of Rio.

The police in London have committed the inexcusable, but there are all too many who are willing to excuse it in the name of the ill-named and even more ill-conceived War on Terror--or, as I prefer to call it, because it's much more accurate to do so, the War on Terra. What they have done has not only failed to solve this crime, it has deepened the already festering social tensions around the world that, left unresolved, can so easily lead to violence.

If plainclothes officers have carte blanche to shoot and kill anyone they even only suspect of being a terrorist--with no proof--what's to save even the most law-abiding citizen's hide?

I don't have a criminal record; not even so much as a jaywalking ticket (I don't drive), and I guess I can still thank my lucky stars that Canada isn't London, but I'm frankly scared shitless over this. Hell, who wouldn't be? Only a smug, arrogant fool, the kind who is likely to blow this off as just a necessary or at least unavoidable bit of collateral damage in the War on Terra!

And the apologies we've seen so far--from Prime Minister Tony Blair, from London Mayor "Red Ken" Livingstone, and Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair (no relation to the PM), have all been lame and utterly inadequate. No taking responsibility at all; they've all been too happy to shove this into the terrorists' shoes. Where is the accountability?

Meanwhile, the shoot-to-kill policy that resulted in the death of Jean Charles Menezes remains. The police need to be able to get in a head shot at anyone they suspect of being a suicide bomber, the excuse-makers say, tripping over themselves to justify the unjust. Exactly how many times that's worked elsewhere, or how many disasters it's prevented, they can't tell you. Probably because that policy is questionable at best, and in practice, like so much else in the War on Terra, it's proven a dismal failure. The same Londoners who are not afraid of terrorists, could well have something to fear when it comes to their city's (former) "finest", whose job is to stop the terrorists, not become them. It's a helluva comedown, wouldn't you say?

Meanwhile, as a gentle reminder that First World and first-rate cities also suffer from police brutality (which only rends the fabric of society, and never reinforces it), I'll give you a little musical interlude here, courtesy of the Pukka Orchestra:

I've got a bone to pick with you,

I confess I'm mystified by all of this too--particularly the stubborn insistence, against all evidence to the contrary, that the War on Terra is anything but a flat failure. That it is anything but the sort of thing you'd expect of a Third-World military dictator. That it is anything but back-door fascism.

I never dreamed it would be like this, either.

I have zero sympathy  7/9/05

...for Judith Miller. And I'm far from alone in this; read the letters from Salon.com's readers.

They sure sound pissy, don't they?

Well they might. I would be too, if I were an American reading of how the Fourth Estate betrayed my country and its trust so egregiously.

It's bad enough that Miller is the hack responsible for peddling BushCo's lies about Saddam's nonexistent WMD in the New York Times. Now she's been found guilty of sheltering a criminal, someone who leaked CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to the media. Plame, a NOC (non-official cover) agent, is the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had the audacity to tell the truth as uncovered by his own investigation: that Saddam Hussein did NOT buy yellowcake uranium from Niger, nor did he have a nuclear weapons program in place to use it. Since Plame had no official ties to the government (hence the NOC designation), she was particularly vulnerable to potential assassins. Had she been killed as a result of her blown cover, the person who blew it would be as responsible for her murder as the killer himself. Maybe more so, since to knowingly permit a murder is tantamount to ordering one.

So Judith Miller, in knowingly peddling a false WMD story, is not only a liar herself; in refusing to reveal who leaked Valerie Plame's identity to her (and five others), she's covering the ass of someone who wanted Valerie Plame dead as revenge for her husband's honesty. BushCo's lies are lethal to anyone who stands in their way, it seems. But they can't shield Ahmed Chalabi's pet stenographer from prison, so thank Nemesis for small mercies.

Still, don't look for any big displays of integrity on Miller's part now. According to CBS's Jim Stewart, Miller has said, "I won't testify. The risks are too great. The government is too powerful."

Without testifying, still, she's let it pretty much slip who the evil leaker was. It's clearly the power behind the Dimwitted Dauphin's throne. Can you say TURDBLOSSOM?

I knew you could.

It doesn't do for any reporter to be so tight with a criminal administration that she's willing to cover for it. This is not about Miller's free speech rights, but about her role in a criminal conspiracy. A source who's guilty of a crime doesn't deserve to be kept confidential by any reporter. That's a serious breach of journalistic ethics--right up there with knowingly filing false news. It's one thing to guard a whistleblower's identity, and quite another to cover for a callous would-be murder conspirator.

So I shed no tears for Judith Miller. She gives journalists a bad name. They're already hurting as it is, seeing how big corporate owners are hamstringing them at every step, and right-wing blogtards are dogging them in the hopes of pulling another "Rathergate". They don't need the likes of her to rob them further of credibility.

Book 'er, Dano. And don't be too gentle with the 'cuffs.

Tom Cruise is WHAT?  7/5/05

I'm glad someone else said it. I can't afford the lawsuits.

But still, I heartily concur.

The ugly soul of a pretty girl  6/11/05

Georgie Binks has some choice words on Karla Homolka, the former wife and murder accomplice of serial killer Paul Bernardo.

For those who don't know the particulars of the case, Homolka was 17 and had no criminal record when she met her husband-to-be, who was then already in his early twenties and already an accomplished--and notorious--serial rapist who prowled the Toronto suburb of Scarborough. She worked at an animal clinic part-time. She was just about as ordinary as they come; she'd never have made the front page news on her own. In fact, the only noteworthy thing about her is how willing she was to do anything to get the guy. She was one of a high-school clique who called themselves the "Diamond Club", because the objective of the members was to see who could get engaged first (complete with obligatory ring).

Karla, of course, won.

And no wonder. Look at what closed the deal for her:

Laura Rowe, who served as a member of the Metropolitan Toronto Police Services Board during Homolka's arrest explains, "She's the ultimate submissive. 'You want a virgin -- I'll find you one. You want to have sex with a prostitute when I'm in bed with you -- I will do it.' She's the ultimate sexual fantasy in a bizarre way even for the healthiest of men -- a woman who is willing to go along with anything."

The virgin in question was Karla's baby sister, Tammy, 15. Karla Homolka "gave" her as a Christmas present--quite possibly the sickest ever--to her then fiance, Bernardo.

Karla had stolen halothane--an anesthesia gas--from the animal clinic where she worked at the time. She crushed several sleeping pills and mixed them into Tammy's drink. When Tammy got woozy from the combination of Halcion and alcohol Karla had fed her, and passed out, Karla ensured she stayed that way by holding a halothane-soaked cloth over her nose and mouth while Bernardo raped her. She also complied with his requests that she digitally penetrate Tammy. She complained that it was "fucking gross", but not because it was her baby sister she was sexually abusing; it was because Tammy was having her period.

And the entire sexual assault was caught on video.

Then, after the camera stopped rolling, things went even more horribly awry. Tammy threw up, as a lot of drug-overdose victims do, and choked to death on her own vomit. The death was accidental, but what led to it certainly wasn't.

Two more "virgins", 15-year-old Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy, 14, would die before the pair's criminal career was up. Both were strangled to death with an electrical cord. Mahaffy's corpse was dismembered with a Skil saw, the parts encased in concrete and dumped in a nearby lake; French's hair was cut off to make identifying her difficult before her nude corpse was dumped in the brush by a roadside.

Paul Bernardo, being the Scarborough Rapist, was clearly the one in charge of the criminal operation. Everything that happened was his idea--his fantasy. But it all might not have happened if he hadn't had an accomplice to help him kidnap those girls and keep them prisoner, as well as taking turns with him at sexually assaulting them for the video cam. Guess who that accomplice was?

But wait, there's more. A handful of other Bernardo victims, also caught on tape, didn't die. They, too, were lured with the help of a very compliant accomplice, who helped make videos of the assaults. She also drugged them so they wouldn't fight back, or even remember much of what happened. Guess who?

Karla Homolka cut what many have criticized as a "sweetheart" deal with the Crown. She got 12 years in prison for her part in the kidnap/rape/murders of French and Mahaffy, but nothing for the drugging death of her youngest sister. In exchange for this relative leniency, she agreed to testify against her soon-to-be ex-husband, who by then had turned abusive on her, beating her with a flashlight. Her black-eyed photo was a fixture on the front page of every tabloid in the country. And she did, indeed, testify against him, saying he killed the girls by strangling them with an electrical cord after he was done making his home porn tapes. She also testified that it was Bernardo who dismembered Leslie Mahaffy and put her body parts in concrete for dumping. And while Leslie's waterlogged remains, in their crumbling concrete blocks, were being fished out of the lake, Karla and Paul were parading around the streets of St. Catharines in a horse-drawn carriage and full bridal regalia, oblivious to the cops unravelling their sordid secret life. It was their wedding day--and of course, it was all caught on tape.

Of course, there are those who believe Karla was the real killer, the real ringleader. Paul Bernardo would undoubtedly like us to think so; it might just get him off lighter so he can get back out on the streets and live out his violent fantasies again, this time under a different name. Karla's notoriety can only serve him; perhaps even better than her submissiveness could.

And yes, she is an unbelievable bitch, for what other kind of woman would hand over her baby sister to a rapist to do with as he pleased--on video, yet? It's impossible not to despise her. And there's also no doubt that her sweetheart deal with the Crown should have been negated by the fact that she is responsible, albeit unintentionally, for her sister's death. She definitely deserves a harsher punishment than she got. She is by no means innocent. But is she the real killer?

Remember, she was only 17 and had no previous criminal record when she met Bernardo. He was the one who'd been raping his way around Scarborough; he'd been a peeping Tom in his teens, then graduated to sexual assault, refining his "technique" as he went along, and growing steadily bolder. One of his surviving victims from the pre-Karla days remembers his penchant for using a ligature around her neck while he was sodomizing her. Apparently, he got off on the terror that a combination of choking and anal rape created.

Oh, and he liked for Karla to wear dog collars while he bum-fucked her, too. It was a poorly kept secret among the couple's friends that Bernardo was a kinky bastard.

There is no doubt, in my mind, that Bernardo was the real ringleader, the real killer. He was the Svengali. He was able to pull Karla down into his world of sick fantasy, but he couldn't have done it unless there was something seriously wrong with her. Something ugly in the soul of that pretty, blond 17-year-old girl.

I think that ugliness was the willingness to do anything for an evil man she wanted to keep. Karla was, so far as I can see, the perfect little right-wing "feminine" gal. What was "right" about her, in the eyes of traditionalists, was exactly what was wrong with her. She was submissive. She was eager to please. She was loyal to her man. She would do anything he wanted, just as the Christian Right is always enjoining women to do.

She is, in short, living proof that the Right's ideal woman is the skankiest bitch on the planet.

The OTHER terrorist Bush won't arrest  5/15/05

Remember this name: Luis Posada Carriles.

Remember this date: October 6, 1976.

Why?

Because to Cubans, that date is their 9-11. And that man is their Osama bin Laden.

On October 6, 1976, Luis Posada Carriles and an accomplice, Orlando Bosch, became the murderers of 73 people. At the time, both were active in the Venezuelan intelligence service, Disip. (He was also still in regular contact with the CIA, although he was no longer officially an asset by then.) They planted a bomb on board a Cuban airliner, Cubana CUT-1201, designated Flight 455; the plane blew up shortly after takeoff from Bridgetown, Barbados, killing everyone on board. One of their hired bomb-planters later called Bosch to report that the plan had succeeded, in the following manner: "A bus with 73 dogs went off a cliff and all got killed." As for Bosch, he made excuse for this act of terrorism in 1987 with the unbelievable utterance, "All of Castro's planes are warplanes."

Even innocent civilian passenger planes, it seems, are fair game to a terrorist. Osama would be proud.

And just like Osama, Carriles is the terrorist George W. Bush won't arrest.

Bosch and Carriles have both spent plenty of time behind bars since that day, but it has hardly slowed either of them down in their terroristic profession. Carriles, in particular, has been a busy boy; in 1985 he escaped, thanks to bribery, from the Venezuelan prison where he was serving out his sentence for the Cubana bombing. Shortly thereafter, he took the alias of "Ramon Medina", and became active in Oliver North's infamous Iran-Contra scheme, as a deputy to another anti-Castro Cuban thug, Max Gomez, a.k.a. Felix Rodriguez, airlifting weaponry to the right-wing Contra terrorists in Nicaragua. And in 1999, he and three others attemped to assassinate Fidel Castro while the latter was attending a summit in Panama. The following year, Carriles was pardoned (on "humanitarian grounds"!) for that crime by the outgoing (and shockingly corrupt) then-president of Panama, Mireya Moscoso. That little incident resulted in Cuba cutting off relations with Panama. (Word has it that Moscoso always was tight with the Cuban conservatives, despite being elected on a platform of anti-poverty and social justice rhetoric; it is well known that she has a home in Key Biscayne, Florida.)

Now it seems Carriles has found a new cesspool to ooze about in: Miami. Yep, Jeb Bush's Florida. And he got in from--get this!--Mexico. If the Minutemorons out there on the Arizona/Mexico border aren't a bit chagrined by this, they should be. They're sitting out in the pitiless desert sun like the saps they are, watching for skulking figures between the cacti; meanwhile, a wealthy Cuban developer was giving this bona fide terrorist a ride to Miami from the resort of Isla Mujeres on his yacht. While they're busy chasing starving wetbacks, this former CIA asset (who used to be paid US$300 a month for his anti-Castro services) is whooping it up in Little Havana, even applying for political asylum.

And, sad to say, he'll probably get it--for the same reason Osama got away with 3,000 murders on 9-11: He's ex-CIA. Never mind that the FBI has a dossier on him that reaches from floor to ceiling; he'll never be apprehended as the criminal he is, let alone extradited to Venezuela to face the justice of Hugo Chavez (which is bound to be harsh, seeing as Chavez and Castro are on excellent terms.) He'll never see justice any more than Osama will. The FBI can sound the alarm on both of them until the entire organization is collectively blue in the face. It won't matter. Both are safe as flies in an outhouse.

If ever you need proof that nobody in the Bush Administration--or, for that matter, the entire Republican party--really gives a flying fig about terrorism, this is it. They didn't care that they were arming those who were, by their own definition, terrorists (in at least two countries!) back when Reagan was in power. They didn't care that they were creating them in Afghanistan back then, either. They didn't care that they had one on the CIA payroll from 1960 to 1976. In fact, George H.W. Bush was probably glad to have Carriles aboard. After all, he was CIA, too. He blocked the extradition of Carriles' old accomplice, Orlando Bosch, in 1990. And, like Mireya Moscoso, he issued a scandalous mass pardon shortly before leaving office: six truly egregious Iran-Contra villains on his way out of the White House in December 1992.

Meanwhile, the 77-year old Carriles may be reaching the bottom of the sand in his hourglass. He's said to be dying of cancer. The question is, where will the Grim Reaper finally give him his just reward for all that terrorism--in Miami, or in a Venezuelan prison?

So now Dubya is caught in a most unwelcome dilemma: Should he appease the right-wing Cuban mafia of Miami, as he has always done, and as his father did before him? Or should he break with Republican tradition and actually follow through on his heretofore empty rhetoric about the importance of fighting terrorism? Whichever he does, he's bound to piss somebody off in the worst way, and compromise his entire house of cards in the process.

And I say it looks damn good on the little hypocrite.

You MUST remember this  5/13/05

Absolutely essential reading: The Downing Street Memo.

Yes, you know what I'm talking about. Don't play coy, now. It's only the basis for BushCo's war on Iraq. You know, the war built on a LIE??? That's the one.

Full text here. If you still believe it wasn't a lie--read it and weep!

Conscientious objectors, take note  5/13/05

Army recruiting has become increasingly desperate lately. Just take a listen to this.

By the way, this sort of "marketing technique" is highly illegal.

Oh, jeesh...  5/13/05

How could I forget THIS one? Thank heaven Buzzflash didn't.

Frankly, I don't care that Spokane mayor Jim West is gay; that's not abnormal. What is, is that he's a right-wing hypocrite who abused power--and the affections of an unsuspecting woman--to cover his ass while he trolled for sex.

And what sex it was. Throughout his career, West was haunted by allegations of pedophilia. Perhaps that's why he made such a public to-do out of it when he proposed to his wife (she stuck it out for five years living his lie for him, if you can believe it.) Perhaps that's why he made such a big noise about family values.

The noise, we now know, was the skeletons in his considerable closets rattling their bones.

Are you sensing a pattern here, reader? Every right-wing nut, it seems, has something to hide. And the louder they prattle about sexual morality, the worse you can safely assume their own to be.

They have Skanky...  5/13/05

We have SEXY.

Yes, Lauren Bacall is a proud, loud, articulate liberal. And Larry King is, by the looks of things, totally bowled over.

Eat shit, Ann Coulter!

Is any one of them NOT a sex fiend?  5/12/05

Oh, lordy, we have a couple more kinky doozers surfacing on the right. Larry Flynt has uncovered some dirt on John Bolton that would make the Marquis de Sade blanch with horror--or envy. Then there's this winner in Pennsylvania, a Family Values hypocrite accused of attempting to strangle his mistress (who is, incidentally, in the same age group as his daughters). But who really takes the biscuit? Yup, Dubya's pick to head up the FDA. Dr. David Hager, whose chief prior claim to fame was a book recommending prayer as a cure for PMS, has depupated as a pervert who liked to sodomize his wife while she was suffering from attacks of narcolepsy--brought on, perhaps, by the stress of living with a raving one-man freak scene.

The list of Republican sex fiends is ever growing. By now, it's so long that it's no longer a question of who IS one, but whether any of them is NOT one.

PS: Got a polimerick for ya, written in response to a thread started by Rob G....

Neal Horsley, the murderous fool,

Yah, mule!  5/10/05

First it was Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum. Then it was Bill "Cat Killer" Frist. Then it was James "Spare the rod, spoil the wiener-doggie" Dobson. And then Pickles let it slip that Dubya had been masturbating stallions. Just when you think right-wingers couldn't get any kinkier with poor defenceless animals, though, Neal Horsley decided to share with the world at large just what he used to do...with mules.

Horsley, an adulterous anti-abortion freak who wants to post on his butt-ugly website a hit list of doctors for his fellow right-wing terrorists to shoot, gives a whole new meaning to the term "country bumpkin". He fessed up to his prior shame with great gusto; the way he talked about it, you'd think he'd never put it behind him. And poor Alan Colmes may never recover:

AC: "You had sex with animals?"

Um, Neal? We're not the ones who have trouble telling the mules from the humans. We're also not the ones advocating doctor-murder on the Internet. We're not the ones in denial of our sexual identities, or the ones who pretend that juvenile bestiality is normal just because it's common in the dumber parts of the country. Who's far removed from reality, again?

Apparently, an awful lot of farmboys in Georgia. Particularly Neal Horsley, R-Mulesticker.

I guess this explains why those rightards are all so confused between homosexuality and bestiality. They practice both simultaneously. No wonder same-sex marriage scares them and they think it means that next, you'll be allowed to marry Bowzer or Bessie or your pet goat...

Oh. Oh dear. I just had a thought I really don't want to have...about Dubya and what he was reading during those seven infamous minutes on September 11.

Shudder.

Thank heaven we have the Neal Horsleys of this world to prevent THAT from happening.

Runaway bride, walking neurosis...  5/9/05

...what's the difference?

Just ask the attorney who prosecuted Jennifer Wilbanks for shoplifting a few years ago. She's now representing her in court on her public-mischief charge.

I don't know what's funnier, the small-worldism or the fact that the pop-eyed bride (and darling of the right-wing mainstream media distraction machine) is a repeat offender for committing public mischief.