harikari.com

A Chicago man was briefly detained on Saturday after he spoke on his cell phone in a foreign language.
According to the Seattle P-I:

The man was speaking Tamil, a language largely used in India, Sri Lanka and Singapore, on his cell phone at the departure gate and on the aircraft. An off-duty airline employee heard the conversation and informed the flight crew.

The man also apparently said something in English about a sporting rivalry at his alma mater.

It’s refreshing to see that racism is alive and well here in the Northwest.  I hope they follow up with the airline employee who started this whole thing.

Is life in America really so scary that a man speaking in a foreign language on a cell phone would prompt such a reaction?

So, here we are at the start of October and I am wondering what brainiac Karl Rove has planned for this year’s midterm elections. According to Newsmax.com, last month he promised political insiders an “October Surprise”.

He has made similar promises in the past. In 2004, he told Sean Hannity that he had a “few surprises”. Hmmm. So, what was this mastermind able to come up with?

I have only been able to come up with 2 items that are attributed to the ‘October Surprise’ of 2004. The first is the Osama Bin Laden video that was aired right before the elections. I don’t really buy that he was responsible for this, although it is quite possible that the tape had been sitting around the CIA, waiting for the right time to air. The second is an article written in the Washington Times that stated:

U.N. ambassadors from several nations are disputing assertions by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry that he met for hours with all members of the U.N. Security Council just a week before voting in October 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

Wow.

I sure hope ‘Turd Blossom’ can figure out a way to top that.

Here are my current predictions of Karl Rove’s big October Surprise:

10. The announcement that the Democrats founded the Ku Klux Klan. (No, wait, that already happened.)
9. Saddam Hussein (guilty verdict, implicates Clinton Administration)
8. An announcement that torture works and just saved over 10 million lives in Los Angeles, New York, and/or Chicago
7. A proposed tax cut of some sort (targeted at a specific demographic key to the elections)
6. A sudden drop in gas prices (until about mid November)
5. Bill Clinton is still having extramarital affairs (casting doubt on the moral integrity of Democrats)
4. Iran found to be planning an attack on US or Israel
3. Hugo Chavez is linked to narcotics trafficking and named on the FBI’s most wanted list
2.Osama Bin Laden (caught, dead, new video)
1. Nothing at all (just oe big ‘Psyche!’)

Ultimately, who knows what Turd Blossom will come up with.

Forget the D.O.D.  Bring on the D.O.O.

President Bush yesterday:

And so we’ve adjusted tactics and we’re on the offense to meet the threat and to defeat the threat.

I think it’s a mistake for people to believe that going on the offense against people that want to do harm to the American people makes us less safe.

We’re not going to let their excuses stop us from staying on the offense.

…we’re on the offense against an enemy that wants to do us harm.

Does being on the offense mean we create terrorists?

My judgment is the only way to defend the country is to stay on the offense.

The only way to protect this country is to stay on the offense…

And Tony Snow today:

…do we intend to go on the offense in the war on terror?

…are you going to go on the offensive against them or not?

You’ve got to decide whether you’re going to go on the offense or not.

And the other thing they ought to know is whether they ought to have confidence that a government is going on the offensive at being as aggressive and as resourceful as possible in going after it.

See… we used to defend our country but that wasn’t getting us into very many wars, so now we offend other countries.  With that strategy, we can have a war any old time we need one.

Today’s L.A. Times had a lengthy story about how the U.S. Military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops. Excerpts:

The articles, written by U.S. military “information operations” troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Many of the articles are presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists.

Doesn’t that sound familiar?

The stories trumpet the work of U.S. and Iraqi troops, denounce insurgents and tout U.S.-led efforts to rebuild the country.

…

The military’s effort to disseminate propaganda in the Iraqi media is taking place even as U.S. officials are pledging to promote democratic principles, political transparency and freedom of speech in a country emerging from decades of dictatorship and corruption.

It comes as the State Department is training Iraqi reporters in basic journalism skills and Western media ethics, including one workshop titled “The Role of Press in a Democratic Society.” Standards vary widely at Iraqi newspapers, many of which are shoestring operations.

…

One senior military official who spent this year in Iraq said it was the strong pro-U.S. message in some news stories in Baghdad that first made him suspect that the American military was planting articles.

“Stuff would show up in the Iraqi press, and I would ask, ‘Where the hell did that come from?’ It was clearly not something that indigenous Iraqi press would have conceived of on their own,” the official said.

…

Nearly $1,500 was paid to the independent Addustour newspaper to run an Aug. 2 article titled “More Money Goes to Iraq’s Development,” the records indicated. The newspaper’s editor, Bassem Sheikh, said he had “no idea” where the piece came from but added the note “media services” on top of the article to distinguish it from other editorial content.

Read the whole thing here.

There’s sure to be more to this story in the coming days…

This Sunday is the anniversary of the September 11th attacks. To commemorate the anniversary, the Department of Defense is sponsoring an event they call the “America Supports You Freedom Walk.”

The Washington Post reported yesterday about how the D.O.D. plans to “remember the victims of Sept. 11, 2001, to honor U.S. troops and veterans, and to highlight the value of freedom.”

Organizers of the Pentagon’s 9/11 memorial Freedom Walk on Sunday are taking extraordinary measures to control participation in the march and concert, with the route fenced off and lined with police and the event closed to anyone who does not register online by 4:30 p.m. today.

The march, sponsored by the Department of Defense, will wend its way from the Pentagon to the Mall along a route that has not been specified but will be lined with four-foot-high snow fencing to keep it closed and “sterile,” said Allison Barber, deputy assistant secretary of defense.

The U.S. Park Police will have its entire Washington force of several hundred on duty and along the route, on foot, horseback and motorcycles and monitoring from above by helicopter. Officers are prepared to arrest anyone who joins the march or concert without a credential and refuses to leave, said Park Police Chief Dwight E. Pettiford.

(snip)

Pettiford said officers would patrol to keep interlopers out because the Pentagon restricted the event in its permit application. “That is what their permit called for, so we have those fences to keep the public out.”

Nothing like a little fascist lockdown to “highlight the value of freedom.”