Senators who favored Clinton impeachment silent
on Libby.

Of the 25 current Senators who voted in 1999 to impeach President Bill Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice, none have issued a public statement on the commutation of Cheney aide “Scooter” Libby’s sentence for the same crime in the three days since it occurred.

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A Giuliani Flip-Flop on Pardons

Here's Rudy Giuliani in 2001 on the pardon of Marc Rich:

MAYOR RUDOLPH GIULIANI, New York: Well, I'm shocked that the President of the United States would pardon him. After all, he never paid a price. He got on an airplane, took all his records, and ran off to Zug, Switzerland, where he's remained a fugitive, and has made untold efforts to try to get the charges reduced, including many, many overtures and entreaties based on the use of influence.

Here's Giuliani now on the commutation of Scooter Libby:

"After evaluating the facts, the president came to a reasonable decision, and I believe the decision was correct," Giuliani said in a written statement Monday evening.

Did he forget that Scooter Libby hasn't paid a price yet? At least Marc Rich proceeded within the system and "made untold efforts to try to get the charges reduced." He even had Scooter Libby representing him in those endeavors.

It should be noted that Giuliani indicted Rich in 1983.

More...

On other Giuliani matters, The Boston Globe reports that people are beginning to wake up to relentless Rudy's milking of the 9/11 teat.

And Joe Biden sounds hungry.Raw Story reports after referring to President Bush as "brain dead" he says of Giuliani:

"I can hardly wait to debate Rudy Giuliani if he is their nominee,” he said. “Because I will eat his lunch."

Mitch Romney takes a flip-flop hit on pardons as well.

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Hugh Grant's "Pretty Woman"

In the Cinderella ending of the most romantic hooker movie ever made, Richard Gere climbs a fire escape ladder to save Julia Roberts from The Life.

Now we have a real-life counterpart, sort of, in the story of Divine Brown, who has gone on to fame and fortune after an encounter with Hugh Grant twelve years ago.

The transaction went public after police officers noticed the brake lights of the actor?s BMW convertible flashing on and off as he was being orally stimulated by Ms. Brown, leading to headlines over their arrest for lewd behavior.

Her 15 minutes of fame, thanks to the debonair British movie star, took Ms. Brown from a shabby Oakland apartment to what the Daily Mail describes as a four-bedroom home near Beverly Hills, driving a Mercedes Benz and wearing a mink coat, diamond earrings, and more diamonds around her neck, ankles and feet. She has put two daughters through private school and is still making lucrative appearances on TV shows and in commercials.

Mr. Grant, however, was led away in handicuffs, fined $800, sentenced to attend an AIDS awareness program, lost his girl friend, Elizabeth Hurley, and had to go on the ?Tonight? show to make a contrite confession to Jay Leno.

While it isn?t quite ?Pretty Woman? or ?Love, Actually,? it certainly is a 21st century reversal of the old axiom, ?It?s always the woman who pays.?



Read The Full Article:
http://ajliebling.blogspot.com/2007/07/hugh-grants-pretty-woman.html

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BuzzFlash Mailbag for July 5, 2007

BUZZFLASH MAILBAG

Want to join the conversation? Share your thoughts with other Mailbag readers by clicking here.

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Car pooling for the troops.

Yesterday in his Fourth of July speech, President Bush discussed the “many ways” Americans can “say thanks to the men and women who wear the uniform and their families”:

You can send a care package. You can reach out to a military family in your neighborhood with a mom or dad on the front lines; you can ask somebody, “What can I do to help you? What do you need?” You can car pool. You can be on bended knee and pray for a soldier and their families.

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Question of the Day - Fucked in the Classrooms

Good morning, one and all!

In light of the recent slashing of civil rights by our esteemed estacked Supreme Court....

I'm want to go two places with today's question, one in the past one in the present/future.



My stance on this is very clear, yet as I learned about myself in Shanikka's "To Elizabeth Eckford, the Little Rock Nine, Linda Brown, Nikki & Nettie Hunt" essay, I still find myself saying really stupid things, ingrained from childhood, and myself spewed urban myth as fact.  Oy.

I think diversity is important, and that white people should quit trying to "assimilate" other cultures in to being "like" them, rather learn from people and respect and celebrate the varieties of all.

This country has a sordid and hideous tradition of fucking over any non-white people they encounter.  Yet, the one place we made legal gains was to quit fucking the children over.  By law, we could no longer block people's kids from inferior education, or being relegated to ancient texts and community colleges.

I went to a Catholic School 1-8, then 9-12th Catholic High School.  There were few blacks in my  grade in High School, but more in the grades behind me.  Really, I only really remember one in my grade, a girl named Felicia, and the first 3 years she hung out with us a lot.  She was loud, funny as hell and a perfect fit with my group of equally loud and funny smart ass friends.

In 12th grade she dumped us for some wilder burn-out types, including a girl named Cindy who talked her into taking Mesc during the schoolday.  She freaked, and I smuggled her into the girls locker room until someone could take her home (I didn't have a car) long before I had ever heard the term "trip sit" or had any idea how to calm her down. She was terrified, and I was too.

I was so pissed at Cindy I almost kicked her ass, and she was bigger and a toughie, unlike me.  But she backed down, apologized, cried... Totally unlike her.  She was a white strict Baptist-raised girl who wore leather and slept around a lot in rebellion.  She had a messed up home life too.  Bad influence on Felicia, but in retrospect, I feel bad for her as well.

So, anecdote aside, I was raised strictly to not be prejudiced, my parents were adamant about it, yet didn't have a diverse childhood at all.

As I have mentioned many times, my contact with blacks happened older, and I cannot even begin to tell you how formative they were in my growing up from there....

I now live in an area that is thinly veiled racist, mostly white and it weighs on me as I raise my son here.

There are a surprising amount of black kids in his school, yet he has not befriended any one of them in more than a casual way.  Partially because he is 8 and doesn't hang out with "girls, eww" a lot; and partially because the only boy in his class that is black hangs out with all the football stars.  That group teases Jake about "sucking" at football, and won't play with him.

An aside of that, is that one of Jake's former best buddies is the child of a really vocally racist father (who won't speak to me because I got in his face about it years ago) and the father started drilling his poor kid on football 2-3 hours a DAY for a year in 1st grade.  He is trying to produce a "star" and has no qualms about saying so. 

That father encourages his son to "only hang with the BEST football players", and tells him "thats how to be popular."  He encourages his son to hang with the black child, who is also an excellent little athlete (remember these are 8 yr olds) and it blows my mind.  "Only play with boys in your league, son."  How 2-faced, he hates blacks, uses the N-bomb constantly, but will let his son use that boy to get ahead.

I don't see my son differentiate, again at the fireworks picnic, he played with black and white alike, and gave flowers to girls of both colors, saying "She's pretty, Mom" about a hugely wide variety of girls.

But it still is not like living with people of many colors and backgrounds.  There's no immersion, and what comes out of my mouth... will it be enough to counter the shit that will inevitably drip out of his peers mouths as they grow older and meaner?

Have the classrooms again fucked any chance of his learning about white privilege and how the beauty of all races should be respected?

Are the classrooms now a weapon, again to keep black people down, and keep an undereducated class of people as a serving class?  PHD's don't work at Mickey D's, you know.  Look at me, my lack of education keeps me from finding anything above manual labor; yet would those same rich Ann Arbor people employ me were I black?  Would they let me have the codes to their houses and wander freely inside when they are gone?

(rhetorical ponderings, not the question)

What will his college look like now?  We live by U of M. Now surprisingly the diversity picture I googled from there is "No longer available".  Makes me wonder if even the traces of it will be erased.  Fucking University of Utah had one, though.

That's my story, and ponderings on the future of my son.

Tell us of your School years, how diverse was your school, and did you interact with other races.

Secondly, how diverse is it where you live now, and does your child interact with other races much?  If you haven't yet had children, what do you think about where you live for raising a racially aware and sensitive child?

Read The Full Article:
http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=17657

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