0713 am 'Get This' news

Produced by:

KBOO

07/13/07 Get This
Chris Andreae

Taking a Flier: The Multnomah County DA won’t prosecute the activist who was arrested for putting up fliers on the federal courthouse, because of the “dubious constitutionality” of the case. You will recall that last month Richard Prentice put up ‘Wanted’ posters featuring photos of Portland police officers, Brett Burton, Kyle Nice and Christopher Humphreys with the catchy phrase, “Wanted…These Scumbags killed an innocent man named Jim Chasse by beating him to death….”
Oregon college and high school journalists will be protected from administrative censorship under a bill the Guv is going to sign today. (Now let’s move on to the rest of the country’s journos: It’s well past time the administration stopped meddling with the media and the media stopped censoring itself. (And with any luck, the law will stop the president from mocking questions asked by 13 year-old girls to the point that his questioner is reduced to tears…. arguably, virtually every word that stumbles drunkenly out of Bush’s mouth is enough to bring a reasonably intelligent person to tears…)
Keep Coming Back!: In Seattle, an intrepid band of activists have disrupted the school board meeting for the third time in threes months. The message: No military recruiters in King County high schools.
Measure for Measure: Kulongoski kicked off his Kampaign on behalf of ‘Measure 37 Lite’ yesterday. The only thing worse than Ballot Measure 49, is the original version. (Notice how the Guv has bought the biodiesel story, hook line and sinker – and yet Kulongoski can’t seem to address the catastrophic environmental damage caused by suburban sprawl and the decentralized anonymity of the region’s rural slums…don’t believe it? Take a look at Gresham…)
Caught With His Plants Down: The CEO of Whole Foods – or ‘Whole Paycheck’ to you gleeful cynics out there – got popped posting online attacks against rival and potential take-over target, Wild Oats. We know this because the Federal Trade Commission has brought an anti-trust suit to block Whole Foods from acquiring Wild Oats – and for purely financial reasons, not because the CEO of Whole Foods is apparently out of his gourd…
Qworst: Your phone service may a source of tears, rage, hilarity and frustration to you…But to Qwest’s CEO it’s the source of eye-popping profits.
The Left Coast’s lone Republican, Gordon Smith, has raised record-breaking campaign funds. The Democrats, meanwhile don’t seem to be able to raise a viable candidate to take him down….
The federal government is all set to ban the slaughter for human food of nature’s most defenseless, pathetic creatures: Cattle so sick they can neither stand nor walk. (Let’s hear it for cannibalism! After all, meat is meat whether it comes wrapped in plastic or a Gap tee shirt. And there’s just so damn much of it on the hoof…)
Ship’s Log: Seattle’s fleet of ferries could be fitted with pollution detecting equipment. Better than the monthly seaplane fly-over because the sampling would be continuous - and when one of the ships hits a deadhead, the screens on the bridge will light up with the word. ‘Log.’
The Timberline Trail on Mt Hood collapsed without taking any tourists from California with it….Better luck next time, Trail…
The House of Representatives voted for a third time in favor of pulling most of the troops out of Iraq. Not that it will have any effect. We have a Comadman In Chief calling the shots. And now that he is almost at the end of his presidential Magical Mystery Tour, Bush is no longer useful to his own Shadows, who are already moving on, inexorably advancing their Empire agenda. It looks like, at this point, Bush is alone and rudderless upon “the wine-dark sea.”
Condoleeza Rice piped up - as she casually shuffled backwards and away from the Bright Lights - with this: ‘Give the Surge more time.’ (Rice is on her way to the Middle East next month to finalize plans for the autumn invasion of Iran…You think I’m kidding, but just watch…)
The military says that it accidentally on purpose killed 429 Iraqi civilians – and that was just at checkpoints and roadblocks.
Is it just me, or have we all been inundated with those magic words that got George Bush a crow: Al-Qaeda. (For al-Qaeda, it must be said, this ‘surge’ is working out brilliantly: The US is utterly bogged down, going broke and universally hated by the rest of the world…Does it get any better?)
With Friends Like These Dept: The riveting trial of Michael Reynolds continues in Pennsylvania. Easily the most entertaining defendant in recent history, Reynolds contends that he was not helping terrorists build a ‘dirty bomb’. No. Nope. He was just a private citizen working hard to uncover nefarious plots and entrap the real terrorists. What a hero!
With Enemies Like These Dept: A federal indictment alleges that 14 members of a white supremacist (Not the Bush Cabinet, but it’s a thought…) group directed beatings and stabbings both inside and outside Nevada State prisons and sold drugs from behind bars (Safer that way, y’know…)
Kucinich told the NAACP at a candidate’s forum in Detroit that the first step toward restoring the Constitution is to impeach Cheney. (Cue thunderous applause…)
Consumer confidence and spending have tanked.
US forces killed six of the Iraqi policemen they are supposed to be training so that they can leave. At this rate, they’ll never get home….
An Iraqi journalist working for the New York Times was shot too death in Baghdad today as he headed to work.
And it looks like things are going South for another military dictator/president: In Pakistan, people are getting very hot with Pervez Musharraf over his handling of the Red Mosque Debacle. Families and Friends of the victims say that inside those closed coffins being slipped into unmarked graves there just might be more than one body. Not very presidential, Pervez…
Iran is going to let the IAEA come in and have a look at the progress it has been making with its nuclear program. Nothing the IAEA hasn’t seen before a thousand times, I expect, seeing as how the US got them started down the road to nuclear Armageddon years ago when we gave the Shah a ‘starter kit.’
Israel has this fund, you see. It’s basically bribe money handed out to Jews all over the world to try and entice them to move to Israel and help occupy traditional Palestinian land. But when Israel up the ante and offered more than he usual ‘fee’ to Iran’s Jews, they – all 25 thousand – said ‘No Thanks….And by the way, isn’t that kind of insulting?’ Israel, showing its usual sensitivity, didn’t get it.
The new, improved, somewhat less virulently anti-Syrian UN panel that is investigating the Hariri assassination, says that it has found the people who rented the van for the car bomb (And no bad jokes about ‘Hertz’…) Well it’s a step in the right direction. Now let’s follow the money back to Israel…