Current Events

This time they’re kicking out teenage boys (hundreds of them) so there’s less competition for the men who are marrying as many as a dozen teenage girls. Read the story in the L.A. Times.

Gideon is one of the “Lost Boys,” a group of more than 400 teenagers — some as young as 13 — who authorities in Utah and Arizona say have fled or been driven out of the polygamous enclaves of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City over the last four years.
His stated offenses: wearing short-sleeved shirts, listening to CDs and having a girlfriend. Other boys say they were booted out for going to movies, watching television and staying out past curfew.
Some say they were sometimes given as little as two hours’ notice before being driven to St. George or nearby Hurricane, Utah, and left like unwanted pets along the road.
Authorities say the teens aren’t really being expelled for what they watch or wear, but rather to reduce competition for women in places where men can have dozens of wives.
“It’s a mathematical thing. If you are marrying all these girls to one man, what do you do with all the boys?” said Utah Atty. Gen. Mark Shurtleff, who has had boys in his office crying to see their mothers. “People have said to me: ‘Why don’t you prosecute the parents?’ But the kids don’t want their parents prosecuted; they want us to get the No. 1 bad guy — Warren Jeffs. He is chiefly responsible for kicking out these boys.”

The original Freeway Blogger, my idol and inspiration, has hit the big time with a news article in the San Francisco Guardian. I’ve corresponded with him a bit in the past (he visited my site and commented on one of my posts once).

The Pentagon finally admitted that Newsweek wasn’t actually wrong, and that the Quran was abused at Guantanamo Bay. Of course they did this late Friday, after the evening news was already on, so that it would miss the news cycle over the weekend.

U.S. military officials say no guard at the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects flushed a detainee’s Quran down the toilet, but they disclosed that a Muslim holy book was splashed with urine. In other newly disclosed incidents, a detainee’s Quran was deliberately kicked and another’s was stepped on.
On March 25, a detainee complained to guards that “urine came through an air vent” and splashed on him and his Quran. A guard admitted he was at fault, but a report released Friday evening offering new details about Quran mishandling incidents did not make clear whether the guard intended the result.
In another confirmed incident, water balloons thrown by prison guards caused an unspecified number of Qurans to get wet, and in a confirmed but ambiguous case, a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Quran.

So far, the republican controlled main stream media are trying to keep a lid on the smoking gun memo from Tony Blair’s office that reveals that Bush was planning to attack Iraq long before there was any intelligence about WMD or terrorist involvement.
Help out with the campaign to blow the lid off this powder keg story and force the media to report the news instead of the White House’s talking points.

It would be funny if it weren’t completely painful and just sad. So sad.

“It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of — and the allegations — by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble — that means not tell the truth.”

“Dissemble” is what Rove actually said in Bush’s earpiece. Not “disassemble”, which is what Bush heard and repeated. And even more frightening that he tried to give a definition, like the American public doesn’t know what the meaning of “dissemble” is. Except that they probably don’t, given that they voted for this doorknob.
What’s even more hideous about this is that the Chicago Tribune corrected the transcript with the right word, not the word he actually said. So how much do you think the Tribune is getting paid by the White House?