The Times Online has tried to spin this as if the cabbie who wound up in front of the camera made some effort to misrepresent himself, but it seems to me more like it was a matter of people getting a little rushed and putting someone who doesn't have a very powerful grasp of English in front of the camera.

The *video* can be found on at least two different sites at the moment. Pay close attention to the interviewee at the start when the BBC reporter introduces him. The look on his face is priceless.

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/video/cabbie.wmv
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0cLprNk438

BBC errs and puts the wrong person in front of the camera! (mit video!)

Okay, so it's a little hackneyed, but it is still a funny "public service announcement". ...and for those of you wondering, that might as well be in-game footage from a video card perhaps one notch higher up than mine.

Friends Don't Let Friends Play Solo

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

Here's the article from the New Yorker about the situation.

Bush needs to be made aware that there is no possible way that the use of nuclear weapons is to be considered an acceptable tactic, under any circumstances.

THE IRAN PLANS: Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?

WASHINGTON, April 8 — The Bush administration, which publicly advocates negotiations to halt Iran's nuclear program, is accelerating military planning for possible attacks against Iran, and has not ruled out using tactical nuclear weapons, according to a new article.

The article goes on to do some spin-doctoring, but if you were thinking that this was something fictional, think again.

U.S. Stepping Up Plans to Attack Iran, New Yorker Article Says

Don't just be afraid. Get ANGRY. It doesn't matter what country you're in. A nuclear war means the end of EVERYONE. Not just people in other places.

More sites picking up the Bush is a nuke-wielding maniac story

According to this Bloomberg/AP article, Bush apparently has plans to USE NUCLEAR WEAPONS against Iran.

I don't fucking care WHAT his reasons are. This is NOT ACCEPTABLE.

It's time we started calling people to get his warmongering ass out of office BEFORE HE KILLS THE FUCKING WORLD.

It's time for Bush to go. Period.

Well, well, well. Amidst all the posturing and fist-shaking about who dared to leak the career information about CIA employee Valerie Plame, and the resulting witch hunt, it looks like we've actually found that Bush indeed did happen to "accidentally" release that information to disgrace his political enemies. Libby has now apparently testified that Bush OK'd the release of the oh-so-career-destroying information.

Whodathunkit!

I wonder if perhaps we'll get lucky and Bush will actually follow through with firing the person who leaked this information like he swore he would at a press conference shortly after this witch hunt began, and fire himself and Cheney?

Who let the secrets out! Who! Who-who-who!

Looks like Leno had a folk-singer type on his show the other night, singing a rather biting tune called "When the President Talks To God".
This link contains video of the performance.

Finally, some more people have found their testicles!

Political Dissent folk singer on Jay Leno (with lyrics)

I really didn't know quite where to begin on this one. Perhaps this time justice will be done and they'll put this woman in jail for a few days. Goodness knows, if you or I hit an officer of the law, not only would we still be in jail for it, we'd have gotten a solid beating (...which, in all honesty probably wouldn't be so terrible as long as no permanent damage was done. Don't hit cops!) before any cuffs were slapped on.

In any case, Mrs McKinney is a US rep who decided she was going to simply waltz past one of the security checkpoints in the capitol building, one of the checkpoints that are there just to protect people like her I'll add, when one of the police officers who was on duty tried to stop her because he didn't know who she was. She promptly turned around and struck the officer in the chest with her cell phone. Note that at the time, she'd just gotten a new hairstyle (which is something McKinney has been trying to turn into a play on words) so she might have been hard to recognize, but more importantly she wasn't wearing the mandatory badge or less formal legislator's pin. Basically, she might as well have barged in in street clothes and demanded to be treated like she owned the place.

Now, this would have been a relatively simple thing to just hush up and let blow over, but apparently just getting special treatment (in that she wasn't immediately arrested for assaulting an officer, which can only be due to the fact that she's a rep) wasn't enough for her. Even though the officer was only doing his job in stopping her, McKinney and her lawyer held a press conference where they made threats of hauling the officer up on criminal and civil charges, in addition McKinney referring to the incident as "inappropriate touching" of her "black, female person". What's sad is that McKinney had already been given an apology that there was even any confusion in the first place. ...and for those who missed it, let me reaffirm... McKinney is claiming she was stopped because she's black, and that this is "racial profiling".

Some people just don't know when to quit.

Clearly the officer's superior is a stand-up guy, because this kind of challenge basically means that they must investigate, and right at the top of the list is why was this woman not arrested in the first place for assaulting the officer.

If you want to see how far into "complete bullshit" this has gotten, click on the video links about halfway down the page, where McKinney's white lawyer (until then we'd only been shown her black lawyer, she has two) while sitting right next to her states repeatedly that "no one knows what actually happened" although I'm thinking that quite possibly his client was probably somewhere nearby. By the way, the police aren't really going to discuss it all that much until their investigation is complete because that's the normal way they work--which has been leaving McKinney and her lawyers plenty of time to run all over talking to, or actually not talking to reporters.

I dearly hope they throw the book at her, both for assaulting an officer whose sole reason for being there was to protect her, as well as for daring to pull this race card bullshit to the media. I'm not sure if the latter is actually a prosecuteable offense, but at least I'm willing to let judges sort it out instead of hauling off and hitting McKinney.

McKinney prepares to waste Supreme Court time to argue her specialness

Just brace yourself.

Things like this are supposed to be funny, and then you realize it hits too close to home against a man who is ordering our people to go kill other people in order to protect his oil wells.

An explanation for Bush's 'speechcraft'