Recall the mercenaries

Blackwater

Tell Sec. of State Rice to stop using hired mercenaries in Iraq.

Take Action

Mercenaries paid with our tax dollars opened fire on Iraqi civilians over the weekend. They killed 8 people and shot 13 more.

“They are untouchable,” one private soldier told the Los Angeles Times. “They’ve shot up other private security contractors, Iraqi military, police and civilians.”1

Now the Iraqi government has had enough, and has ordered Blackwater to stop work in the country. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has promised an investigation, but that’s not enough.

Tell Sec. of State Rice to stop using hired mercenaries as state department guards.

http://act.truemajorityaction.org/o/2/t/21/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=21

Most of Blackwater’s work is guarding officials from the State Department. They are among the most high-profile mercenaries working in Iraq, but hardly the only ones. An astounding 120,000 “private security contractors” are in Iraq, 48,000 of them working as combat soldiers.2 They get paid far more than real soldiers, their deaths are not included in the official casualty counts, and they are essentially accountable to no one, according to state department officials.

This is still America. We can’t hire mercenaries to fire on civilians with no accountability.

Tell Sec. Rice to put an end to it, and follow the Iraqi government’s demand that Blackwater leave the country.

We have ways to make you _not_ talk…

Student Tasered at Kerry speech
Toward the conclusion of Kerry’s UF forum, [a student] approached an open microphone at the University Auditorium and demanded Kerry answer his questions. The student claimed that University Police Department officers had already threatened to arrest him, and then proceeded to question Kerry about why he didn’t contest the 2004 presidential election and why there had been no moves to impeach President Bush. A minute or so into what became a combative diatribe, Meyer’s microphone was turned off and officers began trying to physically remove him from the auditorium. Meyer flailed his arms, yelling as police tried to restrain him.He was then pushed to the ground by six officers, at which point Meyer yelled, “What have I done? What I have I done? Get away from me. Get off of me! What did I do? … Help me! Help.”

That will teach him to ask questions of our illustrious leaders.

I urge you to watch the video. It will cause you to revel nostalgically in the glory of our great nation. I assure you.

Here’s a better quality video of the student being restrained and drug out:

I really like how Kerry continues throughout the incident with one of his typical riveting and energetic explanations. Putz.

Seriously, this is a joke, right?

Jottit is the insta-wiki | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone
Here’s a cool tool that’s kicked off a bit of a Twitterstorm this evening: Jottit. It’s a very simple, Web-based text editor and publishing service. It can create a brand new Web page or wiki in about 10 seconds flat. For an example, you can see a draft of this story, which I composed in Jottit, as a Jottit page.

…

For publishing a small site really quickly, I’ve never seen anything quite like this. I’m not sure Jottit is a programmer’s experiment or an actual business, but it’s very slick, either way. Check it out.

/me ROTFL. Tears. Head shaking.

WTF is this? I can not believe this useless textarea is getting press. I have an idea! I’ll make this page with a textarea. Then when people type stuff into it and press save, they’ll have a page with stuff they wrote on it. My God! I don’t know if I should laugh or cry. Is this journalism? Is this software engineering? Is this a business?