4th of July DC Tea Party

I attended today’s Tea Party near the Capitol Building in DC.  Here’s a few of my pics that I scaled down and posted at PJTV.

hooray for france

Didn’t think you’d see that as a title here, did you? After our own President made such a weak speech in Cairo (see Let Women Wear the Hijab), it’s nice for a leader to call a spade a spade.

Nicolas Sarkozy says the burqa is ‘not welcome’ in France

“We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity,” Mr Sarkozy told the special session in Versailles.

“That is not the idea that the French republic has of women’s dignity.

“The burqa is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience. [emphasis mine -melo] It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic,” the French president said.

No one should be forced to spend their life attempting to navigate the world from inside a tent with only an eye slit from which to view it.

a tree grows in galilee

Good on Schreiber and Watts for planting trees in Israel with the Jewish National Fund. Sadly, the comments at the Huff ‘n’ Puff are what you’d expect.

because every day is caturday

more about “Cat “Army” Guards Treasures“, posted with vodpod

another morality saver from iran

Since Iran’s regime shut off access to social networking sites during the campaign, I guess this comes as no surprise.

Cell phone service appears to have been cut in Iran’s capital after a disputed election that the government said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won.

…

Iran has already blocked the use of text messages and most Web sites affiliated with Ahmadinejad’s top opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, were blocked. Other Web sites including Facebook were not accessible but it was unclear if they were blocked.

via Y!

Surely this is another case where the regime is attempting to protect the morality of its citizens and has absolutely nothing to do with silencing unhappiness over what might politely be called “election abnormalities.”  yeah. 

on iran and facebook

For those worried that our friendly Iranian fascist regime would be denying access to Facebook to keep youngsters from getting bright ideas about voting for reform candidates, never fear.  Why even the “reformist” candidate claims it’s merely for moral purposes.

“As far as I know the blocking of this website was due to problems of morality but during this pre-election period, many issues are interpreted as political,” opposition and reformist candidate Mehdi Karroubi said in a briefing to the media in the Iranian capital,Tehran.

via AKI

Yeah.  I’m sure that’s it.  Everybody knows that keeping people isolated and ignorant protects the morality of the state. 

good grief, 1984 edition

Those wacky Brits are at it again… and yeah, Orwell must be taking another spin in the crypt.

At the end of April, Caroline Cartwright, a 48-year-old housewife from Wearside in the north east of England, was remanded in custody for having “excessively noisy sex.”

..So how did Cartwright’s expressions of noisy joy become a police case, which later this month will be ruled on at Newcastle Crown Court, one of the biggest courts in the north of England?

Because, unbelievably, Cartwright had previously been served with an Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO)—a civil order that is used to control the minutiae of British people’s behaviour—that forbade her from making “excessive noise during sex” anywhere in England.

Read it all at reason.

It appears that these ASBOs are even more horrid than Canadian human rights tribunals.

good grief, morning commute edition

For THIS, traffic (some of the worst in the US on a good day) was incredibly nightmarish.

Seven protesters from the environmental group Greenpeace scaled a construction crane next to the State Department early this morning and unfurled a large banner protesting global warming, part of a dramatic demonstration that drew scores of emergency workers and snarled traffic into downtown from Northern Virginia.

Perhaps it never occurred to our friends that in tying up traffic for thousands of cars, not only would they be causing people to get extremely annoyed (which one might think would be less than beneficial for their cause), but they’d also cause people to waste even more gas (thus undermining their supposed goal of reducing global warming).

And yet…

“We believe our message was heard,” Muffett said. He said delegates came out of the State Department meeting to take pictures of the protesters and the banner.

The only message I heard on the radio this morning was that some a**holes created a disturbance due to which two streets were closed and traffic was backing up over every bridge into the city.  Greenpeace, you suck.

claude moore park

like a cow with a sawed-off shotgun

It’s Sunday. The sky’s blue. The sun’s shining. And I’m heading to the park. Pictures shall be forthcoming. In the mean time, enjoy some fuzzy goodness.