Hillary’s Mouseketeers

The State Department is trying to outdo itself for silliness.

(image adapted from DisneyNuts)

Following is a joint statement of Canada, Colombia, Finland, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, European Union, South Korea, Spain, Mexico, Norway, and the United States.

Begin Text:

We, the Group of Friends of the International Conference in Support of the Central American Security Strategy, meeting tomorrow, June 22, 2011, in Guatemala City, express our strong support and recognition to the Member States of the Central American Integration System (SICA) in their fight against organized crime and drug trafficking in the region.

The members of the Group of Friends recognize that confronting the threat of organized crime is a shared responsibility, and commend the leadership and responsibility shown by the Central American governments in formulating and implementing policies to promote security, and urge them to continue their efforts to implement the new Central American Security Strategy, mainly through the regional integration mechanisms, by ensuring adequate financing based on timely fiscal and budgetary policy decisions.

Moreover, the members of the Group of Friends stand willing to fully maximize the effectiveness and sustainability of our contributions, reducing duplication of efforts, generating a more effective impact in support of the Strategy and national efforts by the countries of Central America, and taking steps domestically which help enhance security in Central America.

The members of the Group of Friends will pay special attention to, and collaborate on, programs aimed at increasing Central American countries’ capacity in the fight against transnational organized crime; strengthening rule of law institutions, including prosecutors, the judiciary, police, penitentiary, and border security institutions; combating corruption; as well as building SICA’s capacity as a key institution for achieving regional security objectives.

Moreover, we recognize the need to act on the underlying causes of crime and insecurity, including poverty and the lack of access to jobs and education by the most vulnerable segments of society.[emphasis added]

Group of Friends? I don’t think a sillier name could have been chosen. What do Finland, South Korea, and Israel have to do with Central American drug trafficking? And what leadership has been shown by Central America? Half the Honduran government must be members of the cartels, and the rest of the nations of the region aren’t much better.

Go ahead. Listen to the theme song of the Group of Friends and see if it doesn’t sound familiar.

Classy John Gilmore Update: Now with Video

Thanks to Jeremy Ryan of Defend Wisconsin, who gave permission to AmericaBlog to post this on their YouTube channel, we now have video of prominent Minnesota Republican activist and party functionary John Gilmore right as he’s about to get arrested for harassing a few women who made the mistake of being openly Muslim in his presence.

Oh, and guess what? It turns out FDL’s very own Gregg Levine was an inadvertent witness to the start of the harassment:

OMG, after looking at the videos, I realize I saw the start of this whole thing Thursday night on Nicolette Mall. I assumed Gilmore was some drunk local or tourist. He was screaming in a sort of drunk-sounding slur, THIS IS AMERICA, and holding his camera three feet in front of his face and flashing pictures while he yelled at the women.

The women in hijab had this so under control, I felt no need to intervene. Really, they were calm and smart and mostly just told him they were practicing their religion and to leave them alone–and I felt they didn’t need some pasty NYer escalating things. I didn’t realize it did escalate after I walked on.

Gilmore came off as a screaming freak. I’m glad the police intervened–he was harassing the women. And since it is now theoretically illegal to take pictures of bridges, it should at least be investigated when someone tries to intimidate by snapping picture after picture of you when you are minding your own business.

And, now that it is in context, think what lies beneath. Gilmore is taking pictures to show how insidious the left Netroots is because we include these “obviously subversive terrorists or terrorist sympathizers.” I’m sure he thought he had some sort of scoop, himself. What a pig.

This tallies well with what we see on the video as well as with the various other eyewitness descriptions, such as these at City Pages, the local arm of the Village Voice:

Elisabeth Geschiere, a pedi-cab driver, was working on Nicollet Mall when she recognized a friend, Jamila Boudlali, standing outside of the Dakota Jazz club. She came over and started talking with Boudlali, and her friend Anwar Hijaz, who were downtown for an afterparty for Netroots Nation, the progressive political blogging conference. Both Hijaz and Boudlali were wearing Muslim headscarves.

That apparently attracted the attention of a gray-haired man — 52-year-old Gilmore — who suddenly approached the trio and said the name, “Ayan Hersi Ali.” Ali is a vocal, female critic of Islam. The three women tried to brush him off, saying they did not want to debate with him.

And that, according to cops and witnesses, is when Gilmore became belligerent, taking photos of the women, and demanding to know why they were in the U.S. Geschiere says when she asked him to stop taking their photo, things only escalated.

“He started saying things like, ‘This is America, welcome to America, this is the western world,'” says Geschiere. “So I immediately retorted like, ‘Dude, we all grew up in America.'”

As bystanders started to intervene, the shouting ramped up, and Gilmore started pacing around the crowd and yelling “Andrew Breitbart — hello!” into his phone. That was the first time, says witness and visiting Netroots Nation-attendee Matt Glazer, that he realized the man was a conservative.

“He made it sounds like he was about to hurt people, so then that’s when I called the police,” says Glazer.

More on this as it develops.

Note, ladies and gentlemen, that this occurred the evening before Andrew Breitbart’s attempt to sneak into Netroots Nation without paying. Much of the early scuttlebutt about this conflated the two events, leading to confusion that still exists today in some quarters.

(Crossposted to MyFDL.)

Gadget of the month

A mosquito trap using natural attractants and no pesticides:

http://www.flowtron.com/movie/high.wmv

If they’d sell it with carbon dioxide generated from anything other than carbon-based fuels and got the price tag below $100, I’d buy one. Out of all of God’s creatures, mosquitoes (and especially the parasites they carry) are the ones that I least understand the reason for existence.

BTW, anyone know of a good, electric chipper/shredder for under $250?

He’s baaaaack!

Opening to Keith Olbermann’s Countdown on Current:

Michael Moore: The third wheel in this [governing] is Congress. Where are they? They don’t stand up to the Supreme Court on that issue [courts making law], they don’t stand up to the President on this issue [making war]. It’s not healthy for the country.
Keith: It appears that in Congress they’re spending too much time there for it to be just a hobby, but they’re not taking it seriously enough to be a full time job.

Rightwingers, Winning Hearts and Minds

In Dearborn, Michigan, “Christian” missionaries proclaimed the superiority of their faith by yelling anti-Muslim insults at an Arab Festival and making little girls cry. They were attacking Catholics, too.

In Australia, scientists researching climate change are receiving death threats.