All Posts Tagged With: "Outrageous"

From Think Progress:

AIG executives went on luxurious retreat one week after receiving $85 billion bailout.

Today, the House Oversight Committee discovered that, just one week after the federal government bailed out insurance giant AIG, company executives went on a retreat to a luxury resort. The executives spent nearly $500,000 on manicures, facials, pedicures, and massages. During a hearing today, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) asked, “Have you heard of anything more outrageous?”:

CUMMINGS: Let me describe for some of you the charges that the shareholders, taxpayers, had to pay. AIG spent $200,000 dollars for hotel rooms. Almost $150,000 for catered banquets. AIG spent $23,000 at the hotel spa and another $1,400 at the salon. They were getting manicures, facials, pedicures and massages while American people were footing the bill. And they spent another $10,000 dollars for I don’t know what this is, leisure dining. Bars?

Just when I thought I couldn’t be shocked more, along comes something like this:

Think Progress reports that the site has since be scrubbed of the graphic:

After local Democrats “alleged racist campaign tactics,” the Republican Club in Pemberton, NJ removed a banner yesterday from its website that compared Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) to O.J. Simpson. “Obama loves America like O.J. loved Nicole,” the banner read. Though the image has now been removed, Blue Jersey saved a screen shot of the offensive banner.

Ed Kuck, the Republican County committeeman who placed the image on the website, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that he had put it up while adding pictures from a local rally for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). Simpson was effectively found liable in a 1996 civil trial for the death of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson.

It’s one thing to be opposed to a particular political candidate — even strongly and passionately opposed. It’s quite another thing to be absurd about your opposition, making outlandish claims and suppositions, and generally resorting to hysterics.

While politics will still remain a small fraction of what I write about here, for the remainder of this election season, I will regularly share a post that exposes some of the more outrageous and outlandish rhetoric and political posturing that we see during this excruciatingly interminable campaign. Today’s spotlight is on the right-wing radio darling Hugh Hewitt:

By the way, I — I’m still trying to find two tickets to the Ohio State-USC game. And none of the USC people will give up their tickets to me. I’d pay fair price. They — they know Ohio State’s gonna slaughter the Trojans. They know that they’re gonna slaughter the Trojans, and therefore they do not want me there at the bloodbath, since it’s probably the last football game we’ll ever get to see before the United States gets blown up by the Islamists under Obama.

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More Hewitt hysterics here.

Speaking of vacations, Australia’s Sunday Herald Sun recently published a story about a little known vacation spot with a quite notorious “attraction”:

The sand is white, the sea laps gently and crowds of bronzed Americans laze in the Caribbean sunshine.

There is a cinema, a golf course and, naturally, a gift shop stocked with mugs, jaunty T-shirts and racks of postcards showing perfect sunsets and bright green iguanas.

Only the barbed wire decoration, a recurring motif, hints at anything unusual.

Welcome to “Taliban Towers” at Guantanamo Bay, the most ghoulish tourist destination on the planet.

Apparently, this resort is open to U.S. service personnel and Guantanamo’s 3,000 workers, the paper reports. And it only costs $42 per night “for a fully equipped, air conditioned unit.”

While there, visitors can buy souvenir T-shirts, including one decorated with a guard tower and barbed wire that reads “The Taliban Towers at Guantanamo Bay, the Caribbean’s Newest 5-star Resort”.

Says Zachary Katznelson, a lawyer representing 28 detainees, who exposed the “Guantanamo holiday trade”:

“Pretending that Guantanamo Bay is essentially a Caribbean resort is grossly offensive. The idea of relaxing in the sun while close by many individuals are robbed of their rights, tortured and abused is repugnant and ridiculous.”

How far we, as a nation, have sunk.

This pin was being sold at a booth at the Texas Republican Party Convention in Dallas, reports the DallasNews.com …

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In some ways, this is a good thing. It’s opening people’s eyes to the racism still festering beneath the surface.

From today’s New York Times:

He was a carefree Italian with a recent law degree from a Roman university. She was “a totally Virginia girl,” as she puts it, raised across the road from George Washington’s home. Their romance, sparked by a 2006 meeting in a supermarket in Rome, soon brought the Italian, Domenico Salerno, on frequent visits to Alexandria, Va., where he was welcomed like a favorite son by the parents and neighbors of his girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper.

But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.

Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit — meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon — eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.

Mr. Salerno’s case may be extreme, but it underscores the real but little-known dangers that many travelers from Europe and other first-world nations face when they arrive in the United States — problems that can startle Americans as much as their foreign visitors.

You can read the entire article here.

[Warning: Here comes another rant...] Continued