perfidy

Rudy Giuliani, sawing through his own treelimb on The Today Show:

"No matter how you try to blame [allegedly misplacing 370 tons of 'splosives] on the President, the actual responsibility for it should be on the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough?"

Shorter Rudy: "Our troops are clowns." Way to energize the base!!

Gen. Patrick M. Hughes, now an Intelligence bigwig at the Department of We Can See What You're Doing, speaking at Haahvahd last yearon the topic of civil rights, safety and terrorism:

"Set aside what the mass of people think. Some things are so bad for them that you cannot allow them to have them. One of them is war in the context of terrorism in the United States... [t]herefore, we have to abridge individual rights, change the societal conditions, and act in ways that heretofore were not in accordance with our values and traditions, like giving a police officer or security official the right to search you without a judicial finding of probable cause.

Let me guess. We live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. You have more responsibility than I could possibly fathom. I weep for civil liberties. I have that luxury. I have the luxury of not knowing what you know. That what you do saves lives. And your existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to me, saves lives. I don't want the truth. because deep down, in places I don't talk about at parties, I want you on that wall, I need you on that wall!

Something like that, then? Assclown?

[wik] ... and a Bonus Round from the Department of Homeland Security And Frivolous Prosecution of Stated Duties (this and the last via Reason):

So far as she knows, Pufferbelly Toys owner Stephanie Cox hasn't been passing any state secrets to sinister foreign governments, or violating obscure clauses in the Patriot Act.

So she was taken aback by a mysterious phone call from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to her small store in this quiet Columbia River town just north of Portland.

When the two agents arrived at the store, the lead agent asked Cox whether she carried a toy called the Magic Cube, which he said was an illegal copy of the Rubik's Cube, one of the most popular toys of all time.

He told her to remove the Magic Cube from her shelves, and he watched to make sure she complied.

After the agents left, Cox called the manufacturer of the Magic Cube, the Toysmith Group, which is based in Auburn, Wash. A representative told her that Rubik's Cube patent had expired, and the Magic Cube did not infringe on the rival toy's trademark.

Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said agents went to Pufferbelly based on a trademark infringement complaint filed in the agency's intellectual property rights center in Washington, D.C.

"One of the things that our agency's responsible for doing is protecting the integrity of the economy and our nation's financial systems and obviously trademark infringement does have significant economic implications," she said.

Seriously, DHS agents could take a stroll down Canal Street in Manhattan every day of the week and meet their yearly quota for copyright infrigement busts. It's not that I object to them doing their job (much) but I do object to spending money on a toy store outside Portland and for busting Tommy Chong for selling impractical and unusable artistically-designed handblown glass intoxicant delivery devices. C'mon guys! Real bootleggers sell off tarpaulins, and real stoners can make a bong out of an apple. Why not go bust up a crystal meth lab somewheres?