Here’s today’s headlines:

Libyan civilians: allegedly killed by a NATO airstrike, according to the Libyan government, which is of course a reliable and objective source on the subject. (Not.)

Huge Arizona wildfires: still burning, though evacuees from one sparsely populated area were allowed to return to their homes.

Northern Syria: still being violently repressed by Syrian government forces. A refugee crisis is brewing in the region; thousands of Syrians have fled their country for Turkey, whose government is providing food aid to the refugees but is unsure of how to deal with the refugees in the long term.

Car tabs for Metro: Metro is in the hole $60 million for the next fiscal year, so King County Executive Dow Constantine is going to propose a car tab fee to reduce the shortfall. The measure may be on the ballot in November, depending on the actions of the King County Council.

Afghanistan: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says that Talks with the Taliban are being conducted by the State Department but are a long way away from a peace deal.

Barack Obama the Golf President Team Obama-Boehner won the golf game of the century. Somehow there still isn’t a budget deal.

Venoy Overton: apparently has a history of being a Grade A creep. Overton, a former UW basketball player who was arrested on charges of pimping his girlfriend this week, allegedly has a fondness for underage girls—including his cousin.

Here’s James Brown:

21 replies on “Morning News”

  2. And in typical bigoted and irresponsible Republican fashion, John McCain is blaming illegal immigrants for the Arizona wildfires.

  3. @2: Whether or not there is evidence, there’s ample evidence that those ruthless coyotes smuggling illegal aliens set campfires, trample vegetation, and kill livestock. They are not environmentally friendly liberals with a conscious.

  6. the fire near the border and the one east of tuscon i could see. the one east of phoenix on the NM border? seems far north for a coyote route.

  8. Here’s the source to the John McCain blaming illegal immigrants for the fires.

    For those who don’t want to click, here are the highlights:

    “There is substantial evidence that some of these fires have been caused by people who have crossed our border illegally,” McCain, R-Arizona, said Saturday at a press conference. “The answer to that part of the problem is to get a secure border.”
    …..
    McCain said that illegal immigrants set such fires either to send signals, keep warm or distract law enforcement agents. But he did not specify which fires allegedly had been started by illegal immigrants, nor did he identify his sources or provide details of the “substantial” evidence he cited.
    …
    Angelo Falcon, the president of the National Institute for Latino Policy, criticized McCain for what he called “increasingly blatant” political opportunism.

    “The degree of irresponsible political pandering by Sen. McCain has no limits,” Falcon said in an email to CNN. “With the lack of evidence, he might as well also blame aliens from outer space for the fires.”

  12. The UW refuses to release any paper on the Overton matter “because of our rules to protect student privacy”, but it is apparent that the privacy they are protecting is their own. They don’t want people to know how they handle their players’ criminal cases. But there were a few clues. Stephanie Rempe is the “Senior Associate Athletics Director”, and she appears to have been on point as the protection machine got underway. She even asked SPD if they would “provide protection” in case one of his victims attacked the poor baby. Fortunately the SPD told her to piss off. We also know she was the one who kept Overton appraised of the various investigations against him, and presumably set in motion the famous UW athlete’s legal system that they so desperately want to keep secret.

    Perhaps she was also the one who made sure Lorenzo Romar had plausible deniability that Overton spent his entire college career traveling around with a posse of thugs with rap sheets as long as your arm. Were they ever in the locker room?

  13. Quite fitting, though, that Overton got popped for pimping, since he himself is a prostitute, allowing his body to be used by white people for their amusement for a couple of years, then dropped for younger, fresher meat.

    Hands up everyone who thinks Overton could name the author of any assigned reading in his Ethnic Studies degree program, if there was any, which I doubt. Or who thinks that Overton could talk intelligently for 30 seconds on the subject. I’ll bet he didn’t do any of the coursework; the university provides surrogates for that.

  15. “used by white people for their amusement for a couple of years”

    Yes, let’s blame whitey for the criminality that pervades urban black pimp culture and is covered up by sports. Hey fnarf,, isn’t aiding and abetting black criminality simply a form of social justice?

  17. @16, Overton never got the cash. All he got was a worthless degree that he didn’t earn, a thick sense of entitlement, and a couple of years’ protection from the law that’s expired now that he’s off the team. Did you read the article? He still thinks he’s going to the NBA. He’ll never even get a tryout.

    Romar got the cash — over a million bucks a year. And no one’s ever going to arrest him for pimping.

  18. I’m so grateful that regular old natural born American citizens are too responsible to ever start wildfires by being careless with cigarette butts, campfires, fireworks, burning love letters from exes, burning wheat fields after harvest, and other incendiary activities. Once our borders are impenetrable, our problems will be SOLVED.

  20. Why doesn’t Metro just go around slashing people’s car tires to really prove that everyone would rather ride around on a tram with two guys smelling like an unkempt toilet?

  21. The really sad thing about McCain’s comment is his supposition that one of the reasons those illegal immigrants might have set the fires was to “keep warm”. Think of what you’ve read about what immigrants abandoned by their coyotes have to do to stay alive, and many of them don’t succeed. They die of heat and thirst in the day, they freeze at night, and we criminalize them.

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