In the past week, WikiLeaks, the controversial organization that claims its goal is to keep governments honest by revealing classified documents, made news again. They announced that in the upcoming weeks, they will be releasing more than 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables and internal documents – to the dismay and embarrassment of top government officials in the US and the world over.
Government leaders from Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi to Libya’s Muammar Gaddifi to Russia’s Vladimir Putin to North Korea’s Kim Jong Il have been privately ridiculed and derided as incompetent, sexually promiscuous, behaving like a thug or having amazingly bad hair. WikiLeaks’ Australian-born editor and Internet activist, Julian Assange (right) has been characterized as everything from an anarchist to a terrorist – but he has not been ridiculed for having bad hair. This reporter thinks it’s quite stylish, actually.
But this is just the tip of the WikiLeaks iceberg. Thanks to my own painstaking Pulitzer-Prize-deserving investigative journalism and my extensive network of contacts within the Latvian intelligence community, I am about to blow the lid off the latest WikiLeaks scandal. In a View from the Bleachers EXCLUSIVE, I have uncovered WikiLeaks’ secret plans to release everybody’s email communications from the past ten years – Yes, everybody’s – including yours. The reasons for this latest attempt at public humiliation are unclear. My own speculation is that WikiLeaks chief Assange is trying to get back at an ex-girlfriend. But whatever the reasons, the consequences could be potentially devastating for millions of Americans, Russians, Chinese, Indians, Europeans, Middle Easterners, and potentially as many as three Greenlanders.
I try to be an informed voter. So this year, I researched the candidates running for political office in my region, listened to the debates, read their policy platform statements, watched their TV ads and scoured through their direct mail literature to get a clear picture of where they stand and how they differ from their opponent on the important issues facing us.
After all my research, I am still a bit uncertain as to whom to give my vote. Perhaps you can help me decide. Take the race for U.S. Senate for my state. It’s between three-term Democratic incumbent, Patty Murray, and Republican challenger / pro-business advocate, Dino Rossi.
Let’s take a look at how they stand on some of the major issues of the campaign, in their own words:
On Jobs and the Economy
Democratic position: The most important issue in front of us this election year, without question, is jobs. Our unemployment rate is almost 10%. While Wall Street fat cats are raking in record profits again, none of this has trickled down to the millions of unemployed workers on Main Street. My honorable opponent has no idea what it’s like to be unemployed. He has the luxury of sitting in his corporation’s penthouse office suite – a captain of industry, sipping dry martinis with his Wall Street bailout buddies. He has no idea what it’s like to be a laid-off fork lift operator or an unemployed single working mother of three. You know he didn’t buy those cuff links at Sears. Probably drives a Bentley, if you ask me.
Republican position: My reputable opponent and I agree on one thing – and that’s that she wants to turn this great country I love into a bloated big government, socialist bureaucracy intent on taking over every major industry and depriving your freedom to pursue the American dream. As a three-term, inside-the-Beltway bureaucrat, my opponent is completely out of touch with America’s small business people. She wants to do an extreme makeover on the USA and convert it into another Belgium. But this is America, the greatest nation on earth. I won’t let us become another Belgium, no matter how hard my distinguished opponent schemes for this to happen.
(* Translations for the TI– “Twitter-impaired”: OMG: “Oh My God”; GR8: “Great”; Twttr: “Twitter”; IC: “I see”; LOC: “Library of Congress”; Itz: “It’s”; 4: “for”; Deets: “Details”; TTYL: “Talk To You Later”; RLWNM: “Random Letters With No Meaning”)
In a critically important and bold act of government intervention, it was announced last week that the US Library of Congress (henceforth LOC) will soon be digitally archiving the entire collection of public tweets dating all the way back to Twitter’s inception in March 2006. How many tweets will that be? Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, many of which are vaguely intelligible, with the total to date numbering in the billions. It would take the average person reading 16 hours a day over six thousand years to read all the tweets posted to date or a long weekend to read all the ones having any remote historical significance.
Please help us avoid another Katrina catastrophe, won’t you? Turns out the next imminent disaster we have to fear is ourselves – or more specifically, our own U.S. Navy. If we don’t act fast, thousands of people on the tiny island of Guam stand to perish as their island capsizes into the sea. Don’t believe me? Listen to the ominous words of one informed federal government official.
Last week, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-GA. (right), was questioning Navy Admiral Robert Willard during a House Armed Services Committee meeting about the Navy’s plans to relocate 8,000 Navy personnel and their families to Guam. After noting at some length that the island is rather narrow, Rep. Johnson solemnly stated “My fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated it will tip over and capsize.” (I can’t make this stuff up. And, no he was not being facetious.) Admiral Willard paused and replied, “We don’t anticipate that.” You can watch this riveting testimony here.
If you’re like most patriotic, big government-distrusting Americans, you are probably experiencing a range of emotions right now, from anger to rage to angerful rage. It’s a dark day in America thanks to the dreaded OBAMACARE Act of 2010 which was signed into law this past week. It’s just a matter of time before every last hard-fought freedom we’ve long cherished is pried out of our God-toting, gun-fearing hands – like mankind’s sacred right to be paid more than womankind. We are on the road to becoming United Socialist States of America. If you ask me, the health care plan I had was working just fine. Thanks a lot, Obamacare.
Here are just a few of the new law’s most pernicious features. It denies us…
I live in Seattle, about 3 hours south of Vancouver, BC. I am married to a Canadian. I consider myself an honorary Canadian. I regularly root for the Canadian team – except when it is competing against God’s team, which of course would be the USA (After all, the song goes “God Bless America”, not “God Bless Canada”). So it is all that more upsetting that I have to ask the Vancouver Olympics Organizing Committee, “Vancouver Games, have you no shame?”
In the past week, WikiLeaks, the controversial organization that claims its goal is to keep governments honest by revealing classified documents, made news again. They announced that in the upcoming weeks, they will be releasing more than 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables and internal documents – to the dismay and embarrassment of top government officials in the US and the world over.
Government leaders from Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi to Libya’s Muammar Gaddifi to Russia’s Vladimir Putin to North Korea’s Kim Jong Il have been privately ridiculed and derided as incompetent, sexually promiscuous, behaving like a thug or having amazingly bad hair. WikiLeaks’ Australian-born editor and Internet activist, Julian Assange (right) has been characterized as everything from an anarchist to a terrorist – but he has not been ridiculed for having bad hair. This reporter thinks it’s quite stylish, actually.
help us avoid another Katrina catastrophe, won’t you? Turns out the next imminent disaster we have to fear is ourselves – or more specifically, our own U.S. Navy. If we don’t act fast, thousands of people on the tiny island of Guam stand to perish as their island capsizes into the sea. Don’t believe me? Listen to the ominous words of one informed federal government official.
Last week, 
I live in Seattle, about 3 hours south of Vancouver, BC. I am married to a Canadian. I consider myself an honorary Canadian. I regularly root for the Canadian team – except when it is competing against God’s team, which of course would be the USA (After all, the song goes “God Bless America”, not “God Bless Canada”). So it is all that more upsetting that I have to ask the Vancouver Olympics Organizing Committee, “Vancouver Games, have you no shame?”
