CARACAS, Venezuela - President Hugo Chavez told U.S. officials to “Go to hell, gringos!” and called Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice “missy” on his weekly radio and TV show Sunday, lashing out at Washington for what he called unacceptable meddling in Venezuelan affairs.
The tirade came after Washington raised concerns about a measure to grant the fiery leftist leader broad lawmaking powers. The National Assembly, which is controlled by the president’s political allies, is expected to give final approval this week to what it calls the “enabling law,” which would give Chavez the authority to pass a series of laws by decree during an 18-month period.
A Rather Personal Picture Here
PALOS HEIGHTS, Ill. -- Nine months pregnant and married to a fervent Bears fan with tickets to Sunday's NFC Championship Game, Colleen Pavelka didn't want to risk going into labor during the game against the New Orleans Saints.
Due to give birth on Monday, Pavelka's doctor told her Friday she could induce labor early. She opted for the Friday delivery.
Every sports town brags that it has the best fans in the world (except maybe Philadelphia), but teacher Colleen Pavelka might have put Chicago over the top when she asked doctors to induce labor on Friday to assure her husband would be able to attend yesterday's NFC championship game at Soldier Field.
Obviously, Mark Pavelka is a huge Chicago Bears fan if he was grappling with the choice of watching his wife have a baby or maybe watching Rex Grossman lay a giant egg, but to hear that his wife was willing to move up the birth of the couple's second child just so he wouldn't have to face that decision, well, it almost brought tears to my eyes.
My wife would never have done that for me, not even if Southern California were playing for the national championship and Christina Aguilera was the halftime entertainment. I know this because she made me sit in a straight-back chair for 12 hours in a maternity ward one night when there was really nothing I could do for her other than utter an occasional encouraging word and then duck.
Look, no roof!People of New Orleans, lend me your ears.
We are not your sponge.
A football is an oval hunk of leather. And large, fast and supremely violent men catch it and run with it as others try to smash them to the ground.
But a sponge is porous and soft, often pink, or yellow, belonging in a sink or the tub. There is no violence in a sponge. A sponge is designed to sop up unwanted water.
And New Orleans, please understand this: We like you guys. But we're not your sponge.
Get it?
Chicago is not your paper towel, either, or your Shop-Vac or your spaghetti mop or your squeegee.
So no matter what happens Sunday in the NFC championship game between the Bears and the Saints, it has nothing to do with that flood of yours.
We're not sopping up your water.
This is football.
"That's all anyone wants to talk about, Hurricane Katrina and the flood and how if the Saints win this game, it'll help New Orleans," said my friend Dave Kaplan, the WGN-AM sports talk show host who has been doing interviews with his counterparts in other cities about Sunday's game.
"It's Katrina this and Katrina that," Kaplan said, shrugging.
It makes me sick, I said.
"Me too," Kaplan said, who has issues with New Orleans that I'll reveal later. "What does Katrina have to do with football?"
Nothing.
All of us felt terrible about Katrina and the flood. Even Kaplan. And we hold no animosity for a great city that has endured so much.
What drives us crazy is the blabbermouth national media, projecting their own desires in their stories, putting the Saints on the side of the angels, and the Bears on the side of Katrina. If they were political writers, they'd be card carrying Obamamaniacs.
Even our future president, Sen. Barack Obama, has the guts to publicly say he wants the Bears to whip Saint behind on Sunday.
"More Than Football," cooed Sports Illustrated on its cover last week. "Drew Brees and the Saints lift the city of New Orleans to higher ground."
Oh, I get it. If the Bears lose, New Orleans will rise above the place where it now sits, below sea level, where some ridiculous Frenchman put it, ignoring the warnings of his engineers.
It ends Sunday, unless the unthinkable happens and the Bears lose. Then Indianapolis or New England can be cast as the Great Satan. Or is that The Great Sponge?
It's so bad, it's almost like the coverage of Olympic women's figure skating, which isn't about the skating, but about the emotion.
There's always that poignant moment between the young skater and her aged mom in the black babushka, the mom's legs bowed by endless toil, working 18-hour days in the Azerbaijani Fish Cooperative, squeezing caviar out of giant sturgeons, so as to buy new skates for her daughter.
There's always some sappy music in the background--Yanni or Kenny G-- and it makes you weep with the drama of it all. It's like that with the Katrina story line around Sunday's game.
And I can't eat that cheese no more.
But before a mob of angry Bears fans strangle Yanni with a Kenny G string, there's work to do. We have to have a few pops and chips with Mrs. Grass Onion Soup Dip mix, and then cheer grown men beating the heck out of Mother Teresa.
That's right. Mother Teresa.
"[The Saints] are the sweethearts of the league. Everybody loves them and deservedly so," Baltimore Ravens coach Brian Billick told Tribune NFL writer Don Pierson before his team whipped the who-is-that out of the Saints 35-22.
"You go in and beat them, you might as well go and beat up Mother Teresa."
Which brings me back to Kaplan and his strained relationship with New Orleans, which started when he was engaged to a woman from that town.
"I was staying overnight at their place, and got up late to hit the fridge for some food, and here comes my almost future mother-in-law. She hates me. And she's silent. She doesn't say a word.
"So I figure, the heck with this, I approach her and say, `I'm a likable guy. I get along with just about everybody. What's your problem with me? Is it because I'm Jewish?
"She said `No, it's because you're taking my daughter away, you Yankee!'
"I finally had enough of her, and I tell her, `That's right. I'm a Yankee, and guess what? We kicked your butts 150 years ago and we could do it again.'
"And the next morning, I broke up with my fiance and left and that was it," Kaplan said, with a big smile.
We kicked their butts 150 years ago. And Katrina or no Katrina, the Bears will kick some again on Sunday.
I gar-on-tee.
Yet even if the president were in a position to send in 215,000 extra men, I
doubt they would suffice to halt the civil war. Why? Because, having been the
war makers who precipitated Baghdad's descent into anarchy, U.S. forces now lack
the legitimacy to be regarded as peacemakers.Oh yeah, either have troops who are making a serious effort to help the Iraqi people, or put the organization that allowed the Iraqi people spiral into despair by allowing the food for oil scandal or the genocide of the marsh people of Iraq, Rwanda, Croats, the Congo ...
It's time to send in the blue helmets.I'll post more today ... Happy MLK day
Here's the concept: First you take five celebrities -- including Erik Estrada of "CHiPs" fame, La Toya Jackson of the Jackson family, and a guy named Jason "Wee-Man" Acuna, whose previous career highlight was appearing in the movie "Jackass." Then you train the stars, swear them in as reserve police officers and send them out on the night shift with real Muncie police.
Yes, La Toya and the rest have been given guns, badges and policing powers.
Any doubts about that were eliminated Friday, when the Muncie Star Press ran a front-page story headlined, "Community activist Randall Sims stabbed, argues with Erik Estrada." Next to the story was a picture of Estrada, a gun in his holster, shouting at the victim, who was also a suspect.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind was set in Muncie, but they found the city to cultured so they actually filmed it in Georgia
In the Coen brothers' film, The Hudsucker Proxy, Tim Robbins' character gets off the bus from the Muncie School of Business, obviously this is polite reference to Ball State's School of Business which makes Harvard's look like a third rate community college. He did invent the hula hoop in that movie and the frisbee.WASHINGTON — Iraq war protesters broke up a press conference by House Democrats on Wednesday with chants to bring American troops home from Iraq.
Chanting "de-escalate, investigate, troops home now," the protesters disrupted a briefing aimed at outlining priority goals when Democrats take over the House and Senate on Thursday.
