Vinny sent me a link to an article today that made me laugh so hard I almost peed my pants. Apparently a Chinese school teacher and a beautician have filed a lawsuit against CNN, Turner Broadcasting, and Jack Cafferty, because of the comments Jack Cafferty made earlier this month.

They are asking for $1.3 billion in compensation for violating the dignity and reputation of the Chinese people. A similar suit was filed by 14 lawyers in Beijing as well. The lawsuit filed by the two women was filed in New York. Six lawyers are handling the case for the women.

If you remember, Cafferty said,

The United States imported Chinese-made “junk with the lead paint on them and the poisoned pet food” and added: “They’re basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years.”

I am not going to rehash the comments Jack Cafferty made, or my support of them. The point here is that Jack Cafferty stated his opinions on the air and they took offense to it. It’s not so hard to believe that people get so easily offended these days. Just look out your window. I bet three out every five people you see get offended at something someone does at least once per day.

I, personally, am offended at the lawyers who are involved in these cases. All twenty of them, but especially the six who are representing the women in the second case.

That’s right. I am highly offended. Why, you ask? It’s simple.

Six lawyers filed a lawsuit in New York over an incident where a news reporter vocalizes his opinion on the air. Don’t any of those six lawyers realize that Jack Cafferty had a constitutional right to say what he said? It’s called freedom of speech. He has a right to his opinion, and the right to state it, no matter how much the Chinese didn’t like it.

Six lawyers filed a lawsuit in New York over an incident where a cable news network chose to air the opinion of one of it’s star reporters. Don’t any of those six lawyers realize that CNN had a constitutional right to air what he said? It’s called freedom of the press. They had a right to air his comments, no matter how much the Chinese didn’t like them.

It’s a shame that six lawyers, who practice law in the United States, could overlook such important rights. Unless of course they have spending a lot of their time in China where those rights and just about every other right we enjoy here in the United States simply don’t exist. Maybe it just slipped their mind.

Maybe they should consider hiring new lawyers. No, that wouldn’t work. I’m not sure, but I don’t think you can sue someone simply for being stupid. Maybe they should just stick to representing people who are in desperate need of drug rehab. They might have better luck.

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The Chinese government is demanding that CNN and Jack Cafferty apologize for comments made on the air.

China on Tuesday demanded that television news channel CNN apologize after one of its commentators said the Chinese were “goons” and that their products were “junk”.

Jack Cafferty made the comments earlier this month on CNN’s political program, The Situation Room.

…

Cafferty said the United States imported Chinese-made “junk with the lead paint on them and the poisoned pet food”, adding: “They’re basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years

First of all, he has nothing to apologize for. I hardly ever agree with Jack Cafferty but this time, I do. The United States has imported the Chinese made crap he talked about. The majority of toys recalled in our country because of lead paint contamination do come from China. The poisoned pet food also came from China.

China has a very poor track record when it comes to human rights. Heck, they haven’t even made in onto the track, that’s how poor their record is. From the outside looking in, they are goons and thugs and even though I have heard they are slowly improving, it doesn’t change the fact they are still the same “goons and thugs” they’ve always been.

So what is CNN going to do? Will they apologize? Will they grovel and beg forgiveness? Or will they stand up and tell China to stuff it? I’ll be shocked if they stand their ground.

We, as a world community, cannot bring about the changes needed within China, only the people of China can stand up and force a change. But it’s our duty to do everything we can, whether it’s boycotting Chinese made products or simply calling them out on a live broadcast on television. We must do everything we can to ensure that the people behind that Great Wall know that the rest of the world has their back. Only then will real change come to China.

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The people of Tibet ask for freedom in the form of monks and nuns. The Chinese government responds with gunfire. Whatever happened to “just say no”?

Paramilitary police opened fire on hundreds of monks, nuns and Tibetans who tried to march on a local government office in western China yesterday to demand the return of the Dalai Lama.

Residents of Luhuo said that a monk and a farmer appeared to have been killed and about a dozen people wounded in the latest violence in Tibetan areas of China. Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, said that one officer was killed when police confronted a “lawless mob” in Luhuo.

The demonstration began at 4pm when about 200 nuns from Woge nunnery and a similar number of monks from Jueri monastery marched towards the Luhuo Third District government office. They were joined by several hundred farmers and nomads, witnesses said.

If this was happening in any other country in the world, everyone (the United States, Canada, the European Union, etc) would be pulling strings at the United Nations, or working with NATO forces to bring resolution to the matter. I guess, because it’s China, we’re simply going to look the other way. Again.

Now is it time to boycott the Beijing games?

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The United States government gave Suharto a free ride, right up until the end. I’m afraid this is sounding more and more like every other “we supported the lesser of two evils” story I have heard over the course of the past twenty years.

The United States declassified documents Monday detailing how Washington propped up ex-Indonesian leader Suharto, who died at the weekend, at the expense of democracy and human rights.

The documents, declassified following requests under a freedom of information law, showed the US administration did not use its leverage to bring Suharto to account during his 32-year reign until his last months in office.

“One thing that is clear from the tens of thousands of pages of which we had declassified concerning US ties with Suharto from 1966 to 1998 — at no moment did US presidents ever exercise their maximum leverage over his regime to press for human rights or democratization,” Brad Simpson of the National Security Archive told AFP.

How disgusting. I know, I know, we’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again. I’m just sick and tired of hearing about them all. How many more evil power hungry dictators are there in the world?

We should be ashamed of ourselves. It’s one thing to bring hope and freedom to people around the world, it’s another to stifle it for our own gain.

When you draft a document that basically does nothing, can you expect the subject of that document to make changes based on it? There has to be a name for something like this. Oh yeah, it’s called the United Nations.

Russia said Wednesday a new draft U.N. resolution on Iran’s disputed nuclear program does not call for any harsh sanctions, and the Iranian president said new measures would not deter the country in its pursuit of nuclear technology.

If it was anyone but the U.N. I would be telling the leaders of Iran to look for some good life insurance quote, but apparently they have nothing to worry about.

The resolution does not call for any harsh sanctions and Iran says that the resolution will not deter them. Great! Another ineffective time wasting resolution from the powers that be at the United Nations. The next thing you know they’ll be drafting a resolution on the resolution saying they are resolute towards the resolution.

Wow. Rather than going through the trouble to start enforcing civility in their community, Mexico City’s transportation system has decided to start segregating buses by the sexes, all in the name of ’safety’.

The first three cars on the subway are already reserved for women and children and it’s working so well that they are now trying the whole segregation idea on buses, because you know it’s easier to fix a problem if you eliminate the conditions that may have caused it, by sticking your head in the sand.

Mexico City has started a women-only bus service to protect female passengers from groping and verbal abuse common on the city’s packed public transportation system.

Millions of people cram into subway trains and buses in the Mexican capital, one of the world’s largest cities, and women have long complained of abuse from men taking advantage of overcrowding to sneak in an inappropriate grab.

While there are a lot of men who are pigs, are they saying that men are the only ones capable of inappropriate behavior? Seriously? I doubt it. Even the article I am referencing has a comment from a woman who says there are aggressive women too.

How far will they take the whole segregation of the sexes thing anyway? First trains, then buses, then what? Are we going to see guys selling a used Rolex or something in a trenchcoat? Will women cross the street on one sidewalk and men on the other? God forbid they share a drinking fountain.

What’s next?

How flawed is a society that it resorts to forced segregation rather than enforced socialization to solve it’s problems?

On the surface, the arrest of 774 people sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Pardon me if I laugh about this. While it’s nice they are “cracking down” on the food suppliers, maybe they should focus on fixing the problem rather than pointing fingers. Arresting a few people here and there will not stop the problem.

China said Monday that it had arrested 774 people in a crackdown on substandard goods, part of ongoing efforts to calm international worries over the quality of the country’s products.

The General Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said the arrests were the result of 626 criminal investigations nationwide into the manufacture and sale of fake or substandard food, medicine or agricultural products between August and mid-October.

“All local authorities and relevant departments have maintained a high-pressure attitude toward their crackdown on the illegal activity of producing and selling fake products,” the AQSIQ, one of China’s main quality control agencies, said on its Web site.

Too bad all the arrests are for making fake or substandard food. When will the get around to cracking down on all of the plants that paint toys with lead based paints? When will they get around to stopping the flow of the crap coming into our country?

If I remember correctly though, those people are not arrested, they just disappear.

They rented the car five weeks after they reported their daughter missing. How then did her DNA show up in the trunk?

Portuguese police say they have found firm DNA evidence that the body of Madeleine McCann was in the boot of the family’s hire car five weeks after she went missing, sources have told Sky News.

Sky crime correspondent Martin Brunt, speaking from Portimao, said police were “adamant” they had found the most “damning” evidence yet implicating either one or both of the McCanns in their daughter’s death.

The evidence came in blood samples returned from the Forensic Science Service in Birmingham.

I think it’s time for one, or both, of the McCann’s to come clean. The evidence found was consistent with having a body in the trunk, not simply a toy or piece of clothing that might have transfered the DNA. Isn’t it time to tell the truth?

Oh no! Europe may screen travellers from the United States like we screen those coming from Europe! Say it isn’t so!

US business travellers and tourists flying to the European Union are facing the threat of the same laborious registration requirements that Washington has demanded of Europeans in the latest US security crackdown.

In its first reaction to the new US visa law, the European Commission said it was “considering” a so-called electronic traveller authorisation scheme – similar to the American plan – that would require foreigners heading to the EU to give notice of their travel plans before departure.

The threat has been conveyed to senior US officials and lawmakers, with one letter sent last month stressing that a European system would “of course operate on a reciprocal basis”.

So? Why wouldn’t we expect them to be as vigilant in screening travellers? Is this really news?

The government of Israel says they are “correcting a 60-year-old blight”…

Six million Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II. Hundreds of thousands who survived concentration camps came to Israel after the war. Many suffered physical or psychological damage from the torture and deprivation they suffered at the hands of the Nazis.

Six decades after the war ended, the remaining survivors are elderly, and many have been unable to provide for themselves in their final years, suffering chronic shortages of money for medical and psychological treatment and in some cases even food.

…

“We are correcting a 60-year-old blight,” he said. “Holocaust survivors living in Israel are entitled to live respectably without reaching a situation in which it is beyond their means to enjoy a hot meal.”

Beginning next year, the amount allocated for 120,000 needy survivors, about half the total number still living in Israel, will be $28 million annually, according to Olmert’s statement.

But that works out to an average of just $20 a month for each survivor.

Apparently, the cost of living respectably in Israel is just $19.44 per month, that’s the amount their generous stipend works out to be.

The number 1944 is ironic enough if you ask me.

[Crossposted at RetroMental]