AirTran Airlines says nine Muslim passengers were removed from a flight from Washington, D.C., to Florida after other passengers reported hearing a suspicious remark.
An AirTran spokesman says the it was a misunderstanding. The Muslim passengers say AirTran wouldn’t rebook them Thursday and they had to pay for seats on another airline.
Passenger Kashif Irfan tells The Washington Post the confusion began when his brother remarked aloud that the plane’s jets were next to his window.
Two other passengers reported hearing what they considered to be a suspicious remark.
Those of us who remember the Fabulous Flying Imams of 2006 will be understandably suspicious about this being a simple misunderstanding.
At this time of year, do the Republicans really want to play Scrooge with the nation’s beleaguered autoworkers? Even President Bush — still the top Republican — sees the need to keep the U.S. auto industry alive and has been working for a compromise.
But a bevy of Republican senators from the South are trying to break up what the United Automobile Workers have struggled since the 1930s to achieve — a middle-class life for union members.
It’s no coincidence that many of the Senate Republicans in the lead on this issue — Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C. — represent states benefiting from Japanese and German automobile plants that employ nonunion labor.
My family moved from Winchester, Ky., in 1924 to Detroit when my uncles reported the Ford factories were paying its workers a munificent $5 a day. My father never went on the assembly line but ran a small grocery store on the East Side of the motor city that served those who worked in the car plants.
The blue-collar auto workers led the way for other workers throughout the country and blazed a trail for labor in all industries to win decent wages and bargaining rights.
What would we be without the industry that has given so much to America?
Apparently the Republican senators have no problem hurling us backward to the early part of the Great Depression when then-President Herbert Hoover failed to rise to the challenge posed by the stock market crash of 1929 and unemployment levels soaring to 25 percent.
It was then that Republicans earned a reputation as the political party impervious to the impact of hard times on the American people.
Earlier this month, Republican senators — led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — were able to scuttle a $14 billion bailout for General Motors and Chrysler.
The fact that the Democrat party couldn’t lead enough people in Congress to get the $14 billion bailout passed went unmentioned. Why does she have a front row seat again?
A boat carrying international activists, including former Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, and medical supplies to the embattled Gaza Strip sailed back into a Lebanese port on Tuesday after being turned back and damaged by the Israeli navy, organizers of the trip said.
The crowds on the docks in the Lebanese port city of Tyre were jubilant and cheering as they welcomed the vessel.
The boat, which set off from Cyprus Monday wanted to make a statement and deliver medical supplies to embattled Gaza. The trip’s organizers said the boat was clearly in international waters, 90 miles off the coast of Gaza, at the time of its close encounter with the Israeli navy.
“Our boat was rammed three times, twice in the front and one on the side,” McKinney told CNN Tuesday morning. “Our mission was a peaceful mission. Our mission was thwarted by the aggressiveness of the Israeli military.”
Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, denied there had been any shooting although the two ships had made “physical contact.”
Palmor said there was no response to a radio warning to the Dignity, and the vessel then tried to out-maneuver the Israeli patrol boat, leading to the collision.
Cyprus state radio said the Cypriot government would seek explanations from Israel over the incident.
“What did this administration know and when did it know it, about the events of September 11?”
A South Philadelphia man enraged because a father and son were talking during a Christmas showing of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button took care of the situation when he pulled a .380-caliber gun and shot the father, police said.James Joseph Cialella Jr., 29, of the 1900 block of Hollywood Street is charged with attempted murder, aggravated assault, and weapons violations.
“It’s truly frightening when you see something like this evolve into such violence,” said police spokesman Lt. Frank Vanore.
Police were called to the Riverview Theatre in the 1400 block of Columbus Boulevard about 9:30 p.m. where the gunshot victim, a Philadelphia man who was not identified, told police a man sitting near him told his family to be quiet and threw popcorn at his son.
HE’S the world’s most powerful man, dashingly handsome and about to be sworn in as America’s first black President.
And if any blokes out there weren’t already feeling inferior . . . yes, Barack Obama also has a V spot.
The new US Commander-in-Chief — or maybe Commander in Briefs — couldn’t resist whipping off his T-shirt and showing off the taught lines of abdominal muscle while on holiday in Hawaii with wife Michelle and their girls.
His buff chest and toned tum belie his 47 years and show he’s got more in common with George Clooney than George Bush.
President-elect Barack Obama’s incoming chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was pushing for Obama’s successor just days after the Nov. 4 election, sources told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Emanuel privately urged Gov. Blagojevich’s administration to appoint Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett, and the Sun-Times learned Tuesday that he also pressed that it be done by a certain deadline.
Jarrett was initially interested in the U.S. Senate post before Obama tapped her to be a White House senior adviser, sources say.
The disclosure comes days after Obama’s camp downplayed Jarrett’s interest in the post.
From author Jonathan Carroll, we are pointed to this article in The Village Voice that addresses literary tours and criticism on the blogosphere. Interesting in parts, but what is somewhat noteworthy is this passage:
“A lot of those people almost ruined that experience for me,” notes Robert Mackey, a writer for The New York Times website, referring to writing The Climb, a blogged account of his time riding much of the Tour de France route this summer as a novice cyclist. While the overwhelming number of comments were positive, Mackey found that a group of self-described “bike snobs” kept sparking dozens of “weird, angry” comments that he had to edit, including the bizarre contention that he had no “right” to do what he was doing, or even that he should hand over his bike to a poorer, more “worthy” cyclist—a demand made by the cyclist himself. It was a black-hole conversation, one that produced infinite heat and no light.
“It was an unbelievable experience—like editing graffiti,” remembers Mackey. “It makes you feel awful about the world.”
This was, ultimately, Strauss’s complaint. In the end, it all worked out. He was able to score appearances on Good Morning America and The Craig Ferguson Show—not easy gigs for a literary novelist these days. More Than It Hurts You did well and is now in its third printing. The only thing missing, as so often is the case in fin de Bush America, is any intellectual engagement: No wider argument about his indictments of American culture or his writing; no discussion on whether or not Munchausen’s-by-proxy is a real, widespread mental disorder.
I understand that digs against President Bush are de rigeur; I mean, he can be blamed for everything from bridges collapsing to the likely demise of the American automobile industry. The wider question is: how does a sitting President inform, influence, or alter American culture? If there’s a lack of intellectual engagement (leaving aside the idea that just because people aren’t discussing the things you like to talk about, it doesn’t mean that people aren’t intellectually engaged), is that a sign of the times, or a direct result of whose rear end occupies the Oval Office? Did blow jobs become more common because of President Clinton’s marital infidelity? If Al Gore had been elected President, would we now be far more intellectually engaged in topics that Village Voice columnists approve of? Did Kerry’s defeat doom us to four more years of discussing baseball, tuna casserole recipes, and dick jokes instead of loftier subjects?
Or maybe people just don’t give a fuck about yet another author’s searing indictment of some aspect of American culture, and Kevin Baker should just get over it.
The Flying Imams Strike Again!
