Day: April 4, 2011

U.S. Politics

Charlie Sheen’s Second Night Goes a Little Bit Better

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Gawker

The first night of fighter jet Charlie Sheen’s national tour may have been an unmitigated disaster, but the poem-fingered Vatican assassin seemed to have, uhm, recovered in time for Sunday night’s Chicago show, which seemed to—the Chicago Tribune‘s Steve Johnson writes—”satisfy, if not amaze, concertgoers.”

According to Johnson, Sheen left behind the weird videos and and rambling monologues and stuck with the onstage interview, during  which he said he’d go back to Two and a Half Men if they gave him his job back, and said he was “wrong” to call costar Jon Cryer a troll. And, yet, a somewhat coherent show may have actually disappointed his crowd:

“I wanted to not go at all, then I read the review (of the Detroit show) this morning and it changed my mind,” said Bill Termunde, 26, a Wicker Park resident who works in marketing. “I wanted to see this disaster.”

Termunde and a friend paid $15 for $35 tickets outside the Chicago Theatre from someone who, they said, had made the opposite decision.

Sheen was, in a sense, bulletproof. “I’m not expecting him to do that well, or he wouldn’t be Charlie Sheen,” said Jenna Schaefer, a student at Eastern Illinois University from Gurnee.

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Midddle East Demonstrations · Middle East · Middle East Unrest · Yemen

U.S. Changes Mind About Yemen

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Well what took the President and the State Department so damned long?

Gawker

The U.S. will no longer support jerkoff Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, The New York Times reports, and is actively negotiating for his departure. Which is good, we guess, insofar as Saleh was a brutal, repressive autocrat whose people have been calling for his resignation (or more) for weeks; on the other hand, the deal seems to be that his vice-president will take power until elections are held, an outcome that’s unlikely to pacify Yemen’s angry protestors.

Oh, and, terrorism: One reason the U.S. hasn’t called for Saleh’s resignation is that Yemen is “because he was considered a critical ally in fighting the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda.” (Fret not, however, for the State Department’s stated position is that fighting al Qaeda in Yemen “goes beyond any one individual.”) Student protestors, meanwhile, are “really very, very angry” with the U.S. for dragging its feet. [NYT; image via AP]

Yemen Police Beat Female Protesters With Sticks: Activists

Huffington Post

Thousands of women calling for the ouster of Yemen’s longtime ruler were attacked on Sunday by police with sticks and rocks, setting off a furious battle with male protesters that left several people hurt, activists said.

The women were marching down a main street in the southern town of Taiz shouting “peaceful! peaceful!” when they were attacked, activist Ghazi al-Samei said.

Three of the young men suffered serious gunshot wounds when police opened fire, protester Bushra al-Maqtari told The Associated Press by telephone. She said over 200 more suffered breathing problems caused by inhaling tear gas.

Army tanks and armored cars stopped other demonstrators from entering Taiz, the site of some of the largest and angriest protests against President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s rule.

Protesters have been camping out in main squares throughout Yemen for weeks, demanding Saleh immediately leave power after 30 years. The president has offered to resign by the year’s end and says leaving without a negotiated transition, would lead to chaos. On Saturday, opposition groups demanded he hand power to his vice president and set up committees to thrash out constitutional reform and elections.

Continue reading…

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Southwest Airlines

Cracks found in 3 more Southwest jets

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The Seattle Sun Times

Three more Southwest Airlines planes have been found with small, subsurface cracks similar to the ones that caused a jetliner to lose pressure and make a harrowing emergency landing in Arizona.

Three more Southwest Airlines planes have been found with small, subsurface cracks similar to the ones that caused a jetliner to lose pressure and make a harrowing emergency landing in Arizona.

Southwest said in a statement Sunday that it had found cracks in two Boeing 737-300s. A National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) member later said a third plane was discovered to have the cracks as well.

NTSB member Robert Sumwalt said Boeing is developing a “service bulletin” strongly suggesting immediate checks on all similar models with comparable flight time and age.

A Boeing 737-300 carrying 118 people to Sacramento, Calif., on Friday rapidly lost cabin pressure after the plane’s fuselage ruptured — causing a 5-foot-long tear — just after takeoff from Phoenix. Pilots made a controlled descent into a military base near Yuma, 150 miles southwest of Phoenix.

The tear, along a riveted “lap joint,” shows evidence of extensive cracking that hadn’t been discovered during routine maintenance before Friday’s flight — and probably wouldn’t have been unless mechanics specifically had looked for it, officials said.

NTSB investigators were in Yuma on Sunday to oversee removal of the top section of the jetliner’s roof around the tear. The structure will be sent to Washington, D.C., for analysis.

Southwest spokeswoman Beth Harbin said the airline would not comment on the board’s findings.

“We won’t be able to add anything,” she said in an email. “We’re participating in the investigation and conducting our own inspections on several other aircraft.”

Southwest canceled about 600 flights over the weekend “to accommodate aircraft inspections” of 79 planes, its website said.  

Continue reading…

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Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck: Donald Trump Making Me ‘Uncomfortable’

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Define irony. 

While Glenn Beck discusses how Donald Trump makes him uncomfortable, imagine the tens of thousands of people the Glenn Beck make feel uncomfortable.  In my opinion , both Beck and Trump are clowns.  Plain and simple assessment to match their plain and simple mentality.

Huffington Post

Glenn Beck told Bill O’Reilly that Donald Trump’s recent comments have been making him “uncomfortable.”

Trump has been in the news lately for his controversial remarks about President Obama. In a widely seen interview on Wednesday, he repeated his claims that Obama may not be a citizen of the United States, and even hinted that the president could be a Muslim.

Speaking to O’Reilly during his weekly “At Your Beck and Call” segment on Friday, Beck said that, while he respected Trump and though he could “economically fix our country,” he didn’t understand why Trump had been making his recent comments.

“I don’t know exactly what that strategy is,” he said. “I’ll tell you what it is,” O’Reilly said. “It’s get attention.”

“But that doesn’t help you,” Beck said. “I could walk around the streets of New York without pants and I could get attention.”

He then said that Trump’s birther talk, as well as his comments about China, had “made me a little uncomfortable recently.” Speaking about the birth certificate he said, “He releases one that’s worse than Obama’s, and then he comes back and says on your program, ‘he might be a Muslim too.’ What does that mean, Bill?!”

Beck concluded, “The last thing the country needs is a showboat…I would hope we could get serious candidates who could shake things up by not saying provocative things, just by stating the truth of what’s going on.”

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