COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

91 MPH, no seat belt, reckless driving and trying to blame another driver.


Nothing portrays the hypocrisy of our masters and rulers more that this little foray into the Don Imus affair by New Jersey Governor, John Corzine. He is speeding to an "affair of state" to broker a peace deal between girl basketball players with freshly straightened hair, and an infantile old dope wearing a cowboy hat. A state trooper is recklessly driving an suv, breaking NJ law, speeding, while the gov is also breaking the law with no seat belt. The predictable happens and they try and pin the whole thing on some guy in a pick up truck.

What would the NJ State Police and legal system do to you?


Corzine’s Speed Put at 91 M.P.H. Near Crash Site

By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI NYT
Published: April 18, 2007
CAMDEN, N.J., April 17 — In the seconds before Gov. Jon S. Corzine was critically injured in an accident last Thursday, the Chevrolet Suburban he was riding in was traveling 91 miles per hour, 26 m.p.h. over the posted speed limit, according to a crash data recorder retrieved from the vehicle.

The superintendent of the state police, Col. Joseph R. Fuentes, said Tuesday that the trooper driving the vehicle, Robert J. Rasinski, had told investigators that he did not know how fast he was traveling as he led Mr. Corzine’s two-car caravan, emergency lights flashing, from an Atlantic City speech to a meeting at the governor’s mansion in Princeton.

But the recorder clocked the speed at 91 m.p.h. five seconds before the Suburban collided with a white pickup truck, and at 30 m.p.h. when it slammed into a guardrail along the shoulder of the Garden State Parkway, the police said.

Mr. Corzine, who was not wearing a seat belt, was thrown from the front passenger seat to the back, breaking his thigh bone in two places, a dozen ribs, his breastbone and collarbone and a lower vertebra. He remains in critical condition and on a ventilator after three operations on his leg.

Colonel Fuentes said that troopers who drive the governor and other state officials are given discretion to use the emergency lights and exceed the speed limit in cases of an emergency and, because of security concerns, are advised not to let the governor’s vehicle remain “bogged down in a traffic jam.” But “if it’s a nonemergency situation, we would ask them to obey the traffic laws and the speed laws,” Colonel Fuentes said in a late-afternoon conference call with reporters.


14 comments:

  1. They would lock my ass up if I did this!

    Oh! Happy Anniversary guys!

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  2. According to court records, Virginia Tech Police issued a speeding ticket to Cho on April 7 for going 44 mph in a 25 mph zone,

    Maybe Cho heard that Corzine was doin' 91 mph in a 55 mph zone and got pissed about the debauchery of the rich, because of it.

    nah, just funnin'

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  3. BAGHDAD (Associated Press) -- Three separate explosions rocked Baghdad on Wednesday, killing at least 33 people and wounding dozens as violence climbed toward levels seen before a U.S.-led surge to pacify the capital.

    Meanwhile, U.S. troops killed five suspected insurgents and captured 30 others in a raid in Iraq's western Anbar province, a day after police uncovered 17 decomposing corpses beneath two school yards in the provincial capital.
    ...
    n the deadliest of the Baghdad attacks, a suicide car bomber crashed into an Iraqi police checkpoint at an entrance to Sadr City, the capital's biggest Shiite Muslim neighborhood and a stronghold for the militia led by radical anti-U.S> cleric Muqtade al-Sadr.

    The explosion killed at least 18 people and wounded 37, police said. At least eight vehicles among a jam of civilian cars stopped at the checkpoint were incinerated.

    Earlier, a parked car exploded near a private hospital in the central neighborhood of Karradah, killing 11 people and wounding 13, police said. The blast damaged the Abdul-Majid hospital and other nearby buildings.

    A third explosion was from a bomb left on a minibus in the northwestern Risafi area, killing four people and wounding six others, police said.

    Also in Baghdad, four policemen were killed Wednesday afternoon when gunmen ambushed their patrol south of the city center, police said. Six pedestrians were wounded in the gunfire.


    Another day in Paradise, with 33 more folks that will never get to see the beach, but there is a ray of sunshine in the mix, make no mistake about that.

    A ceremony was held in Maysan's provincial capital of Amarah, 200 miles southeast of Baghdad, and was attended by senior Iraqi and coalition officials including Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie and the British commander in southern Iraq, Maj. Gen. Jonathan Shaw.

    Al-Rubaie said that in order for a timetable to be set for the withdrawal of foreign troops, Iraqi forces and local authorities have to be ready to take over. He was apparently referring to calls by some Sunni Arab groups and al-Sadr's Shiite followers to set a timetable for a pullout.

    "We should work to create these circumstances in all provinces, in order to revert security to Iraqis and end the foreign presence," said al-Rubaie, who represented Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the commander in chief of Iraq's armed forces.

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  4. GEN. ZINNI: Well, I know Jack Sheehan very well, and he’s a extremely competent and capable former commander of the Atlantic command. And I think he’s expressing a view that, that many of us feel. We are in a situation now where we have to rethink our strategy on how we handle this. We have caused in the center of the Middle East a place where the—we could have a sanctuary for extremist groups, where Shia and Sunni strife can spill over, where we could have an Iranian or Persian/Arab conflict, and we have to find a way to contain this now. We can’t walk away from it. We cannot continue on the same course.

    What has disappointed me is there hasn’t been this debate on the strategy, on the policy, a regional strategy on policy, let alone an Iraq policy. We’re, we’re debating the tactics. The, the surge is a tactic. In what context is the surge? You can make an argument for a surge if you were going to withdraw, to cover the withdrawal, for example, or to contain, to reposition forces or to re-engage in a different way or a stronger way. And why we got caught up in the tactical debate, in my mind, is an indication that we don’t understand what we want to do. What should our Middle East policy be? What should our policy be in terms of Iraq and, and the war against the extremists out there or the conflict against extremists? We seem to be strategically adrift, in my view.

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  5. MR. RUSSERT: Many have suggested that the Army is near broken because of the constant redeployments. Can we sustain the number of troops we have in Iraq for years to come?

    GEN. ZINNI: No. You know, what’s, what’s shocking about all this, if you look at past wars, in, in three to four years into a war, we’ve had remarkable transformations of our military. Just think about World War II, where we were when Pearl Harbor was attacked, what our military looked like. I mean, all our equipment was inferior to our enemy, the size of our forces, our organization, our tactics. Three and a half years later, we were a superpower. We dominated in all those areas. Even in Vietnam, at the tactical level, we made adjustments and adaptations, and, and we increased the size of the force to meet the commitment.

    Although we’ve mouthed the words about this being a long war and a long struggle, the very forces that it places the greatest demand upon, our ground forces, our, our soldiers and Marines, we’ve seen no increase, no change, no adaptability on the battlefield. We’re still confused about the enemy. We’re, we’re, we’re stifled by the IED attacks and, and the problems we face. And, and these adjustments, over four years, have not been made. We have to ask ourselves why. What happened to transformation? Why was the design not right? What have we done to adjust? Our military, especially our Army and Marine Corps, are not going to be able to continue this kind of rotation. Traditionally you need three units for every one you have deployed. That’s the ideal, in terms of training, reconstructing the unit, the kind of quality time, the quality of life and family time necessary to rebuild the unit before it goes out. We’re down to almost one-to-one.

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  6. Maybe we should give everyone a gun in Iraq so they can protect themselves...

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  7. Yes, Ash. Life was much better for all Iraqis when only the ruling regime had guns.

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  8. and now we are responsible for the wonderful life they now experience...

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  9. Yes we are. Some others get to share in the credit as well. Hopefully we get the credit for the good as well as the bad. A fair minded person would acknowledge that the present grief is in a limited portion of the country, with a significant majority of the population better off (less threatened) now than their condition under the prior regime. I believe that is what the Iraqi citizens generally say.

    By way of analogy, with your reasoning one could say that we would be better off had the French not assisted us 230 years ago in throwing off the English overlords. After all, handgun ownership has been largely banned in the British Commonwealth, and yesterdays carnage could not then have occurred.


    How is it possible that someone who
    considers themself enlightened would argue in favor of the prior regime?

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  10. I would in no way argue in favor of the previous regime. I do, however, take issue with our role in overthrowing it, with the methods we employed.

    With respect to your reference to French help; their help was significantly different then invading and occupying.

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  11. p.s. raymondshaw can you imagine how the French would have been received if they had invaded and occupied in order to help?

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  12. George Washingtons' "First War"

    The War the Brits were trying to recoup finacially from, with taxes on the Colonies, that the War was fought for.

    Taxes without representation.
    To pay for the defense of their culture.

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  13. And the irony of the Iraq war, in the context of 'taxes', are the early statements on how the Oil revenues would easily pay for 'reconstruction'.

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