Mourners In The Streets Of Warsaw (Photo: Dean Gallup / Getty)
... Fortunately, that's not entirely true, but it sounds like the beginning of one of the worst Polish jokes imaginable.
Polish President Lech Kaczynski and dozens of Poland's top Parliament members and policy-makers died this past Friday when their plane crashed in heavy fog, creating a unique crisis in a country's government: It was decapitated by the tragedy.
Also among the passengers was Bronislaw Geremek, the anti-communist Polish politician whose actions in the late 1960's began the Solidarity movement, and was a living legend in creating a post-Soviet-dominated Poland.
The bitterly ironic twist to this story is that the plane (a former Soviet Tubolev airliner) went down about a half-mile from a runway outside the Russian city of Smolensk. It was carrying a delegation to a ceremony commemorating the massacre of more than 20,000 members of Poland’s elite officer corps 70 years ago, at the hands of the Soviet army and NKVD -- forerunner to the KGB, Vladimir Putin's former employer.
2.) Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens To Retire
John Paul Stevens, at nearly 90 years of age the second-longest sitting Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court and its leading liberal voice, announced this week that he will retire over the summer.
Senate Minority Leader John Boner said the GOP "will push to replace that old Liberal _______" with a large trainable rodent, similar to four other members of the formerly venerated and formerly neutral Hugh Court.
3.) Mine Explosion Kills Twenty-Nine
Handmade Highway Sign, VA (Photo: Jeff Gentner / AP)
In churches across southwestern Virginia, services were held Sunday mourning the loss of 29 miners in what appears to be an underground explosion, possibly due to a lack of ventilation of coal dust -- something the mine's owner, Massey Energy Corp., had been cited for by Federal safety officials on four separate occasions in the past year.
But, you know; any Teabagger will tell you: That there nosy Federal government got no business poking around in the affairs of honest citizens, and preventing free enterprise from bein' more free. Yuh.
4.) President Obama Announces U.S. Reserves Right To Use Nuclear Weapons Against Rogue States Who Possess Them And Haven't Signed the UN Non-Proliferation Treaty
Little Mahmood Plays 'Jeopardy': Odds Are, He Loses
On Saturday, President Barack Obama announced a summit for nations in the 'Nuclear Club' to agree to specific controls to their stockpiles of nuclear materials to be put in place within four years -- on the strength of the argument that not to do so, seriously, invites terrorist acts too terrible to contemplate.
At the same time, Obama announced that while a "No First-Use" of nuclear weapons was the stated position of the U.S. government, that did not apply to rogue states such as North Korea or Iran, which have (as in the case of North Korea), or appear to be developing (as with Iran), nuclear weapons.
What this should tell us: earlier this week, Iran publicly unveiled, on their national television with a ceremony, a new centrifuge design for enrichment of Uranium. At the end of last year, they were shown to have built a secret enrichment facility which they kept from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Iran only admitted it because the British and U.S. governments were about to publicly announce it. And, Iran has conducted several tests of medium-range missiles, capable of hitting targets in Israel -- which has no trouble seeing potential nukes and operational missiles as a serious threat... particularly when Iran's "President" says the Holocaust didn't happen.
All in all, the Iranian government has shown it has no intention of slowing their march towards building nukes, and has no fashion sense (those windbreaker-and-khaki-pants-with-white-shirt ensembes just scream "Repressive Misogynist Uptight Religious _______"). The Israelis have said they can't permit Iran to have nuclear weapons.
Also, they would like the Iranians to at least start wearing button-down Oxfords -- in muted colors, for Christ's sake; they don't have to immediately jump to stripes or tattersalls -- and try maybe jeans, with Timberland or Bass loafers, and a grey or brown tweed sports coat from LL Bean or Joseph A. Banks.
I'm only a dog, but I won't be surprised to wake up one morning and find that Iran's nuclear facilities have been bombed (in the same way that the Israelis leveled Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981) and this time possibly with "bunker-busting" tactical-level nuclear warheads.
If so, the Middle East's political and military circumstances, and possibly its fashion direction, will change in a hurry. I believe Burkas will be all the rage, whether women want to wear them or not. And, radiation suits will be in vogue, for a while.
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