Katrina and the waves of malice

This World Baseball Classic is the blogging gift that just keeps on giving. I learn today from Reuters* via DailyKos that the runner-up in the tournament is entitled to 7% of the event's profits. Except that the runner-up happens to be Cuba, which was only allowed to play in the WBC after negotiating a deal with the US State Department in February. And, under the 1962 US trade embargo, Cuba wasn't allowed to receive any profits at all. So Fidel, wily old bugger that he is, rather cheekily offers the prize money as a donation to victims of Hurrican Katrina, obliging the US government to refuse it since "there is nothing for Cuba to donate". And so perhaps the longest running gag in American foreign policy slaps its thigh once again and wanders off muttering to itself.

In further Katrina news, I thought this deserved a mention too. The wicked witch of the West and matriarch of the insidious B*sh clan, Barbara (soul pictured right), has reared up again to breathe sulphur into the nostrils of the hurrican's victims and humanity at large. The bubble-queen previously said of Katrina victims: "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (she chuckles)–this is working very well for them." Now it appears she gave a (tax-deductible) donation to the government's Katrina Fund, but specified that it go towards buying educational software products made by a company owned by her son Neil, the runt of the litter. Said company was a favourite with all manner of dodgy investment characters, according to TPM (who has another point about the questionable legality of the 'donation' here; turns out B and George senior are both investors in the same company too).

Neil, of course, is unjustly ignored over here, despite being up to his neck in the savings & loans scandals of the 80s, profiting on the family name and acting as bagman/go-between for all manner of scum, and famously pulling this excuse out of his arse during divorce proceedings with his wife a couple of years ago:

"He admitted in the deposition that he previously had sex with several other women while on trips to Thailand and Hong Kong at least five years ago.
The women, he said, simply knocked on the door of his hotel room, entered and had sex with him. He said he did not know if they were prostitutes because they never asked for money and he did not pay them.
"Mr. Bush, you have to admit it's a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her," Brown [Sharon Bush's lawyer] said.
"It was very unusual," Bush said."


To quote Cartman, "I hate you guys".

(And yes that's another BB cracker on the left, about the Iraq war just after the first flag-draped coffin pictures went up on the Web)


*Also, dig the mixed-sports-metaphor in the Reuters headline: 'Baseball money becomes US-Cuba political football'. Doofoids.