Creating a nation to be proud of!

(Note: I was working on another blog, but a couple of items from Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! totally deflected my attention from what I was doing.)


KEEPING AMERICA SAFE!

A Paris to Mexico Air France flight was ordered not to fly into American airspace on April 18. Reason? Air France had a passenger on board who is on the US no fly list. Who? Columbian journalist Hernando Calvo Ospino. What had he done to make the no fly list? Apparently his writings are sometimes critical of US policies in Latin America.

While Ospino is not a terrorist, it appears the US no-fly list can be used for other purposes like protecting America from writers of dangerous thoughts critical of the US. (Note: Ospino is a contributor to a leftwing French political monthly magazine.) And while no landing in the US was scheduled for the flight Ospino was on, the no-fly list sends a strong message to brazen Air France and all other airlines who think they can fly just any journalists over the heads of Americans!


KEEPING AMERICA BEAUTIFUL!

After discovering the dead body of a 14 year old El Salvadoran girl in the Sonoran Desert in February 2008, Dan Mills, a member of No More Deaths, a humanitarian organization, started leaving gallon jugs of water along known migrant trails in southern Arizona. As a result, the US Fish and Wildlife Service ticketed Mills for littering. Mills refused to pay the $175 fine and appealed.

Last month, his appeal was denied. A district court ruled the "water jugs, left in the refuge, constitute garbage."

Apparently, it has been determined by the American court system the 2000 victims who didn't make it across the desert in the last ten years are more bio-degradable than those damn unsightly plastic water jugs.