Two generations of Goodyear sightings have conditioned us to call it a blimp, but in truth the Eureka is a zeppelin. Whatever you call it, the world's largest airship - 15 feet longer than a Boeing 747 - launched its first full weekend of sightseeing flights over Monterey Bay last month.
Airship Ventures began flying over San Francisco Bay in November. The Eureka, which was built in Germany and is one of only three zeppelins in the world, berths at Moffett Field.
I know, I know, we all said we were entirely sick to death of you, Sarah, never wanted to hear another folksy, semi-coherent peep, were hugely grateful that you had mercifully receded like a perky red tide back up to the rural bucolic animal-skinned parts of podunk rusticville from whence you came. I know.
I know, good Sarah, we said all that. And oh dear God, we meant every word, too. No lie. We really, really meant it. Like you cannot believe. Really.
But now, something is amiss. Something feels, how do I say this, a little bit sad. Now that you've up and quit as America's favorite hottie milf ditzball politico moose-slashin' anti-choice anti-feminist destroyer of linear grammar, we feel adrift and lost, a nation without its favorite squeaky purple balloon.
No one ever imagined you'd step up to the mike and deliver one of the most barely coherent, side-steppin', nonsensical, what-the-hell-is-she-talking-about resignation speeches of all time, leaving your role as the right wing's most unlikely taste sensation to ... well, no one knows exactly who. Michele Bachmann? Trust me, Sarah, that flat-out nutbucket can't hold a candle to your winkin', smirkin', carefully manicured caricature of a smart female. Her ignorance and homophobia are far too literal and obvious. You were so much more fun, largely because no one can really understand a single word you say.
So now, we take it all back. I know, it's a bit humiliating to admit, but the nation needs you, Sarah.
Or, more specifically, liberals and Democrats need you, given the simply spectacular job you've done of helping drag the Republican party, if not further to the extremist nutball right, certainly much further down the ladder of intelligence, respect and viability, than even Bush could've dreamed. As long as you're serving as the GOP's hood ornament, and as long as Rush and O'Reilly and Glenn Beck are behind the wheel, the Republican party has not a single prayer of relevance and capability in the next two decades.
In other words, Sarah, the best the left can hope for is for the right's most extremist, silly or otherwise unhinged figureheads -- that's you, Sarah! -- to keep doing exactly what they're doing, shoving out the moderate voices of their own party in favor of wacky fanaticism and raging on about homosexuals and abortion and God, thus locking in Obama's second term and further guaranteeing their own delightful irrelevance.
Do you see, Sarah? We need you here, to keep doing your fine and upstanding and nonsensical work, keep making the right the adorable laughingstock of the world it has so very become.
... Mommy and Daddy pay off your mistress and her cuckolded husband. Now THAT'S the Republican way!

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The Minnesota GOP has sent a check to Senator Al Franken for almost $96,000 to partially reimburse him for defending the election contest under the state's "loser pays" law.
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This is stolen from elsewhere, not written by me:
"McNamara's Damned"
(to the tune of "McNamara's Band")
Oh! His name was McNamara,
Was the leader of the damned.
Although they lacked in morals,
Somehow got to rule the land.
Invaded disobedient puppets,
And hated freedom for all.
Thousands did not get funerals,
After they're shot against a wall.
Oh! The guns go bang, the innocents hang,
And the corpses blaze away;
McCarthyists pump like old buffoons
While politics they do play;
Fascist sadomasochists think torture's a hoot,
And constitutions they disband;
A detriment to democracy was McNamara's hand.
Chopvac | 08.07.09 - 14:06 | #
Somewhere, you know the Clintons are laughing their asses off at Sarah Palin punking out of politics. And that'd be even as they shake their heads listening to bullshit pundit after bullshit pundit declare that poor Sarah Palin and her poor kids and her poor husband were treated oh-so-very cruelly by Katie Couric and the Bloggers.
Shit like this is on an endless loop on CNNMSNBCFox. It's pick and choose the most fucked-up stuff some commenter on Daily Kos wrote while insisting that the beleaguered Palins were treated worser than the worstest any family has ever been worstly treated in the history of worstness. Oh, and Tina Fey hurt her feelings.
Fuck them and fuck her. Sure, people are gonna say mean shit about her. Sure, Andrew Sullivan might get a bit obsessed over whether or not Trig's Palin's kid or not. And if a candidate preaches abstinence but her daughter gets knocked up before marriage? That'd be kind of relevant. But the mainstream media, for the most part, when it wasn't jacking off about how mavericky this moose-huntin' twit (Get an editor, RP. Shoulda been 'twat' - G) was, questioned whether or not Palin was smart enough or experienced enough to be vice-president. Hey, those are legitimate lines of inquiry, even if George W. Bush took them off the table for a few years.
And as for who's been treated worse?
Whether or not Bill and Hillary Clinton had Vince Foster murdered was discussed on mainstream news channels, not just dismissed as sheer madness. Elected Republicans made jokes about Chelsea Clinton's awkward adolescent looks. And when someone investigates Sarah Palin and talks about the shape of her vagina and how she sucks a dick, then we can even begin to talk about who is treated unfairly. It wasn't just some cranky-ass blogger. It was the way the national media functioned: as a nonstop Clinton attack machine. The Clintons fucking took it all, like Rocky against Apollo Creed, man, in Rocky II.
And all this shit was even before blogs existed. What kind of fucktarded shitstorm would have cycloned through the nutzoid right and the 24-hour news networks, desperately trying to fill time until the world ends, if blogs had been around? Oh, right, ask Barack and Michelle Obama about birth certificates, Bill Ayers, and secret Muslim terrorist agendas.
Palin got a taste of it, like a particularly intense amuse bouche. And, as the Rude Pundit said yesterday, if she were truly the honest person her plummeting number of supporters believe she is, she would have simply said last week that she couldn't take it anymore and everyone can kiss her ass. But, hey, maybe Rachael Ray needs some competition.
New Tires Made of Oil from Orange Peels
The Republicans and their corporate sponsors have long known that if a governnment option gets a toe-hold it could to lead to a fundamental re-alignment in which many of the middle and working class Americans that they have demagogued to hate their government come to see the very same governnment as a friend and savior of their health. This is what has happened in nations around the world that have national healthcare -- and a government option isn't even national healthcare, but it will be in time because once you take the profit and excess healthcare costs created by private health insurance out of the system, the default will be Medicare for everyone.
We knew Obama in Illinois. As anyone who reads BuzzFlash knows, we fiercely fought for him in the Democratic primary and the general election.
But we did not know that his desire not to alienate the D.C. villagers would lead to his capitulation on change and evolve it into an acceptance that he is not going to risk leadership with the audacity of fighting for what Americans need for their healthcare, and what will be most cost-effective. In short, Rahm Emanuel and others are telling him that the moneybags of the health insurance industry have too much power to be defeated by the President of the United States.
In the case of Barack Obama not taking the fight for the government option to the mat, we may be seeing a serious character flaw -- a man who can't distinguish between the raised expectations of fighting rhetoric and an actual fight.
As our BuzzFlash columnist Phil Carpenter noted this morning, if President Obama doesn't get a bill with a full government health insurance option, he may not only have caved into the powers with the profiteering billions, he may have lost his re-election campaign.
The Neocons Have No Credibility, So Why Do They Get So Much Media Exposure?
For those of you unfamiliar with the neoconservatives - or neocons, as they are often referred to - they're a clique of right-wing foreign policy ideologues who think the use of American military power is always justified under any circumstances. The endgame, as neocon Max Boot put it, is to have American troops occupy the "troubled lands" that "cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets."
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Can you imagine if the Republicans had the White House, the House of Representatives, and a 60-vote majority in the Senate?
New Jersey GOP gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie's campaign has no interest in help from Sarah Palin after the former vice presidential candidate stepped down as governor of Alaska, in part to help Republican candidates across the country.
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Palin is getting a lukewarm response in Virginia, the other high-profile governor's race this year. Republican candidate Bob McDonnell said Tuesday his campaign had conversations with the Palin camp, but stopped short of saying whether he wanted her help.
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Has Palin been accused of murder? Have the charges been conclusively proven false by three separate special prosecutors to the tune of many millions of taxpayer dollars in investigations that last for years and personally cost her millions of dollars in legal fees? No? Then I think she needs to rethink her claims.
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Former Bush White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove was deposed by lawyers for the House Judiciary Committee, Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) said in an interview Tuesday.
Rove’s deposition took place over a period of some eight and a half hours, beginning at 10 a.m. and ending around 6:30 p.m, ET — and the lawyers took several breaks, Conyers said.
Conyers wouldn’t say what Rove told investigators or whether Rove would appear before his committee again.
Blogger Emptywheel, noted for her reporting on all things related to Plamegate, remarks, “Supposedly, there will be transcripts produced, Harriet and Karl will review them, and then we’ll all get our greedy little hands on them. Given that it’s summertime in our nation’s capital, it’ll take at least a few weeks for all that to transpire.”
“But we might get a Karl transcript before we get a Cheney interview,” Wheeler adds.
A pro-marijuana group is launching another television bid to legalize pot in California — this time with the pitch that legalizing and taxing the drug could help solve the state's massive budget deficit.
The 30-second spot, airing Wednesday and paid for by the Marijuana Policy Project, features a retired 58-year-old state worker who says state leaders "are ignoring millions of Californians who want to pay taxes."
In a phone interview, Herndon said that before filming the ad, she had not told very many people about her marijuana use. But she said her concern over the state's fiscal crisis and her support of medical marijuana led her to go public.
"I came out of the closet with this ad," she said.
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She said she was approached to star in the ad while her husband was taking classes at Oaksterdam University, an Oakland trade school that trains students to grow medical marijuana.
Vaporize Your Herb
Weymouth's hard-to-believe apology as well as the original idea for the event itself shows why newspapers and our democratic process are dying: the public is fed platitudes and PR spin to herd them toward pre-approved opinions while the real debate is going on behind closed doors between those who have the money to buy the outcome they want.
The original article shows one part of the problem is nepotism. Weymouth got her job not because she is the crème de la crème of journalists but because she is the grand-daughter of famed owner Katherine Graham. Owning the press no more makes you a competent publisher than being the first president Bush's son makes you a competent president.
We need a new model of press, perhaps like the Guardian in the UK that is run like PBS & NPR here (but the Guardian doesn't have to beg for corporate donations). We should also fully fund PBS & NPR, so they aren't beholden to corporations and the foundations of the wealthy to stay in business.
If the presidency of George W. Bush, the Enron collapse, the theft of countless pensions, the attempted theft through privatization of Social Security, the banking crisis, our health insurance system that puts profits ahead of saving lives, and our on-going wars for oil and pipeline routes in the Middle East were not evidence enough, Katherine Weymouth provides further proof that the financial elite in this country is as morally and intellectually crippled as George W. Bush--and just as dangerous when their hands are on the levers of power.
As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
Get ready.
Long after the horror of Vietnam was over, McNamara would concede, in remarks that were like salt in the still festering wounds of the loved ones of those who had died, that he had been “wrong, terribly wrong” about the war. I felt nothing but utter contempt for his concession.
McNamara, it turns out, had realized early on that Vietnam was a lost cause, but he kept that crucial information close to his chest, like a gambler trying to bluff his way through a bad hand, as America continued to send tens of thousands to their doom. How in God’s name did he ever look at himself in a mirror?
Lessons learned from Vietnam? None.
More than 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam and some 2 million to 3 million Vietnamese. More than 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq, and no one knows how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Even as I was writing this, reports were coming in of seven more American G.I.’s killed in Afghanistan — a war that made sense in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, but makes very little sense now.
None of these wars had clearly articulated goals or endgames. None were pursued with the kind of intensity and sense of common purpose and shared sacrifice that marked World War II. Wars are now mostly background noise, distant events overshadowed by celebrity deaths and the antics of Sarah Palin, Mark Sanford and the like.
The obscenity of war is lost on most Americans, and that drains the death of Robert McNamara of any real significance.
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Jackson’s memorial service comes at a tough financial time for the California City. Last month when the Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA Championships, the city was unable to scrounge up enough cash to hold a traditional victory parade, instead opting for a celebration at the Forum. Half of that $2 million tab was reportedly paid for by AEG Live.
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Huffington says that it is Froomkin's views on the media that, for her, is his primary appeal. The key to vibrant, successful journalism, she said, is "getting away from the notion that truth is found by splitting the difference between the two sides, that there is always truth to both sides." Huffington argues that establishment journalism is failing due to "the idea that good journalism is about presenting both sides without a voice -- without any passion." The outlets that continue to adhere to that "obsolete" model "are paying a price." Froomkin -- who has written extensively about how passion-free, "both-sides-are-equally-valid" journalism is the primary affliction of the profession -- echoes that view: "The key challenge is to present an alternative to the 'splitting the difference' culture that has infested traditional media."
Hell, even if she had said, "Governoring is boring and I'm sick of people buggin' me for stuff. I'm headin' to L.A. to make shitloads of money, fuckers," it would have been more honest.
At this point, though, Michael Jackson's funeral has more dignity.
[...] Reading Kristol's pathetic whine of a column is like taking pleasure in watching a man eat a shit sandwich and pretending it's fine ham.
In the Washington Times, Tony Blankley, a man who looks like he just ate a whole meatball sub, writes, "And though many a conventional politician might be seen as a quitter if he resigned from office -- I have a very strong hunch Mrs. Palin is constitutionally incapable of being seen as a quitter. Because she is not. She is constantly taking on the biggest challenge on her horizon." You got that logic? If anyone else quit, they'd be a quitter. But if Palin quits, she's not. Thus Tony Blankley finally achieved his goal of licking his own asshole.
Over on MSNBC's Morning Starbucks, Mika Brzezinski, who always looks like she's just aching for a spanking, said yesterday that if Palin were a man, we wouldn't be judging her so harshly for resigning. She's wrong on that account, but she's right that we'd treat a man differently. We'd call him a "pussy." (Bonus points: Brzezinski declared that she's not a feminist.)
Rahm Emanuel Signals White House Is Willing To Compromise On Public Plan
Dear President Obama,
My wife and I voted for you and like you and want you to succeed, but...
If you do not get a 'public option', you have not 'reformed' health care and your Presidency will be a failure for the rest of your term. Period.
Pardon me for putting it this way, but screw the health 'insurance' industry and its Republican politicians. They're the ones who got us into this mess and they're not the ones who will get us out of it.
The time for 'health care for profit' is over. Unlike the dinosaurs of old, these dinosaurs see the end coming and are fighting it tooth and nail. The American people must win this one and enter the 21st century with health care for all like the civilized nations have.
Health care should be like a beer run: everybody kicks in, everybody gets it, nobody gets rich.
Please do the right thing.
Gordon
President Obama Offers Weak Reassurance that He Will Back Government Option in the End.
"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." —Clarence Darrow (1857–1938)
Well, the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell.
McNamara was the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.

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But last week the budget office scored the full proposed legislation from the Senate committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP). And the news — which got far less play in the media than the downbeat earlier analysis — was very, very good. Yes, we can reform health care.
Let me start by pointing out something serious health economists have known all along: on general principles, universal health insurance should be eminently affordable.
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After all, every other advanced country offers universal coverage, while spending much less on health care than we do. For example, the French health care system covers everyone, offers excellent care and costs barely more than half as much per person as our system.
And even if we didn’t have this international evidence to reassure us, a look at the U.S. numbers makes it clear that insuring the uninsured shouldn’t cost all that much, for two reasons.
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No, instead you sigh, thinking that it's too hot a day. You debate in your mind whether or not this is a real movement or just a bunch of people who too readily believe all the goddamn lies they're fed. You get a free sno-cone (sour apple flavor). You listen to the costumed kids sing, "God Bless America." You leave when the band starts to cover Lee Greenwood's fucking song. You go to see fireworks downtown after the local symphony plays. You hear that people around here don't put pro-choice or pro-Obama stickers on their cars because they'll get keyed. You know this is America, too, yes, and, unlike the tea partygoers, you recognize it because, even as they celebrate a so-called "revolution" and hope for another, some things never change.

Robert McNamara died today at age 93. As Secretary of Defense for Presidents John F. Kennedy and more notably Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s, it was McNamara who oversaw America's tragic military buildup in Vietnam. That made McNamara -- right up until today's news -- a vivid anti-icon to those Baby Boomers who opposed the war -- and I think you can make the case that his death is that of the most historical significance of the slew of recent "celebrity" passings, no matter how many millions of people are gathering outside the Staples Center to remember the Gloved One.
Bob McNamara was not a great man. He was a man with great intelligence that didn't prevent him from executing a plan that led to the unnecessary slaughter -- for reasons that remain hard to fully comprehend -- of tens of thousands of Americans and many more Vietnamese. [...]
The life of Robert McNamara was a personal tragedy, but it was also an American tragedy, our tragedy -- because even after McNamara spelled out everything that went so horribly wrong in Vietnam, he lived long enough to see a new generation of the self-appointed "best and brightest" in Washington pay absolutely no mind to the lessons of our recent past.
In Iraq, as in Vietnam, our policy-makers knew nothing or cared little about the long history and convoluted ethnic and religious politics of Mesopotamia's Fertile Crescent. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, there was no plan for the proper military follow-up to a period of "shock and awe" bombing. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, we totally misjudged the "nationalism" of the people who lived there and how they would react to a long American occupation. And perhaps most importantly, In Iraq, as in Vietnam, there was no real "public debate" as we marched headlong and foolishly into the 2003 -- with way too many "unexamined assumptions," "unasked questions," and "readily dismissed alternatives."
I actually spoke, very briefly, on the phone with McNamara in early 2003 in an effort to interview him for the Daily News. Like a few other journalists in that critical hour, I was hoping some of his tragically acquired wisdom might infuse the tepid pre-war discussions, and like all other reporters in those pre-war months, he told me he was holding off on commenting (as noted in the link above, he had a lot to say in 2006 when it was too late). That was a damned shame -- even though I can't imagine it would have tipped the rigged scales.
IRAQ: U.S. OCCUPIERS FINALLY DRIVEN OUT
Search begins for exiled tyrant Bush.
Percentage of Americans Covered by Private Health Insurance at 50-Year Low
But thank God we don’t have socialized medicine.
Many States on Brink of Financial Collapse
Residents of neighboring states advised to purchase firearms.
FBI: Saddam Told Interrogators He Bluffed Having WMD to Scare Off Iran
Worked like a charm.
The Republican Party of Duval County is backing away from their promotion of an event that featured numerous controversial comparisons of President Barack Obama with German Dictator Adolf Hitler. The event, a Tea Party held at the Jacksonville Landing on July 2, was organized by the First Coast Tea Party. However, the Duval County Republican Party promoted the event with e-mails that stated "Paid by Republican Party of Duval County" ...
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"Israel can determine for itself — it’s a sovereign nation — what’s in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else," he said, in an interview taped in Baghdad at the end of a visit there.
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I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
Invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1761. Music by Wolfgang A. Mozart. Played by French artist Thomas Bloch, exhibiting the glass harmonica in the Paris Music Museum, Nov. 29, 2007.
The instrument, an invention of Benjamin Franklin, was quickly banned after its inception. It was said to provoke insanity. The unique harmonics have also been said to import therapeutic powers.
During a townhall in Waukon, IA Tuesday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) was asked by a constituent of his: “Why is your insurance so much cheaper than my insurance and so better than my insurance?” When Grassley struggled to explain the details of his own health care plan, the elderly man followed up, “Okay, so how come I can’t have the same thing you have?” Grassley said, “You can. Just go work for the federal government.” (my em)
[...] Sarah Palin makes Mark Foley, the congressman who sent filthy emails to pages look almost normal. She makes David Vitter, the senator who was hanging out with hookers, look almost boring. She makes Larry Craig, caught hitting on a cop in a men's room, look almost stable. She makes John Ensign, the senator who was having an affair with a staffer, look almost humdrum (and compared to the rest of the GOP whack-jobs, he is). And she makes Mark Sanford, the governor with the Latin lover, look positively predictable.
It was an almost impossible mission, but in resigning from office with 17 months to go in her first term, Sarah Palin has made herself the bull goose loony of the GOP.
[...] A lot of people thought that about George W. Bush. He couldn't be so block-headed, they said. He couldn't be as childish and churlish as he came off. Oh yes he could. And so, too, might Ms. Palin be as vapid and puerile as her inane statement suggests.
We will know. In the fullness of time (and I predict, not much time) we will know. Again and again in her statement, Gov. Palin returned to the nettlesome ethics inquiries that have been visited upon her since she signed on to be John McCain's running mate. No doubt they are annoying. But does anyone believe that's why she's resigning? No, there's more to this story. And Ms. Palin's resignation only increases the chances that we will all know the rest of the story soon. Or, as she might put it:
We will all KNOW the "rest of the Story" *((SOON!))*
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"I'll sue you for defamation!" is the toothless wonder of the legal world. The bluster is meant to scare people, intimidate them, and get them to be quiet. In this particular case, it's not going to work ...
Liberal groups, such as MoveOn and SEIU, and liberal bloggers (such as Jane Hamsher and our own Joe Sudbay) have been pressuring Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu to support the public option in health care reform (i.e., some kind of public health insurance plan). Landrieu has been adamantly opposed to anything resembling a public option. So groups like MoveOn have been running ads against her.
Well, our president will have none of that, He want us all to stop trying to get Landrieu to support a public option. Specifically, he wants them to stop running this ad.
Yes, let's not pressure bad Democrats to support keep provisions of the most importance piece of legislation of Obama's presidency, let alone the next decade.
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Labels: Saturday Emmylou Blogging
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,
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But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
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And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
North Korea has test fired seven missiles off its eastern coast, according to South Korea.
The move is likely to be seen as another act of defiance against the US - coming as it does on Independence Day.
A spokesman reports Sarah Palin is resigning as Alaska governor effective July 26.

A U.S. Marine from 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, RCT 2nd Battalion 8th Marines Echo Co. runs to a new position on July 3, 2009 in Main Poshteh, Afghanistan. The Marines are part of Operation Khanjar which was launched to take areas in the Southern Helmand Province that Taliban fighters are using as a supply route and to help the local Afghan population prepare for the upcoming presidential elections. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)
President Barack Obama and Iraqi leaders may try to sugarcoat the bitter pill for the United States by talking up the achievements of the six-year occupation, but the public celebrations by Iraqis marking the American pullout from Iraq’s cities tell the painful story of a U.S. strategic failure.
The big news organizations also didn’t want to admit their own complicity in this crime since almost everyone in American journalism, who wanted to keep a comfortable seat at the Establishment’s table, either endorsed the enterprise or kept quiet.
So even today – more than five months after Bush left office – it’s still much easier to dismiss what happened as “unnecessary,” to cite the pre-war “intelligence failures,” and to criticize Bush primarily for his tactical misjudgments in planning an effective occupation -- not committing enough troops and not having a detailed enough post-invasion plan.
Accusing him of criminality is much trickier. After all, in the view of the mainstream news media, war crimes are something that “rogue states” commit, petty tyrants from Rwanda or Yugoslavia who can then be dragged off to The Hague and put on trial.
Such humiliations are not for the former “Leader of the Free World” and his subordinates (nor for an ex-British prime minister). [...]
At this point, chances of any serious accountability look slim to none. Though a vocal supporter of international law, President Obama has made it clear that he won’t tolerate any serious investigation of the Bush administration’s crimes. Obama says he wants “to look forward, not backward.”
As part of that ducking of the past, Obama also can be expected to avoid describing the war as a failure. That would only provoke Republicans and right-wing pundits to accuse him of defeatism and “apologizing for America.”
Instead, to protect the withdrawal’s political flanks, Obama will pretend that the sacrifice of American troops achieved great things in Iraq.
The irony was that Bush’s desire to use the SOFA to cement a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq had the opposite result.
Given broad Iraqi opposition to the U.S. occupation, Iraqi political factions decided to position themselves as defenders of the nation’s sovereignty, not as American puppets.
The likely outcome in Iraq now appears to be the departure of U.S. forces with Washington left with little to show for its investment in blood and treasure. As the Washington Post reported on June 30, “there is little talk among U.S. commanders and diplomats of engineering a victory in the 2½ years they expect to remain here.”
For the United States, memories of its military intervention in a country halfway around the world may fade gradually into history, swallowed by the shifting sands of the ancient land of Mesopotamia, another chapter of failed imperial overreach in that region, a long and bloody saga dating back to Biblical times.
Despite the terrible price in lives, money and prestige, little may remain of Bush’s macho adventure besides the eventual recognition of a painful strategic defeat for the United States.
The FBI has released reports on 20 interviews and five conversations conducted with Iraq’s deposed dictator Saddam Hussein before he was put to death, but none of the disclosed Q and A deals with the role of the Reagan administration in delivering key components for Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons in the 1980s.
The gaps in the FBI reports also underscore the historical travesty that resulted from the Bush administration’s handling of Saddam Hussein after his capture on Dec. 13, 2003, near Tikrit, eight months after the U.S.-led invasion toppled his government.
Instead of being turned over to the international criminal court at The Hague, where he could have been thoroughly interrogated, Hussein was kept under tight U.S. control until he was handed over to his Iraqi enemies on Dec. 30, 2006, for a chaotic hanging.
While President George W. Bush and many of his supporters were thrilled with the execution – what the New York Times called Bush’s “triumphal bookend” to the Iraq invasion – the hanging was not just rough justice meted out to a harsh dictator. It also snuffed out a dangerous witness who could have implicated senior Republicans, including Bush’s father.
Important chapters of history died with Hussein on the gallows. Hussein was a unique witness with the broadest knowledge about who arranged and sold the precursor components for his unconventional weapons that were used to kill Iranian troops and Iraqi civilians.
In death, Hussein couldn’t disclose what George W. Bush’s first Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said during that famous hand-shake meeting in 1983, nor whether he got an alleged message from Vice President George H.W. Bush in the mid-1980s about how best to deploy Iraq’s air force against Iran, nor if then-deputy CIA director Robert Gates was running interference for Iraq’s military supply line in the 1980s.
It was the elder George Bush, as Vice President, who allegedly oversaw the covert U.S. operation to assist Hussein’s war machine during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War; Rumsfeld, as special U.S. envoy to the Middle East, held private chats with the Iraqi dictator about his war needs; and Gates, as a senior CIA official, reportedly rebuffed Israeli protests about U.S. tolerance for third-country military shipments to Iraq, including precursor chemicals.
All those important Republicans and more could breathe a little easier after the hangman’s noose choked the life out of Hussein. (Gates remains in government as President Barack Obama's defense secretary.)
Behold, the ongoing, increasingly startling research: homosexual and bisexual behavior, it turns out, is rampant in the animal kingdom. And by rampant, I mean proving to be damn near universal, commonplace across all species everywhere, existing for myriad reasons ranging from pure survival and procreative influence, right on over to pure pleasure, co-parenting, giddy screeching multiple monkey orgasm, even love, and a few dozen other potential explanations science hasn't quite figured out yet. Imagine.
Are you thinking, why sure, everyone knows about those sex-crazed dolphins and those superslut bonobo monkeys and the few other godless creatures like them, the sea turtles and the weird sheep and such, creatures who obviously haven't read Leviticus. But that's about it, right? Most animals are devoutly hetero and straight and damn happy about it, right?
Wrong.
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It's finally happened. They broke my brain.
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Well, this should be interesting. We've been hearing for years that the only thing stopping the Democratic party from asserting itself, from following through on its promises, was the lack of that all-mighty 60-vote majority in the Senate. And now they have it. So, Senator Reid, and President Obama, bring it on.
Oops, never mind.
Sprawling across the northeastern corner of California, this huge, thickly forested county with more cows than people epitomizes the Western frontier - and what seems to be a two-faced political ideology.
Modoc has the highest Republican registration of any county in California, it unfailingly elects anti-tax Republicans to office, and the vote here against last month's ballot measure that would have raised a variety of taxes was one of the most lopsided in the state. And yet, per capita, Modoc County gets more state taxpayer dollars than all but one of California's 58 counties.
The prevailing attitude among the right-wing ranchers and modern hippies who define Modoc County is of fierce self-reliance - but more people here than just about anywhere else depend on welfare checks of some kind to get by.
So with state Republicans blocking new taxes and insisting on deep cuts in taxpayer-funded services, does that make this most solid of GOP bases politically conflicted? Or, worse, just plain ignorant?
On a rare fine day in Juneau, not long ago, Palin was seen sitting in the sunshine in the broad plaza near the state capitol, alone with her thoughts and some reading material for more than an hour and a half. Down the hillside below her, the big cruise liners that ply Alaska’s Inside Passage in the summer months were beginning to call in the port. Only two years have elapsed since William Kristol and his colleagues disembarked from one of them and hearkened to her siren call. Sarah Palin might well have been wondering whether her own ship is going out, or just coming in.
“I'm sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign.”
Loyalists to Palin, including Kristol, were outraged at Purdum’s piece, believing it to be another example of what they see as elite media contempt for the Wasilla native.
Cue the shrieks-- It Came from Wasilla: Miss Personality...Disorder
[...] Before, during, or after 2012 she's gonna make Blagojevich look like a paragon of mental health and reason.
Snowe: Public Option Would Be Too Cheap For Consumers!
Xerox has named Ursula Burns as its new chief executive officer, making her the first African American woman to run a Fortune 500 company.
Burns will take over on July 1, 2009, replacing Anne Mulcahy.
The 50-year-old new boss worked her way up the corporate ladder from a summer internship in 1980 to the CEO position. She has also been a member of the board of directors since 2007.
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Invent a time machine and go back to June 2005. Make bets with people that in four years’ time we’ll have a black Democratic president with the middle name “Hussein.” Then up the ante by predicting that the Democrats will have 60 seats in the Senate. Then top if off by betting that one of those seats will belong to Al Franken.
I mean, four years ago, I would have been too ashamed to post such a prediction anywhere, even if I were anonymously trolling over at Red State. Times do indeed change.
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Last year, Oklahoma state legislator Sally Kern (R) drew well-deserved criticism for an outlandish rant against the gay community, in which she compared homosexuality to “toe cancer” and said “it’s the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam.” “Studies show that no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted more than, you know, a few decades. So it’s the death knell of this country,” said Kern.
Kern is now pushing a “Oklahoma Citizen’s Proclamation for Morality” that blames America’s “economic woes” on “abortion, pornography, same sex marriage, sex trafficking, divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse ,and many other forms of debauchery”:
WHEREAS, we believe our economic woes are consequences of our greater national moral crisis; and
WHEREAS, this nation has become a world leader in promoting abortion, pornography, same sex marriage, sex trafficking, divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse, and many other forms of debauchery;
Only one of the bidders for the eight contracts to run oil and gas fields in Iraq has accepted oil ministry terms.
Six oil fields and two gas fields were available in a televised auction that was the first big oil tender in Iraq since the invasion of 2003.
BP and China's CNPC agreed to run the 17 billion barrel Rumaila field after Exxon Mobil turned it down.
The Minnesota Supreme Court affirms that Franken won his Senate seat.
Governor Tim Pawlenty said on MSNBC Tuesday that he would sign the certificate if the court ordered him to.
Former Senator Norm Coleman has conceded. Al Franken will be Minnesota’s new U.S. Senator.
For most people religion is source of guidance for their lives and comfort when they are troubled. For some it is just a big, fucking Gravy Train.
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Gale Storm, who shot to the top on television as the vivacious star of two popular 1950s situation comedies, "My Little Margie" and "The Gale Storm Show: Oh! Susanna," has died. She was 87.
A summer replacement for "I Love Lucy," "My Little Margie" ran from 1952 to 1955, with Storm starring as the plucky young Margie Albright and Charles Farrell as her widower father, Vern. Although critics generally panned "My Little Margie" as a lightweight farce, the public fell in love with the mischievous Margie. A 1953 poll of the most popular TV stars listed Storm at No. 2, behind TV comedy queen Lucille Ball.
After "My Little Margie" ended, Storm starred in "The Gale Storm Show: Oh! Susanna," in which she played social director Susanna Pomeroy aboard the luxury liner the SS Ocean Queen*. The situation comedy, featuring Zasu Pitts as the ship's flighty beautician Elvira "Nugey" Nugent and Roy Roberts as Capt. Huxley, ran from 1956 to 1960.
In 1980, she returned to the limelight as the commercial spokeswoman for Raleigh Hills Hospital, the now-defunct alcohol treatment chain where she had been treated for a serious bout with alcoholism.
Fox Nation Pushes ‘Satire’ Site’s Article About Ridge Attacking Limbaugh As Fact-Based Truth
On his radio show, Limbaugh responded to Ridge, saying, “I must have missed something, because I remember that Colin Powell endorsed the Democrat, Barack Obama, at a strategic point in the campaign in 2008.” The blog, Elective Decisions, which features “the satire of Chris Davis,” then wrote up a post saying that Ridge responded to Rush by challenging him to a fight:
So this morning, Ridge went back on Washington Journal, responding to Limbaugh’s rhetoric. “I’m so sick of Rush Limbaugh. He’s the reason we lose elections. He needs to get the hell out of the Republican Party. As far as I’m concerned, he isn’t a Republican anymore. The man’s running. The man’s hiding. He’s too scared to face me!”
Ridge continued his rant, threatening Limbaugh. “Meanwhile, he sits there in his ‘Southern Command Post,’ and destroys the Republican Party! I’d like to just have three rounds in a boxing ring with that guy so I could shut him up! I’m caling (sic) you out, Limbaugh. Let’s see if you have a big enough set of marbles to back up your crap!”
Though the “Elective Decisions” blog is clearly marked as “satire,” the Fox Nation linked to the post and promoted it as if it were based on reported facts:
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This isn’t the first time Fox News has promoted a parody as truth. In 2007, the network aired at least eight segments on a purported “news” story that was actually a parody article written by a publication similar to The Onion.
VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif.—The Air Force successfully launched an unarmed Minuteman 3 intercontinental ballistic missile Monday from the California coast to an area in the Pacific Ocean some 4,200 miles away.
NYC Drivers Voted Angriest, Most Aggressive
Celebrate victory by roughing up police, burning taxicabs.
Rep. Bachmann: Census Could Be Used to Put People in Internment Camps
Her thesis: census takers hired by ACORN identify God-fearing patriots, report them to liberal authorities who arrest them or have them thrown in a wood-chipper or, in her case, examined by a team of psychiatrists.
Book: Great Works of Literature Reduced to Tweets
Cliffs Notes reduced to three syllables.
MEXICO CITY — The Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, was ousted by the army on Sunday after pressing ahead with plans for a referendum that opponents said could lay the groundwork for his eventual re-election, in the first military coup in Central America since the end of the cold war.
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Now, with more than 30 members, the regulators put on such events as Railroad Days and Windows on History, to entertain and educate locals about the rich history of this little mountain town. Apparently, Truckee wasn’t as sleepy in the 1800s as many believe it to be.
Even their name, the Regulators 601, is historic, borrowed from other groups that lived in Truckee near the end of the 19th century.
To keep in line with the times, Deveney says its important for this "bunch of old guys playing cowboys" to have their own corruptible politician at hand, namely Susman. "He can’t be bought, but he can be rented damn cheaply," Deveney jokes.
dear socialist fuckstick,
i am well awear of the fact that liberals are immune to logic and reason, but allow me to try to prove to you that you are communist scum thrugh something called the scientific method:
1 a) FACT: you suck obamas cock every chance youget. you defend everythign he does and says and you are nothing more than an apologist. this makes you complicit in obamas actions.
1 b) FACT: obama is a well known socialist. this is evident his policies and his love of SELFDESCRIBED COMMUNISTS LIKE BILL AYERS!!!! so dont thinkthat he can hide his true nature for much longer. he will eventully be exposed and impeached. SOCIALISM CANNOT WORK OR RUSSIA WOULD STILL EXIST AND THEY WOULD NEVER HAVE LOST THE COLD WAR TO REAGAN!!! retard.
1 c) you are thusly a pro forma socialist; whether you like it or not. logic dictates this.
(2) FACT: you, sir, are a illegal immigrant. i dont give two shits whether you are an american citizen or not: you came here on taxpayer expense and you continue to drain our limited resources. you should be ashamed and go back to guatemala or whatever fucking middleeastern asshole you came from and try to sell yor leftwing bullshit there.
(3) FACT: you are also OBJECTIVELY ANTIAMERICAN!!!!!!!! dont even try to deny this for there is ample prof: in 2004 you openly supported the murder of four brave american soldiers in falluja. you tryed to weasel out of your responsiblity, but you cant hide the fact that you hate america and american soldiers and you love al queda and other muslim terrorists who have killed THOUSANDS OF AMERICANS!!!! and will never stop unless they are killed. and whose going to kill them? you? LOL you dont even own a gun because you leftofascists want to repel the second amendent.
(4) FACT: it is clear that you are a socialist illegal immigrant america hater. there is prima facies proof as above. and if logic and science says you are scum then you are scum (remember global warming? no proof, just science and that makes it true for you liberals) no matter what you think. however, i dont think you are a homo, just a homo enabler.
this doesnt mean that we cant have common ground. if you stop publishing antiamerican communist screeds, then i will stop hating you. fair?
sincerely yours
glenn
The Lovell Sisters perform at Bonnaroo 2009 on "This Tent" Stage!! Song: Bleeding Heart (written by Jimi Hendrix) | For more information about The Lovell Sisters, visit: www.lovellsistersband.com
And here, from this week, is an example of how Rush is faring. In sorting out the why's and wherefore's of "this [Gov. Mark] Sanford business," Limbaugh said, he actually said:
This is almost like: I don't give a damn! Country's going to hell in a handbasket. I just want out of here! He had just tried to fight the stimulus money coming to South Carolina. He didn't want any part of it. He lost the battle and said, "What the hell? The Federal government is taking over! I want to enjoy life!"
Yes, it's one for the psychiatric record-books, folks: In Rush Limbaugh's increasingly dark, desperate and distorted mind, a $787 billion economic stimulus package is believable-enough stimulation to send a perfectly proper, right-thinking Southern governor into a follow-up exploration of Argentina's forbidden bush country.
So I put this to you: That's beyond strategic broadcasting; that's just plain nuts. And it just may be that Rush has been acting the lunatic for so long -- stridently bashing the left and absolving the right for ever-greater fun and profit -- he has finally become a genuine, certifiable one.
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
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WASHINGTON - The family of a woman killed Monday is dealing with more than just grief in the aftermath of Metro's deadliest accident in history.
The family of Ana Fernandez says they have been getting hate-filled telephone messages about whether or not Fernandez, a mother of six, was a legal immigrant.
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[...] Pop culture just died. Didn't you hear?
First, it was the beauty. How many countless millions of feverish boyhood fantasies were spawned by 1970's Farrah Fawcett? How many of our admittedly vapid and slightly sexist, yet somehow also wondrous and utterly divine ideas of lust and desire and perfect all-American prettiness were inspired by her uncomplicated sparkle, that Barbie-doll hair?
I am unashamed to say, I had that poster on my wall. Most every male I know of that generation had that poster on his wall. It was some sort of boyhood law, a requirement, a key to the Kingdom of Testosterone. Chances are you don't even need to click that link to know which poster I'm talking about. Chances are you can close your eyes and see it in a split second, and sigh. Sex and beauty and Americana and teeth and sex and hope and hairdryers and carefree love and bathing suits and shimmer and sex. Farrah made it all possible.
But even that glorious, soft-focus icon is no match for the King of Pop. There is no contest.
BAGHDAD — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has taken to calling the withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq’s cities by next Tuesday a “great victory,” a repulsion of foreign occupiers he compares to the rebellion against British troops in 1920.
The day itself has been declared a national holiday, though it is not yet clear whether Iraq will hold the “feast and festivals” he recently promised.
More than 150 American bases or outposts have been closed in Iraqi cities this year — 85 percent of the total, an Iraqi official said — including some that commanders considered crucial.
The Americans asked to keep open an outpost in Sadr City, the Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad that once served as the base of Shiite militias, only to be rebuffed.
“This is one we wanted,” Brig. Gen. John M. Murray said. “The Iraqi government said ‘no,’ so now we are leaving.”
Far from a celebration, the deadline has provoked uncertainty and even dread among average Iraqis, underscoring the potential problems that Mr. Maliki could face if bloodshed intensifies.
Even some Iraqi officers are worried. Brig. Gen. Mahmoud Muhsen, a commander with the First Division of the Iraqi National Police, grimly predicted that sectarian violence could return. He warned that control of Iraq’s borders remained ineffective, allowing more foreign fighters to enter.
“They are taking away all the equipment that the Americans provide,” he said, “and with the agenda of countries neighboring Iraq, it is a recipe for disaster.”
“When the Americans get out of city centers, a big war will start,” a woman who identified herself as Um Hussan said amid the wreckage of a bombing on Monday outside her house in the Ur neighborhood of Baghdad. It has been months, she added, since she last saw American forces there.
“We ask God to help us for what is coming,” she said
Iraq opens fields; Exxon, Shell seek foothold
“Iraq is the big prize in the region,” said Raja Kiwan, a Dubai-based analyst at consultants PFC Energy. “It is one of the only remaining areas that provide the level of upside for companies who want to access reserves.”
I guess we'll have to put up with one long, one-week media circus bukkakke of freakishness about Michael Jackson ...
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"We were just lucky to be here today," said Kyle Joyce of Sacramento, who came to the hospital after hearing the news while walking on Venice Beach. "We just wanted to see it with our own eyes."
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