Dear 2010; Be not like 2009

Mark Morford on the end of the worst year and decade in living memory and what the future may hold:

Please let us never go through sh-t like that ever again

Let us just say it outright: Good riddance to the Zeros. It was, as widely noted, the decade from hell. It was easily one of the worst periods in recent American history, upwards of 3600 days drenched in fear and ignorance and bitter divisiveness, nipples and anthrax and macho shock n' awe, economic implosions and endless conservative puling about God and gays and terrorism, all slashed through with so much political misprision and presidential ineptitude it's going to require many more years until we the deep, humiliating scars inflicted by Dubya & Co. are fully healed.

What else? Take your pick. Assuming even modestly successful scenarios, the coming decade will see the end of two botched, miserable, costly wars begun by a president who had little clue as to what the hell he was doing but plenty of hawkish cronyism and false cowboy Christian machismo to make him do it.

Climate change will cause enough ice to melt in the mountains of Turkey that Noah's Ark will finally be revealed as verifiable truth. Archaeologists will discover the big ol' boat was full of Buddha statues and Shakti icons and golden Dionysus sculptures and huge stone fertility penises, giant wine vessels and goddess offerings and the seeds of many hallucinogenic plants, indicating it was actually the site the first and greatest pagan bacchanalia party cruise of all time.

Will all be positive and inspiring? Will there be dancing in the streets and recovered tuna stocks and free Wi-Fi in the Gaza Strip? Will all brooding teen vampires shut up and die? What are you, high?

A million things could go wrong, and almost certainly will. There is no shortage of ignorance, religious puling, teabagging deathpanel birther Palin-esque whinebot Glenn Beck laughingstocks. But if the '00s were the decade of alarmism and a desperate clinging to Christian Puritan myth, let the '10s be the decade of integrity and movement, experimentation and possibility and a complete, messy, fundamental overhaul of all we thought we were. What, you have a better idea?

Sure do. Where do I sign up for that cruise?

Underwear Bombers

Now I'll be scared of my skivvies! You should be afraid of my skivvies too...

Thanks to YubaNet.

A Rude End To 2009

Just go to The Rude Pundit and start reading. Here's some examples:

End of the Year Haiku

The blood of the rich
Flooding our dead nation's streets
May improve my mood

Rush Limbaugh's fat ass
Is kissed each day by the right
Yet Dems fear his farts

Oh, How this year blew.
If Limbaugh kicks the bucket
It will have blown less.

Glenn Beck's dervish whirl
Mesmerized maniac minds
To scream at phantoms

Many more.

Our Destruction Seeds Sown: A Final "Fuck-Off" to This Awful Decade

4. Fuck off, Republicans in Congress. You spent most of the decade sucking the syphilitic cocks of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, turning yourselves into accessories to the crimes that have wrecked the country, and now you actually have the balls to think you're right in roadblocking even minor corrections in our self-destructive course? (Concomitant fuck-off: every pundit who supported the Iraq "war" and who mocked the idea that the housing bubble would burst.)

5. Fuck off, God, Allah, Death, or whoever or nobody. In the last ten years, you took out out just about every single living writer who influenced the Rude Pundit: Arthur Miller, Molly Ivins, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Pryor, Hunter S. Thompson, Spaulding Gray. And then you wasted his favorite city with a combination of Hurricane Katrina and a refusal to smite the incompetent assholes who helped wreck it. Yeah, fuck you hard.

Things That Brought the Rude Pundit Unrestrained Joy in 2009:

3. Lady Gaga's performances at the MTV Video Music Awards and at the American Music Awards. Bleeding and hanging like a corpse at the end of a song? Singing in a nude unitard while sitting at a flaming piano and smashing champagne bottles on the edge? That shit's art, Madonna crossed with Diamanda Galas.

He forgot to mention the whiskey he must have consumed in mass quantities...

Part 2: These White Men Are Gonna Get Us All Killed:

1. Fuck off, Al Gore. If you wanted to pinpoint a single reason that this decade has sucked the hair off monkey balls, you would have to pick the moment that Al Gore decided to be a pussy and give up on the 2000 election. In what should have been a slamdunk of an election, Gore ran away from the Clinton legacy and into a tight race with an inbred Mongoloid. It's not just his stupid-ass decision to want a recount in isolated places in Florida instead of the whole state or his legal team's stupid-ass argument before an already-tilted Supreme Court. It's that if he had wanted and asked, the power was within a single Senator to stop the certification of an election he knew was fucked. It was as if Gore didn't want to inconvenience anyone at that moment, thus maintaining a Democratic pattern that exists to this day. Sure, he's done a great deal of good in "raising awareness" as a glorified spokesmodel for global warming. But do you see any major action occurring to, shit, stop global warming? You know how you could have actually accomplished some of those green goals, Al? By being fucking president.

The Machines Own Us:

For every good use of the technology that now controls every aspect of our lives, there's thousands of ways it is destroying us.

4. Fuck off, Twitter and Facebook. Hey, who needs the government setting up all kinds of surveillance when so many people are willing to announce where the fuck they are and what they fuck they're doing at any given moment. Twitter, Facebook, and, to a lesser extent, MySpace have created a world of exhibitionists who are willing to let strangers look at pictures of their children and where people attempt to be profound in less words than it takes to order a meal at McDonald's. They've created the illusion of "friendship" where none actually exists, thus devaluing what real friendship is. If a click is all it takes to "defriend" people, they weren't friends. It led to this moment for the Rude Pundit: "Oh, really, person I haven't seen since third grade, your cat brought you a dead mouse and gave it to you as a gift? How fascinating." He wanted to write, "Fuck you and your cat. May the zombie mouse eat your brains" and then he realized how pathetic it was to even be tempted to comment on a status update about a goddamn cat owned by a virtual version of someone he hadn't seen in 25 years. And then he just felt sad.

5. Fuck off, internet porn. It mainstreamed porn and somehow made it more degrading than it actually was. It wrecked relationships and jobs. And it fucked up porn. Like overused CGI in films, you can see anything you want. If anyone with a webcam can film two legless Russian women fucking each other with their wooden legs while getting shit on by a donkey that's getting blown by an albino tranny, well...wait, what are we talking about?

(Note: The Rude Pundit uses all of the above. You either join the collective or you will be eliminated.)

O Ja!

Much, much more. Enjoy, if that is the word.

A Recruiting Video You Want To Believe...

There are more of these on YouTube than you can shake a stick at!

Thanks to bobos130.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Beautiful.

From Wembley Festival 1988

Emmylou Harris ~ Diamond In My Crown

Thanks to 1000Magicians, UK

Party ...

Like it's 1999. You only got a little under a year and a half left:

Harold Camping lets out a hearty chuckle when he considers the people who believe the world will end in 2012.

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The real date for the end of times, he says, is in 2011.

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Camping, 88, has scrutinized the Bible for almost 70 years and says he has developed a mathematical system to interpret prophecies hidden within the Good Book. One night a few years ago, Camping, a civil engineer by trade, crunched the numbers and was stunned at what he'd found: The world will end May 21, 2011.

...

Marking my calendar now ...

Thanks to Tengrain for the link.

Stuff you can go to jail for today that was OK yesterday...

Fixer and I have sort of an ongoing contest to see which of California's and New York's legislatures is the more useless. It's close. It ebbs and flows depending on the day.

I'm claiming No. 1 today!

Go read some of the new laws going into effect today in California. You decide.

LATimes

California ushers in new laws limiting trans fats, the paparazzi and more

In 2010, hundreds of new rules will be enforced. Among them, a ban on shortening cows' tails; a $20,000 fine for human trafficking; and tougher penalties for mortgage fraud and watching dogfights.

There are many, some good, some kinda silly, but here's one that made me shake my head:

Vietnam veterans: Establishes an annual Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day on March 30.

At first I thought maybe this was long past due until I realized that some of those guys ain't back yet. Maybe about 2050 we'll get a law like this for Iraq and Afghanistan vets. And then another one in 2090 and...

I don't have a problem ...

With it in general, though I don't need the raucous laughter and pointing.

Have We Learned Anything from the Bush Years?

Washington's Blog, a 'recommended read'.

Fear makes people stupid.

It makes us unable to think straight. And it makes us give up our power to tough-talking authoritarians.

The Bush maladministration and Repugs in general well know this. It's their main tool for trying to get what they want to their enrichment and our detriment.

Have we learned anything from the revelations that the Bush administration lied us into the need for a war in Iraq, lied about the need for torture, lied about the reason for spying, loss of constitutional rights, and an overwhelmingly powerful executive branch?

Have we learned anything from the discovery that unnecessary war, torture and panic over sporadic terrorist attacks create more terrorism and reduce national security?

Or will our fear of the underwear bomber and other terrorist acts scare us into stupidity again, as it did so many people during the Bush years?

Sure, if we let them, and they are damn sure still working the fear tactic.

Did we learn anything during the Bush Era? Some of us did and too many didn't.

Continue the march.

Why Did the Bush Administration Send Hardcore Terrorists Back to Al-Qaida?

This ties in somewhat with Fixer's post below.

Evan Kohlmann at Counterterrorism Blog:

One of the most troubling aspects of the recent explosion of activity by Al-Qaida in Yemen (otherwise known as "Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula") is the role being played by Saudi nationals who are former detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. At least eleven former Saudi Gitmo prisoners who were sent back home by the Bush administration between 2003-2007 have promptly rejoined Al-Qaida in Yemen -- including individuals who made no secret of their intentions upon being released. [...]

That's correct: the U.S. military repeatedly warned the Bush administration in advance that almost half of the former Saudi Gitmo detainees who have rejoined Al-Qaida continued to represent active threats to the United States--and yet they were released anyway, evidently for political reasons. There are serious questions here that must be immediately addressed by those within the former Bush administration responsible for this inept decision-making process.

Fat chance, and 'inept' is far too kind a word for war criminal terrorist enablers.

FBI lying about Flight 253?

Go read this eyewitness account of what happened after Flight 253 landed.

Following up on a visit from FBI officials about an eyewitness account first described to MLive.com, Michigan attorney Kurt Haskell described the visit in comment sections across MLive on Wednesday.

Today is the second worst day of my life after 12-25-09. Today is the day that I realized that my own country is lying to me and all of my fellow Americans. Let me explain.

Do not miss this.

Comments here.

Quote of the Day

Greenwald:

It's so striking how often the agenda of America's Right and the desires of Al Qaeda Terrorists perfectly coincide ...

Fun fact ...

From Maru:

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Bonus: supposedly the hospital he [Rush Lintball] is being treated at is the same one he accused of lying about Prez Obama's birth.

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Dinosaur ...

Your landline probably won't make it through the next decade:

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The (almost) one in five Americans relying exclusively on a plain old telephone line should prepare to kiss that wall jack goodbye as the major wireline telephone providers back away from that dying (and expensive business). However, AT&T in its filing doesn’t offer a way to bridge the gap for that 20 percent of Americans relying only on landlines, nor does it address what an all-IP future means for the 33 percent of Americans who have access to broadband but do not subscribe (although those broadband laggards might be paying for a digital voice product from a cable provider).

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We kissed Ma Bell goodbye last month and now get TV, interwebs, and phone through the cable company. All that costs about as much as our AT&T bill did.

Thanks to Cookie Jill for the link.

2010 ...

Things are already looking up!

TheConservatives.com, the Washington Times Web project that was billed as an ambitious "multiplatform" venture to allow "the Joe the Plumbers of the world to speak up to major thinkers, like Newt Gingrich," has gone silent.

Brian Faughnan, editor of the site, tells us the Times has officially canceled the project.

...

Link thanks to Roger Ailes the Good.

We still ain't square ...

Nucks:

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It might be 2010 but 2000 to 2009 needs to be seriously remembered as the years that this country got robbed, raped and sent the bill for the pleasure of having it done so many times the drapes are beyond cleaning.

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Happy New Year

Thanks to bsl128.

It Is Hereby Resolved...

Mad Kane's guide to New Year's Resolutions:

What is it about December 31st that spurs fantasies of self-reform? Is it too much food and drink? Seasonal exuberance? Lunacy induced by crowds?

Every December, otherwise rational people make resolutions meant to transform them into organized, addiction-free souls with clean houses, healthy bodies, wholesome relationships, perfect children, and career paths soaring to the top -- the same vows they made last year and the year before that.

Can our resolutions endure past January 1st? Can we make it to year's end without ripping up our lists?

AGREEMENT entered into this ___________ (Date) by Husband and Wife (jointly called "Couple").

WHEREAS, New Year's Eve is coming and Couple feel compelled to make some vows:

NOW, THEREFORE, Couple make the following New Year's Resolution Agreement:

Go.

Happy New Year, Mad.

"Maybe the problem is that we haven't cleaned up after the Bush administration fast enough."

Worth a watch in case you missed it.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Quote of the Day

Montag:

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Many would say it is not right to wish ill on anyone. That we should take a christian approach and forgive our enemies, but I am not a christian. I am hoping, despite the best efforts of the cardiac staff that his heart is screaming "FUCK YOU RUSH!" as it does a Palin on him and quits. One less enemy of the United States.

Indeed!