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Well, Shitfire and Sweet Zombie Jesus, folks, I have "great potential" to be elected Pope - and I'm neither a priest nor a Catholic. These apparatchiks and their slimy enablers in the press keep telling us this, but they can't articulate a specific victory goal beyond nebulous shit like a "free Iraq."
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In a typical display of time honored hypocrisy, God's Old Party, perennial defenders of wholesome Christian family values, has lobbied for extended bar hours during its five-day circle jerk in St. Paul later this summer.
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The popular war preznit has regained his footing... oh, I'm sorry, Mr Broder, make that "Bush's approval rating has dropped to 'Easter Bunny believer' and 'UFO abduction survivor' adherent levels."
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1. John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now he says his position has "evolved," yet he's continued to oppose key civil rights laws.1
4 times against it
2. According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, Russia and China. Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain "will make Cheney look like Gandhi."2
100 years in Iraq
Bomb Iran
3. His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.
More CCain hypocrisy
4. McCain opposes a woman's right to choose. He said, "I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned."
voting record
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And putting aside the purely legal obstacles to a prosecution for war crimes, there's also the political cost. Why would an Obama or Clinton Administration waste precious political capital early on with a politically divisive prosecution of former government officials? One can imagine the screaming of countless pundits arguing that the Democrats were trying to criminalize political disagreements about foreign policy. Such a prosecution would make politics extremely bitter and derail any chance for bipartisan cooperation on almost any significant issue. Obama or Clinton would rather get a health care bill passed, deal with the economy, or try to solve the Iraq mess, than have the first several years of their Administrations consumed by a prosecution for war crimes by officials in the Bush Administration.
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Study: Lead-tainted marijuana poisoned users
That was a very significant moment at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings with Amb. Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus. Joe Biden asked Amb. Crocker where it would be better for American national security interests to eliminate Al Qaeda in Iraq or Al Qaeda along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Crocker had nowhere to hide with that question.
Crocker, in an impossible political position -- give the correct answer and humiliate the Bush administration; give the administration's answer and look like a fool -- dodged as much as he could. Then Biden forced him down. Crocker: "I would therefore pick Al Qaeda on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border."
Game over.
Every single argument that the Administration and their lapdogs like John McCain have made or are making break down after that answer. The Ambassdor to Iraq just admitted that Iraq is not the central front in the war on terror. He just admitted that the potential for Al Qaeda to gain a beachhead in Iraq should the United States withdraw is miniscule compared to the already-established beachhead along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. He admitted that the global fight against terror is currently misdirected.
Well, it's official. Getting out of Iraq is now exclusively the next president's problem.
They refused to acknowledge that reasonable people might disagree with them.
And, as they demonstrated yesterday and in their testimony last September, no matter what the situation on the ground, they are able to use it as an argument for staying the course.
"But the bottom line was that there was no bottom line.
On ABC's World News, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulous summed up yesterday's testimony this way:
Gibson: "George, did anything change today?"
Stephanopoulous: "Not much, Charlie. I think this was one, big exercise in kicking the can down the road."
MSNBC host Chris Matthews weighed in: "I didn't get anything out of it except that we're staying there indefinitely; there is no condition we can point to. Petraeus and Crocker never told us what to look for so we can know when we're getting close to the end of the tunnel. I was very dissatisfied by the hearings."
"On the contrary, they cited the very problems that Bush created by his decision to invade Iraq -- an Al Qaeda presence and enhanced Iranian influence -- as requiring an indefinite U.S. military effort."
Robert Scheer, writing in his syndicated opinion column, recalls the controversial " General Betray Us" ads run by Moveon.org last year: "By undercutting the widespread support for getting out of Iraq, Petraeus did indeed betray the American public, siding with an enormously unpopular president who wants to stay the course in Iraq for personal and political reasons that run contrary to genuine national security interests. Once again, the president is passing the buck to the uniformed military to justify continuing a ludicrous imperial adventure, and the good general has dutifully performed."
"Iran was the heart of the matter during Senate testimony on the war. With al-Qaeda on the run in Iraq, the Iranian threat has become the rationale for the mission, and also the explanation for our shortcomings. The Iranians are the reason we're bogged down in Iraq, and also the reason we can't pull out our troops. The mullahs in Tehran loom over the Iraq battlefield like a giant Catch-22."
... Now, having said that, as there is actually something called "The Mental Health Assessment" which is done every year, the last one in the late fall, I believe it was. And after several years of a generalization of morale as going down, morale actually went up ...
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Ah, there’s the rub. If you factor out the women, the NCOs and those who have done multiple tours of duty over several years, things are looking great! By the way, I admit I was never a math major, but that last sentence about the morale being close to double this year…well, that’s true if 7.4% was half of 13.1%. Either way, that’s only 1 out of every 7 troop members who consider their morale high. Is that something to celebrate? [my em]
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I do just wonder how much media bullying will be necessary before they decide that if they demand that Hillary Clinton release her tax returns, then maybe John McCain should too. I'm not going to hope that the Clinton rules - where each new disclosure automatically leads to demands for further disclosures - will apply, just that they at least require Huggy Bear to release the damn things.
Oh, yes, what wondrous fellatio is taking place on Capitol Hill right now where sainted General Petraeus is before the Senate Armed Services Committee for his hearing on "How I Haz Not Fucked Up Iraq." Yes, there's a chance Democrats may act like an opposition party and eviscerate the Bush administration, and the Rude Pundit'll deal with that tomorrow.
Instead, let's talk about the inevitable, that Petraeus will stand before the Republicans on the committee, unzip his fly, present his cock, and say, "Who's a-gonna suck it first?"
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The book proceeds as a list, which I'll paraphrase here:
I was born.
I grew up.
Kind of.
I work at the Pentagon!
Old school liberals aren't pussies! They're hawks! Richard Perle is awesome!
Being a lawyer sucks.
9/11.
I shook the president's hand! I was in a meeting! I wrote a policy paper! Rumsfeld listens to me! The president listens to me! Everybody listens to me!
The president didn't want to go to war, except that he did, and we didn't make him, except that we have enormous influence, which is impossible to resist.
I hate Seymour Hersh.
Colin Powell is an asshole.
The CIA sucks.
WAR!!!!
Acronyms. Operational details. Tom Clancy.
WAR!!!!
Whoa, war sucks.
Here's what Bush screwed up to make the war suck.
Let me teach you my ways, so that you might replicate my phenomenal successes.
The end.
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The fact that Penn is still talking to the press is just another sign that Hillary's ears are nearly as tin as the president she hopes to succeed.
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Senator McCain, you're in your 70s. Your grandfather died young (61 years), your father died at the age of 70, relatively young also. You've had repeated bouts of a particularly lethal form of cancer:
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And what about mental functioning? Eight years of a dumbkopf in the highest position in the land — a man who can't string eight words into a correct sentence — is plenty enough. Every time we walk into a room and find ourselves thinking, "Now, what did I come here for?" we wonder if that's what is making McCain repeatedly confuse Sunni with Shi'a, and putting al Qaeda in training in Iran, and telling undoubtedly horrified Israelis that Purim is the Jewish version of fucking Halloween, wouldja believe? And we're decades younger than that old fart.
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NOTE: INTERESTED PARTIES SHOULD FEEL FREE TO QUOTE THE FOLLOWING TEXTS IN PART OR IN FULL. ANY SUCH USE MUST INCLUDE ATTRIBUTION TO THE RIDENHOUR PRIZES, AND TO THEIR SPONSORS "THE NATION INSTITUTE" AND THE "FERTEL FOUNDATION."
Before his death I produced a documentary about him, and during our interview he told me the story of how he and his friend, Boots Cooper, were playing in the chicken house there in central Texas when they were about 12 years old. They spotted a chicken snake in the top tier of the nest, so close it looked like a boa constrictor. As John Henry told it, "All of our frontier courage drained out of our heels. Actually, it trickled down our overall legs. And Boots and I made a new door through the hen house." His momma came out to see what all of the fuss was about, and she said to Boots and John Henry, "Don't you know chicken snakes are harmless? They can't hurt you." Rubbing his forehead and his behind at the same time, Boots said, "Yes, Mrs. Faulk, I know, but they can scare you so bad you'll hurt yourself."
John Henry Faulk never forgot that lesson. I'm always ashamed when I do. Temptation to co-option is the original sin of journalism, and we're always finding fig leaves to cover it: economics, ideology, awe of authority, secrecy, the claims of empire. In the buildup to the invasion of Iraq we were reminded of what the late great reporter A.J. Liebling meant when he said the press is "the weak slat under the bed of democracy." The slat broke after the invasion and some strange bedfellows fell to the floor: establishment journalists, neo-con polemicists, beltway pundits, right-wing warmongers flying the skull and bones of the "balanced and fair brigade," administration flacks whose classified leaks were manufactured lies - all romping on the same mattress in the foreplay to disaster.
Five years, thousands of casualties, and hundreds of billion dollars later, most of the media co-conspirators caught in flagrante delicto are still prominent, still celebrated, and still holding forth with no more contrition than a weathercaster who made a wrong prediction as to the next day's temperature. The biblical injunction, "Go and sin no more," is the one we most frequently forget in the press. Collectively, we don't seem to learn that all it takes to transform an ordinary politician and a braying ass into the modern incarnation of Zeus and the oracle of Delphi is an oath on the Bible, a flag in the lapel, and the invocation of national security.
Make no mistake: heading towards the general election in November, the Republican Party smells intense fear, and that fear will manifest itself into the dirtiest, ugliest, most divisive presidential election campaign in American history. The GOP's coming off of eight miserable, economically ravished, war-torn, scandal-plagued years of Bush/Cheney. Given the likelihood that Sen. Barack Obama--with his message of inspiration, hope and change--will eventually prevail in his protracted primary battle with Sen. Hillary Clinton, the reality is settling in that the junior Senator from Illinois could be the next occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania. Just ask neocon pundit William Kristol.
More shocking details are emerging from the 2003 81-page memo by former Justice Department senior lawyer John Yoo, who determined that the commander-in-chief can order poking out of eyes, slitting of body parts and throwing acid at prisoners, and none of that would constitute torture because it would not result in “death, organ failure or serious impairment of bodily functions.”
Vietnam is key to McCain's thinking. Much to his credit, he has made his personal peace with the Vietnamese. But, in his military mind, he still thinks America could have and should have won our ill-advised adventure in Southeast Asia. How much further would he have escalated that incredibly bloody war had he been president? Who knows? But, given the widespread opposition to the war among Americans at the time, he would have had to destroy any pretense of constitutional rights on the home front. And for what? As most scholars now agree, no conceivable escalation would have defeated Vietnam's long-standing fight for independence from foreign rule, whether against the Chinese, the French or us.
As we will hear this week, General Petraeus understands the importance of political and ideological forces far better than does McCain. Petraeus has even publicly scolded Iraqi politicians for not working harder to reconcile their differences. Still, he will not give up the counterproductive military fight. Like McCain, the Princeton-educated general stands steadfast in his refusal to see the obvious. No matter how cleverly we apply our overwhelming force, foreign occupation breeds its own opposition in Iraq just as it did in Vietnam.
This is a lesson the gung-ho military mind cannot seem to grasp, which is why Americans would do well to look elsewhere for a president.
No one is such a liar as the indignant man. - Friedrich Nietzsche
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, along with a slew of administration underlings and a revolving-door cavalcade of brass hats from the Pentagon, have been making claims regarding Iraq for many years now.
Remember: they lie. They all lie, from the top man down to the bottom. If their lips are moving, a lie is unfolding. If they say water is wet, get into the shower to make sure.
They lie.
Period.
End of file.
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She's uniquely qualified! Let's see: she's a pro-choice ... uhhhh.... she never anticipated that terrists would fly airplanes into US skyscrapers, she was a champion cheerleader for Bush and the war in Iraq, she wrote an editorial for the New York Times back in 2002 entitled Why We Know Iraq Is Lying, she warned the world about Saddam's "smoking mushroom clouds," compared US commitment in Iraq to the Civil War...
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The article says there is at least one big Hillary donor who doesn't want to spend money for the party unless Clinton's the nominee. And I have also heard that Obama donors don't want to fund any efforts that will be construed as "negative" for fear it will blow back on his campaign. Whatever the reasons, and I suspect it's complicated, this is the stupidest damned thing I've heard yet. It's almost as if the Democrats want to lose.
I don't care which candidate they are supporting in the primary, taking on John McCain will benefit their candidate if he or she wins. Surely they are all maxed out by now, so this is the logical place to put their money either way.
All of this might make some sense if McCain didn't have this ridiculously cozy relationship with the press that's been solid as a rock for more than a decade. He is going to be terribly difficult to redefine. It will take everything they have to do it. And if they don't do it, he could very well win this thing even if he is as old as Methuselah and has the campaign style of a pet rock.
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I was talking to a staunchly liberal friend of mine over the week-end who told me that he really didn't worry about the primary because if the party is damaged and McCain wins, it will probably be ok. The reason: he's not stupid like Bush or crazy like Cheney. After I picked up my brains from the floor and put them back in my head, still reeling from the explosion, I tried to explain how that was wrong. It was pulling teeth and I don't think I succeeded. He just likes the guy and doesn't believe he's really capable of being as bad as Bush because he "thinks for himself" and isn't a GOP lackey.
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Ah, The Two Most Beautiful Words In The English Language: "Yes, Helen"
In an informal survey of 109 professional historians conducted over a three-week period through the History News Network, 98.2 percent assessed the presidency of Mr. Bush to be a failure while 1.8 percent classified it as a success.
“George Bush has combined mediocrity with malevolent policies and has thus seriously damaged the welfare and standing of the United States,” wrote one of the historians, echoing the assessments of many of his professional colleagues. “Bush does only two things well,” said one of the most distinguished historians. “He knows how to make the very rich very much richer, and he has an amazing talent for f**king up everything else he even approaches. His administration has been the most reckless, dangerous, irresponsible, mendacious, arrogant, self-righteous, incompetent, and deeply corrupt one in all of American history.”
Apparently, long service in the military makes you an expert on kooky fun-houses. The company behind childrens' restaurant chain Chuck E. Cheese picked retired four-star Gen. Tommy Franks to help them expand their brand.
McCain’s mouthpiece, Lindsey Graham went on Face the Nation and used every talking point to support the war in Iraq, but can’t come up with an explanation why McCain will not support Webb’s new GI benefits Bill. It’s for the welfare of our troops that have been ordered into this nightmare situation in the middle east, and as strong war advocates, you’d think McCain and Graham would be first on the list of the Senator’s who have signed to show how committed they are to our troops. Graham has a lot of words to say about everything else and goes off topic because he doesn’t have a good answer. Supporting the troops is nothing but a talking point for McCain and Graham it would appear.
WEBB: Yes. Well, there are too many people in the Pentagon who are seeing a good GI bill as affecting retention rather than rewarding service, and we need to get those — politics aside, we need to get to those issues to help our troops.
GRAHAM: We want a wining outcome in Iraq so that when we do leave, we’re going to leave behind a country that’s part of the solution, not the problem. That is why people reenlist. That is why I support this new strategy. The old strategy was failing. The new strategy is producing results, and I hope we’ll stay with it.
WEBB: I’ve got to take 30 seconds to respond to what Lindsey said, because I can’t let that hang out there. You know, people don’t reenlist because of the war in Iraq. People reenlist because they love their country and they have family traditions and they love to soldier. And they’ll fight in Iraq, they’ll fight in Afghanistan, or they’ll serve anywhere they are called upon to serve.
McCain once again demonstrates that he’s no straightalker when it comes to the issues that are most important to this country. He makes sure to get the whole Basra/ceasefire incident completely backwards which only undermines his credibility as a foreign policy man. Is he even following the fighting in Iraq? It was Maliki that went to Iran and then asked Sadr to broker a ceasefire.
Olbermann: …that Sadr had only called for the ceasefire after members of Maliki’s government asked Sadr to do so in a during a secret trip to meet with Sadr in Iran.—making McCain wrong about the facts on his signature issue, making Sadr not Maliki the victor in this conflict by McCain’s own reasoning. And making Iran and not McCain and not the US the mediator of choice for Iraq’s two top Shi’a factions. The Maliki government and the Sadrists.
"I proposed a commercial in which Hillary was able to stay alert at 3AM...due to the new Colombia trade deal."
Media coverage of the disclosure of the "torture memo" authored by Bush Justice Department official John C. Yoo has been mostly a deafening silence. But on this morning's Chris Matthews' show, someone finally fired a shot. As we mentioned in this morning's liveblog, credit goes to The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, for taking the opportunity to ensure that this matter got out into the televised discourse somehow.
SULLIVAN: The latest revelations on the torture front show the memo from John Yoo...means that Don Rumsfeld, David Addington and John Yoo should not leave the United States any time soon. They will be, at some point, indicted for war crimes.
The moment came during a segment on Matthews' show where the panel is invited to "tell him something he doesn't know," though this might be more accurately termed, "something he doesn't know he should talk about." Matthews is hardly alone. [...]
Everything else Mr. McCain has to say about Iraq is more troubling, and I don’t mean just his recent serial gaffe conflating Shiite Iran and Sunni Qaeda. The sum total of his public record suggests that he could well prolong the war for another century — not because he’s the crazed militarist portrayed by Democrats, but through sheer inertia, bad judgment and blundering.
So far his bizarre pronouncements have been drowned out by the Democrats’ din. They’ve also been underplayed by a press that coddles Ol’ Man Straight Talk and that rarely looks more deeply into the “surge is success” propaganda than it did into Mr. Bush’s announcement of the end of “major combat operations” five years ago. The electorate doesn’t want to hear much anyway about a war it long ago soundly rejected.
[...] Mr. Maliki’s move against Mr. Sadr in Basra, done without even consulting Iraq’s “democratically elected” Parliament, was an attempt to take out his opponent by force rather than wait for the October provincial elections.
“We’re succeeding,” Mr. McCain said after his last trip to Iraq. “I don’t care what anybody says.” Again, it’s the last sentence that’s accurate. When General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker testify before Congress again this week — against the backdrop of a million-Iraqi, anti-American protest called by Mr. Sadr — Mr. McCain will ram home all this “success” no matter the facts.
The difference between the Democrats and Mr. McCain going forward is clear enough: They want to find a way out of the morass, however provisional and imperfect, and he equates staying the disastrous course with patriotism. Mr. McCain’s doomed promise of military “victory” in Iraq is akin to Wile E. Coyote’s perpetual pursuit of the Road Runner, with much higher carnage. This isn’t patriotism. As the old saying goes, doing the same thing over and over again and hoping you’ll get a different result is the definition of insanity.
The laughs we missed: If only Jay Leno and "SNL" had been there for Nixon, Hoover, and Lincoln
The biggest yuks came when Carson leaned over and said, "With all due respect, Mr. President, what's really on that tape that your secretary accidentally erased?"
Replied Nixon: "I can finally tell the nation that....", and he continued to move his lips for about 45 seconds without uttering a sound, as the audience roared its approval.
Asked by Carson why he agreed to go on the late-night comedy show, Nixon replied: "Because you are completely nuts -- and we ought to know, because we just burglarized your psychiatrist's office!"
But seriously, folks, I'm wondering how Americans ever elected a president before "SNL" arrived to put it all in the proper perspective for us.
whore (hôr) n.
1. A prostitute.
2. A person considered sexually promiscuous.
3. A person considered as having compromised principles for personal gain.
from The Free Dictionary.
As for the Rhodes suspension, this is not a free speech issue. It's an Air America issue. While Rhodes made the comments at a live event for one of her affiliates (Green 960), she represented Air America. And Air America has worked hard to curry favor among many in Washington, particularly the Clinton camp. This is a face-saving issue, designed to minimize the damage a controversy can do. I'm also certain that at least a few of Rhodes' listeners were quite shocked at her diatribe, with language so course that Sam Kinison must be blushing in his grave. Even still, as with most controversies, look for Rhodes to return to Air America soon, after the heat has died down. That's par for the course. Nonetheless, perhaps Rhodes stepped over the line a bit. Even with the raucous San Francisco audience, the tirade may have been a bit over the top. And it's appearance on YouTube is likely to scare away some of her fans. But like other controversial media personalities, such as Imus, Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and others, these people have jobs because they're controversial. We expect them to say outrageous stuff. Anyone who expects otherwise is delusional.
Says Bush Ran 'Premeditated, Carefully Orchestrated Torture Program'
Constitutional Attorney Jonathon Turley Tells MSNBC Congress Refuses To Investigate Because They 'Do Not Want to Deal With That Fact'Jonathan Turley: It really is amazing because Congress, including the Democrats, have avoided any typed of investigation into torture because they do not want to deal with the fact that the President ordered war crimes. But evidence keeps on coming out - the only thing we don’t have is a group picture with a detainee attached to electrical wires. I mean every time we see more evidence we have more and more high ranking people at the scene of this crime. And what you get from this is that this was a premeditated and carefully orchestrated torture program. Not torture, but a torture program.
We like to think of the American right as a finely honed mechanism--a "conservative noise machine." And most times over the previous decade, the metaphor worked. But these days, the movement can no longer keep its stories straight. It reminds me of the McCain website the day after the New York Times lobbying exposé, the same day the RNC sent out its fundraising letter accusing the Times of electioneering for the Democrats. To anyone who might doubt that the good old conservative machine is overheating from the confusion and strain, here is proof that the noisemakers had clearly neglected to coordinate their anti-Times fundraising push with the McCain campaign. For there was the Times endorsement on its website that same day, bold as brass.
The gears of the contraption are jamming. Let the contortions of a Michael Reagan or a Newsmax attest to that, if nothing else. The whole machine had always been built on a series of bluffs: that once the malign hand of the liberals was removed from the executive, legislative and judicial branches, our new conservative Jerusalem would be achieved. But something remarkable occurred in the five years between 2001 and 2006: for the first time since the rise of the modern conservative movement with the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964, then the rise of Newt Gingrich's revolutionaries in 1994, the right had a chance to control all three branches of government--to actually run the country. Naught but obvious failures have been the result: a crashing economy, a rotting infrastructure, a failed war and a less safe world, more Americans saying their nation is on the wrong track than at any time since pollsters started measuring.
In the face of all this, the conservative movement has kept on trying to do the only thing it knows how to do: sell conservatism. Saner heads in the Republican Party, meanwhile, have done their darnedest to put forward a presidential prospect who might let the party distance itself, if only rhetorically, from the disaster that conservatism in power has proved to be.
But without "conservatism" as the core narrative, the Republican Party doesn't know how to tell any stories at all. Its confusion over how to talk about McCain is only the symptom. The conservative era is over--if you want it.
One positive result of the face of the Democratic primary is that cable news networks are increasingly looking to women and people of color for political commentary. Said a media expert, "We haven't ever had as much talk about women as voters, except as soccer moms. Now there's talk about white women, African-American women, women over 60, and what about Latinos?"
Indeed. Cable news is casting such a large non-white male net that the modern TV watcher can't be blamed for not knowing whom to sexually fantasize about. 23/6 aims to help:
Poor Hillary. Everybody wants her to quit. Nancy Pelosi wants her to quit. Michelle Obama wants her to quit. Wouldn't be surprised to hear Fidel Castro thinks she's been hanging on too long. Even pundits who don't really want her to quit are calling for her to quit because the next vote isn't for three weeks and they're caught in the Primary Dead Zone Vortex and like an excited terrier piddling in the stairwell at the sound of the key in the door, just can't help themselves.
The media chorus is as insistent as a 3am car alarm: "Its time to go. Leave now while you have a shred of dignity intact. You're ruining it for everyone. How can we hug and kiss Barack when you're still wrestling with him, you sweaty old hag?" She, in turn, has put a brave face on her acknowledged uphill battle, comparing herself to Rocky Balboa, but seems to have forgotten, that in the first movie, Rocky loses. To a black guy.
The Left has long held a deep-seated need to fall in love with their candidate and while people may respect Hillary, she's as cuddly as a stainless steel teddy bear. Dora the Diaspora. A burlap banky. Besides, like her beloved Chicago Cubs, there is always next year. Say the GOP does bury Obama like a bone in the backyard of the 2008 election; she can run in 2012 on the "I told you so" ticket.
The Nanny Party, however, rewrote the rules to make sure nobody accidentally gets their feelings hurt. Because every one of us is special. You win a state, you get SOME of the delegates. And if you come in second, you get some too. Third? You bet. Have a couple delegates. Take one of the short ones. Fourth. Fifth. Sure, what the hell. And counseling is available. Everybody's a winner here. Because this isn't about electing a President, this is about sharing and caring and nurturing. Nobody goes away feeling like a loser in the Democratic Party. Except during the general election that is.
Comic, actor, soon-to-be author, Will Durst, thinks Hillary Clinton is this close to becoming a stalker.
Last night NBC Nightly anchor Brian Williams enthused over new color footage of King that adorned its coverage of the 40th anniversary of the assassination. The report focused on the last phase of King's life. But the same old blinders were in place.
NBC showed young working class whites in Chicago taunting King. But there was no mention of how elite media had taunted King in his last year. In 1967 and '68, mainstream media saw Rev. King a bit like they now see Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Back then they denounced King's critical comments; today they simply silence them.
While noting in passing that King spoke out against the Vietnam War, mainstream reports today rarely acknowledge that he went way beyond Vietnam to decry U.S. militarism in general: "I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos," said King in 1967 speeches on foreign policy, "without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government."
If King had survived to hear the war drums beating for the invasion and occupation of Iraq -- amplified by TV networks and the New York Times front page and Washington Post editorial page -- there's little doubt where he'd stand. Or how loudly he'd be speaking out.
And there's little doubt how big U.S. media would have reacted. On Fox News and talk radio, King would have been Dixie Chicked...or Rev. Wrighted. In corporate centrist outlets, he'd have been marginalized faster than you can say Noam Chomsky.
In 1967, King denounced a Democratic-controlled Congress for fattening the Pentagon budget while cutting anti-poverty programs, declaring: "A nation that continues year after year to spend money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
SFist reports that the enterprising Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is looking to rename Oceanside Wastewater Treatment Facility to the “George W. Bush Sewage Plant.” The group explains it seeks to “select a fitting monument to this president’s work” and to “honor George W Bush for his eight years of honorable public service.” “No other president in American history has accomplished so much in such a short time,” the group notes.
Steve Coll, author and president of the New America Foundation, was online Tuesday, April 1, at 3 p.m. ET to discuss his new book, "The Bin Ladens (review by Richard Clarke - G)," which was reviewed in Book World.
New York, N.Y.: Chances of ever catching Bin Laden? Zero or less than zero?
Steve Coll: I think the chances are better now than they have been for a while. His popularity in Pakistan has fallen dramatically because he is seen as responsible for a wave of suicide bombings on Pakistani soil. These hunts in Pakistan have ended in the past usually because somebody drops a dime on the fugitive. That seems more likely now, because of his falling popularity, but of course, you can't predict these things with any great confidence.
_______________________
Washington D.C.: Biggest Bush mistake re: Osama?
Steve Coll: Giving Osama the narrative of total global war that Osama wanted.
In honor of publication day, Tomdispatch offers the equivalent of a little online extravaganza. Below, you can read Zinn's essay on how he first learned about the American Empire; and you can also click here for two special treats. You can view an animated video, using some of the book's art, with voiceover by none other than Viggo Mortensen. (Think of it as Lord of the Rings, Part IV: The American Mordor Chronicles.) Finally, if you look below the video on that same page, you'll see an autobiographical section of the new book, focusing on Zinn's early years. (Click on each illustration to view a single page of text.) Have fun. Tom
A hooker for every senator
Imagine a world with more sexually open, sensual, happily libidinous politicians. Wait, can you?
Michael Mukasey has conclusively proven himself to be an exact replica of Alberto Gonzales -- slavishly loyal to every presidential whim and unbound by even the most minimal constraints of truth while serving those whims.
But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it's dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.
Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. [...]
Biofuels do slightly reduce dependence on imported oil, and the ethanol boom has created rural jobs while enriching some farmers and agribusinesses. But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon.
If biofuels are the new dotcoms, Iowa is Silicon Valley, with 53,000 jobs and $1.8 billion in income dependent on the industry. The state has so many ethanol distilleries under construction that it's poised to become a net importer of corn. That's why biofuel-pandering has become virtually mandatory for presidential contenders. John McCain was the rare candidate who vehemently opposed ethanol as an outrageous agribusiness boondoggle, which is why he skipped Iowa in 2000. But McCain learned his lesson in time for this year's caucuses. By 2006 he was calling ethanol a "vital alternative energy source."
'It Becomes Almost Impossible To Find A Purpose In What We Do.'
A friend of a friend just received the following email from a junior officer serving in Iraq. It makes for especially powerful reading in the wake of the Second Sadrist Intifada. Reprinted with permission.
[Name redacted],
I agree that the war was a great strategic mistake. The way I see it, Saddam Hussein was a secular leader and therefore a huge stumbling block to the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. Yes, he was an evil person and he was our enemy (since Gulf War I) but he was also an enemy of Bin Laden and the Shia extremists etc. If he did have WMDs, he would have used them for regional influence. He never would have given them up to terrorists or risked provoking the US by using them against us. Now, with Saddam gone we have a vacuum that can only be filled by Shia extremists who are more of a terrorist threat than Saddam.
So I agree that coming here was a big mistake for those reasons and others. As far as things on the ground, the outlook isn't much better. In my opinion, what everyone fails to realize is that this is not a counterinsurgency. If we wanted to stay in Iraq, then it would be a counterinsurgency. But it is clear that our goal is to turn over power and pull out. So, in building our strategic endstate, it's pointless to set goals that relate to our presence in Iraq. If the "insurgency" is a function of our being there, then it is not an insurgency in terms of our endstate. For example, if one of our goals is to stop IED attacks on US forces, that is pointless. When we leave, there will be no more IED attacks on US forces. So our endstate needs to be different. We need to ask "if we left tomorrow, what would happen in Iraq?" and from there, we need to determine which of those anticipated results are unacceptable to us. Then we must aim our efforts on making sure those unacceptable results do not occur.
When I look at the problem that way, it becomes almost impossible to find a purpose in what we do. Regardless of what we do, the Shia are going to take control. They have completely infiltrated all the security forces. The only kind of leader who could keep them in check was a tyrant like Saddam. And when the Shia take control, as soon as we leave, they are going to be as brutal as they like against the Sunni and there will be little we can do about it. That is what will happen whether we leave tomorrow or in ten years. As far as the foreign fighters, they will leave Iraq when we do. So what are we trying to accomplish here? Train the Iraqi forces? History shows that training forces in the Middle East can backfire. Any training we offer these people will find its way to our terrorist enemies.
Things are heating up as well. The Shia are getting more aggressive. We lost a man the other day and another was seriously wounded a week or so later. We're facing a high risk with very little potential payoff. We are able to make a difference at the local level. Some of the people are very kind and appreciate our help. That is the only positive thing I can see coming out of this.
Very Respectfully
Junior Officer XXXX
[...] The almighty dollar is now no better than a third world currency you've never even heard of. From Reuters:
The U.S. dollar's value is dropping so fast against the euro that small currency outlets in Amsterdam are turning away tourists seeking to sell their dollars for local money while on vacation in the Netherlands....
That's because the smaller currency exchanges -- despite buy/sell spreads that make it easier for them to make money by exchanging small amounts of currency -- don't want to be caught holding dollars that could be worth less by the time they can sell them.
Imagine if Bill Clinton had done this. Imagine the Republican talking points. Come on, Democrats - think strategically. This is the kind of insult that regular Americans can appreciate.
Can you say "PIN-O-CHET"? Those three syllabes should become a sacred mantra to US patriots.
Yes, Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, Gonzalez, Rice, Fieth, Wolfowitz and the others should be looking over their shoulders for what happened to Valerie Plame, for what happened to New Orleans, for what happened to the US military, for what happen to US honor and prestige, for what happened to the DoJ, the EPA, and other vital federal agencies, etc. Presidential pardons might be able to insulate the principals from US law, but they cannot insulate them from international law.
And what must we do to make sure that Bush, Cheney, et al, like Pinochet, have to look over their shoulders at potential legal woes for the rest of their lives?
You can't say I didn't give it a go, either. Politics, that is. Not prostitution. But then, they're easy to mix up. [...]
Oh sure, I've made a halfway decent living mocking and scoffing and taunting our various elected officials, but what most of us fail to appreciate are the necessary complement of specialized growths our beleaguered civil servants are forced to sprout. Slippery skills, like appearing way too happy to see people you don't even know. How to wear clothes so boring, tailors weep in your presence. Or saying stuff you don't really mean for fear of inflicting possible offense upon potential contributors you wouldn't be caught dead with in a zombie infested chemical lab sub-basement huddling from rampaging mutants. And yes, I am talking about pollsters.
And who among us could hold our tongues like Chelsea Clinton did after some cretin wondered about her mother's response to Monica Lewinsky. My retort, "Blow it out your butt, dirtbag," would have garnered equal time with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright on a FOX News loop. [...]
But look at it this way. Obama's mother was white and Richardson's father was white. Together, you get one whole white man. And you get black, white and Hispanic rolled up together like an all-American burrito.
President Bush delivered the first pitch tonight at the new Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. to a resounding chorus of boos. After being announced, Bush was showered by boos as he strode to the mound. Even after Bush delivered the pitch, the jeering did not let up until the President disappeared from the field. Watch it:
Anyone who has worked in a large organization - or, for that matter, reads the comic strip "Dilbert" - is familiar with the "org chart" strategy. To hide their lack of any actual ideas about what to do, managers sometimes make a big show of rearranging the boxes and lines that say who reports to whom.
You now understand the principle behind the Bush administration's new proposal for financial reform, which will be formally announced today: it's all about creating the appearance of responding to the current crisis, without actually doing anything substantive.
So, will the administration's plan succeed? I'm not asking whether it will succeed in preventing future financial crises - that's not its purpose. The question, instead, is whether it will succeed in confusing the issue sufficiently to stand in the way of real reform.