Creepier than you think*

*Title links here.

Lawrence O'Donnell said yesterday that the whole cult leader/Qur'an burning deal is turning into South Park (no cite, but I heard him say it). He's pretty close. I don't watch that show and I'm sick of this one as well.

Headline at BuzzFlash:

After Visit from FBI, Loser "Minister" With Checkered Past Decides to Abandon His 15 Minutes of Infamy and Calls Off Quaran Burning. Did the FBI Make Him an Offer He Couldn't Refuse Like Not Charging Him With Some Past Infractions? Hmmm....

From the link:

The FBI visited Jones at the Dove Center on Thursday, according to Jeffrey Westcott, special agent in charge of the Jacksonville, Florida, bureau. The FBI also visited him a few weeks ago, he said, but would not say what was discussed.

Well, gee, that calls for some speculation...

Could the FBI have reminded him that he's been accused of slavery?

Shane Butcher, who was expelled from the church for disobedience, told the Gainesville Sun he worked for the pastor's TS and Company for up 72 hours a week without pay, and meals were provided from a ''food bank''.

Mr Butcher said punishments for disobedience ranged from cleaning the barnacles off Mr Jones's boat in Tampa, to carrying a life-size wooden cross or writing out all of Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the Bible.

Emma Jones, the pastor's daughter from his first marriage, has described her father's church as a ''cult''.

Could they have mentioned that the FBI is chockablock with forensic accountants who just love revoking tax exempt status from phony religious tax cheats who put the administration's ass in a sling?

Pastor Terry Jones runs a used-furniture business out of the church, buying old furniture from around the state, storing it in the church sanctuary and selling it on eBay. Academy students work full-time packaging the furniture; according to the rulebook, lunch breaks are for testing students on their homework.

The center's tax-exempt status was partially revoked because of the apparently for-profit used furniture business.

Or maybe the G-Men have some nekkid pictures of him and Rushole doing a really 'sloppy joe'?

Conservative blog American Thinker notes that you can't choose your high school classmates either, in response to the "news" that the pastor in Florida threatening to burn a Koran -- presumably at least once -- ate sloppy joes in the same cafeteria with controversial pundit Rush Limbaugh, who is no friend to Muslims or, apparently, cultish book burning fringe figures either.

Now Jones has captured the world’s attention with his book-burning act and finally become “Cape Girardeau’s most prominent export,” at least for this week. He has achieved A-list status, however fleeting. Predictably, Limbaugh responds as though they never walked the same public/socialist school hallways together — calling Jones a “crackpot.” What does it all mean? That Limbaugh has become the envious one, naturally.

A world-class weapons-grade dick gets dick envy over a wannabe! Priceless! But I digress...

Note to Cape Girardeau school board: You better check up on what's goin' on in your classrooms if you're turnin' out yingyangs like those two.

Or maybe it was just that the G-Men kept calling him "Pastor Koresh, oops!" over and over during their interview?

Perhaps there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Hopefully it's the headlight on a train that's about to run over Pastor Fucktard's skinny white ass. Or the headlight on a BATF tank.

South Park? Go ahead and kill Kenny. If it shuts him up, who the fuck cares?

Update:



More at YubaNet.

Off of Social Security and Medicare ...

And up against the wall. "Want a blindfold, grandpa? Cigarette?"

I know the conservatives want to cut "entitlements" but literally killing off old people seems extreme even for them. But they seem to think that the elderly are being profligate spenders on health care and so they need to "take responsibility" and pay more so they won't use as much. Anyone who's been around old people and their plethora of health issues knows that's tantamount to killing them.

...

Fuck them old people. They only paid taxes all their lives, worked hard, fought for their country, and tried to raise their kids right.

The conservatives look at the aged they way they look at the military. If you're too sick or can't afford healthcare, just like a soldier who is injured and can't carry a rifle, they don't want to know about you. They want you to go away and die. Heartless cocksuckers.

Running late this morning, had too much fun with our friends from CA last night. See yas later ...

Oo-rah!

I fuckin' love this!

US Marines Thursday rescued a German-owned ship seized by pirates in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia after hijackers vainly sought the crew which hid in a secret compartment, the US military and the shipping firm said.

The pirates spent nearly 20 hours searching for the crew and even phoned the shipping company in Germany to ask where they were hidden, a spokesman for the firm said.

"The crew had closed down the engines and locked themselves away in a safe room which the pirates were unable to find," he said.

After searching the ship for three hours the pirates picked up the phone and called the shipping company asking about the crew's whereabouts, the spokesman said.

"They were told the crew was on holiday," he said.

"They then asked how to switch the engines back on, but were told they were broken," he added.

Priceless! Usually it's just Marines that fall for shit like that. I'm surprised the home office crew didn't ask the pirates for a credit card number to pay for their passage! Hey, the Marines'da coughed it up...

The rescue operation was launched from the USS Dubuque after a Turkish frigate -- part of a multinational force -- responded to a distress signal from the Magellan Star which was sailing from Bilbao in Spain to Singapore.

Dubuque (LPD-8) is a Landing Platform, Dock gator navy amphibious landing troopship that carries 900 Marines. She is home-ported in San Diego.

The Marines are with the 15th MEF or MEU. I am not sure of the difference between an MEF and an MEU, and the unit in this incident is being reported both ways, but these appear to be 1st Marine Division troops out of Camp Pendleton CA. I am unable to determine the exact unit these Marines are with at this time. Marines like to know that shit. Coulda been the Mess Kit Repair Platoon for all I know.

Doesn't matter. The Somalis wised up when they saw a platoon of 'em coming and opted for their own lives. They'll no doubt get a trip to New York, have their case thrown out, and get a bus ticket (or 1st class air fare) home where they'll receive a hero's welcome. They oughta wash up on the Somalia beach with aces of spades pinned to their foreheads with a 5.56 round, but that's just me.

Good on yer, Jarheads. You make this old Marine proud.

Improvement

Obama: Quran burning ‘a recruitment bonanza’ for al Qaeda

It's a big improvement that al Qaeda's main recruitment center in the U.S. is now one batcrap crazy southern hater phony xtian snake oil salesman in a tin building out in the middle of no-fucking-where rather than in the Oval Office like it was when Bush was warming the seat there.

Jumping On The Bandwagon Update:

Tennessee minister plans to burn Quran, too

“The guy is a nut,” Herbert said. “This is crazy. I am sorry that anyone who names the name of Christ would do this.”

Nuttier'n a squirrel turd. Monkey see, monkey do. Yeesh.

Mrs. G just said that wasn't a nice thing to say about monkeys. Yes, dear.

Burns on Rose

If you are still interested in the perfect storm of incompetence that went into the Iraq fuckuo and what may lie ahead, go see last night's conversation between John Burns and Charlie Rose. It takes 30 minutes and they discuss other things as well such as Burns' lack of a haircut and the new Brit government. I was transfixed by it. Burns knows his shit and I'm glad he got out of Iraq with his life and most of his sanity.

The View From India

Vijay Prashad tamps our politics into a nice neat brick in a piece entitled "White Fright".

The far Right is making a bid to use the average American's economic frustrations in its campaign against the minorities and immigrants.

This may be the most succinct single paragraph I've seen:

Barack Obama's election was a blow to white supremacy. No longer could it be said that the highest reaches of American society were out of bounds to non-whites. It rattled the cages of hardened racists. Protests came fast on the heels of the election. Those who refused to believe that a black man could be President of the U.S. sought fantastic reasons to deny reality: that Obama was not born in the U.S. (a criterion for the office) and that Obama was secretly a Muslim (until now not a disqualification for the office). Having inherited an economic and foreign policy mess, Obama did not articulate a plan that generated confidence among the large section of the American middle class that saw its jobs and its wealth disappear (one indication of the lack of trust in the future is the decline in the birth rate since 2007). The unemployment rate continued to rise, and home foreclosures seemed unstoppable. The general drift in the country was fodder for the growth of small protests, whose presence attracted the attention of Washington's far-Right organisations and the money of the sturdy pillars of the far Right. Former Congressman Dick Armey's FreedomWorks gave its activists to the nascent Tea Party, and rising figures in the Republican Party, such as Sarah Palin, offered themselves as its leaders. They were funded by such figures as David and Charles Koch, owners of Koch Industries, the second largest private firm in the U.S. (after the agro-business behemoth Cargill). The grass-roots protests soon became astroturf events.

Why can't our "press" do that? We always seem to get the clearest view from afar.

Much more.

93-Year-Old Vows to Arrest Qur’an Burner

Pensito Review

Local (in my neck of the woods anyway) legend Stetson Kennedy, best known for his ground-breaking journalism exposing Ku Klux Klan members in the 1940s, is taking on the Qur’an burning church. The 93-year-old Kennedy has vowed to perform a citizen’s arrest of Pastor Terry Jones of Dove World Outreach Center on Sept. 11.

Goddam, Pops (I don't get to call very many people that anymore)! That's the spirit!

Question of the Day

Why do I have to know about this little troll named Snooki?

Good God, with all the news coverage of her, you'd think she cured cancer instead of just being a professional twat.

Can we do this ...

To George Bush when he goes somewhere?

Sounds like Blair can't run away from his own history. First he was pelted with eggs and shoes in Dublin then he canceled an book signing event in London. Now that protesters discovered he was preparing for a party at the posh Tate Modern in London, he canceled his showing there as well.

...

If we can't get the war criminals to The Hague, maybe we can keep them under "house arrest". At the very least, give them something to think about before they leave the house.

I say this ...

Every year.

Being the avid cruisers the Mrs. and I are (we frequent Holland America Line), the odds are not in our favor that we'll end up on a ship with these assholes one day.

...

By my count, that is thirty men and only three women, and I’m being generous about the “women” part since I’m not sure Phyllis Schlafly even counts as human anymore, much less as a woman. On the other hand, it would probably be worth the price of admission just to listen to Schlafly order Ramesh Ponnuru around all week (“Boy! Cabin boy! Bring mama a mai tai and I’ll give you a shiny new dime.”) while Rich Lowry cruises the piano bars with his new wingmen: Greg “The Gut” Gutfeld and Jonah ” The Much Bigger Gut” Goldberg.

...

Somebody'd be going overboard, be it me because I couldn't take it anymore or Jonah and the rest of 'em, because I couldn't take it anymore. It would, however, be fun to see Jonah try to outswim a Japanese whaling ship. Heh ...

As if ...

We didn't know this was coming:

...

They said that we just needed to pass this so we could get something better down the road. Perhaps that's true. But for the foreseeable future it's going to a fight just to keep the fairly crappy plan as it is, and I frankly have very little faith that' they'll be able to do it. I certainly hope they do.

...

Especially if we end up with a Republican Congress this fall, the health care "reform" legislation is a goner. At the very least, we're not going to get more (remember they said they'd make the bill better as time went on) for the foreseeable future. We'll be lucky to keep what we fought for.

the Right to Be a Fucktard

El Rude-o. Go read.

The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution allows one, nay, encourages one to be a total fucking douchebag asshole in support of whatever fucktarded cause one and one's yahoo posse want to hoot and holler over. It's that simple. It's that cut and dried. And the reason it encourages such behavior is that judging who is a total fucking douchebag asshole and whose cause is fucktarded is in the eye and ear of the beholder. For, indeed, one could have argued that blacks in the Jim Crow south who were peaceably assembling at lunch counters were the assholes. And one could argue the opposite. Many people considered the Chicago Eight a bunch of unAmerican hippie cocksuckers who deserved only imprisonment, if not exile. One could argue that Gregory Lee Johnson was a complete cunt for burning an American flag outside the Dallas City Hall during the Republican National Convention in 1984. But the Supreme Court said in 1989 that his level of cuntishness didn't matter. What mattered was that it was speech (with even Scalia agreeing). And that as such, go fuck yourself with your precious little hurt feelings.

That's the deal. That's why you say rights are rights. As New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who has emerged as this passionate advocate for free speech, said, "The First Amendment protects everybody, and you can't say that we're going to apply the First Amendment to only those cases where we are in agreement." Bloomberg was commenting on Pastor Yosemite Sam's plan to burn a pile of Korans outside his shitty little church in Gainesville, Florida.

And you know who else is right? Fucking Pastor Yosemite Sam himself. Yeah, he's a hateful redneck son of a donkey ass-fucker (more or less). But read what he says on the church's website about why he's burning a Koran:

When you read the rest, you will find that you have to grit yer teeth and agree with the son of a bitch. What he says is hateful and distasteful and stupid and uncaring and unmindful of possible consequences and damned un-Christian and he has every right to say it and calling bullshit on him will just get us a load of our own wind-borne piss back in our face.

Hypocrisy, stupidity, and plain old lying are protected speech. Anybody can say any damn fool thing they want to, and they do waaaay too often.

More doggie ...

As you folks know, I'm all sloppy about the new dogs coming next week. I showed ya pictures of Choo-Choo the other day (here and here) so today, I introduce you to the other new face in the Fixer household. This is Ziva.





A week from Saturday, we travel to Pennsylvania to pick up the Dingo sisters.

Disgraceful Symbolism: IOKIYAR

Fred Kaplan in Slate:

Republicans are usually eager to trumpet their support for the troops and the war against terror. So why aren't they condemning the Florida pastor who plans to lead his congregation in a Quran-burning bonfire on Sept. 11?

In September 2007, the Senate voted 72-25 to condemn the anti-war group MoveOn.org for running a full-page newspaper ad that denounced Gen. Petraeus, then the U.S. commander in Iraq, as "General Betray Us."

If the senators want to show their genuine support for Petraeus (and not just indulge in an easy political stunt), they should denounce Terry Jones for endangering the troops and providing aid and comfort to the enemy—and, better still, send federal marshals to Gainesville, Fla., to help the local fire chief (who has ordered Jones not to burn the books) maintain public safety.

Fred goes into the effect this might have on the troops but he didn't answer his own question posed in the opening paragraph. I will.

The reason the Repugs aren't condemning this disgraceful act by a publicity-seeking phony xtian preacher is because they don't want to piss off their anti-Islam base of haters two months before an election.

Book-burning in this case is not about denying knowledge like it has been in other times. It's entirely symbolic. The Qurans here are nothing but flammable wood products, probably printed in English which most Muslims in the world couldn't read anyway, and millions of printing presses the world over crank 'em out every day in most every language.

We oughta consider ourselves lucky that he's not going to burn a Muslim.

Burn a Bible, save a kitten

If it's Wednesday, it must be Morford.

Comedic horrors thrive, moronism seems to inbreed and fester, and most of it manifests under the banner of a mutant Christian God, or extreme conservatism, or some form of fundamentalist moral outrage that can't exactly be explained but which often makes its most devout adherents appear to be nothing more than frenetic fleas sucking blood from the Great Hound of life. The beast merely scratches and sighs, and keeps right on gnawing the bone of eternity.

Oh, the hardcore lefty fringe has its violent cretins, to be sure, natty Earth Firsters to slavering PETA blood hurlers, eco-terrorists and freako off-grid cults, but those groups never claim to be a vital part of the Democratic Party. Liberalism does not depend on terrible education rates to survive.

The GOP, on the other hand, sucks hard from the teat of ignorant extremism, splashes gleefully in the shallow mud puddles of Sarah Palin's battered grammar, draws much of its power from the worst the human spectacle has to offer. Simply put, the modern Republican Party would not exist without its army of high school dropouts drunk on Rush Limbaugh and sexual dread. It's not difficult to imagine "Burn a Quran Day" becoming a new Texas state holiday.

What to make of it? After all, the world has always been speckled with rabid clowns, an endless parade of spittle-flecked sociopaths that make us shudder and sigh, many with "Reverend" before their names or "Show" just after it. American culture is rife with worldviews so narrow and poorly educated, you can be quickly convinced we are but an inch from permanent insanity.

Shit, Mark, an inch would be a safe margin! Right now it seems like it's a millimeter and closing.

After all, the Fred Phelps, the Glenn Becks, the Terry Jones of the world are but our basest natures made manifest, the bleakest, most paranoid, lazily ignorant parts of each and every one of us. Deny it at your peril. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, "the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest conflicts of the world are carried on in every individual breast capable of feeling and passion." He should know.

There are far too many people who have allowed, or worse encouraged, their lizard brains to shape their lifeview, and they all seem to have a forum these days with their own media and political party. Ain't the rest of us lucky? Yeesh.

"... a fucking disaster ..."

There is a critical point that I fear the commentariat is just not getting. In my darker moments I fear that some of my fellow economists aren’t getting it either but we aren’t going to go there.

...

I've been thinking this for a long time. For those who don't know, my dad was a defense contractor. During the Vietnam War, he had more work than he knew what to do with. He subcontracted to Grumman, Republic Aircraft, and several hundred machine shops that were working 3 shifts. His place was unionized and so were all the corporations and shops he dealt with. He went out in 1984, Grumman and Republic left soon after and now, I only know of 3 of those machine shops still in business and they're closed by 5 pm. Shit, these folks helped put a man on the Moon.

...

This is a failure of our basic institutions of production. The job of the market is to bring together willing buyers with willing sellers in order to produce value. This is not happening and as a result literally trillions of dollars in value are not being produced.

Let me say that again because I think it fails to sink in – literally trillions of dollars in value are not being produced. Not misallocated. Not spent on programs you don’t approve of or distributed in tax cuts you don’t like. Trillions of dollars in value are not produced at all. Gone from the world entirely. Never to be had, by anyone, anywhere, at any time. Pure unadulterated loss.

...

Not being an economist, or even good with money, I defer to experts, but to me it seems like we're turning into one big "unemployed nation". Everything we buy (nearly) is made somewhere else. I get parts from the Ford dealer and the box tells you where the part was made. Shit, I'd be surprised if the box itself was made in the U.S. Half of our military aircraft are made in another country. How do we get those jobs back when those in other nations will do them for less, with less benefits? How do we get the American people (as a whole) to pay a little more for "American made" when they can barely squeak by on their low salaries (or unemployment checks) buying Chinese or Vietnamese shit at Wal-Mart? I don't see how it can be done.

It's one of the reasons I fear this nation is in an irreversible decline.

Thanks to Mr. Philadelphia for the link.

Chicken? Egg?

Our pal D-cap has an excellent essay up on the state of "journalism" today:

Which came first - journalists turning into to a bunch of sideshow barkers because the only thing Americans want is to be entertained or Americans losing any semblance of reality because the once noble profession of journalism has turned into nothing more than a conduit to sell Tide and Toyotas?

...

The politicians have beaten the journalists at their own game - the politicians know it, the public knows it - only the journalists haven't quite figured it out. Journalists used to be savvy about their strategies and smart about their tactics when they went looking for the story. The victory was uncovering the truth, not selling the most Toyotas. Today people like Palin, Romney, Paul, Rubio, King, Boner, and McConnell have been taught to master anti-journalism skills and make the press work for them. They have been able to stack the deck and play the journalists to their advantage.

Truth has taken a back seat to revenue and any control we might have had over our government is long gone. If a person gets their news solely from the TV, they have no clue about how things work.

Trumka: "Most Crucial Election in 75 Years"

Truthout

Many unionists are frustrated as usual by the lack of a viable progressive alternative to the Democratic Party. But they'd best beware, as AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says, of the serious consequences of being less than enthusiastic supporters of Democratic candidates in November's elections.

"The Republican Party of NO doesn't want our vote," says Trumka. "All they want is for us to stay home. They want us to feel hopeless and disgusted so they can come back by default." (my em)

When patience and enthusiasm don't work, fearmongering might. Right out of the Repug liebook, only I'm not lying. Be afraid. Vote.

1938 in 2010

Paul Krugman with a history lesson:

I had hoped that we would do better this time. But it turns out that politicians and economists alike have spent decades unlearning the lessons of the 1930s, and are determined to repeat all the old mistakes. And it’s slightly sickening to realize that the big winners in the midterm elections are likely to be the very people who first got us into this mess, then did everything in their power to block action to get us out.

Third plunge of the dagger

Read this piece at Words of Power.

Dissed and Marginalized by POTUS' Inept Inner Circle, Progressives Must Rally (Again) to Save POTUS & the Democrats? Yes.

A coupla terrific paintings and a few words about how the current Dark Ages started in California and are fixin' to maybe get darker from there in a coupla months.

Starting to get the fuller picture of what has happened here?

As California goes, so goes the nation. Remember, the Reagan Counter-Revolution came to power here first.

So will the battle for Senator and Governor here signal the end of all hope, or the beginning of the reversal of the illness that has seized the US body politic?

And yet, it can even be worse. Just allow John Boehner to replace Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, and send Carly Fiorina to Beltwayistan and Meg Whitman to Sacramento, and you will see how much worse it can get, and how fast. Right now, it is very bad, but we have some leverage and a place to stand. If we lose the House or are further weakened in the Senate, or if POTUS fails to be elected to a second term, and the 5-4 corporatist edge on SCOTUS is institutionalized for another generation, well ...

And those of you who think it might be better to stay home, and let it all turn back to the Greedy Oiligarch Plutocracy (GOP), in order to hasten some more radical change, you are as deluded as the tea-baggers who are following Beck and Palin over the cliff into a hell-realm.

Just as an aside, and I throw those in anywhere, Mrs. G says GOP stands for Greedy Obstructionist 'Phobes.

Which side are you on? Yes, it is another moment to choose sides.

Vote in November, and influence everyone you can to vote in November. We must buy ourselves more time.

I know that we're not particularly fond of the Democrats right now, but the alternative is far worse. Cheney was right when he said the American people get their chance to be heard every four years, or in this case, every two years. As distasteful and arrogant as that is, it's absolutely correct. If you still your voice by throwing away your vote, either by voting for unelectable third-party candidates or staying home in disgust, you are helping the Forces of Darkness who seem poised to turn out in record numbers.

I'm not voting for Rahm or Axelrod or any of the other Dems I'd like to punch in the nose, or Obama this time, and I actually like our Dem candidates out here in California, but if I had to hold my nose to vote for them, I'd still do it in a heartbeat.

If you remember the apt right now old joke about the people in Hell up to their necks in shit, if the Repugs get back in control, coffee break's over. Back on your knees.

So ...

I'm off to work. I hope I remember how to fix cars. Righty-tighty ...

Why do they hate our troops?

Another crazy Jesus freak preacher and his sheeple think it's big fun to stage a "Burn A Koran Day". Don't forget, these are the same people who were rah-rah, gung-ho, kill the ragheads and "support the troops" during the run up to war. Now, they don't seem to care about those same troops they been supporting.

The top US commander in Afghanistan has warned that troops' lives will be in danger if an American church sticks to its plan to burn copies of the Koran.

Gen David Petraeus said the action could cause problems "not just in Kabul, but everywhere in the world".

Pastor Terry Jones, of the Dove World Outreach Centre, has said he will make a bonfire this week on the anniversary of the 11 September 2001 attacks.

...

I don't see anything in the way of "outreach" or "dovishness" from these people. If it weren't for the suits and ties, you wouldn't be able to tell the American Taliban from the Afghan type.

Fuck Rahm ...

And if you wonder why the White House runs the way it does (and Barry will probably be just another one-term President), you just have to look to the Chief-of-Staff. Rahm Emmanuel is nothing but a double-dealing slime mold and it's come back to bite them, and the Dems, in the ass.

Michael Moore, via Digby, on Rahm's disregard for the base:

Dear Rahm Emanuel:

Happy Fuckin' Labor Day! I read this week that — according to a new book by Steven Rattner, your administration's former "Car Czar" — during White House meetings about how to save the tens of thousands of jobs that would be lost if GM and Chrysler collapsed, your response was, "Fuck the UAW!"

...

Nonetheless labor unions did create a middle class for the majority (even companies that didn't have unions were forced to pay at or near union wages in order to attract a workforce) and that middle class built a great country and a good life. You see, Rahm, when people earn a fucking good wage, they spend it on stuff, which then creates more good paying jobs, and then the middle class grows fucking big. Did you know that back when I was a kid if you had a parent making a union wage, only one parent had to work?! And they were home by 3 or 4pm, 5:30 at the latest! We had dinner together! Dad had four weeks paid vacation. We all had free health and dental care. And anyone with decent grades went to college and it didn't fucking bankrupt them. (And if you ever used the F-word, the nuns would straighten you out in ways that even you couldn't bear to hear about).

Then a Republican fired all the air traffic controllers, a Democrat gave us NAFTA and millions of jobs were moved overseas (hey, didn't you work in that White House, too? "Fuck the UAW, baby!"). Unions got scared and beaten down, a frat boy became president and, like a drunk out of control, spent all our fucking money and our children's money, too. Fuck.

...

One day, before I die, I'd like to see a Dem in the White House who is a true Lefty (Obama & Co. would be considered raving conservatives in Europe). Ain't had one of them since LBJ. Alan Grayson, maybe?

Too little, too late ...

So, we're pretty much assured of a Dem disaster this fall. They pretty much have themselves to blame, from Barry on down. He should have been giving speeches like this from the get-go.

The Barack Obama who showed up in Milwaukee today is the one I remember from 2008 who seemed to disappear over the past year or so. If he keeps this tone between now and November, I'll bet on the press narrative changing from "Dems are hosed" to something far more positive. With a mix of humor, sarcasm and a generous dose of fire, Obama put Republicans on notice: Their days of obstruction are numbered.

...

What the Dems don't seem to get is that the campaign season doesn't start 2 months from Election Day. The Rethugs are always campaigning, in one form or another, constantly throwing shit against the wall to see what will stick and the Dems need answer, and ridicule it. They can't wait until a few weeks before the election to mount a counterattack.

Unfortunately, after this election, the obstruction, with a Rethug majority, will become weapons-grade.

Moonbeam! Finally!

LATimes

Jerry Brown launches his first ad in California gubernatorial campaign

His rival, Republican Meg Whitman, has been pummeling the candidate with a barrage of advertising over the summer that questioned his record. Brown could not afford to advertise over the summer, but labor unions did on his behalf, questioning Whitman’s qualifications. But this marks the first ad making a pro-active case for why voters ought to support Brown.

The ad, which will begin airing on television later this week, says that during his prior two terms as governor, Brown eliminated waste and luxuries, balanced budgets, cut taxes and created 1.9 million jobs. “California was working,” says the announcer.

Brown them introduces himself and names three priorities that keep in mind voters’ frustration with government –- frugality, local control and only raising taxes if voters agree.

My only question for our current Attorney General and next Governor is "What was it like boinkin' Linda Ronstadt?". Enquiring minds wanta know...



JerryBrown2010

Headline of the Day

California pot legalization ‘could end Mexican drug war’

Swell. I hope it takes a big chunk outta our drug war in the process.

The Poodle Speaks

I watched Christiane "Still A Babe!" Amanpour interview Tony Bliar on This Week yesterday. Once a poodle, always a poodle, this time yipping mightily with a book to sell. Look in 'fiction' next to Bush's book.

MoDo

He says he does not regret serving as the voice for W.’s gut when the inexperienced American princeling galloped into war with Iraq. As for “the nightmare that unfolded” — giving the lie to all their faux rationales and glib promises — Tony wants everyone to know he has feelings.

So do the families of the hundreds of thousands whom you enabled to become dead and injured, arsehole.

There is no apology, but Blair sounds like a man with a guilty conscience.

He concedes that the invasion of Iraq was more about symbols than immediate security, about sending “a message of total clarity to the world,” after 9/11, that defying the will of the international community would no longer be tolerated.

Unless, like us, you're big enough to get away with it. How's that workin' out?

Blair did not want to be W.’s peripheral poodle. He wanted to “stand tall internationally” with Britain’s main ally and not “wet our knickers,” to use a Blair phrase, when the going got tough (or delusional).

You don't always get what you want. Blair and Bush were both Cheney's little fixed poodles. Either one of them could have stopped it before it happened.

It is criminally naïve, given the billions spent on intelligence, that Blair and W. muffed the postwar planning because they never perceived what Blair now acknowledges as “the true threat”: outside interference by Al Qaeda and Iran. So the reasoning of the man known in England as Phony Tony or Bliar amounts to this: They had to invade Iraq because Saddam could hypothetically hook up with Al Qaeda. But they didn’t properly prepare for the insurgency because they knew that Saddam had no link to Al Qaeda.

He knew Dick Cheney had a grandiose plan to remake the world and no patience for “namby-pamby peacenikery.”

“He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran,” as well as “Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.,” Blair writes of Cheney, adding: “He was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. We’re coming after you, so change or be changed.”

The religious Blair fancied himself a conviction politician who had intervened for good in Kosovo and Sierra Leone and would do so again in Iraq. So he did not, as he said others did, “reach for the garlic and crucifixes” when Dick hatched his sulfurous schemes.

Fuck the garlic and crucifixes. Someone shoulda reached for a big pointy wooden stake and driven it through where The Dick's heart would be in a human being and at least pinned him to the ground so he couldn't move.

If he had challenged W. and Cheney instead of enabling them, Blair might have stopped the farcical rush to war. Instead, he became the midwife for a weaker Iraq that is no longer a counterweight to Iran — which actually is a nuclear threat — and that seems doomed to be run one day by another brutal strongman.

Yep, did the wrong thing, then did the thing wrong, and all for naught. Countless lives and money and Iran wins and we lose when we didn't have to even go and shouldn't have gone in the first place. And the best part? We will be paying for the failed* neocon wet dream for generations.

You fucked up right along with Bush and Congress, Blair, and all the spin and smoke and mirrors in the world won't change that.

*Actually, the neocons may have succeeded all too well. They always really wanted to make war on Iran. When Iran claims Iraq as its spoils, that might make it easier for them to beat the war drum to retaliate against Iran for undoing all 'our brave troops' and contractors did in Iraq.

Our only defense is to not let the Repugs hijack the country again.

You want to go to war with Iran? Don't vote.

Update:

From MoDo to MoJo. Heh.

In his new book, the former British prime minister asks for a fair hearing on the Iraq war. But he ignores a key meeting where George Bush suggested they con their way to an invasion.

Gotta leave out the inconvenient parts of history that would make him look like the poodle and war criminal he is. It's his own memoir after all.

Out with the old, in with the new

AP/MSNBC

BAGHDAD — Days after the U.S. officially ended combat operations and touted Iraq's ability to defend itself, American troops found themselves battling heavily armed militants assaulting an Iraqi military headquarters in the center of Baghdad on Sunday. The fighting killed 12 people and wounded dozens.

It was the first exchange of fire involving U.S. troops in Baghdad since the Aug. 31 deadline for formally ending the combat mission, and it showed that American troops remaining in the country are still being drawn into the fighting.

Well, the "end of the combat mission" didn't last very long, did it? Maybe it was the end of the old combat mission and this heralds the start of the new combat mission. Yeesh.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

U.S. Combat Troops Leave Iraq While Government Stuck In Factional Gridlock
Iraqi government not doing too well either.

Blackwater Created 30 Shell Companies to Get Big Government Contracts
Millions paid out to Bluewater, Blankwater, Belchwater, Bleepwater and 26 other phony fronts.

Glenn Beck Launches Own News Site
Faces stiff competition from RavingParanoidNews.com, NutcaseNewsNetwork.com and The Wackington Post.

Federal Appeals Court Rules “Ladies Night” Promotions Constitutional
“Free Jell-O Shots for Babes” also passes legal muster.

Labor Day Music Blogging ...

Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band - Feel Like A Number

Fuck off ...

Why do these fucking southern Jesus freaks have to bring their traveling circuses to NYC?

NEW YORK (WABC) -- Florida televangelist Bill Keller began the first service of his new 9/11 Christian church at ground zero on Sunday.

...

"If they want to go there [the 'Ground Zero' Mosque] and preach the lies of Islam, I can come and preach the truth of the bible," Keller said.

Keller spoke before roughly three dozen supporters, with support of varying degrees.

...

Like the Muslims at the Mosque, this guy has every right to preach and build his own church. Unlike the Muslims at the Mosque, this clown is nothing more than a demagogue.

It gives me faith in my fellow NYers that there are a million people who live within walking distance from this guy's 'church' and only 36 of them showed up.

Fuck off and go home, asshole.

Quote of the Day

Ol' Fez:

...

Ooh, Lindsey Graham too! So not just Herpes, but a nasty case of Chlamydia as well.

Shopping ...

My British buddy Dave calls me a "sloppy dick" because I get all romantic with the Mrs.; I get that way about the dog(s) too. We went shopping today and bought new harnesses, bowls, and a 2-by leash. Did I mention I got two doggie coats from Queen Mary 2 (Like this one.)?

Sloppy dick indeed!

Another Choo-Choo pic. Heh ...

Why Glenn Beck Ought to Be Repeatedly Cock-Punched (National Archives Edition):

Other than just on general principles?

The Rude Pundit

You see that? That's the first page of George Washington's Inaugural Address. It's got eight pages. Fox "news" host and Jim-Jones-without-the-guts Glenn Beck did not hold a single page of it. He didn't even hold the clear box that it's preserved in. Why? Because it's George Washington's Inaugural Address, fucker, and no one gets to touch it because it will fucking fall apart and then America will be destroyed by angry Revolutionary War zombies. Such is its power. The only upside is that they would eat Beck first and we'd at least get to see that on YouTube.

In his new self-serving piece of worm shit website, The Blaze, a Beck ball-washer named Scott Baker writes, in a pretty much incomprehensible article, that he was there with Beck: "Did I 'hold' it? That depends on what the definition of 'hold' is. Perhaps I 'hold' it closer in my heart for having gazed upon it? Perhaps I 'hold' it in greater esteem for having pondered the care and craftsmanship of the author." Umm, Scotty, if you say, "I held my balls," that means you were cupping your sack. If you say, "I held my balls in my heart," that means you spend too much time jerking off. But, oh-ho, oh-ho, how libtarded we are, caring that "words" actually "mean" "things."

However, Beck didn't just mention the holding in passing. The Rude Pundit watched the entire day of Beckturbation. Beck made a big deal about it. He put out his hands, as if they were sanctified by their contact with the holy papers of our past. He used the image to separate himself from the unworthy masses (who couldn't call a member of Congress for a private trip to the Archives). He was transforming himself into an apostle of a white American Christianity. The proximity to the relics made him holy. Is that too far? Is that hyperbole? Then you weren't paying attention.

Beck's followers won't care, you know. They'll just dismiss it as shitting on their parade. Why should a man like Beck be held to the truth? The truth is just so many chains to the earth. The faith shall set you free. And sometimes faith requires a leap over the dissonance of facts.

Sometimes, shit. Always, to the pseudochristers.

Freedom’s Just Another Word*

*From Me and Bobby McGee. The rest of that sentence is the operative part.

Daddy Frank on Obama's tepid speech on Bush's War:

What was so grievously missing from Obama’s address was any feeling for what has happened to our country during the seven-and-a-half-year war whose “end” he was marking. [...]
...

Yet most everyone, regardless of age or calling or politics, is at war — not with terrorists, but with depression, with their consciences and with one another.

I hope anyone who supported that criminal war and now realizes how wrong it was never again has a good night's sleep.

Americans are less forgiving. In recent polls, 60 percent of those surveyed thought the war in Iraq was a mistake, 70 percent thought it wasn’t worth American lives, and only a quarter believed it made us safer from terrorism. This sour judgment is entirely reality-based. The war failed in all its stated missions except the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

For this sad record, more than 4,400 Americans and some 100,000 Iraqis (a conservative estimate) paid with their lives. Some 32,000 Americans were wounded, and at least two million Iraqis, representing much of the nation’s most valuable human capital, went into exile. The war’s official cost to U.S. taxpayers is now at $750 billion.

That's the official cost. The people in the know who claimed the real cost will be $3 trillion are now saying they low-balled it. I have no cites for this. When it all gets added up in a coupla generations, they probably did.

Bacevich also wrote that “common decency demands that we reflect on all that has occurred in bringing us to this moment.” Americans’ common future demands it too. The war’s corrosive effect on the home front is no less egregious than its undermining of our image and national security interests abroad. As the Pentagon rebrands Operation Iraqi Freedom as Operation New Dawn — a “name suggesting a skin cream or dishwashing liquid,” Bacevich aptly writes — the whitewashing of our recent history is well under way. The price will be to keep repeating it.

Don't worry, we will. One of the things this country is not at all good at is taking long hard looks at ourselves. When stuff starts showing through the new coat of whitewash, we just slap on another coat. When that one inevitably fails, we just don't look at it.

And yet here we are, slouching toward yet another 9/11 anniversary, still waiting for a correction, with even our president, an eloquent Iraq war opponent, slipping into denial. Of all the pro forma passages in Obama’s speech, perhaps the most jarring was his entreaty that Iraq’s leaders “move forward with a sense of urgency to form an inclusive government that is just, representative and accountable.” He might as well have been talking about the poisonous political deadlock in Washington. At that moment, there was no escaping the tragic fact that instead of bringing American-style democracy and freedom to Iraq, the costly war we fought there has, if anything, brought the bitter taste of Iraq’s dysfunction to America.

Swell. Thanks again, Georgie.

Much more. Pops lets it fly.

Hey ...

They're building a new Ferrari/Maserati dealership on Long Island:

...

Right. This recession has hit everyone hard and you can't raise taxes during a recession. Of course, some people aren't actually in a recession:

...

Heaven forbid the rich might have to pay another percent or two.

Saturday Homemade Political Humor & Totally Unrelated Video Blogging

This is a good funny story that makes an excellent point. I put it to this video because dogs and snow and snow machines came up in the Brain yesterday and today and I have a warped sense of connection. Enjoy.

Utah Phillips tells a story about Will Rogers and Standard Oil from his wonderful storytelling CD "The Moscow Hold".

Headline of the Day

Jan Brewer Blames ‘Brain Freeze’ On Her Own Beheading

Heh. Reminds me of 'Nixon Under Glass' on Futurama.

Hatred and Stupidity, Lumps and Bumps and Bruises

I just love this by William Rivers Pitt!

So, yeah, not much to hang your hat on there. In the absence of anything substantive to give the American people, the right has gone home to their mothership: sowing discord, fear and hatred to distract people from the fact that, while Republicans are good at campaigning, they are walking cancer cells to the body politic if and when they actually win.

There's a joint in West Haven, Connecticut, called the Fire and Ice Hookah Lounge. By all reports (Click it! - G), it's a nifty little place; the theme is Middle Eastern, the hookah smoke is tasty, and the belly dancers are something to see indeed. Last Thursday, a fellow named Kevin Morris, also of West Haven, came ditty-bopping into Fire and Ice and staked his claim to first-ballot entry into the Dumbass Hall of Fame.

Mr. Morris, it seems, decided that any place with hookahs and belly dancers must be a festering nest of Muslims, and decided to give the patrons what-for. According to news reports, he barged through the door and started screaming racist and anti-Muslim epithets at everyone there. The crowd didn't really react until Morris tried to throttle the bartender...at which point, the patrons rose up righteous and basically beat the ever-loving Jesus out of him. Morris' mug shot looks like his face went through a wheat thresher, and as of now, he remains in police custody.

Hatred and stupidity, folks. When they ride in the same applecart, things can get truly dangerous. But sometimes, and only rarely, things can also get truly funny.

Thank you, Mr. Morris.

Indeed! That story was good for the soul and it should only happen more often. My sides, they hurt...

Now it's official ...

As you know, we had to say goodbye to our beautiful Shayna not long before we left for Europe.

Just before we got on the ship, I sent my pal Kathy from the Australian Cattle Dog Club of America an email letting her know about Shayna and asking if she knew any reputable breeders who were expecting a litter around the end of the year or spring next year (a little background, Kathy is the premier breeder of champion Cattle Dogs in the U.S. [Katwala Australian Cattle Dogs] and has her finger on the pulse). She wrote back immediately that one of hers just had a litter in July. The opportunity to get one of her pups was a pleasantly surprising twist of fate.

I asked if she had a blue girl and she replied that the puppies were all red (more background, Cattle Dogs generally come in two colors, blue and red). Okay, can't fool with Mother Nature, so I wrote back asking if she had two sisters in the litter (when Shayna was alive, we always said it would have been nice for Shayna to have someone to play with so getting two together was in the back of our minds).

Kathy then replied that she had an adolescent blue girl from a February 2009 litter whose purchase deal fell through. She was a half-sister to this current crop of puppies (same dad) and was great with the little ones. I couldn't say no.

So ... On Saturday, September 18th, we'll drive to Erie, Pennsylvania to meet Kathy and her husband to pick up Choo-Choo:

Katwala's Pardon Me Boys - "Choo-Choo"(r) with anonymous puppy.

And one of the female pups on this page.

I just received an email from Kathy yesterday confirming the date and we're ecstatic. The house has been too quiet. We are also a little nervous. One Cattle Dog pup can be a Tasmanian Devil, two will most likely make our lives ... interesting to say the least. Heh ...

And just a note: I never thought I'd have a dog with the name of "Choo-Choo". I won't change it, but I will "New York-ize" it to "Da Chooch". The name we chose for the pup is "Ziva".

And another note: We did cosider a rescue or two, but after 12 years with Shayna and all her health problems (Cattle Dogs are prone to hip, eye, and other congenital problems and rescues generally aren't tested for them), we wanted sound dogs. The only way to assure that was to buy from a reputable breeder. While I wouldn't trade the time and expense for anything, the sleepless nights, administering medications several times a day, and the emotional drain were wearying. It'll be tiring enough chasing after two young ones without the added dimension.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Classic Emmylou.

From 1980 German TV

Emmylou Harris ~ To Daddy

Thanks to 1000Magicians, UK.

Home ...

Just finishing up the unpacking, then calling the pizza guy to deliver. I'll be back later ...

Update:

Pics you'll never see in a cruise line commercial. Heh ...

On Moosebreath

We gotta go out and do our shopping for the weekend before the locusts descend on our grocery store, so I'll leave you with a recommendation to read the big story about Moosebreath in Vanity Fair.

The woman is a vengeful, petty, self-centered, hot tempered unhappy shrew, but whether she's blowing hot or cold, one thing is for certain - she blows. This quote sums it up pretty good:

[...] “You’re just putting on a show. You’re so fake,” one of the children said when Palin made a point of praying in front of other people. “This is not who you are. Why are you pretending to be something you’re not?”

Money and power, child, money and power. She's gotta get it before her fake little world collapses around her and her gullible public. Soon, let us pray.

Update:

We got to the market at 11:30. Waaaay too late. They're already here.

I scored a free snowmobile yesterday that had been abandoned at a house a coupla doors down that's in foreclosure. The Realtor-In-Charge was happy that I would get it outta there. All I know so far is that it's a Yamaha Phazer, probably of 1984-'89 vintage, worth maybe $300, started easy and ran well enough to get it the few hundred feet to home. Must investigate my new toy further, so see yas later.

Headline of the Day

Major human trafficker is huge GOP donor who fought illegal immigration

Why doesn't this surprise me...?

In Case You Missed It

Raw Story

Countdown: Olbermann, Scahill thank Bush for the ‘success’ of the Iraq war

Yes, thanks a great steaming pile, Georgie. You want 'credit' for the worst foreign policy blunder in American history and its attendant war crimes? It's all yours. Asshole.

'They' say that it really isn't healthy to keep things bottled up inside. On Wed. evening's MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, the liberal host and his guest, The Nation's Jeremy Scahill went the healthy route and let it rip.

"These people have a Ph.D in lying and a master's degree in manipulating intelligence," Scahill says of the neocons, "And it is, it's really sobering to see this kind of brash historical revisionism happening in real time. The idea that these people want to post some kind of false flag of victory on the corpses of all who have died in Iraq because of their decisions. These people destabilized Iraq, they destabilized the Middle East, with their neo-con vision of redrawing maps, and they didn't even succeed in their own stated mission. This is a special kind of pathological sickness that these individuals are plagued with."

Thanks to PoliticsNewsNews.

The Cry for Democratic Moral Leadership and Effective Communication

If you don't read anything else today, read these:

George Lakoff at Truthout:

If you have not read Drew Westin's outstanding piece "What Created the Populist Explosion and How Democrats Can Avoid the Shrapnel in November" on The Huffington Post, AlterNet, and other venues, read it immediately. Westin states as eloquently and forcefully as anyone what he, I, and other progressives have been saying from the beginning of the Obama administration. I agree fully with everything he says. But ...

Westin's piece is incomplete in crucial ways. His piece can be read as saying that this election is about kitchen table economics (right) and only kitchen table economics (wrong).

This election is about more than just jobs and mortgages and adequate health care. All politics is moral. All political leaders say to do what they propose because it is right. No political leaders say to do what they say because it is wrong. Morality is behind everything in politics - and progressives and conservatives have different moral systems.

In the conservative moral system, the highest value is preserving and extending the moral system itself. That is why they keep saying no to Obama's proposals, even voting against their own ideas when Obama accepts them. To give Obama any victory at all would be a blow to their moral system. Their moral system requires non-cooperation. That is a major thing the Obama administration has not understood.

I won't go too deep into Repug "morals" except to say they're mean-spirited racist throwback bastards who lie and fearmonger. The end justifies the means, no matter what. All they want at the top is power and obeisance from the bottom. 'Top' and 'bottom' are carefully chosen words.

From the link:

Following the conventional wisdom, Democrats return to their all-too-familiar defensive crouch, and conclude that when in trouble, tack right. [...]
...

The White House starts adopting failed conservative policies and talking points that leave the public utterly confused about where the president, and by extension, his party, stands on the central issues of the day. [...]
...

The underlying psychological assumption of these moves is that if you mix policies from the right and left in equal parts, you win the center. In fact, no one has ever won the center that way. It appears weak, opportunistic, and incoherent to the average swing voter, which is particularly problematic at a time when people in the center desperately want to know that their leaders have a vision and a coherent plan for what to do (which is why both FDR and Ronald Reagan were so effective in moving voters in the center). It doesn't win any votes on the right. But it does have one predictable effect: It sucks the motivation out of your base, who feel demoralized and betrayed (if they're part of the "professional left") or less likely to vote (if they're average voters who don't follow politics carefully but just don't feel very enthusiastic anymore, even if they don't really know why).

Much, much more in both pieces.

VI

Six years at this pop stand. Holy crap.

Glenn Beck's liberation theology obsession

Tim Rutten in the LATimes. Sub-head:

The Fox News personality is strangely bent on linking the president -- and race -- to liberation theology, evidence to the contrary be damned.

Op-ed follows, and its last line:

Perhaps Beck should go back to peddling misinformation about the Founding Fathers, who have been dead too long to complain.

They're spinning in their graves too fast to comment as well. Heh.

Sharron Angle’s Plan For Education: Eliminate All Of It

Think Progress

Speaking at a forum for the right-wing Steamboat Institute last week, Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle effectively declared that public schools should cease to exist. [...]

Oh, indeed! Church- and home-schooled kids without even the minimal secular education they now receive will be much more ignorant and thus better indoctrinated right-wing apparatchiks.

Kudos, Harry! Planting her was your best idea ever!

Funny story: I watch Reno TV for a half hour on weeknights because I like to watch Jeopardy! There are NO commercials these days besides Reid and Angle. I take that back - there's usually one for a muffler shop or a personal injury shyster, but the campaign ads predominate.

Here's the funny part: one ad goes through all of Angle's negatives - well, as many as they can squeeze into one ad - and the voice-over ends with "Sharron Angle - wrong for Nevada" and out and immediately, not a split second later, into the next ad beginning "I'm Sharron Angle and I approve this message".

Heh. They knocked off running those two ads in that order after a coupla times, but just for a minute there it sounded like Angle was admitting she's a Reid plant.

Things the President Left Out of His Big Speech

In italics, from Michael Collins at The Agonist:

THE PRESIDENT: Good evening. Tonight, I’d like to talk to you about the end of our combat mission in Iraq, the ongoing security challenges we face, and the need to rebuild our nation here at home. But before I do that, we need a moment of truth. The Iraq war was based on a deliberate lie involving the White House distorting the National intelligence estimate on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). The report got it wrong on WMD. There were none. But it concluded that the only way the nonexistent WMD would be used against the United States was in retaliation for a US attack on Iraq that threatened Saddam Hussein. By deleting this information, the Bush-Cheney White House justified a preemptive invasion without any basis, a crime under international law that our nation helped establish after World War II.

We’re treating the signature wounds of today’s wars -- post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury -- while providing the health care and benefits that all of our veterans have earned. These veterans and all those lost and injured would be here today, never have needed treatment were it not for the illegal invasion. As a result, I'm appointing one of the nation's greatest prosecutors, Vincent Bugliosi, to prosecute those responsible for the injuries and deaths of all U.S. soldiers who served in Iraq.

More.

I think we learned something very valuable from Bush's Criminal War: If you're going to lie the nation into an an unnecessary war of criminal aggression, it's important to fearmonger the citizenry into a stinky lather, yes, but it's much more important to scare the crap outta the politicians whom they vote for, very few of whom will do the right thing when their seat on the gravy train might be put at risk.

One question for President Obama about something else that was noticeably not in his speech: Besides staggering debt, the deaths and suffering of hundreds of thousands of people, and the unbridled scorn of the rest of the world, what did we GAIN from the Iraq clusterfuck?

[Crickets]

Update:

A word about the final outcome of the monumental neocon blunder of Iraq as I see it.

The 50,000 American troops still in theater are there ostensibly to 'advise and assist' and will no doubt do that to the best of their considerable ability, but they remain there as a tripwire to try to keep Iran from waltzing into Iraq right now as the victor claiming its spoils, much the same function as our troops in South Korea have had for 57 years.

Once they are gone at the end of next year, the best we can hope for is that Iran will wait a decent interval so that the fall of Iraq will not be blamed directly on us, though it will be and rightly so. The mostly Sunni Arab world will not be happy when the Persian Shiites are strengthened by 20-something-million more Shiites. Your guess is as good as mine about what may happen next. It will not be pleasant.

Note to the American embassy in Baghdad: build more helipads in anticipation of the final comparison of Iraq to Vietnam. See Fall of Saigon.

‘Why Has He Fallen Short?’

Daddy Frank in The New York Review of Books with a review of Jonathan Alter's The Promise and some comments on Obama's Presidency, leans toward the economic side. Worth a read. A coupla ¶:

His achievements so far have been accomplished in spite of obstacles that would fell most mortals—the almost uncountable messes he inherited from Bush-Cheney, a cratered economy, a sclerotic Congress in thrall to lobbyists and special-interest money, and a rabid opposition underwritten by a media empire that owns both America’s most-watched cable news channel and its most highly circulated newspaper. Indeed it could be argued that the matrix of crises facing Obama would have outmatched any Bush successor, no matter how talented. (They certainly would have drowned John McCain, whose utter cluelessness about the economic crisis alarmed even his Republican allies in 2008.) But Obama knew what he was getting into when he ran for president, and the question that matters now is how he can do the job better.

Can Obama self-correct? He remains the same driven, smart, psychologically balanced leader we saw in the campaign, and to these familiar attributes, Alter adds another quality that is less frequently displayed in public—an utter lack of sentimentality. He’s “the most unsentimental man I’ve ever met,” says one aide, summing up for many of his peers. That trait may be the most useful of all if Obama undertakes the ruthless course corrections that are essential to the realization of his promise.

I think Obama's biggest mistakes so far are a) trying to achieve bipartisanship with pols who want him to fail at all costs so they can regain power, and b) putting people in charge of the economy who helped cause the problem in the first place.

Lack of sentimentality? Who the fuck cares? Ruthless? He'd better.

And she said "yes" ... again!

For our 20th Wedding Anniversary, we retook our wedding vows aboard Queen Mary 2. We're 2 days out from New York and it looks we'll meet up with hurricane Earl just as we reach the Ambrose Lightship. We had great fun for the past three weeks, but it will be good to get home.

The Speech Glenn Beck Meant to Give

Arthur Blaustein

I have a dream that the Yalie son of a Houston oil magnate can walk hand in hand with the daughter of a Wall Street hedge fund operator on the white sands of Southampton while evading inheritance taxes.

I have a dream that the young white guys playing with rifles at survivalist retreats in northern Michigan, that the middle-aged white guys playing Minuteman with guns at the Arizona border, and the older white guys frolicking at the Bohemian Grove, playing with whatever they play with, will keep people of different races or religions in their place.

I have a dream that the Supreme Court will vote 5 to 4 to revoke the statehood of Hawaii—but not Alaska—vindicating you Birthers out there.

May corporations get the American people and “government of the people, by the people and for the people” (Lincoln had it wrong) off our backs.

From the newsroom of Fox to the boardrooms of our corporate masters, let freedom ring.

Thanks to Justice Roberts Almighty, the tea party and the GOP, we’ll be free at last!

That would be "straight, non-immigrant, rich white christians will be free at last, thank the Blessed Dollar Almighty and activist wingnut judges".

Christians put out welcome mat for new mosque

The Commercial Appeal (Memphis TN)

When pastor Steve Stone initially heard of the mosque and Islamic center being erected on the sprawling land adjacent his church, his stomach tightened.

Then he raised a 6-foot sign reading, "Welcome to the Neighborhood."

The issue for Stone and the 550-person Heartsong Church in Cordova, came down to one question:

"What would Jesus do if He were us? He would welcome the neighbor," Stone said.

While the 4,000-square-foot worship hall is being completed, Heartsong has opened its doors to its neighbors throughout the monthlong observance of Ramadan.

Under a gigantic cross constructed of salvaged wood, nearly 200 area Muslims have been gathering each night to pray.

I think religion causes most of the trouble in the world. Bad people's agendas pervert the Word of the sky monster of their choice and innocents suffer. As it was and as it will be, forever and ever. Amen.

That said, the people who walk the walk and actually live by their chosen Word aren't the problem. Too bad there aren't more of them who speak out like this preacher.

The right-wing congressman made for the Obama age

Will Bunch in Salon shows us a prime example of what we're up against.

Paul Broun is the perfect embodiment of the right-wing backlash that has greeted Barack Obama's presidency

Except that the gala was held to celebrate the notorious, conspiracy-minded right-wing political group the John Birch Society, the band of Commie hunters made famous in the early 1960s, who’d seemingly vanished, only to burst back onto into the newly mainstreamed paranoid fringe within months after the election of Barack Obama as president. Rather than back away from its divisive views -- most notably that popular U.S. president and World War II hero Dwight Eisenhower was somehow an agent of international Communism -- the Birchers were doubling down in the age of Obama, still maintaining that a planet-wide conspiracy hatched some 200 years ago by the ultra-secret Illuminati in search of a so-called "New World Order" continues to flourish today.

The rise of cable TV-friendly-but-governing-averse pols like Broun and Bachmann has become a hallmark of the backlash against the Obama presidency. After the GOP lost control of the government over the second half of the 2000s, the party’s direction and indeed its very life force has been seized by a new breed of political huckster -- who saw that the paranoia and anger of the extreme political right is the only thing passing for a pulse in the modern conservative movement these days (my em). This cynical ambition of high-ranking elected officials not to tamp down the paranoid style but to adopt its latest fashions was a successful strategy ... for the politicians who might have been unknown back-benchers if they had acted more responsibly. Their mainstreaming of the political fringes made them into darlings of cable television and helped ensure reelection within their deep-red conservative districts.

A family doctor who treated Jimmy Carter’s relatives in South Georgia for a number of years, Broun declared bankruptcy in the early 1980s. A federal judge ruled -- according to news accounts in Athens -- that Broun "falsified financial documents in an effort to obtain a loan and misrepresented his assets and debts during bankruptcy proceedings" and ordered him to pay nearly $70,000 to an Americus bank. According to a bankruptcy complaint, the young family doctor "has a reputation of having an extravagant lifestyle evidenced by the acquisition of a number of expensive rare hunting books, expensive rare ceramic items related to hunting, safari to Africa, expensive gun collection and the acquisition of the very best in everything purchased." He had to pay more than $61,000 in back taxes to the IRS, and one of his ex-wives even took him to court for alimony and child support. There was a time when that kind of résumé would have sunk a would-be politician, but the 21st century has proven to be remarkably kind to past sinners who adopt the language of 12-step recovery -- just ask Glenn Beck how that works -- and even awards bonus points when Christianity is involved.

Another dry drunk like Bush, and a Tali-born again phony christian who can't handle his money or his life and is against taxes because the IRS caught him and made him pay. Another miserably failed human being who turned to right-wing politics.

There are more of these on the way this November unless WE sober up.

Quote of the Day

From a piece by Christopher Hitchens entitled "White Fright". Good short read.

Glenn Beck's rally was large, vague, moist, and undirected — the Waterworld of white self-pity.

Heh.

Note to Hitch: I hope you beat the big C, bud. I don't always agree with you but I always read you.

Becky as MLK? More like Malcolm X

I don't agree 100% with Reihan Salam, particularly about anything Becky says as "spiritually uplifting", but he makes some good points.

Glenn Beck's weekend speech was reminiscent of the radical 1960s black separatist leader: Both terrify mainstream liberals and shed politics for a message of spiritual uplift.

If white separatism is supposed to be 'spiritually uplifting' I want no part of it. Also, being caught between two 18-wheelers terrifies me. All Becky y ilk does is piss me off.

[...] Palin, like Beck, was talking about a spiritual restoration, a return to time-tested virtues that had been celebrated by the more homogeneous America of the past, in which non-traditional families were stigmatized and relatively rare, church attendance was far more common, and the dominance of Anglo-Protestant culture was unquestioned.

But as most of those who attended Beck’s rally(*) understand in their bones, that world is gone. And President Obama, for all his efforts to expand the reach of the federal government, has had very little to do with this deep transformation. Rather, the country has long since been transformed by powerful demographic and economic forces that very much threaten what we might call Glenn Beck’s America.

*"Whitestock". Apt.

Instead of accepting or embracing this transformation, a large and growing number of white Americans are, knowingly or otherwise, taking a page from minority protest movements of the past by asserting themselves and demanding recognition from political and cultural elites. Many on the left find this sense of anger and alienation risible, seeing in this movement of “are-nots,” as opposed to “have-nots,” a class of ignoramuses duped by Fox News into acting against their supposed economic interests.

And your point is...?

So in this very strange and very fluid political moment, Glenn Beck has emerged as the white Malcolm X. Whereas Malcom X embraced militant black separatism, Beck marries a stridently emotional style with political views that wouldn’t have been out of place at a 1950s Elks Lodge event. [...]

Most of Becky's crowd probably attended those.

And though Beck is scrupulously inclusive — I was particularly struck by his reference to “our churches, our synagogues, our mosques” during his lengthy address to the crowd — his people are overwhelmingly white and old. Among Americans over the age of 65, 80 percent are non-Hispanic whites, an artifact of an earlier era in which the number of Latinos was negligible and African Americans were the only minority population of any significance. This over-65 population, well represented at the rally, has tended to be the most hostile to President Obama’s agenda. Not coincidentally, the average age of Fox News viewers is 65, a shade older than CNN’s 63 and MSNBC’s 59.

[...] With each passing year, the cultural mix of the United States is growing more Latin and Asian and black. Non-Hispanic whites are just 56 percent of the under-18 population, a reality reflected in an increasingly pan-ethnic youth culture that seems baffling to older white Americans. Imagine how elderly viewers of Glenn Beck must feel when they accidentally catch themselves watching an episode of Jersey Shore.

I don't watch Becky, but I can dig the reference to Jersey Shore. I don't get it either. Perhaps Snooki and I could take a sweat lodge and she could esplain it to me...

I like the 'Malcolm X' comparison. I hope it holds.

Update:

Also see "The Glenn Beck Crazy Tracker".

The punk took a half day off from his message of hate and racism and some are calling it a 'transformation'. Yeesh.

Op-Ed of the Day

This is who `we' really is, Glenn

The we to which Glenn Beck belongs is the we that said no, the we that cried "socialism", "communism", "tyranny" whenever black people and their allies cried freedom.

The fatuous and dishonorable attempt to posit conservatives as the prime engine of civil rights depends for success on the ignorance of the American people. Sadly, as anyone who has ever watched a Jay Walking segment on The Tonight Show can attest, the American people have ignorance in plenitude.

This, then, is to serve notice as Beck and his tea party faithful gather in Lincoln's shadow to claim the mantle of King: Some of us are not ignorant. Some of us remember. Some of us know very well who "we" is.

And, who `"we" is not.

Read this.

It's Witch-Hunt Season

Paul Krugman

Anyone who remembered the 1990s could have predicted something like the current political craziness. What we learned from the Clinton years is that a significant number of Americans just don’t consider government by liberals — even very moderate liberals — legitimate. Mr. Obama’s election would have enraged those people even if he were white. Of course, the fact that he isn’t, and has an alien-sounding name, adds to the rage.

By the way, I’m not talking about the rage of the excluded and the dispossessed: Tea Partiers are relatively affluent, and nobody is angrier these days than the very, very rich. Wall Street has turned on Mr. Obama with a vengeance: last month Steve Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman of the Blackstone Group, the private equity giant, compared proposals to end tax loopholes for hedge fund managers with the Nazi invasion of Poland.

And powerful forces are promoting and exploiting this rage. [...]

Dupe the sheeple, wreck the country, get the money.

And where, in all of this, are the responsible Republicans, leaders who will stand up and say that some partisans are going too far? Nowhere to be found.

They're as scared of the teabaggers as the Democrats are of everything.

So what will happen if, as expected, Republicans win control of the House? We already know part of the answer: Politico reports that they’re gearing up for a repeat performance of the 1990s, with a “wave of committee investigations” — several of them over supposed scandals that we already know are completely phony. We can expect the G.O.P. to play chicken over the federal budget, too; I’d put even odds on a 1995-type government shutdown sometime over the next couple of years.

It will be an ugly scene, and it will be dangerous, too. The 1990s were a time of peace and prosperity; this is a time of neither. In particular, we’re still suffering the after-effects of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, and we can’t afford to have a federal government paralyzed by an opposition with no interest in helping the president govern. But that’s what we’re likely to get.

Except for the investigations, it's what we've got now.

Every coupla years, a lotta Liberals get all pissed-off, petulant and whiny as well, at the Dems for not doing what they want and threaten to stay home from the polls or throw their vote away by voting for some candidate without a snowball's chance in hell of getting elected. The gasbags are calling it 'the enthusiasm gap'.

This time that will be fatal.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Ex-Sen. Simpson: Social Security “A Milk Cow With 310 Million Tits”
Declined to characterize his lifetime taxpayer-funded pension quite as colorfully.

Plan to Build Mosque in Southern California Draws Protests
Opponents say proposed building in Temecula “too close to Ground Zero.”

Thousands of Cars Snarled in 60-Mile-Long Traffic Jam in China
Another sign they’re moving ahead of us.

Porn Goes 3-D Imax
Ad boasts “Puts the 'imax' back in climax.”

Oy...

No smoking ...

It's gotten ridiculous.

Update:

My last post from Scandinavia ... finally.

5 Years

This is about the fourth or fifth time I've put this video up. I think it symbolizes the failures of Katrina as well as anything.

Never forget. Repugs do not care a goddam thing about you, less if you're The Other.

Old Crow Medicine Show ~ I Hear Them All

Thanks to NettwerkMusic.

Who ya afraid of, Becky?

Symbol of Fear: Glenn Beck Wore a Bulletproof Vest at Restoring Honor Rally

Politicususa has the photos to prove it.

Glenn Beck delivered a powerful symbol to America today during his Restoring Honor rally, but it had nothing to do with his words or the crowd. If you looked closely at Beck during his “I Killed a Dream” speech, you could see that he was wearing a bulletproof vest. Beck was afraid of his own fans. [...]

Glenn Beck is so paranoid that he could not face his own fans without wearing a bulletproof vest. This fact not only speaks volumes about Beck, but also the mental stability of his fans. Ironically enough, Beck claimed that he is not a fear monger.

Today’s Tea Party rally disguised as charity was a typical right wing event. They wrap themselves in Patriotism, God, and Country, but beneath this thin veneer of bluster is cowardice and fear. The blue hairs who were attending Beck’s white power festival live in terror. They are terrified of the black man in the White House with the funny sounding name. They are terrified of Muslim people and think that every Islamic believer had a hand in 9/11. They are terrified of progress, and they are most terrified of change.

When they talk about taking America back, they are not only referring to political power. These people literally want to take America back in time. Their goal is to undo all progress. The message is that things were safer before they changed. Of course, in the time before things changed, black people were enslaved or segregated against, women had no rights, the poor could only believe in the American Dream, white people had all the power, and there would have most definitely never been a black man in the White House.

Glenn Beck is no Martin Luther King, and those people who gathered in DC today, were no civil rights marchers. Those involved in the civil rights movement risked their lives for equality, where as Glenn Beck is such a coward that he feels unsafe facing his own supporters without a bulletproof vest. Martin Luther King stood on that same ground 47 years earlier today and offered up a dream for a better America, but all Beck offered up was fear wrapped in Kevlar. Just as the March on Washington was a symbol for all that America could be, Glenn Beck’s bulletproof vest is a symbol of all that the Tea Party isn’t.

Hey, Becky, who the fuck ya afraid of? Lefties don't do that shit and the righties love you. Maybe there's some militant fringe righties that are after you because you're not enough of a batcrap crazy lying racist fearmonger. OK, I get it.

Note to Miss Becky: Have you considered suicide? You can say liberals drove you to it. That would be a great career move! It might restore some honor to this country as well.

The last thing we should want in the world is for someone to shoot Miss Becky and make her a martyr to a phony corporate cause. She needs to be humiliated somehow that will last and drive her off the public stage, but it's unlikely given that her own despicable spew hasn't done it already. The suckers eat that shit up. Sigh.

The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party

Daddy Frank on the Koch Bros and Rupert Murdoch, links at site:

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.

The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the “ground zero mosque.” Last week on “Fox and Friends,” the Bush administration flacks Dan Senor and Dana Perino attacked a supposedly terrorism-tainted Saudi prince whose foundation might contribute to the Islamic center. But as “The Daily Show” keeps pointing out, these Fox bloviators never acknowledge that the evil prince they’re bashing, Walid bin Talal, is not only the biggest non-Murdoch shareholder in Fox News’s parent company (he owns 7 percent of News Corporation) and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox.
...

[...] As Jon Stewart summed it up, the protestors who want “to cut off funding to the ‘terror mosque’ ” are aiding that funding by watching Fox and enhancing bin Talal’s News Corp. holdings.

When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”

And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.

Sadly.

Shorter: Obama just stands there and watches these assholes work the teabaggers like a rented garden tool.