Good stuff...

Got this from one of our esteamed (like a tortilla?) commenters, jjoats. Go see Toons for Our Times.

Strike Two!

AUSTIN - A Texas grand jury on Monday indicted U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay on a new charge of money laundering.

A different grand jury whose term ended last week indicted him on a conspiracy charge, forcing DeLay to temporarily step down as House majority leader.

[. . .]

Isn't Rove running this?

Via His Highness:

Relief efforts to combat Hurricane Katrina suffered near catastrophic failures due to endemic corruption, divisions within the military and troop shortages caused by the Iraq war, an official American inquiry into the disaster has revealed.

[. . .]

Our tax dollars at work.

[. . .]

The report was commissioned by the Office of Secretary of Defence as an "independent and critical review" of what went so wrong. In a hard-hitting analysis, it says: "The US military has long planned for war on two fronts. This is as close as we have come to [that] reality since the Second World War; the results have been disastrous."

[. . .]

Our children's lives sold to Halliburton.

[. . .]

The report concludes: "The one thing this disaster has demonstrated [is] the lack of coordinated, in-depth planning and training on all levels of Government, for any/all types of emergency contingencies. 9/11 was an exception because the geographical area was small and contained, but these two hurricanes have clearly demonstrated a national response weakness ... Failure to plan, and train properly has plagued US efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq and now that failure has come home to roost in the United States." [The Independent]

Our nation broken and disgraced.

This is all the Republicans have been good for.

Depressing

Yeah, I know I said I was taking the day off, but it's either blog or jerk off. Anyway, I ran across this depressing post from my man Dave:

I'd like to coin a term for the times in which we find ourselves: The Propaganda Age.

We've lived throught the Jet Age, Atomic Age, Space Age and Computer Age. We've experienced the Vietnam Era, the Depression era and the McCarthy Era.

[. . .]

Reasons

I might as well weigh in on that woman . . . Ms. Miers. Xan said it plainly:

[. . .]

This is clearly a snow job. Miers will never sit on the Supreme Court, but while we're going through the high theatrics necessary to block her, attention will be turned away from Frist, DeLay, the wreckage of the Federal bureaucracy and the rampant theft and cronyism that is at the heart of the Scandal-Plagued Bush Administration.

[. . .]

However, ya think Harry Reid coulda waited at least 24 hours without rolling over and playing dead?

[. . .]

"I like Harriet Miers," said Reid, who voted against John Roberts as U.S. chief justice last week. "In my view, the Supreme Court would benefit from the addition of a justice who has real experience as a practicing lawyer."

[. . .]

Jesus H. Christ, the Chimp's spittle was still wet and warm on the microphone, Harry. Couldn't ya have said 'we'll think about it'? How in Hell ya gonna filibuster her now? Or are ya just gonna cave like you did with Roberts? There's a good side though:

[. . .]

"It is very hard to avoid the conclusion that
President Bush flinched from a fight on constitutional philosophy," said William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard magazine. "Her selection will unavoidably be judged as reflecting a combination of cronyism and capitulation on the part of the president."

Manny Miranda, head of a conservative coalition called The Third Branch Conference, said Miers was "the most unqualified choice" for the high court since Lyndon Johnson tried to make Abe Fortas chief justice in 1968.

[. . .]

At least the right wing nitwits are pissed too. Who knows, our best hope is maybe the Republicans will filibuster.

Before I forget . . . again . . .

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and since female breasts are a subject very dear to me I offer this. Make sure the women in your life get regular checkups and mammograms, more frequently as they get older. Even if just for selfish reasons, do it.

Good

Taking a second out from smoking dope and surfing porn sites (my wife is at my mother-in-law's for Rosh Hashana - don't ask) to relate something that makes me smile on my birthday. From the lovely Pam:

[. . .]

K12 Inc. today announced that William J. Bennett has resigned as an employee, and as Chairman and member of the company's Board of Directors, effective immediately.

[. . .]

Ha-ha!

Lock your car...

Boston Globe

The FBI's counterterrorism unit has launched a broad investigation of US-based theft rings after discovering that some of the vehicles used in deadly car bombings in Iraq, including attacks that killed US troops and Iraqi civilians, were probably stolen in the United States, according to senior government officials.

Better yet, three sticks of dynamite under the driver's seat, wired to the brake light switch so it won't go off 'til it's at the next stop sign and not in your driveway.

Republicannibalism

I predicted right after the '04 elections that the Repubs would soon start eating their own. They're doing it.

I think of Socialists as bomb-throwing Bolshevik nutsos, but some of them have good ideas and there's nothing wrong with their keyboards. From the World Socialist Web Site:

Behind the DeLay indictment: vicious infighting within the US ruling elite

You'll want to read this one. I say let 'em fight 'til there's only one left standing, then hang him.

The guys at Blogger must all be Jewish. The thing is working so good today they must be trying to atone during Rosh Hashanah.

Day off

I'm taking the day off. It's my birthday. 43 for anyone who gives a shit.

The GOP's Spreading Plague

My theme so far today seems to be evolving, or designed intelligently (Ha!), as Let's Get To The Bottom Of Republican Corruption And Crimes And Throw The Bastards In Jail. Nothing new for me, but I'm glad the better opinion writers are catching up.

Joe Conason adds even more fuel to the funeral pyre:

To be an honest Republican (oxymoron - G) these days must be to wonder what awful revelation is coming next - and how the Grand Old Party, which once claimed to represent political reform, became a front for sleaze, corruption and cynical criminality. Across the country, from the Capitol to statehouses, Republican officials are under indictment, under investigation or under suspicion.

This week's headlines featured the indictment of Rep. Tom DeLay and the probe of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, but the infection of venality among their fellow partisans is now reaching epidemic proportions. So widespread is the plague that keeping track of all the individual cases, and their increasingly baroque variations, has become a distinct challenge.

It's a good piece and you should go read it.

Here's my point: There is so much investigation of Republican sleaze going on right now that one op-ed writer can't possibly refer to all of it in any one article. I'm sure they have space limitations. I have to read three or four or more to get the whole picture. I'm fuckin' lovin' it!

If the Republisleaze funeral pyre gets as big as I hope it will, it will be too big to do the Dance of Joy around it. Therefore, I am preparing a machine suitable for the 40-Inch Triumph Full Bore Third Gear Wheel-Spinnin' Dirt-Throwin' Ya-Hooin' Sideways Slide of Joy! I think extensive testing at a Republican golf course might be in order to make sure it works when the proper time comes!

In the beginning, there was Abramoff...

Daddy Frank lays it on 'em about about all the present, and upcoming (Yay!), investigations and indictments of our criminal ruling cabal.

Those who still live in the reality-based community, however, may sense they're watching the beginning of the end of something big. It's not just Mr. DeLay, a k a the Hammer, who is on life support, but a Washington establishment whose infatuation with power and money has contaminated nearly every limb of government and turned off a public that by two to one finds the country on the wrong track.

The most important plot development of the past two weeks, in fact, has nothing to do with Mr. DeLay (as far as we know). It was instead the arrest of the administration's top procurement officer, David Safavian, on charges of lying and obstructing the investigation of Mr. Abramoff. And what an investigation it is: The F.B.I., the I.R.S., the Treasury Department and the Interior Department have all been involved. The popular theory of the case has it that Mr. Safavian, a former lobbying colleague of both Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Norquist, is being muscled by the feds to rat on the big guys in Washington - much as another smaller fish may have helped reel in Mr. DeLay in Texas.

The DeLay and Abramoff investigations are not to be confused with the many others percolating in the capital, including, most famously of late, the Justice Department and S.E.C. inquiries into the pious Bill Frist's divine stock-sale windfall and the homeland security inspector general's promised inquiry into possible fraud in the no-bid contracts doled out by FEMA for Hurricane Katrina. The mother of all investigations, of course, remains the prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's pursuit of whoever outed the C.I.A. agent Valerie Wilson to Robert Novak and whoever may have lied to cover it up. The denouement is on its way.

But whatever the resolution of any of these individual dramas, they will not be the end of the story. Like the continuing revelations of detainee abuse emerging from Afghanistan, Iraq and Guant·namo, this is a crisis in the governing culture, not the tale of a few bad apples. Every time you turn over a rock, you find more vermin. We've only just learned from The Los Angeles Times that Joseph Schmitz, until last month the inspector general in charge of policing waste, fraud and abuse at the Pentagon, is himself the focus of a Congressional inquiry. He is accused of blocking the investigation of another Bush appointee who is suspected of siphoning Iraq reconstruction contracts to business cronies. At the Justice Department, the F.B.I. is looking into why a career prosecutor was demoted after he started probing alleged Abramoff illegality in Guam. According to The Los Angeles Times, the demoted prosecutor was then replaced by a Rove-approved Republican pol who just happened to be a cousin of a major target of another corruption investigation in Guam.

This is the culture that has given us the government we have. It's a government that has spent more of the taxpayers' money than any since L.B.J.'s (as calculated by the Cato Institute, a libertarian research institution), even as it rewards its benefactors with tax breaks and corporate pork. It's a government so used to lying that Mr. DeLay could say with a straight face that the cost of Katrina relief could not be offset by budget cuts because there was no governmental fat left to cut. It's the government that fostered the wholesale loss of American lives in both Iraq and on the Gulf Coast by putting cronyism above patriotism.

Cronyism above patriotism. Well put, Pop, but too mild. I call it Treason For Profit.

Bush Dunnit

Juan Cole starts out on Plamegate and ends up blaming Bush for everything that has ever gone wrong in the last five years. Rightly so.

The whole point of Bushism is to punish dissidence within the ranks immediately and ruthlessly. Wilson, a former State Department official, had to be destroyed for having stepped out of line. Everyone should remember that when former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill decided to come out with a tell-all memoir about being in the Bush cabinet for a year, he proclaimed, "I'm old, I'm rich, and there is nothing they can do to me" (or words to that effect). Then all of a sudden the Bush administration was finding signs of classified documents in O'Neill's book, implicitly threatening him with spending the rest of his life in jail for having revealed government secrets. O'Neill feebly protested that he had not had access to classified documents. But all of a sudden he disappeared from the airwaves. He had discovered that there were, too, things that could be done to him. He must have been astonished that the Bushes of Kennebunkport would behave like Vladimir Putin. Everyone always underestimates the malevolence of the Bushes of Connecticut.

So in the hothouse atmosphere of the White House in 2003, when the awful truth was dawning that there was no WMD in Iraq, Rove, Libby, W. and the big Bruce huddled together with others in the administration to think how to discredit Wilson. They care only about image, not substance. It didn't matter to them that Wilson had been proved right. In their world, you only lose if the public sees the truth. The mere discovery of the truth in some obscure quarter is irrelevant. They had to prevent the public from seeing Wilson's truth.

I have long been frustrated by the US press's tendency to talk about Bush's cabinet officers as though they were independent agents, and to put Bush on a pedestal. Let me just follow through on some further assertions in the spirit of Stephanopoulos's remark.

It is fruitless to speculate about who dissolved the Iraqi army in May of 2003, and why. (This move contributed to the rise of the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement). Bush did it!

Who ordered the Marines, against their better judgement, to launch a reprisal attack on Fallujah after four Western private security guards were killed and their bodies desecrated there? Bush did it!.

Who authorized torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib? Bush did it!

Who appointed Michael Brown, a man with no experience in emergency management, head of FEMA? Bush did it!

Who let Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora? Bush did it!

Who completely destroyed the fiscal health of the US government and forced us into massive debt, squandering Clinton's surplus and endangering social security? Bush did it!.

Bush is the president. He makes the decisions. If there has been a major bad decision, it has been his.

Who outed Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA operative? Bush did it!

Amen and fuckin' A, brother.

The War Machine

Andy Rooney says it well:

Ike Was Right About War Machine
Oct. 2, 2005(CBS) The following is a weekly 60 Minutes commentary by CBS News correspondent Andy Rooney. It was first broadcast Oct. 2, 2005.


I'm not really clear how much a billion dollars is but the United States - our United States - is spending $5.6 billion a month fighting this war in Iraq that we never should have gotten into.

We still have 139,000 soldiers in Iraq today.

Almost 2,000 Americans have died there. For what?

Now we have the hurricanes to pay for. One way our government pays for a lot of things is by borrowing from countries like China.

Another way the government is planning to pay for the war and the hurricane damage is by cutting spending for things like Medicare prescriptions, highway construction, farm payments, AMTRAK, National Public Radio and loans to graduate students. Do these sound like the things you'd like to cut back on to pay for Iraq?

I'll tell you where we ought to start saving: on our bloated military establishment.

We're paying for weapons we'll never use.

No other Country spends the kind of money we spend on our military. Last year Japan spent $42 billion. Italy spent $28 billion, Russia spent only $19 billion. The United States spent $455 billion.

We have 8,000 tanks for example. One Abrams tank costs 150 times as much as a Ford station wagon.

We have more than 10,000 nuclear weapons - enough to destroy all of mankind.

We're spending $200 million a year on bullets alone. That's a lot of target practice. We have 1,155,000 enlisted men and women and 225,000 officers. One officer to tell every five enlisted soldier what to do. We have 40,000 colonels alone and 870 generals.

We had a great commander in WWII, Dwight Eisenhower. He became President and on leaving the White House in 1961, he said this: "We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Well, Ike was right. That's just what’s happened.

Free Tom Delay

Yeah, right.

Birthday present

You don't want to do a "ramp strike" here. It's been done.


The 'hood.


Lake Tahoe

I had a birthday recently (if you must know, I turned 60, God help me!) and Mrs. G gave me some dynamite presents. Besides way too much Italian food at Lanza's, an ice cream cake with all my favorite flavors, and a sport shirt with WWII airplanes on it, she gave me something I wish I had done years ago and will do again: a sailplane ride.

I took my ride this morning at Soar Truckee, which is just down the road apiece and located on the crosswind runway of Truckee-Tahoe Airport. The joint is run by Joe, from Philly, and his wife Samantha, a tall redhead from Down Under somewhere to judge by her accent.

Before takeoff, I told Joe I was going to post my experience at the Brain and he said this had better be a good Republican blog. Uh-oh. I had visions of him bailing out, insurance policy in hand, yelling "You're on yer own, Lefty!". Didn't happen.

What did happen was we got more or less hauled into the air on a long rope by a crop duster. The Piper Pawnee towed the Schweizer 2-32 up out of the Martis Valley in a buncha ascending circles and waved bye-bye. Joe says once you take the crop dusting apparatus off to clean up the lines, and without the weight of the salad poison, the 250hp engine hauls the Pawnee around pretty good. The 2-32 is one of about 60 in the U.S. out of a production run of 87. Interestingly enough, this model was the basis for a powered military observation plane, the YO-3A. Schweizer Aircraft is now owned by Sikorsky.

The ride was totally bitchin'! Joe took the plane up above the tops of the mountains and caught a thermal updraft in the process, like an express elevator. I think we topped out well over 10,000 feet. You could see a hundred miles, from Lake Tahoe to Mt. Shasta. All you could hear was the "whoosh" of air around the thing, and we could talk normally. The ride was real smooth with only a couple of "yahooeys!". It was a half-hour ride and it went by too quickly. I can't wait to go again, and have told Mrs. G she must go for a spin. It may take days to get the shit-eatin' grin off my face.

I highly recommend this safe, fun, and joyful experience to everybody.

Joe and I agreed, Democrat or Republican be damned, we were both smart enough to be here together.

Vast Left Wing Conspiracy

Remember Hillary's Vast Right Wing Conspiracy? Turns out she was right. DeLay thinks it can work for him but Mustang Bobby calls bullshit:

[. . .]

Frankly, I think if there was such a thing as a "vast left-wing conspiracy" -- an oxymoron if there ever was one -- we would not have wasted our time on a pipsqueak like Tom DeLay. We would have won the election in 2000, we would have run the Republicans out of the majority in the Congress and Senate, and we would have opened gay bars and abortion clinics in St. Patrick's Cathedral. Dream big dreams, Tom.

[. . .]

If there was such a thing, DeLay would have been in jail long ago.

You're too happy

Listen up, Lefties [and I include myself]. You're all far too happy over this DeLay thing. About everything. Fitzgerald's probe of the Plame case, Frist's Martha Stewart-esque troubles, the Chimp's mishandling of Katrina and Iraq going into the dumper; we seem to have an astrological confluence of events resembling a 'perfect storm'. I have reservations.

I have serious reservations about the common sense of my fellow Americans. I used to think even the most myopic of us could see the blatant patterns of corruption, the hallmarks of the Republican Party. After 2000 and again in 2004, the majority of my fellow Americans have let me down and I have no reason to believe the Congressional elections of '06 will change much of anything.

I hope and pray I'm wrong, but Jesus Christ, I don't think folks will wake up; not as long as Fox News continues to be the highest rated news network. Not as long as the Democratic Party takes this limp-wristed approach with their opposition. Not as long as companies like Diebold continue to receive contracts to supply voting machines. As I said, I hope I'm wrong.

Maybe the DeLay indictment might put pressure on others to open up. Maybe Frist will be indicted. Maybe Rove and Scooter Libby too. But I think they'll weasel out of this instead and I think the American people, with their 10 minute attention spans, will forget all about these scandals over the next 13 months.

Instead, one of the Repub spinmiesters will come up with some half-assed tag that will stick wth the Dems until the election. Remember the Swift Boating of John Kerry? Ladies and gentlemen, think what you will of John Kerry, but a decorated combat vet was smeared with his own record by a draft dodger. Think about it. Then think about what they will do in '06, probably the most desperate time for the Republican majority in Congress. For if they lose the House or the Senate, or both, there's a good chance God's Chosen President will be impeached soon after. Do you think they will let scandal stop them?

Hup-toop-treep-ribbit

In a pretty long piece at ConsortiumNews about Bush's abuses of power and war crimes, there appeared this jewel:

In a healthy democracy, the debate might be less about imprisoning England and other "grunts" than whether Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other war architects should be "frog-marched" to the Hague for prosecution as war criminals.

The international community also has largely shied away from the issue of Bush's criminality, apparently because of the unprecedented military might of the United States.

If the leaders of a less powerful nation had invaded a country under false pretenses - touching off a war that left tens of thousands of civilians dead - there surely would be demands for war crimes prosecutions before the International Criminal Court at the Hague. But not for Bush and his War Cabinet.

If we keep at it, perhaps our "democracy" will someday be strong enough to make it happen. Gives me something to live for.

Learning Curves

Mrs. F and I were talking the other day, just after Hurricane Rita hit, wondering about how FEMA and Homeland Security might drop the ball again. The King of Zembla posted on it last night and it got me thinking again.

The Mrs. theorized that our federal response, hell the local response too, was educational to people who might actually do us harm. Thanks to the 'leadership' in this country, these two natural disasters pointed up the basic fact we are more vunlnerable than ever.

Not only are our borders less secure, but also our response to a terror attack of any magnitude will be slow and disorganized at best. Odds are, it would be inept and clumsy, assuring large collateral damage numbers.

They've learned how to cripple our economy. Screw the World Trade Center, just hit the refineries. The damage done to our energy infrastructure would long term, assuring ever higher gasoline (and home heating) prices. The impact might even trigger a decline of Great Depression-type proportions.

Yes, thanks to the Bush administration's cronyism and ineptitude, they have given 'evildoers' a road map to landing the death blow to our nation. All they had to do is watch TV.

Back to painting . . .