Ooga-booga!!!!

Or, be very scared* of this woman.



You see, though she might look like a sweet old broad, she was carrying ... ice packs. And they had ... duct tape (or something) on them. And well, we all know she was really testing airport security for Osama and all them bad al-Qaeda guys. You know, the ones were "fightin' over there"?

An unsuspecting senior citizen from Long Island, N.Y. is behind one of the incidents that prompted the TSA to issue a bulletin last week about cases in which they suspect terrorists may have been probing airport security by trying to bring peculiar items on board airplanes.

In her case, Sara Weiss tried to bring ice packs on her flight home.

"I'm not a terrorist. I'm just a 66-year-old woman who's coming back from visiting her son and I have a bad back, so I carry these things," Weiss told ABC News' Lisa Stark.

...

Yeah, that's what they all say, Grandma. Orange jumpsuit and a free trip to Gitmo for you, honey. Now shut up and spread 'em, it's time for the cavity search.

What is this fucking country coming to when we're jacking up grandmothers and putting little kids on the no-fly list?

*Great thanks to Blondie for the link.

[A big welcome to Skippy the Bush Kangaroo readers.]

"Dave ain't here, man ..."*

The wonderful TRex (were I gay, he'd be mine) on the conference call the White House had with conservative bloggers the other day:

Right Wing bloggers are the kinds of guys who get a couple sheets to the wind and decide they want to do some blow, so they call up this one guy they’re pretty sure does drugs who works at their law-firm and shout down their cell phone at him from a crowded bar, “Dude! Pete, man! It’s Chad! Chad Anderson! Chad! Anderson! Right, from down the hall, listen man, do you know how we could GET SOME DRUGS? Like some COKE OR SOMETHING? We’d like totally share with you, man! Hello? Hello?!”

...

Note to conservatives: Just as you "can't handle the truth", you also can't handle drugs. I could just imagine the shit they'd write stoned, or wired on coke. Bad enough Ann OutAlthouse vlogs drunk.

...

Not only do they happily report to the White House via conference call to get their weekly ration of talking points about How to Spin Questions of Executive Privilege, but then they go around and thump their chests around their even smaller-dicked buddies to brag about it. Think about that. [my em]

...

Remind me never to get arrested with a conservative. We'd both be doing 25 to Life for puffin' a dube by the time he shut up.

...

“Hey, Chester, a bunch of Liberty University grads who work for a guy with a 29% approval rating just told me exactly what to say and think for the next week until they call me back! Oh, shit! I forgot to ask them how I’m supposed to wipe my ass!”

...

Something they should have thought about before they left their steaming piles on the interwebs.

...

I don’t think the Bush administration is in a position to be giving anybody advice right now. But regardless of that, Right Wingers, you’ve got this all wrong. Blogging is not meant to be a top-down thing. They call the grassroots the grassroots because they grow from the bottom upward.

...

Another note to conservatives: While we're speaking of grass (on several levels), it's planted green side up.

*Aplogies to Cheech & Chong fans.

The Legacy of George W. Bush

Taking out the Boner ...

This would be so fucking good:

The Buckeye State Blog has revealed that the next member of Congress who will be revealed as a client of the DC Madam's, the way David Diapers Vitter (R-LA) was, will be a Republican member of the Ohio congressional delegation ...

...

... Most people Every single person we've contacted so far says it's Boehner.

Of course, this is only rumor, but I'm already touching myself.

Link thanks to Maru, whom I rob regularly.

Don't worry, Bob...

Think Progress

“I’m 76 years old, and pretty soon I’m going to a place where there are no blogs,” said conservative pundit Robert Novak at an American Spectator breakfast on Thursday morning. Speaking of the land beyond, Novak added, “All presidents look better after they’re dead, and George W. Bush can count on that.”

Heh. There won't be any blogs where you're going, Bob - the heat renders computers inoperable. You'll like it there, though - all your friends will be there. All sweaty, with acres of fat fish-belly-white flab, in Speedos. Good visual, huh?

I hope Bush looks his best real soon.

In all fairness to Bob "Douchebag for Liberty" Novak, if he hadn't outted Valerie Plame we might not be where we are in terms of public knowledge of the administration's deceit and criminality in starting the Iraq clusterfuck. He did us a favor.

Yes, that's an "attaboy" for Novak. Remember, though, that one "aw shit!" wipes out ten thousand "attaboys". He's still goin' to Hell.

It was up his ass and he still doesn't get it...

Saul Friedman has a few words to say about Bush and the Repugs who are against government-run health care:

But I don’t think it would have been in bad taste for members of the press–especially those who cover health care–to point out, as did San Francisco Chronicle columnist David Lazarus, that the president was attended by a team of physicians who made a house call, that they were government employees and that it cost the president nothing. That, of course is how it should be for a president; free medical care for himself, his wife and his daughters come with the job.

But when the president told an audience in Cleveland that “people have access to health care in America; after all, you just go to an emergency room,” he might have thought about his coming procedure and connected the dots to the millions of Americans who don’t have colonoscopies (and risk cancer) because they have no insurance. Or reporters who know how crowded emergency rooms are when their kids need help in the middle of the night, might have reminded him or one of his spokespersons of the realities of health care without house calls.

So I wonder if anyone in the press or on his own staff points out to him that he and every member of his family, including George H.W. and Barbara Bush, have been cared for by government-run health care for as long as they’ve been in public service. And they’ll have government-paid health insurance and care for as long as they live.

No one would seriously object to providing government-paid health care to the president, his family and other government officials, even Vice-president Cheney. They are all entitled to health insurance and it’s mostly paid for by the public. But in addition to their insurance, lawmakers at the Capitol as well as White House officials have doctors on call, and a military or government hospital is available, for the flu, a broken bone or a colonoscopy. And as far as I know, these officials, from the president on down, have not complained about government-run health care–for themselves.

To their way of thinking, the finest of everything, on the taxpayers, is merely their due for all the hard work of being the Ruling Class. The peasants? Fuck 'em.

I just noticed I don't have to go through the posts any more to change all the punctuation maks that used to result in weird shit if left unedited. Whee!

Slave Labor builds U.S. Embassy In Iraq

Well, ain't that nice? WaPo:

Two American civilian contractors who worked on a massive U.S. Embassy construction project in Baghdad told Congress yesterday that foreign laborers were deceptively recruited and trafficked to Iraq to toil at the site, where they experienced physical abuse and substandard working conditions.

First Kuwaiti's labor practices are under investigation by the Justice Department, which is looking into allegations that foreign employees were brought into Iraq under false pretenses and were unable to leave because the company had confiscated their passports.

First Kuwaiti has termed those allegations "ludicrous." The company declined the committee's invitation to testify or provide officials for interviews, said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the oversight committee.

Foreign workers lived in tightly packed trailers and had "insufficient equipment and basic needs -- stuff like shoes and gloves," Owens said.

They worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and made as little as $240 a month, he said. They were "verbally and physically abused" and had their salaries docked for petty infractions, he added.

Rory J. Mayberry, an emergency medical technician who worked briefly at the embassy site under a subcontract, testified that he was asked by First Kuwaiti managers to escort 51 Filipinos through the Kuwait airport and onto a flight to Baghdad. However, "all of our tickets said we were going to Dubai," he said, adding that a First Kuwaiti manager instructed him not to tell any of the Filipinos that they were going to Baghdad.

He said the men were basically "kidnapped by First Kuwaiti to work on the U.S. Embassy." Their passports had been confiscated, and they were driven away on buses after landing in Baghdad, then were "smuggled into the Green Zone," he said.

Words fail me, other than to note that you know good and damn well that the Kuwaitis got rich on our tax money by doing this egregious bullshit.

The danger of a cornered Chimp

Today's 'must read'. Consortiumnews has a warning about the madmen at the helm.

Editor's Note: As the nation and the world face 18 more months of George W. Bush's presidency, a chilling prospect is that Bush – confronted with more defeats and reversals – might just "lose it" and undertake even more reckless military adventures.

In this special memorandum, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) collaborated with psychiatrist Justin Frank, author of Bush on the Couch, to assess the potential dangers and possible countermeasures available to constrain Bush:

What a burden to have to face his many inadequacies - now held up to the light of day - whether it is his difficulty in speaking, thinking, reading, managing anxiety, or making good decisions. He will not change, because for him change means humiliating collapse. He is very fearful of public exposure of his many inadequacies.

His certitude that he is right gives him carte blanche for destructive behavior. He has always had a sadistic streak: from blowing up frogs, to shooting his siblings with a b-b-gun, to branding fraternity pledges with white-hot coat hangers.

It may well be that, unconsciously, the government represents his neglectful parents, and those helped by the government represent the siblings he resents. If George W. Bush wanted to destroy his own family, he could scarcely have done better. Thanks to him, no Bush is likely to be elected to high office for generations to come.

There is a God!

And so, we are left with a president who cannot actually govern, because he is incapable of reasoned thought in coping with events outside his control, like those in the Middle East.

Outlined below are three illustrative contingencies, each of which would pose a neuralgic threat to George W. Bush's shaky self-esteem, his over-determined efforts to stave off humiliation, and his unending need for self-protection.

These are not seat-of-the-pants scenarios. Each of them is possible - arguably, even probable. The importance of coming up with educated guesses regarding Bush's response BEFORE they occur is, we hope, clear.

The reaction would come from deep within and would warn, in effect: This is what you get if you try to make me look bad.

Is there nothing to rein in Bush and Cheney? It seems likely that only if impeachment proceedings were under way would senior officers like CENTCOM commander, Admiral William Fallon, be likely to parry an unlawful order to start yet another war without the approval of Congress and the UN.

To do that effectively, he will need senior generals and admirals as co-conspirators. It will be up to them to choose between career and Constitution. All too often, in such circumstances, the tendency has been to choose career.

Impeachment hearings, though, could encourage senior officers like Admiral Fallon to pause long enough to remember that their oath is to defend the Constitution, and that they are not required to follow orders to start another war in order to stave off political and personal disaster for the president and vice president.

Chilling. I think the Secret Service needs to assign agents full time whose sole mission is to double-tap a couple into Bush and Cheney's left ears if they try to start another criminal war.

Soreness ...

Feel that pain in your nether regions? That's because Exxon/Mobil is giving us our quarterly reaming:

Gosh, how are they going to find the money to fund global warming denier Lee Raymond's retirement program? You know if the GOP still controlled Congress, they would be shoveling over more corporate welfare because Exxon only hit $10.26 billion, down slightly from Q2 2006 when they set the all time record for a quarterly profit. At least Exxon found a schmuck from the AP to give them an easy headline "Exxon Mobil 2Q profit slips" in hopes of minimizing the downright massive profit they just reported.

...

Far be it the price of gas come down but that bastid can get a half-billion dollar retirement bonus. Old folks are freezing to death in the winter but heaven forbid they get a break in the price of heating oil.

Talk about raping the public, and that isn't even considering the tax breaks Cheney arranged for them to get. Nobody who shows a 3-month profit of $10bln deserves a tax break.

And just an anecdote: The cost of my commute has doubled in 3 years.

GOP = Party of Cowards

The great Josh Marshall:

It's looking like there might not be a GOP CNN/Youtube debate. Rudy appears to be opting out and Mitt Romney doesn't seem far behind. And GOP party functionary Hugh Hewitt is already laying down a line of covering fire for the retreat, arguing that CNN and Youtube are biased against Republicans.

"Liberal Bias", whatever else it once was, now appears to be the new Republican code word for any venue or events not controlled by Republican commisars like Hugh Hewitt along the lines of President Bush's notorious Social Security townhalls in which only certified flunkies who swore to a Bush loyalty oath were let into the room.

...

Heaven forbid these sleazy, incompetent, dishonest bastids would actually have to face questions 75% of Americans think relevant. Their schtick won't fly for anyone but the brainwashed and the stupid and they know it. It's time for the media to call the Republicans, and Fox News, what they rally are; a bunch of self-serving, special interest-fellating, cowards.

The Republican Party is a joke. More a sideshow (apologies to Avedon Carol) than an honest political movement and it's time it was relegated to the dust bin of irrelevancy.

[An Alternate Brain welcome to Sideshow readers.]

Space drunk ...

Listen to me. You want me to strap my ass to a roman candle and ride it into space, you damn straight I'm gonna have a belt or two before I go.

ASTRONAUTS were allowed to fly although their colleagues and flight surgeons warned they were so drunk they posed a flight-safety risk, according to media reports.

An internal NASA panel also reported "heavy use of alcohol'' within the standard 12-hour "bottle to throttle'' abstinence rule applied to NASA flight-crew members, Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine said.

...

At the very least, I'd be puffin' up a fattie. Ain't like it's a commercial flight.

I'm comin', 'Lizbeth ...

Looks like I'm goin' to that Big Gitmo in the Sky:

...

But CUFI has an ulterior agenda: its support for Israel derives from the belief of Hagee and his flock that Jesus will return to Jerusalem after the battle of Armageddon and cleanse the earth of evil. In the end, all the non-believers - Jews, Muslims, Hindus, mainline Christians, etc. - must convert or suffer the torture of eternal damnation. Over a dozen CUFI members eagerly revealed to me their excitement at the prospect of Armageddon occurring tomorrow. Among the rapture ready was Republican Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. None of this seemed to matter to Lieberman, who delivered a long sermon hailing Hagee as nothing less than a modern-day Moses. Lieberman went on to describe Hagee's flock as "even greater than the multitude Moses commanded."

...

To: The People of Israel

Subject: Our Nutcases


When they get there, please don't encourage them. Ridicule them, laugh at them, and point them in the direction of Iran.


Thank you,

Fixer

Quote of the Day

Lord help me, this is the first, and hopefully the last, time I quote Robert "Butt-boy Bob" Novak, but it highlights how desperate the conservatives are. They're equivocating ... badly:

...

BLITZER: Your subtitle is "50 Years Reporting in Washington." You have covered a lot of presidents, you covered Nixon, for example. In the book, you say "he was a poor president, a bad man who inflicted grave damage on his party and his country."

Give us your report card, your ranking of the current president, President Bush.

NOVAK: I think he's mediocre. I think he's very disappointing. I don't think he's a bad man as Nixon is. I think he means well. He made a terrible mistake on Iraq. But I thought he was the first conservative Bush. I thought he was a real Texas conservative. It turns out he's like his grandfather, who I covered, a Connecticut liberal. [my ems]

...

And anyone who could call the Fascist / Nazi sympathizer Prescott Bush a liberal* should be ridiculed, laughed at, and spanked in the public square.


*Well, maybe a Connecticut Liberal like Joe Lieberman.

Link via Maru.

Pay up, sucka ...

(CBS) NEW YORK Servicemen and women who made huge sacrifices fighting in the war and now paying yet another price, even after coming home.

One soldier in particular is currently battling against a new "debt of service."

Brian Rodriguez is a fighter, an honorably discharged soldier who'd been deployed in Iraq.

"I was a combat engineer," Rodriguez said. "We deal with land mines, explosives."

...

My kinda guy. Heh ... But wait, seems, after being in a war zone, some of his equipment somehow got damaged.

...

Former Army Specialist Rodriguez started getting bills for $700 for lost or damaged government property this summer. Although he was discharged some four years ago, bills recently arrived demanding payment, but giving no details on what or why -- nor do they offer a way to dispute the charges.

"For doing my job you're going to bill me?" Rodriguez said.

...

Man, if they billed me for all the shit I broke, modified, traded, and sold while I was in, I'd have to take out a mortgage.

They've been to war for their country and made it back with their skins intact. How much more should these folks pay?

Squeal like a pig, Turdblossom

Raw Story

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy announced Thursday he had subpoenaed White House adviser Karl Rove and his deputy accusing them of stonewalling a widening probe into the firing of federal prosecutors.

"The Bush-Cheney White House continues to place great strains on our constitutional system of checks and balances," Leahy said in issuing the subpoenas. Not since the darkest days of the Nixon Administration have we seen efforts to corrupt federal law enforcement for partisan political gain and such efforts to avoid accountability."

Get some, Pat!

Gettin' Turdblossom in front of 'em might be problematic, but I hope they can figure a way to do it. If it was up to me, and it wouldn't exactly be the American way, at least until lately, I'd grab his ass and stick it in a hole somewhere until he begged for the "rule of law".

Lemme 'splain this to Karl - if you lie, you're screwed. If you tell the truth, you're screwed. You can squeal to the Judiciary Committee or you can squeal on yer knees in a Federal pen. Mox nix to me. Win-win either way.

The chickens are finally coming home to roost and I hope they shit all over these administration assholes.

Fix me, fix you. Let's all kick in.

Jane Bryant Quinn has about the best one-page article I've seen on how we can get health care for everybody. A 'recommended read'.

I do agree that we can't afford to cover everyone under the crazy health-care system we have now. We can't even afford all the people we're covering already, which is why we keep booting them out. But we have an excellent template for universal care right under our noses: good old American Medicare. When you think of reform, think "Medicare for all."

Medicare is what's known as a single-payer system. In the U.S. version, the government pays for health care delivered in the private sector. There's one set of comprehensive benefits, with premiums, co-pays and streamlined paperwork. You can buy private coverage for the extra costs.

Health insurers hate this model, which would end their gravy train. So they're trying to tar single-payer as a kind of medical Voldemort, ready to destroy. Here are some of their canards, and my replies:

She de-canards them beautifully. Go see.

Right now, Congress is trying to bring 3.3 million uninsured children into the State Children's Health Insurance Program. President George W. Bush says he'll veto the expansion as "the wrong path for our nation." He objects to "government-run health care" (like Medicare?) and says that SCHIP "deprives Americans of ... choice" (like the choice to go uninsured?). Buzzwords like "government run" are supposed to summon up monsters like "socialized medicine" that apparently still lurk under our beds. If these terror tactics work, prepare for another 46 million uninsured.

Since we're about 27th in health care amongst the top 25 industrial (read "modern" or "first-world" or even "white") nations, the time has come to treat it as a utility like gas or electric, or at least like something we're all entitled to, not just those who can afford it.

The time for health-care-for-profit is past. Greed and profit as determinants of who gets well or not, who lives and who dies because of money or the lack of it, is unconscionable and should be relegated to the scrap heap of failed scams. Big MediCo will go out kicking and screaming, but go it must and go it will. My suggestion? Earplugs.

I hope the stockholders in health care related companies take a moment when they're admiring their dividend checks, or the Wall St. numbers on how rich they're becoming, that folks have died to get them that money. Fat chance. When they get left holding the bag, I'll have no sympathy for them.

Bush: Don't Know Much About History

Michael Winship on Bush's literarycalness and fouled up sense of history. Just a few:

News of President Bush's weekend colonoscopy and the successful removal of five benign, non-cancerous polyps put me in mind of Evelyn Waugh's comment after the disagreeable Randolph Churchill, son of Winston, underwent a somewhat similar procedure.

Leave it to medical science, the novelist said, to remove the only part of Randolph that wasn't malignant.

Bada Bing!

The commander-in-chief doesn't read much in the way of history books, the article continued. "He's busy making history, but doesn't look back at his own, or the world's.... Bush would rather look forward than backward. It's the way he's built."

As my late great uncle and lifelong Baptist W. F. "Bubba" Downs of Temple, Texas, would say: Oy.

But now, it seems, the president is desperate to find his place in history, to search its tomes, old and new, and grill its authors for redemption and justification. Posterity suddenly has become the focus group about which he cares the most.

Despite the presidential reading list, those who forget history still tend to repeat it. This White House even forgets history of its own making. Thus, despite the absence of a plan for rebuilding Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam - the administration's downfall - there now is no plan for the inevitable withdrawal from Iraq, a task that will be an enormous, time-consuming and dangerous undertaking of logistics, lives and resources.

President Bush, better start leafing through your biographies of Churchill to learn more about strategic retreat. Look in the index under "Dunkirk."

I'm sure his minders can find him an edition with lotsa pictures.

How's that for leadership?

Quote of the day from a BuzzFlash article:

The Head of the Mightiest Military Power Ever, Started Two Wars And Lost Three!

House Passes Lee Bill to Ban Permanent Bases in Iraq

Common Dreams

WASHINGTON - JULY 25 - – Today, by a vote of 399-24, the House passed legislation introduced by Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) (Yay East Bay! - G) to prevent permanent military bases in Iraq and bar U.S. control over Iraqi oil resources.

Go read Congresswoman Lee's statement.

Of course, even if the bill is passed, the Chimp will either veto it or add his usual signing statement: "This is fine for my subjects, but I'll do it if I want to. Fuck Congress and the law."

Just askin' ...

Does anyone notice the self-defeating dichotomy of bullshit coming out of the White House lately?

First they say, "we're turning the corner in Iraq, fighting them over there blah, blah, blah ...". Then, in the same breath, they say, "there are bands of al-Qaeda here, preparing to strike".

We iz in ur country, blowin' up ur shit!

So, tell me why we're still "over there"? Why, if the threat has moved "over here", highlighting what we're doing "over there" isn't working, haven't we brought our military home to protect us from these people "who hate us for our freedom"?

Just askin' ...

Off to the shop ...