*Shitless, shitless ...

Scared shitless. Warning! Al Qaeda is lurking in the mall, waiting to blow you up.

Listen to me. Al Qaeda doesn't have to do anything else. They've won. Consider the scorecard since 9/11:

1. The U.S. military is bogged down in wars there seems no escape from, though we're throwing trillions into the Sandbox.

2. Oil prices are through the roof (just paid $3.30/gal for regular gas in Mrs. F's car an hour ago), and the Afghani at the station is quite certain we'll hit $4.00/gal by Christmas.

3. The dollar is approaching worthlessness (the Canadian dollar is now worth more).

4. The 'American brand' is hopelessly tarnished around the world, most likely never to regain its former luster in my lifetime.

5. The American political apparatus has been stymied into a virtual stalemate.

6. The only thing the government can do is scare you over the 'terrorists' lurking under every rock, but even that isn't working anymore. They've cried wolf for so long, nobody even gives a shit.

On 12 September 2001, Osama bin Laden would have been fully justified declaring 'Mission Accomplished'. There's no need for him to do anything else here aside from an operation a few months before Election Day next year, just to assure The Party of Al Qaeda the Republicans win the Presidency for another 4 years. Hey, Osama knows he would never have been so successful were it not for the Chimp, Cheney, and their neocon morons minions. Why mess with success, right?

*Apologies to CSN&Y.

They write themselves ...

Maru:

Bonus: the U.S. Commander-in-Chief tells Musharraf: "You can't be the president and the head of the miltary at the same time."

Blink.

Blink.

I'll take that in Euros, please...

7 Countries Considering Abandoning the US Dollar (and what it means)

It’s no secret that the dollar is on a downward spiral. Its value is dropping, and the Fed isn’t doing a whole lot to change that. As a result, a number of countries are considering a shift away from the dollar to preserve their assets. These are seven of the countries currently considering a move from the dollar, and how they’ll have an effect on its value and the US economy.

I'll bet you can name them without looking.

What does this all mean?

Countries are growing weary of losing money on the falling dollar. Many of them want to protect their financial interests, and a number of them want to end the US oversight that comes with using the dollar. Although it’s not clear how many of these countries will actually follow through on an abandonment of the dollar, it is clear that its status as a world currency is in trouble.

Obviously, an abandonment of the dollar is bad news for the currency. Simply put, as demand lessens, its value drops. Additionally, the revenue generated from the use of the dollar will be sorely missed if it’s lost. The dollar’s status as a cheaply-produced US export is a vital part of our economy. Losing this status could rock the financial lives of both Americans and the worldwide economy.

Georgie's daddy gave him our country to play with and he broke it bad. Get the pieces of it away from that brat before he eats them. I don't want the United States to end up as chimp shit.

Senate overrides Bush's water bill veto

CNN

The Senate on Thursday handed President Bush his first veto override -- authorizing $23 billion in new water projects.

Supporters said the projects authorized under the Water Resources Development Act are necessary to rebuild the Gulf Coast after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, restore the Everglades and Great Lakes fisheries and build flood-control projects nationwide.

"A quarter of the state probably wouldn't even exist if we didn't have flood control projects," Lott said. Nearly every president has had trouble with water resource programs, and Bush was "just trying to hold the line on spending."

Spending again, on projects that might actually help undo some of the damage that prick has done.

Go read about these projects. I think possibly the Everglades might fix itself after a little more global warming. It won't be much of a swamp, or a unique ecosystem, any more if it's at the bottom of the ocean.

Let's hope this first override opens the floodgates (Sorry, I couldn't help myself!) to many more. Bush has to be shown he's not really in charge.

Surge Seen in Number of Homeless Veterans

Please read the full article in the NYTimes.

More than 400 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have turned up homeless, and the Veterans Affairs Department and aid groups say they are bracing for a new surge in homeless veterans in the years ahead.

Experts who work with veterans say it often takes several years after leaving military service for veterans' accumulating problems to push them into the streets. But some aid workers say the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans appear to be turning up sooner than the Vietnam veterans did.

"We're beginning to see, across the country, the first trickle of this generation of warriors in homeless shelters," said Phil Landis, chairman of Veterans Village of San Diego, a residence and counseling center. "But we anticipate that it's going to be a tsunami."

With more women serving in combat zones, the current wars are already resulting in a higher share of homeless women as well. They have an added risk factor: roughly 40 percent of the hundreds of homeless female veterans of recent wars have said they were sexually assaulted by American soldiers while in the military, officials said.

That last sentence relates to Fixer's post about how are GIs supposed to 'blow off steam' without booze and whores. I'm guessing they get the booze first, either by making it themselves or from Halliburton, and in the absence of hookers go after and commit crimes against female GIs, which crimes are largely covered up. Disgusting on both counts. Back to the main plot line...

Special traits of the current wars may contribute to homelessness, including high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and traumatic brain injury, which can cause unstable behavior and substance abuse, and the long and repeated tours of duty, which can make the reintegration into families and work all the harder.

On the street for a year, he finally checked in at a V.A. clinic in Maryland and has struggled with PTSD, depression, and drug and alcohol abuse. The V.A. has provided temporary housing as he starts a new job.

I stayed at a VA Domiciliary for four and a half months while I was getting some bad habits removed. I had the ability to pay, so it cost me $5 a day, payable after my stay. It's free to the indigent until they get clean and sober and get a job. By that I mean staying sober. Alcohol on your breath will have you on the street outside the facility, or in a civilian jail if you're deemed too drunk to care for yourself, in ten minutes, and you can come back and get your gear in three days' time. I saw this happen to guys who backslid off the program, or 'went out' as they say. Relapse is part of recovery, but not at the VA and I understand why. They can be readmitted at a later time.

The Domiciliary program is wonderful, but space is limited at the various facilities around the country that offer it. There are WWII Vets who need assisted living all the way to modern-day vets who are there to rehab themselves, to out-of-area Vets needing on-site residency while they're undergoing medical treatment. It's comprehensive - three good slops and a clean, comfortable flop, two men to a room where I was, recreation, counseling, virtually everything you need to live pretty good. I liked it there. If they'da let me have a dog, I'd be there yet. Just kiddin', Honey!

Due to the advanced age of WWII, Korean War, and lately Vietnam Vets, the VA is damn good at geriatrics. There was a nursing home adjacent to the Dom where I was, and it was full all the time. Vacancies occurred both from the folks getting well enough to go go home or from 'home-going' as the brothers call it. They had the decency to wheel the deceased out late at night. There were funerals several times a week at the post chapel with accompanying gunfire, which made some old combat vets hit the deck.

Just as an example, there was an old gent there whose favorite war story was about the time he damn near stepped off the front of USS New Orleans in the dark and the smoke after she got her bow blown off by Japanese naval gunfire off Guadalcanal. He was eighty years old, a snappy dresser in the Arizona style, and would go on any outing just to go for a ride. Nice old coot. He was at the Dom because his family had swindled him out of any money he might have had, and, oh yeah, because he had Alzheimer's and they couldn't be bothered. We used to see him occasionally wandering around not knowing where he was. We would gently steer him back to his room and he would be OK the next day and not remember a thing.

There was another fellow who had been on the Bataan Death March and spent WWII as a prisoner of war. He was very quiet, and spent his time looking in the potted plants for God knows what. He was a little 'out there', but a good guy. Rumor had it that he had a MOH, but I've not been able to verify it.

My Dom roommate, now my friend for life, was a Marine Vietnam Vet and later a firefighter, who got in some trouble, did some prison time, lost his wife and everything else, and ended up with a low-paying casino food-service job and a meth habit to the point where, job notwithstanding, he slept (when he slept) under the stars on the banks of the Colorado River. He's now a custodian at the same VA facility, a good-paying job and one not uncommon amongst former patients 'til they move onwards and upwards if they care to, lives off post, and is rebuilding his life.

Just as an aside, me'n my roomie used to go play Bingo a coupla nights a week at the post theater. That's a whole story by itself. The Vet we always sat with was a WWII Coastie who was staying temporarily at the nursing home. On Bingo nights, she told her friends that she had a date with two Marines!

The VA works, folks. They understand very well what they are doing and their 'customer' base whom they are doing it to for. The medical treatment is very good, if sometimes a little slow. A note here: if you have a Purple Heart (or a Medal Of Honor) you go to the head of the line.

The VA used to be only for Vets who had service-connected health problems. They damn near went out of business in the '90s. The WWII guys were starting to dwindle, so they opened it up to Vets without service-connected problems, and that's when I and probably millions of others were able to hook up with them for cheap medical care. That was also about the time the Korean War and Vietnam Vets started to get old enough to need care. The system got overwhelmed then, and it's getting overwhelmed again by Bush's Lie.

The VA knows what it's doing and cares deeply about Veterans. It needs to build and expand. It didn't anticipate what's happening now. We can say it should have, and indeed it should have, but it fell for the same Bush & Cheney bullshit a whole lotta the rest of us did. Now it's playing catch-up. With one little problem slowing down what should be a full court press expansion project.

The problem is George W. Bush. He'll fight his endless goddam criminal war with trillions in borrowed money that future generations can pay back to the Chinese, but when it comes to things that actually help people, like children or Veterans, well, he's gotta cut spending and fuck them. I could go on and on about that mean-spirited, petulant little prick, but I'd be repeating myself.

One more year. If it is the will of Allah. Then things can start to straighten out. It's going to be an awful long process. Bush has done a lot of damage to every segment of America and will do so until he's shown the door, which I hope is on a prison cell. In Webuttfukyugudistan.

I kinda went off on a tear here. Please go read the article and this related one. It's shameful.

A Very Blackwater Thanksgiving

Glenn W. Smith with a 'recommended read':

Profiteers are wrecking our health and destroying our security.

As Thanksgiving approaches, we should pay homage to the 17th Century Blackwater-like private security firms who made the very first Thanksgiving possible. That's the message from Serviam, a magazine committed to the unstinting defense of private profiteering in every realm of human endeavor. By the magazine's stuffed-turkey logic we should give thanks for all the profiteering and the accountability-killing privatizing that dominates what was once a public sphere. From health care to a mercenary army, profit is alpha and omega, while the moral fabric that holds us together is being ripped apart by pirates. Yes, even our health has been blackwatered. Thank-yous are hardly in order.

The Easter Bunny and be-buckled Puritans have nothing on the blackwater movement when it comes to fantasy, however. Inventing a need for themselves is something of a tradition among mercenary birds-of-prey who somehow get us to stay still while they, all beak and talon, swoop down on our treasuries, our health, and our morality. "Who will guard our diplomats in Iraq if the privateers don't?" they ask self-approvingly. There is a clue in that rhetorical and misleading question to the sorry state of the American health care system, which is entirely dominated by Blackwater-like, privateering insurance companies. "Who will provide health care if you hurt our profits?" insurance company executives and defenders ask. "Our armed forces," should answer the private security executives' question. "Uh, doctors and nurses," should be the answer to the insurance profiteers.

The blackwatering of health care - putting the power in the hands of unaccountable, non-medical, private interests - has taken a deadly toll on our health and lives. We have been so long in the blackwater that we forgot what it would be like to breathe the air of a health care system based on empathy and responsibility, a system that puts citizens' health above private profits.

It's not lost on Blackwater that it will make more money the more dangerous our lives become. That's the logic of the arms industry. War is their profit center. And it's not lost on an insurance industry that the increased fear, imagined and real, of ill health leads to higher premiums and more profits when it is allowed to make its money by denying health care to those who need it most.

The health insurance industry has no more incentive to keep us healthy than Blackwater has in helping us avoid wars.

And the stories they tell us to convince us otherwise have no more reality to them than the Easter Bunny.

At least the Easter Bunny is a cute fiction.

There is certainly nothing 'cute' or 'fictional' about what privatization is doing to us on both these fronts and others. Many lies are told, many laws are made and many others broken with impunity and immunity to get our money. It's Repug policy.

Besides the article ringing quite true, I think the interesting side concept here is that this may be the first time I've seen 'blackwater' used as a verb and an adjective, as in "I been blackwatered! Ooh it hurts!"

No doubt other parts of speech will follow.

Reality-challenged ...

I've said this for years. The Rethugs have no idea where reality ends and fiction begins.

...

You know, I write spy novels and some science fiction. The reason I bring this up is not to peddle books, but to make an observation. Bush & Co's actions sound like the plot of a fucking spy novel. It's as if they're taking literary license with the war, the way I would when I ask my audience to suspend their belief in the flow of time and the details. (If writers didn't, novels would be SO long and boring, and filled with minutiae, that no one would want to read them.) But wars don't proceed like novels do. The president is not an omnipotent being, like a writer, who can mold the world so the outcome is in his favor. War, and running a country, involves minutiae on a biblical scale and all the details have to be addressed BEFORE war is declared. It's as if Bush thinks the world works like a TV show or a pulp fiction novel.

...

Cal Thomas is a prime example (he has been for years) of a wingnut who watches far too much TV. Chet Scoville looks at the old twit's latest TV/Reality morph:

...

I mean, crap, if we're going to take 24 as proof of how the real world works, maybe we can extend the idea a bit further. Maybe we can use The X-Files as proof of extraterrestrial life. And hey, surely it's "not coincidental" that Rupert Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer says that the world used to be a demon dimension until humans kicked all the demons out (Giles is after all a scholar and should know what he's talking about). Or, I know, maybe CSI: Miami constitutes proof that forensics works best when you've got whopping big holes in your logic and you take off your sunglasses a lot. And maybe Animaniacs showed us that chickens can disguise themselves as action heroes, cats sing like Bernadette Peters, and minks are teh hawt. After all, why not? None of that is any less real than 24.

As I said about 2 years ago:

...

Running a country is NOT a fucking TV show, you idiots.

I hope so ...

Dr. Attaturk (Podiatrist to the Stars):

...

We're going to find out someday...perhaps while we're still alive, just what this Administration has done, and just what all the Republicans and too many Democrats have allowed them to get away with. It won't be pretty.

...

Before I die, I have to know what went down over the past 7 years; just exactly what hold the Bush/Cheney cabal had over our lawmakers to pull this off. And then I want to see the enablers in jail along with them. Unfortunately, the truth will come out in a century or so.

Boy, I Hate When That Happens...

I got this by e-mail from my old high school pal Barb:

[I have three dogs and I was buying a large bag of Meaty Bites at Big Wand standing in line at the check out.

The woman behind me asked if I had a dog.

On impulse, I told her that no, I was starting The Meaty Bites Diet again, although I probably shouldn't because I'd ended up in the hospital last time, but that I'd lost 20 kilos before I woke up in intensive care ward with tubes coming out of most of my orifices and IVs in both arms.

I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way that it works is to load your pants pockets with Meaty Bites and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry and that the food is nutritionally complete so I was going to try it again.

I have to mention here that practically everyone in the line was by now enthralled with my story, particularly a guy who was behind her.

Horrified, she asked if I'd ended up in the hospital in that condition because I had been poisoned.

I told her no; it was because I'd been sitting in the street licking my balls and a car hit me.

I thought one guy was going to have a heart attack he was laughing so hard as he staggered out the door.

Stupid broad... why else would I buy dog food??]

'Cause ya got company comin'? Put toothpicks in the kibbles, they'll never know the difference...

Cannabis replacing opium poppies in Afghanistan

International Herald Tribune

KHWAJA GHOLAK, Afghanistan: Amid the multiplying frustrations of the fight against narcotics in Afghanistan, the northern province of Balkh has been hailed as a rare and glowing success.

Two years ago the province, which abuts Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, was covered with opium poppies - about 11,000 hectares of them, or 27,000 acres, nearly enough to blanket Manhattan twice. This year, after an intense anti-poppy campaign led by the governor, Balkh's farmers abandoned the crop. The province was declared poppy free, with 12 others, and the provincial government was promised a reward of millions of dollars in development aid.

But largely ignored in the celebration was the fact that many farmers in Balkh simply switched from opium poppies to another illegal crop: cannabis, the herb from which marijuana and hashish are derived.

That's a step in the right direction. Looks like Fixer's gonna make friends with a whole new buncha cab drivers. Heh.

Woman cited for cursing her toilet

The Times-Tribune (Scranton PA)

Dawn Herb, of 924 Luzerne St., is facing a disorderly conduct charge that was issued after she started swearing at her backed-up toilet near an open window last week.

If convicted, she could face a maximum sentence of 90 days in jail and a $300 fine.

“This is an extreme example of the government trying to intrude into a place they have no business being, your bathroom and your home,” said Mary Catherine Roper, an attorney with the ACLU. “You can prosecute somebody for bad language in Iran, this isn’t Iran.”

No, it's not Iran. I think the current role model under study is Pakistan, but I digress...

90 days for cussin' out a toilet? If they're listening at my house when Bush or Cheney or a neocon come on TV, I'll get fuckin' life!

If, on the other hand, they come into my bathroom when I'm takin' care of business, they deserve whatever they get.

Chuck's Senate

A Truthout Perspective:

This is a darker day still. In addition to personally making the decision that Michael Mukasey would be confirmed, Schumer now leads Congress by proxy to ratify torture as legal under US law, by virtue of its inaction. Game, set, match: Bush, Mukasey and Schumer.

One reason that Republicans can get away with whatever they like is that, in the end, they always stick together. Some call it lockstep, others call it goose step, but whatever you call it, they don't break ranks. Democrats do - regardless of the consequences. In this case, Mr. Schumer played the role of the powerbroker fatale. It was Schumer who assured the White House that, if nominated, Mukasey would be confirmed. So Schumer promised, and so he delivered.

Congress, the Democrats and the Nation be damned.

Yeah, the fix was in from the gate. I hope the unholy mess I blogged about yesterday gets some serious scrutiny, but it probably won't.

Update:

Rude One weighs in:

The saddest part about the Mukasey cave-in by Democrats was that it was so goddamned predictable. Democrats do their wittle dance o' outwage, stompin' their cute toddler feet on the ground, balling up their fists and declaring, "No way, no how," before finally shitting themselves and crying to be loved. The second some of the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee voiced concern about Michael Mukasey for his inability to say if waterboarding is torture, we knew the way it was gonna go down. It's just fuckin' depressing, innit?

In other words, once the rapist gets into the Catholic girl's school, he can just lock the doors, and the nuns and priests can do fuck-all while he unzips and wanders from room to room nailing the girls. Well, shit, at least the nuns can say a prayer that the girls aren't too horribly scarred by the ordeal. Schumer has consigned the Senate to bystander status, so he may as well give up now and at least have someone in there he can grab a beer with.

So Mukasey's gonna get the go-ahead, and, as with Alberto Gonzales, John Roberts, and others, personal and public assurances made by them will amount to so much bullshit clogging the hearing rooms. Between Harry Reid pulling back his party's senators from filibustering Mukasey to the coming cave on war funding, Democrats are making the big mistake of not taking down the bullies and thugs who are destroying this village. We thought we were electing the Seven Samurai or at least the Three Amigos. Instead, we got a handful of Barney Fifes.

'A handful of Barney Fifes'. Boy, there's a disturbing visual! Right on the money, too.

Rapture Rescue 911

Naomi Klein in The Nation:

I used to worry that the United States was in the grip of extremists who sincerely believed that the Apocalypse was coming and that they and their friends would be airlifted to heavenly safety. I have since reconsidered. The country is indeed in the grip of extremists who are determined to act out the biblical climax-the saving of the chosen and the burning of the masses - but without any divine intervention. Heaven can wait. Thanks to the booming business of privatized disaster services, we're getting the Rapture right here on earth.

During last year's hurricane season, Florida homeowners were offered similarly high-priced salvation by HelpJet, a travel agency launched with promises to turn "a hurricane evacuation into a jet-setter vacation." For an annual fee, a company concierge takes care of everything: transport to the air terminal, luxurious travel, bookings at five-star resorts. Most of all, HelpJet is an escape hatch from the kind of government failure on display during Katrina. "No standing in lines, no hassle with crowds, just a first class experience."

The same pay-to-be-saved logic governs this entire new sector of country club disaster management. There is, of course, another principle that could guide our collective responses in a disaster-prone world: the simple conviction that every life is of equal value.

For anyone out there who still believes in that wild idea, the time has urgently arrived to protect the principle.

Silly girl! Everyone knows that white christians with money's lives are much more valuable as Repuglican voters than poor folks of color's lives.

White money talks, black bullshit drowns, I guess.

House Passes Bills to Boost Vets Benefits

Army Times

With Veterans Day a week away, the House of Representatives passed four veteran-related bills on Monday - but the heavy work still remains to be done.

By voice vote and with little controversy, the House passed a veterans' credit protection bill and three veterans-related proclamations: one in support of Veterans Educate Today's Students Day, another in support of the National Veterans History Project and a third honoring Native American veterans.

By week's end, Congress expects to pass a bill that will include funding for veterans programs for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, with a chance that a small package of improvements in veterans benefits also may pass.

The veterans spending bill appears headed for an almost certain veto (my em) because it is part of a larger appropriations measure that President Bush has said he opposes. The benefits package that could pass this week includes improvements in disability benefits for some veterans with vision impairment and a modest expansion of burial benefits for state-run veterans' cemeteries.

The four bills now go to the Senate for consideration. The Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee is trying to prepare a package, or possibly several packages, of veterans legislation that could be passed before lawmakers go home for the year.

On Friday, the Senate approved one such package - the bill that would expand disability benefits for some veterans with vision impairment in both eyes.

Also included in the bill are provisions to expand reimbursement to states that operate veterans' cemeteries and to pay to have private headstones include a medallion showing that the deceased is a veteran.

Each one of these bills helps Veterans in seemingly small ways. Unless you are one of the Veterans they help. Then it's a BIG way. Every little bit helps, and I applaud the House for doing this.

A trillion dollars of borrowed money to fight for a lie, and Bush will veto a few measures that help Vets because all of a sudden he has to get a grip on spending. He needs to get a grip all right, the petulant little punk. It's OK to waste billions on Halliburton and Blackwater and a useless missile shield system that benefits only the companies that make the junk, but he wants to 'cut spending' on the backs of Vets who need glasses or have credit problems because of repeated deployments. What an asshole.

At the top of the Army Times site there was a VFW ad that said something like, "Because of veterans, all wars come to an end". Speaking as a VFW Life Member, bullshit.

Wars only end when the last Veteran of that war dies. Until then, we owe them.

Just as an aside to illustrate that last sentence, last night I watched a film on PBS (KQED) called "Red White Black and Blue" about a coupla WWII Vets in their 80s who returned to Attu where they had fought. The guy they mainly profiled is a classic case of undiagnosed PTSD and what had been going on in his head all these years only started to sink in after his battlefield visit. It was heart-wrenching to watch and I couldn't take my eyes off it.

In the case of Iraq, they shouldn't have had to go in the first place. We really owe them and will until the end of this century.

A question ...

Before I head out.

Now that we are 'officially' entering the 2008 election season, I figured I'd ask. Do you think it is more likely than not Bush and Cheney will try something (staged terrorist attack, declaring martial law, suspending the elections) to hold onto power after January 2009?

The dregs ...

Now a qualifier. At 17, I enlisted in the Air Force by the order of a judge. He saw some potential in a punk kid standing before him in handcuffs, arrested the night before for stealing a car and joyriding the shit out of it. I thank Judge Corso (I'll never forget his name) for it.

That said, I have a problem with waivers for criminal behavior being more the norm than the exception.

WASHINGTON - Faced with higher recruiting goals, the Pentagon is quietly looking for ways to make it easier for people with minor criminal records to join the military, The Associated Press has learned.

...

Overall, about three in every 10 recruits must get a waiver, according to Pentagon statistics obtained by AP, and about two-thirds of those approved in recent years have been for criminal behavior. Some recruits must get more than one waiver to cover things ranging from any criminal record, to health problems such as asthma or flat feet, to low aptitude scores — and even for some tattoos.

...

While I'm sure a lot of kids will 'grow up', as I did, I can't help thinking this will become a problem the same way it was in Vietnam.

Foresight ...

Seems MSNBC should have realized this a couple years ago:

Riding a ratings wave from “Countdown With Keith Olbermann,” a program that takes strong issue with the Bush administration, MSNBC is increasingly seeking to showcase its nighttime lineup as a welcome haven for viewers of a similar mind.

...

I don't know if I could sit through an hour of Rosie, but it's nice to see them rethinking their Fox-lite programming. How about giving David Shuster a show and flushing that idiot Carlson? How about Rachel Maddow replacing Scarborough?

I wondered when it would start ...

So now the wingnuts are accusing Hillary of murder. Taylor Marsh looks at the latest diarrhea from WorldNutDaily:

The general election is exactly one year away so people are picking their target and it's a blast to the past.

...

In a new book alleging a campaign of slander and intimidation orchestrated chiefly by Hillary Clinton, Kathleen Willey points a finger of suspicion at the former first couple for the death of her husband, who was believed to have killed himself.

...

And so it begins. This is one of my big worries if Hillary is nominated. All this crap will start again and I wonder if she'll be able to govern effectively under the same constant pressure her husband faced. If the Dems' performance over the last year is any indication, she'll receive no help from Congress, even a Dem-controlled one. They will be cowed whether there is a Rethug majority or not as we've seen from their legislative actions so far.

Royalties ...

Or, Fucking Their Own. As an author, royalties are a near and dear subject to me. The running joke here is that I do nothing without my 20%. That said, the right wing publishing house, Regnery, is screwing their writers out of theirs:

... The New York Times reports today that a group of conservative authors, including Swift Boat nutball Jerome Corsi, is suing right-wing darling Regnery Publishing ...

... "It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance." He added: "Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?" ...

Not that I'd pay for one of their books but then a lot of people wouldn't be caught dead buying one of mine. Regardless of the subject matter or quality or motive, these writers put in their time and effort and should be compensated accordingly. Once again, we see the right wing has no qualms about screwing anyone, even their own.

Addendum: Though it is a nice bit of schadenfreude I'm enjoying seeing these clowns get their dose of Karma.

Great thanks to The Man from Philadelphia for the link.

Musharraf Adopts Bush-Cheney Doctrine of "Lawfare"

From Informed Comment: Global Affairs:

Opposing "judicial activism" is one of the rallying cries of the American right. Initially this was simply a cover for racism, as the most salient examples of "judicial activism" were Brown vs. Board of Education and other decisions by the Warren Supreme Court overturning American apartheid. Over time, however, the term began to cover a larger protest against attempts to extend the rule of law to the disadvantage of the powerful.

Not until the Bush administration, however, was this political code word integrated into the National Security Doctrine of the United States. Scott Horton of Harper's, writing on "Bush's War on the Rule of Law" describes how the attack on judicial activism entered national security doctrine through the concept of "lawfare":

This could serve as a cogent summary of the doctrine presented by President Musharraf. Unlike Bush, Musharraf at least had the decency to announce to the whole world that he was placing the constitution "in abeyance" and arrogating all power to his sole person. The Bush administration prefers to promulgate shadowy memoranda, signing statements, and Humpty-Dumpty like amendments to the meaning of common words. Since the courts are instruments of terrorists (and can even be used to demoralize the security forces!) counter-terrorism logically requires the abolition of the rule of law.

Gee, now I understand! As long as they don't come kill me in my bed...

'Logic' in some demented parallel universe maybe, like the one Bushworld is in.