War, Depression, and Turning-Point Elections

Excellent 'must read' Tomgram by Steve Fraser. Disquieting and heartening at the same time.

Will the presidential election of 2008 mark a turning point in American political history? Will it terminate with extreme prejudice the conservative ascendancy that has dominated the country for the last generation? No matter the haplessness of the Democratic opposition, the answer is yes.

Mr. Fraser describes a few teeny-tiny problems we are going to be living with for a while, thank you George and the Repugs. Iraq, the abtogation of the Constitution, the coming Depression, stuff like that.

All signs are ominous. The credibility and legitimacy of the old order operate now at a steep discount. Most telling and fatal perhaps is the paralysis spreading into the inner councils at the top. Faced with dire predicaments both at home and abroad, they essentially do nothing except rattle those sabers, captives of their own now-bankrupt ideology. Anything, many will decide, is better than this.

Or will they? What if the opposition is vacillating, incoherent, and weak-willed -- labels critics have reasonably pinned on the Democrats? Bad as that undoubtedly is, I don't think it will matter, not in the short run at least.

There's an old blues song about "been down so long, it looks like up to me". Up is the Dems. Scary, but anything is better than what's been going on under the Repugs. File that last sentence under "Famous Last Words" or "Watch This!".

Yet the New Deal followed. And not only the New Deal, but an era of social protest, including labor, racial, and farmer insurgencies, without which there would have been no New Deal or Great Society. May something analogous happen in the years ahead? No one can know. But a door is about to open.

If I could predict what is going to happen tomorrow I would be down at the Race & Sports book with my life savings. I can't, but I welcome whatever comes as long as the door slams shut on the criminal regime currently in power and its enablers.

Wasn't me ...

Although as soon as we saw this, my wife looked at me the way a mother would when she knows her little kid is up to something. My response: "You know I wasn't in Philly this weekend." My parents woulda killed me. Heh ...

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Everything was relatively normal about the event until shortly before 11 a.m.. That's when authorities say an employee's child hit a button that said "don't hit button unless in an emergency". The button triggered the fire suppression system, filling the hanger [sic] with foam.

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Video at the link. Heh ... I'm still laughing.

Forgiveness ...

Not from me and not from Athenae either:

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You know, it's past time we stopped giving people a pass for not criticizing this stuff from day one. We are rapidly approaching the day when this all will be counted out, and we will have to rebuild the world after the Bush years, and in that accounting, I don't really want to start handing out cookies for people who spoke up once it became clear there would be no real repercussions.

Because the minute we say it's okay to refrain, in the immediate aftermath of some terrible event, from speaking up, that's the minute we make another Bush era possible. It can't be okay, not even temporarily, not even when there will be those who call it treasonous, it can't be okay to ever look the other way while America tortures people in secret prisons. I don't care how "politically painful" it is for them. I don't care, because it's not like it wasn't blindingly obvious to everybody by like week two that every asshole with an R after his name was gonna use this to brand all Democrats as spineless pussies, it's not like we didn't know about the supposed political pain, that it was gonna come no matter what. [my em]

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Indeed. The deal with 'doing the right thing' is to do it from jump street, not just when it's politically 'safe' or expedient.

M-i-C*

Stolen from bluegal.

*Moron-in-Chief.

So tell me ...

Why we shouldn't march on the White House and the Capitol, drag 'em all out, string 'em up from the light poles, and start from scratch?

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

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With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).

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Avedon, from whom I stole the link, quotes our pal Lambert:

Lambert says: Well, I guess now I know why impeachment was "off the table."

They're all in it together. I've had it with the lot of 'em. Seriously.

I Hear Them All

We've been havin' fun with music videos today, but music serves a higher purpose sometimes. Old Crow Medicine Show.

Sold out ...

The Dems' new strategy for folding on Iraq:

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So, let's be clear: for eleven billion dollars more in domestic spending, House Democrats are willing to waste hundreds of billions more on the disastrous war in Iraq. Not to mention, you know- lives. Perhaps it should occur to them that there would be a helluva lot more for domestic spending if we weren't busily bankrupting ourselves in Iraq. Not to mention, you know- lives.

I'm sure it will come as great comfort to our troops, the families and friends of our troops, and the Iraqi people that we'll have more money for domestic spending. Certainly, their lives are worth it. Or something.

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Take It Easy? How Long?

Fixer's got the right idea today with two excellent R&B numbers. I'll add a couple from one of my favorite genres, but first let's get the political news outta the way:

1. Bush is a lyin' sack o' crap

2. The Repugs are a buncha perverts, criminals, warmongers, and general all-around nogoodniks

Ho-hum, yawn, nothin' new. On to the good shit.

It should come as no surprise that I'm a fan of the Eagles. It was required for California citizenship a few (!!?) years back. Here's "How Long?" from their new album Long Road Out Of Eden, their first in 28 years. This song is nominated for a Grammy and is getting radio airplay. They have a video in rotation on some of the oddball TV programs I watch, but this is a performance at the Country Music Awards:



Frey and Henley can still write 'em and belt 'em out, Walsh can still pick 'em, Schmit's good on bass, and all of 'em make great harmony. 'Nuff said. Olde Fartes (lctp) Rule!

Since I seem to be in Eagles mode, here's a song the title of which is the best advice I can give you, "Take It Easy". Embedded in the tune is the second-best advice I can give you - "watch out for girls in flatbed Fords!". Seems like the guys forgot to color their hair gray for this one...



Later.

Update:

I tried to snag this one by The Derailers for you, but the embedding was disabled. Check it out.

Smoothness ...

Robert Cray - Right Next Door:



Gary Moore - Still got The Blues:

Saturday whorage

As usual*, the next chapter of Thirty Days at Zeta is up at The Practical Press.

Whore your own in comments.

*Might not get to it when I'm in Germany but I'll try.

Snow Day

Light blogging today. We got about a foot plus of snow overnight. I've already got about an hour in clearing it enough to get Mrs. G launched to work, and, of all days, I have a routine eye doc appointment in a coupla hours, so I got a whole 'nuther truck to uncover and another path to clear. Hey, some folks pay big money to come play in the snow, but it comes to me!

We really needed snow. There are thousands of ski area employees that until today have had nothing to do except hang out on the street corners wonderin' where they're gonna get rent money. Also, the weeping and wailing of the merchants, who have had no skiers and other winter visitors to fill their coffers, has been keeping me awake nights. And I'm a mile from the nearest one.

Just another day in Paradise.

Give him hell, K.O.

Thanks, Keith. It's way past time to call Bush the lyin' sack o' shit that he's been all the years of his reign.

Pig Out for Chanukah

Liquid Alert!

This was REALLY not kosher. A grocery store in Manhattan made a food faux pas, advertising hams as "Delicious for Chanukah."

A woman who saw the mistake over the weekend at the Balducci's store on 14th Street took pictures of the signs and posted them on her blog.

Jennifer Barton, director of marketing, told The Associated Press on Thursday that the signs were changed as soon as the error was noted.

She issued an apology on the company Web site, saying the company would be reviewing its employee training.

Boy, I'd like to be there for that!

Thanks to Fixer, I learned a new word for our Italian friends, and now I understand its etymology: Ginzo = Guinea + Bozo.

And by the way, I mean no offense to any ethnic group except Republicans.

OMG!

Late for work but I had to post this. I can't remember the last time I agreed with Andy Sullivan (mostly) so I had to post this:

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This administration commits war-crimes, hides the evidence from federal law officers and the 9/11 Commission and then destroys the evidence completely. Give that some time to sink in.

Off to the shop ...

Dear Mitt,

Fuck you very much.

Fixer

"Bumper Sticker Politics"

Stolen from Sarah @ Corrente.

Update:

Montag has more good stuff.

Psychic Dog

Got this by e-mail from my old school pal Barb:

[A South Carolina farm wife called the local phone company to report her telephone failed to ring when her friends called--and that on the few occasions when it did ring, her dog always moaned right before the phone rang.

The telephone repairman proceeded to the scene, curious to see this psychic dog and/or senile lady. He climbed a telephone pole, hooked in his test set, and dialed the subscriber's house. The phone didn't ring right away, but then the dog moaned and the telephone began to ring.

Climbing down from the pole, the telephone repairman found:
1. The dog was tied to the telephone system's ground wire with a steel chain and collar.
2. The wire connection to the ground rod was loose.
3. The dog was receiving 90 volts of signaling current when the number was called.
4. After a couple of jolts, the dog would start moaning and then urinate.
5. The wet ground would complete the circuit, thus causing the phone to ring.

Which demonstrates that some problems CAN be fixed by pissing and moaning. Just Thought you'd like to know.]

"...an oddly familiar pattern of deception"

Froomkin

President Bush changed the way he talked about Iran in August: He stopped making explicit assertions about the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Bush yesterday said he was only briefed about the new estimate last week.

But a close examination of his word choice over the past year suggests that he learned something around August that got him to stop making claims that were apparently no longer supported by American intelligence.

Instead of directly condemning Iranian leaders for pursuing nuclear weapons, he started more vaguely accusing them of seeking the knowledge necessary to make such a weapon.

As he did that, he and the vice president accelerated their rhetorical efforts to persuade the public that the nuclear threat posed by Iran was grave and urgent. Bush even went so far in late August and October as to warn of the potential for a nuclear holocaust.

Indeed, a careful parsing of Bush's words indicates that, while not saying anything that could later prove to be demonstrably false, Bush left his listeners with what he likely knew was a fundamentally false impression. And he did so in the pursuit of a more muscular and possibly even military approach to a Middle Eastern country.

It's an oddly familiar pattern of deception.

Blogger Josh Marshall examines Bush's wording at that press conference and notes: "It's no longer the need to prevent the Iranians from getting the bomb. Now it's the necessity of 'preventing them from hav[ing] the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.'

"That's the tell.

"That change is no accident. He wants claims that will survive the eventual revelation of this new intelligence -- while also continuing to hype the imminence of the Iranian nuclear threat that his spy chiefs are telling him likely does not exist."

Much, much more. Please go read. Froomkin manages to nicely cram ten pounds of Bush's lies into a five-pound sack.

Check out the cartoon links at the bottom, too.

Outrage of the Day

Guardian UK

Arab-American paratrooper faces deportation after Afghan service

A highly decorated Arab-American sergeant in the US army, who is currently serving as a paratrooper in Afghanistan, faces deportation on his return to the United States because of an irregularity in his immigration papers.

Benkabbou came to the US from his native Morocco in 1987, and was granted permanent residency four years ago. But when he applied to become a naturalised US citizen in 2005 - by which time he was already serving in the army - immigration officials discovered that he had failed to register his first marriage and alleged that the ceremony had been arranged fraudulently to get him into the country.

The aggressive prosecution of the case has surprised immigration lawyers who point to a directive that advises officials against pressing to deport acting military personnel unless they have been involved in drug trafficking, crimes against children or violence, or unless they pose a danger to the public.

Benkabbou's irregularity over his marriage falls into no such categories.

His lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia, Paul Ford, said the only explanation he could find was that his client was a Muslim, "which sets off all the buzzers. There is no question that Arab-Americans are given a totally different treatment."

Ford said that Benkabbou had been accused of being a terrorist by officials from the immigration enforcement agency, ICE. "In court, ICE lawyers called Morocco a terrorist country, which I found astonishing."

It seems Immigration can't do anything about the alleged 12,000,000 illegal immigrants in this country, but their eagle-eyed pencil-pushers seem to have plenty of time to fuck with a serving US Army Sergeant who has served honorably in a war zone over a little glitch in his papers. Ask him to explain? Nooooo - try him with an eye toward deportation. After all, an ARAB with a supposed anomaly in his paperwork FOR 20 YEARS must be a deep-plant terrorist. Also, I wouldn't doubt that a paratrooper might have knowledge of firearms and explosives. Yep, terrorist.

Those fucking morons.

I'll bet this gets ironed out before it goes to trial. The Immigration idiot who came up with this brain fart is picking the flyshit outta the pepper, but it's indicative of an anti-Arab, anti-Muslim mindset that needs to be dealt with. Maybe some national leadership would help. Yeah, like that'll happen any time soon.

Just as an aside, as I was preparing to do this post, I went to get a cup of coffee and I was gone long enough that my 'My Pictures' screensaver came on. When I got back to my set, there was my favorite paratrooper Lurch grinning at me. It was like "Death From Above" gave me a blessing.

Bonus: Check out Sergeant Benkabbou's Unit History.

Quote of the Day

NZ Herald with one reaction to the NIE:

"People are relieved that World War III is on hold," [...]

I'd be a lot more 'relieved' if The Dick's heart would 'mushroom cloud'.