Redemption

Privacy ...

Fortunately, the Germans understand their peoples' right to privacy:

Civil liberties' groups in Germany have welcomed a landmark legal blow against what they call anti-terrorism snooping. The Federal Constitutional Court ruled that a person's telephone and internet records must still be stored, but denied automatic police access to it, except for inquiries into serious crime.

Court spokesman Dietlind Weiland said: "The right to store information remains, but it can only be used in cases of serious offences, like murder, rape or extortion." Following terrorist attacks in London and Madrid, Berlin introduced a law requiring telecoms firms to keep records of who contacted whom, when, where and how.

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Too bad our rights have been flushed by the Bush government. Think our Supreme Court would stand up for the people or the corporations?

From A Distance

I thought I'd put something up in honor of Christianity's most sacred moment - the day they turned a missing corpse into two thousand years of domination of the western world.

Note to God: Yer smart, Dude. I keep my distance from my mistakes too. And like You, I keep watch lest they bite me on the ass.

A note ...

Since I just packed my laptop away (don't ask, the amount of electronics I carry on vacation is staggering and I have a special case - armored, Kevlar - to hold everything), I'll be out of email range for about 36 hours until we're aboard ship.

That is all.

Coalition of the Willing?

Not so much:

UNITED NATIONS -- In the months leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration threatened trade reprisals against friendly countries who withheld their support, spied on its allies, and pressed for the recall of U.N. envoys that resisted U.S. pressure to endorse the war, according to an upcoming book by a top Chilean diplomat.

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It's not like we didn't figure this out already, but it's nice to know our paranoia was justified.

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On March 14, 2003, less than one week before the invasion, Chile hosted a meeting of diplomats from the six undecided governments to discuss its proposal. But then-U.S. Ambassador John D. Negroponte and then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell moved quickly to quash the initiative, warning them that the effort was viewed as "an unfriendly act" designed to isolate the United States. The diplomats received calls from their governments ordering them to "leave the meeting immediately," Mu¿oz writes.

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But since no one in this country (except for a few voices in the wilderness) had the balls to stand up to them, why should others?

These guys should have been out 4 years ago and we're still dicking around with them. Bush and Co. should be in a dock in The Hague by now.

Battlefield ...

One of my favorite ELP tunes. As poignant today as it was in '71.

Emerson, Lake, and Palmer - Battlefield

Clear the battlefield and let me see
All the profit from our victory.
You talk of freedom, starving children fall.
Are you deaf when you hear the season's call?

Were you there to watch the earth be scorched?
Did you stand beside the spectral torch?
Know the leaves of sorrow turned their face,
Scattered on the ashes of disgrace.

Every blade is sharp; the arrows fly
Where the victims of your armies' lie,
Where the blades of grass and arrows reign
Then there will be very little sorrow,
Very little pain.

Confusion...will be my epitaph
As I cross a cracked and broken path
If we make it, we can all sit back and laugh

Back to packing ...

Sorry for the shitty recording but it's the only one I can find. When I get back I'll have to upload my own video of the tune.

And just because the video above wasn't the best, here's more from the same album, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall in '92. Just so you get the full effect:

Emerson, Lake, and Palmer - Tarkus

We Be Boopin'

This is one of Fixer's favorites.

Minnie the Moocher

The cartoon in its entirety here.

It's Shopping Saturday. Over the mountains and through the woods, to Carson City we go. See ya later.

Bush's Legacy

Note to Canuckistan: Keep this shit up and we'll bring you democracy. Heh.

Toronto Star

Historians will argue over whether George W. Bush is the worst president the United States has ever endured. But that is not the point. Five years after Bush's ill-starred invasion of Iraq, three years after Hurricane Katrina and seven months into the unravelling of the U.S. financial system, the point is that the 43rd president of the United States – regardless of his ranking in the pantheon – is a unique and unmitigated disaster.

Whether Bush is more of a warmonger than James Polk, who in 1846 manufactured a crisis with Mexico in order to seize what is now California, more tolerant of cronyism than poker-playing Warren Harding (1921 to 1923), or more unlucky than William Harrison (he died after catching cold at his 1841 inauguration) is interesting but irrelevant. What we do know is that this president, this "decider" (to use his favoured term), decided his way into a war that has destroyed the nation he was allegedly trying to free, destabilized further an already rickety Middle East and given Islamic terrorism a whole new raison d'etre.

In short, the road to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay was open well before Bush took office in January 2001. But the current president has soared to new heights. His predecessors at least had the grace to be embarrassed about dabbling on the dark side. By contrast, Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney positively gloat about their attempts to subvert human rights.

Part of the reason is ideology. Bush did little when Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, in large part because he does not think governments should involve themselves in matters of social welfare. His efforts in the current financial crisis are equally half-hearted and for much the same reason.

But there is something else, something disturbingly feckless about Bush. This has nothing to do with his malapropisms ("The only way we can win is to leave before the job is done"), his insistence on snuggling into bed early every night or his alarming propensity for bicycle accidents.

At a very basic level, Bush is incompetent. He likes to play at commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces. But in any other country a commander-in-chief who orchestrated an adventure as disastrous as the Iraq war would be court-martialled.

In some public events, he seems fully at ease. But in others – particularly his infrequent, televised press conferences – he seems to be observing events from another dimension.

Among U.S. historians, it has become great sport to rank the country's presidents. Bush vies with many for the title of absolute worst – from Ulysses S. Grant, who oversaw a post-Civil War era so corrupt it was known as Grant's Barbecue, to Richard Nixon of Watergate fame, to Herbert Hoover, the hapless president in charge during the stock market crash of 1929.

But Grant, Hoover and even Nixon did not do as much damage worldwide. Americans may still be debating Bush's legacy. I suspect the rest of the world has made up its mind.

Why can't our newspapers tell it like it is like this Canadian one just did? Oh, I remember...

Church Street Blues

Here's some really good flatpickin' by Tony Rice. This is from an old lesson tape. Lesson: Just play it like Tony does.

Saturday whorage

The next chapter of Thirty Days at Zeta is up at The Practical Press.

And, keeping up the tradition of taking you guys with us when we go on vacation, I'll be posting all our travel pics and stories at Worlds, starting Monday afternoon when we arrive at the pier in Red Hook, Brooklyn (maybe before if I think up some trip-related shit you should know).

And, Nucks found GM is gonna be bringing back the El Camino.

Let us know what's going on at your place. Leave your links in comments.

The McCain/Feingold Bill?

Not so much.

The Vato and the Brother

This is good.

No Country for Old Men: The Reality of Iran in the Shadow of War

Excellent piece at Empire Burlesque 1.0:

What will become of us without barbarians?
Those people were some sort of a solution.
– C.P. Cavafy, "Waiting for the Barbarians"

When it comes, it will come quickly. No big build-up, no new "roll-out of the product." The groundwork has already been laid, the specious casus belli already embraced, enthusiastically, by Congress. Proposed legislation to "compel" Bush to seek Congressional approval for an attack will be ignored, just as Bush blatantly ignores any Congressional stricture he dislikes. If he decides to launch an attack on Iran, no institutional or legal fetter will stop him. That's the stark truth of the matter.

The attack will probably be a limited one at first, with the immediate "reasons" being offered up afterwards or in media res. After all, who is going to seriously question the Commander-in-Chief when our brave boys are in the air over enemy territory in Iran?

And make no mistake, the Bush faction's predatory designs on Iran are business – big business. The entire "War on Terror" is an engine for crony profiteering on a monstrous scale – and the greatest transfer of public wealth into private hands the world has ever seen. Those who believe that the Bushists would hold back from striking Iran because it is too "risky" don't understand the stakes these warmongers are playing for. As they will never suffer personally or financially from even the worst outcome of their policies, the game is well worth the candle for them. Others will do the dying. Others will face the ruin. Others will weep with pain and grief.

Please read the rest.

And then there were three...

AP

WASHINGTON - The passport files of the three presidential candidates — Sens. Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain — have been breached, the State Department said Friday.
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State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the breaches of McCain and Clinton's passport files were not discovered until Friday, after officials were made aware of the privacy violation regarding Obama's records and a separate search was conducted.

This is getting better and better! It'll be interesting to see how it all shakes out. Somewhere between high-level skulduggery and the usual Bush administration incompetence at every level, I think.

The Media-Gone-Wild Promise of Passport-gate: A Short History of Buffoonery

P.M. Carpenter, from his new digs at BuzzFlash as 'The Fifth Columnist'.

Although no one yet knows anything of any verifiable substance -- especially the haplessly in-charge Condoleezza Rice, which naturally is just par for the course -- Barack Obama really needed this.

Thank you, oh "-gate" giving gods, for in all your mysterious playfulness we see that you do indeed giveth what you taketh away. And these days really quickly, too.

This is politics, so imagination and suspicion are happily permitted to substitute for material reality and facts. We watched this axiomatic sordidness unfold with splendid exactitude in the aftermath of the Rev. Wright fiasco -- 1) a "scandalous" story breaks ... 2) a thoughtful, convincing response is offered ... 3) the punditry crowd ensues with half-baked speculations and recriminations about number two, not one. We can rest assured, I trust, that irresponsible network jabber will dominate now, as much as before. It's only fair.

A big and booming business was here to stay -- the obsessive, profitable feeding of the unenlightened masses with heaps-more unenlightenment.

In our unaware darkness we never stopped to consider, for example, that the private and not entirely uncommon act of adulterous fellatio could alter if not end the course of Western civilization, but by golly it could, it just could. All we needed, as good citizens, was the proper news and information and truckloads of partisan, talking-head humbug.

Heh. Adulterous Fellatio. Lends a whole new meaning to the term 'AF weenie', don't it?

Fast forward to the present. Is he black enough or too black? Is he a secret Muslim? Does he hold hand over heart? Does he wear a flag pin? Was he sitting in the pews? Is he, in short, as gullible as we are?

Now that's news, and rightly the kind of crapola we can base our presidential preferences on.

The Media's motto seems to be, "If You Can't Dazzle 'Em With Brilliance, Baffle 'Em With Bullshit". We have to wade through 24/7 meaningless drivel to get a little nugget once in a great while. Like gold in a stream, it's a rare occurrence.

Senior Moments

Tony Peyser

When John McCain made a foreign policy gaffe in Jordan, Joe Lieberman quietly pointed out the mistake, giving McCain an opportunity to correct himself in front of the international press corps. Later in Israel, Lieberman gently intervened when McCain made an incorrect reference about the Jewish holiday of Purim. This is the best dummy-ventriloquist routine since the heyday of Willie Tyler & Lester.

The movie about Lieberman's life finally has a title: "The McCain Whisperer."

McCain is showing the signs of senile dementia before the election that Reagan didn't start showing until he was in office. Fair warning.

Update:

Go see some of his dumbass McCainisms:

"I think I'd just commit suicide." --in October 2006, on the prospects of the Democrats taking back the Senate in the November election

Keep yer promises, old man...

Dance on this, bitchez!

Patricia Ward Kelly in toto:

Re “Soft Shoe in Hard Times” (column, March 16):

Surely it must have been a slip for Maureen Dowd to align the artistry of my late husband, Gene Kelly, with the president’s clumsy performances. To suggest that “George Bush has turned into Gene Kelly” represents not only an implausible transformation but a considerable slight. If Gene were in a grave, he would have turned over in it.

When Gene was compared to the grace and agility of Jack Dempsey, Wayne Gretzky and Willie Mays, he was delighted. But to be linked with a clunker — particularly one he would consider inept and demoralizing — would have sent him reeling.

Graduated with a degree in economics from Pitt, Gene was not only a gifted dancer, director and choreographer, he was also a most civilized man. He spoke multiple languages; wrote poetry; studied history; understood the projections of Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes. He did the Sunday Times crossword in ink. Exceedingly articulate, Gene often conveyed more through movement than others manage with words.

Sadly, President Bush fails to communicate meaningfully with either. For George Bush to become Gene Kelly would require impossible leaps in creativity, erudition and humility.

Patricia Ward Kelly
Los Angeles, March 16, 2008

Gene could dance in the rain, the Chimp is whistling past the graveyard.

Link thanks to Avedon.

Quote of the Day

Jeff Fecke channels Yakov Smirnoff:

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As Yakov Smirnoff might say: "In Soviet Russia, government reads secret passport files on political opponents. But in America, same thing! What a country!"

As the husband of a Russian Jew, I've heard comments like this around the house for the past 8 years. As someone who was in the military when our greatest enemy was the Soviet Union, my comment is "this isn't the America I put my ass on the line for."

Careful ...

Pic stolen from our pal pygalgia.

Update:

A sample of the 'democracy' we brought to Iraq (might be disturbing).

Old time Rock and Roll

Sometimes Fixer inspires me. To new heights of oldfartism, probably, but I just had to express my sentiments musically, so here we go. And yes, I did dance around in my underwear whilst previewing this, to the delight of my neighbors (I think. I hope they weren't tourists!), but it is as nothing compared to my delight in remembering Tom Cruise getting a grip on himself, so to speak, and practicing up to be the bull goose loony Scientologist he is these days!

Bob Seger