The absolute best part ...

Of yesterday's festivities was watching the Chimp leave the White House and board that Marine Corps helicopter. I'd give anything to know what Obama and Biden were saying to each other as they watched him go.

And an aside: Did anybody notice what a great time Joe Biden was having yesterday? If you didn't know better, you'd think he was the one elected President.

And another aside: Feel better soon, Ted. We need ya now more than ever.

A good start ...

WASHINGTON (AP) — One of President Barack Obama's first acts is to order federal agencies to halt all pending regulations until his administration can review them.

The order went out Tuesday afternoon, shortly after Obama was inaugurated president, in a memorandum signed by new White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. The notice of the action was contained in the first press release sent out by Obama's White House, and it came from deputy press secretary Bill Burton.

...

Good. Fuck the Chimp and his midnight declarations. Nice to see Barry coming in with his eyes open.

Link via Mr. Philadelphia.

Deliverance

This goes out to all our dear sweet godless commie fuck friends who were put off the new President because of all the religious crap that goes with the traditional pomp and circumstance that surrounds the passage of power instead of realizing that we've just had sort of a spiritual moment by our deliverance from the worst buncha bastards that ever hijacked a country. Well, this country anyway. Frankly, until PBO said 'I do' or whatever, I didn't think it was gonna come off. I'm thanking my God, your God, any and all gods, the Architect Of The Universe, and/or yer Aunt Sadie that maybe now we've got a guy who'll show up and isn't an intellectual black hole like that last sonofabitch. Hallelujah! Lead us out of the wilderness, Moses Barry, that that bastard and the flying monkeys that shot outta his ass purposely blundered us into at such high speed!

A lovely song by a nice Italian girl from Noo Yalk and a longhaired gui-tar picker oughta make you feel better.

10,000 Maniacs & David Byrne ~ Let The Mystery Be

The Hell It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

Today is a wonderful day for our country, and to use a motorcycle term, I'm backin' off to oil. Tomorrow it's back to work. We have a new administration to watch and an old one to prosecute. See yas.

Joan Baez ~ It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

The long national nightmare ...

will finally be over today.

Tomorrow, we start to clean up the mess.

Thank God.

Quote of the Day

Olbermann (from his Special Comment last night):

...

This is the people's democracy. We are the people, these were our elected officials. That they did not come to us and ask to act thusly in our names is unfortunate, indeed criminal, but it is also almost irrelevant. They worked for us, they tortured people, and so we have tortured people.

...

Indeed. And until we prosecute those who are guilty, we are just as complicit, morally and in the eyes of the world.

Update:

And as our buddy 'Nucks reminds us:

...

We prosecuted and executed Japanese and German prisoners of war for doing exactly the same fucking thing to our soldiers after the end of World War II. [em in orig]

...

Help ya down them Capitol steps one last time, Dick?

Cheney in wheelchair with pulled back muscle

What a fuckin' pussy! I shovel a lotta snow and pull my back muscles all the time, don't need no sissy wheelchair, just some ibuprofen. The Dick gets lots better painkillers than that on our dime. Some guys'll pull any stunt to keep from going to the victorious enemy's inauguration!

Hallelujah and Amen ...

Stolen from C&L:

Click to embiggen.

He's really going to leave?

This might be a little previous. Call it premature de-jackoffication.

The song takes about 2½ minutes, but the blackness goes on three times as long. Fitting, considering that's about how long it will take to get outta the hole the son of a bitch dug us into.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Bush Heading Back to Texas
Cheney returns to Mordor.

Congressionally Mandated Study: Gulf War Syndrome Real
Treatment, VA benefits imaginary.

Bloomberg: NYC Will Help Train Laid-off Wall Streeters
As squeegee guys.

Me Generation, Generation Y Agree to Merge
Into Y-Me Generation.

Jack Bauer Having Inner Turmoil About Torture in New Season of “24”
Look for ratings-grabbing war crimes trial during sweeps.

No thanks. I'll wait for the 'reality show' on C-Span.

Heh ...

At least they ain't going to Paris:

Germany wants to send 500 soldiers to France in what would be its first deployment to the country since the end of World War II in 1945, Der Spiegel magazine reports in an article to be published Monday.

...

The soldiers will cooperate with their French counterparts in a joint force known as the Franco-German Brigade.

...

The bar fights will be the stuff of legend. Late for work ...

Whither the Air Force?

Don't think so. A few bloggers have been suggesting the Air Force has lost its relevancy in this age of asymmetric warfare and its tactical components should absorbed by the respective services they support (ground attack and air control to the Army for instance).

I'd posit that the Air Force mission has evolved into so much more than cruising the wild blue yonder, dropping bombloads on a faceless enemy 60,000 feet below. The Air Force's capability of military airlift is unparalleled, as is its ability to turn an empty field into a forward operating base for tactical air within hours. Those talents can be put to use in more ways than strategic bombing:

The Air Force doesn't just drop bombs. The service does all kinds of "soft power" missions, too -- training doctors, strengthening local economies, and building America's image abroad.

That's the reaction I got from a bunch of Air Force types, after a recent post, suggesting that "hard power" was topic #1, when the service discussed its contribution to fighting insurgencies.

...

'Winning hearts and minds', a tactic that (unlike the Bush administration's use of the term) must go hand in hand with counterinsurgency efforts. Unlike the PNAC/Neocon version of the world, you can't beat people into the dust and expect them to comply with your dictates. You have to show them you actually give a damn about what happens to them or their cooperation lasts as long as your wallet is open. Haven't we learned that in Afghanistan?

...

But nowhere is the Air Force flexing its soft power more than in the Caribbean and Central and South America, argues Lieutenant General Norman Seip, who oversees the service's efforts in the region, as commander of Air Forces Southern.

During 30 "medical readiness events" in 2008, AFSOUTH teams "treated more than 100,000 patients in 14 countries, accomplishing 675 life-altering surgeries such as cleft palate repair and vision corrections, as well as 1500 dental procedures," Seip tells Danger Room.

...

It's the quality of life issues the Air Force can help with better than any other service, those oriented almost exclusively toward supporting the combat mission.

...

New Horizons is an annual infrastructure program sponsored by U.S. Southern Command. In 2008, Air Force New Horizons building projects in the region helped to erect schools and clinics, drill wells and bring services to remote populations. The three clinics and two school houses constructed by Airmen now serve more than 20,000 Peruvian citizens while medical personnel took the opportunity to treat more than 12,000 local patients in the province.

...

Granted, the strategic threat faced by the United States is nowhere near what we were looking at during the Cold War and the future of the Air Force will not be centered around the nuclear deterrent, but the Air Force can play a large humanitarian role in the 21st Century and do it better than the other services. The ability to move large amounts of personnel and materiel quickly and efficiently is something not to be taken lightly in this time of accelerated climate change and unrest around the world.

Aside from their combat support operations, the Air Force's role in humanitarian operations around the world cannot be understated. If anything, the organization of the military in general should be reviewed for redundancy among the services (the F-35 program is an attempt - though halfhearted - to rectify some of it) and to objectively cut costs. As the Navy did with the battleships, the strategic nuclear force should be relegated to dinosaur status (a nuclear threat in the 21st Century won't come from ballistic missiles over the North Pole) but the abolition of the Air Force would be a mistake. We can't afford to make that mistake when the people of the world look to us for help when hard times befall them.

Lab rats ...

My mom wanted a kid; my dad wanted slave labor to help him work on his race cars and do the household chores. The first engine I ever built was an old Buick Straight 8 when I was 10 but I digress. Seems scientists are now using their kids as lab rats. I can sympathize:

... Scientists who may otherwise not be able to round up some test subjects, are now using their own children, they are there and they are free ...

Sunday Crazy Cape Breton Step Dance Extravaganza Blogging

Featuring Natalie MacMaster, the virtuoso Cape Breton-style fiddle player. Always sheer joy to listen to!

Features 9 step dancers, 5 reels & a strathspey. Live in Cape Breton.

Thanks to morigue. I wuz gonna play this one but I felt it would be poor taste, at which I am world class, to then be obligated to make jokes about our new President being shot out of the center of the Earth. And just in time too, I might add!

Sunday Emmylou Blogging

Here's this ol' lecher's object of desire and that Limey gui-tar picker again. I gotta say, the guy plays pretty good for just usin' his fingers...

Emmylou Harris & Mark Knopfler ~ Why Worry

Thanks to DrMalPracktiss. Go see where the doc lives!

White Like Me

Daddy Frank on growing up in Democrat-controlled Jim Crow DC.

I cannot testify to what black Americans feel as our nation celebrates the inauguration of our first African-American president. But I can speak for myself, as a white American who grew up in the segregated nation’s capital of the 1960s. Barack Obama’s day is one that I never thought would come, and one that I still can’t quite believe is here.

[...] Though a few African-Americans and embassy Africans provided the window dressing of “integration,” my mostly white elementary, junior high and high schools had roughly the same diversity as, say, today’s G.O.P.

I wish I could say we were all outraged at this apartheid. But we were kids — privileged kids at that — and out of sight was out of mind. Except as household help, black Washington was generally as invisible to us as it was to the tourists who were rigidly segregated from the real Washington while visiting its many ivory marble shrines to democratic ideals.

But as an unintended consequence of Washington’s particular brand of Jim Crow, white public school students got a tiny taste of what racially mandated second-class citizenship could mean. In those days, the city didn’t even have the bastardized form of “self-government” it has now; it was run as a plantation by Congressional District panels led by racist white Southerners (then Democrats). These overseers didn’t want to lavish money on an overwhelmingly black school system, and they didn’t. By the early 1960s, per-student spending in Washington was less than that of any state, impoverished West Virginia and Mississippi included.

One would like to say in the aftermath of the 2008 election that everyone lived happily ever after. But the American drama, especially when it involves race, is always more complicated than that.

Washington is its own special American case, but only up to a point. For all our huge progress, we are not “post-racial,” whatever that means. The world doesn’t change in a day, and the racial frictions that emerged in both the Democratic primary campaign and the general election didn’t end on Nov. 4. As Obama himself said in his great speech on race, liberals couldn’t “purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap” simply by voting for him. And conservatives? The so-called party of Lincoln has spent much of the past month in spirited debate about whether a white candidate for the party’s chairmanship did the right thing by sending out a “humorous” recording of “Barack the Magic Negro” as a holiday gift.

Next to much of our history, this is small stuff. And yet: Of all the coverage of Obama’s victory, the most accurate take may still be the piquant morning-after summation of the satirical newspaper The Onion. Under the headline “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job,” it reported that our new president will have “to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind.”

After the messes left by those white bastards, who are most decidedly not a, er, credit to their race, I think Obama woulda been elected if he was a Martian.

Please read the rest.

Excuse me?

Do you think you could introduce me to some black folks?

... Overnight, black politicians, lawyers and journalists are hot properties, receiving engraved invitations from people they never got invitations from before ...

So I guess tokenism is alive and well once again?

I'll foot the bill ...

To have it installed on the National Mall ...

Slide Job

A Tribute To Stevie Ray Vaughan

Bonnie Raitt ~ Pride And Joy

Thanks, jazzbungalo.

Born Again American

I saw part of this on Bill Moyers Journal Friday night and went looking for it. Read about it at the link.

We're entering a new era come next Tuesday. I don't know about the 'Born Again' verbiage, hell, gettin' born an American just the once did it for me, and I'll never trust another so-called 'born again christian' after Bush again, but I get the idea. If our country ever needed rebirth, it's as soon as that son of a bitch and his ilk are gone.

Call me a sentimental old fool who wants justice for all, but this made me tear up a little.


Born Again American.org