Sibel Edmonds testifies ...

The back story is long and has been going on for years, interwoven with the Valerie Plame case, and Edmonds has been gagged by a 'State Secrets' order imposed by the Bush administration. She testified at the National Whistleblowers Center this weekend and Brad has been on it since the beginning. You know you won't hear any of this on CNN; maybe Olbermann and Maddow might mention it, so you owe it to yourself to read Brad's live blog of the event.

...

From my opinion, if I'm some of the current members of Congress, I'd be very very worried about the information that's going to come out of this. There are current members of Congress that she has implicated in bribery, espionage. It's not good. It's crazy, it's absolutely crazy. For people in power situations in the United States, who know about this information, if they don't take action against it, in my opinion, it's negligence.

[Which current members have been implicated?]

...

You know they'll do their best to cover all of it up. You. Must. Read. The. Whole. Thing.

"... Linda Lovelace without the talent."

Our pal D-cap is one of the best bloggers around (in league with the great Driftglass) and I can read his writing all day. This time he takes on the 'Palin Fan Club' with sexual analogies that make his point so very well:

...

Even worse than the idolization of Sarah Lovelace is the fact that the so-called "fourth estate" – there to protect the public from lies and deception - has barely made a whimper about her saying Obama will murder her child or about the other lunatics on the right who claim Obama is going to euthanize granny. For politicians and insane cable hosts - if there is no negative consequence for their irresponsible behavior and incendiary speech, you betcha there will be a lot more of it – and a lot more of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. What passes as journalism today is nothing short of dildo party.

...

Why bother?

Reporting from Washington -- U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. is poised to appoint a criminal prosecutor to investigate alleged CIA abuses committed during the interrogation of terrorism suspects, current and former U.S. government officials said.

A senior Justice Department official said that Holder envisioned an inquiry that would be narrow in scope, focusing on "whether people went beyond the techniques that were authorized" in Bush administration memos that liberally interpreted anti-torture laws. [my em]

...

If you're gonna do it, go all the way. If you're gonna do it half-assed, don't even bother. It was the interpretation of the laws that was criminal in the first place. Everything else flows from that.

Marine Corps Rap

These guys seem to be in good spirits, but I'm not sure whether we need to bring them home now to prevent further brain damage or to leave them overseas (NOT in Iraq!) for the rest of their thirty years and let the brain damage run its course where the rest of us can be safe from it...

Run-DMC ~ It's Tricky

Thanks to stingdar.

Quote of the Day

Avedon:

...

Now, at this juncture, we expect the Republicans and the Villagers to do this crap, but I really wish I could smack those lefty bloggers who went along with the idea that it was over-the-top to compare the Bush regime with the Nazis, because they helped make it even easier for the little fascists to do what they did then and do what they're doing now. [my em]

We're stupid ...

U - S - A! U - S - A! I've been saying it for years, stupid has become chic over the past decade. Bill Maher thinks so too:

...

I'm the bad guy for saying it's a stupid country, yet polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. 24% could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don't know what's in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don't know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket.

Not here. Nearly half of Americans don't know that states have two senators and more than half can't name their congressman. And among Republican governors, only 30% got their wife's name right on the first try.

Sarah Palin says she would never apologize for America. Even though a Gallup poll says 18% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth. No, they're not stupid. They're interplanetary mavericks. A third of Republicans believe Obama is not a citizen, and a third of Democrats believe that George Bush had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, which is an absurd sentence because it contains the words "Bush" and "knowledge."

...

It's always been amazing to me that people pay more attention to soap operas and the other drivel on TV (almost everything) than they do to the workings of the government. The annoying part is they feel free to spout their uninformed bullshit to the rest of us (and that they're allowed to vote).

...

And these are the idiots we want to weigh in on the minutia of health care policy? ...

And the big problem is that we give morons the same credibility we give those who know what they're talking about. We are stupid, and it's the corporate criminals who (face it, they run everything) exploit it for personal gain. Collectively, we deserve everything we get if we're dumb enough to let them brainwash us into complicity.

Cynic that I am, I get the feeling we've already passed the proverbial 'point of no return'. The 'American IQ' has fallen too far to work our way out of the mess we let the last Moron-in-Chief get us into. The 'teabaggers' and 'birthers' are just the latest example of 'American Stupid' in action. And you wonder why so many people fall for African email scams?

This'll getcher toes O'Tappin

Sharon Shannon & Steve Earle perform Galway Girl Live at the Kennedy Center Gala for Irish Music

Thanks to daisylabel, Ireland.

Quote of the Day

The Ostroy Report

July Job Losses Down Significantly. Republicans Accuse Nation's Employers of Conspiring to Make Obama Look Good

"...validate Al Qaeda's twisted worldview."

Chicago Tribune

In his first public appearance as the White House counter-terrorism advisor, John O. Brennan said that President George W. Bush's policies had been an affront to American values, undermined the nation's security and fostered a "global war" mind-set that served only to "validate Al Qaeda's twisted worldview."

Gee, ya think?

The sharp language is likely to extend the war of words between the current administration and conservative critics such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has carried out an unusually high-profile campaign accusing Obama of abandoning methods that made the country safe.

Given the choice, I'd rather be safe from the likes of Cheney than from terrorists.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Emmylou Harris & Some Jewish Kid From Minnesota ~ One More Cup Of Coffee

Thanks to SHAYMCN2, Ireland.

It's here ...

Stays on top today. You vill do vat Fixer says at the bottom. Iff you do not, ve haff vays of making you... - G

I've been warning about this for years that, under Bush, we were quickly approaching becoming a fascist state. From the stories my mother told me (she grew up in pre-WW2 Germany and was a nurse in the German Army during the war), the Chimp and Cheney's activities were easily recognizable. Sara Robinson sees the results of that regime's policies bringing us to a tipping point:

...

In the second stage, fascist movements take root, turn into real political parties, and seize their seat at the table of power. Interestingly, in every case Paxton cites, the political base came from the rural, less-educated parts of the country; and almost all of them came to power very specifically by offering themselves as informal goon squads organized to intimidate farmworkers on behalf of the large landowners. The KKK disenfranchised black sharecroppers and set itself up as the enforcement wing of Jim Crow. The Italian Squadristi and the German Brownshirts made their bones breaking up farmers' strikes. And these days, GOP-sanctioned anti-immigrant groups make life hell for Hispanic agricultural workers in the US. As violence against random Hispanics (citizens and otherwise) increases, the right-wing goon squads are getting basic training that, if the pattern holds, they may eventually use to intimidate the rest of us.

Paxton wrote that succeeding at the second stage "depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner." He further noted that Hitler and Mussolini both took power under these same circumstances: "deadlock of constitutional government (produced in part by the polarization that the fascists abetted); conservative leaders who felt threatened by the loss of their capacity to keep the population under control at a moment of massive popular mobilization; an advancing Left; and conservative leaders who refused to work with that Left and who felt unable to continue to govern against the Left without further reinforcement."

And more ominously: "The most important variables...are the conservative elites' willingness to work with the fascists (along with a reciprocal flexibility on the part of the fascist leaders) and the depth of the crisis that induces them to cooperate."

That description sounds eerily like the dire straits our Congressional Republicans find themselves in right now. Though the GOP has been humiliated, rejected, and reduced to rump status by a series of epic national catastrophes mostly of its own making, its leadership can't even imagine governing cooperatively with the newly mobilized and ascendant Democrats. Lacking legitimate routes back to power, their last hope is to invest the hardcore remainder of their base with an undeserved legitimacy, recruit them as shock troops, and overthrow American democracy by force. If they can't win elections or policy fights, they're more than willing to take it to the streets, and seize power by bullying Americans into silence and complicity.

When that unholy alliance is made, the third stage -- the transition to full-fledged government fascism -- begins. [my em]

...

If you read anything today, read this in its entirety.

Waltzing ...

Mrs F conned, badgered, ordered asked me to go with her to her 30th high school reunion and, being the hell of a guy I am, I said yes (Wouldn't miss it for the world, being that my high school still holds a grudge* - if I am alive at my 60th, they might let me show up). While we're out, I leave you with Pyotr Ilyich's classic:

Tchaikovsky - Swan Lake Waltz

*And no, I'm not sharing the story. Heh ...

Of Birthers, Senators and Morons

Shopping day today, so here's a quickie from Kos:

In the news: John Cornyn thinks fact checking is pretext for domestic espionage. Which he's suddenly against. Chuck Grassley uses Ted Kennedy's medical condition as propaganda for his own false and nonsensical claims about "socialized medicine" killing old people -- and this is who Max Baucus is "negotiating" with to bring us his version of health care. Rush Limbaugh thinks Obama is like Hitler. Glenn Beck muses about poisoning Nancy Pelosi.

The birthers are going strong, and the teabaggers are trying to shut down healthcare reform by making town halls on the subject impossible. Dick Morris and John Bolton agree: we should have left those two journalists to rot in North Korea, because Clinton going there to secure their release made the U.S. look weak, and now other countries will steal our lunch money at recess. And Lou Dobbs never met a conspiracy theory he didn't like, as long as it was about brown or black people, but after people got angry that he peddled false nonsense he says he's now reflexively going to oppose Obama on everything.

It almost makes you want to cry. Between Cornyn, Grassley, Limbaugh and Beck, between Dobbs and Morris and Bolton, between birthers and "socialized" medicine but keep-your-hands-off-my-Medicare, the stupid is overwhelming. It's become a tidal wave of stupid. It's a giant Noah's Ark of stupid, in which two examples of every kind of dumbassery known to man have been loaded up to be set adrift on a sea of their own drool. It's the "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" gameshow of stupid -- loud, with big flashing lights, and on every goddamn day of the week. It's the result of drinking conservative bong water and eating the paint chips flaking off Bill Buckley's lead-encrusted casket.

I'd be afraid for the future of our country, but I know that if these people ever actually armed themselves and tried to take over they'd all have accidentally shot themselves in the groin within the first ten minutes. Then they'd all limp to D.C. to hold a rally demanding free government healthcare for crotch-related injuries.

If they need any help to shoot themselves in the crotch, I volunteer.

See yas later.

Recess

Gleefully gleeped from YubaNet.

Note to the House and Senate: Beat on that bully sonofabitch with that case in your hand until he cries 'Uncle!'. Then beat him until he shuts the fuck up. Then just beat him. Yeah, like you got the balls to do that.

Khmer Bush

YubaNet

As leaders of the former Khmer Rouge regime testify in a human rights tribunal, in harrowing detail, for the killing of more than a million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979 a central medical question remains unanswered: will the trials help a society heal or exacerbate the lingering affects of widespread trauma?

Tribunals to assess crimes of war and crimes against humanity are becoming more common. In June, Charles Taylor, former president of Liberia, answered questions in an international courtroom in Paris about his alleged role in genocide in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, a UN-sponsored trial, has been underway since 1993 and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda since 1995. The Nuremberg Trials is perhaps the most well known.

The Khmer Rouge trials offer the opportunity to better gauge the efficacy of these trials, and those lessons hold relevance across a spectrum of injustice.

“The larger question raised by our study is whether attempts to promote justice for survivors of violence – whether en masse or inflicted by one individual to another – can help lessen its psychological toll,” Sonis says. “We simply don’t know the answers yet.”

Let's have some Khmer Bush trials and find out.

William Jefferson Airplane

The title must refer to the fact that The Big Dawg's got Grace and he's Slick...

First 5 minutes is about Clinton and the return of the hostages. Then it goes into the wingtards' response. Scumbags.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
William Jefferson Airplane
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Spinal Tap Performance

Clinton says she regrets U.S. is not a member of ICC

Ol' Hil was firin' on all her cylinders over in Kenya! I hereby volunteer a fresh oversize piston should she ever need one...

Reuters via Think Progress:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Thursday it was a "great regret" the United States was not yet a signatory to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

The United States signed the ICC treaty when Hillary's husband, Bill Clinton, was president, but it was never ratified by Congress. Clinton's successor George W. Bush later rejected the idea of joining the court.

If I did what he did, I'da rejected it too. When ya let the war criminals be the shot callers, no good will come of it and none has.

With the recent addition of the Czech Republic, 110 countries have ratified the Rome statute. Absent from the list are the United States, Russia, China and Israel.

The "Big Four" in Non-Accountability World for war crimes, imperialism, genocide, and general all-around human rights abuses.

The court only has jurisdiction over crimes committed after July 1, 2002, in countries that have ratified its treaty.

It's almost like they knew what Bush & Cheney were going to be up to when they formed that outfit. Maybe someone there was on Yoo and Bybee's e-mail list.

It doesn't look at present like Obama is going to change US policy re the ICC. If he does, listen for the sound of printing presses in The Hague burning out from printing arrest warrants for the neoNaziscons and their Bush administration.

Republicans Oppose 'Cash For Clunkers' Program

Tony Peyser

Whatever their complaints may be
The subtext that's always lurking
Is rage at anything Obama's done
That happens to be. . . working.

Oily Taint ...

And the rest of them. Our pal Maru:

...

Remember when the news used to give you something called… let’s see now, what was it… uh, facts? All we get now is variations on shit like Senator, your republican opponent says your bill calls for the mercy killings of thousands. Why do you hate freedom, you murderer? Even formerly-dignified wonk shows are featuring loonytoon haters such as Michelle Malkin and that Orly Taintz Borat character. I’m so fucking disgusted I could puke.

Surprised the fuck outta me ...

But they actually did the right thing:

Washington -- The Senate will vote today on rescuing the "cash for clunkers" program, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said late Wednesday, announcing a deal he expects to pave the way for an extra $2 billion to keep the initiative alive at least through Labor Day.

The agreement by Senate Democrats and Republicans "accomplishes what we need to accomplish," said Reid, who earlier declared he has the votes to pass the popular program.

The House has already passed the bill, and President Barack Obama has said he would sign it.

...