Once a Dick, Always a Dick

Hillbilly Report

The Republican Party as a whole is suffering from a huge case of mass amnesia. They seem to forget that they are the ones that crashed our economy. They seem to forget that they are the ones that made the whole world hate us. They forget that every policy they enacted was a miserable failure and that our country is paying huge, steep price for it now. In the case of Dick Cheney, he has forgotten that he was the one that dropped the ball on Afghanistan by insisting on a failed, costly in lives and treasure, war in Iraq.

Months after thankfully being escorted out of public life, and months after making a fool of himself speaking on things he obviously knows nothing about, Dick Cheney has been proving yet again that well, Once a Dick, always a Dick.

Enjoy the rest, including videos and this jewel:

Frank Gaffney to Ron Reagan Jr. "Your father would be ashamed of you."

Ron Reagan Jr. to Frank Gaffney: "You Better Watch You Mouth About That Frank"

That's the ticket! We need more of that with these Repug throwbacks! Kudos, Ron.

Unlike wealthy Americans ...

Well-to-do Germans understand the idea of "shared sacrifice". Auntie:

A group of rich Germans has launched a petition calling for the government to make wealthy people pay higher taxes.

The group say they have more money than they need, and the extra revenue could fund economic and social programmes to aid Germany's economic recovery.

...

What was that? Not "I got mine and fuck you"? How is this possible?

...

"The path out of the crisis must be paved with massive investment in ecology, education and social justice," they say in the petition.

...

Bleedin' Commies, they are!

Great thanks to Chris for the link.

Friday Evening Emmylou Blogging

A song about the dangers of drinking. (Wink)

Emmylou Harris & The Nash Ramblers with The Oak Ridge Boys ~ Leavin' Louisiana

Thanks to bluegrassrootstv.

"I ain't drunk ...

I'm just drinkin'." Heh ... The great Albert Collins:

Albert Collins - I Ain't Drunk

Hellfire justice

I see where we're deploying MQ-9 Reapers off Somalia to 'monitor' pirates. This is good. Coupla Hellfires, 'monitoring' done for the day, it's Miller time.

I suggest we expand this program to include the 'pirates' we're paying big money to besmirch our name.

A federal judge's ruling Wednesday won't shutter a war crimes suit against the security contracting firm formerly known as Blackwater, despite the fact that lawyers must refile their claims against the company.

64 Iraqis -- including the estates of 19 who died -- have sued the company, now called Xe, for indiscriminate beatings and killings.

Judge TS Ellis III dismissed several of the suits on Wednesday, citing a new ruling by the Supreme Court which raises the bar for allegations of war crimes.

"Ellis's ruling was not necessarily a response to faulty pleadings by the Iraqis' lawyers, but rather appears to be the result of a Supreme Court decision that came down after the Blackwater cases were originally filed," The Nation's Jeremy Scahill, who has covered the case closely, wrote Thursday. "In a 5-4 ruling in May 2009 in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the court reversed decades of case law and imposed much more stringent standards for plaintiffs' to document facts before going to trial, According to Ellis's ruling, which cites Iqbal, the Iraqis must now file complaints that meet these new standards."

Another right-wing ruling to protect powerful right-wing outfits from 'justice'. Yeesh.

Blackwater's image has been so tarnished that the company was forced to change their name. In August, two former Blackwater employees accused the company of pimping out Iraqi children.

The declarations described Blackwater as “having young girls provide oral sex to Enterprise members in the ‘Blackwater Man Camp’ in exchange for one American dollar.” They added even though Prince frequently visited this camp, he “failed to stop the ongoing use of prostitutes, including child prostitutes, by his men.”

One of the statements also charged that “Prince’s North Carolina operations had an ongoing wife-swapping and sex ring, which was participated in by many of Mr. Prince’s top executives.”

According to the two former employees, Blackwater supervisors in Iraq sometimes sent men back to the United States for wanting to “kill ragheads,” excessive drinking, steroid use, or failure to follow weapon safety procedures, but “Mr. Prince and his executives would send them back” with a reprimand to the supervisor for costing the firm money. Blackwater even fired “those mental health professionals who were not willing to endorse deployments of unfit men.”

The former employees stated that Prince was engaged in illegal arms dealing, money laundering, and tax evasion, that he created “a web of companies in order to obscure wrong-doing, fraud, and other crimes,” and that Blackwater’s chief financial officer had “resigned … stating he was not willing to go to jail for Erik Prince.”

There's a video as well.

A little 'Hellfire justice' would go a long way towards setting Blackwater/Xe right.

Marijuana Prohibition: Another Failed Social Engineering Idea

Good article by the improbably named Nuke Brunswick in The Mountain Messenger (photo - no website yet) via YubaNet:

The fall marijuana harvest is pretty much over; the stalks are hanging upside down to cure, law enforcement is sitting by the fire with its feet up, having done the show-and-tell tip-of-the-iceberg photo op pot busts, destroying crops with a street value greater than the cost of the Afghanistan war. Right.

Where did all this Reefer Madness come from?

It wasn't church groups or enraged parents or law enforcement that plunged America into the first skirmishes of the disastrous and incredibly expensive war on drugs. It was Big Cotton. Hemp was promising to be a better and more useful crop for making fabrics than the white stuff, so the cotton industry sent a wave of lobbyists, armed with FEAR, to Washington.

About then Harry Anslinger appeared on the scene. [...]
...

Anslinger found a powerful ally: William Randolf Hearst, who had invested heavily in the timber industry to feed his chain of newspapers and didn't want to see the development of hemp, a possible competitor to wood. DuPont joined the crusade, wanting to remove hemp as a possible competition to its new product: nylon.

Let the hysterical times roll! And the newspapers of the day were up to that challenge. "The marihuana cigarette is one of the most insidious of all forms of dope, largely because of the failure of the public to understand its fatal qualities," editorialized a paper in the nation's capitol.

Racism was a powerful weapon wielded by the opponents of cannabis. A Montana legislator said, as his state prepared to outlaw the weed, "All Mexicans are crazy and this stuff is what makes them crazy." A newspaper editorial in 1934 told its readers, "Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men's shadows, and look at a white woman twice."

Yellow journalism won and The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was passed.

When Nevada County District Attorney Mike Ferguson was getting ready to retire I asked him about the War on Weed. Did he think the DEA should switch its emphasis from marijuana to meth?

"I think it's a good idea," he told me. "When you look at the impact of what meth is and what it does to people, it should be prioritized." He agreed that the old concept of "Reefer Madness" applied more correctly to meth than pot.

He's off somewhere on his sailboat now and law enforcement still finds it a lot harder to nab the highly mobile meth cookers than it is to bust something that stands in one place for six months.

Editor's note: The Mountain Messenger, California's oldest weekly newspaper since 1853, is published on Thursdays from Downieville, California.

I just threw that last bit in there because Downieville's main claim to fame is:

In July 1851 Downieville gained a distinction it may not have wanted when a mob lynched a Mexican woman, known as Juanita, for the murder of a white miner. It remains the only lynching of a female in California history.

I think I would qualify that by saying it is the only recorded incident of lynching a woman. Those old mining camps were pretty rough.

It's actually a nice destination for lunch on the hotel deck where you can be wetsuit-mooned by gold panners in the Downie River.

F**: "Obama started it! He hit me back! Waaaah!"

I was accused once in exactly the same way by a schoolyard bully.

Think Progress

Media Matters: Fox News’ attacks on the Obama White House ‘have been occurring since January 20.’

Finally he hit the sonsabitches back. He's a lot more patient than I am.

The Two Rude Pundit

RP's got a coupla good ones today:

Photos That Make Christian Conservative Brains Short Out

Dude, I want a photo OF christian conservative brains(?) shorting out.

Yes, the photo, of Barack Obama becoming the first American president to publicly celebrate the Hindu holiday of Diwali, is about a week old, but the reaction to it from the nutzoid right wing is as steamy fresh as a new cow pie in a Vermont meadow on an October morning.

This is not an endorsement of such things. Indeed, there should be no public ceremonies of any faith at the White House. But it's always a wonder what sets off the right, from the smallest gestures. You know who liked it? India. You know who organized it? Kal Penn. Goddamn, is there nothing Kumar can't do?

On the coultergeist and other 'tard gasbags:

You know how you know you've become completely and utterly irrelevant as a writer? When you're still arguing a twenty year-old point. For in her latest "column" (if by "column," you mean, "a neo-Norma Desmond's diary of utter madness"), Ann Coulter re-re-re-re-argues the Willie Horton ad from the Bush the Less Stupid vs. Dukakis campaign of 1988. Why? Because Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews said it first. No, seriously, Coulter, who is at this point just a twig-shaped dildo specially designed to fit Sean Hannity's ass, spends half her weekly column on her spin on the "facts" of the Horton case only because Olbermann and Matthews mentioned it in passing while discussing Fox "news" and its anti-Obama bias.

Regarding this whole kerfuffle over whether the White House saying that Fox "news" isn't really a news outlet, but a propaganda wing of the Republican Party, was this up for discussion? Considering what whiny little bitches Fox people have been about the whole thing, it's pretty damn hilarious that what the Obama administration ended up revealing is not that the President has thin skin. No, it showed that Fox and its hosts and reporters and, by extension, Rupert Murdoch are faux bullies: one little nudge and these pussies go running around telling everyone that they were pushed down.

By the way, the fucking strangest thing in Coulter's column? This description of Daily Kos's founder: "Frito Bandito-accented Markos Moulitsas." Not even remotely true. Criticize away on Markos. Hell, have at it as racist as you like, if that's your thing. But at least pretend like you're actually listening. Oh, wait, that's right. Facts are to Ann Coulter as coyote piss is to deer.

If only facts would make her run across the road in front of a Mack truck...

Nazi looted art found at future site of Bush presidential library

The Political Carnival

That's some blog title. It's not mine, it belongs to The Hill:

Two valuable works of art looted by the Nazis during World War II have been discovered at Southern Methodist University (SMU), which is the future home of the George W. Bush Presidential Library.

I vill not make any Chimpenfuhrer jokes. I vill not make any Chimpenfuhrer jokes.

Because if I did, I'd be just like those mean ol' Tea Tantrumers and ClusterFoxers linking Obama to Hitler, right?

The former president's office declined to comment on the story.

Of course, this Bush/Hitler connection comes to mind, no matter how hard I try to suppress it.

No mention of how they got to SMU or how long they've been there. My guess is they were brought from Germany and Austria where they were found after the war by Bush family minions and have been at SMU with the university's full knowledge ever since.

War has been very profitable to that famiglia, damn them. It still is. Read the links.

And by the way ...

Fuck Olympia Snowe.

Once more for good measure.

Update:

And once for good luck:

...

TPM talked to Snowe today and she said "it would be difficult" to allow a health care bill to come to a vote in the Senate if it had the dreaded public option. Difficult? DIFFICULT? You want difficult, Senator Snowe? Try getting turned down for insurance because of pregnancy, past C-section, or being a victim of domestic violence? How about going bankrupt from health care expenses, even if you have insurance? What about the 45,000 people per year who die because they don't have health insurance? Do you think maybe it is difficult for them and their families?

...

Oh noes!!!!1

The White House doesn't like Fox 'News'! You know, an administration has never singled out a 'news organization' for retribution.

...

In 2001, indicted scumbag Tom DeLay boycotted and personally refused to appear on CNN.
In 2001, congressional conservatives were engaged in a boycott of CNN.
Also in 2001, CNN’s president met with GOP leaders to hear "concerns" about purported bias.
In 2002, GOP leadership reportedly threatened or engaged in Crossfire boycott
2002: GOP boycott of Crossfire "has become official policy."
In 2004, NY Times reporters were excluded from Air Force Two
In 2006, GOP House members sought punishment, possible prosecution of NY Times
In 2008, Bush counselor Ed Gillespie attacked NBC, accusing the network of "blurring" the lines "between the 'news' as reported on NBC and the 'opinion' as reported on MSNBC."

...

Whiny little twats. More at Maru's.

Quote of the Day

Oliver Willis:

...

Harry Reid is "leaning" to support the public option in the health care bill. Of course its far past time for he and the president to quit "leaning" towards things and crap if they’re gonna crap.

...

About the market ...

Yes, a lot of people are glad the stock market is going up again but a good portion of folks are understandably gun shy.

...

Most people are happy that the Dow is rising again because it's considered a leading indicator. But for middle class people in their 50s and 60s who managed to save for retirement, it's a rueful and wary eye they are keeping on the market right now. Between their house losing half of its value and their retirement accounts taking a stomach churning nosedive, they would love to enjoy this stock market rally, but they have a long way to go before they are back to where they expected to be at this point in their lives. They're watching, but I don't think there's all that much pleasure in it quite yet.

...

Of course there isn't because last year, people saw how fast it could all go to shit. Now they see the profits on the Street skyrocketing once again, yet their home value is nowhere near what it was 18 months ago (I got news for you, it'll never be that again.).

Until there is comprehensive regulation of the financial services industry, most people expect nothing but a cycle of bubble and bust for the foreseeable future. It's time to roll back the lassiez faire attitude of government toward business, cultivated in the Reagan years. As we've seen with health care, energy, the news media, or any other corporatized industries, big business does not know best and the 'free market' is the first casualty of deregulation.

If Congress and the President want to do anything to ensure a stable economy, reinstating the regulations put in after the Great Depression would be an excellent start. They can throw as much money as they want at the problem but with out a strict set of rules for business to follow, the financial industry will continue to remain nothing more than a high-stakes, high-risk gambling house with taxpayer money as their stake.

Clearly labelled establishment

Got this via email from my pal Bev.

Click to em-fook-hing-biggen

Problem solved

YubaNet

WASHINGTON, D.C. Oct. 21, 2009 - Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Representative Sam Farr (D-Calif.) introduced legislation today that would prevent cruise ships from dumping sewage and other waste into coastal waters.

Just put the stuff in Fixer's empty whiskey bottles and let it float safely to shore where it can be dealt with. Put a little food coloring in it and dump it off red states. The natives will just think it's a bonanza of Repug kool-aid and drink it.

You can't make this stuff up...

Fed calls for closer scrutiny of bankers' compensation





I just thought this was a terrific juxtaposition on the front page of the LATimes. Heh.

Conservatives roar; Republicans tremble

Gordon tingles! A little good news for a change!

Politico

Many top Republicans are growing worried that the party’s chances for reversing its electoral routs of 2006 and 2008 are being wounded by the flamboyant rhetoric and angry tone of conservative activists and media personalities, according to interviews with GOP officials and operatives.

And this is somehow supposed to be a bad thing? I don't think so.

But the reality of the GOP during the Obama presidency is that the party’s image and priorities are in many ways being imposed on Washington — driven by grass-roots energies that lawmakers and strategists can scarcely control.

The only Republicans standing up to Beck and other conservative activists right now are familiar iconoclasts like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and New York Times columnist David Brooks — both of whom are distrusted by many Republicans for their frequent departures from conservative orthodoxy.

Sorry, probably shoulda given you a 'liquid alert' there...

Brooks, a Republican who has written both favorably and critically about Obama, amplified Graham’s concern with the party’s obsequious relationship with Beck and Limbaugh. “It is a story of remarkable volume and utter weakness,” he wrote. “It is a story as old as ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ of grand illusions and small men behind the curtain.”

Hey, you fuckers cranked up the Wurlitzer and now you can't control it. Tough shit. You crapped in your bed, now lie in it.

The debate means the argument over whether outspoken talk show hosts are reviving a beaten party or trashing its brand is likely to persist through the 2010 midterms and into the 2012 presidential primary.

What argument? They're trashing it, and rightly so and doing a fine job of it I might add. The lunatics are finally in charge of the asylum, and the Repugs are getting what they deserve.

The only thing better would be a buncha prison sentences.

Quote of the Day dos

This is about Repugs v Obama v ClusterF**. Buchanan figures in this one too. Heh.

Think Progress

“I also have to laugh,” liberal talk radio host Bill Press said during the segment. “When two Republicans want to hurt a Democrat, what do they do? They compare him to another Republican. It’s crazy.”

Repugs? Crazy? I think yer onto something there, Bill.

Quote of the Day

The Rude One:

While one should not advocate kicking an old man in the nuts, neither should one advocate not kicking an old man in the nuts. Especially when that old man is Pat Buchanan ...

It's already begun ...

Haven't the wingnuts been saying the Obamas are gonna indoctrinate our children into their ... something? Well, here's proof:



They're all gonna be hula hoop playing, pot smoking, Motown loving, dirty fucking hippies. The brainwashing is nearly complete. Heh ...

Pic stolen from Virgo Tex.