Heh ...

Tristero on Sarah Palin's view of evolution:

...

Yes, it is truly hard to believe that such noble species as fish and early primates are the progenitors of an animal group that includes such an ignoramus as Sarah Palin.

Evolution works in mysterious ways.

...

And how was your day?

Watch the guy in the wheelhouse.

Thanks to pukeyponche, UK.

Rudy Giuliani and Republicans Are Goddamned Cowards

There's enough typos in his post that I surmise he's installing tomorrow's hangover, but RP's all over the "they'll kill us in our beds if Obama brings 'em to New York!" thing like a cheap suit:

Mohammed ain't Magneto, nemesis of the X-men. He's not going to use his mutant Islamic powers to melt the chains and blow up the heads of the dozens of snipers around him, all while ululating some sinister shout that'll bring back the dead of the Crusades to liberate him. In other words, this ain't a movie. He's beaten man who'll be spouting crazy blather in hand and ankle cuffs while shitting his diaper who wouldn't even be coming to trial if his case wasn't a done deal, who will be sentenced to death. And if anything happens that could lead to acquittal, he will be taken right back into indefinite detention. In other words, we're not doing this for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He'd over. We're doing it for us.

And then there's the one big aspect that so many on the right are just flat-out fucking wrong about. Here's Giuliani, whose creepy-ass grimace and passive aggressive sneers are just played out, this time on Fox "news" after Chris Wallace asked him about bringing the Gitmo torture victims to New York City: "We generally don't bring people back to the scene of the crime for justice."

No, actually, that is what we do. It's what the Constitution says in the Sixth Amendment: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law..." Even if a change of venue is granted, it is usually in an area in reasonable proximity to the scene of the crime. Now, the Rude Pundit may not have a fancy law degree like America's (Most Craven Manwhore Desperate to Cash in on Being) Mayor, but that amendment seems pretty fucking clear.

Re technical misfires that could lead to mistrial and possible acquittal:

Still, no one out-wrongs or out-pussies Bill Kristol, and The Weekly Standard editor, who, one should always be reminded, was Alan Keyes's presidential campaign manager, didn't disappoint. Also on Fox, he repeated what is becoming a mantra of the right on Mohammed: "There are huge problems with this. These guys were not given their Miranda warnings...[W]here was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed arrested? In Pakistan in a pre-dawn raid. He wasn't read his rights."

Oh, calm down, Nancy. Mohammed was captured in Pakistan. The most stomach-churningly charitable reading of his torture and treatment for years at Gitmo is that he was like a detained suspect in a crime who is questioned before being formally arrested. That's the whole "enemy combatant" status thing. You can pretty much bet that he'll be Mirandized once he's officially under arrest, if he hasn't already. But, no, don't let that stop another talking point that sounds like it's from an episode of Law and Order: STFU.

We on the left have now become the defenders of law and order by simply saying the rules should be followed. We're the tough guys and they're the fruitcakes. The right has become the cowering wimps who want to toss the rulebook in the shitter when it doesn't suit their game. Put up or shut up, motherfuckers. You don't like what's in the Constitution? Then try to change it. Otherwise, it's goddamned obvious that we're doing what should have been done six or seven years ago (my em).

Fuckin' A.

Iraq: It's Still All About The Oil

Did Big Oil Win the War in Iraq?

Shorter: Yes. Just the way they were supposed to. Just as Cheney/Bush meant for them to when they started the Iraqi Oil Grab War. Not as big a victory as they had hoped because Iraq gets some of the money.

By the way, if there are any lingering doubts as to what Cheney's secret 'Energy Task Force' meeting with oil company execs was about in 2002 several months before the war plans were announced, it was about divvying up Iraq's oil. To their everlasting and rare credit, they demurred at that time. Taking the nation to unnecessary war to steal the oil outright was too much even for them. It worked out OK for 'em. They're getting in on it now.

Before the Invasion

In January 2000, 10 days into President George W. Bush’s first term, representatives of the largest oil and energy companies joined the new administration to form the Cheney Energy Task Force. As part of its deliberations, the task force reviewed a series of lists titled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts" naming more than 60 companies from some 30 countries with contracts in various stages of negotiation.

None of contracts were with American nor major British companies, and none could take effect while the U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iraq remained in place. Three countries held the largest contracts: China, Russia and France -- all members of the Security Council and all in a position to advocate for the end of sanctions.

Were Saddam to remain in power and the sanctions to be removed, these contracts would take effect, and the U.S. and its closest ally would be shut out of Iraq’s great oil bonanza. (my em)

That sentence alone tells the whole story of why Saddam had to go. It's a good thing that he's gone, of course, but it had nothing to do with any of the lies we were told, although we've known that from the gate. "We're going to oust Saddam and steal Iraq's oil" wouldn't have worked as an excuse for war. Probably.

All the oil in the world was not worth hundreds of thousands of dead and injured, trillions of dollars, and repercussions that will be with us for the rest of this century.

Except in the eyes of the neocon oilmen who hijacked the United States to enrich their accomplices. May God damn George Bush and Dick Cheney. Today would be fine.

Please read the rest.

Dr. No and the Wounded Veterans

NYTimes

A creative plan to help wounded veterans and their exhausted families adapt to the strain of long-term home care is on the brink of bipartisan approval — but for the familiar obstructionism of Senator Tom Coburn. This is one of the most deplorable displays by the lawmaker-physician, an Oklahoma Republican who relishes playing the self-styled budget hawk by putting attention-grabbing holds on crucial legislation.

The urgently needed legislation consolidates more than a dozen improvements in veterans’ health care — most notably a new assistance program for family members who wind up providing lifelong home nursing to severely disabled veterans. These vital caregivers — who sacrifice careers and put huge strains on their own mental health — assume an obligation “that ultimately belongs to the government,” Senator Daniel Akaka, the bill’s chief sponsor, properly notes.

The measure also expands benefits for women veterans who suffered sexual trauma on duty, extends veterans’ care in rural areas, tightens quality control at V.A. hospitals, and ensures that catastrophically disabled veterans will not be charged for emergency services in community hospitals.

The omnibus legislation drew unanimous committee approval. But Senator Coburn objected to quick floor passage, demanding that the five-year, $3.7 billion cost be offset with immediate budget cuts. The senator’s argument rings hollow in the face of veterans’ suffering and the world of deficit budgeting brought on by his party’s tax cuts and zealous war investments.

Now he is demanding balanced books for wounded vets? Sheer embarrassment should drive the senator into retreat as he trifles with veterans’ needs and burnishes his petty role as Dr. No.

$3.7Bil over 5 years? That ain't shit, particularly when it comes to aid for Veterans. The Senate is the only place I've ever heard of where one man can stymie the wishes of 99 others just because he's an asshole. He oughta get his ass handed to him and the others should throw that rule out the window right along with him.

Ah, what am I thinkin'? Every Senator wants that little bit of petty power for himself should he need some air time. They'll throw that rule out when pigs fly. Maybe, but I doubt it.

Sarah Palin, the Musical

Tina Brown

That Sarah Palin, what a tease!

This book tour of hers is one of the all-time great hoochie coochie dances. The tea partiers are lining up like rubes at the “Direct from Gay Par-ee!” tent at the Dingleberry County Fair.

The star attraction knows that you may take it off, but you don’t take it all off. As governor, she left the stage when she still had her political pasties on. As “author,” she knows that the key is to take off just enough to keep the crowd transfixed and wanting more, but not so much as to stand revealed in all her nakedness.

I got this visual and it won't go away: Moosebreath twirlin' her rack-tassles, clockwise, then twitchin' her shoulders and they're goin' counter-clockwise, then givin' one shoulder a little twitch and gettin' 'em to contra-rotate like a Square Four's crankshaft. Bleach and Prozac, please, with just a twist of heroin...

It’s an index of the fog we’re in that Palin’s confrontational ignorance still feels refreshing to a lot of Americans. With waves of sullen anger rolling through the country, her stringent vitality, her media mistakes, her unpredictability, and her pert victimology at least give us a reality show everyone wants to watch.

Someday there’s going to be a Broadway musical about Sarah, maybe based on the book. I see Going Rogue! (the exclamation point will be a must) as a blockbuster in the tradition of Annie Get Your Gun, Gypsy, and Funny Girl. Or, come to think of it, Evita. Every 40-plus diva on both coasts will fight for the starring role. And there will be juicy parts for those cast as Todd, Bristol, and Levi.

What a hoot — except that this musical isn’t a comedy. Just by being out there again, Palin will fuel the tea party cranks, the talk-show ranters, and the suicidal wing of the GOP with the sheer force of her Q rating. To many people who feel marginalized and left behind, Palin’s brashness seems to represent clarity when in fact she represents ignorance. David Brooks might consider Sarah Palin “a joke” and “a potential talk-show host,” as he told George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. And he’s probably right that there’s no way she can actually get elected president. But that won’t necessarily stop her from getting the nomination. I have a persistent hallucination: Sarah Palin atop the GOP ticket in 2012, running with — yes, Lou Dobbs. Just to add a bit of gravitas.

Tina, stay away from the 'Brown' acid...

Thanks, YubaNet.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Business Groups Seek to Weaken Bill Cracking Down on Imports Made With Convict, Child or Slave Labor
Would only take jobs away from convicts, children and slaves.

Cell Phone Use Linked Again To Brain Changes
But only if you use one every day.

Health Reform Debate in Senate Breaks Down Along Party Lines
Dems want abortion covered, Republicans Viagra.

Obama Mulling Four Different Strategies for Afghanistan
Republicans mulling four different talking points.

Don't I wish ...

Painted on the dumpster in front of the house. Click to make big.

Heh ... Off to work.

Quote of the Day

Greenwald:

... As always, the Right's tough-guy leaders wallow in a combination of pitiful fear and cynical manipulation of the fear of their followers. Indeed, it's hard to find any group of people on the globe who exude this sort of weakness and fear more than the American Right.

...

Oh noes!!!!!!1

Obama bowed to the Japanese!!1!

You ain't gonna believe this!

I had nagging suspicion this was a model airplane right up until the pilot opened the canopy. If I find out he does this all the time as part of his show, well, it worked. Sucked me right in.

Thanks to 808wiz.

Another benefit ...

Of having the "terror trials" in NYC. Tristero:

...

But the possibility is what's got the rufftuffcreampuffs on the right quaking in their booties, that American law will actually shine a light on the murderous, torturing, incompetent, insanely frightened, paranoid, corrupt, and completely out of control Bush/Cheney regime.

...

Be nice if we got some justice there too.

Wagon Wheel

Here's a group I just discovered yesterday. Here they cover an Old Crow Medicine Show hit.

The Barrel House Mamas ~ Wagon Wheel

Thanks to barrelmama.

Honey ...

A great blues/soul band I just discovered. Rock a little on a Sunday morning.

The California Honeydrops - Ms. Louise

Saturday Crazy Redneck Music Blogging

Ths goes out to the guy who crashed in front of Fixer's house last night who was obviously cramming for his finals just previously. Heh. One of my favorite bands as well.

The Derailers ~ Bar Exam

Thanks to seacow797.

Sarah Palin Book Jokes

Just set your drink down and go.

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little...

A good day for America, a horrible day for the new "hate America" crowd

Will Bunch at Attytood on the decision to try the terrorists in New York.

Jim Riches, whose firefighter son, Jimmy, died in the attacks, welcomed the decision.

“Let them come to New York,” said Mr. Riches, a retired deputy chief with New York Fire Department. “Let them get on trial. Let’s do it the right way, for all the world to see what they’re like. Let’s go. It’s been too long. Let’s get some justice.”

Meanwhile, I can't decide whether to laugh or cry at the unvarnished, infantile fear and the abject anti-Americanism that I heard or read today expressed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Hannity-wannabe Mark Simone, Rep. John Boehner, Sen. John Cornyn, Rudy Giuliani and so on. Their rage - why do they hate our freedom? -- was laced with some of the most inane logic or phony rhetoric I've ever heard, that Mohammed will be wearing suits and eating lunch at a fancy New York restaurant during recesses in the trial (he'll probably be shackled), that KSM's lawyers will get the trial delayed endlessly (not mentioning how George W. Bush and Dick Cheney delayed justice in the case for seven years), that the defendant will be found not guilty because of waterboarding (wait, now they're against waterboarding?), that New York City will now be a target for terrorists (not to be flip, but I think they've already thought of that)....

...and, most importantly, that the American legal system and the constitutional rights that so many soldiers fought and died to preserve, is actually -- it can now be revealed after 233 years! -- a joke, a farce, not worth the parchment paper that it's written on. And that deep down they think the country that they profess to love so much in all their best-selling books is so weak that it can't even keep a handful of two-bit extremists safely in custody. Of course, the only thing the Limbaugh-Giuliani-Boehner crowd really revealed today is their own pathetic fear to breathe the air of a free and just country. How sad.

I hark back to Jack Nicholson's line in Easy Rider forty years ago: "They're scared to death of freedom". Worse, they want us to be as well. We're easier to control that way.

For the rest of America and the rest of the world, if they want to see in the coming months how a nation can prosper and defeat terrorism by respecting human rights within a system of real justice, I can only echo the Kennedyesque words of everyday citizen Jim Riches.

Let them come to New York.

New York took the punch and it's karmically appropriate for New York to get to hit back. Rule of law is a mighty fist.

Afterthought:

I useta think Noo Yawkahs was just fast-talkin' city slickers and snooty Easterners. Since I been hooked up with Fixer, I've come to like fast talkin' city slickers and snooty Easterners. Heh.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

The streets are cracked
And there's glass everywhere
And a baby stares out
With motherless eyes
Under long gone beauty
On fields of war
Trapped in lament
To the poets core

Emmylou Harris ~ Where Will I Be (Daniel Lanois)

Thanks to ernst810, Netherlands. Skeeter Davis fans should go see.

Conservatives Are Scared of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Liberals Are Not

The massively hung-over Rude One:

Why does the notion of putting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial drive them past the edge of insanity and "get the rhino tranq" frothing? Mohammed will more than likely get their beloved death penalty. Erickson seems to think Mohammed might pass classified information on to terrorists. But one of his readers inadvertently hits the nail on the head. In a comment, jdub19 writes, "I see this as another way to bash the Bush years. No OBL and after all the years in custody, KSM will be brought to justice. They have to keep reminding the public of GWB failures."

Ah, dear jdub, there is the problem. It's not that Barack Obama is going to put us in danger. It's that he's showing how justice is supposed to be done. Just doing that simple thing, abiding by the laws of the land, demonstrates the failures of the last administration. The Rude Pundit's said it before and he'll say it again: so much of the anger at Obama is a projection of right wing anger at George W. Bush. Obama has to fail at everything in the right wingers' sad world, just to show that they didn't devote eight years of their pathetic, deluded lives to abetting the destruction of the nation. They are shitting themselves in fear, not just in the intensely unlikely scenario of hot terrorist on terrorist action. They are afraid of what evidence at trial might reveal about how far down the rabbit hole to actual tyranny we fell.

We on the left are not afraid. We have the courage to confront the truth and not hide it away in a cell forever.

Just to reiterate another point: it's not weak to say that our laws are strong enough to take care of terrorists. In fact, believing in our justice system actually makes Barack Obama more patriotic than all waterboard-loving, conservative pricks and cunts who just want Mohammed disappeared. Nidal Hasan killed more people than just about anyone ever at Gitmo, yet no one's saying that he should be detained forever without charge or trial.

I have nothing to add.

Note to RP: Ya hit the nail right on the head, son. If a hangover helps yer insight, I'm in. Name yer brand.