Crawling ...

Got my belated post and pics up from Bermuda.

I wish I'd been wrong ...

Me, last year:

Having been on the PTSD rollercoaster for 5 years of my life, I can spot the signs. It's time to get Michael Ware out of Iraq and find him some help. I love the guy and the job he's done over there, but for the last few months it's been obvious (to me anyway) he's losing his grip. I'd hate to see such a capable, talented journalist (there are so few of them as it is) completely come apart at the seams.

This week:

We won't be seeing any more of Michael on CNN...

In addition to having taken a break recently in order to work on his book, it is no secret that he has been grappling with PTSD, brought on from the hellish years he worked in Baghdad. I was told that, unfortunately, when he needed more time off in order to deal with things, his request was denied. So he will not be returning.

...

I wish him all the best.

Thanks to Jill for the link.

It's time ...

For a "Jackie Robinson Moment":

The draconian Arizona law SB 1070 is finally reaching the players of MLB. San Diego's slugging starter Adrian Gonzalez has come out publicly and said that he will not play the 2011 All Star game if the law goes into effect. The outrage that we've felt over this barbaric law has filtered down to into The Sports Villagers now, because on ESPN's Mike & Mike in the Morning radio show they spent a lot of time discussing this topic, and it is raging.

The time is a-coming for Bud Selig to take a stand on this issue. Baseball has already proven that it can be a leader in advancing civil rights in America, so this should be right up their alley. The MLB have a hugely profitable Cactus League in Arizona where 15 teams us their facilities for Spring Training games, and they also host Arizona fall-league games. It's a yearlong operation. Studies have shown that the MLB is comprised of as much as 27 percent Latino players, and the league's 9 percent African Americans could be targeted by the new law as well. [my em]

...

Cmsr. Selig, it's time to make Jackie proud.

Pic from here.

War is Gaga

Good article at Slate on military humor in the electronic age. Many links.

A brief history of soldiers posting ridiculous dance routines on the Internet.

We've posted lots of 'em.

It's also safe to say that soldiers in drag dancing to Lady Gaga wasn't what the Pentagon expected when it recently revised its social media policies. [...]

The Pentagon has never had a clue what goes on in the 'other ranks'. On the one hand, I kinda wish we'da had the internet and video cameras in my service days. On the other hand, I'm damn glad we didn't. Heh. I have no idea what went on in the other services although I've heard rumors, but we didn't dance much, so all there would have been on YouTube was thousands of videos of us lighting farts. Hint: wear skivvies or apply lots of anti-flashback cream.

[...] But a humorous guide on "How To Prepare for a Deployment to Iraq" offers the best insight into the psyche of troops there. Tip No. 24 helpfully suggests:

Wash only 15 items of laundry per week. Roll up the semi-wet clean clothes in a ball. Place them in a cloth sack in the corner of the garage where the cat pees. After a week, unroll them and without ironing or removing the mildew, proudly wear them to professional meetings and family gatherings. Pretend you don't know what you look or smell like. Enthusiastically repeat the process for another week.

Another e-mail forward gives a good idea of how troops in Afghanistan perceive their Islamist foes. A sample: "You maybe Taliban if … You refine heroin for a living, but you have a moral objection to beer" or "You have more wives than teeth." [...]

Taliban, shit. Sounds like fundies with a meth lab and Mormons.

Enjoy. I've got things to do today. There's a shipping container on my front lawn that mysteriously appeared overnight and I must investigate...

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA): Deport Children of Illegal Aliens
Including his good friend, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Yeesh. Talk about a day late and a dollar short...

Point Man Named to Fight Oil Spill
Sober, experienced Joe Hazelwood will coordinate cleanup.

Noah's Ark Found on Top of Mt. Ararat in Turkey
Inside, bones from two of every species.

Are ya kiddin' me?

There are very few times I'm rendered speechless. This is one of them:

School districts in Arizona are under orders from the state's Department of Education to remove from classrooms teachers who speak English with a very heavy accent or whose speech is ungrammatical.

Officials say they want students who don’t know much English to have teachers who can best model how to speak the language, but, according to The Wall Street Journal, some principals and administrators are concerned that the standards for removal are arbitrary.

...

Link stolen from HuffPo.

Couple things ...

Before I gotta do all the things I couldn't yesterday (like paying the ransom picking up my dog, for instance).

I knew Rush was a lowlife, slime mold of a person. I'm very cynical about conservatives in general, always expecting lies, hypocrisy, and false equivalency, but this takes the cake:

One of the more idiotic memes floating around of late is that the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is somehow “Obama’s Katrina.” Liberal NY Times columnist Paul Krugman first raised the specter as a joke, after which right-wing loon Rush Limbaugh followed suit…albeit without the sense of irony.

...

You know, if Lintball would listen to Dr. Krugman when it mattered, we wouldn't be in half the shit we are right now.

And just a question or two:

Shouldn't this show us, after the obvious effects of burning things (especially oil) on the climate, that drilling for oil in our offshore waters is a recipe for environmental disaster?

Shouldn't it also show us, after the banking scandal that nearly brought down the economy, that we should never trust corporations who are accountable to their bottom line to police themselves?

Home ...

Satellite bandwidth sucked aboard and time got away from me and we're home. Unpacking, grabbing a pizza (a real, genuine NY pizza, not the cheap imitation aboard ship) and I'll be back to join the fray. I'll have pics of the pub crawl and around the ship.

An aside: I read the NYC attempted bombing the same way Gord does. Dumbass, not terrorist.

On the bomb in NYC

My first impressions late last night were these:

The bomb actually tried to go off but the chain of events malfunctioned, which leads me to believe that this was an effort by a RWNJ or someone who is angry at Bank Of America, probably with good reason.

If a real terrorist outfit, whether foreign or homegrown, had been behind this, Times Square would be a smoking ruin. They know how to build bombs that work.

We will see, but it looks like ignorance saved New York this time.

Update:

Pakistani group claims NYC car bomb responsibility

Goat humpin' Muslim fundies. Dumbass ones, like Fixer said above. The difference between them and our dumbass fundies is ours fuck chickens.

If Only Arizona Were the Real Problem

A 'must read' by Daddy Frank.

DON’T blame it all on Arizona. The Grand Canyon State simply happened to be in the right place at the right time to tilt over to the dark side. Its hysteria is but another symptom of a political virus that can’t be quarantined and whose cure is as yet unknown.

The crowd that wants Latinos to show their papers if there’s a “reasonable suspicion” of illegality is often the same crowd still demanding that the president produce a document proving his own citizenship. [...]
...

To the “Take Back America” right, the illegitimate Obama is Illegal Alien No. 1. [...]

McCain, like Arizona, shouldn’t be singled out for censure: He is far from alone in cowering before his party’s extremists.
...

There are few profiles in courage among the leaders in this G.O.P. — only a lot of guys hiding under their desks.

The one group of Republicans that has been forthright in criticizing the Arizona law is the Bush circle: Jeb Bush, the former speechwriter Michael Gerson, the Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, the adviser Mark McKinnon and, with somewhat more equivocal language, Karl Rove. McKinnon and Rove know well that Latino-bashing will ultimately prove political suicide in a century when Hispanic Americans are well on their way to becoming the largest minority in the country and are already the swing voters in many critical states.

The Bushies, however, have no power and no juice in the new conservative order. The former president is nearly as reviled in some Tea Party circles as Obama is. [...]

Well, at least they got that part right. Where were they when they could have done some good? Oh, that's right - the southern white racist party was in control. That was fine with them.

Do not miss the rest of Pop's column.

Saturday Krazy Kraut Redneck Music Blogging

These guys step out of their TexMex bag a little for this song, but you get the idea. Ya oughta hear 'em do 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer'...

German TexMex band www.wildtaco.de is performing the all time caribic classic margaritaville. Live at Kneipenfestival Dachau 19.04.2008

Wild Taco ~ Margaritaville

Thanks to Texmex4you, Germany.

The Lowdown from Hightower

Good piece on Jim Hightower (website).

But it was the convention speech by Hightower that I especially remember. He was the Texas agriculture commissioner in those days -- an important job in the Lone Star State -- and described Bush as a "toothache of a man," a cruel but remarkable metaphor. And he said that Bush behaved like someone who was "born on third base and thought he hit a triple... He is threatening to lead this country from tweedle-dum to tweedle-dumber."

Maybe Hightower didn't originate those lines (as Milton Berle used to say, "When you steal from me, you steal twice"), but he delivered them with a gusto akin to genuine authorship and over the years has come up with enough original material of his own to absolve him -- mostly -- from the sin of occasional joke-filching.

Now others steal from him. It was Jim, I believe, who came up with the notion that all elected officials be required to wear brightly colored, NASCAR-like jumpsuits with the corporate logos of their biggest campaign contributors, an idea I've heard appropriated by several others without proper attribution.

And I think it was Jim who first said of George W. Bush, "If ignorance ever reaches $40 a barrel, I want the drilling rights to his head" (On hearing that another politician was learning Spanish, Hightower is supposed to have remarked, "Oh good. Now he'll be bi-ignorant.").

"What created democracy was Thomas Paine and Shays Rebellion, the suffragists and the abolitionists and on down through the populists and the labor movement, including the Wobblies. Tough, in your face people... Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie... Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez. And now it's down to us.

"... These are agitators. They extended democracy decade after decade. You know, sometimes we get in the midst of these fights. We think we're making no progress. But... you look back, we've made a lot of progress... The agitator after all is the center post in the washing machine that gets the dirt out. So, we need a lot more agitation...

"[...]"

Much more.

Run For Your Life, Mr. President! It's Frank Luntz!

Obama Interviews Elena Kagan For Supreme Court

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Mary Chapin Carpenter, Sheryl Crow & Emmylou Harris with Marty Stuart ~ Flesh And Blood

Thanks to LarryMusicMan, Germany.

¡Viva Mexico!, or Screw You, Arizona

This is from 57silverhawk who lives out east of Fresno and takes a lot of videos of different kinds of mostly homegrown music that I like and puts them up on YouTube.

If there are religious experiences in my life, they come when I am face down in a plate of Mexican food, which we do about once a week as a more thankful act than going to church. I thank my lucky stars I'm a Native Californian and grew up with Mexican food and culture, too.

My husband's niece Sandy Fernandes singing "Viva Mexico" with Mariachi Colonial.

The white-haired lady with the balloons behind her was celebrating her 95th birthday!

Recorded June 7, 2009 at Los Portales restaurant in Visalia, California.

Sandy's got a heckuva set of pipes on her, and I think "Mariachi Colonial" roughly translates as "the 4th item on the combination plate". Enjoy.

Arizona: Poster-State for Republican Rule

P.M. Carpenter

[...] Arizona, that microcosm of Republican Government Unbound, is "a state in mob-rule frenzy of cranky old men."

Harrumph. Speaking as an old man who can be crankier'n shit, I resemble that remark...

Jon Stewart, noted Egan, has aptly called the state the "meth lab of democracy." "But," Egan continued, "Arizona is more than a laboratory for intemperate times: this place is a warning of what a state" -- or our country -- "can look like when it’s run by talk-radio demagogues and their television cohorts. [Its] crackpot laws owe their genesis to the crackpots who dominate Republican politics, who in turn cannot get elected without the backing of crackpot media."

I guess the craziness has to run its course. I hope people realize someday how bad they've been suckered and STFU and slink away in shame and let the country progress for a while.

Update:

At least AZ's stupid-ass 'birther bill' won't become law.

Illegal Eagle, The Killer App!

Christian Science Monitor via Yahoo!News

You're going to love using Illegal Eagle, the iPhone app that helps you determine who's an illegal.

Step 1: Take a photo of the suspect. Then watch as the app sifts through multiple data points based on solid anecdotal evidence from thousands of interviews with police officers who have busted illegals in the past. For example, does the suspect have greasy hair? That could be a tell. It's aknown fact that illegals don't have regular access to shower facilities.

Could just be they use the same hair grooming product the rest of use on our wheel bearings.

But let's say you're in northern California, and they've just passed a similar law. You're in luck as long as you have the Illegal Eagle app. You'll be prompted with prototypical photos of people from Asian countries.

Living in Detroit? You'll be able to browse pictures of people from obscure Middle Eastern countries.

Step 3: Now the app shows you one of three verdicts. Illegal. Legal. Not enough anecdotal evidence.

The Illegal Eagle: Made in America, by legal software programmers working in my garage. And because this is America, several of these programmers were not originally born in America, if you know what I mean. (I assure you they have green cards). Anyhow, one of them came up with another app, one designed to help Congress pass comprehensive immigration reform.

It's a sort of video game called Home of the Brave. Each elected official selects an avatar and then selects what country he or she is from. Then the senator or representative has to get that avatar through a world of pain to the shores of America. Lots of action along the way ­ daring escapes, secret roundezvous. Apparently, it's based on empathy theory or some such thing.

Empathy my ass. Make sure the payoff is measured in votes. All they care about is staying on the gravy train.

Look Ma, No Hands!

garrufat — April 28, 2010 — Player Piano in lobby of the El Rancho Hotel in Gallup, NM Dec 2009 www.AlongTheAmericanMusicRoad.com

Obama's tyranny is a sore loser's opinion

HuffPo

Ken Blackwell, Author Of 'Blueprint,' Tries To Convince Jon Stewart That Obama Is A Tyrant, Fails (VIDEO)

Blackwell, you will no doubt remember, was the, you should pardon the expression, HNIC of making sure the Ohio ballot count came out in Bush's favor in Ohio in '04.

Ken Blackwell, author of the new book, "Blueprint: Obama's Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency," was on "The Daily Show" last night where Jon Stewart tore to shreds his argument that the Obama administration is tyrannical and unconstitutional.

Stewart pointed out that the level of rhetoric in the book does not match what is actually happening in government, adding that the "tyranny" that Blackwell discusses is actually the constitutional use of executive power to do things that Blackwell and other conservatives don't like.

Stewart:

If the debate is "I don't like your programs," or "I don't like the philosophy of the judges you have the right to appoint," that's a very different conversation than "You are becoming a tyrant and subverting the constitution," because that's a very emotional, loaded statement that's not seemingly backed up by a tremendous amount of, I guess you'd call them facts.

Anything Blackwell says is pretty fact-free.

Go watch Stewart hand this guy his ass in a three-part video.

Quote of the Day

MoDo on the "Government Sachs"/Senate Kabuki:

You know you’re ethically compromised when Senator John Ensign scolds you about ethics.

Pot, meet kettle.