Nostalgia ...

This whole Reggae thing I'm on has got me waxing nostalgic about my youth. My dad had a great voice and used to sing me to sleep when I was a child. Harry Belafonte was a staple. This was one of dad's regulars.

Harry Belafonte - Jamaica Farewell

Late for work ...

Anatevka ...

Looking at the news, we see Hispanic immigrants (documented and not) packing up to leave Arizona ahead of the horrible "immigration" law going into effect. Legal or not, they all fear persecution and harassment; being stopped by police and harassed by those civilians who would do the government's work (usually after a stop at the bar), whether they are American citizens or not. It will get ugly.

...

Latino activists are encouraging their community to check their tail lights, not to travel in large groups and even to remove the Catholic rosaries from their rear-view mirrors.

Erika, a 23-year-old undocumented student, came to Mesa, Arizona in 1998 at the age of 11. She says her family was escaping from her abusive father. Erika dreams of being a counselor one day but is bracing to be separated from her family.

"I've been looking forward to being able to do what I studied for, what I worked so hard for and show this country that immigrants can also be good people," she said. "We're not here to take over."

..

.

When I heard this, I immediately thought of Mrs. F's grandparents. A century ago, my wife's people came from Russia, Jews who had to leave their homes, families, and lives for an uncertain future in the US or other places who would have them. Her grandmother's samovar sits in an exalted place (she carried it all the way) in our house to remember their suffering to give their children a better life.

Click to see my dining room in actual size.

It wasn't all sweetness and light in the shtetl, but it was their home for generations and were forced from it. Granted, situations are different than they were in Russia at the turn of the last century but persecution because of race or religion is the same all over, at any point in history.

You will have children, born in America, American citizens, taken to places that are as foreign to them as the shores of America were to Mrs. F's Russian ancestors when they landed at Ellis Island. Innocent children who have no responsibility for their predicament, for the choices their parents made years, even decades, before, will either end up in the nightmarish foster system or leave the country along with their parents.

It is about fear and an "ethnic cleansing" of sorts and we've found over the years that fear is a great motivator. It is somewhat understandable in the Tsarist Russia of a century ago. It is unconscionable this will take place in 21st Century America.

Fiddler on the Roof - Anatevka

No, Joe ...

They don't want to kill you for getting married to someone of the same sex, they want to kill you because you're gay to begin with. The conservatives and Jesus freaks just can't come out and say it that way.

Blame Gordon ...

Which I do every time he gets my brain going on a tangent. As most regulars know, my dad was a British subject born in Jamaica. Reggae is my soul music. Since the old man brought up the subject of Peter Tosh (my favorite Reggae artist next to Jimmy Cliff), I had this tune going through my head. Here he is with one of his more mainstream hits, along with one of the whitest white boys with rhythm.

Peter Tosh and Mick Jagger - Don't Look Back.

Thanks, Gord! I been dancin' around the house (puffin' up a fattie) all evening.

Rock Concert Pooped Out

LATimes

ST. LOUIS -- Pooping pigeons forced the Kings of Leon to abandon their St. Louis, Missouri, concert after just three songs Friday night, the rock band's management said Saturday.

Yeesh. Everybody's a critic...

Blood Raids In Iraq

NYT

MOSUL, Iraq — Members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia have been holding up blood banks and hospitals at gunpoint, stealing blood for their wounded fighters rather than risk having them arrested at medical facilities, according to Iraqi doctors, employees at health centers and the Sunni insurgents themselves.

The Iraqi security force members that guard medical facilities have often stood idly by as the armed robberies take place, according to workers. This has reinforced doubts about Iraq’s ability to take on even a diminished insurgency as the United States continues to reduce its troops in the country.

Yeah, we "won" in Iraq. Wrong again, McLame. I'm sure glad The Ghost & Mrs. Moron aren't President.

What is not clear, however, is whether the stolen blood would do an injured person any good. Imperfectly matched blood can prove fatal. “Even if you had the same blood type, you’d have to make a perfect match,” said Dr. Yaseen Ahmed Abbass, director of the Red Crescent Society in Iraq. “It is not an easy procedure.”

But some Iraqi doctors working in Sunni areas believe that Al Qaeda has its own specialists who perform blood transfusions and treat shrapnel and bullet wounds — and carry out more gruesome procedures as well.

Hey, I've got an idea - get a buncha diseased blood, mislabel it so it's even more of a game of roulette, and keep it right on top like keepin' "mugger money" in yer jockstrap, and let 'em have all they want.

Go read the rest. The minute we're outta that shithole it's going to be worse than it's ever been since Saddam. We coulda saved ourselves a lot of trouble but for the neocon wet dream.

Two US polls show marijuana legalization support growing higher and higher

A tongue in cheek (spliff in jibs?) play on the word "higher". Heh.

In the garden with Fixer

Raw Story

"Every man got to legalize it, and don't criticize it," Reggae legend Peter Tosh sang in 1976.

While US support for marijuana legalization may never hit the "every man" level -- at least not publicly, that is -- two recent national polls definitely show that it is growing higher and higher.

Please read the rest. It bodes well, mon.

Why I Don't Give a Damn About What Charlie Rangel Did

Good rant from Words of Power:

Lessons in Accountability for Senate, White House & Board Room: Why I Don't Give a Damn About What Charlie Rangel Did, & Why I Hope He Beats the Rap

To put the US body politic in touch with the truth and consequences of the foolish military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the excesses of the military-industrial complex in general, Charlie (who actually served in the U.S. military) proposed reinstating the draft:

I absolutely agree with the way he proposed to do that. No-deferment National Service would be an excellent class leveller, which is why it won't happen. The elite do not want their kids levelled with those of the Great Unwashed.

To pay for meaningful health care reform for the poor and the middle class, Charlie proposed slapping a surtax on the wealthiest:

His biggest sin in the eyes of many, no doubt.

Is Charlie Rangel guilty of the charges of corruption on which he faces accountability?

I don't know, and I don't give a damn.

There are plenty of lessons in accountability that are past due in Beltwayistan, Banksterstan, Infotainmentstan and the Oiligarchy, and only once the backlog is cleared up, will I entertain the issues related to Rangel, or acknowledge any validity in the calls for his resignation.

When Donald Rumsfeld has to follow in the footsteps of Idi Amin and seek refuge in Saudia Arabia; when C-level executives at BP; Goldman Sachs and Massey Energy are indicted; when Scooter Libby does prison time for the crimes he was convicted of; when those who wrongly imprisoned Don Siegelman are tried for what they did; when those responsible for Bin Laden's escape for Tora Bora (HINT: they were suits, not uniforms, and they were politicians not intelligence officers) are held accountable; when the full documentation on Cheney's secret energy meetings is released; when Bush stops raising money for his library, and has to raise money for defense lawyers instead; when mainstream media exposes the Chamber of Commerce's role in the propagation of denialist lies about the Climate Crisis; when John Yoo is forced from UC Berkeley, and has to lawyer up and turn on the "Commander Guy" he served; when someone can explain to me what happened to the federal investigation of Tom DeLay, and why his trial in Texas has been delayed eight years, then I will give a damn what Charlie Rangel did or didn't do to deserve this investigation.

Fuckin' A.

Enough right-wing propaganda

E.J. Dionne with nothing we don't know, but at least he's saying it out in the open. We need more of that.

The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that "fairness" requires treating extremist rants as "one side of the story." And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President Obama and against progressives in this year's election.

The administration's response to the doctored video pushed by right-wing hit man Andrew Breitbart was shameful. [...]

The traditional media are so petrified of being called "liberal" that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors. Mainstream journalists regularly criticize themselves for not jumping fast enough or high enough when the Fox crowd demands coverage of one of their attack lines.

On the terrible threat of the New Black Panthers (both of them?):

And never mind that, to her great credit, Abigail Thernstrom, a conservative George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, dismissed the case and those pushing it. "This doesn't have to do with the Black Panthers," she told Politico's Ben Smith. "This has to do with their fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the [Obama] administration." [...]

Now, Adams is accusing the Obama Justice Department of being "motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law." This is racially inflammatory, politically motivated nonsense -- and it's nonsense even if Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh talk about it a thousand times a day. When an outlandish charge for which there is no evidence is treated as an on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other-hand issue, the liars win (my em).

When out-and-out lies by a few Project Obama Fail agenda-driven whackjobs and lyin' sacks of shit are given the moral equivalence of the larger truth, or even plain old facts, we all lose. The spinelessness of the MSM added to that of the Dems guarantees it.

Headline and Quote of the Day

If We Learned Anything Last Week it Was that Right Wing Propaganda Works If There's No Pushback

It works so well they're getting sloppy at it, and it still works on the DEQ and the Dems. Yeesh.

Why should ...

My Facebook pals have all the fun? I posted this on my page today:



Circa 1977. I'm the one on the left. Dig the hair*?

I got nothin' this morning so have a good laugh at my expense. Heh ...

*Quite Phil Lynott-ish, don't you think?

The "good" war ...

Stays on top today - G

Ain't going so good:

A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.

The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year.

...

The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.

As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat.

...

Long, with a ton of documentation.

What this article tells me is we have no coherent strategy in the Afghan theater. If we're out to "win hearts and minds", you can't have SOF teams roaming the countryside with a "license to kill". If we want the locals on our side, we can't go killing them wholesale with unmanned drones these people see, in their 10th Century way, as the closest thing to Aliens. But (9 years on) it's too late to "unring" that bell.

Had we done any research on the culture over there (and the arbitrary political divisions the British drew up before they were chased out left), and began to understand it, before we went in, we wouldn't have enlisted the Pakistanis in our cause. We would have known that ethnic boundaries overlapped borders and many in the Pak government had allegiance to those across the border. We would have known we could only buy their loyalty for so long and that money, like water, does not run thicker than blood. At this point, they're just extorting as much as they can from us before we finally pack up and leave.

Had they asked any of us who'd played a part in "Charlie Wilson's War" 30 years ago, they would have learned that the only reason we saw some success then (we paid through the nose at the time too) is because the US, the group that would become Al Qaeda, and the Pakistanis had a common enemy in the Soviets. They didn't detest us any less than the Soviets but we served their purposes (Stinger missiles, unlimited small arms, ammo, explosives, and, of course, money) until the Communists were gone.

I'm sure there were some in our government, at the time, who knew this Afghan adventure would only end up with the result we have now and counseled against it. But, if you'll remember, we were out for vengeance; "Dead or Alive" and all that good shit and nobody listened to the levelheaded folks. If you weren't gung-ho, you were a traitor.

Personally, I thought it would be quick, Osama's dead ass hung from the fence in front of the White House, and that would have been it. Then they blew it at Tora Bora as all eyes were on the prize (oil) in Iraq. And the "war" drags on.

My dear friend Gordon believes our mission might have been right-minded at one time and might have met with some success had it been run better from the beginning. I'd like to think so too but with the Bush administration (Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld) holding the reins, Afghanistan, like Iraq, was doomed to failure. To them, Afghanistan was merely an entry point, taking advantage of a national tragedy to put us on a war footing, to allow them to realize their primary goal, taking the oil fields of Iraq. There was no commitment to do anything related to "winning".

Afghanistan is lost. There is nothing we can do now to "win hearts and minds" and "bring democracy" to that place. There is nothing we can do but pack up and leave. Hopefully, this article will cause enough people to wake up and smell the coffee and realize we're throwing hundreds of billions of dollars down a dry hole.

Putin Rides American Iron!

Everything today is about the Clusterfuckistan war's "Pentagon Papers" moment and Fixer covered that, so until the brouhaha sorts itself out a little (and there's more to come) there's not much use in my adding to the din.

Here's something a little more fun. Prime Minister Putin could no doubt have ridden anything he chose to this Ukrainian biker rally, but he chose a Harley-Davidson Lehman trike. Hey, why ride something practical (or Russian!) when you can go hideously expensive and flashy?

Note how he leads his motorcade, followed by what appears to be a Honda Gold Wing trike, possibly an older model Lehman, pursued closely by (I think) a Dodge van which is no doubt full of his security detail and parts that fell off the trikes.

Let's see - The Harley-Davidson is from Milwaukee WI and York PA, the Gold Wing was probably assembled in Marysville OH, the Lehman is from Spearfish SD, and the Dodge...well, perhaps the less said about that the better, probably Hecho en Mexico. Heh. A pretty good representation of American products for a bike rally in Sevastopol, I'd say.

The rally is like bike rallies anywhere. Badass lookin' guys young and old, pretty girls, a vast assortment of 'sickles smokin' an' roarin', probably food, music, booze, vendors and tattoos.

Note to Tony Hayward of BP: Shave yer head and let yer beard grow. You'll fit right in at next year's rally.

From motorcycles.about:

According to the Associated Press, the leader-- wearing sunglasses, black jeans, fingerless gloves, and no helmet-- proclaimed motorcycles as "the most democratic form of transport," and praised the free spirits of bikers.

Tell us something we don't know, Mr. Prime Minister.

Thanks to nocommenttv and euronews.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Paper: Intelligence Community Has Grown Out of Control
One in four Americans now operates clandestinely.

Pakistan: Elite Pay Few Taxes, Causing Huge Gap Between Rich and Poor
Unlike U.S., where rich pay no taxes.

Jobless Reap Windfall as Congress Extends Unemployment Benefits
They laugh condescendingly at working stiffs with regular good-paying jobs with health plans and pensions and a chance for advancement and lifetime security who aren't eligible to receive such government largess.

The last time I got unemployment bennies, it was $55 a week. I really lived it up!

Marijuana Use by Old People Rises
Widespread reports of grandparents eating cookies meant for grandchildren.

Quote of the Day

Digby:

Did you know that you can attend Glenn Beck University for the amazing deal of only $9.95 per month? The thing is that most of [us] would probably agree that $9.95 a month is $9.90 more than we would be willing to spend.

...

Digby, honey, I wouldn't part with the nickel.

Sunday Hot Rod Rock 'N Roll Music Blogging

Thanks to bulletroll, Estonia.

RedState’s Erickson to GOP: ‘Stop lying’

Yeah, like that'll happen...

Think Progress, with video:

Yesterday, ThinkProgress caught up with RedState founder Erick Erickson and asked his thoughts on the “Party of No” moniker. Erickson took the GOP to task for clouding the issue. He advised them to “stop lying” about being the “Party of No” because “everyone knows you are”:

TP: They are saying, if you accuse them of being the party of no or not having ideas, they will say “oh no!”

Erickson: That’s such crap. Say you’re the “Party of No.” Of course you are. Everyone knows you are. Stop lying.

Bozo The Neoclown sums it up in 'comments':

pretty bad when red state starts attacking you…

Heh. Even the wingnuts don't like the Repugs. For all the wrong reasons, of course, but at least it divides them and that's good.

Quote of the Day

From a column in Time by Joke Line entitled "Apocalypse Not: Are the Dems Really Facing Doom?":

[...] Charles Krauthammer, the neoconservative columnist, argued that the worst part of Obama's failure was that he was succeeding — he was reversing Reaganism [...]

Heh.

There’s a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin’

Daddy Frank on the GOP/Teabagger racism of the past week:

This country was rightly elated when it elected its first African-American president more than 20 months ago. That high was destined to abate, but we reached a new low last week. What does it say about America now, and where it is heading, that a racial provocateur, wielding a deceptively edited video, could not only smear an innocent woman but make every national institution that touched the story look bad? The White House, the N.A.A.C.P. and the news media were all soiled by this episode. Meanwhile, the majority of Americans, who believe in fundamental fairness for all, grapple with the poisonous residue left behind by the many powerful people of all stripes who served as accessories to a high-tech lynching.

[...] But an executive so easily bullied by Fox News has no more business running a government department than Ken Salazar, the secretary of interior who let oil companies run wild on deepwater drilling until disaster struck. That the White House sat back while Vilsack capitulated to a mob is a disgraceful commentary on both its guts and competence. This wasn’t a failure of due diligence — there was no diligence.

[...] But one thing was certain: the N.A.A.C.P. was wrong to demand that the Tea Party disown its racist fringe. It should have made that demand of the G.O.P. instead.

“You think we have come a long way in terms of race relations in this country, but we keep going backwards,” Sherrod told Joe Strupp of Media Matters last week. She speaks with hard-won authority. While America’s progress on race has been epic since the days when Sherrod’s father could be murdered with impunity, we have been going backward since Election Day 2008.

Backwards is as backwards does. Its poster boy is the GOP/Teabaggers.

America: The New Pakistan

Curv3ball:

...

By Saint Reagan’s ghost, is there any doubt that Pakistan’s productive class, unfettered by taxes, is free to strike their globe-straddling poses in full libertarian regalia, molding wonderment with their copious amounts of untaxed money – selflessly allowing second-hand benefits to trickle down the benighted masses who would be lost without their stewardship…what?…oh, wait:

...

Gotta love the trickle-down ...