Quote of the Day

Our good buddy Nucks:

Lindsey Lohan got out of jail.

This country is seriously fucked up when that is a major news story.

Indeed!

Christ ...

Mr. Philadelphia*:

The gelling conservative view is that the recession happened because in 2007 businesses started worrying that future President Barack Hussein Marx Stalin Obama would implement economy destroying regulations so they all went Galt to destroy the economy ...

When I was 14, my mom gave me Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead and told me to read them. I was a voracious reader when I was a kid. When I was done, I went to her and said, "I don't know what you see in this. It's about a bunch of whiners." She took them back from me and tossed them in the trash and said "Jawohl." Unfortunately, it took me 25 more years to get what she meant.

*And I guess I should explain, finally, in case anybody noticed, why I don't refer to Atrios by name. He's a smart guy and I respect him, but by golly he's so fucking full of himself. I'm waiting for him to start referring to himself in the third person or start using the "Royal 'We'".

Californians need mental help?

Yeah, we know, readers say

One in five Californians say they need mental-health care, thus confirming what we East Coast transplants have been saying for so long.

Just kidding.

Don't hurt me.

[...] We got plenty of interesting discussions and clever quips in our comments section.

Fluster: The mere fact that anybody chooses to live in California tells me they are in need of some form of mental, or emotional, therapy.

Actually, one out five doesn't seem so bad when you figure that more than that ain't from around here. Alternatively, since one out of five probably are native Californians, mebbe all the carpetbaggers and transplants are what drove me us them crazy.

Sometimes I understand exactly how the Afghanis feel. When they leave, I'll still be here. Oh please come the day...

Arizona was once tolerant of illegal immigrants. What happened?

LATimes analysis. Good article that can be summed up thusly:

At the same time, the Republican Party in Arizona has moved to the right on all sorts of issues. Susan Gerard, a former GOP state senator who also worked for former Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano, was one of more than a dozen Republican moderates in the Legislature at the start of the decade. Now, she said, there are none.

"The Republican Party in Arizona, and really throughout the country, has taken giant leaps to the right," Gerard said.

Kinda funny, well, peculiar that "right" means "wrong", ain't it?

NAE Urges Church to Cancel "International Burn a Quran Day"

Following up on Fixer's post, Talk To Action has more on the ever-so-xtian Kill A Commie For Christ Burn A Quran Day and the founders and perpetrators of the phony "church". Links at site.

Dove World Outreach Center has been featured on Talk2Action before for their visible anti-Islamic protests. In an ironic twist, their pastor, Terry Jones, testified in 1997 U.S. congressional hearings on religious freedom in Europe, where he complained of intolerance and revocation of the tax-free status of his charismatic church in Cologne, Germany.

Smart, those Krauts. IRS, listen up.

In a press release the National Association of Evangelicals has urged Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, led by Terry and Sylvia Jones, to cancel their International Burn a Quran Day to be held on September 11. [...]

Pigeon (Flying Rat) World is too whackjob for the whackjobs.

Terry Jones is an apostle in the "apostolic and prophetic" movement which teaches the "five-fold ministry" preparing the church for the end times. (Note that Jones is not one of C. Peter Wagner's International Coalition of Apostles members.) Jones is also author of the book Islam is of the Devil which can be purchased along with matching coffee mugs. The church provides instructions by Pastor Wayne Sapp on how Christians should go about burning the Quran, complete with a test run.

Jones founded and pastored a large independent charismatic church in Cologne, Germany, and was serving there when he testified in U.S. Congressional hearings titled "Religious Intolerance in Europe Today" before the Commission on European Security and Cooperation. The hearings were chaired by Senator Alphonse D'Amato on September 18, 1997, and other witnesses included John Travolta for the Church of Scientology.

Scientology. Yeah, there's the voice of religious tolerance. I bet Congress believed 'em too, being under oath and all. No, they're not intolerant their own selves. Everybody else is. Yeesh, Cult Day on Capitol Hill.

The Dove World Outreach Center has also been in the news for their protest against a gay mayoral candidate, and coincidentally, risking their tax exemption status. Student members have drawn attention in the press for wearing their "Islam is of the Devil" t-shirts to local public schools. On August 2, the church will be holding a No Homo Mayor protest in front of the Gainesville City Hall.

No intolerance there, nosirree, good Xtians to a man. How d'ya say "yeesh" in Islam? Will "oy" do?

I wish these phony bastards would keep in mind that Jesus, whom they claim to follow but don't, was a dark-skinned Liberal Jew from the Middle East. Oh wait, that wouldn't do at all.

To-be-fair Update:

There are, of course, real Christians. Too bad they're usually drowned out by the phonies.

NPR

Ariz. Churches Mobilize Against Immigration Law

O'DOWD: On the day the watered-down law went into effect, demonstrations against it still went ahead, beginning here at the Episcopal Trinity Cathedral. Religious leaders and politicians stood in the pulpit and roused about 400 people to continue the fight.

(Soundbite of congregation chanting in Spanish)

Ms. PRISCILLA AUSTIN: Christ going to the cross was the very presence of a brown man being sent to the execution chamber on some trumped up charges.

O'DOWD: This is Priscilla Austin. Shes a vicar at a local Lutheran church, who says the merger of religion, justice and politics goes way back to the beginning of Christianity. Austin says modern politics has forced her congregation into hiding. Attendance has been cut in half at Hispanic prayer services since Arizonas immigration controversy began. Nearby Episcopal and Catholic churches report similar drops. Austin believes people are afraid to be in public.

To normal peaceful folks, I guess the neighborhood loonies are scary. White v brown. See "scapegoat du jour" elsewhere in the Brain today.

"The issue is the 50-state GOP Southern strategy"

Joan Walsh in a piece about a recent appearance on Softball with Howie Dean:

But it's really not funny, or odd, at all: Dean and Sherrod have a similar message: Throughout our history, powerful forces have pitted black and white folks against each other, and white ethnics against each other, to obscure the fact that we have more in common than not, and to keep the have nots from banding together against the haves. That is a subversive, dangerous message to the people who have wealth and power in this country. It always has been, and it always will be. Maybe that's why no one is interested in talking about it.

This is a worldwide tactic: Give the great unwashed a scapegoat of the day to be angry at and they won't concentrate on what's really being done to them.

Headline and Quote of the Day

BuzzFlash

If Fox Fraudcasting is the Television Voice for the American Corporate-Sponsored Taliban, Glenn Beck is Mullah Omar

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

CHELSEA CLINTON WEDS

The Clintons, with new son-in-law Marc and his dad, pose at ultra-private nude wedding held in upstate New York.

I'm beginning to see the attraction of the Clinton ladies...

Afghans Complain Current Government Worse Than Taliban
Cost of bribing officials has more than doubled.

Rep. Rangel Faces House Ethics Trial
First of 435 ethics trials.

Colorado Newspaper Hires Marijuana Critic
He's chosen from among 131,000,000 applicants.

GM Rolls Out Second Electric Car
Like first one, $41,000 Chevy Volt will be available for three years, then destroyed.

GOP Congressman Pulled Over While Doing a Radio Interview
For driving under the influence of banks.

Quote of the Day

Jill:

...

The American worker has been kicked out in the cold, and the door has been locked and bolted behind him. Now the question is this: What, if anything, can we do about it, other than what the American worker has been doing for the last 30 years -- voting Republican and beating up on their scapegoat-du-jour.

The Party Line ...

The guy who got us into this mess says, finally, that it was all bullshit:

He let the fiscal fiasco known as Republican tax and budget policy gut the finances of the US, former Fed President Mr. Andrea Mitchell finally says tax cuts do not increase revenues.

...

You would think the cable 'news' folks would be running around with their hair on fire, screaming how badly the Republicans screwed the nation, right?

Crickets. It's all OK if you're a Republican.

Unbelievable ...

Well, maybe not.

(CNN) -- In protest of what it calls a religion "of the devil," a nondenominational church in Gainesville, Florida, plans to host an "International Burn a Quran Day" on the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The Dove World Outreach Center says it is hosting the event to remember 9/11 victims and take a stand against Islam. With promotions on its website and Facebook page, it invites Christians to burn the Muslim holy book at the church from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

...

In addition to being particularly hateful, what purpose does this serve aside from ratcheting up the tension? But, underneath it all, a Holy War is what these people want, isn't it?

The Missing Piece

The last ¶ of a piece by William Rivers Pitt:

Mr. Obama's performance to date has not lived up to expectations, to be sure. He simply must do better - and, pssssst, Mr. President, your best move might be to forego this nonsense about compromising with the GOP and just get stuff done through reconciliation, filibuster reform and the ever-handy Executive Order - but the public's collective impression of his performance to date has been thoroughly skewed by the absence in our national discussion of the last guy to occupy the Oval. The media wants you to forget George W. Bush ever happened.

Don't fall for it.

It's hard for anyone with a brain to forget something we've been slapped in the face with every day for the last ten years.

"A new level of stuffication!"

A little light Sunday reading in Salon. Hi yo, Trigger!

Roy Rogers' iconic horse lives on, stuffed and high-priced. We take a look inside his recent bizarre auction

All week long, city slickers, tourists and fans moseyed in off 49th Street to see Trigger (and Bullet, Buttermilk and Trigger Jr.) and to preview the movie star's memorabilia before the big auction on July 14. The powerful steed reared on hind legs in Christie's atrium in the pose made famous on the July 12, 1943, cover of Life magazine. "The Smartest Horse in the Movies" could hula dance, shoot a gun, and untie ropes — everything, it seemed, but read his fan mail (100 letters a week).

It wasn't Trigger alone that moved people but what he represents: an era when the good guys wore white, the bad guys never smiled, and cowboys defined and defended America. "This is one of the most iconic pieces I've ever sold," said auctioneer Cathy Elkies. "And I've sold John Travolta's 'Saturday Night Fever' suit, Rosebud from 'Citizen Kane,' and the dress Marilyn Monroe wore when she sang 'Happy Birthday' to JFK."

Phyllis Zavasky, of the Upper West Side, examined Trigger's proud arched neck, his perked ears, docile eyes, and the way his muscles were articulated, and gasped, "This is a new level of stuffication."

"Back in the Saddle Again"* played on auction night as Gil the doorman, in full cowboy attire, welcomed guests. He was Roy's size and was modeling the "Yellow Rose of Texas" shirt, a flamboyant number with pearl buttons and rhinestone fringe designed by Nudie Cohen, "Rodeo Tailor to the Stars."** Nudie's granddaughter Jamie (in a Gram Parsons' marijuana jacket) posed for a photo with Trigger. "It's very sad. I could never do this. I'd live in one of Nudie's cars before I'd sell it," she said.

*A Gene Autry song. Shouldn't they have played "Happy Trails"? Them city slickers cain't get nuthin' right that's important!

**Known to some as "Schmatta boy to country music".

This is a fun article and you should go read, but nowhere on the internets can I find the answer to my burning question:

How much did the stuffed Dale Evans go for?

Kiss This War Goodbye

Daddy Frank on the Clusterfuckistan WikiLeak v the Pentagon Papers, Nixon v Obama, etc.

About the only prominent figures who found serious parallels between then and now were Ellsberg and the WikiLeaks impresario, Julian Assange. They are hardly disinterested observers, but they’re on the mark — in large part because the impact of the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War (as opposed to their impact on the press) was far less momentous than last week’s chatter would suggest. No, the logs won’t change the course of our very long war in Afghanistan, but neither did the Pentagon Papers alter the course of Vietnam. What Ellsberg’s leak did do was ratify the downward trend-line of the war’s narrative. The WikiLeaks legacy may echo that. We may look back at the war logs as a herald of the end of America’s engagement in Afghanistan just as the Pentagon Papers are now a milestone in our slo-mo exit from Vietnam.

What was often forgotten last week is that the Pentagon Papers had no game-changing news about that war either and also described events predating the then-current president. [...]

The papers’ punch was in the many inside details they added to the war’s chronicle over four previous administrations and, especially, in their shocking and irrefutable evidence that Nixon’s immediate predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, had systematically lied to the country about his intentions and the war’s progress. Though Nixon was another liar, none of this incriminated him. His anger about the leak would nonetheless drive him to create a clandestine “plumbers” unit whose criminality (including a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist) would lead to Watergate. Had Nixon not so violently overreacted that June — egged on by Henry Kissinger and fueled by his loathing of The Times and the antiwar movement — the story might have ebbed. Yes, the Pentagon Papers were labeled “top secret” — as opposed to the Afghanistan war logs’ “secret” status — but, as Richard Reeves writes in his book “President Nixon,” some 700,000 people in and out of government had clearance to read “top secret” documents. Compelling as the papers were, they were hardly nuclear code.

Most Americans knew or guessed the crux of the Pentagon Papers, too. A full year earlier the Senate had repealed the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution; no one needed a “top secret” smoking gun by 1971 to know that L.B.J. had lied about the Tonkin incident. The papers didn’t change administration war policy because we were already pulling out of Vietnam, however truculently and lethally (the Christmas 1972 bombing campaign, most notoriously). In 1971, the American troop level was some 213,000, down from a peak of 537,000 in 1968. By 1973 we were essentially done.

Unlike Nixon, Obama is still adding troops to his unpopular war. But history is not on his side either in Afghanistan or at home. The latest Gallup poll found that 58 percent of the country favors his announced timeline, with its promise to start withdrawing troops in mid-2011. It’s hard to imagine what could change that equation now.

Certainly not Pakistan. As the president conducts his scheduled reappraisal of his war policy this December, a re-examination of 1971 might lead him to question his own certitude of what he is fond of calling “the long view.” The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its 1971 Pentagon Papers coup. But another of the Pulitzers that year went to the columnist Jack Anderson, who also earned Nixon’s ire by mining other leaks to expose the White House’s tilt to Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistani War. The one thing no one imagined back then was that four decades later it would be South Asia, not Southeast Asia, that would still be beckoning America into a quagmire.

One parallel between Afghanistan and Vietnam is dead nuts: When, not 'if', we leave, and the sooner the better after abandoning the effort and allowing the Taliban to regroup, the locals will still be there. They will take care of their own business as the Vietnamese did. Our involvement there, all the blood and treasure, will have gone for naught.

Thanks again, Georgie.

Update:

An unlikely pairing with Frank Rich, Will Durst weighs in:

Unplug the drain and the ring around the tub is we’ve been there 8 years and things are so not getting better. As a matter of fact you could say the movement more resembles whatever is the opposite of getting better. Don’t even mention quagmire. Hah. Hah. We sneer at your quagmire. Our Afghanistan participation makes a quagmire look like a refreshing dip in a spring fed pool with buckets of frosty beer within reach and cold cucumbers slices on our eyelids. Spa spangled bog.

If this leak tells us anything, it’s that this is not a winnable war. Right now, America has a lot of stuff on a lot of plates and keeping them all spinning is neither cheap nor easy. Afghan plates, on the other hand, are not very full and they seem to like it like that. Especially when deep- dish pizza crumbs can get them beheaded. As they say in Animal House, “If I were us, I’d be… leaving.”

It is good to remember that Bluto ("A drunken degenerate with his own style, in his seventh year of college, sporting a GPA of 0.0."), the head party animal in Animal House, ended up as a U.S. Senator. To quote him:

"Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!"

His spirit lives on in the halls of power.

Saturday Reggae Redneck Music Blogging

Looks like we ain't done with Reggae just yet. Heh.

Johnny Roquemore and the Apostles of Bluegrass include David Ross on Bass and John Nipper on Mandolin on this song. It's a great story of Little Davey and his Broomstick Pony told to a Reggae beat in a charming island kind of way mon...

Thanks to bluegrassrootstv.

Eliminate the middle man?

Priorities ...

We haz dem! D-cap:

...

9. Congress (who apparently really live in a Video Game) took weeks to find $33 billion to help 2.5 million Americans fighting to keep food on their tables, but took about an hour to to find $60 billion to help Americans fight 50 Al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan.

...

Headlong into obscurity ...

We're on our way. Greenwald via Mimus:

...

Second, as was painfully predictable and predicted, the bulk of political discussion in the wake of the WikiLeaks disclosures focuses not on our failing, sagging, pointless, civilian-massacring, soon-to-be-decade-old war, but rather on the Treasonous Evil of WikiLeaks for informing the American people about what their war entails. While it's true that WikiLeaks should have been much more careful in redacting the names of Afghan sources, watching Endless War Supporters prance around with righteous concern for Afghan lives being endangered by the leak is really too absurd to bear. You know what endangers innocent Afghan lives? Ten years of bombings, checkpoint shootings, due-process-free hit squads, air attacks, drones, night raids on homes, etc. etc.

...

As we, and many of our commenters, have said here on many occasions, we are heading the way of the Roman Empire.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

From Letterman 1990

Emmylou Harris ~ Rollin' And Ramblin'

Thanks to 1000Magicians, UK.

I know everybody's got it ...

But ... fuck yeah!