My Uncle Bill
Has a still on the hill
Where he runs off a gallon or two
The buzzards in the sky
Get so drunk they can't fly
On that good old mountain dew
A group of prominent Republicans may have actually committed a crime last month when they traveled to Paris to speak to an Iranian opposition group that the US has deemed to be terrorists.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former national security adviser Fran Townsend and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey all attended a forum organized by supporters of Mujaheddin-e Khalq (MEK).
The MEK is a communist group that helped Saddam Hussein carry out attacks against Iraq's Shiite population in the 1990s. The group attacked Americans in Iran in the 1980s and helped with the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran.
Giuliani and the former Bush officials, however, sided with the group due to their opposition to the current Iranian regime.
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The natural gas boom gripping parts of the U.S. has a nasty byproduct: wastewater so salty, and so polluted with metals like barium and strontium, that most states require drillers to get rid of the stuff by injecting it down shafts thousands of feet deep.
Not in Pennsylvania, one of the states at the center of the gas rush.
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Harold Camping lets out a hearty chuckle when he considers the people who believe the world will end in 2012.
"That date has not one stitch of biblical authority," Camping says from the Oakland office where he runs Family Radio, an evangelical station that reaches listeners around the world. "It's like a fairy tale."
The real date for the end of times, he says, is in 2011.
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Navy probes racy onboard videos by carrier chief
On ABC’s This Week, conservative columnist George Will responded to Republican opposition to raising the national debt ceiling and the threat it poses to the fiscal solvency of the nation:
I know of no other developed nation that has a debt ceiling. This is a purely recurring symbolic vote to make people feel good by voting against it.
The trouble is it’s suicidal if you should happen to miscalculate and have all kinds of people voting against it as a symbolic vote and turn out to be a majority. Because if the United States defaults on its sovereign debt, the markets will be — well, it will be stimulating.
Will’s analysis echoed remarks made earlier by Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, on ABC’s This Week. “The debt ceiling is not something to toy with,” stated Goolsbee. “If we get to the point where you’ve damaged the full faith and credit of the United States, that would be the first default in history caused purely by insanity.” [...]
No country can be great if its citizens are unwilling to pay for it. No country will remain great if it neglects the health and education of those citizens who lack lobbyists. The tax cuts may have assured the President’s reelection, but they also ensure America will grow more separate and unequal, not unlike the proverbial banana republics. As a result the U.S. will slowly slip from the leader of the First World to an honorary member of the Third, unless Americans stop believing their exceptionalism stems only from their virtue and requires no sacrifice.
The Rove/Assange Story Hits the International Press in Sweden
Ivory Coast's President Refuses to Step Down Despite Losing Election
On advice from five U.S. Supreme Court justices.
Every Obama District Court Nominee Opposed by All GOP Senators on Judiciary Committee Was Person of Color
Due to remarkable coincidence.
What did you do on the first day of 2011?
Well, whatever it was, you would certainly have needed some Dutch courage to join 10,000 or so swimmers near the Hague in the Netherlands.
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But this year’s award for daring has to go to Germany where even the brass monkeys were wincing when Berlin bathers took a New Year’s Day dip. Apparently, it is good for the health.
The No Ones MIA car show! This was a bitchen show with lots of hot rods and rat rods. Check out the hot pinup contest hosted by Chiksonthehill.com and music performance by Buck Wild.
I figured I would write this week about the holiday's meaning and memories. But I think New Year's Eve has lost its allure with me.
I tried to amp myself, but finally accepted the reality: This holiday seems to come around too often, too soon for me.
Years ago, the holiday seemed like a shimmering reminder of new possibilities. Now it feels more like a reminder that time is slipping away from me.
Research shows that the older we get, the faster the years seem to go by. And it's not just fear of our own mortality that troubles us.
Professor Meck blames the brain's "neural conduction velocity" slowdown. Our brains pulse more slowly as we get older, and we rely on those pulses to calculate the passage of time. That (paradoxically, it seems), creates the sensation that life is speeding up.
Another theory relies on the mind's mechanics. Our brains record new experiences in exquisite detail, then carefully preserves them in our memory. But when a similar experience occurs again, the brain recognizes it and responds with a quick sketch that is crammed into an overstuffed drawer.
So milestones dominate our memories. The Technicolor moments of youth persist, while recollections of the mundane fade. That's why later years — sprinkled with fewer vivid first-time experiences — can seem to pass in a blurry haze: quickly, with less to hold on to.
I'm casting my vote for the milestone theory, because the last New Year's Eve I clearly remember was the night the 21st century began. I gathered that night, a decade ago, with family and friends in my living room, champagne glasses poised for celebration and flashlights at hand for the catastrophe that Y2K was supposed to bring.
Today it seems unfathomably quaint that we believed a programming glitch could have unraveled our computerized country. And yet we have come undone, instead, in ways we couldn't have foreseen then.
We mastered the technology, but in the decade that followed, we were vanquished by old-fashioned demons — greed and hubris and inattention.
So it seemed right to skip the party this year. I'm not sure if this is one I'll remember, but it's one that I will fully enjoy—on my couch, with my dogs, a blazing fire and a glass of merlot—and my eyes closed as I try to adjust my mind's perception and try my best to slow down time.
New Orleans: Get out of FEMA trailers or pay $500/day
So let's make with the bubbly already; 2011's going to be just too weird.
Now that the agenda in Washington for the next two years will be driven by the far right wing of the Republican party, you might think economic issues have trumped cultural issues in the public mind. After all, this is the bunch who have taken over the House based on promises to slash the federal debt and shrink government.
Perhaps you have figured out by now that the Tea Party is a sham— a gigantic ball of self-serving, self-righteous faux outrage bounced back and forth by Republicans. After two years of marching and bellowing — of dressing up in stupid costumes with three-cornered hats and carrying misspelled signs—-of going apoplectic at town halls about the mountains of debt and deficit spending that are “destroying our children’s future,” the Tea Party finally had an opportunity to display their fury, wrath, and indignation. When Republicans fought for and voted almost unanimously to add $858 billion to the budget deficit by extending the Bush tax cuts, the Tea Party was quieter than little church mice. There wasn’t even a whimper of an outcry. Confirmed was what we already knew — they are hypocrites for hire.
This “movement” has never really had anything to do with making serious fiscal policy change — no, the Master Thespians of the right wing are simply tools who were bought and paid for by the billionaire Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, and Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks for the explicit purpose of Bringing the Crazy and distracting us yet again with—you guessed it—a culture war!
The Tea-publican game plan will go like this: While John Boehner, Mitch McConnel, and other GOP professionals are making sweeping and symbolic but completely inconsequential points about fiscal responsibility, Michelle Bachmann, Rand Paul and the Tea Party will use proposals on moral and social issues to divide, distract, and divert by convincing some Americans that they are real Americans and that other Americans are their enemies.
Like a scene in Groundhog Day, the GOP will keep giving us their failed trickle-down economics while the birthers, death-panelists and the “Obama is a Muslim/Hitler/Socialist/Fill in the Blank”crowd have a field day calling for government shutdown based on sanctimony and vilification of their imagined enemies. They will finally have the chance to fight the war they have really wanted for two years — the one that will help them make good on their claim of taking the country back—- all the way back to the days of Herbert Hoover.
Happy Fresh Hell New Year!
Fuck all the birthers,
Teabaggers and born agains.
It's our country too.
From 1992
