Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Emmylou on the Hank Williams Snr song

Emmylou Harris ~ Half As Much

Thanks to 1000Magicians, UK.

A right-wing combo plate of stupidity, insanity, and talking points, with sides of conspiracy and apocalypse

You must go see the Guardian UK's take on Miss Becky and some of the other right-wing nutjobs' reaction to the unrest in Egypt.

To cut to the chase, a new caliphate will emerge in the Middle East and push further east until China, as Beck puts it, says "Knock it off guys" and takes over India, reaching some way into Pakistan. The caliphate will then push north, which is when it will absorb the UK:

What happens to the overwhelming radical population of the UK, of radical Islamicists. What happens? Do they just sit around on their hands or do they see an opportunity? When you take the Marxists and you combine them with the radical in Islam the whole world begins to implode

So there you have it, an "Archduke Ferdinand moment" which will split Europe, the Middle East and Asia into Chinese and radical Islamic zones. In the full Beck, he also introduces Bill Ayers (who Sarah Palin had in mind when she accused Barack Obama of "palling around with terrorists"), Hizbullah and Code Pink, a feminist antiwar group. But that's enough for now.

We useta say that the most dangerous man in the Marine Corps was a 2d Lieutenant with a map and a compass, but when it comes to getting lost nobody, but nobody, is the equal of Miss Becky with a blackboard and a piece of chalk!

There is so much to quote in this beautifully distilled lump of what's wrong with unlimited garbage free speech that I can go no farther. The last line offers a jewel:

And then there are more non-partisan positions, such as Glenn Beck's Egypt protest theories show he's finally lost the plot.

From the link:

Of course it’s all connected. The media won’t tell you the truth. Only Glenn Beck will.

The man has finally blown a gasket. His pattern-recognition machine is spewing smoke and shards of metal.

Out his ears. His 'brain' done blowed up from no oil pressure. Heh.

Don't miss these. It's fun.

Gipperfest!

The Rude Pundit on the upcoming 30th anniversary of Reagan's and our nation's Alzheimer's. Links at site:

[...] It's the centennial o' the birth o' the greatest President that ever Presidented in Presidentin' history. Ronald Reagan, motherfuckers. The man who knocked down the Berlin Wall with a single swing of his mighty dick while finger-fucking Margaret Thatcher and taking a shit on Grenada. He would have been 100 years old had he lived to see this coming Sunday, but who needs the birthday boy when you can have all the cake you want?

Fuck, yeah, let's drag his bones outta the ground so we can ground them up and freebase the dust so that we can shoot it straight into our veins so we can feel some of that Reagan morning in America high one more time, fuckin' A, that shit's like the finest heroin. You get that in ya and you feel that brief buzz, that warmth and delusion of goodness and rightness that tricks your brain into believing that the high is reality and reality is just the buzzkill. No wonder Republicans are addicted to it. No wonder so many Democrats wanna get stoned on it, too.

You can come up with your own ways to celebrate that don't involve shooting up. Like:

1. Go to Best Buy and max out your credit cards on the most extravagant, useless shit you can find, like 3-D TVs and smart phones that you can implant in your brain so you can only think in Google searches and text messages. Make sure it's expensive. Then, when you're tens of thousands of dollars in debt, make sure you die so that your kids have to pay for all of it.

Hey, it worked on the Soviet Union!

Here's one for Grenada Vets:

2. If you're pissed off at your neighbor, but he's an ex-boxer, go to the local day care center and kick the asses of the children there. Declare that you win, even if no one knows what you were fighting for.

More. Go.

(Bonus way to celebrate: Read the Rude Pundit's "tribute" to Reagan upon his death in 1994. It's the finest way to skullfuck the memory of the awful, cruel, incompetent puppet of a man who set the nation on its current path to doom and demise.)

Fear ...

Not the ginned up, scary A-rab fear of our current generation that sent thousands of our young men and women to their deaths needlessly "fighting for our freedom", but the real, existential fear that was quite legitimate in 1942:

...

That terrifying [Axis] momentum was felt most keenly in the United States, which until recently was half convinced it could sit out this world war on the sidelines. Now a reluctant belligerent, America saw itself caught between two hostile, agressive powers, one over each coastal horizon.

In those early days after its involuntary entry into the war, panic must have been a palpable feature of the nation's mood. While it mobilised for the best, America feared for the worst. In its March 2, 1942 issue, Life magazine distilled that national anxiety into six maps, each portraying a different scenario for Axis invasion.

...

If you look over the maps at the link, you'll see we weren't worried about a couple goat humpers in a cave the press turned into supermen with super powers but large armies of industrial powers who'd already conquered major parts of two continents. They had a right to be scared. That is what "fighting for our freedoms" means. In the "War on Terror", we have more to worry about, in terms of losing freedoms, from our own government than we do from al-Qaeda.

If you don't know about Frank Jacobs' Strange Maps site yet, you should take the time to go through it. I always find it intriguing.

Co-opted press ...

NYT v. Guardian. A good read from Marcy Wheeler:

...

Under cover of off the record meetings with top national security officials, the NYT collaborated with the government, at the least on damage control, if not their investigation of WikiLeaks. The Guardian, by contrast, was unwilling to do more than warn State what general topics they’d cover on a day to day basis.

...

Just another example how the "free press" is no longer, very much by their own choosing. I believe we saw that before the balloon went up in Iraq.

And another point that Marcy touches on is the fact Bradley Manning is their only suspect in the leaks:

... Geoff Morrell’s press conference last week made it clear that they still only consider Bradley Manning a person of interest in the leak of the larger dump, meaning that if he leaked them, they haven’t identified how he did so ...

When they know there's someone else (link NSFW) out there too. How? Document security:

...

Now we get to the good part. The feds have made it clear that they are looking for other leakers (aside from BM). Meatballs now know why.

Not all the State Dept cables obtained by WikiL bear the SIPDIS header tag.

...

I'd even suppose there are more than one. Whether we'll see anything Earthshaking in American papers is yet to be seen (maybe McClatchy) but I'm sure the rest of them will "cooperate" with the US government in fear of reprisal or some other such motivation. We'll have to look to the foreign press to learn anything of substance, probably, and the corporate news media won't touch it at all unless they're trying to skewer Assange.

I don't know ...

Why I bother but it has to be called out for what it is (but they haven't invented a word to describe the immense amount of stupid in Sean Hannity's body):

...

Now Fox host Sean Hannity has proclaimed that in the entire history of the world, only one democracy has ever arisen out of an uprising — Iraq.

...

The stupid, on several levels, is detailed at Pensito Review.

It burns ...

In light of this winter ...

This is believable:

Stunning his handlers, from the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, as well as tens-of-thousands of fans and spectators who make the pilgrimage to this tiny Pennsylvania berg, the infamous prognosticating groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, saw the shadow of the abdicating, half-term former Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, which spelled out we are in for winter, extending through 2012.

...

I still have a base of snow (3" of ice now) in the yard from Christmas plus everything that fell on top of it. The way it looks now, it will be 2012 before it melts.

Great thanks to J. Thomas Duffy for the link.

Are you serious?

It's not like the balloon went up yesterday. We've been there a decade and this piddly shit hasn't been ironed out yet? What. The. Fuck?

Drugs, swearing and a sometimes insurmountable language barrier are just some of the cultural problems facing US troops striving to hand security to their Afghan counterparts by 2014.

Americans are infuriated by Afghan soldiers smoking hashish while Afghans hate the often florid swearing of US troops, soldiers told AFP in the Zhari and Arghandab districts in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan.

...

We gotta go. If we're still dealing with dope smoking and cursing, it'll be 3 lifetimes before they get it together. These people love fighting too much for us to leave them unsupervised.

...

Although drugs are banned in the Afghan National Army (ANA), many still take them, according to both sides.

"If I don't, I fight with the other soldiers twice a day. It relaxes me," explained Munawar.

...

"I'm bored, let me beat up one of my buddies." Or "It's 1600, time to kick Sarge in the ass."

Shit, I'd give them all opium, tell them which direction to shoot, and then split before the dust settles.

What a fucking horror show. We. Have. To. Go. NOW.

Policing themselves ...

Or, "No shit":

The Senate Ethics Committee's decision to appoint a special counsel to lead the investigation into activities surrounding Sen. John Ensign's (R-NV) affair with a political staffer is raising age-old questions about the panel's relevancy.

Members of Congress are the first to admit that they hate serving on the Ethics Committee, and policing their peers puts them in an unusually awkward position. If that's the case and the panel has to farm out its work to true professional investigators, then why have lawmakers investigating their colleagues misbehavior in the first place?

...

And we all know that if you're a Republican, the odds of having to be accountable to anything are slim to none. Has self-policing ever worked?

It's a theme today ...

Well, a dual theme. A mashup of "Insane Clown Posse" and "Guys in Funny Hats meet Aliens" ... something like that.

Anyway, I mentioned in comments to Gordon on my planet post that all of "God's Mouthpieces" would shit themselves when having to revise our place in the Big Scheme of Things if we discovered (or they discovered us) intelligent life on one or more of these new planets they found.

... Wouldn't somebody's Good Book have hinted that He put His children somewhere else too? Wouldn't "God's representatives" have some inkling of His grand plan, being they lecture us all the time on how in touch with the Big Guy they are?

So that said (the "Guys in Funny Hats" part), we get to the "Insane Clown Posse" part. Amanda has a thoughtful post up (and gives BillO the Clown a kick in the process) about why the religious folks have a problem with gravity:

...

I sometimes still find that people on the liberal, or at least thoughtful, side of the fence still think that global warming denialism and creationism are discrete things borne out of an emotional need not to believe either in global warming or evolution, and while that’s true, I think it’s deeper than that. I think that science itself is under attack, and that the reason that conservatives are so eager to lash out against it has to do with an anti-modernist bent. This is especially true when you understand that science really is a threat to religion. A lot of people say it’s not, because science doesn’t address "spiritual" needs, but said folks are really overrating the importance of spirituality for most people---or assuming that this urge isn’t better scratched by loving others and enjoying life. Religion really draws its power from explanation. It gives order to the world. And science is poaching that territory rapidly, which pisses off authoritarians, because they rightfully understand that if they lose the power to create facile goddidit explanations for everything from gravity to the problem of evil, they will lose their power over people. Thus, the attack not just on specific scientific theories, but on science in general, and most of academia, as well.

...

Conservatives of any stripe, be they from the church (all of 'em) or of the political bent, can only survive if people are kept in the dark. Knowledge is power they have to keep the public ignorant. History holds many examples of this and now science and religion are rubbing against each other in more places than ever. Won't see it in my lifetime but it would be nice to see what humanity can do once they shrug off the crutch of religion.

Hosni Mubarak splits Israel from neocon supporters

Politico. Interesting.

As Israeli leaders worriedly eye the protests and street battles in neighboring Egypt, they’ve been dismayed to find that the neoconservatives and hawkish Democrats who are usually their most reliable American advocates are cheering for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s fall.

The Egyptian autocrat has kept his side of a chilly peace agreement with Israel for thirty years, permitting an era of relative stability in the Jewish state. And as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear in a cautious speech to the Knesset Wednesday, Israel is deeply worried what will happen to that relationship when Mubarak departs.

One of the big reasons Mubarak kept to the deal is that Egypt, and the Egyptians, got tired of going to war with Israel and getting their asses handed to them every time.

And indeed, while voices cheering Mubarak’s fall can be found across the political spectrum, the Israeli-style fears of the future can be found largely on the margins, and are more likely to be found in the old-line conservative – not neoconservative—foreign policy circles that sometimes clashed with the neocons inside the Bush Administration.

Not often enough.

A longtime nemesis of the neocons, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said he didn’t care much about the stand they are taking on the unrest in Egypt and the broader region, but he couldn’t resist a quick dig.

“I don’t take neocon views very seriously, except when they result in U.S. policy which, in turn, means it turns into a disaster,” (my em) he said, a view he’s elsewhere attached to his criticism of the Iraq war.

Get 'em, Zbig!

Some are worried about this and some are not. Extensive article.

All your problems, instantly solved

If it's Thursday, yesterday musta been Morford.

Generation Facebook is totally bummed, dude. Incoming freshman across the nation report their emotional health is at an all-time low, even though they've barely been on the planet long enough to understand the question, even though they've only been alive about as long as it takes a good single-malt Scotch to reach nirvana.

It's gotten so bad that even the "best and brightest" of today's college flesh admit they'd rather get a good grade, a compliment, some sort of ego-fluffer aimed at their fragile personalities, than have sex. I know, right? What's a porn-loving, kink-obsessed, devoutly hypocritical nation to do?

Does saying "Gee, for a fat girl you don't sweat much" during sex count? Always worked for me...

Some say it's Facebook's fault, that there's a sinister side effect to the world's largest online narcotic, given how whenever you check your friends' status updates, everyone invariably seems to be happier and hornier, traveling and singing in the rain, eating better and doing more giant tennis balls of cocaine with Charlie Sheen than you, so you feel horrible and cut off, and you flip over to the porn, glumly.

Could this be the answer to everything? Turn the heat down a little. Have more sex. Burn more calories. Lose more weight. Stay off the Facebook. Avoid pseudo-happy people who really aren't happy but just pretend to be in their overblown status updates. Emotional health rises! Compliments abound! Problem solved! Everybody into the pool!

OK, maybe not. [...]

I know, it will never happen. We are too obsessed with sex and intolerance, with gender and genitalia. The political right, in particular, absolutely despises you who are reading this sentence right now. It's true. Did you hear how the Republicans are currently seeking to enflame their most fearful, ignorant base by way of igniting the abortion fight all over again? Yep.

How will they do it? By attempting to redefine rape, of course, so as to make it seem less, you know, rape-y.

The GOP would hereby like to inform all women and especially younger girls that, unless physical force was involved, it wasn't actually rape. Therefore, if you got knocked up, the Repubs ain't paying for no slutty abortion, y'hear? Drugged, incest, statutory? Too terrified to struggle? Too bad for you, kiddo. The Republican Party hates you, and your terrifying vagina.

I think Ann Coulter useta have one of those...

So buck up, distraught youth. Sure, the wolves are at the door. Sure, the economy is acrumble. What else is new? The world ain't so bad. In my day, we had to dial rotary phones with our fingers. We had to buy our pot illegally. We had to wait four days for a letter. Buy records in a store. Read a map. Invest in Exxon. Buy newspapers. Use dial-up modems. Endure George W. Bush.
...

[...] What the hell else do you want, a pony?

There is rarely anything to add to Morford, so just...go.

A glimmer of hope...

Glenn Beck Posts Biggest Ratings Drop Of Any Cable News Show In January

So what's behind this drop? It's entirely possible viewers are simply tiring of the chalkboard and the high rhetoric, which has been notably higher of late. And needless to say Beck is not the phenom he was a year ago, merely by dint of the country becoming more familiar with him.

The more you know about him, and it doesn't take much, the less you want him soiling your TV screen or your car speakers.

Glenn Beck is many things but he is not hard news (nor does he generally attempt to be). And considering the nature of the news, perhaps it's not entirely surprising that viewers were clicking away for a while. Sometimes it's nice to be told the world is not ending.

Maybe people are realizing that Miss Becky's koolaid is made of bullshit and snake oil and they're tired of the taste and being told to drink it.

The Reagan Ruins

There's going to be a lotta bullshit flyin' about Ronnie Raygun's 100th birthday, which is also the 30th birthday of his Alzheimer's.

The last few ¶ of a piece by Robert Borosage on the mess he left us with.

Family values, the Republican reach to the evangelical right, were cynically used to divide Americans, not unite them, targeting blacks, women (or feminazis in Rush Limbaugh's lingo), and gays. Reagan, steeped in the ways of Hollywood, was the utter cynic. He was the only divorced man to occupy the White House, was at best a distant parent, and generally avoided going to church. While he pandered to the Christian right, he was never very serious about pursuing their agenda.

Today, America is more unequal, its middle class is weaker, its manufacturing sector is hollowed out, its bloated military, laden with baroque weaponry, can start wars but not win them. Under the banner of conservatism, predatory corporate interests -- Big Oil, Big Pharma, Wall Street, global corporations, agribusiness -- have fleeced taxpayers while feathering the nests of the few.

So let's celebrate Ronald Reagan's style. He was a great communicator, an aw shucks American original, a genial optimist. He was a transformational president who launched America on a misguided, 30-year experiment with market fundamentalism. But let's not forget the reality. His race bait politics of division were inherited from the dark side of Nixon. And his conservatism has cost this country dearly.

No shit.

Insane Clown Posse

Following up on Fixer's post about the CPAC Annual Psychopathic Convention, or as it is called at Fixer's link and elsewhere, "The Insane Clown Posse", I got ta thinkin' (uh-oh) about insane clowns. Which led down the twisted passageways of my mind to one of my favorite TV shows, Tripping The Rift and its insane clown Darph Bobo, a Repug if there ever was one!

Darph Bobo is the supreme Dark Clown. He wants to take over the universe because he was teased as a child. He attended high school with Chode, and the two also spent time in prison together. He has a belittling wife, Bernice, and a daughter, Babette. Bobo is often seen with his "clown trooper" guards - a parody of Storm Troopers, while the name is a play on clone troopers. Both his name and outfit are a parody of the Darths from the Star Wars movies, as is his desire to construct a Death Orb, a deadly battle station, which is an obvious parody of the Death Star.

Here's how I hope the CPAC Insane Clowns end up:

Thanks to llinsazz.

Why Ann Coulter Is a Cunt, Part 1,390,873

I don't even need to suggest you go read El Rude-o as he unloads on that aging pathetic skank. Have some fun!

Let us take a break from protest violence and health care reform stupidity and blizzards and typhoons to enjoy the exquisite thrill of kicking someone when she's down:

How awful it must be to be Ann Coulter, especially right now. On that horrible precipice that, to the disgrace of our sexist society at large, many women face of having to choose between aging gracefully and openly or becoming a Joan Rivers-esque plastic surgery gargoyle. Looking around as she sees that her brand of crazy has been co-opted from her by younger, hotter, and dumber upstarts or one-upped by the even crazier, like Glenn Beck and his conspiracy theories so barking-at-one's-own-shit insane that UFO conspiracy theorists say, "Whoa, motherfucker, that's nuts." Yeah, one might feel pity for Ann Coulter if she didn't have a long, long history of being such a cunt.

To paraphrase a quote (out of a book and my head, no cite. Please don't make me look it up.) about The Flying Burrito Brothers and the Eagles, the Coultergeist perfected the style, and Palin and Bachmann took it to the bank and Coulter's hangin' on by the skin of her I-don't-wanta-know.

So, one could ask, and one should, "Why the fuck bother? If Coulter's way past her expiration date and getting lumpy and stinky, why not just walk away?" And the answer is simple: because fuck her. Because she's responsible in no small part for our current disgusting state of political argument. Because you don't get a free pass. Even if, sometimes, the only way to get revenge on the monsters in this world is to piss into their graves.

And load that bladder up, like Patton did before he pissed in the Rhine.

Looks like ...

God's gonna be a little busier:

...

Discover's Phil Plait puts today's findings in proper perspective: "Mind you, Kepler is only looking at a sample of stars that is one one-millionth of all the stars in the Milky Way. So it's not totally silly to take these numbers and multiply them by a million to estimate how many planets there may be in the galaxy...70 million Earth-size planets, and a million in the habitable zone of their stars. A frakking million. In our galaxy alone." [my em]

I'd posit, with those odds, some sort of intelligent life has sprung up on at least one of them. Ya think Jesus got there too? Wonder what the Bible says about that?

Great thanks to Susie for the link.

We're in ...

When we want to be, and out when we don't:

Members of the state Legislature, including Arizona's de facto governor, Senate President Russell Pearce, have introduced a bill that essentially would have Arizona secede from the union without having to do so officially.

...

Twits. If you're gonna go, you'd better go all the way, because if you want to come back, I got a "2nd Amendment solution" for ya. You don't get protection from the US armed forces, nor do you get benefits of being American unless you're all in. Ain't no halfway here.

...

It's called SB1433, (See it here.) It creates a 12-member committee within the legislature that could "vote by simple majority to nullify in its entirety a specific federal law or regulation that is outside the scope of the powers delegated by the people to the federal government…"

Committee members themselves would decide this, then pass along their recommendation to the full Legislature. If, in turn, a majority of state lawmakers go along with the committee then, according to the bill, "this state and its citizens shall not recognize or be obligated to live under the statute, mandate or executive order."

...

Let's start a fund drive to move the border fence. Let 'em worry about their own security. I'm tired of paying taxes for a buncha freeloading idiots who don't want to pay their share and cherry pick which parts of the Constitution they want to abide by.

They called us un-American when we bitched about the loss of lives in a war there was no reason to be in, yet it's so American to disregard whatever laws of our own country they don't like? What happened to "America, love it or leave it"? These idiots in Arizona, and those in Texas, and every other buncha clowns who threaten secession, must not love this country at all being they're in such a big hurry to leave.

If you want out, go all the way. This way we don't have to deal with your ignorance and stupidity anymore.

Great thanks to Oliver Willis for the link.

The annual psychopath convention ...

It's that time again:

In case you haven’t been paying attention or are trying (understandably) to block it from your memory, the annual CPAC conference is going to be at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington from February 10-12th. Among the confirmed speakers:

Rep. Michele Bachmann, Inspiration for the Who’s “suicidal psychopath.”
Gov. Haley Barbour, bloated racist
Hon. John Bolton, group sex-loving psychopath
Andrew Breitbart, lying, racist psychopath
Ann Coulter, anorexic, Islamophobic closet trangender psychopath
Hon. Newt Gingrich, Islamophobic, chronically unemployed psychopath
David Horowitz, Liberals on the campus-fearing psychopath

...

And there are more psychos at the link. With them all in one place, it would be a good time for a raid by the Mental Health Department. Bring a big net and get 'em all at once.

A 60-second letter to your congresscritter

I posted about this some time ago. Please go read. Damn, didn't seem that long ago. Tempus do fugit, don't it? But I digress.

I got this yesterday via the jungle drums of the trials club I belong to:

We've all heard about the nonsense surrounding lead poisoning and kids motorcycles. Finally, so politicians are acting on this.

SUPPORT THEM!

Go here:

http://capwiz.com/amacycle/issues/alert/?alertid=23903516&PROCESS=Take+Action

Put in your name and address and show your support. This actually makes a difference. 60 seconds. GO NOW!

Don

If you can see your way clear to do it, please go do this. Dirt bike riding is one of the best family sports there is.

I hate this phrase, but this time it's true, so tongue-in-cheekily, it's for the children. Barf.