Heh...

Thanks to YubaNet.

Blame, Not Shame

Go read MoDo on Rumbo's self-serving pack of lies book:

So many to blame. So little space.

Yeah, 815 pages isn't near enough room to shift the blame.

When you think about it, it was really all the fault of his nemesis, George Herbert Walker Bush. Rummy writes how humiliating it was to run for president briefly in the 1988 Republican primary, with no money or name recognition, when front-runner Bush didn’t bother to show up for their candidate forums. Rummy has never hidden his disdain for Poppy, whom he regards as a flighty preppy who didn’t have the brass to march into Baghdad and take down Saddam Hussein. The end of the Persian Gulf war was about manners. The first President Bush had promised the allies he would merely shoo Saddam out of Kuwait, so that’s all he did. Any more would have been “unchivalrous,” as Rummy quotes Colin Powell saying.

There were those in the military who considered Rumsfeld the devil incarnate, and those in diplomacy who considered him more ruthless than any global despot. Rummy dismisses reports of his masterminding as inaccurate rumors.

W., however, loved Rummy’s blunt muscularity and contempt for weakness. “I was still surprised by Governor Bush’s request to see me,” Rummy writes about the president-elect. “He had to be aware that I did not have a close relationship with his father.” At some level, that must have appealed to the wimp-phobic W., who spent more time trying to be Ronald Reagan’s heir than his dad’s.

He blames Colin Powell for posturing with the press and George Tenet for being so cocky about Saddam’s phantom W.M.D. He claims viceroy Paul Bremer messed up Iraq, occupying too long, ignoring the chain of command and carving out a separate relationship with the president.

He even delicately blames the president, for not making incisive decisions at times on pressing matters and for not scheduling “a high-level meeting on my proposals” sent in a memo.

He says it was Tommy Franks who didn’t want a lot of ground forces in Tora Bora, when Osama got away from us. He blames the generals for not telling him he needed more troops to secure Iraq — as though he would have listened. He blames the Geneva Convention’s drafters for not knowing detainees of modern “asymmetrical” wars would need rougher treatment. He blames the Supreme Court for its “novel reasoning” defending detainee rights. He blames Katrina on ...

Oh, never mind. You get the idea.

I get the idea. I get the idea that he should be in Gitmo with the rest of The Worst Administration Ever.

Their Own Private Idaho

Yahoo!News

Neo-Nazis dominate tiny German village

It is set behind a six-foot (two-meter) wooden fence topped with razor wire; a guard tower shines a floodlight at night, and dogs bark incessantly through the padlocked steel gate. The black-white-and-red German imperial flag used in the last years of the Kaiser flies overhead — a common neo-Nazi substitute for the outlawed swastika banner. Through the fence on an inside door the smashed Star of David logo can be seen.

Legally, very little can be done to expel the neo-Nazis — they carefully skirt German laws against displaying Nazi symbols, like the swastika or the SS runes, and the banned songs people hear in the night cannot be pinned on any one individual.

"They sit around the bonfire and sing these songs — `Adolf Hitler is mein Fuehrer' they sing — they call out `heil' — there are sometimes as many as 300 right extremists at these parties," Birgit Lohmeyer said.

"Maybe today they're not talking about Jews but about foreigners in general, but their ideals are exactly the same.

The bonfire could attract a heat-seeking missile, I am sure.

And where's Stasi when ya need 'em? Oh, that's right, it's all one Germany now. The Fifth Reich to these clowns.

Afterthought:

I guess 300 right-wing extremists ain't that many in a country the size of Germany. There's that many at W**M*** any given Saturday morning.

Reagan: Morning After in America

David Corn

Why the Gipper's tax-cut guru is aghast at today's GOP.

Good enough article to go read.

Shorter: G.E. spokesman Reagan made everybody feel good with happy talk while he fucked the joint up, as in "Please, sir, may I have another?"

Today's Repugs have skipped that part. They're just fuckin' the joint up and don't give a shit how anybody feels.

Update:

Click to inflate Reagan's image. Everyone else is doing it.

A tip o' the Brain to John Sheffius.

Headline of the Day

Freshman GOPer Didn't Know Government Paid For Her Health Benefits

David Aquarius said it best in a comment at this post:

You know, remember back in grade school when we used to keep the bullies from beating up on the slow kids that ate paste and drooled?

Well, those bullies finally got their revenge. They got the paste eaters elected to Congress.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

280 Iraqi Prisoners Removed from Camp Honor Just Before Human Rights Inspection, Taken to Camp Justice
Later transferred to Camp No One Will Hear Your Screams.

Finland: Nuclear Storage Site Will Safely Hold Radioactive Waste 100,000 Years
Unless something unforeseen happens.

Republicans Say They Can Cut Billions From Budget
Without hurting Koch brothers.

Exxon Reports Better-Than-Expected 53% Profit Increase Due to Lower Taxes
Also helpful: takeover of U.S. government.

Congrats!

To all those crazy (and you know who you are) Packers fans out there!

Varnishing my desk. Back later.

Update:

This one was my favorite. Hey, I'm a hopeless dog person.



I liked the little kid in the Dick Cheney Darth Vader outfit next.

Los Tres Entierros De Melquiades Estrada

I've wanted to see The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada since it came out about 5 years ago. Never got the chance until I got a DVD of it at Safeway for 5 bucks.

It's a really good movie. It's a really dark movie, kind of a modern western film noir. I'm not sure how it did at the box office, but it won all kinds of awards.

There's all kinds of videos of it at YouTube, but this trailer does a fair job.

Melissa Leo, the oldest gal in the flick at 45, nekkid was worth the 5 bucks all by itself! Sort of a comedy scene about, er, failure to erect, yeah, that's it. Perhaps the shallowest moment in a deep flick, but that's how I roll.

Thanks to howlingsin.

Rumsfeld Overheard: "War Lies Are Cool Now"

War Is A Crime.org (formerly AfterDowningStreet)

Donald Rumsfeld began his new book tour with some frank comments, including these:

"War lies? Does anybody really give a rat's ass now? You know what? You know what? They do. They do because war lies are actually cool now. We began the invasion of Iraq in October 2001, but the invasion of Iraq paid off."

"Once we'd expended hundreds of billions of dollars killing hundreds of thousands of people and completely devastated the nation of Iraq, with the only tangible result being a dramatic rise in anti-American sentiment and violence around the world, I proposed a different strategy, and do you know what that jack-ass post-turtle two-bit moron from Crawford did? He told you all that he would keep me on after the election. After the election he gave me the old snake-skin boot in the posterior and told you that he'd had to lie to you so that you wouldn't know the truth. And you said 'Oh OK, well that's all right then. Thanks for explaining it to us. Thank you, sir, may we have another? Thank you, sir, may we have another?' You dumbasses.

"You want to learn something about the way the world works? Buy my book. Do you know why Ronald Reagan was a great president? Do you want me to tell you? Because he believed his own bull. That's what it takes. You think we lie to you for the good of the nation. That's not how it works. We lie to ourselves for the good of our careers, and the marketplace of ideas makes that good for the nation. Or not. That's a known unknown.

"Let me just leave you with this, you embarrassing facsimiles of sentient animals. Let me provide you, outside of your comprehension, a little demonstration of your inability to be awakened by a five alarm fire in your jock straps. Are you ready? Here it goes. We're making progress in Afghanistan.

This shit really works. See my "Fear The Facts" post a couple below this one.

They might as well just come out and say they're lying. We all know it anyway. Some of them are. And why not? They know they're safe from prosecution, in this country at least.

Headline of the Day

Surge of immigrants from India baffles border officials in Texas

Fear of Facts Endangers the Nation

PETER MICHAELSON FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

What may be hurting our country more than anything is a thick-skulled mentality that refuses to face the facts.

Sad to say, people don't necessarily change their minds when their erroneous assumptions are corrected. A University of Michigan study found that misinformed people, particularly those loyal to their politics, rarely change their minds when exposed to corrected facts in news stories. Instead, they often become more strongly set in their beliefs.

This restriction of intelligence may be America's most baffling and self-destructive problem. The nation's complex challenges won't get solved by all the dead brains cells insisting that President Obama is foreign-born, death-panels are coming, and gun controls destroy liberty.

While we're at it, let's deny the fact that the carbon we're producing from oil, gas, and coal is causing global warming.

Why are many of us so obtuse? [...]

Read on...

Wallflowers at the Revolution

Daddy Frank on Americans' media-fed ignorance about Egypt and the Middle East:

A month ago most Americans could not have picked Hosni Mubarak out of a police lineup. [...]

The live feed from Egypt is riveting. We can’t get enough of revolution video — even if, some nights, Middle West blizzards take precedence over Middle East battles on the networks’ evening news. But more often than not we have little or no context for what we’re watching. That’s the legacy of years of self-censored, superficial, provincial and at times Islamophobic coverage of the Arab world in a large swath of American news media. Even now we’re more likely to hear speculation about how many cents per gallon the day’s events might cost at the pump than to get an intimate look at the demonstrators’ lives.

Perhaps the most revealing window into America’s media-fed isolation from this crisis — small an example as it may seem — is the default assumption that the Egyptian uprising, like every other paroxysm in the region since the Green Revolution in Iran 18 months ago, must be powered by the twin American-born phenomena of Twitter and Facebook. Television news — at once threatened by the power of the Internet and fearful of appearing unhip — can’t get enough of this cliché.

The social networking hype eventually had to subside for a simple reason: The Egyptian government pulled the plug on its four main Internet providers and yet the revolution only got stronger. “Let’s get a reality check here,” said Jim Clancy, a CNN International anchor, who broke through the bloviation on Jan. 29 by noting that the biggest demonstrations to date occurred on a day when the Internet was down. “There wasn’t any Twitter. There wasn’t any Facebook,” he said. No less exasperated was another knowledgeable on-the-scene journalist, Richard Engel, who set the record straight on MSNBC in a satellite hook-up with Rachel Maddow. “This didn’t have anything to do with Twitter and Facebook,” he said. “This had to do with people’s dignity, people’s pride. People are not able to feed their families.”

Al Jazeera English, run by a 35-year veteran of the Canadian Broadcasting Company, is routinely available in Israel and Canada. It provided coverage of the 2009 Gaza war and this year’s Tunisian revolt when no other television networks would or could. Yet in America, it can be found only in Washington, D.C., and on small cable systems in Ohio and Vermont. None of the biggest American cable and satellite companies — Comcast, DirecTV and Time Warner — offer it.

Unable to watch Al Jazeera English, and ravenous for comprehensive and sophisticated 24/7 television coverage of the Middle East otherwise unavailable on television, millions of Americans last week tracked down the network’s Internet stream on their computers. Such was the work-around required by the censorship practiced by America’s corporate gatekeepers. You’d almost think these news-starved Americans were Iron Curtain citizens clandestinely trying to pull in the jammed Voice of America signal in the 1950s — or Egyptians desperately seeking Al Jazeera after Mubarak disrupted its signal last week.

The consequence of a decade’s worth of indiscriminate demonization of Arabs in America — and of the low quotient of comprehensive adult news coverage that might have helped counter it — is the steady rise in Islamophobia. [...]...it’s no wonder that Americans are invested in the fights for freedom in Egypt and its neighboring dictatorships only up to a point. We’ve been inculcated to assume that whoever comes out on top is ipso facto a jihadist.

Our media and pols figured out long ago to treat us like mushrooms - keep us in the dark and feed us shit and we will think(?) the way they want us to.

Puff up another one!

This guy was stupid before he puffed up his first fattie:

... As Daily Intel writes, Michelson was interested in growing his own plants—he even bought all the seeds and materials needed for it online. But something was itching at him still. So he called 911 ...

Blogroll Amnesty Day

Late to it this year (thanks to the flu) so I'm directing you to other folks' pages who've found some great blogs you might not know about.

Skippy: Here, here, here, here, and here.

Nucks: Here.

Jill: Here.

Vagabond Scholar: Here.

Left in the West: Here.

Pruning Shears: Here.

Cookies in Heaven. Here.

Mike Finnigan/C&L [our pal Michael Stickings filling in]: Here.

That should hold ya for the better part of the morning. Chelsea v. Liverpool in a couple hours. Don't bother me. Heh ...

Switzerland ...

It's beautiful this time of year*:

GENEVA (Reuters) - Former U.S. President George W. Bush, under fire from human rights group over allegations of ordering torture, has canceled a visit to Switzerland where he was to address a Jewish charity gala.

Bush was to be the keynote speaker at Keren Hayesod's annual dinner on February 12 in Geneva. But pressure has been building on the Swiss government to arrest him and open a criminal investigation if he enters the Alpine country.

...

Aside from the fact Obama should have the CIA "disappear" him to Geneva, it says something that our former leadership (Bush, Cheney, and cabinet members) can't travel abroad for fear of arrest.

Update:

Stolen from Maru:

*Great thanks to our pal Montag for the link.

Varmint Dancing

Whether you like cowboy music or don't like it yet, if you ever get the chance to see Riders In The Sky (wiki) in person, go. They put on a Cowboy Themed Multi-Media Music & Comedy Show that will knock yer socks off.

I am not endorsing their product because I know nothing about it, but thanks to 00YellaWood00.

Republicans Vote To Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That Would Destroy Asteroid Headed For Earth

From America's Finest News Source:

Repealing the act, which opponents have branded 'Obamastroid,' has been the cornerstone of the GOP agenda since the law's passage last August. Throughout the 2010 elections, Republican candidates claimed that the Democrats' plan to smash the space rock and shield citizens from its fragments was "a classic example of the federal government needlessly interfering in the lives of everyday Americans."

"This law is a job killer," said Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), who argued the tax increases required to save the human species from annihilation would impose unbearably high costs on businesses. "If we sit back and do nothing, Obamastroid will result in hundreds of thousands of lost jobs, which we simply can't afford in this economy."

Many GOP members have also criticized the legislation for what they consider pork-barrel spending, claiming the act includes billions in "giveaways" to NASA, nonperishable food manufacturers, and pharmaceutical companies contracted to produce mass volumes of vitamin D supplements in the likely event that dust from the asteroid's impact blots out the sun for a decade.

In an effort to counter Republicans' claims, Democrats have asserted that the long-term benefits of preventing the United States from being incinerated by an explosion several billion times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb would far outweigh the initial monetary outlay.

Repugs would see the prevention of the destruction of the human race and maybe the planet as a victory for Obama and Democrats and are therefore against it.

More.

Headline of the Day

Son Says Reagan Would See Today's GOP as 'Mean-Spirited and Stupid'

Perhaps he would, in a rare moment of lucidity. And he'd be right.

I'm glad all this Fatted Calf Reagan Worship is happening on a weekend so it doesn't fuck with the important shit.

Debunking the Reagan Myth

Paul Krugman on Ronald Reagan, who wasn't really a President but did play one on TV and whose addled reign we still suffer from. This is from January 2008:

Historical narratives matter. That’s why conservatives are still writing books denouncing F.D.R. and the New Deal; they understand that the way Americans perceive bygone eras, even eras from the seemingly distant past, affects politics today.

[...] The fact is that how we talk about the Reagan era still matters immensely for American politics.

Bill Clinton knew that in 1991, when he began his presidential campaign. “The Reagan-Bush years,” he declared, “have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.”

For it did fail. The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. Yes, there was a boom in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from a severe recession. But while the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen.

I understand why conservatives want to rewrite history and pretend that these good things happened while a Republican was in office — or claim, implausibly, that the 1981 Reagan tax cut somehow deserves credit for positive economic developments that didn’t happen until 14 or more years had passed. (Does Richard Nixon get credit for “Morning in America”?)

And like Reaganomics — but more quickly — Bushonomics has ended in grief. [...]

This is, in short, a time when progressives ought to be driving home the idea that the right’s ideas don’t work, and never have.

The right’s ideas don’t work, and never have. You can't change their minds. Bring up the record, they just trot out the folk tales they always use and call you a commie.

A Mid-Winter's Tale

Today is the mid-point of winter. It's half over. Most of our snow has so far sailed over our heads and landed on a lot of you. It's been extreme for some of you folks so I thought I'd try and cheer ya up. Here's an article from yesterday's Sierra Sun, my local paper, by noted area historian Mark McLaughlin about the most severe winter around here ever. I hope it makes you feel better.

Weather patterns were erratic during the winter of 1938, Tahoe's biggest winter. Heavy rain in December 1937 caused major flood damage, but by mid-January there was less than a foot of snow covering the high country. Colder storms finally ripped into the region at the end of January, blasting residents with 12 feet of snow in less than a week. It was the opening salvo of an epic three-week storm.

In February, severe blizzards buried Tahoe communities with more than 9 feet of snow in seven days. At one point, Tahoe City was completely isolated with no automobile traffic and all communication cut off. For 10 days the overwhelming snow shut down Southern Pacific's horse-drawn, express mail and passenger stageline between Truckee and Tahoe City. Small towns throughout the Sierra were inundated by the snowfall. Tahoe City and Truckee residents endured in relative safety, though those areas received 17 feet of new snow within 16 days. There were no mail deliveries to the North Shore for more than a week and no fresh food for twice that long.

By Valentine's Day, the snow was 20 feet deep on Donner Summit. During a rare break in the weather, the steamer that regularly circled Lake Tahoe with mail and deliveries arrived back in Tahoe City. The captain mentioned if anyone wanted some horsemeat, it was available at Glenbrook, Nev. Apparently a caretaker there shot a horse due to injury and was willing to share the meat if anyone was interested. The story spread to San Francisco and even Los Angeles that snowbound Tahoe residents were running out of food. On Feb. 17, the San Francisco Examiner quoted Tahoe City Constable Harry Johanson as saying he was “holding in reserve 1,000 pounds of fresh horsemeat, should the situation get serious and the need for fresh meat become acute.”

California Governor Merriam was alerted and the San Francisco Call Bulletin newspaper enlisted United Airlines to organize an emergency food drop at Tahoe City. Local residents built signal fires in the middle of the Tahoe City Golf Course and that night two airplanes swung in low, dropping 10 boxes of bread, meat and vegetables. Half the boxes shattered when they hit trees, but the remainder was retrieved by cross-country skiers and distributed around the community.

The winter of '38 started late, but made up for it with powerful storms in February. By May, a record 67 feet of snow had buried Donner Pass, the greatest snowfall in Tahoe history.

67 feet of snow "made up" for a "late start" to winter! Sometimes I think we're fuckin' crazy around here. Heh.

This year, we had an early start to winter but there's not much snow* left at my house and the weather has been very nice and I hope that pattern will continue for you as well.

*Coupla feet or less on the ground, bare ground around the trees. "Not much" can turn into "waaaaaay too much" overnight of course, but like the fellow who jumped off the 30th floor said as he went by the 15th floor, "so far, so good".