Ya think?

Raw Story

In what will likely be seen as something of a Freudian slip by the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton said recently in a Mexican news interview that the United States cannot legalize drugs as a means of fighting the black market because "there is just too much money in it."

The comments drew criticism from legalization advocates who argued her position was a misunderstanding of the situation.
...

Clinton evidently does not understand that there is so much money to be made by selling illegal drugs precisely because they are illegal. [...]

"I can't help but wonder what everyone on the left would say if this preposterous analysis came from Sarah Palin, rather than Hillary Clinton. [...]"

Oh, if only...

I love ya, Hil, but ya done stepped on it this time.

The real reason drugs can't be legalized is, of course, that too much money - our money - flows into federal, state, and local pockets in The War On Some People Who Use Drugs, and that politicians of all stripes benefit greatly from the Prison Industrial Complex.

Headline of the Day

China’s poor treated to fake rice made from plastic

Gee, who knew they've got Taco Bell in China?

American Public Shows How it Would Cut the Budget Deficit

Verrrrry interesting. At World Public Opinion.org. Charts and graphs too, with circles and arrows on the back of each one telling what each one is*...

*Apologies to Arlo and Alice.

A new study finds that when average Americans are presented the federal budget in some detail, most are able to dramatically reduce the budget deficit and resolve the Social Security shortfall.

Through a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, on average, respondents cut the discretionary budget deficit projected for 2015 by seventy percent. Six in ten solved the problem of the projected Social Security shortfall through adjustments in payroll taxes, premiums, and benefits. The projected Medicare shortfall was also dramatically reduced.

Much, much more.

You and I could do this too. There are two things we have to understand and admit to ourselves first:

1) This whole deficit/debt thing has been going on so long and has been allowed to grow into such a monster that spending has to be cut at the same time taxes go up at least for the more affluent. It's gonna hurt for all of us. A lot now rather than a whole lot later. Fat chance.

2) The real key to the solution: let folks do it who aren't running for re-election.

Denial on de Nile

Will Durst on Egypt:

The whole world holds its breath as we view through splayed fingers the unrest that is the Egyptian uprising. Or as Hosni Mubarak sees it: ten or twenty rabble rousing unemployed slacker agents of the West with too much time on their hands up to no good.

Further demonstrating a cluelessness best measured in Jersey Shore degrees, the Egyptian President screwed up the order of the Unofficial Despot Rebellion Response Handbook, unleashing a mob of pro-regime protesters before blaming the press for all his problems. Every second-year Egyptian Military School cadet knows the first thing you do is blame the press. One thing I've always been curious about, what do pro-regime protesters chant? "Up with Repression!" "Jobs Aren't for Everybody!" "We Want Better Torture!"

Same as right-wingers everywhere.

Diplomatically, of course, Obama needs to be careful. His task is to encourage the demonstrators while allowing the Egyptian leader to save face. Fortunately, equivocation is one of our President's strong suits. This guy has straddled so many fences he could build a tree house in a redwood from the splinters in his butt. A skill Mubarak must now regret, he never bothered to learn.

Heh. More.

Breaking a Sarah Palin Fast

El Rude-o breaks his 'Palin-free February' fast on some of her ignorant-speak comments on Egypt. It's OK, brother Rude-Man, nobody's been able to stick to it. It's like vowing to not eat Mexican food and then going to a quinceñera - no way. The temptation is simply too great for mere mortals.

Those are all from an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, a venue so friendly to Palin that it makes Fox "news" look like Cardinal Richelieu's men on an iron maiden bender. She had shut the fuck up for a little while (except for a bizarro Facebook rant on how much she hated Obama's State of the Union address). But now she's weaving sentences that are so incomprehensible that you wonder if there's a race of extraterrestrials she's actually speaking to. Or maybe it's just the solemn call of the loon. Or teabagspeak. Either way, she has as much business talking about Egypt as a deranged rat has.

She and Glenn Beck are teetering on the brink of oblivion. They are hanging by their thumbs above a black hole that will suck them away, into irrelevance. And who are we not to give them a nudge? In fact, who are we not to stomp on their fingers until they are screaming into the void and disappearing from our public consciousness for good (or until they show up on Celebrity Rehab Fat Club for Attention Whores or something).

Maybe the snowbilly grifter can suck Miss Becky off. The edge, that is...

Terminator, anyone?

You knew this was just around the corner:

The Northrop Grumman -built U.S. Navy X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System Demonstration (UCAS-D) aircraft has successfully completed its historic first flight at Edwards Air Force Base (AFB), Calif.

...

Heh ... Soon the "Top Gun" competition will resemble Robot Wars.

Go to the mirror, boy ...

Glenn Greenwald has a great piece this morning about how the US media can look at Egypt without noticing the similarities:

...

But so intertwined are the U.S. and Mubarak -- still -- that such narrative separation was impossible. Not even American propaganda could whitewash the fact that the U.S. has imposed Hosni Mubarak's regime on The Egyptian People for decades. His government is not merely our ally but one of our closest client regimes. We prop him up, pay for his tools of repression, and have kept him safe for 30 years from exactly this type of popular uprising -- all in exchange for his (a) abducting, detaining and torturing whom we want, (b) acting favorably toward Israel, and (c) bringing stability to the Suez Canal.

And yet it's remarkable how self-righteously our political and media class can proclaim sympathy with the heroic populace, and such scorn for their dictator, without really reconciling our national responsibility for Mubarak's reign of terror. Thanks to this Look Over There genre of reporting, we're so accustomed to seeing ourselves as The Good Guys -- even when the facts are right in front our noses that disprove that -- that no effort is really required to reconcile this cognitive dissonance. Even when it's this flagrant, we can just leave it unexamined because our Core Goodness is the immovable, permanent fixture of our discourse; that's the overarching premise that can never be challenged.

...

And just to get you out of bed, a little from the Who:

The Who's Tommy: Go To The Mirror!

Quote of the Day

Jill:

... What most people didn't realize then, and still don't realize, is that the shining city on the hill was a gated community of mansions into which only the wealthiest Americans were allowed ...

Dear Florida,

If you thought you were fucked before, wait until your new governor gets done with you.

...

Education would be hit with a $3.3 billion cut. Per-student spending, currently at $6,843.51, would be cut by $703, or 10 percent. Scott, though, is banking on savings from his proposed pension fund changes, if approved by the Legislature, and local school money freed up this year by a one-time federal infusion of non-stimulus cash[*], to trim that spending cut to $300 per student.

He proposes saving $1 billion on the state-federal Medicaid program for low-income and disabled people by reducing fees paid to doctors, hospitals and other providers by 5 percent. Growing enrollment, though, still would increase Medicaid spending by $2 billion for a $22 billion total.

Democrats said Scott is pursuing the same policies that got Florida into its present financial fix. State economists say revenues will fall $3.6 billion short of paying for high-priority to critical needs in the next budget year. House leaders also want to hold $1 billion in reserve, which would widen that gap to $4.6 billion.

...

Regards,

Fixer

Update:

More on this from Think Progress:

...

Scott already presides over a state with one of the most regressive tax systems in the country. The average tax rate on a low-income individual in Florida is 13.5 percent, while the average tax rate on the someone in the richest one percent of Floridians is a paltry 2.6 percent. Instead of finding new sources of revenue, Scott decided to cut into services designed to help those who are already bearing the burden of financing the state, while lavishing tax breaks on corporations.

...

[*]Fucking Tea Party asshole will take federal funds though, won't he?

When Bill Kristol calls you crazy ...

You know you're ready for the room with rubber wallpaper:

Neoconservative columnist Bill Kristol called out conservatives, and in particular, Glenn Beck, for fear-mongering about the unrest in Egypt, saying that "when Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left," he's "marginalizing himself."

...

Although, I do agree with Kristol on one point (go figure, but stranger shit's happened):

...

Kristol continues: "Nor is it a sign of health when other American conservatives are so fearful of a popular awakening that they side with the dictator against the democrats. Rather, it's a sign of fearfulness unworthy of Americans, of short-sightedness uncharacteristic of conservatives, of excuse-making for thuggery unworthy of the American conservative tradition."

...

But don't you get it, Bill? Conservatives can't allow true democracy because they'd go the way of the dinosaur soon enough.

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