The Forlorn Hope*, or, we gotta out-nut the 'baggers!

*If you don't get the reference, watch the video, then click here.

Via BuzzFlash.

Cruise News

Something a little different.



EssEffChron

Looking past them, at sails being raised on the three other masts and at the sun setting off our starboard, I thought about how rare (and how high) this view is - you can be 10 decks up on a mega-cruise ship, but still feel like you're in an office building. From this perch, there's vastness - a startling amount of empty space between me and the deck, plus an open panorama of stern, prow, port and starboard of the ship.

The Star Flyer, which has four masts rising 206 feet and can set 16 sails totaling 36,000 square feet, carries 170 passengers. My cabin (Category C, with a queen bed) measured roughly 9 by 12 1/2 feet, had a fixed nightstand on the open side of the bed, a padded seat against the hull and a stool beneath the shelf opposite the bed. While the voyage is clearly an upscale experience, it helps to have a flexible definition of "luxury." (The bathroom was a snug 5 by 3 1/2 feet.)

The masts aren't just for show. The Star Flyer is one of the handful of commercial passenger ships that use sails as their primary propulsion.

"We are a sailing ship," Capt. Jurgen Muller-Cyran told me. "The wind, the seas - we want this for our onboard atmosphere. ... Our passengers come for adventure: They don't care where they are going."

Much more in the piece, including how to park your car at an active volcano...

See also Star Clippers Cruises. I couldn't find any prices without signing up so they must be expensive.

I'd love to see Fixer after this cruise - a peg leg, eye patch, parrot on his shoulder, new tattoos where we wouldn't want to see, regaling us with tales of rum, sodomy, and the lash and a good time was had by all!

President Obama's Imaginary Friend

The Rude Pundit lays out what a whole buncha folks are thinking.

It's as if Obama has created this imaginary friend called "Mr. Nice the Elephant," and he's so happy to have Mr. Nice the Elephant around to play with that he just wants everyone to know about Mr. Nice the Elephant. He may as well have said, "Mr. Nice the Elephant and I come up with great ideas all the time. We should all have a pal as terrific as Mr. Nice the Elephant. Isn't that true, Mr. Nice? He says it's true. You just can't hear him, but I can."

Mr. Nice the Elephant is fuckin' awesome. He'll sit down at a table with you and tell you how grand a bargain you can come up with. He'll tell you not to worry about all those meanie rogue elephants out there. Mr. Nice will take care of them. He'll teach 'em all to be nice, like him, Mr. Nice the Elephant.

It's as if nearly all of us are watching Jim DeMint and Rand Paul and Eric Cantor and Michele Bachmann and other nutzoids raping Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty and skull-fucking Ted Kennedy's dead head with Ronald Reagan's femur and calling that compromise. And we're all yelling, "Hey, could someone stop them from doing all that? It's really bad." And then Obama says to us, "Well, guess Uncle Sam shouldn't have bent over to pick up that beard soap in the shower. It's his problem because he thinks getting ass-raped is bad. Why is he drawing a line in the sand over the fucking of his anus? Gosh, Mr. Nice, that's not very nice of Uncle Sam."

The Democratic point of view is so degraded right now in the country that people keep telling the Rude Pundit, "But..but...the majority of Democrats support the debt deal." That's because Democrats actually understood that if you didn't raise the debt ceiling, the zombie recession would have risen even more viciously hungry. That's because, if we take John Boehner at his word that he got 98% of what he wanted, Democrats are happy they got 2% and Republicans are angry that they negotiated 2% away.

Just as an aside, the 98% of what Boner wanted that he got was to keep his fucking JOB.

Here's the question the Rude Pundit would like to ask this President who keeps on attempting to appear post-partisan, who refuses to lay the dead bald eagle at the feet of the people with the gun: "Would you have been elected if you had run as a Republican? No? Then maybe you should lead like you need to defeat the fuckers who want to defeat you."

(Note: That last part presumes a level of hope and bravado that may not be possible at this moment.)

Am I disappointed with the way Obama is doing his job? Hell yes.

Am I going to waddle on down to the polling place with my panties all in a bunch and vote for him as a "closet Repug" to try to keep a real ideological ass-rapin' Repug outta the White House? Hell yes. It ain't about me and how I feel. It's a helluva lot more important than that.

Good for him ...

Because he ain't getting my vote:

...

The data, taken from Gallup's polling from January 2011 to June of this year, charts the president's rating in all 50 states, using interviews with more than 90,000 American adults. While his national approval rating for this time period in the Gallup tracking poll is below 50%, the map shows an improving picture after the GOP victories of 2010, and much of that improvement in swing states.

...

Sorry, but I ain't voting for an incompetent/closet Republican. I'll vote for everything else, but my vote for President will remain uncast. He's gonna have to get reelected without me.

Verrrrry interesting...

From The Spy Who Billed Me with a tip o' the Brain to Andy Sullivan.

Bin Laden Turned in by Informant -- Courier Was Cover Story

[...] Sources in the intelligence community tell me that after years of trying and one bureaucratically insane near-miss in Yemen, the US government killed OBL because a Pakistani intelligence officer came forward to collect the approximately $25 million reward from the State Department's Rewards for Justice program.

The informant was a walk-in.

The CIA and friends then set about proving that OBL was indeed there. And they did.

Next they approached the chiefs of the Pakistani military and the ISI. The US was going to come in with or without them. The CIA offered them a deal they couldn't refuse: they would double what the Saudis were paying them to keep bin Laden if they cooperated with the US. Or they could refuse the deal and live with the consequences: the Saudis would stop paying and there would be the international embarassment...

The ISI and Pakistani military were cooperating with the US on the raid.

The cooperation was why there were no troops in Abottabad. They were all pulled out. [...]

Although the White House really pissed off the intel and DEVGRU guys with their knee-jerk reaction that tossed the Pakistanis under the proverbial bus, ironically it did have the same outcome as the original CIA cover story: the way they were treated, no one believes Generals Kiyani and Pasha were cooperating with the US.

Since my personal opinion is that the CIA couldn't find a Jew in Miami without a tip-off, I have no trouble believing this. Doesn't matter. The fucker's dead and that's the important part.

Credibility, Chutzpah And Debt

Paul Krugman

To understand the furor over the decision by Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, to downgrade U.S. government debt, you have to hold in your mind two seemingly (but not actually) contradictory ideas. The first is that America is indeed no longer the stable, reliable country it once was. The second is that S.& P. itself has even lower credibility; it’s the last place anyone should turn for judgments about our nation’s prospects.

Let’s start with S.& P.’s lack of credibility. If there’s a single word that best describes the rating agency’s decision to downgrade America, it’s chutzpah — traditionally defined by the example of the young man who kills his parents, then pleads for mercy because he’s an orphan.

So there is no reason to take Friday’s downgrade of America seriously. These are the last people whose judgment we should trust.

No, what makes America look unreliable isn’t budget math, it’s politics. And please, let’s not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided — specifically, they’re caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands.

The real question facing America, even in purely fiscal terms, isn’t whether we’ll trim a trillion here or a trillion there from deficits. It is whether the extremists now blocking any kind of responsible policy can be defeated and marginalized.

Here's my way of doing that, from a short story about how sailors and Marines used to deal with people who fucked 'em over:

There was much talk of "dungaree liberty," a time honored Naval tradition in which sailors donned working uniforms, armed themselves with knives, pipes and clubs and went ashore to wreak havoc on an offending liberty town.

A little dungaree liberty on the 'baggers and the Repugs who kowtow to them would not be out of line at this point.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Dow Tumbles 513 Points on Thursday
Oil, gas down; gold, ramen up.

CNN Poll Shows Congress’ Approval Now at 14%
Slightly below Al Qaeda.

Taiwan-based Foxconn, Electronics Manufacturer, Will Replace 1,000,000 Workers with Robots
Workers will be dismantled and sold for scrap.

Only 52% Give God Positive Job Approval Rating
If they had to choose today, 48% would worship “unnamed other deity.”

Quote of the Day

Digby:

...

If this is a all a kabuki conspiracy, it's the best acted Vaudeville farce of all time. The other alternative is to concede that we're governed by drooling idiots in Wall St. and Washington alike, largely because anybody with a clue about what's really going on is relegated to the sidelines and not allowed anywhere near real policy decisions.

...

I'll go for the drooling idiot option.

Liquidating the Empire ...

We're gonna have to do it, either voluntarily or not.

Chalmers Johnson died on November 20, 2010, but -- for me at least -- his spirit lives on in the most active of ways. In his last years at TomDispatch.com, he regularly chewed over the profligacy of the Pentagon, our unbridled urge for military spending, and our penchant for war-making and war preparations without end. He was convinced that we had long passed the point at which we were still a “republic,” that we had decisively opted for empire, and -- long before the U.S. intelligence community came to that conclusion -- that we were on the downward slide, helped along by what he called a “military Keynesianism” run amok.

One question he raised regularly in conversation, but never answered in print, was: What would it mean for the United States -- i.e. a great military superpower -- to bankrupt itself? After all, we aren't Argentina. But if there was no obvious model to draw on, he never doubted one thing: if we didn’t change our ways and reverse course on empire, we would certainly be a candidate for debtor’s prison and a wreck of a country. In his last major essay, also the title of his last (and still unbearably relevant) book, he turned to the issue of “dismantling the empire,” knowing full well that it wasn’t on any imaginable Washington agenda.

...

I've said all I've had to about this financial mess we're in. It's 2008 redux and there's nothing more to do than ride it out at this point. With the leadership, or lack thereof, in Washington today, I'm not optimistic about the outcome.

Thanks to Susie for the link.

The "Dummy Belt" ...

Satire ... mostly:

We are a land of many ‘belts’: the Bible Belt, the Rust Belt, the Sun Belt, to name a few.

But watching the near dissolution of our political institutions and our international reputation as a scientific, medical, and cultural leader at the hands of ideologically puritanical and intellectually useless base idiots, the time has come to name another of America’s ‘belts’: the DUMMY BELT.

This belt encompasses a swath of the United States that, were it drop-kicked from the Union, would instantly join the likes of Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau among the world’s most primitive societies. A grotesque mutation joining Iranian theocracy and Central African poverty would emerge, despoiling the planet and setting back global progress a dozen generations merely by existing.

...

Thanks to Infidel753 for the link.

Yeah ...

"I find it interesting to see S&P so vigilant now in downgrading the U.S. credit rating. Where were they four years ago when they, and other credit rating agencies, helped cause this horrendous recession by providing AAA ratings to worthless sub-prime mortgage securities on behalf of Wall Street investment firms? Where were they last December when Congress and the White House drove up the national debt by $700 billion by extending Bush's tax breaks for the rich?"

Bernie's right but like I say when it comes to football (soccer) and teams complain about a bad call or two by the ref: If you play well enough (score enough goals, play good defense), a bad call shouldn't matter.

S&P should never have been in the position to judge our creditworthiness*. Had they not manufactured this debt ceiling "crisis" (Obama and the Republicans) - if our elected representatives would govern instead of act like children - the "good faith and credit of the United States" would never have been in question.

To use another football analogy: play the game the way it's supposed to be played. In football, there are The Laws of the Game and none may change them to suit their whim. All over the world (from playground to Premier League), the rules of football are the same. It wouldn't be the same "beautiful game" if FIFA allowed individual regions and leagues to put their own spin on it.

We're changing the rules of the economic game for stupid political motives and we're ruining the game for everyone else. If we want to play with the rest of the world, the people in Washington will have to grow up and govern. American Major League Soccer learned that and so will the rest of us.

*And I got a sneaking suspicion that a whole buncha Wall St. assholes made a killing because of the downgrade. I wonder if Barry will have the AG look into S&P's motivations in that regard? And yes, I already know the answer to that question.

Goin' ridin'

Off today to ride the Geritol Trial put on by SactoPITS. Sounds like it's right up my alley. The ideal of course would be the "Prune Juice and Hydrocortisone Trial". Heh. See yas later.

Update:

Home safe and sound, tired, dirty, happy. No blood, tears, or trauma, plenty a' sweat. Got another 1st place (also last and only) in class trophy (photo). Only dropped the bike once and it doesn't count because I didn't fall all the way off and Mrs. G got video. Heh. Will put something up at Fixer & Gordon tomorrow. Hopefully. G'nite.



Update the Twoth:

Due to the amazing restorative powers of a Blue Coyote Combo pizza and three glasses of limeade, I came up with enough energy to put up a short video of my ride over at Fixer & Gordon. Longer post will follow.

Are we ...

Still winning?

A helicopter has crashed in Afghanistan's eastern Wardak province, killing 31 U.S. special operations troops and seven Afghan soldiers, Afghanistan's president said Saturday in a report by The Associated Press. It was the highest number of American casualties recorded in a single incident in the decade-long war, the report said.

...

The Talibans claim they shot it down with an RPG. Who knows what happened but what's fact is 38 more lives were squandered in a wasted exercise. Bin Laden's dead, let's go.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Emmylou Harris and Sheryl Crow ~ Pale Blue Eyes

Thanks to Todaylight, Switzerland.

B'ar Sign

Just to raise the tone around here a little after all the Teabagger talk, here's some fresh today bear sign from out in the woods behind my house:



Notice the food wrappers. I have the same problem sometimes the morning after All-U-Can-Eat Burrito Nite...

Debt and Empire

I'm not sure if this is satire or not, but I am sure it's a 'must read':

Truthout

To: General Petraeus, Langley HQ
From: Operative 650, Kabul office
Re: Memo XE1955

[...] Before I make my modest proposal, permit me a couple observations.

It's easier to get an agreement between the Taliban and coalition forces than it has been to get Democrats and Republicans to see eye to eye. It seems to me, from here in Kabul, that the Tea Party is basically just like the Taliban, minus the beards. They are both determined to take over their countries, they are both fanatical and uncompromising, and they are both willing to destroy their respective governments in order to achieve their aims.

Given their intransigence, I'm wondering whether it might be useful to run an extraordinary rendition program for some of these Tea Party types. I know that the CIA is prohibited from working inside the United States, but perhaps we can use a Colombian or Israeli contractor to bring these folks here to Afghanistan. A few weeks here at Bagram prison under "austerity measures" would surely make some of these legislators more amenable to compromise. Since Congress is about as popular right now as al-Qaeda, I'm willing to wager that the public would wholeheartedly support such a program.

Bagram might be better than Gitmo!

As good as it is, that ain't the half of it, folks! Go see what this gent proposes to solve all our problems! Read the comments too.

Christie's Shariah "Crazies" Strike Back

Following up on Fixer's post, links at Media Matters:

Christie's comments have drawn plaudits from the editorial board of the New Jersey Star-Ledger and from the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center. But the "crazies" are unhappy, and they're not letting the matter rest.

Geller comments that Christie "has shown himself to be a dangerous blustering bloviator, a good little dhimmi" who has made a "monumental mistake." Andrew Breitbart's Big Peace website calls it "disappointing" to see Christie "dismissing substantive and damning facts, statements and associations in order to accuse his critics of racism and bigotry." And JihadWatch comments, "to think that some people think this tool would be a good president."

It will be interesting to see whether other Republican politicians follow Christie in denouncing the anti-Islam right-wing media, or if they knuckle under in the face of this sort of criticism.

My money's on "knuckle under". Honesty will get them nowhere with those ideological idiots.

It's not ...

Some post-apocalyptic science fiction; it's what's happening to real people in this country today and tomorrow, and for many tomorrows until the people we sent to Washington decide to govern:

...

Ruby does not know what to do about her son, Raymond, either. Ray was doing well, with a good job and a lovely wife and two kids, when his army reserve company was sent to Iraq. It was supposed to be a short mission. Take down Sadaam, in retaliation for his bombing of the World Trade Center, and then back home to the states for a hero’s welcome. Instead, Ray spent four years overseas protecting Iraqi oilfields for Chevron. His wife divorced him and is remarried. He messed up his right knee, and the VA keeps putting off the surgery that might fix his problem. When he sees his VA psychiatrist about his mood swings and nightmares, he is given huge handfuls of pills to take. All the pills do is make him fat and sleepy. He used to play football in high school. Now, he can barely get out of the chair to go to the bathroom. Sometimes, when he watches the television news and hears about how there never were any WMDs, it was all a lie, he gets so mad he is afraid that his heart might stop. And he thinks to himself that might not be such a bad thing. And then he rolls himself a joint, because he has discovered that marijuana helps a lot more than the pills he gets at the VA.

Ray used to get his weed from a neighbor, Michael who grew his own, because it helped with the pain from his MS---multiple sclerosis. Mike is now living at the local (private, for profit) prison. Like Sarah, he is a menace to society, and so a company with ties to the governor is paid a lot of money to keep him off the streets. The DEA agent who grilled Michael is the same one who allowed huge shipments of cocaine to enter this country, in exchange for testimony about other cocaine distributors. It was a sweet deal for everyone. The DEA and the prosecutors got convictions. The cocaine lord got rid of his business rivals. Michael’s only son, Justice, died at the age of 34 from a heart attack brought on by cocaine.

...

We, somehow, have to find our way out of this Bizarro World. We can't continue the way we're going and still call ourselves "America".

Christ ...

Don't these people ever stop?

When Fox News producers aren't coming up with simple-minded metaphors to "debunk" the scientific consensus on climate change, they're apparently turning their outrage machine onto a children's show for refusing to be "fair and balanced" like them.

In a bizarre string of on-air attacks, Fox News hosts seem to be feigning outrage over the Nickelodeon show "Spongebob Squarepants" for a segment about global warming. Hosts have in recent days been claiming the cartoon was shown to students by the U.S. Department of Education, even though it wasn't, accusing its creators of trying to push a liberal political "agenda" on the nation's children.

...

Really? Really? Do these Fox people even qualify as adults anymore?

Great thanks to the folks at TGUAR for the link.

I've had this question ...

For a long time. I ask my European friends and family members and all I get is the blank look, mouth agape. One little question:

"Why did you create the EU to begin with?"

I mean, it sounds like a good idea, a common currency, open borders, and one big trading bloc as opposed to 20 - 30 little ones. On paper, it looks great but everybody I talk to now thinks it's a bad idea.

They all bitch about the open borders. All saying that the people from the poorer countries of the EU come to ____________* and take ______________** jobs and use up resources and the social safety net meant for ____________** people.

They all bitch about the economy. My _______________** friends say that ____________* is far more productive than the ____________*** and the ____________** economies are always being looked to for money to keep ___________**** afloat.

They all bitch about "multicultualism". We are losing our _____________** identity because all these people from ________________**** are coming here, not speaking the language, changing our way of life, and looking for a handout. Either that or the ___________*** come to ______________* and steal everything they can't get for nothing from Brussels/Strasbourg.

They also have no use for the central government in Brussels/Strasbourg. I hear Brussels/Strasbourg thinks they can make the rules and decisions for _____________ * when they have no idea of how they hurt business in ____________* in order to help ___________****.

I ask this question again in light of Dr. Krugman's post yesterday:

...

The US 10-year bond rate is now down to 2.5%. So much for those bond vigilantes. What this rate is saying is that markets are pricing in terrible economic performance, quite possibly a double dip. And it also says that Washington’s deficit obsession has been utterly, totally wrong-headed.

Meanwhile, Italy’s spread against German bonds is soaring even further. What are markets pricing in here? Default as a real possibility; maybe even euro breakup. The latter certainly sounds a lot more plausible now than it did a few months ago. [my em]

...

So if, as it seems, a number of countries are going to abandon the Euro and move back to their old currency so they can manipulate themselves out of debt, what was the point in the first place? Didn't anyone take the differences between cultures into consideration before they all jumped on the bandwagon?

I never put much faith in the longevity of the European Union, though I thought I wouldn't see the end of it in my lifetime. Yes, they looked West after World War 2 and saw a pretty good system. What they didn't get is that the people who founded the United States were basically all in the same boat. They were mostly disaffected Englishmen wanting to break the hold of King George on the colonies. It never seemed to me you could do the same with diverse cultures (with ingrained biases), all millennia old. Maybe, in a century or two, we might be enlightened enough to move to worldwide governance, but old habits die hard. The EU might live on in some form or another, but if the economy keeps tanking, it's gonna be every man for himself over there sooner rather than later.

*Insert: Germany, France, England, Holland
**Insert: German, French, English, Dutch
***Insert: Spanish, Italians, Greeks, Polish
****Insert: Spain, Italy, Greece, Poland