You can die ...

For your country but you can't vote:

Charges of voter suppression are only growing in the state of Florida. As we reported yesterday on The Last Word, that state's Republican Governor Rick Scott is being accused of leading a "misguided" purge of the voter registration rolls. You can see our report in the video above. Florida officials have put together a list of around 180,000 people they believe are not U.S. citizens and should not be allowed to vote.

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Included on that list is a 91 year old Army vet who faced down the Nazis in WW2. It's time for the DOJ to get involved. Oh, wait, they're too busy busting potheads to save our democracy. Silly me ...

Conservative Logic

Gleeped from Americans Against the Tea Party.

At last! A worthwhile use of taxpayers' money!

“The plot of the movie, to the extent that it has one, revolves around a football team and a cheerleader.”

That’s how The Los Angeles Times describes “The Gangbang Girl #32,” a porno shot on the turf of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in 2001. So far, no one can say who allowed the movie to film under the lights at the taxpayer-owned stadium and national historic landmark, home of the USC Trojans and the spot where John F. Kennedy once accepted the Democratic presidential nomination.

From the "plot" description I think I can guess at the action scenes...

I've been to the L.A. Coliseum many times, everything from USC football to the first World Series game ever played in L.A. to motocross. There was even a motorcycle hillclimb there once, just a ramp up to the peristyle but the bikes were loud. A friend of mine wandered in there through an unlocked gate and did his Tai Chi in broad daylight and complete solitude on the 50-yard-line.

Earlier this month, facing insolvency, the commission voted earlier this month to surrender control of the facility to USC.

If they'd sold tickets to the porno shoot they woulda cleaned up. Heh.

Afterthought re the USC "Trojans": Coulda been a good product placement deal!

Beating-Head-Repeatedly-On-Keyboard Headline of the Day

Senate Candidate Hoaxstra: Create A National Birther Office

The plus side? From the look of the monitor screen, I just wrote a novel with my forehead...

All seriousness aside...

When two men on either end of the seriousness spectrum come up with essentially the same cockamamie idea on the same day, perhaps they're onto something!

Andy Borowitz:

Trump Could Help Romney Win Elusive Billionaire Asshole Vote
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Reportedly, the top .00001% wealthiest Americans have regarded Mr. Romney with suspicion to date, wondering, in the words of one billionaire, "if he's really one of us."

"It's a bit of a reach for us billionaires to vote for someone like Romney, who just has a couple of hundred million in the bank," said Grayson Rance, a billionaire who has so far viewed the former Massachusetts governor warily. "But if a bona fide billionaire asshat like Trump is for him, that makes you give the guy a second chance."
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Speaking on CNN's "Situation Room," Mr. Trump told host Wolf Blitzer his reason for endorsing Mr. Romney: "After four years of a President who was born overseas, its time for a President who was born here and sends his money overseas."

As for Mr. Romney, he experienced a rare emotional moment on Memorial Day, placing a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Banker.

Robert Reich:

Trump, like Romney, represents almost everything that's wrong with the American economy today — an unprecedented amount of wealth and power at the very top, widespread insecurity and declining real wages for everyone else, and a form of casino capitalism that places huge bets with other peoples' money and depends on everyone else to bail it out when the bets turn sour.

But wait a minute. Perhaps Romney's handlers are smarter than they seem. Maybe Mitt has decided to let it all hang out. Rather than try to hide what's obvious to everyone, the new strategy is to make Romney's liabilities into assets by flaunting them. Be even bigger and bolder. Money rules!
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So they figure Mitt's choice of Trump as running mate will allow Mitt to celebrate his boundless capacity to make money, the "I've got mine and the hell with you" financiers and CEOs he represents, and the social Darwinism that he and the regressive right are convinced will be good for America.

The new bumper-sticker: ROMNEY-TRUMP IN 2012. YOU'RE FIRED!

Or maybe they just went out drinking together or got some brown acid outta the same batch. Either way, I'm glad to see Bobby Reich having some fun.

And yer point is...?

NOM spokesperson: LGBTs will make us all sex-worshipping, pagan ‘hedonists’

Gee, he says that like it's a bad thing...

All the dead people say yes

If it's Wednesday it must be Morford invoking all our ancestors.

You do not have it so bad. The dead just sigh, shake their ghostly heads. "You think you got problems? Player, please."

The citizens of all bygone eras would like you to know: There has never been a better time to be gay, lesbian, black, a sexually awake female, independent minded, free thinking, kinky, weird, unique, artsy, progressive, open minded, curious, a little feral, a lot sly and winking and ready for what's next.

Conversely, there has never been a worse time to be uptight, clenched, fearful of change and gay rights and alternative thinking, hating on all the kinds of progress that are right now doing nothing but accelerating and mutating so fast no one can really keep track anymore.

And the remarkable news is, this basic equation? It never really changes. Conservatives resist flow. Progressives embrace it. Nevertheless, flow happens.
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And this is the message from those long passed: Fear not the ignorant and the sexually repressed, the homophobic and the religiously paranoid. There will always be conservatives puling against change, pushing back against the inevitable, thinking things would be somehow so much better if we could just go back to a more God-fearing, well-armed, heterosexual time that never actually existed.

In the words of Steve Martin's song, "Memories of a time that never was became the good old days".

The Jukebox in my mind ...

Eurythmics - Here Comes The Rain Again

Yes, it's raining again in NY.

Owned ...

Pic stolen from Dr. Attaturk.

Don't be a hypocrite!

Stolen from God.

Tourism and Self-Lighting Sushi

Fixer's comment on an earlier post:

I'm surprised my buddy Billy the Scrap Merchant hasn't made it out there by now. Heh ...

He'll probably be along. I hope he brings his camper. The B&Bs'll likely be full...

LATimes

Now we are seeing the first trickle of that debris. A ghost ship arrived in the Gulf of Alaska this spring. A rusting Harley Davidson from Miyagi prefecture was discovered on a remote beach in British Columbia. A soccer ball found on an Alaskan island and marked with a personal message was returned to its delighted teenage owner in the tsunami-devastated town of Rikuzentakata.

Like dreams — or nightmares — these wayward bits of other people's lives bring us closer to the distant disaster. They make the world smaller. A number of groups have started projects to reunite recovered possessions with their former owners. And one beachside town in Oregon is hoping tsunami "treasure hunting" will result in increased tourism.
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Experts also say the debris is not likely to be radioactive. [...]

Whew! That's a relief!

Not so fast, Sparky. It looks like the radioactivity is getting here under its own power:

LATimes again

Pacific bluefin tuna carried radioactivity from Japan’s 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster all the way across the ocean to the shores of California, scientists reported Monday.
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“We showed that a bluefin tuna is capable of picking up radioactive material and transporting it across the ocean. That’s new. Traditionally people don’t think of migratory animals as transport vectors for radioactive materials,” he said.
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The amount of Cesium 134 and 137 detected in the fish “didn’t come close to exceeding safety limits,” Madigan said, noting that what was in the fish, per gram, is lower than the amount of naturally occurring radioactive potassium found per gram in a banana.

Whew again! I'm safe! I ate a banana in 1948 and was sick for a week. The next time I ate one was I ate a slice of banana cake by accident at a party in 2008. Didn't get sick that time, probably because it was diluted. I used to get nauseous when I'd go past an auto body shop back when they used banana oil in the paint. Mrs. G loves the damn things and they were a very effective birth control device. Yuck.

Sushi? Not on your life! Us saltwater fishermen also call it "bait". I will admit to serving salmon eggs to my guests as fine caviar. Dirt cheap and tasty on good toast points and no one ever caught on. I also put $5 a quart vodka in Grey Goose bottles, but that's another story. No one caught onto that one either. But I digress...

Watch for a barrage of positive ads from the tuna/dolphin canning industry much like the ExxonMobil ads on how good for the environment oil companies are.

I'm still not over the radioactive milk scare of the '60s. That was traumatic. I'm barely over the visual of ladies' breasts blinking at me whilst rotating like a lighthouse, although that was mostly the tassels. Oops, there it goes again...

Note: This post is meant to be a tongue-in-cheek look at the debris problem and hopefully will not elicit anything factual from long-winded penguins. (wink)

Wir sind Grüne ...

These new developments in Germany are impressive. They are now generating as much energy as 20 nuclear power plants, though without all of the downside side effects of nuclear energy. Remember that for years, many in the anti-change camp have insisted that the green energy sources could never provide enough energy.

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My message to all the doubters: shut the fuck up. We put a man on the fucking Moon, we can sure as hell find an alternative to dirty fuels.

Bullshit ...

It's the only thing the Mittster has.

Stolen from the Being Liberal FB page.

The Bomb ...

No, not the one for which we did "duck and cover" drills as schoolkids in the '60s, not the one that, when I got to SAC, demanded 12 B-52 bombers and 6 KC-135 tankers be launched within a 7 minute window; the amount of time we had before our base would be destroyed by incoming.

No, the bomb that's ticking, the fuse that's burning, within the conservative head.

So there you sit with a bomb in your head.

It's a bomb which will detonate if you ever admit -- even for a moment, even to yourself -- that the Evil Libruls have ever been right about anything.

If detonated, this bomb will not only annihilate your identity, your ideals and your faith...not only destroy your standing in the community, the esteem of your friends, the respect of your spouse and children and, potentially, your livelihood...but it will also utterly humiliate you.

Should that bomb ever go off you would be forced to admit that have gotten really, really important things terribly wrong for the last 10...20...30...40 years.

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It's why we have a "Dead End Quarter", the 25 - 30% of Americans who absolutely refuse to get a grip on reality or take an introspective look in the mirror.

Shooting one's self ...

In the foot. Good read about how the Jesus freaks are alienating a lot of the people they're trying to keep in the fold:

If the Catholic bishops, their conservative Protestant allies, and other right-wing fundamentalists had the sole objective of decimating religious belief, they couldn’t be doing a better job of it.

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That's just...Evel

Gleefully gleeped from a comment on deuddersun's Facebook page!

America's Finest News Source

Biden To Honor Fallen Soldiers By Jumping Motorcycle Over Vietnam Memorial

I wonder how that worked out...

Maybe it's better than being called 'babykillers' but...

Raw Story, links and video.

MSNBC host Chris Hayes offered up a not so common perspective on Memorial Day Sunday, sharing that elements of the day, including calling soldiers “heroes,” makes him “uncomfortable.”

“Why do I feel so uncomfortable about the word ‘hero?’” Hayes asked himself on Up with Chris Hayes. “I feel uncomfortable about the word because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.”

Mr. Hayes, whom I like, is catching all kinds of shit for his remark, probably because he's right.

I damn sure wasn't a hero, and I never waved a baby in the air on the end of my bayonet either. In Vietnam War days we were accused as a group of the latter in the national, and justified, anti-war fervor of the time. Nobody really believed it, but it was good hyperbole.

Some of the anti-war activists even accused the Vietnam War of being the troops' fault because they answered their country's call and followed orders and went to fight in it instead of doing the honorable thing like deserting or fleeing to Canuckistan. I had moments of prayer with more than one of them over that, and left them with the painful understanding that no lowly EM ever started a war. Except with them then and there. Heh.

When I bring up the tone of that time and the epithets that were ignorantly hurled at us, folks today say it was only the commie left, Jane Fonda types, that said that. Most of those folks didn't serve, got college or medical deferments which were too damned easy to get, at least if you were white and not poor, and don't have the memory of being on the receiving end of it.

I don't blame anyone for dodging the draft in that unnecessary and unpopular war that should not have been waged and was waged all wrong and divided the country for over ten years. Nobody wanted to die for a war they didn't believe in.

The draft was dropped after Vietnam. Now, since nobody has to go, there are few protests of our nation's wars, and even fewer that make the ruling class and the MIC uncomfortable, more's the pity, and our "leaders" have used the military exactly as the murderer Kissinger said in the post just below.

And now your average snuffy is a "hero" just for being there. Horseshit. The word "hero" has lost its meaning. Yes, their service is admirable in a country full of people who will never have to put their asses on the line and wouldn't if they could, but "heroes" most of them are not. Just doing the duty they signed up for, which they probably never thought would be for a failed political ideology, hegemony in places we don't belong, and corporate profit. The ones who figure it out realize full well that once you're in, you're stuck with it.

If I had a dime for every time I've heard "I would have joined up, but...", I'd be a lot richer than I am. Lip service patriots. Phony bullshit. The tone of this time.

Denoyer previously said earlier this year that any cuts to military spending could result in a return of the draft, despite no evidence or news indicating such a thing would happen.

Damn good idea. If we made getting killed or injured equally available to all, people would have motivation to bitch loudly and maybe the warmongers would be forced to think twice and forego disastrous foreign adventures that only benefit a few at the expense of all.

Chickenhawk Hall of Shame

The Christian Left

King of the Chickenhawks

Many of the usual suspects who pissed their pants at the thought of service and possible personal danger, but this one is a rare moment of truth from one of their great statesmen about what they really think:

Henry Kissinger: Kissinger's take on our brave men and women in uniform? "Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy." -- Henry Kissinger, as quoted in "The Final Days" by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in chapter 14. Page 194 in the paperback version (1995). Kissinger has never denied saying it.

There ya go.

Old soldiers recall

A Memorial Day "must read".

WWII vets gather at a Denny's to share stories about their service. They call themselves the Third Thursday Lunch Bunch, and the decades haven't dimmed their memories.

In early February 1945, Tharratt said, the guards at Stalag Luft IV informed him and other inmates that they were leaving for a three-day march. The destination was not revealed. Tharratt had an overcoat and a blanket, and wrapped his belongings in a towel.

They marched on country roads for 600 miles, he said, sleeping in fields, labor camps and warehouses with their boots drying under their armpits. Days passed without any food. Tharratt wanted to give up at times, but his buddies kept him moving. Many men got sick and could no longer march. They disappeared. Tharratt does not know what became of them.

He walked for 86 days until American GIs approached and liberated the prisoners, the war nearly over.

Tharratt returned to his family in Reseda, graduated from UC Davis, married and worked in the cement industry. He now lives in a retirement community in Walnut Creek.

Nightmares have plagued him since the war, he said, and even now he "tears up the bed" once in a while.

The Distinguished Flying Cross was an immense honor, but the lunch bunch it spawned has become a lifeline.

"We were asked to do a job," Tharratt said. "And I think we did it."

I think you did.

Memorial Day Thoughts on National Defense

Robert Reich

We can best honor those who have given their lives for this nation in combat by making sure our military might is proportional to what America needs.
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At the very least, hundreds of billions could be saved without jeopardizing the nation's security by ending weapons systems designed for an age of conventional warfare. We should shrink the F-35 fleet of stealth fighters. Cut the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons, ballistic missile submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles. And take a cleaver to the Navy and Air Force budgets. (Most of the action is with the Army, Marines and Special Forces.)

At a time when Medicare, Medicaid, and non-defense discretionary spending (including most programs for the poor, as well as infrastructure and basic R&D) are in serious jeopardy, Obama and the Democrats should be calling for even more defense cuts.

A reasonable and rational defense budget would be a fitting memorial to those who have given their lives so we may remain free.

Let's quit sending our people to die for the defense of the Military Industrial Complex bottom line. If that's a priority, and it is, let's send the neocons, 99% of whom have never served and are cowards to a man except when it comes to sending other folks' kids to die for their wet dreams of conquest. Their weeping and wailing and rending of garments as they try to get out of service would be vastly entertaining.