(Bloomberg) -- BP Plc and Exxon Mobil Corp. took the best deal they could get in Iraq last year when they won the largest oil contracts since addam Hussein was toppled in 2003. Oil companies may wait a long time to get a better one.
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Western producers haven't had access to oil fields in southern Iraq since 1972, when the country nationalized production including concessions owned by the companies now known as BP, Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Exxon.
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Behold, an item known henceforth as the National Impact Survey of the Radical Homosexual Agenda in California Public Schools, as recently and furtively received/discovered by yours truly, your humble and sexually perverted and imperfectly liberal, very-straight-but-very-gay-rights-supporting satire columnist, in a roundabout manner I cannot divulge right now lest I might get shot waiting in line at Starbucks.
What is the NISRHACPS, you ask? Why, it's a document. It's a mailer. It's a survey of sorts, a short, wretched little questionnaire made entirely of sadness and bile and fear.
It's a piece of paper sent out en masse to particular members of the Republican party who are so openly terrified of all homosexual personages, they fully believe said gays are actively bewitching and recruiting your innocent children behind the locked doors of hugely perverted schoolhouses near you.
In fact, most liberals, moderates, chimps, garden gnomes and humans with intact brainstems have likely never seen this document, given how it is carefully targeted only at persons of dangerously limited consciousness, people who clearly think book learnin' is for elitists, the vagina was created by the devil and Sarah Palin is like, super-duper smart, and stuff.
You perhaps think I am exaggerating? I am not exaggerating. Behold:
There are 10 questions in the NISRHACPS. They are all, as you imagine, completely silly, front-loaded, leading questions along the lines of "Pimply spidermutants from planet Fukulon-7 like to devour the severed heads of newborn baby deer like popcorn. Do you support this practice? Yes [ ] No [ ] Don't Know [ ]"
Besides, it's nothing really new. This kind of shrill fearmongering and right-wing propaganda has been going on since Rush Limbaugh was knee high to Pat Robertson's gay bathhouse towel boy's coke spoon (my em). What's more, if you're reading this column, odds are extremely good you're already many, many times smarter than the target demographic of this survey.
But oh, what a target. Allow me to point up one aspect of the NISRHACPS I find particularly distressing. It is this: the document comes from -- and is aimed straight at -- women.
True. The survey is apparently the dark creation of a little D.C. splinter clan called Concerned Women for America (CWA), who in my imagination aren't really women at all, but are far more like bulky bundles of bad skin and beige polyester with only faintly female characteristics, such as thigh stubble, cankles and a creamy fondness for Jay Leno and lumpy pancake batter and cats.
This new campaign plays on the same sort of heartless fears, only this time it's targeting one of the weakest and most gullible of all American demographics: mal-educated conservative moms who don't know any better. Sad doesn't begin to cover it.
The NISRHACPS ends with a petition to Gov. Schwarzenegger to please put an end evil homosexual propaganda in our public schools, and instead help "promote views toward sexuality that support our nation's traditional moral values."
Do you remember those values? The moral codes that have helped shaped America lo these many years of joyful Christian goodness and open-hearted love? I bet you do.
From the top, they include: Unchecked sexual guilt, shame, hysteria, pedophilic priests, failed abstinence programs, banning birth control education in schools, dangerous illegal abortions, widespread teen pregnancy, the 50-percent divorce rate, and freaking the hell out over a single exposed nipple on primetime TV.
Also, by extension, unhappy marriages, sexual unfulfillment and a deep misunderstanding of God, love and simple human connection. You know, values just like mom used to enjoy. Thanks for reminding us, CWA!
Mystik is an exclusive engine oil sponsor for the 2010 Iron Dog Snowmobile Race and a sponsor of Team #22 Scott Davis and Todd Palin – past Iron Dog Champions.
"So what?" I hear some of you mumbling. "Big deal," I detect from afar. "Now what goofy name is Laffy gonna come up with for Sarah Palin?" I suspect you may be thinking.
Here's the big deal:
It turns out that Mystik Lubricants is owned by… wait for it … Citgo. Yes, that same Citgo that’s owned by Venezuela. Socialist Venezuela. Socialist, Hugo Chavez lovin’, Venezuela.
See? It was worth wading through that rinkydink ad just to witness Lubey McHypocrite step in it one more time.
So, as I said, the parties now live in different universes, both intellectually and morally. We can ask how that happened; there, too, the parties live in different worlds. Republicans would say that it’s because Democrats have moved sharply left: a Republican National Committee fund-raising plan acquired by Politico suggests motivating donors by promising to “save the country from trending toward socialism.” I’d say that it’s because Republicans have moved hard to the right, furiously rejecting ideas they used to support. Indeed, the Obama health care plan strongly resembles past G.O.P. plans. But again, I don’t live in their universe.
More important, however, what are the implications of this total divergence in views?
The answer, of course, is that bipartisanship is now a foolish dream. How can the parties agree on policy when they have utterly different visions of how the economy works, when one party feels for the unemployed, while the other weeps over affluent victims of the “death tax”?
Which brings us to the central political issue right now: health care reform. If Congress enacts reform in the next few weeks — and the odds are growing that it will — it will do so without any Republican votes. Some people will decry this, insisting that President Obama should have tried harder to gain bipartisan support. But that isn’t going to happen, on health care or anything else, for years to come.
Someday, somehow, we as a nation will once again find ourselves living on the same planet. But for now, we aren’t. And that’s just the way it is.
Live in De Boerderij Zoetermeer 2-12-2010
Rudy de Queljoe
Great Dutch/Moluks Guitarplayer
More on Arthur's Musical Journey
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Emmylou Linda and Dolly on a track from their Trio ll CD plus interview where they talk about the album. From 1999
"Tea parties are for little girls and their imaginary friends."
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"They were like locusts," says one vendor at the suite, regarding Palin and her large group of hangers-on. "She showed up with like 20 people, and they immediately swarmed the place taking everything!"
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My Constituents Care Way More About Political Gamesmanship Than Jobs, Health Care, And The Economy
By House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH)
I assure you, the last thing my voters need is some well intended, do-all-I-possibly-can-to-help-the-little-guy congressman running around Washington, working across the aisle, and fighting tooth and nail for jobs, health care, and financial reform to ensure their tax dollars never end up in the hands of banks capable of holding our entire economy hostage.
No, sir. My constituents deserve better.
They deserve a leader willing to roll up his sleeves and play the types of twisted, greedy political games that, by their very nature, tear apart the fabric of our democracy for the sake of assuring reelection. They deserve someone on their side who will ask the tough questions, such as how will painting Democrats as radical ideologues play in, say, Arkansas? Can we vote "no" on the health care bill and still make it look like we give two craps about the welfare of ordinary Americans? How can we twist positive news about the GDP into a negative for the Obama administration?
The fact is, if I ever worked across the aisle to help thousands of uninsured Ohioans receive health care, I wouldn't be able to look them in the eye. How could I explain to them that I abandoned the idiotic yet politically fruitful claim that Barack Obama is a socialist bent on destroying the American way of life? How could I admit to them that deficit spending is the only way to get us out of an economic crisis perpetuated by my party's disastrous fiscal ideology? How could I tell them I stopped obsessing over scoring petty political points right before the midterm election?
How could I stop being the greedy, myopic scumbag they elected me to be?
But in the end, of course, I can't take full credit for the Republican Party's utterly undeserved yet all-too-depressingly-real resurgence. That would be unfair to my Democratic colleagues, who, in their unwillingness to act like grown adults with any kind of backbone and exercise the largest majority any party has seen in decades, have let us get away with all of it.
Thank you, you cowardly pieces of shit.
In our fantastic uniqueness, we are unified. In those things we fear make us total freaks, we are the same. Religions and political parties work like demondogs to normalize and codify certain weirdnesses into collections, tribes, cults and voting blocs, in order to get our money and give them power. This is, quite naturally, utter bulls--.
It doesn't take much blasphemy to note how all religions are, across the board, brazen, synthetic freakshows, far stranger and more surreal in their oddball accumulation of fetishes and rituals than anything your average agnostic, atheist or Burning Man devotee could come up with in her happiest LSD-soaked dreamgasm. You ever been to a Catholic mass? A Mormon temple? A mosque? Disneyland on acid, people. And not in the good way.
Perhaps this is exactly what scares the rigid, the fearful, the conservative mindset most of all. If you really acknowledge our collective weirdness, if you look closely at what makes up the haphazard human spectacle, you are left with one overwhelming and totally awesome conclusion: If God really does exist, She is one deviously kinky, delightfully insane barrel of monkeys indeed. Hell, I'll drink to that.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Family Values GOPer Was At Gay Club Before Drunk Driving Arrest
Two people have been killed and six injured as giant waves slammed into a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, the ship's owners have said.
The 26ft (8m) high rogue waves hit the Cypriot-owned Louis Majesty off the north-east coast of Spain.
A spokesman for owner Louis Cruises said three "abnormally high" waves broke windows in the front of the ship.
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In March 2007, Holland America's cruise ship MS Prinsendam was hit by a 21-meter (69 ft) tall rogue wave in the Antarctic segment around the tip of South America.
The Republican National Committee plans to raise money this election cycle through an aggressive campaign capitalizing on “fear” of President Barack Obama and a promise to "save the country from trending toward socialism."
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In neat PowerPoint pages, it lifts the curtain on the often-cynical terms of political marketing, displaying an air of disdain for the party’s donors that is usually confined to the barroom conversations of political operatives.
The presentation explains the Republican fundraising in simple terms.
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... This will be as if Lincoln had to debate Britney Spears ...
In other words, no matter how much you love or care for your dog or cat, you don't know what it's thinking. You impose your human frame of reference on them, but at the same time, Fido is putting you into his canine one. And you are always just one can of Alpo away from becoming meat.
When the Rude Pundit read this week about the explosion of right wing extremist groups, he thought, "It's sad, really, how quickly an animal will turn when it panics." According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, "Hate groups stayed at record levels — almost 1,000 — despite the total collapse of the second largest neo-Nazi group in America. Furious anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80%, adding some 136 new groups during 2009." This is not to mention the 512 "active" Patriot Groups, which foster antigovernment conspiracy theories and stand around bragging about how armed they are, like the Oath Keepers, which may just be a new peak of sublimated homoeroticism, a kind of gun fetish mixed with cock worship.
See, the reason they and the Tea Party are the dogs is because they have made the leap to wanting to overthrow the government if things don't go their way. They don't want to work within the existing American system. Because if their worst fears come true, and America becomes socialist, it will be because our elected representatives voted for it, not because it was done at the point of a gun. When George W. Bush was wrecking the nation, left wing groups talked in terms of organization for elections or of impeachment. These groups talk in terms of armed resistance. And we're here, in terms of our increasingly unhinged right wing nutzoids, after only a year of the Obama presidency. When people turned to revolutionary or radical acts in the past, it was after years of war or centuries of mistreatment and the failure of any systemic means of solving the problems. In other words, these people in all these extremist groups are greedy, selfish pussies who want what they want now and don't want to do the hard work to get there.
We could say they are delusional. We could say that they are victims of the cruel capitalist system that has only gotten crueler in the three decades. We could say they have been manipulated by a media that feeds off their fear.
Instead, as Mother Jones magazine says, they are flirting with actual, honest-to-god treason. Once you start talking about overthrowing the government through any means but elections, you have ceased to part of the conversation. Actual patriotism is believing that the American form of government can work, even if that is slow and frustrating. If you don't like it, then amend the Constitution to change the way the country works. Elect people who support you. Then, if that doesn't happen, you might want to consider other means. It takes some time, not one year after the black dude was inaugurated.
But, really, motherfuckers? Guns? And those, like Michelle Bachmann and Jim DeMint, who fan their flames are privileged enablers who will run away like panicked kittens as soon as the dogs tear into the body.
Bob and Jane Cull bought a house in suburban Ft. Worth, Texas in 1996 for about $233,000. It promptly started falling apart on them. They sued the builder. An arbitration ruling went for the Culls in the amount of $800,000.
The builder spent $1 million fighting the $800,000. And yesterday, a lower court in Texas awarded the Culls $51 million.
The builder is Bob Perry, the chief financial backer of the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and of various other right-wing outfits.