Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Us godless commie liberals know all about Satan's Jewel Crown. I'm wearing mine now.

Thanks to hussarII.

Light Blogging Today

This is Lexie. She's 5 years old and needs a home. She is currently being fostered by a nice lady at Golden Gate Springer Rescue, which is the same outfit we got our Maggie from 5 years ago.

We're going out to Oakland today to be interviewed by her to see if ours will do. There is competition. Several other people are being interviewed as well but I have a secret weapon - I will slather myself with bear poop to entice her and show her the fabulous life she will have in the mountains!

Oakland is a Dreaded Big City. Heady stuff for us simple hill folk!

Update:

We met Lexie at her foster home in East Oakland. The photo doesn't do her justice. She is drop dead gorgeous, very friendly, and a bubbly personality. We fell in love with her instantly and really hope we get her.

She licked ALL the bear poop off me!

Getting into the Bayarrhea over a high bridge across the ass end of Frisco Bay is free. Getting back out costs 5 bucks. Too cheap. I'da paid anything to get outta that traffic.


Update II:

Lexie went to her new home in Sausalito. I'm happy for her but waaaaaaah...

There'll be another come along soon. There are far too many dogs always needing a home and family.

Shrinkage

TRMS

Former Bush aide Mark McKinnon on the incredible shrinking Republican Party: "Increasingly, it is becoming clear that the party is against everything and for nothing.

"Nothing on taxes. Nothing on gun control. Nothing on climate change. Nothing on gay marriage. Nothing on immigration reform (or an incremental, piece-by-piece approach, which will result in nothing). It's a very odd situation when the losing party is the party refusing to negotiate. It may be how you disrupt, but it is not how you govern, or how you ever hope to regain a majority.

"And so, we have a Republican Party today willing to eliminate any prospect for a decent future for anyone, including itself, if it cannot be a future that is 100 percent in accordance with its core beliefs and principles. That's not governing. That's just lobbing hand grenades. If you're only standing on principle to appear taller, then you appear smaller. And the GOP is shrinking daily before our eyes."

Perhaps it will drown in the bathtub. Then we can add a little quicklime and pull the plug...

Illustrated Headline of the Day

2012: The year we all got high

Ahhhhhh...

6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying

You'll like this. From Cracked.

You're only being asked to pitch in because you have the resources. You're not a tall person who us dwarfs are jealously trying to cut down to size. You're a tall person being asked to get something down from a very tall shelf because nobody else can fucking reach it.
...

[...] Without society, all of your brave, individual talents and efforts won't buy you a bucket of farts.

So when somebody else asks for your help, in the form of charity or taxes, or because they need you to help them move a refrigerator, you can cite all sorts of reasons for not helping ("I think you're lying about needing help" or "I don't care" or "I'm too tied up with my own problems"), but the one thing you can't say is, "Why should you need help? I've never gotten help!" Not unless you're either shamefully oblivious, or a lying asshole.

Hell, if anybody could play the "I did this myself!" card, it's me. I mentioned earlier that I've made an unfair amount of money due to writing a novel about a zombie detective who only solves crimes of paranormal romance and then selling the film rights to said novel. If anything is a one-man show, it's writing a book. Nobody helped me with that. Well, I mean other than the friend who created the title character. And the publisher who spent the money to print up the copies and publicize it. And all of the previous novelists who established the medium and genre. And the public school system that taught me how to read and write, and that taught all of my readers how to read. And the people who built and maintain the Internet so that I would have a place to promote it, and the people who maintain the roads so that the books could be shipped from Amazon ...

You get the idea.

Yeah, I do, but a lot of people don't.

Chuck E. Jeez

A rare appearance on this page by Tom Friedman about Chuck Hagel's detractors. If you are concerned about Israel's rapid right-wing drift this is a 'must read'.

I am certain that the vast majority of U.S. senators and policy makers quietly believe exactly what Hagel believes on Israel — that it is surrounded by more implacable enemies than ever and needs and deserves America’s backing. But, at the same time, this Israeli government is so spoiled and has shifted so far to the right that it makes no effort to take U.S. interests into account by slowing its self-isolating settlement adventure. And it’s going to get worse. Israel’s friends need to understand that the center-left in Israel is dying. The Israeli election in January will bring to power Israeli rightists who never spoke at your local Israel Bonds dinner. These are people who want to annex the West Bank. Bibi Netanyahu is a dove in this crowd. The only thing standing between Israel and national suicide any more is America and its willingness to tell Israel the truth. But most U.S. senators, policy makers and Jews prefer to stick their heads in the sand, because confronting Israel is so unpleasant and politically dangerous. Hagel at least cares enough about Israel to be an exception.

Supplementary article at Think Progress.

Four former national security advisers in a letter to the editor in the Washington Post published on Tuesday denounced what New York TImes columnist Tom Friedman described as “disgusting” attacks on former Republican senator Chuck Hagel and praised Hagel’s prior service to the United States.
...

The high-level support for Hagel comes after the “neocon smear machine” recently began a campaign to tar Hagel as an anti-Semite and anti-Israel and not sufficiently militaristic toward Iran after news reports that he is President Obama’s top choice to succeed Leon Panetta.

It seems to me that Israel's only chance of survival is if we get rid of the neocons, or at least get their influence out of Israel policy, and start telling the Israeli government what it really needs to hear, i.e. they're fuckin' up by the numbers.

We're taking our country back!

From the Teatards. About fuckin' time. Via Raw Story.

Illustrated Headline of the Day

Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: The NRA shoots its mouth off edition

Hopefully, Lalala Pee-air done shot both of the NRA's feet and its ass off too. Good wrap-up.

The War On Christmas

CounterPunch

Israel’s large Palestinian minority is often spoken of in terms of the threat it poses to the Jewish majority. Palestinian citizens’ reproductive rate constitutes a “demographic timebomb”, while their main political programme – Israel’s reform into “a state of all its citizens” – is proof for most Israeli Jews that their compatriots are really a “fifth column”.

But who would imagine that Israeli Jews could be so intimidated by the innocuous Christmas tree?

This issue first came to public attention two years ago when it was revealed that Shimon Gapso, the mayor of Upper Nazareth, had banned Christmas trees from all public buildings in his northern Israeli city.

“Upper Nazareth is a Jewish town and all its symbols are Jewish,” Gapso said. “As long as I hold office, no non-Jewish symbol will be presented in the city.”
...

But Gapso is not alone in his trenchant opposition to making even the most cursory nod towards multiculturalism. The city’s chief rabbi, Isaiah Herzl, has refused to countenance a single Christmas tree in Upper Nazareth, arguing that it would be “offensive to Jewish eyes”.
...

But the image hides a dirtier reality. A recent letter from Haifa’s rabbinate came to light in which the city’s hotels and events halls were reminded that they must not host New Year’s parties at the end of this month (the Jewish New Year happens at a different time of year). The hotels and halls were warned that they would be denied their kashrut licences if they did so.

“It is a seriously forbidden to hold any event at the end of the calendar year that is connected with or displays anything from the non-Jewish festivals,” the letter states....

But what is clear is that there is plenty of religious intolerance verging on hatred being quietly exercised against non-Jews, mostly behind the scenes so as not to disturb Israel’s “Jewish and democratic” image or outrage the millions of Christian tourists and pilgrims who visit Israel each year.

This poses a great problem for FOXNews. How do they present it as part of "The War On Christmas" when it's actually being done by far-right-wing Jews instead of not actually being done by godless commie American Liberals? Nothing outta Bill O'Rally yet as far as I know. Heh.

A Holiday Letter from John Boehner

Borowitz via Seniors for a Democratic Society

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Today, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) released the following holiday letter to the American people:

Dear American People:

It’s Speaker Boehner here, writing my first and last ever holiday letter to you. Why am I doing this after all of these years, you might ask? Well, I won’t mince words. I’ve started drinking a little early this Christmas.

Yes, I’m sitting here in my man-cave, panelled in mahogany the color of me, doing a rack of Canadian Club shooters and smoking my way through a carton of Lucky Strikes as if they were the last Twinkies in creation. If my chief of staff knew that I was writing to you while I was this polluted, he’d shit a phone book. But guess what? I don’t fucking care anymore.

You see, this will be my last Christmas as Speaker of the House, all because a cabal of Tea Party miscreants in the House of Representatives doesn’t think I’m a ginormous enough asshole for their taste. Who’s more to their liking? Virginia’s own Eric Cantor. As a waiter might say at an all-you-can-eat shit buffet, “Excellent choice.” How odious is Eric Cantor? Let me put it this way: when we have to speak to the press, I actually prefer to stand next to Mitch McConnell.

What will life be like under Speaker of the House Eric Cantor? Well, he’s the guy who recommended cuts in disaster funding just hours after tornadoes hit Joplin, Missouri. Nice. And it was his “never met a dick-measuring contest I didn’t like” pathology that helped create last year’s debt-ceiling crisis. You can’t put a price tag on a performance like that. Well, actually you can: it cost the country nineteen billion dollars. Starting to miss me already, aren’t you? Fuck you.

So have a very Eric Cantor Christmas, America, and as that smug four-eyed sociopath drives the entire nation off the cliff, don’t say I didn’t warn you. Now leave me alone, God damn you. Damn you all to hell.

Happy Holidays,

Speaker Boehner

Heh.

Question of the Day

Did The NRA Faceplant After Newtown?

The answer is hopefully and we will see.

I was an NRA member since my service days, back when you needed a sponsor to join. My Company Commander signed for me. I quit when they went so godawful loony right-wing. I still have a silver bullet keychain with Charlton Heston's signature on it.

The NRA can kiss my ass. At gunpoint if need be.

Grow A Pair, Mr President

Andy Sullivan

After the neocon chorus on the Sunday talk-shows, with Butters and Lieberman doing their usual Likudnik dance, there's word that Obama might be wavering in picking the realist, candid Republican, Chuck Hagel, as defense secretary. Let's just say that if Obama allows Bill Kristol to scalp a Purple Heart veteran for defense - then he will be betraying the core base that got him the nomination and the presidency twice. People didn't vote for Obama to get a neoconservative-dictated foreign policy.

First the smearing and scalping of Rice; now the brutal AIPAC-led campaign against Hagel. I say: let the hearings begin, and let Hagel debate the wisdom of the Iraq war with those who campaigned so ferociously for it. Let a Purple Heart veteran Republican take on Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney. It would do the GOP a world of good as well.

So we'll see if, once again, Obama is rolled on the Middle East. If he is, we will know for sure he is not the change we believed in.

He could have left that last line out. Shovelling shit, and I mean that pretty literally, against the tide is a long, arduous, thankless task. Change comes over time and we're starting to see it.

He's certainly right about not letting the draft-dodging warmongers prevail over Hagel. His less-than-fawning approach to Israel is a good thing IMNSHO and would be a refreshing and necessary change.

Also, from Peter Beinart:

We’ve seen this before. From the 2009 settlement freeze fight to the 2011 call for a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines plus swaps, the Obama administration has a history of picking fights with the “pro-Israel” establishment and then backing down, which is worse than never picking the fight at all. When it comes to Israel policy, diverging from Washington orthodoxy requires genuine political conviction. In selecting Chuck Hagel, the Obama administration has found someone who has it. Whether the same can be said of the President himself remains to be seen.

Let me put it this way: if the draft-dodging, warmongering, right-wing, Israel-sucking, Likudnik, neocon bastards are against Hagel, then the President made the right choice and I'm for him and Obama better fight for him.

'Twas the night before Christmas in Boehnerville

Via Kos.

Has "Idiot America" Become More Idiotic?

Short answer: Yes. Not so short is this interview with Charles Pierce.

MK: Do you believe that FOX "News" is helping to create an alternative universe Idiot America bubble? You discuss the inanity of being Sean Hannity in your book, for instance.

CP: The bubble exists, and it is goddamn dangerous. It clearly was dangerous to Mitt Romney as a politician because it kept him from believing he was in trouble, right up to the moment they called the election the other way. The bubble is created when we go into denial that there are consequences to believing nonsense. It seems right now that the mother of the Newtown shooter may have been living partly in the bubble of survivalist paranoia. FOX has contributed to both of these bubbles.

MK: Let's look at the rabid denial that global warming exists. More than 80 percent of Republicans in Congress appear to believe that it does not exist - and many Democrats don't seem to see any imperative in resolving it. Here we see a climate change denial propaganda machine - in large part financed by the fossil fuel industry and polluting companies - having, it appears, successfully debunked the growing degradation of our planet. Are we in an age when there are simply no facts; only, as you have noted, falsehoods turned into realties by those who scream the loudest and get the most coverage on television?

CP: Again, the real danger is that we’re in an era where we think there are no consequences to believing nonsense. That’s the reason I went to Shishmaref in Alaska for the book. The people there think the whole “debate” is goddamn crazy.

MK: Are there any regional differences in Idiot America as far as numbers of people living in alternative realities?

CP: Living in them? No. Demanding that other people live in them? Yes. We have actual laws being passed in the South and West enshrining nonsense into law.

MK: One of your final chapters is entitled, "The Principles of Automatic Pilot." In it, you discuss how those who objected to the lies that were created to justify invading Iraq either didn't speak up or weren't listened to. You talk about those who understood terrorists better than anyone, but were ignored. How does this apply to "the principles of automatic pilot"?

CP: The metaphor was based on accounts from airplane crashes in which the pilots forgot to disengage the autopilot until too late. The actual human expert was defeated by the machine. The Iraq war was a bloodier example of what’s going on with the climate crisis. The more you knew, the easier you were to dismiss.

The corollary to which, seems to me, is the less you know and the louder you are, the harder you are to ignore. That esplains a lot.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

NRA: Place Volunteer Armed Guards at Every School in Nation
Says there are millions of out-of-work gun-toting middle-aged men available.

Queen Becomes First Monarch in Over a Century to Attend Prime Minister's Cabinet Meeting
Without jokes about royal family, meeting lasts less than five minutes.

Iran: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khanenei Has Own Facebook Page
Best not to unfriend him.

Stores Quickly Sell Out Last Batch of Hostess Twinkies
Lucky buyers will keep them for their grandchildren to enjoy.

Half of Americans Own Guns
To protect themselves from other half.

Besides being ironic, that may be the most illogical statement Ironic Times has ever made.

Here's-What's-Wrong-With-Our-Country Headline of the Day

Mosque arsonist tells court: ‘I only know what I hear on Fox News’

Fuckin' yeesh...

Neocons' Last Stand

Robert Parry on the neocons' view of Hagel as SecDef due largely to his stance on the Israel lobby. Worth a read.

The neocons were as stunned as Karl Rove and other GOP operatives when their predictions of a Romney landslide evaporated as the actual votes of the American people were counted. Instead of cashing in their chits with President Romney, the neocons were facing four more years on the outside-looking-in under President Obama.

Then, just days after Obama’s reelection, a second shoe dropped. One of the neocons’ last senior allies in the U.S. government, CIA Director Petraeus, was forced to resign as a result of a humiliating sex scandal.

The stunned neocons suddenly looked out over a Washington where they no longer held key government positions and few possessed top-secret security clearances. They still held lucrative jobs at think tanks and had prominent space on op-ed pages but their direct control of U.S. foreign policy was ending.

Thus, the significance of the neocon counteroffensive against Chuck Hagel, a generally popular Republican who served with distinction as a soldier during the Vietnam War. To demonstrate their continued clout in Washington, the neocons must show they can still claim some important scalps and can still frighten President Obama into retreat.

But the risk the neocons run is that their bold march in pursuit of Sen. Hagel’s scalp may turn out instead to be something of the Neocons’ Last Stand.

I'm down wid dat! Wishing the neocons a speedy demise, here's a little song for them.

Thanks to gypsytwo.