No Saturday Emmylou Blogging

I'm being lazy. Fuck everything until at least Tuesday.

Headin' out

We're going out to the coast for a few days for Mrs. G's 50 year High School reunion. Blogging will be light to bupkis, but I'll do what I can. See yas.

Headline of the Day

Maddow to Iraq War architects on TV: ‘Your opinion is no longer required on matters of war and peace’

Word.

Note to Rummie: You better keep your lying pie hole shut and thank your lucky stars you ain't in prison.

Headline of the Day II

If We Stay Out of Syria, Assad Has Bush to Thank

No shit.

Quote of the Day

Tag line from a piece by Charles P. Pierce on the Syria hearings:

John Boehner has no power. John McCain has no power. Only the Stupid has the power now. Fear the Stupid.

Headline of the Day

REPUBLICANS OFFER SYRIA STRATEGY: “WE MUST DEFUND OBAMACARE”

Why do I have no trouble believing that?

The Burn

If it's Wednesday it must be Morford, back from Burning Man with 92 photos.

Keep in mind, this gallery is but a tiny sample, a glimpse, a taste; I’d say it represents not even 10% of what’s really out there. And it’s utterly impossible to capture the tremendous scale of the thing, the vast flatness, two miles across and 360 degrees of brain-melting, body-blasting, anima-pumping, skin-scorching sensory overload like you can find nowhere else in the world. Trust me. And that’s not just the stimulants talking. Mostly.

That's the only warning you're going to get. Heh. Enjoy.

The End of U.S. Imperium - Finally!

David Stockman

Next week Congress can do far more than stop a feckless Tomahawk barrage on a small country that is already a graveyard of civil war and sectarian slaughter. By voting “no,” it can trigger the end of the American Imperium—five decades of incessant meddling, bullying, and subversion around the globe that has added precious little to national security but left America fiscally exhausted and morally diminished.
...

The screaming strategic truth is that America no longer has any industrial state enemies capable of delivering military harm to its shores: Russia has become a feeble kleptocracy run by a loud-mouthed thief, and the Communist Party oligarchs in China would face a devastating economic collapse within months were they to attack their American markets for sneakers and Apples. So the real question now before Congress is, how is it possible that the peace-loving citizens of America, facing no industrial-scale military threat from anywhere on the planet, find themselves in a constant state of war? The answer is that they have been betrayed by the Beltway political class, which is in thrall to a vast warfare state apparatus that endlessly invents specious reasons for meddling, spying, intervention, and occupation.

I don't necessarily agree with all the writer's points but I'd like to see the end of American Imperialism, in particular the mess we've made for ourselves in the Middle East. Please read the rest.

"He knew that this was so wrong that he didn’t want to tell anyone"

Yes, Obamacare is going to be a disaster. To all the usual suspects' bottom lines.

Raw Story

Georgia governor gets paid through secret PAC to obstruct Obamacare
...

Contributors to Real PAC include Aetna, Humana, Blue Cross, United Health care and other interests that want to keep health insurance premiums and other costs as high as possible. Bryan Long of activist group Better Georgia told Raw Story that the list of donors shows who Gov. Deal really works for.
...

“What’s remarkable about this isn’t that there’s money in politics,” he continued. “We all know there’s money in politics. He knew that this was so wrong that he didn’t want to tell anyone. He tried to keep it a secret for two years.”\
...

Last week, state insurance commissioner Ralph Hudgens was caught on tape boasting to a crowd of supporters that his office is deliberately obstructing the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. As Floyd County Republicans called out “Amen!” and applauded, Hudgens said that his office is interfering with the certification of the ACA’s insurance policy “navigators,” individuals hired to help consumers choose policies on the open market.

“Let me tell you what we’re doing (about Obamacare),” he said. “Everything in our power to be an obstructionist.”

Got caught because he bragged about it. Nothing will happen to this yingyang because IOKIYAR. Business as usual. Yeesh.

9 Years

Today is the 9th anniversary of my tour at the Brain. Fixer started it on 4 July 2004. Lotta water under the bridge. I came along a little later, and depending on who's telling this war story, I was either left on his porch in a basket with a $50 bill pinned to my chest or he tracked me down with dogs. Either way, he gave me a home and I've never looked back. I didn't even know how to cut and paste when I started. I know a lotta tricks now.

A few specs: We've had 1,126,894 pageviews; 20,471 posts; 12,471 comments; and thank you to our 53 followers. We get 1000+ pageviews per day on average, and have had as many as 5000. The trick is to use the same headline as the article I'm posting so it pops up on browsers. Heh. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it!

A lot has changed in 9 years. When we got going, Kerry was running for POTUS against the Chimp, and Repuglican't Rule lasted 4 more years. Nowadays, the Repugs are well on their way to being an officially backward and shrinking party of old scared Southern white people and their ilk elsewhere. Their antics have gone from day-in-and-day-out outrageous to mostly comedy gold, and I'm enjoying the shit out of them swirling the drain.

On the federal level, that is. If you live in one of the states they run, times are bad. Throw 'em out in '14, '16, whenever you get the chance. Show up and vote. Dems in general dropped the ball big time in '10 and I hope we've learned our lesson: Off-year elections get less turnout, but ALL the morons we're trying to defend against crawl out from under their rocks and vote and so must we or we're screwed. 2010 NEVER AGAIN!

I figured out early on that opinion writing is too much work so I find real writers who say things I like and quote them with short, pithy even, diabolical genius comments of my own. I'm spending more time on Facebook these days, like Fixer is, and I know the Brain has suffered for it. On the flip side, I get a lotta good material off there.

I discovered I'm not as liberal as I once thought I was. I believe in liberty and justice for all, and if that makes me a godless commie fuck, so be it. Damn, I wish a 'bagger would say that to my face just so I could tell him to tell his friends he got those shiners from a pussy liberal!

I believe that Repugs in any of their 5 factions are the worst enemy our country has ever faced, and anything else is better. Despite his flaws, I'm still down with Obama and will be with Hillary too.

This isn't as much fun without Fixer.

Thank you all for reading and commenting. You're the reason I plug away at this. Here's to 9 more.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

PUBLIC DOESN'T SUPPORT STRIKE ON SYRIA
Supports strike on Time Warner Cable.

Heh.

Revealed: NYPD Has Secret Spy Cab
Discovered when someone got a ride from the airport and was driven directly to their destination and charged the proper amount.

Obviously unclear on the concept.

Oxford English Dictionary Adds “Twerk,” “Selfies” and “Vom”
Removes “linguist,” “spinning” and “grave.”

Unpaid Laborers Begin Raising Billions for Their Wealthy Masters
College football's back.

Women Protest Across the Globe August 25th
on Go Topless Day
And you missed that?

How the Republican Party lost its mind

Excellent article at Salon.

Now, in 2013, we have the politics that 50 years of this process have created. The Democratic Party has fewer conservatives than it once did, but is still a broadly coalitional party with liberal and moderate elements. It controls the coasts, has strength in the industrial Midwest, and is making inroads in the upper, more urbanized South and in Florida. It confronts a Republican Party almost wholly dependent on the interior states of the old Confederacy. (The party continues to win in the mountain and prairie West, but the region is too sparsely populated to provide any real electoral heft.) Because of its demographic weakness, it is more beholden than ever to the intensity of its most extreme voters. This has engendered a death spiral in which it must take increasingly radical positions to drive these voters to the polls, positions that in turn alienate ever larger segments of the population, making these core voters even more crucial — and so on. We have a name these days for the electoral residue produced by this series of increasingly rigorous purifications. We call it “the Tea Party.”
...

Unfortunately, our government isn’t designed to function in these conditions. The peculiarities of our system — a Senate, armed with the filibuster, that gives Wyoming’s 576,000 people as much power as California’s 38,000,000; gerrymandered districts in the House; separate selection of the executive and the legislature; a chronically underfunded elections process, generally in partisan hands and in desperate need of rationalization — simply won’t permit it. What we get instead is paralysis — or worse. The Republican Party, particularly in the House, has turned into the legislative equivalent of North Korea — a political outlier so extreme it has lost the ability to achieve its objectives through normal political means (my em). Its only recourse is to threats (increasingly believable) that it will blow up the system rather than countenance this-or-that lapse from conservative dogma. This was the strategy it pursued in the debt ceiling debacle of 2011, and if firebrands such as Ted Cruz and Mike Lee have their way it will guide the party’s approach to the same issue this fall, and perhaps to government funding (including “Obamacare”) as well. Realignment and polarization have led us to gridlock and instability.

The relentless radicalization of the Republican Party since 1964 is the most important single event in the political history of the United States since the New Deal. It has significantly shaped the course of our government and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But this means it has also shaped the individual life of every citizen— the complex amalgam of possibilities and opportunities available (or not) to each of us. The conservative visionaries of the ‘50s and ‘60s wanted a new world. We’re all living in it now.

We have been for thirty years and it sucks.