Bill Buckley

And this generation's 'Cronkite Moment'. Via Atrios.

Update:

Read Taylor Marsh too.

Pay up, Sucka

IRS exams found nearly three out of four churches, charities and other civic groups suspected of having violated restraints on political activity in the 2004 election actually did so, the agency said Friday.

...

I've said this for a while now. Churches, synagogues, and other houses of worship sit on some prime real estate that's not contributing to the tax base. This is America, separation of church and state and all that. Time to start contributing to our society instead of fucking our children and insinuating yourselves into our daily lives in ways that most of us don't want. It's high time you start supporting your community instead of taking from it. When I pay $8000 a year for shitty schools and poor to no services, it's time for you to kick in.

Dubai and The Bush Dynasty Deal with the Devil

Well, it's Saturday. We gotta go to the Big City today, that's Carson City, pilgrim, so while we're a-traipsin' over the hills an' through the woods, go read this BuzzFlash editorial.

The Dubai arrangement is perfectly reasonable to Bush: it's about the money. And as Kevin Phillips might tell you, for the Bush Dynasty, money and corporate cronyism trump national security any old day.

What you have here is a collision in the goals of our two real co-presidents: Rove for domestic affairs and Cheney for international affairs.

Maybe it was because Cheney was distracted with his big Saturday: a couple of beers, shooting some quail, shooting a man, followed by a "hold off the hangover" cocktail at the Armstrong ranch, an early night's sleep and desperate calls to Mary Matalin to bail him out.

Or maybe it is because Rove was distracted by a still possible indictment for betraying the nation by being involved in the outing of a CIA operative specializing in the tracking of illicit weapons of mass destruction.

But whatever the cause of the distraction, it's clear that the fault line of the insane clown posse has temporarily been exposed for all to see, even the Kool-Aid drinking rubber stamp Republican Congress.

I'll be thinkin' 'bout y'all while I'm cruisin' past Lake Tahoe. Later.

It's come to this

They've reconstituted the Underground Railroad.

The Iraqi Army

I posted on them the other day. More today from Dr. Attaturk:

About six months ago it was admitted that there was but ONE IRAQI batallion capable of fighting on its own without the United States help. But Rummy et al said "hey they are really progressing in their training".

Then a few weeks ago we heard that after all these months of training it was again admitted that there was still but ONE IRAQI batallion capable of fighting on its own without the United States help.

Progress.

And the news gets even BETTER a few weeks later when you find out a few weeks later that there are NO IRAQI batallions capable of fighting on their own without the United States help.

Altogether now....

...

So what; are we gonna be there forever or are we gonna cut and run? Seems like the only two options to me.

Update:

Lurch expands.

"Real" conservative men

Jesus' General does satire that runs very close to the truth:

Serving in the vanguard of the Glorious Conservative Christian Revolution isn't easy. It's very hard work. I think that's why it attracts a certain kind of man. We're all conservative and Christian of course, but we also have other qualities that some might perceive as weaknesses.

You see we're a frightened bunch. We're scared of nearly everything. That's why we own so many guns and are so gung ho about sending poor people out to shoot, bomb, torture, and imprison those who scare us. That fear might seem like a negative quality at first glance, but it, along with impotence and feelings of powerlessness, is what drives us to achieve so much.

This probably isn't a major revelation to most of you. It's pretty damned obvious to anyone who's thought about how advertisers target us. Switch Rush, Hannity, or O'Reilly on and you'll hear wall-to-wall ads for male enhancement products and wealth building seminars. You don't have to be a student of Freud to see that they're targeting our fears of powerlessness and impotence. [my em]

...

'Enhancements' don't make you a man. Neither do guns, money, or a big dog. Women who would love you, or not, on the basis of whether you have them, or not, aren't worth having anyway.

Friday Cattle Dog Blogging

Princess Shayna is mad at Preznit Anything-For-A-Buck for trying to sell out our nation's ports to terrorist enablers. "Is he effin' kidding me?" She said to her friend across the street.

Port Poetry

From MadKane:

It's Surely Snowing In Hell
By Madeleine Begun Kane

I never thought I'd see the day
That I'd agree with Tom DeLay,
And Fristy too and Peter King,
To port sales we're all saying nay.

George Dubya ought to be quite proud,
Cause Dub's united quite a crowd.
The Dems and Libs and GOP
All think the port deal stinks out loud.

Thanks again, Sis.

The light of day

You knew this port thing wasn't done yet. When you uncover some Chimp shenanigans, there's always more beneath the surface. UPI via Maru:

WASHINGTON, Feb. 24 (UPI) -- A United Arab Emirates government-owned company is poised to take over port terminal operations in 21 American ports, far more than the six widely reported. [my em]

...

More on gooned-up Dick

Yesterday I posted about a report coming out that The Dick was gooned up when he blasted his buddy while booze-binging "hunting" in a Republican Green Zone in Texas. Doug Thompson of Capitol Hill Blue has caught a predictable load of crap from the hardly-ever-right who claim he "made it up" for various reasons. He replies:

Running with the story brought the usual chorus of boo-birds, the armchair commandos who dominate the partisan bulletin boards, claiming that I sit up here in my mountaintop home and just make these things up.

In reality, I could be doing just that. But why should I? The bizarre antics of the Bush administration provide far more interesting fodder for stories than anything my imagination could possibly conjure up.

Others talk about truth as if it were some divine providence of a political party or philosophical organization. Truth is non-partisan. It crosses party lines and follows no philosophical path.

We piss off partisans from both sides because we follow the truth wherever it leads. We don't give a damn who gets mad or who gets exposed. We don't apply different rules to different parties and all are held to the same standards.

We don't play favorites. Never have, never will. And we don't have to make this stuff up. The truth is far more interesting, even if the partisans don't want to believe it.

I'll betcha that the right-wing partisans get pissed off about ten to one over us lefties. With good reason. Their idea of "truth" involves more smoke than mirrors.

Mr. Thompson goes into considerably more interesting detail than the quotes. Read 'em, cowboy.

Cheweeney can't get charged with this because he was sober by the time the cops were allowed to show up, so the only reason I'm going on about this is it goes towards his character and sense of personal responsibility for his choices and actions, or rather his lack of it.

New York and New Jersey lead the way

NYTimes

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey will break the lease of a big container terminal at Port Newark to stop a company based in Dubai from taking over part of the operation there, the agency's chairman said yesterday.

"Fundamentally, this is a landlord-tenant dispute," said Mr. Coscia, who is a lawyer. "We're terminating their lease because they sublet illegally."

There was no pending dispute with the operators of the container terminal before the Dubai deal surfaced. But, Mr. Coscia said, the lease states that a tenant must get the agency's approval of a transfer of ownership interest.

"Our approval wasn't sought, so we haven't provided it," he said.

Good on yer, City Slickers. Go with what ya know.

Hoist by his own fearmongering

I've been waiting for days for Paul Krugman to weigh in on the seaport deal. I'm not disappointed.

The storm of protest over the planned takeover of some U.S. port operations by Dubai Ports World doesn't make sense viewed in isolation. The Bush administration clearly made no serious effort to ensure that the deal didn't endanger national security. But that's nothing new - the administration has spent the past four and a half years refusing to do anything serious about protecting the nation's ports.

So why did this latest case of sloppiness and indifference finally catch the public's attention? Because this time the administration has become a victim of its own campaign of fearmongering and insinuation.

Now comes the port deal. Mr. Bush assures us that "people don't need to worry about security." But after all those declarations that we're engaged in a global war on terrorism, after all the terror alerts declared whenever the national political debate seemed to be shifting to questions of cronyism, corruption and incompetence, the administration can't suddenly change its theme song to "Don't Worry, Be Happy."

Mr. Bush shouldn't really be losing his credibility as a terrorism fighter over the ports deal, which, after careful examination (which hasn't happened yet), may turn out to be O.K. Instead, Mr. Bush should have lost his credibility long ago over his diversion of U.S. resources away from the pursuit of Al Qaeda and into an unnecessary war in Iraq, his bungling of that war, and his adoption of a wrongful imprisonment and torture policy that has blackened America's reputation.

But there is, nonetheless, a kind of rough justice in Mr. Bush's current predicament. After 9/11, the American people granted him a degree of trust rarely, if ever, bestowed on our leaders. He abused that trust, and now he is facing a storm of skepticism about his actions - a storm that sweeps up everything, things related and not.

He should be facing impeachment and a rope. Please go read.

What it does...

I've tried (along with most of the reality-based veterans) to give folks a taste of what it's like in combat and the effects of that on the human mind in the years that follow, dealing with post traumatic stress disorder and the effect it has on the vet and their family. In light of the South Dakota abortion ruling (hateful cocksuckers), ReddHedd relays a personal experience and illustrates the after effects of rape are almost the same as combat troops face:

...

As I said, I was young -- but despite how horribly brutal the rape was, I was lucky. I never had to face the choice of an abortion because I did not get pregnant. Thank God.

But every single time I hear someone talk about being pro-life without giving a thought to the woman involved, I cringe. Because I could have easily been impregnated against my will. Violently, viciously impregnated.

And now, some young girl in South Dakota who is raped and finds herself pregnant will be forced to carry the child of her rapist, feeling it grow and move, a daily reminder of the rape -- with the flashbacks, the terror, the nightmares, the gut-wrenching fear -- everything that you have to overcome after being raped, along with handling the emotions and the responsibilities that come along with a pregnancy. [my em]

...

And again, the loudest voices in the 'pro-life' movement are men, the group most uniquely unqualified to comment on the female experience. The 'pro-lifers' merely want to keep women from having sex and punish them if they do. Being forced to carry the child of your rapist, I believe, is criminal in itself.

...

Last I checked, rape and incest victims didn't ask for the violent, terrifying, horrible action taken against them. But clearly someone in South Dakota disagrees.

...

You might as well send these poor women to Iraq. The effect on them will be the same.

Update:

Democratic Veteran adds his two cents.

Fire me up...

First thing in the morning. I see this at Atrios and it makes my blood boil:

I wonder if we'll ever really get the full story of why Hitchens still, in his own weird way, defends David Irving. Obligatory disclaimer: I of course think having laws which lock people up for odious speech is a really bad idea.

But there really is no distinction between "Holocaust Denial" and "Holocaust Revisionism," except to the extent that the latter is an attempt to put a legitimate gloss on the former, sort of like the difference between young Earth creationism and creation science.

...

First off, Hitchens is a drunken idiot. He defends this:

...

In a 1991 speech, Irving said, "Until 1988, I believed that there had been something like a Holocaust ... but [in] 1988 ... I met people who knew differently and could prove to me that story was just a legend."

In 1990: "The holocaust of Germans in Dresden really happened. That of the Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz is an invention."

And, again, in 1991: "More women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz."

...

I've been to the camps. I've seen what was done in the name of 'racial purity' and it's why these skinheads in this country piss me off so much. As a German, I've seen what fanatics did to the land I love, the place of my ancestry. I go to the graves of relatives lost who were conscripted into the army to defend that horror. And I've seen what Germans have done to ensure it never happens again. When some drunk defends a denier, an idiot who actually sees some good in Hiter's policies, it makes me nuts. Yes, the curtailing of free speech should be bothersome to us, but you're not allowed to yell 'fire' in a movie theater either.

Farwood

I got a kick out of this one Mrs. G sent me in an e-mail:

FARWOOD

"Hello, is this here the Sheriff's Office?"

"Yes. What can I do for you?"

"This here is Floyd. I'm calling to report my neighbor, Virgil Smith. He's drillin' holes in his farwood and hiding drugs inside!"

"Thank you very much for the call, sir."

The next day, the Sheriff & his deputies descend on Virgil's house. They search the shed where the firewood is kept.

Using axes, they split every piece of wood, but find no drugs. They sneer at Virgil and leave.

The phone rings at Virgil's house.

"Hey, Virgil! This here is Floyd. Did the Sheriff come?"

"Yeah!"

"Did they split yer farwood?"

"Yep!"

"Happy Birthday, buddy!"

(Who says rednecks aren't real bright?!)

Heh. Good thing they didn't notice the meth lab in the kitchen, huh?

How Neo-Cons Sabotaged Iran's Help on al Qaeda

Or, "Ideology trumps reality". From IPS News:

The United States and Iran were on a course to work closely together on the war against al Qaeda and its Taliban sponsors in Afghanistan in late 2001 and early 2002 -- until Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stepped in to scuttle that cooperation, according to officials who were involved at the time.

The bureaucracy recognised that there was an opportunity to work with Iran not only on stabilising Afghanistan but on al Qaeda as well. As reported by the Washington Post on Oct. 22, 2004, the State Department's policy planning staff had written a paper in late November 2001 suggesting that the United States should propose more formal arrangements for cooperation with Iran on fighting al Qaeda.

That would have involved exchanging intelligence information with Tehran as well as coordinating border sweeps to capture al Qaeda fighters and leaders who were already beginning to move across the border into Pakistan and Iran. The CIA agreed with the proposal, according to the Post's sources, as did the head of the White House Office for Combating Terrorism, Ret. Gen. Wayne A. Downing.

But the cooperation against al Qaeda was not the priority for the anti-Iranian interests in the White House and the Pentagon. Investigative journalist Bob Woodward's book "Plan of Attack" recounts that Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen J. Hadley, who chaired an inter-agency committee on Iran policy dealing with issues surrounding Afghanistan, learned that the White House intended to include Iran as a member of the "Axis of Evil" in Bush's State of the Union message in January.

So they offered help and we told 'em to get fucked so the Chimp could look like a big man. No wonder they're tellin' the West to get fucked now.

We certainly have a buncha dildos in charge of our country. Please go read the rest.

Veep was gooned up

Got this from Lurch at Main and Central. Lurch says:

Capitol Hill (yeah - I know) reports this morning that Secret Service agents in Mr Cheney's security detail have filed multiple reports that Mr Cheney was drinking on the hunt and was in fact as drunk as a Republican left alone in a cash room at a casino.

Secret Service agents guarding Vice President Dick Cheney when he shot Texas lawyer Harry Whittington on a hunting outing two weeks ago say Cheney was "clearly inebriated" at the time of the shooting.

Agents observed several members of the hunting party, including the Vice President, consuming alcohol before and during the hunting expedition, the report notes, and Cheney exhibited "visible signs" of impairment, including slurred speech and erratic actions.

According to those who have talked with the agents and others present at the outing, Cheney was drunk when he gunned down his friend and the day-and-a-half delay in allowing Texas law enforcement officials on the ranch where the shooting occurred gave all members of the hunting party time to sober up.

The prez and The Dick love to go to Texas. They can get drunk as lords, with all kinds of folks - donors, henchmen, cops, doctors, cronies, etc. - to cover up their their knee-walkin', commode-huggin', drunken indiscretions and keep 'em out of the public eye and/or from bein' charged with anything. Beats the shit outta soberin' up in jail like us peasants get to do, huh?

Poetry

I think these are way bitchin'. From Firedoglake:

The bronze medal goes to:

The Ballad of Swagger and Scowler

They came from Wyoming and Texas, addicted to
power and drink;
They bullied and lied, they tortured and spied till most folks
were too scared to blink;
But when Scowl shot a hunter he thought was a bird and
Swag let New Orleans drown,
Folks finally saw what these guys really were: a crusty old
coot and a clown.

by a littlemusicalityplease

In second place, and by only the smallest fraction (one vote), our silver medalist is:

An accident it must have been,
And not a planned attack
Because Dick shot him in the face
Instead of in the back.

by rageneau

And the gold goes to:

If epitaphs were polygraphs,
This, terse and edifying,
Would crown the veep in final sleep:
Here lies Big Time--still lying.

by 88

Yella...not

The most excellent Friend o' the Brain, Patrick Yelladog, has gone through some changes. The best is that his software will let me commment again. Go take a look.

Bend over . . . continued

That Rethug bankruptcy law? Remember when we all said the only people it will hurt are the ones who really need the help? Well...

...

"Contrary to the claims of proponents of bankruptcy-law changes that they would zero in on the alleged legions of 'deadbeats,'" the new law is doing no measurable good, said Brad Botes, executive director of the bankruptcy lawyers' group. "Instead, (it has) put new hurdles in the path of people who are already flat on their back due to financial crises over which they have no control."

...

Details at CorrenteWire.