Put a cork in it...

You vill click, ja?

AFP via Raw Story

A prosecutor in Bolzano, northern Italy seized wine bottle labels on Wednesday bearing a portrait of Hitler and other Nazis from a winery near the Austrian border, the company said.

The Lunardelli company said it had sold around 20,000 bottles featuring the Hitler labels per year. It also sold wine with images of Mussolini on the label, which were not seized by police.

The bottles make up part of a product line started in 1995 called the "historic collection", selling wine with labels with the faces of Winston Churchill, Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist philosopher, Adolph Hitler, Karl Marx, Napoleon Bonaparte, Benito Mussolini, and Che Guevara.

I wonder if they have Bush on a label in their "Dictators and Despots" line? Oh, right, he's in the bottle, not on it...

The Regional Pist, Regina's Proudly Independent Drunken News has more which you can go see. Apparently, folks from Northern Europe ain't too pleased with what the paisans in Southern Europe are up to.

I'm not a wine man. To me, Italian wine is red and comes in a raffia-covered bottle with a big plate of spaghetti.

I tried some German wine once. I think Gewürztraminer is German for 'battery acid'.

Update:

On a related note:

British professor wins prize for bar-fight research

Done a little research on that topic my own self over the years. The 'prizes' I got took days to wear off and sometimes required sunglasses even after dark. Heh.

Rowdy bars may no longer be quite as dangerous thanks to a British professor who won a criminology prize on Wednesday for his work showing how injuries from broken glass can be reduced.

Limey beer mugs are heavy and have handles. You can get a pretty good swing goin' with one of 'em. My preferred method, right in between the obligatory "Oh yeah?" and the "You !@#$%^&*...", is: raise mug to lips, drain said of suds, lower the mug to the length of your arm in a cross-body fashion and backhand the sucker right in the chops with it. Try to surprise him. If you do it in a nice smooth motion you'll get extra style points in addition to maybe not getting hit back! A good follow-through helps with that, in other words: Apply, repeat as necessary.

If you can, hit your opponent with a bottle of ketchup - if it breaks, he'll think he's bleeding to death. Fight over. You win.

One word of caution: Be prepared to vibrate for several minutes after clockin' someone with an unbreakable bottle!

Saturday whorage

No whoring of a new chapter today. We'll be starting a new story next week and I'm still collecting input for which one I'll post. Vote here if you like.

Pimp your own stuff in comments. See yas later, got a honey-do list to work on. Heh ...

They get letters ...

[A big Brain welcome to Sideshow readers.]

MoveOn, from my Inbox:

Dear MoveOn member,

Yesterday, an amazing thing happened. After the Senate's shameful vote, and after President Bush called MoveOn "disgusting,"1 our email started to fill up with messages like this one:

I'm currently in Iraq. I do not agree with this war, and if I did support this war, it would not matter. You have the RIGHT to speak the truth. We KNOW that you support us. Thank you for speaking out for being our voice. We do not have a voice. We are overshooted by those who say that we soldiers do not support organizations like MoveOn. WE DO.

YOU ARE OUR voice.

***
All day, messages from vets and military family members kept pouring into our email, many of them aimed at the Senate:

I have given a son to this country. My brother, my father, my uncle have all served honorably and bravely. I am a loyal American. I am outraged and sick to death of the tactics this administration uses to try to silence dissent to a war that is unjust, built and maintained on lies, political power, and greed. I was content to let others fight more loudly, but no more.
–Sharyn W., NC

I am a prior soldier who served in Iraq for 13 months, and am now an expecting mom with a husband who is deployed in Baghdad. I don't think I can ever forgive the Bush administration for the lies that tricked America into this war and hurt my family so badly. I am ashamed of those American politicians who would condemn an organization for practicing the Freedom of Speech that so many soldiers have died for.
–Danielle B., OH

As a US Navy veteran and an Iraq war veteran of over a year I want to ask, What has happened to us? What has happened to our voice? Where is this country going with stopping free speech and free press? ... Every time I think of the long nights I had in Anbar remembering what I was fighting for, well here it is....
–Ahmad H., LA

Anybody in Washington listening?

Update:

The lovely Avedon is as annoyed as I am at the Dems who caved on this stupid resolution against MoveOn:

...

How dare you?

Have you ever seen the Senate condemn Saxby Chambless for morphing his Democratic opponent with Osama bin Laden?

Have you ever seen the Senate condemn Ann Coulter for calling for the assassination of a Supreme Court justice?

Have you ever seen the Senate condemn Fred Phelps?

And what about the attacks on General Wesley Clark, or the treatment of General Shinseki? Did they condemn that? Did they even manage to muster up a little outrage over the full-scale attack on anyone who'd ever been awarded a Purple Heart during the 2004 campaign?

No.

But the Republicans call on you to condemn a mainstream organization that tells the truth about Petreaus disgracing the uniform to act as Bush's personal political shill and you fall right in line. How dare you?.

I think I can speak for every Maryland voter when I say we did not vote for you to go to Washington just to condemn your own supporters.

We sent you there to hold this administration accountable, to restore the Constitution, and to end the occupation.

When are you going to start doing that?

...

Our Acme economy

Paul Krugman on the declining almighty dollar, thanks George:

Lots of buzz suddenly about the possibility of a sharp fall in the dollar. The Canadian dollar is back at parity with the greenback; there are rumors that the Saudis are planning to diversify into euros, and maybe even that the Chinese might break the dollar peg. A nice summary at Barry Ritholtz’s blog The Big Picture.

So, according to the story, one of these days there will be a Wile E. Coyote moment for the dollar: the moment when the cartoon character, who has run off a cliff, looks down and realizes that he’s standing on thin air – and plunges. In this case, investors suddenly realize that Stein’s Law applies — “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop” – and they realize they need to get out of dollars, causing the currency to plunge. Maybe the dollar’s Wile E. Coyote moment has arrived – although, again, I’ve been wrong about this so far.

My personal opinion, and I know nothing about economics but that's never stopped me, is that the rest of the world is seeing Bush drag our economy into the shitter with him, or maybe they're just punishing us for his misdeeds, and are looking elsewhere for a stable currency standard. In any case, Bush is getting us fucked over as he oversees the decline of the United States. Happy legacy, fuzznuts.

We Have Seen the Enemy — And Surrendered

If you're interested in health care for everybody, go read Barbara Ehrenreich:

Bow your heads and raise the white flags. After facing down the Third Reich, the Japanese Empire, the U.S.S.R., Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein, the United States has met an enemy it dares not confront – the American private health insurance industry.

...the Republican idea of actually feeding the private insurers by making it mandatory to buy their product. Will I be arrested if I resist paying $10,000 a year for a private policy laden with killer co-pays and deductibles?

Note: The private health insurance industry is not big because it relentlessly seeks out new customers. Unlike any other industry, this one grows by rejecting customers. No matter how shabby you look, Cartier, Lexus, or Nordstrom’s will happily take your money. Not Aetna. If you have a prior conviction – excuse me, a pre-existing condition – it doesn’t want your business. Private health insurance is only for people who aren’t likely to ever get sick. In fact, why call it “insurance,” which normally embodies the notion of risk-sharing? This is extortion.

And what about the two to three million insurance industry employees whose sole job it is to turn down claims? Well, I have a plan for them: It’s called unemployment. What country in its right mind would pay millions of people to deny other people health care?

Well, pretty much alone in the industrialized so-called civilized nations, THIS ONE. Not in its right mind at all, just greedy capitalists.

The time of robber baron health care for obscene profit is past. The 'insurance' companies know it and are fighting tooth and nail to preserve their own money spinning scam, but the writing is on the wall. They are like dinosaurs except that these dinosaurs are fighting the meteorite that will make them extinct with shitpots full of cash to legislators.

Déjà fuckin' vu all over again...

Yeesh...

That was the closest I could come to puke green.

Another Bush Exercise in Futility - So What's New?

AlterNet

This fall, Americans are going to witness a brutal and ham-fisted "crackdown" on illegal immigration by the Bush Administration. It will be a stark and tragic illustration of what happens when a vocal and well-organized minority of hardliners hijacks the country's legislative process.

The results are entirely predictable - the results of bad public policy are in some ways easier to forecast than good. [...]

In every case that people blame foreign-born workers for decimating native employment in an industry such as roofing or meat-packing there were lax regulations and busted unions --the conditions that allowed employers to turn them into undesirable occupations for Americans -- before there was a shift to undocumented workers.

The crackdown will hurt a few employers that rely on illegal immigrants, but anyone who thinks the Bush Administration -- effectively a mouthpiece for corporate America -- will truly threaten employers' supply of cheap labor doesn't appreciate how great the cost of losing our immigrant workforce would be.

After a few months of these photo-op raids, Bush will declare victory over illegal immigration, and cite statistics showing that the flow of immigrants from Latin America has decreased. The claim will be bogus, but the data will be legit -- the current wave of immigration peaked in 2001 and was decreasing before the right realized that immigrant-bashing was a good, pseudo-populist wedge issue.

That brings us to the easiest prediction of them all: despite the fact that the flow of immigrants has been decreasing since well before Bush decided to make a showy crackdown, most reporters will be too lazy to fact-check the administration's claims and a lot of Americans will end up believing a policy that could never in a million years work is in fact working beautifully.

Sounds about par for Bush's course: convince people that chicken shit is chicken salad and they'll happily chow down. Mmmmm - please sir, my I have another?

Here's the money line:

More likely, he is trying to punish the hardliners within his base who have derailed all the efforts to pass a balanced set of immigration reforms. After all, it is not often that a senior Republican official announces a new White House policy and then says, as Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff did recently, that "there will be some unhappy consequences for the economy out of doing this."

That's it in a nutshell - the one - the only - policy Bush has gotten anywhere in the vicinity of being right, and the racist xenophobic good christians and phony patriots in his base won't have anything to do with it.

Those morons want a crackdown. Actually, they'd like to see everybody with a complexion darker than Appliance White sent back "where they came from". They want to see laws that have been ignored in favor of cheap labor for as long as anybody can remember enforced mightily all at once and the devil take the hindmost.

Bush is saying, "You don't like my policy? You don't think we need these people? OK then, WATCH THIS!"

Bush won't let it go too far. He's still beholden to the other half of his party, the big money half, so he'll use a lotta flaps and no throttle as usual, and give the morons what they want without actually doing anything, and then he'll lie about how much he's accomplished. As usual.

He's just gonna fuck with a lot of 'little people' and make their lives miserable. As usual.

God responds to lawsuit

Following up on my previous post, the Almighty has apparently heard that He is being sued and gives enough of a Holy Shit to respond. From AP:

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — A legislator who filed a lawsuit against God has gotten something he might not have expected: a response. One of two court filings from "God" came Wednesday under otherworldly circumstances, according to John Friend, clerk of the Douglas County District Court in Omaha.

"This one miraculously appeared on the counter. It just all of a sudden was here — poof!" Friend said.

Poof - just like that! Yep, that's Him.

Chambers, a self-proclaimed agnostic who often criticizes Christians, said his filing was triggered by a federal lawsuit he considers frivolous. He said he's trying to makes the point that anybody can sue anybody.

Not so, says "God." His response argues that the defendant is immune from some earthly laws and the court lacks jurisdiction.

It adds that blaming God for human oppression and suffering misses an important point.

"I created man and woman with free will and next to the promise of immortal life, free will is my greatest gift to you," according to the response, as read by Friend.

There was no contact information on the filing, although St. Michael the Archangel is listed as a witness, Friend said.

If you don't think God has a sense of humor, and a sick one at that, look around at the other shoppers next time you go to Wal-Mart. Or at Bush.

Is it just me?

As I watch the news coverage of the "Jena 6", I am overcome with a sense of anger and sadness. Unlike some of you youngsters, I remember the civil rights marches (and atrocities) of the 1960s. I remember Watts and Newark. Why, 40 years later, are we going through it again? Our pal Scout Prime has the same feelings:

...

I grew up in a small all white town in Wisconsin. I was idealistic and though I thought I knew what was going on, I soon learned in Mississippi that I was quite naive. Each day we would work on the playground sometimes taking breaks to walk to the store for snacks. On several ocassions as cars drove past us someone would lean out the window and yell at us..."ni**er lovers." The town knew who we were and why we were there and didn't like it one bit. A few college students were in our group and they were working on voter registration. One day one told us that he had been out in the country talking on the porch with a woman about registering to vote. A pick-up truck pulled up and 3 men got out. One held a machine gun and told him he better leave. Of course he did.

...

You can thank the Republicans for this, for pandering to the base of racists, warmongers, and radical Christians. It sickens me that racism has become en vogue once again, where people feel confident spewing their hateful garbage with impunity. Thanks again, Mr. Bush.

The plane! The plane!

...

Sadly, these stories are true, while so much that is said about Iraq is myth and delusion. As the famous American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn wrote about armed conflict, there is “the real war and the propaganda war.” During the congressional hearings about the surge, I kept thinking of Tattoo on Fantasy Island, half expecting Ambassador Crocker to tug on Gen. Petraeus’s sleeve and say, “Look, boss, da plane.” Smiles, everyone, smiles!

...

The Canadians, it seems, still practice journalism the way it was intended. Excellent article, courtesy (along with the pic) of FDL.

I rest my case ...

Remember what I wrote this morning?

...

I'm tired of the laziness and ass-covering. I'm tired of my elected representatives being scared of bullies. I'm tired of people being resigned to the fact that anything they do will be shot down so why bother trying ...

Well Hell, I didn't have to wait long to prove my case.

The GOP-introduced resolution condemning MoveOn just passed by a huge margin, 72-25. Roughly half the Democrats in the Senate supported it.

...

I can take it. I'm a Mets fan.

Saddam killed him ...

Seems, according to our Nitwit-in-Chief President, Saddam killed Nelson Mandela*. Can we send the guys with the white suits, butterfly nets, and rubber wallpaper to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue now?

*"Fuck, somebody shoulda told me," Nelson probably said today.

He had me worried ...

I figured our pal Creature had gone over the deep end:

Dear President Bush,

Let me begin by saying that you are the greatest president ever and it is my pleasure, as a citizen of the United States, to serve you in any way I can.

...

But he links to the Sidney Blumenthal article I was gonna blog about, but read Creature's letter and then read Blumenthal. It's too fucked up for fiction.

Assholes v. Dickheads

Birmingham Blues - Suburban Housewife Gone Bad (Intriguing, no?)

This is too funny. Larry Klaymans’ Judicial Watch, the right-wing Scaife-funded “watchdog” group that spent most of the 1990’s suing the Clinton administration, is suing Ari Fleischer’s pro-war Freedom’s Watch for trademark infringement. Seems the TV show West Wing parodied the litigious organization back in 2000, creating a fictional group called Freedom Watch. Klayman was flattered, and bought rights to the name.

Right-wing smackdowns are so entertaining.

Ari Fleischit's war-mongering commercials are getting personal with me - I get one Nevada TV station and I watch Jeopardy on it every night. They've been airing those bullshit ads for a coupla weeks now.

Then KOLO-TV adds insult to injury: paired up with Ari's Seig oder Sibirien scam are religious ads for the Mormons. I had to re-install the chicken wire in front of my set.

"I ain't goin' out there without my posse!"

A 'recommended read' at Attytood

More proof "the surge is working": Right-wingers claim even the CIA is afraid to go outside without trigger-happy Blackwater

There's been a lot going on this week -- so much that I haven't been able to comment on maybe the biggest story of all, and that is the uproar surrounding the U.S. security firm Blackwater USA and its alleged shooting up of civilians in Baghdad. It's the biggest story because Iraqis are so angry over this, it may be the final tipping point in their relationship with their self-proclaimed liberators.

The bizarre logic here escapes me. The surge is working so well that our own CIA agents -- trained for months at "The Farm" in Virginia to learn how to kill a man with a ballpoint pen, and that sort of thing -- are now afraid to walk out the front door without a bevy of allegedly trigger-happy men toting machine guns and firing indiscriminantly?

My God, what was it like in Baghdad before the awesome power of the surge?

And from Cursor:

"If Blackwater and other private contractors are shut out of Iraq, Democrats in Congress and Iranian intelligence operatives may have stumbled on a way to end the Iraq War."

Hmmmm....

Go peruse the 'Tood.

Oil and Betrayal

BuzzFlash

George Lakoff of the The Rockridge Institute examines what Alan Greenspan's admission that "the Iraq war is largely about oil" means for America's troops and for the people of Iraq:

[...] Greenspan even advised Bush that "taking Saddam Hussein out was essential" to protect oil supplies.

Saddam was probably extorting too much baksheesh in the 'oil for food' scam and the OCs were pissed off about it.

Yes, we suspected it. In a deep sense, many of us knew it, just as those in Washington did. But now it's in our face. Greenspan put the mother of all facts in front of our noses, and we can no longer be in denial. The US invaded Iraq for the oil.

'Suspected' my ass. We've known this all along.

Think about what it means for our troops and for the people of Iraq. Our troops were told, and believed because they trusted their president, that they were in Iraq to protect America, to protect their families, their homes, their friends and neighbors, our democracy. But they were betrayed. Those troops fought and died and were maimed and had their marriages break up for oil company profits. An utter betrayal of our men and women in uniform and their families, a betrayal of their sacrifices, day after day, month after month, year and year — and for some, forever! Children growing up fatherless or motherless. Men and women without legs or arms or faces — for oil company profits.

And hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, more maimed, and millions made refugees. For oil profits.

Mr. Lakoff has a coupla paragraphs about the oil ripoff by U.S. OCs 'Production Sharing Agreements'.

But none of this will work without military protection for the oil companies. That is what would keep us there indefinitely. The name for this is our "vital interests."

What is most frightening is that they may mean what they say, that they may have a concept of "victory" that makes sense to them but not to the rest of the country. If the goal of the invasion and occupation of Iraq has been to guarantee access to Iraqi oil for the next 30 years, then any result guaranteeing oil profits for American oil companies would count as "victory." Suppose the present killing and chaos were to continue, forcing us to keep our troops there indefinitely, but allowing the oil companies to prosper under our protection. That would be a "victory." Or if the Iraqi army and police force were to develop in a few years and keep order there protecting American investments and workers, that too would be "victory." If the country broke up into three distinct states or autonomous governments, that too would be "victory," as long as oil profits were guaranteed and Americans in the oil industry protected. And it doesn't matter if a Republican president keeps the troops there or a Democratic president does. It is still an oil company "victory" — and a victory for Bush.

That's the crux of the biscuit right there, folks. Screw the Constitution, screw the American people and everybody else, break laws, commit war crimes - none of it matters as long as Bush's bros get more and more money. Whenever Bush decides to leave office - IF he decides to leave office - he'll still be in the awl bidness and still be beholden to the OC people who've gotten him this far without any actual brains or talent on his part. If it weren't for them, he'd be goin' "Want fries with that?" for a living.

I say again, we've known that this Iraq war & occupation have been all about OIL from the get-go. So have an awful lot of other folks, both the good and the bad. Whatever his motives for saying what he said, I'm glad Greenspan spoke out. His is a voice that people listen to. Even the MSM.

State Prick

Florida finally did something right:

The Committe For Updating Florida State Symbols (CUFSS) designated Rush Limbaugh as Florida's State Prick the spring of 2007.

Go here for more info. Scroll down. You can't miss it.

Coming down ...

I know I probably piss a number of people off when I come down on the Dems. Trust me, I know the Rethugs are being obstructionist, forcing the Dems to get a supermajority for every bill they want to pass. We saw it with Webb and Habeas yesterday.

Thing is, I expect more from the Dems. I hold them to a higher standard than I do the Rethugs. I expect their best efforts should be focused on doing the right thing, not political expediency. When they cave to the Chimp, namely over the FISA bill, just to get out of town for the August recess, I got a problem.

It started in '02, when the Chimp's play for war in Iraq was endorsed without much discussion. When many of us knew what the result would be long before the first U.S. boots hit the ground in Iraq. Don't tell me none of the Dems knew the same things. They've spent the last 5 years laying the blame at the Chimp's feet when all they had to do was what the Rethugs are doing now.

They did the same with Bush's Supreme Court nominees, caving when they should have put up a fight. Sorry, but if you're not going to fight for yourself, for the people you represent, just because someone might call you a pussy or some such, well you won't get much respect from me.

I was called names in '02, '03, '04 for voicing my displeasure with the war, for saying it was a big mistake, for saying it was only for oil. So were a lot of people who expected someone to stand up and do the right thing. Guess what? We were right. About everything.

Yes, I'll vote Dem. I certainly won't vote for a Republican ever again. But I'll be damned if I actually go out and support people I don't respect. I will not push the party line if I don't agree with it and I will certainly vote for a viable third party alternative if that ever comes to pass in our fucked up political situation.

I'm tired of the laziness and ass-covering. I'm tired of my elected representatives being scared of bullies. I'm tired of people being resigned to the fact that anything they do will be shot down so why bother trying. Are there any folks out there willing to stand up for 'the right thing' regardless of political expediency or the will of special interest? It doesn't seem there are. Everybody talks a good line until they worry about reelection.

The seat they hold is not theirs, it's ours and we decide who holds it. If you won't do what we send you to Washington to do, you should be replaced. You represent the majority of the people in your districts and those are regular working folks, not multi-billion dollar conglomerates.

If you want my support, earn it.

And let me just add, there are individual Dems who are doing yeoman's work. I'm speaking of Dems collectively because if they don't all get together and on the same page, ain't shit gonna change.

Crash and burn ...

Once again. Webb and habeas fail.

Nice to see the Rethugs support the troops and respect civil rights. Motherfuckers.

Your party of 'Moral Values'

Wow, another Rethug with deviant desires. Go figure. Remember that list Gord linked to last week?

Federal prosecutor arrested in child sex sting: a republican US Justice Department official from Florida has been arrested on suspicion of traveling to Detroit over the weekend to have sex with a 5-year-old.

...

Add another name to it. And these people feel they have a right to pass judgment on my morality?