Raiding YouTube

Gord got me over to YouTube today thanks to his crazy redneck music and his homage to Tet, I figured I'd get you in the mood to enjoy Saturday evening partying on your future 'stimulus'.

Two of my favorite guitar men together. B.B. King and Gary Moore doing B.B.'s The Thrill is Gone:

Bai Ca Truong Son

I was reading an article at Kos by truong son traveler on the 40th anniversary of the Tet Offensive, a turning point in the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War sums up thusly, the shortest and best quote about the eventual outcome:

As a final comment especially for those who claim that "we were never defeated on the battlefield". Those people most certainly never spent much time on the "battlefields" of this, a mostly unreported small-unit war. Not that it mattered anyway, for as General Giap said, "We were prepared to lose for longer than you were prepared to win." (my em)

I got curious as is my wont. What the hell is a 'truong son'? Turns out it's a mountain range in Central Vietnam in the Greater Annamite chain. I ran across this video. My grasp of Vietnamese is slightly less than my tenuous hold on English, but I recognized a coupla place names, and 'My' which I think means 'American' in a picture of a Huey.

While we're remembering Tet, let's not forget the outcome of that war. Enjoy this.

I wonder if in 40 years we'll be watching Iraqi videos like that.

Red Necks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer

Man, I'm on a roll today! If anyone thinks I must've lost my mind to post the previous music video (scroll down a little), this one will remove all doubt.

This is dedicated to mechanics and other folks who "don't fit in with the white collar crowd" everywhere, and to anyone who has ever found themselves shitfaced at 1 AM with their sunglasses still on the bar in front of them.

Hank Thompson

Please tell me ...

Why men feel qualified to speak on the female experience?

'Stimulus' Advice

This is dedicated to all the folks who are planning to follow Philip's advice as to how to spend your 'stimulus' check. This is very stimulating.

Red Ingle and the Natural Seven with absolutely the hokiest version of this pæan to the temptations of the flesh (Whee!) I've ever heard. Try not to get dizzy watching it. If you've already borrowed against the anticipated tax rebate loan, you probably already had a good start on this subject matter and are already dizzy, so never mind.



And the moral of the story? Spend less money on cigarettes and you'll have more to spend on booze and babes.

Saturday whorage

Another chapter of Thirty Days at Zeta is up at The Practical Press.

Leave your links in comments.

I'm with Philip ...

Headline of his post on what he'd do with his 'stimulus' check:

I'm spending my stimulus on beer and hos!

Hear hear!

More on the 935

I hope we keep talking about the report that quantifies what we've known for years until the bastards are put away where they belong. Fat chance.

Visitor Update

The other day I posted that I had some old friends coming over to visit. We had plans to go out to dinner and eat and play catch up.

Didn't happen.

They made it part way up from Reno and the snow started dumping a little. It's been doing that for days. Those folks are from L.A. and so aren't used to driving in the snow. Wisely, I think, they turned back. Me 'n Mrs. G were already dressed to go out to dinner, so we did. After a large glass of the house white zin, Mrs. G turned to the non-present Vivian and carried on quite a nice conversation.

I spoke with Vivian this morning, and told her to make sure everybody knows that Arnie, outlaw biker and former US Navy hard-hat diver* who once cleared mines in the Red Sea, weenied out in two inches of snow.

*He has a tattoo of a a hard-hat along with the text of what he likes to breathe: "Mixed Gas and Muff".

She asked me if I'd told him that. "Hell no! Ya think I'm nuts?" She said she'd tell him on the plane home where the windows don't open!

We're disappointed that our visit didn't come off as planned. Hey, they tried, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. Next time. At least we're back in touch now, and that's a good thing.

On the plus side, I did get the house cleaned up to "presentable" and the guest bathroom rebuilt to human specs...

Troops felled by a 'trust gap'

[A big welcome to Skippy's readers. - F]



As usual, the furrin press is better at lettin' us in on what's really goin' on in Iraq and the halls of power than our own. Asia Times:

With US requirements in Afghanistan - estimated by McCaffrey at four brigades permanently engaged in a campaign that would last 15 years, a continued war on terrorism in Southwest Asia has become nearly impossible. Additionally, McCaffrey says, "The US Army is starting to unravel. Our recruiting campaign is bringing into the army thousands of new soldiers who should not be in uniform" - those with criminal records, who have used drugs, who have been given moral waivers, or who have not graduated from high school. A senior Pentagon official agrees. "We have increased our recruiting totals and tripled the number of our police battalions," he says, bitterly. "We will soon have to build new stockades to handle the influx."

Build more stockades. Swell. The military really does reflect the society it comes from. Yeesh.

In fact, the shift in strategy is more the result of necessity than choice - of decisions made by commanders on the ground who opposed the White House, National Security Council, CPA - and State Department view that all opposition to the Americans must be, ipso facto, evidence of terrorism. "We've not only started to define the real enemy," a senior military office says, "but we've stopped shooting people. We've figured out that protecting Iraq is Iraq's job, not ours."

All of which raises the question of whether the United States should have invaded Iraq in the first place, an issue that is becoming more pertinent to military officers who view the American adventure in Iraq as a political and military failure.

Some of these officers have become outspoken in their condemnation of the Bush administration: which is a rarity, even among retired senior officers. "There's a reason for that," former four-star General Volney Warner says, "and the reason is that every former and currently serving military officer's fear is that we in the military will be left holding the bag, that we will be blamed for this debacle. And that's the last thing that we want to have happen. We didn't make the decision to go into Iraq. We were ordered to do it. So the blame should go where it belongs."

Remember, it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you place the blame, and the Bushies are damn good at blaming others for their own mistakes.

American military officers in key combat commands (the captains, majors, lieutenant colonels and colonels who are actually responsible for carrying out the orders of their superiors) are leaving the services in record numbers. "The Marine Corps has just ceased to exist," a former marine commander says. "They have been gutted by the insurgency. They are losing their cadre of officers, their majors and captains. They are coming home and they are dedicated and these are fine young men. And Yale and Harvard are offering them positions and the marines are saying, 'Well, we can send you to do recruiting in Minot, North Dakota.' I don't understand that. They are doing nothing to retain them. And the army is just on the ropes - the tours are being extended and then reextended. And they say the recruiting numbers are not down, but the truth is they are lowering the bar. They are letting people in now that they would never have allowed in five years ago. This is a disaster. The army is over-extended and the Marines Corps has just been eviscerated. Iraq has been a catastrophe for the American military."

More specifically, and in the view of a large number of military professionals, the reason fewer and fewer field grade officers are agreeing to stay with their chosen profession has been a loss of faith in the general officer corps, an officer corps that has consistently failed to stand up to civilian leaders and who have allowed themselves (in the words of one officer) to be "stabbed in the back by the likes of Rumsfeld, [former under secretary of defense for policy Douglas] Feith and [former deputy defense secretary Paul] Wolfowitz".

Seen in this light, the question of whether the "surge" is working seems unimportant for many American military officers: for even if it is working in Iraq (and that is still a very big if) it is clearly not working in the US military. In fact, the time for victory may long be past, as thousands of the nation's soldiers have simply lost faith in their commanders and in their government.

In a time when the rest of the nation is consumed with November's vote, America's soldiers are already voting with their feet. They are doing what Michael Mullen says they must do if they have lost faith in their country. They are leaving.

Please read the rest.

Dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew...*

That actually looks more like a wine cellar than a coal mine, but you get the idea.

*Apologies to Merle Travis.

Quote of the day due

Headline from BuzzFlash, Liquid alert!

We thought the humor writers were on strike; Fox News: U.S. economy tanking because of fear of Democrats taking White House

If you want details, go find it yourself. I'll link to F** Noise if I have to, but not today.

29 things to be happy about

Don't miss this one by Mark Morford!

Yes, it's all doom and gloom and war and global warming and Bush. Except when it's not

Excerpts:

4) Women and minorities appear to be galvanized by Hillary Clinton's presidential run. Youth and college-educated voters appear to be galvanized by Barack Obama's. No one at all is truly, deeply galvanized by Mitt Romney or John McCain or crazy little Mike Huckabee, and everyone is generally repulsed by the fetid little tyrant that is Rudy Giuliani. All of this, remarkably, seems just about exactly as it should be.

Then you're like, wait a sec, you know what? Screw the Gray Lady; Google should buy General Motors, Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Kraft and Dow and Viacom and pretty much all of North Korea and just wipe them all away and replace them with nice organic flowerpots and solar farms and really big trampolines. How much better! (Note to Google: Forget the NYT. Please buy The San Francisco Chronicle. Way cheaper. Plus, we're local. I would very much like to eat free sushi in your amazing cafeteria every day. Thank you.)

7) "I Don't Want to Blow You Up!" is a new children's book by the author of "It's Just a Plant." It dares to tell children that the vast majority of scarf/turban/headband/burqa-wearing peoples in the world do not, in fact, wish to bomb them, eviscerate them, eat their brains with a rhino horn or hang them upside down and steal their Playstation 3 and rape their dog. Despite what Bill O'Reilly's children's book says.

26) Karl Rove is gone. Trent Lott is gone. Rick Santorum is gone. Richard Pombo is gone. Sweet Jesus, a whole rancid stew of hardcore Bushites has vanished like rat-tailed thugs from a murder scene, leaving behind all manner of shrapnel and smoking craters and karmic wreckage for the next wave of politicos to try and clean up. But hey, at least they're gone. Mostly.

28) A whopping 84 percent of Americans claim to be somewhere between "pretty happy" and "very happy." No, no one knows what sort of crack they're smoking. I mean, haven't they all seen the global warming? The imminent apocalypse? The staph infections and the drug-resistant bacteria and the Islamo-fascists and Dick Cheney's black and vile stare? Why all the happiness? It is because of all the Prozac? Or is it because of No. 29?

Gently raise rod tip, set hook...

Ever so much more, including an alarm clock that won't last a day. Many links. Enjoy.

Quote of the Day

Fred the Cat:

... Jeez, is shopping the new answer to all American problems? ...

Off to work. It's Friday!

Are the Iraqis dumb enough ...

To let us stay?

Depends if there are rifles pointed at their heads or not:

WASHINGTON — With its international mandate in Iraq set to expire in 11 months, the Bush administration will insist that the government in Baghdad give the United States broad authority to conduct combat operations and guarantee civilian contractors specific legal protections from Iraqi law, according to administration and military officials.

This emerging American negotiating position faces a potential buzz saw of opposition from Iraq, with its fragmented Parliament, weak central government and deep sensitivities about being seen as a dependent state, according to these officials.

...

You see, even though the Republican Crime Family has managed to loot our Treasury without accountability, they've failed to gain control over the Iraqi oil reserves. The agreement will allow Halliburton and their ilk to reap rewards long after the Chimp is a bad memory. Hey, gotta plan for retirement, don't ya?

...

At the same time, the administration faces opposition from Democrats at home, who warn that the agreements that the White House seeks would bind the next president by locking in Mr. Bush’s policies and a long-term military presence.

...

And a prolonged military presence means more government contracts. And you know who gets those*, don't ya?

*Required reading today.

Selling out your rights ...

Like yesterday, I direct you to Greenwald. Like yesterday, he highlights a Dem lawmaker who's been bought and paid for by the telecom industry to cover their collective ass in the warrantless wiretap debacle. Unlike yesterday, it's not Harry Reid who's been co-opted, but Jay Rockefeller:

...

But ponder the "win" that is giving him these feelings of immense self-satisfaction. Is he finally accomplishing what Democrats were given control of Congress to do: namely, impose some checks and limits on the administration? No. The opposite is true. Rockefeller is doing the bidding of Dick Cheney. The bill that he is working for is the bill the White House demanded. Rockefeller is supported by the entire Bush administration, urged on and funded by the nation's most powerful telecoms, and is backed by the entire GOP caucus in the Senate.

...

He is being allowed to win only because he is advancing the Bush agenda and those of his largest corporate donors, and waging war against members of his own party, acting to destroy the allegedly defining values of that party. Yet he's so desperate to feel like he's won something that this is enough to cause him to strut around giddily battling feelings of cockiness over his impending "win." At least he's being honest here about whom he represents. [my ems]

...

The nation will never move toward progressive principles of honesty, ethics, and good government until paid shills like Rockefeller, Reid, Feinstein, and others are held up for what they are, ridiculed, and then drummed out of the party. Then it would be time to do some 'urban renewal' on K Street; clean out all the lobbying firms and remove the money from the process.

You know, it's bad enough having to worry about the Republicans constantly trying to screw the nation, it really torques my sphincter that we have to worry about the people on our side too. With Dems like these, who needs Republicans?

Quote of the Day Zwei

Barbara Ehrenreich

With all the talk about how to stimulate it, you'd think that the economy is a giant clitoris.

Better have some women in there to tell 'em how to do it...

Quote of the Day

Part of a headline at BuzzFlash:

One party preaches bi-partisanship while kicking the other party in the groin, and one party hobbles around Congress on kneepads. Guess which one the Democrats are.

Lemme guess - the ones being held by the ears with the holders' cocktails perched on their heads?

Question: Can pols be impeached for giving a massive 'bi-partisan' blow job?

The Legacy of George W Bush's Presidency

The Country He Inherited, The Country He Leaves Behind

All his failures tamped into a nice little brick that will sit on a shelf at his presidential library in lieu of books. Or maybe it'll be a nice mural.

Your Democratic Congress ...

Giving the Chimp what he wants, regardless of what the voters demand.

Glenn Greenwald highlights how Harry Reid et al have been bought and paid for:

Harry Reid -- who has (a) done more than any other individual to ensure that Bush's demands for telecom immunity and warrantless eavesdropping powers will be met in full and (b) allowed the Republicans all year to block virtually every bill without having to bother to actually filibuster -- went to the Senate floor yesterday and, with the scripted assistance of Mitch McConnell and Pat Leahy, warned Chris Dodd, Russ Feingold and others that they would be selfishly wreaking havoc on the schedules of their fellow Senators (making them work over the weekend, ruining their planned "retreat," and even preventing them from going to Davos!) if they bothered everyone with their annoying, pointless little filibuster.

To do so, Reid announced that, unlike for the multiple filibusters from Republican colleagues, he would actually force Dodd and company to engage in a real filibuster ...

Ahem, Mr. Reid, Chris Dodd has a 'D' next to his name. You know, he's on your side. Or do you have a problem because Chris Dodd has more ethics in his little finger than you have in your whole body? An elected representative who wants to do what his constituency demands, as opposed to, say, the telecom lobbyists? Go figure.

...

That is what Democrats have been urging Reid to do to the filibustering Republicans all year -- in order to dramatize their obstructionism -- but he has refused to make them actually filibuster anything, generously agreeing instead that every bill requires 60 votes. Instead, he reserves such punishment only for the members of his own caucus trying to take a stand for the rule of law and the Constitution, those who are trying finally to bring some accountability to this administration. [all ems in orig]

...

No impeachment, giving in to everything Bush wants, and forcing fellow Dems to deal with an obstacle course of congressional protocol when Rethug criminals get a pass. Is he the Democratic leader in the Senate or a Republican plant? Hard to tell nowadays. Can somebody tell Harry that we voted a Dem majority to stop the criminal looting of our rights and solvency? If we wanted to keep getting fucked over, we would have voted for Republicans.

And an addendum: Just in case it's been forgotten during the last 7 years, we don't pay our reps and senators to party with the rich folks. We pay them to do the nation's business. They get too much time off as it is. I wonder if any of 'em could hold down a real job. They all should be paid like piece-workers and we might get something done.