Hillary gives Russkies wrong Red Button!

The Swamp

What's a little humor between Doomsday players?

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went for a little joke today about resetting relations with the Russians, but it turned out the joke was on her.

Clinton, presenting Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a gift-wrapped "reset" button, called the "little gift" symbolic of what President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have been saying about the U.S. and Russia.

""We want to reset our relationship," she said.

Yet something may have been lost in translation in the gift before closed-door talks in Geneva. The word on the button was meant to say "reset" in Russian.

"We worked hard to get the right Russian word," Clinton told Lavrov. "Do you think we got it?"

"You got it wrong," Lavrov replied - the word actually means "overcharge.''

"We won't let you do that to us," Clinton said, with the two laughing.

Shit, anybody can confuse перезапуск* and перезаряд. I do it all the time. Those may not be the exact words they got confused, but given the literary license I have proclaimed for myself, sort of borrowing from Bush, the 'unitary smartass' theory, they're close enough.

I'm glad Hil and the Russian gent got such a good laugh over an object that has come to symbolize nuclear holocaust. Laughter is a good thing, and if the joke was on Hil, so what? She's a good sport and we need a little levity after Bush's Russian 'policy' of 'Let's have a new Cold War! Whee!'.

I think we should get many, many copies of the button with 'overcharge' on it and give them out to Bush and the Repugs' corporate and financial cronies, from Wall Street to Blackwater and beyond. I think we should also wire the buttons, so if they push them...Poof! Then we can 'reset'.

*Sounds like trying to get yer car started with the help of the gardener - "Hey, Perez, poooosh!"

Saturday Central Coast Redneck Music Blogging

Some nice scenery along California's Central Coast from about Santa Barbara to Salinas. I think the train is Amtrak's Coast Starlight.

Dan Tyminski also plays with Alison Krauss and Union Station and was George Clooney's singing voice in O Brother Where Art Thou which is one of the best movies ever, IMNSHO.

Dan Tyminski ~ Wheels

Thanks to nshields and Rounder Records, one of the better record companies.

Saturday Off The Hook Hip-Hop Metaphorical Music Blogging

I've liked Harry Belafonte and Calypso music for fifty years, and it's amazing how old things get seen in a new light with the passage of time. This song is a perfect metaphor, albeit a mite bright and cheery, for what the Repugs and their corporate and financial cohorts, 'Matilda', are doing to us, '...she take me money an' run Venezuela'. Long at 9:31 and worth every second!

Harry Belafonte ~ Matilda

Thanks to WelllExcuuuseMeee.

Republicans battle a truth commission

Well, yeaaahhhhh. So what's new? The Repugs have been waging a war on truth in all its forms since I can remember. Oh, I know what's new! This time, some of 'em might go to jail!

Joan Walsh. Links at site.

Republicans rolled out their arguments against a "Truth Commission" to investigate Bush-era interrogation and detention issues at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today. They're pretty predictable.

[...] Sen. John Cornyn insisted Congress has already investigated all these allegations and a commission would be "an indictment of congressional oversight responsibilities." Yes, Sen. Cornyn, it would be.

Rivkin is an interesting figure: He's never met a Bush power grab or anti-terror policy he couldn't defend. [...]

So according to Rivkin, other countries can't prosecute such abuses, only we can. But we shouldn't. Got it.

Two-thirds of the American people want to see some kind of investigation (a plurality prefer a criminal probe to a mere fact-finding commission). The Democrats can't get away with doing nothing after this lawless eight years. They can't let stand Bush officials' claims to be above the law. That conception of the absolute power of the presidency to violate human rights and break the law was rejected last November. I think Leahy is looking to start with what he can get. We'll see how far this crusade goes.

It'll go farther if we keep pushing it, like pushing a car that's stuck in a mudhole. The Repugs are the mudhole and it's gonna take a lot of shoulders against the trunk lid.

Neocons Wage War on a 'Realist'

Robert Parry with today's 'must read'.

In a normal world, people in Washington might welcome the hiring of a “realist” to oversee the production of U.S. intelligence analyses, with the hope that even if the truth doesn’t set you free, it at least might be the foundation for sound policies.

But that is not the world in which the United States finds itself. In today’s Washington, the city’s preeminent newspaper publishes a neoconservative attack on President Barack Obama’s choice to oversee intelligence analyses because the person is a “realist.”

Freeman’s chief offense, according to The New Republic’s Jon Chait in a Washington Post op-ed, is that the appointee is “an ideological fanatic” because Freeman believes excessively in “realism” and fails to apply a moral filter when looking at the world.

In Chait’s neocon critique, “realism” is not simply a hard assessment of what today's challenges are; it is an “ideology” – and thus open to dismissal as simply a competitive way of understanding the world.

Oh yeah, like the neocons 'understand the world' real well. Yeesh. Maybe Disney World. Fantasyland. Fine. Keep 'em out of politics and positions of power.

The neocons, who are essentially right-wing intellectuals wanting to bend U.S. government policy in directions that fit their ideological interests, recognized early on that seizing the main levers of information inside Washington was crucial. So, they took aim at two targets in particular: the CIA’s analytical division and national journalists.

But the neocons and the Right launched a fierce attack against Freeman because he threatens their influence over U.S. intelligence estimates and thus their ability to exaggerate dangers and to manage the perceptions of politicians and the public.

So, as Chait does in his Post op-ed, the neocons have transformed Freeman’s realism into evidence that “he’s an ideological fanatic.”

Go read how this applies to our Israel policy. Here's a tease:

But Chait’s real beef with Freeman appears to be that he thinks the “Israel Lobby” actually exists in Washington. It is a staple of neocon rhetoric that anyone who observes the political clout of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or other influential pro-Israel groups must be an enemy of Israel.

If you acknowledge it, or admit you see it, you're an enemy of Israel.

Folks, this is the crux of the biscuit when it comes to neocons and misguided Middle East policy. Go read the rest, please.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

I've posted this song before, but not this performance.

Royal Albert Hall 1995

Emmylou Harris ~ One Of These Days

Thanks to onebarton2

Adapt, Improvise, and Overcome

Young Marines today are a lot smarter than in my day. I never heard of this, and if anybody did, they weren't talkin'.

Ladies, we love you and respect you, but this is typical bratty guy stuff. Please don't go.

Bitch Slaps, Butt Boys, and Kiss My Ass

Pablo On Politics is a terrific site. Under that lovely picture of Rushbba the Hutt's heinie, Pablo links us to the following:

Margaret and Helen, which I posted a coupla days ago.

TPM:

You know what's great about all this Rush nonsense? It looks like the Democrats, from Robert Gibbs to Rahm to the DCCC, are finally using some of the techniques of bitch-slap politics against the Republicans. If GOPers are put on the spot and agree with Rush, they're taking an unpopular position about the direction of the country. If they disagree, they're immediately forced to grovel and look weak doing it. Only in this case it's sort of like the bitch-slap theory combined with jujitsu, because the Dems are actually getting Rush to administer the slaps. I'm about your age, and I'm not sure I've ever seen the Dems have the confidence to make Republicans look weak like this.

Actually, the Repugs don't need any help making themselves look weak. They knocked themselves down and the Dems jumped in. Rahm knows those good old street fighting techniques and he's teaching the rest of them. I wish he'd school Reid a little.

Digby, links at site:

Limbaugh is now calling people "butt boys." This is on top of his adorable comments that Republicans are being asked to "bend over and grab their ankles" because Obama is black. I realize that the term "butt boy" is fairly common in junior high locker rooms as a synonym for sycophant, but when did it become ok to say this on radio? Does the FCC know that it literally means submissive, teenage anal sex (with a strong implication of coercion?)

I've written many posts about Rush over the years so all this new interest in him as a leader of the Republican Party is old news to me. I think this one, from 2006, may the most pertinent:

Notice how Limbaugh and the preachers pander to the depraved imagination? It's not religious values these people are selling. They are selling a brutal, domineering, degenerate culture, making their listeners and viewers wallow in it, plumbing the depths of the subconscious, drawing forth Goyaesque images of bestiality and violence and death. That's a feature of some religions, to be sure, but it's not the nice upright Christian morality everybody's pretending it is.

When the troop handlers in the Marine Corps wanted us to go somewhere in a tightly bunched line, the command was 'Asshole to belly button, maggots! Close it up! Make the man in fronta ya smile!'. We kept our flys buttoned. The Repugs don't, and it brings visions of a prison conga line right after a fresh batch of pruno hit the yard. Heh.

Damn, but this is fun to watch! We've waited a long time and we deserve it!

Bush succeeded quite well at all the wrong things

Bush damn near was successful at destroying our country, The Constitution, the economy, and our reputation world wide. Other than that, not so much.

Winning Hearts and Minds

Sent to us by John Gall from Suburban Guerrilla (their masthead photo is terrifying!).

This is what Harry and several other lame-ass dems need to have given to them.

He's right. Being a former expert on receiving this sort of motivational speech, please enjoy this one delivered by an expert!

NSFW.

The Secret Republican Apology Machine

Ever wonder how Republicans are able to tuck their tails between their legs and apologize to Rush Limbaugh so quickly after they've offended their leader?

We've uncovered the secret Republican Apology Machine!

Give it a try!

John Yoo’s growing disgrace

The Last Chance Democracy Cafe on that moral coward and Bush toady's recently released 'legal' opinions:

The use of the military envisioned in the Yoo-Delahunty reply appears to transcend by far the stationing of troops to keep watch at streets and airports, a familiar sight in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. The memorandum discussed the use of military forces to carry out “raids on terrorist cells” and even seize property.

“The law has recognized that force (including deadly force) may be legitimately used in self-defense,” Mr. Yoo and Mr. Delahunty wrote to Mr. Gonzales. Therefore any objections based on the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches are swept away, they said, since any possible privacy offense resulting from such a search is a lesser matter than any injury from deadly force.

What utter nonsense. Equating the actions of public officials in ignoring the Fourth Amendment with the private right of self-defense? That’s like arguing it’s fine to serve motor oil on scrambled eggs, since, after all, it works great in your car. The one situation has nothing to do with the other.

Speaking as a guy who has had motor oil on just about everything (Harley-Davidson Regular Heavy [105 weight on the Saybolt Universal Seconds scale, 60 weight SAE, aka 'stove oil'] with 10,000 miles on it is chewy and has a nice metallic bite to it), that is a very apt analogy.

And a guy as bright as John Yoo had to known that. But he had a job to do — to defend the indefensible.

And to his never ending shame he did it.

Oh, and by the way, there are apparently more Yoo opinion memos, some perhaps even worse, still to come.

The more the merrier.

Yoo and the others were told that they needed to come up with legal-sounding opinions to cover the higher-ups' asses and justify abrogation of the Constitution, most likely by Cheney, to be signed off on by his trained Chimp, and did it. They all need to be in prison.

Of Limbaugh and Steele and their pending doom: A morality tale of heavenly justice

P.M. Carpenter

Look at the bright side: The one thing that makes these Bad Times of Bush's Depression bearable is watching the End Times of his party. The experience is, to use a bit more of the hip eschatological lingo, rapturous.

I realize and even accept that the amusing Dark Side has life left in it yet -- the gods of our choice work in mysterious, downright befuddling ways -- but as John Weaver, a former apprentice to the frustrated sorcerer John McCain, put it yesterday: "We're working damn hard to see how fast we can hit rock bottom."

Exactly which circle of hell would that be, Mr. Weaver?

And then there is indeed that other GOP leader, its de facto leader, that rancid slab of fatheaded bombast, Mr. Limbaugh.

..."why doesn't President Obama come on my show? We will do a one-on-one debate of ideas and policies."

Well, that would be one way for Rush to lose weight, because there wouldn't be anything left of him. Obama could outthink Limbaugh in a coma, and in person he'd just paw him for a while, then chew him up and spit him out and leave him as the Walking Dead.

Ever so much more.

I don't want our President to waste his time on that gasbag, and he won't. It'd be fun to watch but he has better things to do.

As to 'which circle', just cross dat ol' Styx nine times and drop yer gear, Repugs.

Quote of the Day

Our pal, UL, who goes off. Heh ...

...

Rushpublicans now want Obama to fail like Bush failed. It legitimizes their never-changing bullshit, which the poor taint sniffing, fist exchanging fuckers know is bullshit but yet, they still cling to it's soft warm and gooey aftermath essence. Hold me!
This is what they do and how they are, and it's been like this for a long time.

...

Housekeeping ...

As those of you who use Blogrolling to keep links in order on their pages know, it's been teh suck (I haven't been able to add links to it in months) since they 'updated' to v2.0 (merely an excuse to hang ads in front of you, unless you pay). Since they ain't getting any money from me, I'm gonna redo the blogroll infrastructure here at the Brain this weekend.

That said, I'd like those of you whom I haven't/couldn't added/add to the blogroll yet to take a couple seconds while you're reading this and send me an email with your URL and the name of your blog so I can include it. We've got quite a few commenters whose blogs I don't have up and it'll save me going through the comment archives to find it (I got little enough time on my hands). If I can do this in one shot, it'll make shit easier.

Thanks for your help.

And a note to Gordon: There's a lot of pages you go to that I don't have up; could ya ship me an email with 'em so they can be included too? Thanks, pardner.

Just Another G-Day* In Paradise

*Term is from a fine compliment from Fixer. We've had these at both ends of the United States of Brain Land this week.

Dave The Berm Fairy and his Case 580 Super M Magic Wand

Click to waaaay embiggen.

This is gonna get a little Fixer & Gordon-ish. If details of The Wonderful World Of In-The-Field Snowthrower Repair and How Nice It Is To Have Friends bore you, the shorter version is: Dave saved my ass yesterday.

It snowed here for a coupla days. I went out yesterday to clear the driveway, a daily ritual during snowstorms. I discovered toot de sweet that the snow was unusually heavy, real avalanche snow, and my snowthrower was having difficulty plowing through it. It was ten feet forward, ten feet back, twelve feet forward, ten feet back, and so on. This was shaping up to be real work, which I am generally allergic to.

A note here to folks who don't have the need for a snowthrower or have never used one - if you think all you do is walk along behind the thing and it does all the work, I'm glad for you for not having the need to know. That's sometimes the way it works if the snow isn't too heavy and the machine is working properly. Sometimes you have to really get physical with the sumbitch and horse it around with all your might. It's just a fancy 200-pound snow shovel, after all.

For you technoids, I'm runnin' an MTD 8hp 26" track job. It's on its 14th winter, and the horsies have shrunk a mite, I think. 8-horse is the generally accepted minimum necessary around here, although a 5hp Honda is just as good and an 8hp Honda is da kine! You get what you pay for.

After about five minutes, I had made it the length of the Tacoma, which normally takes about twenty seconds. I began to realize how this was going to go. Fuck me.

I had noticed for a while that my machine wasn't runnin' right, but we've had an unusually light winter and the thing did its job OK so I let it go. It would quit running instead of idle, and on top end would hunt, 8-stroke, run up and down on the governor, etc. I could get it to almost run right with the adjustable main jet which is easily accessible. 35 years experience told me that the slow speed mixture screw needed a 1/4 turn one way or the other, but it's a minor pain to access it.

I figured I was gonna need all the performance this thing had left in it, so I got out the tools, undid five fasteners to get the carb cover off, and adjusted it. Took maybe ten minutes. I work even slower when I'm working for free than when I'm getting paid. Heh.

Ran like a champ! With apologies to Dave Dudley (BCB Band cover), "got 'er wound up and she wuz runnin' like never before". Whee!

Rememberr the 'ten feet forward, ten feet back' part? The motor was running great, but now the machine wouldn't back up! I had to physically pull it back. No fun. I'da collapsed and died before I got to the end of the driveway at this rate.

Again, I knew what was wrong. I had done this before. Now that the engine ran properly, it was overpowering the clutch, which term is a compliment to the antediluvian good ol' Amurrican technology that passes for a drive train in these things.

It's American-made which means it can be easily repaired by the owner which, because it's American-made, he's going to have to. Good circular thinkin', Sparky, and there is something to be said for it. Honda figured out how to keep things from breaking nearly as often by using up-to-the-minute technology, but when they do, the average owner is in the arms of the Honda dealer at $100 an hour.

Back to the garage. Well, just outside it in the snow anyway. Plastic bag under the gas cap and up on its nose. Bottom plate off, gear shaft out, replace drive rubber (an in stock item at my house), button 'er up, and back at it. Probly 30 minutes, a fair bit of which was finding the replacement drive rubber which I had hidden from myself five years ago after the last time I did this job. Remembered to take the plastic bag out from under the gas cap this time before I tried to start the engine. Heh. I'm getting better...

While the thing was apart, up shows The Berm Fairy. Now, I don't know Dave real well, and I've never asked him to remove my berms. He's just been doing it for a coupla years unbidden, bless his heart. Day before yesterday was the first time I've ever caught him at it, and he says he does it because I'm a Good American. I don't care if he does it because he thinks I can sing real loud in church!

Dave's an excavating contractor, a working man who made good. He's dug foundations and done general dirt work around here for years. He dug the foundation for my next door neighbor Clancy's house. Clancy rents out the house and lives in a bachelor's dream tree fort over the garage. They're good friends. Dave comes by to clear the berm next door and just voluntarily does mine while he's at it. Dirt, snow, mox nix. He's got the gear and, like all gearheads, loves to run it.

I called in the pups who were sniffing around his loader while it was working, o potential horror!, put 'em in the house, and ran, well, plodded, down the driveway with a six-pack of Heineken's Best Berm Removal Fuel. I told Dave my snowthrower was apart and asked would he please take a coupla more cuts so I could get my Dakota out (really back in. I coulda powered it out.) and this he did. I got the pictures after an up-'n-down re-plod to get the camera. As he left, I snapped to attention and gave him a Good American full-on Marine embassy guard snappy-ass hand salute, which he returned by turning his ball cap backwards and giving me a thumbs up.

Thank you, Dave. By the way, he doesn't mind being called 'The Berm Fairy'. If he did, I'd be movin' 'em myself and it took guts or a lack of commmon sense to ask him, but I'm a joker. So's he.

Here's what the driveway looked like when he got done:



I had cleared the driveway and the Dakota the day before of about an equal amount of snow, so that's one day's accumulation. Nothing out of the ordinary around here.

I put the snowthrower back together and it worked fine. I got the driveway cleared just enough to satisy the desire to be dug out enough to not be snowed in but not as much as I would have liked. It was hard. It wouldn't throw the heavy snow very much past the buildup at the sides of the driveway, and it avalanched down for twenty feet ahead as I cut near the sides about three or four times. Elapsed time about three and a half hours, normally takes about an hour, and there's more to do. It's gonna take some shovel work and another snowthrower pass to get it the way I like it. Maybe tomorrow. My typing finger is about the only thing I got today that doesn't hurt when I try to use it. It ain't snowing today and the Sun is shining brightly and all's well with the world.

A final note: I'm a mechanic, not that I really need to be to work on a simple gadget like a snowthrower, but I have many thousands of dollars' worth of tools, of which I used maybe fifty bucks' worth on this job, and I keep wear parts in stock. If I had had to call the small engine repair joint, have 'em come get it, fix it and return it, it would have cost a coupla hundred bucks, more if they'da missed the track drive problem the first time. That's if they had the time in the middle of a snowstorm, and if they had the one part I used in stock, which they probably wouldn't have because there's no MTD dealer in town. It could have taken a week to do what I did in less than an hour, and that would be a week of tire-trampling the snow until it was solid bumpy ice, or shoveling it by hand, or paying someone like Dave about a Benjie to plow you out. It can add up. The total out-of-pocket expense of this whole saga was a long-gone $6 for the drive rubber and $8.50 to thank Dave. The Boy Scouts got one thing right: Be Prepared.

Harry Reid's big decision: the filibuster

P.M. Carpenter on the economy.

And who holds the one critical key to success? It's not the economists; they're already doing their part, boosting pharmaceutical sales of antidepressants. Nor, even, is it the president, who's all-too aware of what the economists are doing, and consequently is motivated to do much more himself. Nor is it Nancy Pelosi, who possesses that marvelous elixir of legislative action: simple majority rule.

No, it's our mild-mannered, soft-spoken, always considerate, forever(?)-compromising Harry Reid. That's who. A man perhaps misplaced in time -- a parliamentary leader with Chamberlainlike gentility rather than Churchillian wartime cajones (sic - s.b. 'cojones'. Get a Meskin editor, P.M. - G)

Harry, you're going to have to change. And the first little to-do item in your personal reinvention is confronting the action-crushing obstacle of "phantom filibusters," soon to be (non)launched again with unsurpassed verve by that minority platoon of inactivist No-ism, GOP senators.

Besides, it is, as noted, the "mere threat of a filibuster" that today rules the Senate floor and every possible progressive move. It's the problem that poses as the pre-problem with fixing the even bigger problem: the economy. It will bottle up every authentically activist measure in perpetuity.

But, as political scientist David RePass observes in the Times, arm in arm with an army of similar observations elsewhere, "fixing the problem would not require any change in Senate rules. The phantom filibuster could be done away with overnight by the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid. All he needs to do is call the minority’s bluff by bringing a challenged measure to the floor and letting the debate begin."

That's a necessity I'd love to see: the clueless likes of a James Inhofe slouching on the Senate floor for hours on end, with C-Span's intense eyes bearing down, inarticulately struggling to justify to the desperate, embattled American people why the War on the Great Recession should not be waged with overwhelming force.

Come on, Harry. Make 'em do it. Make them make the public fools of themselves they are. Because odds are, they'd wise up fast.

Ya see, Harry, the whole point of having power is the ability to use it if you have to. All it takes is some balls.

George W. Bush’s Disposable Constitution

Scott Horton in Harper's:

Yesterday the Obama Administration released a series of nine previously secret legal opinions crafted by the Office of Legal Counsel to enhance the presidential powers of George W. Bush. Perhaps the most astonishing of these memos was one crafted by University of California at Berkeley law professor John Yoo. He concluded that in wartime, the President was freed from the constraints of the Bill of Rights with respect to anything he chose to label as a counterterrorism operations inside the United States.

John Yoo’s Constitution is unlike any other I have ever seen. It seems to consist of one clause: appointing the President as commander-in-chief. The rest of the Constitution was apparently printed in disappearing ink.

We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship. (my em)

It's not news to a lot of us, but thank you for finally noticing it in print now that it's safe.

That last sentence was unfair to Mr. Horton. Yes, we knew BushCo was shredding the Constitution. We didn't begin to know the exact details until these memos came out. I think it's the tip of the iceberg.

Yes they can ...

Pic glommed from our pal UL. Click to prolapse.

Quote of the Day

Comrade PhysioProf:

... If you think of yourself as some kind of rational moderate right-winger, you need to start a new political party ...