Quote of the Day

Drifty:

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Tomorrow, the former President who was impeached and shouldn't have been and the former President who wasn't impeached and should have been ... will be on virtually every channel asking you for money for Haiti.

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Saturday Crazy Redneck Music Blogging

Zac Brown Band perform Manfred Mann's "Fox On The Run" live in an impromptu jam session while on the bus.

Thanks to zacbrownband. I'll be baaaack...

Off the table, Mabel, the quarter's for the beer...

Rare footage of me'n Fixer on liberty, doin' a little thinkin' with the alternate brain...

Thanks to Theaterpalace, who has scads of these. Clip is from What Price Glory? (1926).

It's almost time to pay off your end of the deal, Pat

From the Swampland blog at Time magazine.

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox -- that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it -- I'm just saying: Not how I roll. You're doing great work, Pat, and I don't want to clip your wings -- just, come on, you're making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That's working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan

Airports and Liberty

Thanks to YubaNet.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Ol' Lady Liberty has had a rough few days what with Miss Becky totally misconcrewing her raison d'etre to impress Moosebreath, and in the cartoon above, so I thought I'd do something nice for her. This one's for you, Liberty.

Nanci Griffith and Emmylou Harris ~ Good Night, New York

Thanks to ericablue32.

Headline of the Day

Pat Robertson 'A Public Relations Nightmare,' Says God

Almighty Holds Rare Press Conference

'Gator Navy departs for Haiti

USS Bataan (LHD 5), USS Fort McHenry (LSD 43), and USS Carter Hall (LSD 50), along with elements of the 22nd MEU, are on their way to Haiti to provide humanitarian assistance.

I've been to some strange places on LSD, but never to Haiti...

Marines have been to Haiti before:

Our countries have had a special relationship, not always good, ever since the former French colony's slaves successfully revolted in 1803.

That musta been their 'deal with the devil' - going against big business that enslaved and exploited them. Just fucking die, Robertson. Yeesh.

From 1915 to 1934, U.S. Marines occupied Haiti to protect our business interests. In the '60s, we winked at the repressive government of President Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier; in 1986 we helped arrange the exile of "Baby Doc," the son who succeeded him.

In 1994, a multinational force led by U.S. soldiers reinstalled former parish priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president. But by 2004, Aristide was accused of rampant corruption, and U.S. Marines arrived to maintain order as he was forced into exile.

This time they're going there to help the Haitians.

This is an excellent use of our military might and our tax dollars that pay for it. For once.

 

California is free to make its own drug laws

"Blowback" in the LATimes. A 'must read' if you are interested in legalizing marijuana as California may be poised to do. Disclaimer: gotta use a lotta weasel words until it's a done deal.

The state's existing marijuana laws are an example of destructive and reactionary public policy. They are largely responsible for the horrific drug-related violence in both California and along our border with Mexico. Thankfully, we aren't stuck with this destructive marijuana policy.

The Times is simply wrong to suggest that California does not have the authority to tax and regulate marijuana. There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that requires states to criminalize anything. We could scrap our entire penal code tomorrow if we wanted to. States get to decide state law, not Washington. This is why California and 13 other states have been able to legalize and regulate medical marijuana despite continuing federal prohibition.

Go read, then smoke 'em if ya got 'em.

Ann Coulter's Favorite Democrat

Follow-up to Fixer's post.

Thanks to bravenewfilms and a tip o' the Brain to ThinkProgress.

Note to Harold: You better stay in Tennessee. Even the Upstate New Yorkers are city slickers compared to what you're used to. They'll skin you alive. Sal si puedes, dude.

The Clarice and Hannibal Show!

In case you missed it, this may undo some of the damage caused by watching the video in the earlier post:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Crazy Like a Contributor
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Good night, Harold ...

From our buddy Nucks:

...

This guy just moved to New york to run for office and when he was asked if he had been to all five boroughs, he admitted that he had been flown over them in a fucking helicopter.
How much of the local politics does this guy know?
He doesn't even know where to order a fucking pizza from.

...

And yes, my friend, if he doesn't reconsider, I'm gonna be on his ass every day. New York politics is dysfunctional enough without Harold Ford selling us out.

Christ ...

Why couldn't Obama have recruited the old man?

At the urging of President Obama, that epitome of responsibility and compassion, George Wuhhh Bush, will get off his lazy fucking keister and join former president Bill Clinton to help lead the US relief effort for earthquake-devastated Haiti.

...

I'm surprised he accepted. I wonder what the little prick will do to embarrass us now.

Update:

Maybe someone named Bush might not be the best guy to send over there.

The stupid ...

It burns:



Warning: Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck in the same vid. Hearing and vision damage may result.

Vid stolen from Atrios.

Heh ...

Not so much.

Morphine shows promise against post-traumatic stress disorder

This is interesting:

Early administration of morphine to military personnel wounded on the front lines during Operation Iraqi Freedom appears to have done more than relieve excruciating pain. Scientists believe it also prevented hundreds of cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, the debilitating condition that plagues 15% of those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That conclusion is based on findings published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. They suggest that a simple treatment can stop a single horrifying event from escalating into a chronic, incapacitating illness.

Small clinical trials and observational studies have hinted that opiates and other medications could disrupt the way the brain encodes traumatic memories, thus preventing the incidents from being recorded with too much intensity. The new findings -- troops who received morphine within a few hours of their injuries were about 50% less likely to develop PTSD than those who didn't get the powerful painkiller -- are a strong endorsement of that theory.

Psychiatrists and neuroscientists aren't sure why some people develop PTSD while others don't, but the leading theory is that too much of the stress hormone norepinephrine at the time of a traumatic event causes the brain to malfunction when it records the memory.

The idea behind the preventive treatment approach is to disrupt the transmission of norepinephrine in the brain, either by blocking its release or by preventing it from binding to a receptor. In either case, a drug would have to be administered very early, while the memory was still being encoded.

I think this is fine. Every little bit helps, but what about soldiers and Marines who aren't injured? What can we do for them to prevent PTSD?

Don't send them to unnecessary wars might be a good start.

PTSD often doesn't set in 'til years after a Veteran returns to civilian life. I think experience shows that enough of them have self-medicated with opiates and other stuff and that it has the short term effect they seek, but exacerbates the condition in the long term to the point of ruining their lives and those of others.

Science needs to work on after-the-fact prevention of PTSD. We'll be working on non-physically-wounded PTSD Vets for fifty or more years as it is.

When your nation's only accountability is a late-night comedian

I watch The Daily Show every night. When John Yoo was on the other night flogging his manifesto of self-serving lies I turned it off. I don't need to hear that son of a bitch try to spin his enabling of war crimes into something noble and patriotic. He makes me sick and angry. I will watch his war crimes trial. Fat chance.

Attytood, links at site:

I did indeed watch the interview that torture-enabler, Inquirer op-ed columnist and Episcopal Academy alum John Yoo did with Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show." And...it was what it was, which was an interview of a highly intelligent, unflappable and affable man who did some very, very bad things.

An interview conducted not by a prosecutor, or a congressional investigator, the kind of people who should be asking questions of the former Bush administration official who wrote the memos authorizing torture at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

But by a comedian.

Why didn't Stewart nail him on these statements?! Maybe, um, because he's a comedian -- one that people admire because he has a sense of moral outrage in addition to a sense of humor, but a comedian nonetheless. Stewart was able to "compel" Yoo to testify in the court of public opinion because Yoo needed the Daily Show to help sell his new book. Of course, there's plenty of folks who could compel Yoo to testify in a real court or investigate hearing. But this is America -- we don't really do the whole accountabilty thing.

Call it the new American exceptionalism. As Glenn Greenwald and others have noted, other nations around the world are going through exhaustive investigations of what went wrong during the decade of the 2000s in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, even as the United States -- which masterminded the Iraq invasion, opened up Gitmo, and waterboarded prisoners during that period -- is the nation with the most to answer for. Consider England, where the Chilcot inquiry into the launching of the Iraq war continues to make front-page news. Heck, even Iran is charging people in the deaths of its detainees. Here at home, we refuse to look back, fearful that our massive Jenga tower of militaristic foreign policy might collapse.

The selling of John Yoo is made even more frustrating by the fact that in his case, there actually is the potential for some measure of accountability. More than a year ago, in the waning days of the Bush administration, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility wrapped up a report that is said to be quite damning toward Yoo and a colleague -- reportedly accusing the lawyers of "sloppy legal analysis, misjudgments and possible political interference" and recommending them for possible disbarment. Amazingly, the report has been kept under wraps by an Obama administration that seems no more motivated to hold torture (d?-G) criminals accountable than the administration that committed the crimes.

In a perfect world, there would be criminal investigations and charges against Yoo and the others behind the Bush torture regime. At the very least, the Justice report on Yoo must be released and disbarment proceedings must begin. Because the idea that America can handle one of the worst stains on our nation's legacy through a late-night comedy show is the biggest joke of all.

Ha-fuckin'-ha. Some joke.

Note to AG Holder: Do your job, which, if you need to be reminded, is to investigate crimes and prosecute criminals wherever you find them and no matter who committed them. These are in plain sight and are a festering sore on this nation.

Why Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh Ought to Be Dropped Into Haiti as Food

Ooooooh...what a lovely visual! Makes me tingle all over! I'm sure the Haitians have some kind of fugu-like process that would de-poison them and make them edible, and some sauce so folks wouldn't have to hold their noses all during lunch, but I don't envy the guy who has to clean them.

The conundrum arises: Should they be dropped in sans parachutes so as to tenderize them, or landed gently so they can enjoy being prepared as food? Decisions, decisions...

Some of you may think it is cruel and inhumane to make people eat the likes of those two. The Haitians have probably never heard of them, so I wouldn't worry about that.

El Rude-O

Seriously, did you think that Pat Robertson wasn't going to be a completely batshit insane fuckbag about Haiti? C'mon: natural disaster, scary black people, hoodoo-voodoo shit? It's the first Jesus boner Robertson's had in over four years, since he blamed New Orleans for being some kind of gay, sinning magnet for Hurricane Katrina. Robertson said that Haiti only overthrew colonial control because the slaves there made a pact with the devil. "True story," he assured us, despite the fact that it's false. (Sure, yeah, fine, Robertson's got relief organizations working in Haiti. Doesn't make him less of an asshole.)

By the way, if you wanna prove your God is so goddamn powerful, let him cause an earthquake somewhere that's not on a fault line, or let him whip up a hurricane in, say, the middle of the desert. Otherwise, shut the fuck up about how big and strong he is. In fact, Pat Robertson, you saggy, sick, senile fuck who needed to be ground up into soylent green about a decade ago or buried alive with Jerry Falwell's corpse, if your God is such a dick that he'd try to prove some bullshit point by flattening a country of poor, beaten down people, then fuck your God. Motherfucker oughta spend some time hanging with his son to learn how to treat the meek. (And as for Robertson's nodding sidekick there, Kristi Watts, others have put it quite nicely.) (Go see - G)

On Rushole using the earthquake to attack President Obama.

According to Limbaugh, there's some kind of equivalence between the deluded fucktard who sparked his balls aflame on an airplane on Christmas and a major catastrophe that has destroyed a country and probably killed tens of thousands of people: "Now, I want you to remember, it took him three days to respond to the Christmas Day Fruit of Kaboom Bomber, three days. And when he came out after those three days, he was clearly irritated that he had to do it. He didn't want to do it. He comes out here in less than 24 hours to speak about Haiti." It's a little like saying, "How dare those bastards in the ER deal with a code blue heart attack while I'm sitting here with an ass pimple that needs popping."

I'd like to pop his ass pimple, aka his brain, from the inside with the climbing spikes on a phone pole.

- Because, ultimately, as Limbaugh says, Obama coming out to talk about Haiti the next day is just a cynical political ploy: "This will play right into Obama's hands. He's humanitarian, compassionate. They'll use this to burnish their, shall we say, 'credibility' with the black community -- in the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country. It's made-to-order for them. That's why he couldn't wait to get out there, could not wait to get out there." Does it even need to be said that Obama probably needs no help at all with the black vote in this country? That, at this point, he'd have to do something pretty fucking awful in order to lose it? It's not just a cruel statement by Limbaugh; it's dumb.

Oh, by the way, George W. Bush had a statement out about the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami within 24 hours of its occurrence. Guess that was just to burnish his credibility with Sri Lankans and Indonesians.

At this point, Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson need to be bundled up with some canned goods and dropped into Port au Prince in packages marked, "Meat." Griot up those motherfuckers. It's about the only way they'd be useful.

To me, Griot has always been an outfit that sold garage stuff I couldn't afford, so I had to go look up 'griot' in the context of Haitian food. I knew the Haitians had something appropriate for the likes of those two assholes! Fried marinated PIG! My apologies to pigs.

Snotty trivialities do not a Game Changer make...

I'm sure all of us who aren't in a coma or on another planet have seen the perpetrators of, and heard snippets and discussions about, the book Game Change. Here's some opinions:

The last paragraph from Glenn Greenwald:

The real value of a book like this lies in the opportunity it presents for Washington's elite class to distract themselves and everyone else from the oozing corruption, destruction, decaying and pillaging going on -- that these same Washington denizens have long enabled. With some important exceptions, that is the primary purpose of establishment journalism generally. Even better, the book lets our media and political elite -- and then the public generally -- feel good about themselves by morally condemning the trashy exploits of Rielle Hunter and the egoistic hypocrisies of the irrelevant John and Elizabeth Edwards. As The Nation's Chris Hayes so perfectly put it: "Just when you think the news cycle can't get any stupider, Mark Halperin publishes a book." All imperial courts -- especially collapsing ones -- love to occupy themselves with insular, snotty trivialities. As this book and the excitement it has produced demonstrates, providing that distraction is exactly what our press corps most loves to do and what it does best. The media sleazebags who turned Bill Clinton's penile spots, cigars and semen stains into headline news for two straight years haven't gone anywhere; they're actually stronger and more dominant than ever.

The Rude Pundit

The parade of the usual conservatives are outraged, just outraged, over the Reid (and, to an extent, Clinton's) comments. But you can't have it both ways, motherfuckers. You can't embrace the book's supposed revelations about Reid, the Clintons, and the Edwardses without acknowledging that Sarah Palin is a fucking deranged, megalomaniacal retard, like Pinky without the Brain, yet still with an urge to take over the world. The book's either right or wrong, worth credit or discredited.

Oh, wait, that's right. You're conservatives. You can dismiss the stuff you don't like in order to fulfill your worldview and propagate a hypocritical path of self-preservation at all costs, even logic. Almost forgot that that's what you do.

It's a book I won't be buying. Why should I? All the good gossip is on TV all over the place.

I just got this book in the mail about someone I love and respect. Maybe there's some good gossip in it.

If you want to help ...

The poor folks in Haiti, Digby has a list of reputable charities you can donate to. Beware, the scammers are already at work.