We are going to spend a long, LONG time coming to grips with the Bush presidency.

There are just so many things that are oozing out from underneath the carpet that they are very difficult to ignore. Many people, including Bush/Cheney apologists, neo-cons, conservatives, and the well connected (both politically and powerfully) who are doing their utmost to keep all this crap that the Bushies swept under the rug from ever seeing the light of day. That includes, most unfortunately, many people within the Obama administration, including President Obama himself. The big question is, will we ever find out everything that happened during the Bush years?

I, personally, doubt it very much. There are too many people conspiring to keep everything hidden. I don’t know if Obama’s reasons are deeper than his professed position of “moving forward and not looking backward.” If that’s really it, then this is certainly an example of when obstinate pragmatism may serve the person well in the short term, but that might be a disastrous position to have in the long term.

So Dick Cheney lied again. He ordered people at the CIA to not Congress, which has, if I am not mistaken, a Constittuional obligation to oversee the CIA and to reign them in if they get too out of control. From HuffPo:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney directed the CIA eight years ago not to inform Congress about a nascent counterterrorism program that CIA Director Leon Panetta terminated in June, officials with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

Subsequent CIA directors did not inform Congress because the intelligence-gathering effort had not developed to the point that they believed merited a congressional briefing, said a former intelligence official and another government official familiar with Panetta's June 24 briefing to the House and Senate Intelligence committees.

Panetta did not agree.

Upon learning of the program June 23 from within the CIA, Panetta terminated it and the next day called an emergency meeting with the House and Senate Intelligence committees to inform them of the program and that it was canceled.

Cheney played a central role in overseeing the Bush administration's surveillance program that was the subject of an inspectors general report this past week. That report noted that Cheney's chief of staff, David Addington, personally decided who in Bush's inner circle could even know about the secret program.

But revelations about Cheney's role in making decisions for the CIA on whether to notify Congress came as a surprise to some on the committees, said another government official. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the program publicly.

Wow, what a surprise. Dick Cheney in charge, and was being secretive. I really wonder if George really know what his VP was doing...

Photo from here.

Amazing astronomical photo

This is today's Astronomical Photo of the Day from NASA. Isn't that absolutely incredible?

And here is the explanation given:

The Pillars of Eagle Castle

Credit & Copyright: Emanuele Colognato & Jim Wood (Backyard Skies)

Explanation: What lights up this castle of star formation? The familiar Eagle Nebula glows bright in many colors at once. The above image is a composite of three of these glowing gas colors. Pillars of dark dust nicely outline some of the denser towers of star formation. Energetic light from young massive stars causes the gas to glow and effectively boils away part of the dust and gas from its birth pillar. Many of these stars will explode after several million years, returning most of their elements back to the nebula which formed them. This process is forming an open cluster of stars known as M16.

O.K., yes. This photo is under copyright. I am thinking it will be O.K. if I give them attribution and a link. Please go visit their home page.

Sarah Palin = Chance the Gardener?

See, this is a scary thought.

These two characters, Sarah and Chance, one fictional and one apparently very real, have quite a few things in common. Apparently neither read very much, but do watch television. Neither of them really have much on the ball upstairs, if you know what I mean. In fact, both have a tendency to say really strange and silly sounding things that other people who should really know better, amazingly enough, take as deeply insightful and full of wisdom. Both of them REALLY like to be on television. Both are plucked from relative obscurity by a stroke of fate involving very powerful and influential people. And both end up, due to this amazing stroke of fate, on the pathway to possibly becoming the President of the United States.

That's really scary.

Yet ANOTHER reason to hate the New York Yankees.

They have security people who won’t let you go pee during the singing of “God Bless America.” From Whiskeyfire:

Two uniformed cops who ejected a Red Sox fan from Yankee Stadium last summer when he tried to use the bathroom during "God Bless America" have cost NYC taxpayers some $20,000 in settlement money. But the good news is that Yankee Stadium will now allow attendees relieve themselves during the Seventh Inning stretch! You'll recall that last August, one Brad Campeau-Laurion refused to obey an NYPD officer who ordered him back to his seat when he tried to use the bathroom as "God Bless America" played. According to Campeau-Laurion, two officers then forcefully threw him out, with one of the officers telling him to "leave the country if he didn’t like it." In the wake of 9/11, Yankee stadium began requiring spectators to remain in their seats during patriotic songs, in some cases extending chains to block the ends of the aisles. But after a lawsuit filed by the NYCLU over "enforced patriotism," a settlement was reached yesterday whereby Campeau-Laurion gets $10,001 from the city, the NYCLU gets $12,000 for legal fees, and baseball fans are granted the liberty to micturate at will.

“Extending chains to block the ends of the aisles”?!? You have to be sh*ttin me.

Enforced patriotism = fascism, in my mind. No one is going to make me sing a crappy, simpering song if I don’t want to, just as no one is going to force me to say the Pledge of Allegiance if I don’t feel like it. And for some reason, I find it even more upsetting that this wasn’t a government entity trying to enforce this, it is a professional sports team!

Photo from here.

"I was going to clean this up, but I decided that NOT cleaning it up was the best for everyone!"

I absolutely refuse to continue to be the target of unfair media people who keep pointing to all these beer bottles in the road. Oh, and good point guards keep their head up for lame ducks that don't chase dead fish... You betcha!

I wonder if we can get Joe the Plumber to quit, too.

I mean, we would all have to figure out exactly what he IS that we want him to quit from first... I suppose he could just shut up and disappear, that would be good enough for me. Maybe Sarah Palin could give him some inspirational thoughts about quitting, stuff like dead fish and lame ducks, and how quitting from something you started and aren't done with is really a GOOD thing. More Americans should quit... whatever it is they are doing that they haven't completed yet.

So, Sarah Palin quits as governor 1 ½ years early and “bloggers and activists” are the reason?

There is lots and lots of speculation out there about Sarah Palin’s real motivations for calling it quits. She’s freeing herself up for a presidential run in 2012. No, she’s sick of politics, dislikes her life and wants to spend more time with her family. But she really wants to travel around the country, helping out Republican candidates. Which may be really difficult to do while spending more time with her family.

Here is one reason, as noted by Nick Ayers, the executive director of the Republicans Governor’s Assocation, in HuffPo.

While Ayers may have had a direct heads up as to Palin's intentions, he wasn't entirely on cue with the Governor's talking points. Asked why Palin was stepping down as opposed to finishing her term (which ends in 2010), the RGA header cited pesky bloggers and activists as the reason. Palin had insisted she didn't want to put Alaskans through two years of a lame-duck governorship.

"I don't think this is buckling to pressure," said Ayers. "I think this is her coming to the realization that the legislature in Alaska and that some bloggers and activists in Alaska are going to do everything they can to stymie her progress. This is a governor who didn't run for the office because she wanted a title. She wanted to make significant change in the state. She realized that that was no longer going to be able to happen, because things had become so partisan there."

She can’t do her job as governor of a relatively small state (in terms of population) because bloggers and activists are giving her such a hard time, but she wanted to be Vice President of the United States? Does she not think that might be a little bit more visible position than governor? And as for the compliant that “things had become so partisan”, does she not remember her contribution to the entire “partisan” thing? Obama “pals around with terrorists” and such? People in the crowd at her rallies were recorded yelling, “terrorist” and “kill him!” That’s not partisan? By engaging in such tactics, does she not open herself up to criticism? By getting into a high profile dust up with David Letterman, after Letterman apologized several times for the rather nasty joke about one of Palin’s daughters, doesn’t she just add fuel to the fire? She’s the one who made her family into a campaign issue, after all.

I also think her use of the term “lame duck” is really unusual. I have never heard of an official call himself or herself a “lame duck” after only 2 ½ years on the job. That term is normally applied to someone in their last term in office and can’t run anymore, and everyone knows it so there is no real reason to go along with that person because everyone knows there will be someone new coming along very soon. She’s the one who said she wasn’t going to seek a second term, so that automatically qualifies her as a lame duck after 2 ½ years? That’s really weird logic.

I have no doubt that some “bloggers and activists” go beyond the pale when it comes to Sarah and her family, and they have the ability to make Sarah Palin’s life difficult, but only if she lets them. Myself, I have real doubts that someone as narcissistic as Sarah Palin appears to be would just step down voluntarily from the office to which she was elected, just because bloggers are saying nasty things about her. She said some pretty nasty things about others. I guess this means that if someone has particularly thin skin, then they shouldn’t be in politics. I couldn’t do it, for instance. But unless Sarah Palin goes into seclusion and stays there, I can’t see the scrutiny by all those pesky bloggers diminishing any time soon.

One way of looking at this is the old saying, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.” A slightly different way of looking at that is this. If you are going to say and do things on a national stage that makes you look like a moron, but don’t like the negative publicity, then maybe you should either stop looking like a moron or else get out of the game entirely.

More thoughts on conservative desires for another terrorist attack in the U.S.

(This was originally an update of my earlier post on this subject. However, it turned out to be more angry and full of content than I had originally intended, so I decided to make this into its own entry.)

You know, after a day mulling this over, I am still unable to grasp the enormity of just how insane these people are. Sadly, No! posted some comments from some right wing site about this. There really are people out there hoping and praying that the U.S. gets hit again with another terrorist attack. One lady (I assume it was a female, by the name) said something like, "If it can't be Washington D.C., then I pray that it is San Francisco."

The psychological makeup of these people is incredibly scary. They are so lost, so upset that they are no longer in control and the world is not conforming to their very odd view of reality that they hope for a repeat, or even worse, of the absolute worst day in America since Pearl Harbor. Their emotional state is that fragile. They cannot cope with the fact that they are not "correct", so they wish for more mass casualties in the U.S., for the sole purpose of being able to have that feeling of self righteous anger, the kinds that burns in the breast that requires we go destroy someone or something. Last time, it was Iraq. Bombing the shit out of Iraq was cathartic to these people. It was just unfortunate that Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the terrible events of 9/11. However, justifications could come later. All that was really necessary was that we go destroy something. It felt good to these people. They got their rocks off by watching the nightly pyrotechnics in the safety of their living rooms. "Yeah, we showed them terrorists!!"

Now that a Democrat, and a black man to boot, is in the White House and the Dems control both the Senate and the House, the coping mechanism of these lunatics is obviously on life support. They cannot deal with reality. They want to return to the safety of their constructed reality, where the United States of America (Fuck, yeah!) is the always the victor over ultimate evil. We smite the infidels with our righteous sword, because God is on our side! That is what they want. That is why insane people like William Kristol kept agitating to bomb Iran, after our "adventures" in Iraq were shown to be an unmitigated disaster. They needed that fix of self righteous anger. The same thing is going on now. A terrorist attack, and preferably a nuclear one (according to Michael Scheuer above), will make things simple again and put everything back in the correct order. Republicans will once again be in charge, Democrats will hide, whimpering in fear, in their closets, and the U.S. will show the world, friends and enemies alike, that NO ONE messes with us! If you do, the consequences will be terrible.

This is the same exact mentality of the schoolyard bully. He can't deal with his classmates on normal terms. He has to terrorize them in order to feel good about himself.

I tell you, if God DID create humans in His own image, then God must really have some deep issues that he needs to resolve.

Sorry for this early morning session in amateur pop psychology, but I am just incensed that these kind of people call liberals "anti-American" and being "for the terrorists." Man, if rooting for Osama bin Laden to detonate a nuclear bomb in a major U.S. city is not "rooting for the terrorists", I don't know what is. I am just astounded that these people can't even see how crazy they are. Which, now that I think about it, is the very definition of "crazy."

Well, it’s official. Conservatives hate Obama so much that they hope Al Queda attacks the U.S. again.

This is not some mindless ravings of a basement blogger. (I’m actually in my library on the second floor, and I am not wearing pajamas either.) No, this is actually what one Michael Scheuer said on Glenn Beck’s show on Fox “News.” From Crooks and Liars:

Scheuer: The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it's going to take a grass-roots, bottom-up pressure. Because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. It's an absurd situation again. Only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary.

Did you get that? This guy is saying, on what is purported to be a mainstream media outlet, says that he hopes Osama bin Laden attacks the U.S. again so that true conservatives like himself can immediately start blaming Obama. Please note that Glenn Beck did not immediately jump in and tell this guy he was a lunatic. He actually agreed with him! They want another 3000+ innocent men, women and children, along with the heroic police and firefighters, to die just because they don’t like what President Obama is doing.

Besides sounding like the ravings of someone who should be in an insane asylum, this guy’s statement doesn’t make logical sense. Look at that last sentence. He is saying that Osama bin Laden should attack the U.S., which would no doubt result in mass casualties, because that is, after all, the point of such a terrorist attack, so that people will demand that the U.S. government protect them! That’s like burning down your house to get the fire department’s attention that they should protect your house from burning down! I mean, this is absolutely insane stuff. This is not anti-American? They are actively rooting for the epitome of a terrorist, those people for whom the U.S. must shred the Constitution and give up the very things that make this country free, to successfully murder 100's if not 1000's of American citizens!

I have said before, I know that every society has its fringe movements and individual lunatics. But how did this country ever come to the point where we have so many people who appear to be stark raving mad, and why are they now offered such a prominent soapbox as national television?

UPDATE: This story is starting to make the rounds in the blogosphere. Here is Steve Benen's take at Washington Monthly.

I was trying to think of how best to describe how spectacularly offensive this lunacy really is, but it looks like Adam Serwer beat me to it: "[U]nderstand, this is not unpatriotic. You can wish all manner of horrors on this country, but as long as these horrors might serve a specific political agenda, you're not being unpatriotic. Unpatriotic is a public health care plan. Unpatriotic is a judge modifying subprime mortgage loans to keep a roof over someone's head. Unpatriotic is phosphate free detergent. Patriotic is wishing for a terrorist attack on the United States."

I'd just add that there will almost certainly be no consequences for this. Two nutty conservatives can talk about the advantages of another terrorist attack on U.S. soil -- indeed, they can long for it -- without facing any real pushback at all. There won't be any suspensions or boycotts. No sponsors will withdraw. None of Beck's or Scheuer's allies will distance themselves, and neither one will be excluded from polite company.

Yep. That's totally true.

UPDATE II: From Sadly, No!

I can’t think of one other country in the entire history of the world where right-wing pundits go on TV and pine for a devastating nuclear attack on their own country just so they can say they were right all along. Not even Iranian government officials, crazy as they are, sit around saying, “Y’know, I hope the infidels bomb the hell out of us just so we can expose the Reformists as a bunch of wimps.”

Good Lord. Some policemen in San Diego are under the impression that the U.S. is a fascist police state.

Here are a couple of stories from Talking Points Memo about an incident that I doubt will ever show up in the big time MSM.

The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that a fundraiser for Francine Busby, who previously ran for the deeply-Republican Fiftieth District and came close to winning in the 2006 special election and subsequent regular election, was raided by sheriffs after an unnamed neighbor made a noise complaint. Busby now calls it a "phony" noise complaint, and the article says that multiple neighbors said there was no great noise at all.

Here's the twist: The fundraiser was hosted by a lesbian couple, and shortly before the sheriffs came a particular neighbor had shouted anti-gay slurs at the assembled crowd. "It was a quiet home reception, disrupted by a vulgar person shouting obscenities from behind the bushes," Busby says.

As one neighbor told the paper: "We didn't hear anything until the sheriff came, with eight patrol cars and a helicopter."
The sheriff's department claims that somebody kicked an officer. By the time it was over, multiple people were pepper-sprayed, one of the hostesses was arrested, and the whole neighborhood got to see quite a scene.

Eight patrol cars? Pepper spray?!? A HELICOPTER?!?! For a noisy party complaint? This seems it might warrant, at most, a warning for excess noise. And, although my little excerpt doesn’t say this, the gathering was made of up mostly middle age folks, you know, the kind of people who don't play Aerosmith at Extremely High Volumes and who really aren’t looking to get into a physical confrontation with armed police.

What the hell is up with the SDPD? Are the words “Democratic Fundraiser” so much of a warning signal that the police need to send out the riot squad, looking for trouble? And this person “behind the bushes” yelling sexual epithets and who is probably also the person who phoned in the noise compliant, what is his deal? Is he now proud of himself for disrupting a fundraiser for a Democrat, hosted by a lesbian couple? Does he feel he made a valuable contribution to society?

Stalin would have been proud. I now understand perfectly about how a monstrous government like the Soviet Union, along with their terrifying secret police, can come about. It’s because many people believe that they should behave like this. They enjoy causing pain, anguish and grief for people they deem as their enemies. I’ve said it again and again here. I have no idea how these people even live with themselves. They obviously have no idea of what democracy really means. None whatsoever. I hope several people lose their jobs over this one.

The Audacity of Dopes.

From the NYTimes:

“I disagree with the idea that this shows problems for the modern Republican Party,” said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, a group that applauded Mr. Sanford’s attempt to refuse some federal stimulus funds earlier this year. In reference to the fiscally conservative philosophies of Mr. Ensign and Mr. Sanford, he joked, “I think instead it shows that sexual attractiveness of limited-government conservatism.”

Ah, I see! Conservatism is really, really sexy, so that is why all these Republicans keep getting caught with their pants around their ankles! Women just can’t help themselves when they get around one of those masculine, virile, limited-government he-men. Governor Sanford had no choice in the matter of his infidelity and his unexplained disappearance off the face of the Earth for six days, with his staff saying that he was “hiking the Appalachian Trail” when he wasn’t even in the same hemisphere. Sure. That’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. Well, not really. But it certainly is to Grover Norquist, he of the “government, meet bathtub” theory of governance, if you ask him about it (and even if you don’t).

Yes, yes… Images of Kathryn Jean Lopez fondling her George Bush In A Jumpsuit action figure come flooding, unbidden, into my mind. I may have to take some Alka Seltzer and go lay down for a while. “Sexual attractiveness” certainly contains subjective elements, like personal taste, state of mind and, in the case of K-Lo, being a complete and utter imbecile. But when Democrats get caught with THEIR pants down (and they do), that’s because Democrats have neither values nor ethics, are scumbags, cannot be trusted with anything and should resign from their positions immediately. Otherwise, Republicans must impeach them (ref: Clinton, William Jefferson). But REPUBLICANS, well, that’s a different kettle of fish altogether. Women (and possibly other men, if Larry Craig is any example) can’t help themselves and prostate themselves at the feet of limited-government conservatives, literally begging to be sexually ravaged. (This explanation seems to leave a little something out, such as why said conservatives (especially those of the married variety) can’t seem to refuse those offers of ravagement, in spite of continual claims that they, and they alone, are the protectors of all that is moral in America. It also kind of seems to be missing something in regard to David Vitter and his fondness for prostitutes. They threw themselves at his feet, begging for sex, for which he felt compelled to give them large quantities of money? But these things are apparently trivialities that can easily be dispensed with when necessary.)

It’s just another fine example of IOKIYAR (It’s O.K. if you are a Republican). What hypocrites. Just say anything; it doesn’t really matter what, to excuse yourself and your colleagues from any sort of blame whatsoever. It doesn’t even matter if it makes sense. Even if that really was a “joke”, as the story says, it was a poor one whose only possible purpose could be to deflect the issue by ridicule and make it into “no big deal.” Donald “Gosh, Who Knew That Iraq Had So Many Vases?” Rumsfeld perfected this tactic. Just say anything that comes to mind, and then you can claim victory and go back to bashing Democrats, liberals, gays, Mexicans, Hollywood, whoever, claiming that they destroying this country.

“I think instead it shows that sexual attractiveness of limited-government conservatism.” Ho-ll-ee cow. I am just in awe of that statement. Delusion, rationalization, deflection of blame, minimization of the real issue, pulling something/anything out of one’s ass… It’s all there, wrapped up in one nicely wrapped package, for all to behold in all its glory, not unlike Pigs in a Blanket at IHOP. One can only marvel at the audacity of anyone attempting an argument like that (hence, the title of this post).

UPDATE: More dope audacity. Rush Limbaugh blames Obama and the federal stimulus for Sanford's behavior. Unbelievable.

UPDATE II: And Michael Savage gets into the act, and actually goes even further than Rushbo. This is actually just one small part of Obama's grand plan to rid himself of his enemies. Obama somehow planted this "dear, dear friend" of Sanford's over eight years ago, so that Sanford would self-immolate NOW, just in time to jerk the rug out from underneath his presidential aspirations? My goodness, these people are either totally delusion or grasping at the very molecules that make up straw.

“Gov. Sanford Admits Affair with Argentinean Woman”

That’s the headline today at Talking Points Memo. TPM also outlines the history of this weird episode, from his gone “missing”, to his “hiking the Appalachian Trail”, to his being incommunicado with his staff and family DURING Father’s Day weekend and not telling his Lt. Governor about his absence, to his really being in Argentina after his staff had been saying that, oh sure, he’s just gone hiking, no worries there, to the admission that he has been having an affair…

This is, of course, very close on the heels of Senator Ensign’s admission of HIS affair with a staffer, which included bits of accused blackmail, putting the 19 year old son of his lover on the Republican Party payroll, etc. etc.

These guys are the ultimate “holier than thou” types. Ensign was all over Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinski, stating that Clinton should resign over it.

And this is just THIS year. Who could forget Tom Foley and his constant pursuit of young male teenage staffers? Or the “wide stance” airport restroom encounter of Senator Larry Craig and his subsequent arrest?

Does the Republican Party not realize they look like complete hypocrites, as well as raving lunatics? Why does ANYONE talk the Republican Party seriously these days? They gave us George Bush and Dick Cheney, and everything that entails. Their nomination for the presidency last year was a guy with reputedly a very terrible temper and a very short fuse (which is a bad combination for a President) and who sang “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” at a fundraiser, and whose VP nominee is a complete and utter ditz and who made her unwed, pregnant daughter into a showpiece for her campaign. I haven’t even mentioned Michael Steele.

It’s no wonder like more sane Republicans have either quit the party, left politics or have tried as much as they can to distance themselves from the lunatics that have taken control of the party. I have great respect for Republicans like Olympia Snowe, Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar, even though I disagree with many of their political positions on real issues. I would profess some admiration for Colin Powell as well, except he squandered whatever admirable qualities he may possess for his role in the Iraq War, and for not saying anything about it publicly when he possibly could have made a difference. He let himself be used, and it is his eternal shame that he was a tool for someone who he knew was a liar and not acting with the best interests of this country in mind.

I hope that the next time one of these “family values” types tries to criticize Obama or Democrats again, that the entire country laughs in their face. “Hypocrite” doesn’t even begin to describe them.

I think the late, great George Carlin said it best. “Traditional American values: genocide, aggression, conformity, emotional repression, hypocrisy, and the worship of comfort and consumer goods.”

UPDATE: And, right on cue, Fox "News" labels Mark Sanford as a Democrat. This cannot be accidental. This is at least the third time they have done this. This time, I think at least twice during the Mark Foley story and I believe once when Larry Craig got caught in the MSP airport. Jeez. Do they really think that no one knows that these people are Republicans? Or is Fox required to do everything they can to piss off Democrats? That's my theory.

Do you get the sense that Republicans will howl in outrage about Obama’s actions, no matter what he does or does not do?

It’s the outrage that counts. It all about being able to be on television, casting as much criticism at President Obama as they can. That's all that matters.

John McCain criticizes Obama for not taking a stronger stand on the Iranian protests and in support of those demonstrators. The only problem is this is the guy who was singing “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” last year during the presidential campaign. McCain didn’t seem overly concerned about the Iranian people then. I guess it’s fine when WE kill innocent civilians of another country indiscriminately by dropping bombs on them, but we can’t let their own government abuse them! What an offense for not supporting them by… doing something! Dropping bombs on them, perhaps. Making as much noise as possible about how evil the Iranian government is, which would give said government all the ammunition it needs to make this into a U.S. vs. Iran confrontation.

To carry that point a little further, during the Iran/Iraq war, which side did the U.S. support? Why, Iraq, of course! That same country we pulverized into tiny little pieces just 10 years later! But who does the Iranian government blame for that war? The United States, of course! And who has been meddling in the politics of Iran since 1953? The U.S., when the CIA helped overthrow a democratically elected government whose actions we didn’t really care for! Does the Iranian government remember that? You get they do! And yet, John McCain, and a whole host of other nutjobs like Lindsey Graham, Charles Krauthammer, etc., are agitating and demanding that Obama “do more!”

These people are not even making sense anymore. They just seize on whatever they can in order to bash the President. There is no consideration about how stupid they are going to look. You really have zero credibility when you desire to drop bombs on a country on month and then are hugely concerned about that same country’s civilians the next.

But, of course, if Obama had taken a different approach on this issue than he has and come out really swinging, going all Macho Cowboy, doing his best impression of George Bush and threatening the Iranian regime with death and destruction, do you suppose these same Republicans would be supportive? No, not for one second to I believe that. They would be out there again, full of outrage that President Obama was meddling and making the situation worse.

There is "outrage" out there that a reporter from Huffington Post asked Obama a question at his press conference. How dare Obama plant a question! That's over the line! Of course, everyone has completely forgotten how Bush used to plant softball questions at his press conference. Has everyone forgotten Jeff Gannon?

You know, I knew when Obama was elected, the Right was going to go nuts. I actually looked forward to it. I thought watching their impotent rage would be rather amusing. And it was, for about a week. Now, these lunatics are just tiresome. Tiresome and ridiculous. To have any credibility at all, you cannot protest every single thing the President does, and be totally outraged every time. It looks like an act. No one takes you seriously, except for the extreme base of the Republican party who will swallow anything and everything, so long as it is critical of Obama and Democrats in general.

This is an old story now, but did you read about the “Christian” who was praying for God to kill Obama?

From Pandagon:

Imprecatory prayer is agreeing with God, and if people don’t like that, they need to talk to God,” Drake told syndicated talk-show host Alan Colmes. “God said it, I didn’t. I was just agreeing with God.”

Asked if there are others for whom Drake is praying “imprecatory prayer,” Drake hesitated before answering that there are several. ”The usurper that is in the White House is one, B. Hussein Obama,“ he said.

Later in the interview, Colmes returned to Drake’s answer to make sure he heard him right.

“Are you praying for his death?” Colmes asked.

“Yes,” Drake replied.

”So you’re praying for the death of the president of the United States?”

“Yes.”

..."You would like for the president of the United States to die?” Colmes asked once more.

“If he does not turn to God and does not turn his life around, I am asking God to enforce imprecatory prayers that are throughout the Scripture that would cause him death, that’s correct.”

This guy is totally innocent of anything, of course, because he is only “agreeing with God” via “imprecatory prayer.” There’s no problem with that at all, of course.

And these are the people who think they should be in charge of this country. You do anything they don’t like, God should kill you.

I really was not aware of how many lunatics were in this country who really don’t care about how insane they sound.

When you have a cold, sometimes your dreams look like this.

This country has lost part of its soul.

(Because blogging is international, I would like to make plain that the country I am referring to in the title is the United States of America. You can make your own judgments about your own country.)

I have no idea what our kids are really being taught in school these days. I do remember what I was taught when I was growing up. The U.S. was founded on very well defined principles, such as freedom, equality and justice. The system we had might not be perfect, but the ideals we tried to strive for were.

As with almost everything in life, what I was taught turned out not to be all that black and white. A lot of what we were taught about freedom, equality and justice was true, just as a lot of it was a combination of wishful thinking, self-delusion and propaganda. We really weren’t given the whole impact of having a large part of the nation’s economy based on slavery. We weren’t really told about the systematic extermination of Native Americans. Nor were we told about the interment of American citizens during WWII who had the misfortune of being of Japanese ancestry. The working class was treated as little more than trash during the Gilded Age. Intolerance and racism was not on the curriculum. Those things were kind of left out. There is, and always has been, a lot that is good about America. And there has always been a dark side that most of us would rather pretend didn’t exist.

Yet, given all that, it seems to me that our ideals still held true. Even after all those dark episodes, our better nature would ultimately rise back to the surface. Maybe I am just being naive. Maybe I have been so immersed in our idealized view of our country, I swallowed it, just like everyone else. I really believed that the U.S. was rather exceptional. Possibly, I was suckered.

Even given that uncertainty, it seems like to me the U.S. has changed. The principles we hold dear are worthy of slogans and sound bites, but are not things to be taken literally. Or perhaps the meaning of these words has morphed into something not included in their original definitions.

I would have never thought that our society would seriously be debating whether or not we should be torturing people, or that holding people indefinitely without being charged with a crime and not allowing them access to the legal system would not only be something we would ever consider, but would be held as a moral and patriotic imperative by some. There are some people in this country who would seriously try to make a case that Jesus would torture people, under the right circumstances.

Greed and the pursuit of more and more money override basic tenets of civilized behavior. I wrote the other day about insurance companies, to whom people have paid hefty premiums all their lives, that will drop coverage to people who are in desperate need of healthcare for the flimsiest of reasons. The whole Enron debacle showed us just how out of control people can be when groupthink sets in.

New behavior and attitudes that were once unthinkable have become normalized. Yelling and screaming at people who disagree with you is now commonplace. Attempting to steal elections is now just “part of the game” and the only sin is if you get caught. Blatant self-interest rules. The poor, the aged and the sick can just fend for themselves. It’s survival of the fittest (read: the wealthy and the powerful) taken to absurd extremes, to the detriment of everyone else. As a society, we aren’t even trying anymore to pretend to aspire to ideals. Our ideals have become nothing more than slogans to bash our opponents over the head with.

Like I said, maybe our country really was like this all the time and I was just taken in by very nice sounding propaganda. It’s always easy to believe the best about yourself. Maybe the symptoms just seem worse now because of the 24/7 wall-to-wall coverage of outrage.

Still, I can’t help believe that some fundamental change has occurred in this country. Torturing people is a good thing? How could that possibly be?

What I don’t know, nor does anyone, is whether or not the current attitudes in our country represent just a dip in the road, or is the start of a long, probably very painful, decline of our country as a power for good in this world. All civilizations, small, large, powerful and ineffectual, eventually come to their end.

Let’s hope we, as a society, can once again become what we like to believe about ourselves.

So you think our health care system is O.K. as it is?

This is from the Washington Monthly.

Executives of three of the nation's largest health insurers told federal lawmakers in Washington on Tuesday that they would continue canceling medical coverage for some sick policyholders, despite withering criticism from Republican and Democratic members of Congress who decried the practice as unfair and abusive. [...]

An investigation by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations showed that health insurers WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group and Assurant Inc. canceled the coverage of more than 20,000 people, allowing the companies to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims over a five-year period.

It also found that policyholders with breast cancer, lymphoma and more than 1,000 other conditions were targeted for rescission and that employees were praised in performance reviews for terminating the policies of customers with expensive illnesses.

The insurance companies are as bad as our financial institutions. They are full of greedy people who have absolutely no other interests other than making money. This is sick. How could a company actually do this? And how can this really be legal? It seems to me that the insurance companies are breaking their contacts with their policy holders. How can they do this?

Here’s more.

The insurance industry -- you know, the one conservative lawmakers and the AMA are so desperate to protect at all costs -- has this unpleasant habit called "rescission." Customers have insurance, and they pay their premiums, but once they get sick and require expensive medical treatment, the companies drop the coverage.

And in testifying before Congress, executives of these insurers not only confirmed the rescission practice, but said they had no plans to change the money-saving tactic.

One executive said rescission is about "stopping fraud and material misrepresentations that contribute to spiraling healthcare costs." So, for example, when a woman in Texas was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, her insurer dropped her coverage because the company found an instance in which she visited a dermatologist for acne, and didn't tell the insurance company about it. This, the insurer said, was an example of "fraud and material misrepresentation."

Yeah, “stopping fraud and material misrepresentation.” Uh huh. God, what assholes. And they really don't even care what Congress thinks about this. No shame. No sense of wrong doing. Nope. We don't care that people are dying because of our actions. Not our problem. And we will praise our employees for saving us money!

We need a public option for healthcare coverage for every single person in this country. Perhaps when these insurance companies actually have real competition will they stop these tactics. I don’t even have an adjective that fits right now. I don’t believe in the afterlife, but if I did, Hell would be much too nice a place for people like this.

This is some of what I was referring to in my last post. A society that really cared about its populace would never allow things like this to happen. I am really pissed.

Cynical Sunday morning thoughts.

I haven’t written much of substance on this blog for over a year now. I used to write some fairly lengthy posts that took some thought and research to put together. There are some posts that I have written that I am actually quite proud of. Now, I just express an opinion, usually a rather pissed off opinion, about what is going on in this country. I also break it up with some cheap laughs when I find the opportunity.

I just haven’t had the energy or enthusiasm lately, especially since we elected Barack Obama as the first black man to be President of the United States. I was so upset with criminal and unethical doings of the Bush administration, all I could see was getting a Democrat into the office. I held out hopes that things might change.

It is terribly evident that, even though Obama’s election does indicate that some steps are made (and that is no small step, for certain), things in this country are not going to get much better. We can and should continually try, but things are never going to change significantly. Those with money and power are not willing going to give up what they see as their God given right to run this country, either by having one of their representatives in office or by manipulation behind the scenes. We are never going to get rid of people who cannot get past their ignorance, fear, petty jealousies and hatred of anyone and anything that is different from them. We are never going to do anything about the preventable deaths by nuts with guns. We are never going to have a system, including healthcare, that works toward the benefit of all people, not just the rich. It seems that we, as a country and a species, are never going to get past the limitations of our reptilian brains. Yes, there are individuals, groups and companies that are striving to become what we really could be. But as a whole, the human species is too damn stupid to become something else.

We haven’t advanced any since the time of the Romans. We just have better technology, better medicine, “better” weapons… I can imagine some of the people I see spewing forth their hateful rhetoric saying the same exact same things in the 16th century. I can see people today who would think the Inquisition would be a grand thing if only our government would allow it. I see people today who would make great SS storm troopers. I see people today who would arrest Gallileo for pointing out that Earth is not the center of the universe. It’s the Dark Ages with blackberries, cable television and high speed internet access. That’s how I really feel about our society today.

If this blog had any real readership, I suppose I would be deluged with comments. Since I don’t, I guess this just counts as me screaming at a hurricane. It does just about as much good. I suspect that, as I move more toward the end of my working career and into retirement, I am going to turn into an angry, cynical recluse. I will concentrate more and more on the trivial hobbies and activities that I have going that, essentially, do nothing but focus my attention on something enjoyable to me and to waste time until my eventual death. That sounds really horrible, but that’s how I see it. I really, really dislike society and I am feeling more and more detached from it all the time. Every time I explore the internet and read what is going out there in the blogs, I get a really sick feeling in my stomach.

The human species, in my mind, has so much potential. We have already achieved some astounding results. We understand so much that humans never did before. I am just so in awe of what we now know about the universe. We have robots on Mars and have taken pictures and mapped the surfaces of all the planets in our solar system, with the exception of Pluto and that is coming in a few years, along with numerous moons surrounding those planets. What we now know is light years from what even our civilization knew 100 years ago.

But unfortunately, knowledge does not always translate to intelligence. We are a stupid species that knows a lot. Although I won’t be around when this finally occurs, I wouldn’t really shed many tears at the prospect that our species may become terribly diminished due to global climate change. We are slowly killing ourselves with our stupidity. Oh, I think the Earth will survive, in some form or another. It has been undergoing constant change throughout its lifetime. I expect that to continue. However, what the Earth changes into might not be terribly conducive to the survival of human society in its present form. Who knows? In order to survive, humans may need to revert to our roots as hunter/gatherers in order to survive.

If that happens, it couldn’t happen to a more deserving species.

And now for something completely different, radioactive wasp nests.

From the Seattle Times:

By The Associated Press

RICHLAND — Workers cleaning up the Hanford nuclear reservation are going after radioactive wasp nests.

The Tri-City Herald reports 6 to 12 inches of top soil are being dug up this month from 6 acres near the H Reactor. And, workers will dig up more individual mud dauber wasp nests over about 75 acres of the nuclear reservation in southeast Washington.

The contractor handling the clean-up, Washington Closure, says the nests were all built in 2003 when water was used to dampen dust during demolition of an H Reactor basin. That attracted the wasps that used the mud to make tube-shaped nests for eggs.

Spokesman Todd Nelson says the nests are "fairly highly contaminated."

Well, that’s all we need. I think I read something a couple of years ago about radioactive bats at Hanford. Now, we have a story about radioactive wasp nests. Fortunately, it’s only about the nests right now and not the wasps themselves. I can’t imagine having a giant radioactive dirt dauber settle down in my yard and start burrowing under the crawlspace. I’m telling you, one of these days, Mother Nature is going to come back gunning for us. Global climate change is probably too slow a method, as well as not being terribly reliable, to really get rid of human beings. She might pick a faster method one of these days. Giant radioactive dirt daubers are probably as good a method as any. (No, the AP story didn’t say anything about “giant.” But really, is there any possibility, at all, that there might be a highly radioactive insect that ISN’T a giant monster?)

The poster is of the film, Monster from Green Hell. For a great review of that film, check out the B Movie Graveyard.

It appears the elections in Iran were, shall we say, not quite on the up and up.

Here's a blog entry at Washington Monthly that gives an overview.

Isn't it odd, though, how everyone can really wring their hands about how unfair it is that the ruling party in the government of Iran manipulated election results and thereby subverted the will of its people, but everyone in THIS country seems to be quite happy to turn a blind eye to all the voting irregularities and the possibilities of unscrupulous people being able to change the vote tally in electronic voting machines?

There are a lot of people, all over the world and including in this country, who have absolutely no idea what "democracy" really means. I know one thing it isn't. Democracy isn't, "win an election by any means and then you get to do anything you want for the next four years."

Another recent example of conservative cognitive dissonance.

A point brought up by Tom Tomorrow in his latest cartoon (see here) is one that I have thought of many times in the past. I find it absolutely astounding that, on one hand, conservatives can stomp about, complaining about how violent video games and rap music can negatively influence young people, but on the other hand, say that the crap that Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and other pond scum like them is “only entertainment” and they should not be held accountable for anyone actually acting upon all the egging on that they continually do.

Case in point, Bill O’Reilly has been vilifying Doctor Tiller, who was recently murdered by someone who looks like he has already confessed to the murder in the media and who has a lengthy record of violent acts and intimidation toward abortion providers. O’Reilly went after Tiller (calling him “Tiller, the baby killer) eleven separate times on his show. He used some pretty vile language and really went out of his way to whip up the already heated emotions of his audience. Then when someone actually does go out and murder the guy, O’Reilly seems surprised that anyone would actually try to hold him accountable for anything! My, my. Liberals should really be ashamed of themselves.

I actually do believe in the first point I made above. Constant exposure to violent video games and rap lyrics ARE probably harmful to young kids and teenagers who are still trying to sort out who they are. I’m sorry, but I think the human species is very easily manipulated. You can get a person to believe most anything, if you try hard enough and start early enough. Having a target who is emotionally confused about their identity and maybe in dire straights themselves just makes manipulation all the easier. So, I find it no surprise that kids constantly exposed to those influences would tend to be more anti-social and willing to resort to violence in order to resolve a conflict or just to get their way.

Another point here is that the advertising people have long known that advertising products actually does change purchasing habits of people. Billions and billions of dollars are at stake here. If advertising didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it.

So, to have O’Reilly argue that what he does is “just entertainment” is just absurd. Video games are just entertainment. Rap music is just entertainment. Violent movies are just entertainment. Yet, conservatives of this country flog Hollywood and video game makers to death anytime they want the country to conform to their view of reality. However, they feel they are free to say anything they want and no one should hold them accountable, in any way, shape or form, if someone actually acts on the hatred they spew out over the airwaves on a daily basis. Sorry, but you can’t have it both ways!!

Michelle Malkin, among others, has a favorite trick she likes to use when someone displeases her. She puts up their names and addresses on a website. Now, exactly what does she expect to happen here? There would be absolutely no point in doing that unless the unspoken agreement with her followers is that they should go harass these people! That is the whole point! And if it isn’t, then why do it? That is completely insane to argue that she was not “directing” her followers. She didn’t need to say it! That agreement was there, on the table! It didn’t need to be said. The only thing that not writing it down gives someone like her is some sort of very implausible deniability. The mindset seems to be “Ha ha! You can’t absolutely PROVE I had anything to do with this so you could convict me in a court of law. Therefore, I am innocent of any of the scurrilous charges you are making!”

I don’t know what kind of psychological buffer this argument gives to these morons. Somehow, this point is central to convincing themselves that they really aren’t guilty of anything. They must be making these arguments solely for themselves and their followers. Have to be. They certainly aren’t convincing anyone else. This seems to be a repeated pattern in today’s conservatives. So long as they can say something, anything that they feel will get them “off the hook”, then they will say it. It doesn’t matter if it conflicts with anything else they have said recently. Just as long as they can say something, that’s all that matters to them. It doesn’t matter if it convinces exactly no one; all that matters is that they have built themselves a little barrier that helps protect the laughable notion in their own minds that they are in the right and everyone else is wrong.

If I remember correctly, Charles Manson was found guilty of murder, even though he did not participate directly in the Tate/LaBianca murders.

UPDATE: After the Jew-Black-Obama hater killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., what do you suppose the right wing media would do? Take a step back and look at what they have really been doing to incite their audience into taking action? Or would they call the guy a liberal and try to blame liberals?

If you answered number 2 (specifically Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck), you win the kwepie doll. God, these people are disgusting.

All you Wiccans out there, you are being targeted by the Republican Party!

From Washington Monthly:

Two leading voices of the Republican Party's evangelical wing visited Rock Church [in Hampton Roads, Virginia] on Friday for a forum aimed at recapturing some of the movement's political momentum.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee urged Christians to get involved in politics to preserve the presence of religion in American life.

"I think this is one of the most critical moments in American history," Gingrich said. "We are living in a period where we are surrounded by paganism."

“Surrounded by paganism…” My. I suppose that sounds terribly frightening to the 75 to 85% of the people of this country that profess belief in a monotheistic religion. I certainly have seen an uptick of reporting about Druidic rites being practiced in my neighborhood. One of my coworkers told me he believed in Odin and Valhalla. He is from Norway, you know. I was just asked if I would be interested in joining a coven, just last week! And I am almost positive my neighbor is a Wiccan! At least, they have a bunch of goats in their back yard. I am sure that means something.

Man, these conservatives are really going off the deep end. I think he is using the word “surrounded” as it might have applied to George Custer surrounding all those Indians.

The problem with ignoramuses is that they don’t know they are ignoramuses.

I suppose it is stuff like this that bugs me the most about Republicans and conservatives these days. They think they are brilliant when, in fact, they have about as much on the ball as a bag full of hammers. Michelle Bachmann is a really good example. Last month, she lectured Congress about how carbon dioxide is “natural” and therefore really good for us. It therefore can’t cause global warming.

Here’s someone else that I have never heard of before, but you can be sure he is a Republican, making really stupid statements about global climate change. From Washington Monthly:

"This whole thing strikes me if it weren't so serious as being a comedy, you know. I mean, we just went from winter to spring. In Missouri when we go from winter to spring, that's a good climate change. I don't want to stop that climate change, you know. Who in the world want to put politicians in charge of the weather anyways? What a dumb idea. [...]

"Some of the models said that we're going to have surf at the front steps of the Capitol pretty soon. I was really looking forward to that. [...]

"We've been joined by another doctor, a medical doctor but also a guy who graduated from high school science as well, from Georgia, my good friend, Congressman Gingrey.... So to have actually a guy who's passed high school science is tremendously helpful. And Dr. Fleming from Louisiana."

These people aren’t even smart enough to recognize the fact that they don’t really know anything about the subject. That happens to us all the time. No one can be an expert in everything (except for Dr. Benton Quest, which is probably the subject of a future post), so not knowing something about a specific subject, especially technical or scientific, is nothing to be ashamed of. However, when rational people realize they are in that situation, they usually keep their damn mouths shut so as to not make total jackasses out of themselves. Yet, here are these elected officials making pronouncements delivered as if they were Zeus standing astride Mt. Olympus. And to make this guy look even stupider, he is standing up there, bragging about his friend that passed high school science! THAT makes someone an expert on global climate change!?!

It occurs to me that even a hard-core Republican ideologue should pay attention to a person banging on their front door at night, yelling at them that their house is on fire, even if the person banging on the door is known to be a Democrat. Yeah, you might not trust Democrats. But the situation they are being warned of is pretty dire, so regardless of who might be delivering the message, they better get their butt out of bed to go check out if their house really is on fire. But no. These clowns would prefer to pull the blankets up under their chins and tell their bed partner (whoever that might be, which is also may be the subject of a future post) about what idiots Democrats are. Their house couldn’t POSSIBLY burn down, because God won’t let it burn down! Or because flames are natural so therefore, flames are good for us! Or how burning houses are all a liberal plot to destroy the economy.

Ignoramuses are bad enough, but smug ignoramuses are insufferable.

Ah, remember the good old days, when any criticism of the President was considered to be anti-American, if not downright treasonous?

I remember. It seems like that was pretty much how the Republican Party saw the world in the first eight years of this decade. Man, you said anything critical of even the policy of the Bush administration and it was a pretty good bet the Conservatives of this country were going to demonize you. Dissent was not to be tolerated, period.

Well, now that President Obama has made what many are calling a Very Important Speech in Egypt, the rules of the game are now changed. See what James Inhofe (Crazy Person - Oklahoma) said regarding the current President of the United States, while that President is still abroad. From Washington Monthly:

Sen. Jim Inhofe said today that President Barack Obama's speech in Cairo was "un-American" because he referred to the war in Iraq as "a war of choice" and didn't criticize Iran for developing a nuclear program.

Inhofe, R-Tulsa, also criticized the president for suggesting that torture was conducted at the military prison in Guantanamo, saying, "There has never been a documented case of torture at Guantanamo."

"I just don't know whose side he's on," Inhofe said of the president.

My, how times have changed. I wonder what happened? Oh, yeah. A Democrat is now the President. Funny how the rules change like that, isn’t it?

Actually, no, it isn't funny at all. Expected, yes. Funny, no.

I just do not know what to make of conservatives now.

O.K., sure, there are conservatives out there who have values they live to and do not lie to “win” cheap points off their sworn enemies. But they sure aren’t much in evidence these days. Right now, all I see is Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Newt Gingrich, Dick and Liz Cheney and Tom Tacrendo. And I see these people are all flaming lunatics. Rush seems to think that Sonia Sotomayor is a dangerous racist and nominating her to the Supreme Court is the same as nominating David Duke. He also thinks that conservatives are being oppressed and should learn to “fight back”, because they don’t know how. They’re docile, you see. They let evil liberals just run them over all the time. I also just saw a clip of Rush the other night comparing himself to Thomas Jefferson, because Rush can see things that others can’t. I almost threw something at the television set at that point.

I could go on and on, but it would serve no purpose really. I am just seriously in awe of someone who can be so pompous that he would toss out of the Republican Party anyone who disagrees with him, on anything. Anything. You disagree with Rush, you are not a Republican. And this guy is working under something like a 45 million dollar salary. Amazing.

Well, I guess all I can say about this is that the Republican Party is going to have to do something to save itself from, if not total extinction, then from a long, forced march into irrelevancy. The problem is that they made their pact with the devil long ago. They depended upon the votes of racists, born again fundamentalists and angry white men who don’t like anyone except other white guys exactly like them. That is whom the Republican Party depended upon to win elections. And now those people are running the party. It’s going to be a bitch for anyone to stand up and take control back from the lunatics who are now in charge of the asylum. I don’t even see anyone attempting to try, any time soon.

This is going to be a long, drawn out affair.

Subaru gets an environmental “F minus” on their new television ad.

I really don’t know what to make of the new Subaru commercial. You may have seen it. Some guy is lovingly “retiring” his old Forrester by parking it under some remote tree, with a few other junked cars, so that his Forrester can “live on.” How heartwarming…

My question to Subaru is, what the hell is up with this? These days, isn’t it the “done” thing in commercials to show everyone how “green” your product is? Even if your product isn’t “green” in any sense of the word, companies are still trying to convince the general public that it is, seeing as that is where the new public sensibilities seem to lie. But this new Subaru commercial is advocating that you NOT dispose of your used car in an environmentally sound way. You should to just go find some tree out in the middle of nowhere where you can just park it, in case someone, somewhere is too cheap to go to the dealer and get some new car parts.

I got news for Subaru. Disposing of your junked cars like that seems to be a requirement in places like Montana (you don’t believe me, take a ride on the Amtrak Empire Builder and see how many yards along the tracks have junked cars stored there). But this is not the environmentally sound approach, and I think Subaru should be ashamed for even suggesting that this might be a good thing to do. We need people who are MORE environmentally aware, not less. We have enough of those clods already.

I don’t care how much you loved your old car. You do not just go take it out somewhere and park it under a tree when it dies or when you get tired of paying the mounting repair bills on it. Donate it to some charitable organization that takes used cars (running or not) and somehow makes money off of them for their charity. You are doing somebody a favor and you are not out there trashing the environment with what will eventually become a rusty pile of useless metal, plastic and rubber.

Picture from here.

I believe I understand why Conservatives like Sarah Palin so much.

In their eyes, she can bring down a triceratops by herself with nothing but a stone ax, clean it and then roast up the best parts into a tasty meal, all the while conforming to the strict edicts of the tribe. She just looks adorable in a bear skin, too.

Did you know that Christians can’t be Democrats?

It’s true! At least, it is true according to those nice people who run Jerry Falwell’s Liberty College. From Washington Monthly:

Liberty University, the evangelical school in Virginia founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, is drawing heat Friday for its decision to revoke recognition of the College Democrats' chapter on campus.

According to the Lynchburg News & Advance, the school decided a week ago the organization "stood against the moral principles" held by the school and therefore could no longer be sanctioned.

Maria Childress, the staff adviser to the club, told the paper the school -- which opposes abortion rights and gay marriage -- had issues with the Democratic Party platform.

Childress says she was told by Mark Hine, the vice president of student affairs, that "'You can't be a Democrat and be a Christian and be a university representative.'"

So, after initially approving the College Democrats club, they changed their minds and revoke the club charter. But, of course, it’s not that those fine folks feel like any political activity and going to college don’t mix. No, it’s only Democratic political activity that is hostile to those values held dear by administrators of Liberty. No open mindedness here, please! No diversity of opinions necessary!

Liberty is a private institution and they can do as they please. But this does absolutely nothing except publicize the fact that "Liberty" U is the closed minded, tribalistic institution that everyone knows it is but doesn’t really talk about. It’s just one more example of the entire “we encourage you to join us, just as long as you believe and act exactly like we do!” mentality that pervades the conservative psyche these days.

I just find it amazing that there were enough Democrats actually enrolled at Liberty to make up a club. To me, that’s a bit like being a gay Republican. You are going to have to dig deep to find some reasons for your decision that you can live with. Liberty, pfftt...

Photo from TBogg.

Onward Christian Soldiers, indeed.

This is now kind of an old story, as things go these days. I haven’t gotten around to posting about it, but it is something I felt like I should.

It’s not a secret that the armed forces of the United States has become a very Christianized place in the last 10 years. Oh, no doubt, the various services were always pretty conservative, which usually goes hand in hand with religion. But under President Bush and his Iraq War, Afghanistan War, War Against Islamic Terrorists, Global War on Terror, etc. etc., the trend has become a full fledged avalanche, gathering speed and mass as it careens downhill. I have read stories about what has been going on at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs for years. I don’t like this and firmly believe that religious fervor and military should NOT be sharing the same bed. That’s pretty much a recipe for disaster.

What is finally coming to light, however, is yet another thing altogether. GQ magazine broke a story about how Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon put together daily briefings for President Bush on how the wars were going. That’s not really newsworthy by itself, but the nature of the briefings were. Here is part of a column by Frank Rich at the NYTimes.

But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)

What’s up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”

I really don’t know what I find more disturbing. That Bush might be swayed by such crap, or by the fact that Rumsfeld, who is not really a “true believer”, would cynically play such games with Bush to manipulate him into what Rumsfeld really wanted to do. Both are really disturbing to think about. This is what might have been going on in Europe back in the 16th century. It should not be going on in the United States in the 21st century.

And, as always, some people are upset that these things are being made public. It’s not the fact that they even exist. No, that’s not the problem. But showing them to people and talking about them, well, that’s just terrible.

I wish all politicians, but mostly Republicans, would stop and think for a second about this. If you think there might be some bad repercussions if what you are doing eventually becomes public, then doesn’t that immediately tell you something about what you are doing? If you are worried about your actions showing you in a bad light, then maybe, just maybe, that is something you shouldn’t be doing? For example, it’s O.K. to torture detainees that haven’t been charged with a crime, but boy, no one better talk about that. That would endanger this country!

This is, without a doubt, a very warped way of thinking. It’s never your fault, it’s always someone else’s fault. To me, such thinking is a sign of either criminal behavior or a deep psychological problem, and possibly both. To me, everything that is coming out about the Bush administration just confirms the absolute worst that all us DFH's have always suspected. These guys were delusional. They were megalomanics. They were criminals who knew what they were doing was criminal and tried to hide their actions behind a curtain of fog and legaleze that no lawyer with an ounce of integrity would try to sell to a judge.

And all of them are going to get away with their misdeeds. I find that sickening.

Image from here.

Imperial Storm Troopers really suck at their job.

From cracked.com, here is part of a post called “6 Evil Henchmen Who Sucked at Their Job”. Go check out the entire thing.

Henchmen are an essential part of every plot to take over the world. Unfortunately, even the best henchmen let us down. Is it something inherent in the henchman archetype? Or is it just that we expect too much from grown men in form-fitting body armor? Honestly, we don't know. But we do know that it hurts every time, and nowhere more so than in the six cases below.

Who Are They?

Soldiers of the Galactic Empire, as featured in the Star Wars franchise.




Why Were They Feared?

Stormtroopers started out strong. The way they stormed that Rebel blockade runner in Star Wars was pretty sweet. And the way they overran that Rebel base in The Empire Strikes Back was the epitome of cool (OK, so they let most of the rebels escape from Cloud City, but the rebels had inside help from known scoundrel Lando Calrissian, so we could let it slide). By that point, it seemed like Stormtroopers could do no wrong. But then something happened, something... awful.




What Went Wrong?

After convincing us that they were the baddest asses in henchmen history, Stormtroopers suddenly went all France on us. Somehow, a frigging army of Stormtroopers was outwitted, outmaneuvered and just plain outfought by a bunch of overgrown merkins whose most advanced weaponry was flint-tipped arrows. But that's not even the worst part. The worst part is that these weren't just any Stormtroopers. No, these were, in the Emperor's own words, his best troops, for fuck's sake.

Of course, no one wanted the Stormtroopers to win. Yes, we loved them the way only impressionable adolescents can love something, but we knew they were evil, and we wanted them to get their comeuppance in the end. But not like this. Losing as ignominiously as they did on Endor didn't just diminish the villains, it also diminished the heroic men and women who defeated them.

A Typical Stormtrooper's Last Thought:

"I can't see a thing in this helmet!"

It’s beginning to look a lot like suspects were tortured not to prevent an attack on the U.S., but to provide the Bush administration with a rationale

I’ve wanted to write a post about the daily revelations coming out about our use of torture for a few days now, but I just couldn’t really find the enthusiasm. This is just too disheartening. It’s getting worse and worse each day, and I thought we were at a point where it couldn’t get much worse about six months ago. And I keep hearing promises that there is more to come. More pictures, more briefings, more paper trails. It seems very apparent right now, although this is still not being reported in the mainstream media yet, that we were torturing people not to “prevent attacks” on the U.S., but to find a rationale for the Iraq War. We were torturing people who were already giving us good information with other, non “enhanced” means. But they weren’t giving us what we wanted to hear, which was that there was a direct link between Iraq and Al-Queda. We needed a reason, besides the phony WMD issue, to give the neocons the war they wanted. Even after waterboarding KSM 183 times in a single month, we didn’t get the information the interrogators wanted to hear.

Doesn’t this PROVE that the information gained by torturing someone is unreliable, at best? If they haven’t given it to you after being waterboarded six times a day for a month, then it isn’t likely they are not going to give it to you? And if they do give you something, what does it mean? This sounds so much like the “confessions” elicited by clerics back in the 1600’s, where they would keep piling rocks on you until you agreed you were a witch, or were in league with Satan, or whatever they wanted to hear. When you confessed, they killed you. If you died before you confessed, that meant you were actually innocent. Of course, you were dead, but hey, you weren’t in league with Satan.

This is, of course, ignoring the fact that torturing people is morally wrong and illegal, regardless of whether of not the information you gained was correct or not. But what’s the big controversy of the day? Whether Nancy Pelosi knew about this or not. I don’t give a rat’s ass whether she knew or not. If she was complicit in the whole thing, then let her take the fall along with all the other perpetrators of this evil done in the name of the United States of America. However, I will say that guilty people don’t usually go around calling for release of documents and a truth commission.

I am just so disheartened about all this. Check out this story at Washington Monthly for more info.

THAT'S NOT A TICKING TIME BOMB.... About a month ago, McClatchy reported that the Bush administration abused detainees in part because officials were desperate for non-existent evidence linking al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein's regime. The piece talked to a senior former U.S. intelligence official who said Cheney and Rumsfeld were "demanding proof of the links" in 2002 and 2003. When the imaginary evidence wasn't produced, the administration "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information."

Yesterday, this became a subject of renewed interest.

Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff in Bush's State Department, raised a few eyebrows with this item:

What I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 -- well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion -- its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

It wasn't just Wilkerson.

Writing on The Daily Beast, former NBC producer Robert Windrem reports that in April 2003, Dick Cheney's office suggested that interrogators waterboard an Iraqi detainee who was suspected of having knowledge of a link between Saddam and al Qaeda.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse was questioned on the issue today in two TV interviews. Speaking to CNN, Whitehouse allowed: "I have heard that to be true." To MSNBC, he noted that there was additional evidence of this in the Senate Armed Services committee report, and from Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell. "This thing is just getting deeper and deeper," said Whitehouse, noting that if it were true, it would significantly bolster the case for prosecutions.

And MSNBC's Chris Matthews also picked up on the issue this evening, as did Ed Schultz of the same network.

Torture is wrong (and illegal, and counter to our national security interests) regardless of the Bush administration's motivations. But many -- in the media, on the Hill, etc. -- seem inclined to think doing the wrong thing for the right reason is somehow tolerable. Bush/Cheney was wrong to torture, the argument goes, but they were only trying to protect Americans from another terrorist attack.

Which is precisely why these revelations, if accurate, have the potential to be devastating. There was no "ticking time bomb," but there was a political agenda. Getting a detainee to offer evidence of a non-existent link wouldn't have furthered our security interests or saved American lives, but it would have made the Bush White House's sales pitch for an unnecessary war a lot easier.

Are the same torture apologists we've heard from lately willing to also accept "extracting false confessions" as a reasonable justification?

UPDATE: Even Maureen Dowd in getting into the act. Maybe the logjam is really starting to break apart, regardless of what the Obama administration does or does not want.

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

I used to agree with President Obama, that it was better to keep moving and focus on our myriad problems than wallow in the darkness of the past. But now I want a full accounting. I want to know every awful act committed in the name of self-defense and patriotism. Even if it only makes one ambitious congresswoman pay more attention in some future briefing about some future secret technique that is “uniquely” designed to protect us, it will be worth it.

Blogging, correctly done, takes the best equipment as well as a touch of inspiration.

Wow, they’re going to do it. The Republicans are actually going to do it.

No, they’re not going to change their positions on anything or actually acknowledge they have ever been wrong. I am referring to the fact that it appears as if the Republican National Committee is actually going to approve the resolution to rename the Democratic Party the “Democrat Socialist Party.”

From the Washington Monthly:

Notice, these clowns can't even get the grammar right. The "Democratic Socialist Party" would merely be moronic; the "Democrat Socialist Party" is both moronic and an insult to the English language.

Regardless, the effort is a breakthrough moment in political inanity. Members of the Republican National Committee are holding a special meeting so they can officially ask Democrats to change the name of their political party to something Republicans prefer. In fact, the resolution, which might as well have been written in crayon, concludes that the RNC is "calling on" the Democratic Party to embrace the GOP-endorsed name. It adds that Democrats "should agree" to the re-naming.

How can so many people be so oblivious? With all the problems this country faces, you might think the Republicans might want to spend some time actually trying to come up with some proposals to solve these problems. But no. They want to spend their time voting on a resolution to call Democrats names! And on top of that, they think the Democrats “should agree” with the new name given them by the RNC.

These people are truly morons. Personally, I think we should all agree that all RNC members be named Flounder.

Madam Speaker, I... Gosh, your hair smells wonderful!

As Republicans opt out of the political process, policy debates are now occurring WITHIN the Democratic Party.

I find this fascinating. At least from the ivory tower, “this is really how it should work” perspective, you would think policy debates in Congress would be between Republicans and Democrats. After all, there are very different points of views on the opposite sides of the political spectrum. Debating those differences seems more than logical. However, it seems as if the entire Republican Party has just mailed it in. They have opted out of the process. They are no longer just the party of the loyal opposition. No, they have decided the best way to maintain their political purity is to vote a resounding NO to anything proposed by the Democrats. And God help those who don’t toe the party line. Arlen Specter decided to switch parties after it became apparent to him that he wasn’t pure enough for the party ideologues. When Olympia Snowe wrote an Op Ed in the NYTimes that essentially said she was worried that moderates were no longer welcome in the Republican Party, the overwhelming reaction was “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!” Anyone who criticizes the GOP or Rush Limbaugh is no longer welcome, not unless they do a bit of groveling first. Dick Cheney says that he thought that Colin Powell wasn’t a Republican anymore. And it goes on and on. What Olympia Snowe said is really true, moderates and ANYONE who doesn’t toe the Republican Party/ultra Conservative/born again Christian line is really not welcome in the Republican Party. End of discussion.

What the Republican Party has essentially done is to throw in the towel on any meaningful debate about policy. There are very valid reasons to disagree with any sort of proposal these days, and the amount of money being tossed about is truly astounding. There really should be debates on how best to rescue this country from the myriad of problems we all face. But the Republican Party would rather gnash their teeth and rend their garments about anything and everything these days. They have absolutely no idea about how to govern. The only thing they really know how to do is vilify “the enemy.” Now that now longer seems to be as effective as it once was, they have absolutely no idea how to respond, other than to crank up the volume on the same old message that is no longer working.

In a fascinating turn of events, it seems that the political debates that should be going on are happening within the Democratic Party itself. The “progressives” and the “moderates” (also known as Blue Dog Democrats) of the Democratic Party are really not happy with each other at times on some very important issues. For example, here is a little tidbit from the NYTimes about the debate on the Democrats attempt to fix our broken healthcare system.

WASHINGTON — Forty-five House Democrats in the party’s moderate-to-conservative wing have protested the secretive process by which party leaders in their chamber are developing legislation to remake the health care system.

The lawmakers, members of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition, said they were “increasingly troubled” by their exclusion from the bill-writing process.

They expressed their concerns in a letter delivered Monday to three House committee chairmen writing the bill, which House leaders hope to pass this summer.

Representative Mike Ross, an Arkansas Democrat who is chairman of the coalition’s health task force, said: “We don’t need a select group of members of Congress or staff members writing this legislation. We don’t want a briefing on the bill after it’s written. We want to help write it.”

Mr. Ross and eight other lawmakers who signed the letter are on the committees responsible for writing the legislation.

Centrist Democrats said they fully endorsed President Obama’s goal of guaranteeing access to health insurance and health care for all. But, they said, they are concerned about the cost of the legislation, which could easily top $1 trillion over 10 years. And they want to be sure that the role of any new government-sponsored insurance program, expected to be a centerpiece of the bill, is carefully delineated.

Personally, I would love to see a single payer system (that is, the government administer our healthcare system), but that’s just me. I readily acknowledge that there are many potential pitfalls with that. Others prefer alternative methods. That’s great. We need to have that debate. What we really need to do is fix the problem! It isn’t easy and there isn’t likely to be a consensus on the issue without lots and lots of work and many concessions by both sides. And that process looks like it is starting to occur.

I just find it amazing and more than a little amusing that the Republicans have taken themselves out of the game. Political purity is more important to them than actually, say, winning future elections or addressing the country’s problems in a manner that is acceptable to them. They would rather just sit on the sidelines, holding their breath in a very manly attempt at turning blue, hoping that someone will eventually notice them.

As the current saying goes, “Good luck with that.”

You ever had one of those dreams...?

You know the one I am talking about. The one where you are in college and you realize you are WAY behind and there's no way you are going to catch up, and you are going to fail miserably. And there's always one or two smart a**es who are quite willing to tell you how easy it all is and there's no problem at all. That one. I just had one of those last night.

I am 54 years old, have two degrees, have been published internationally, regularly speak in front of quite knowledgable people and I am STILL having stupid dreams like that. Jeez.

In addition to Texas Republicans, Georgia Republicans now think that secession is a pretty good idea.

"Oh, my God. President Obama didn’t mean that I was going to the Republic of Georgia. He meant Georgia! I am going to Atlanta! As if dealing with Hamid Karzi isn't enough, I have to talk to those idiots as well?”



I must admit, those feisty folks in the Georgia state senate have gone WAY past just a veiled threat. No, the Georgia senate just voted 43 to 1 (let me repeat, 43 to 1) a resolution that… does something. From The New Yorker, here is a bit of a description of the lunacy.

The resolution is written in a mock eighteenth-century style, ornate and pompous. Just two of its twenty sentences account for more than 1,200 of its 2,200 words. But the substance is even nuttier than the style.

It begins by saying that what it sneeringly calls “a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States” limits the “General Government” only to specifically named powers, such as punishing piracy and counterfeiting, and that “each party” to the “compact,” i.e., each state, is the final judge of whether the “General Government” has overstepped its very tight bounds. Among other rights, the states “retain to themselves the right of judging how far the licentiousness of speech and of the press may be abridged without lessening their useful freedom.” (There’s a lovely phrase: “the licentiousness of speech and of the press.”) If I’m reading the resolution’s convoluted language correctly, it also asserts that the states have a right to suppress “libels, falsehood, and defamation, equally with heresy and false religion” without interference from “federal tribunals.”

The kicker:

That should any such act of Congress become law or Executive Order or Judicial Order be put into force, all powers previously delegated to the United States of America by the Constitution for the United States shall revert to the several States individually. Any future government of the United States of America shall require ratification of three quarters of the States seeking to form a government of the United States of America and shall not be binding upon any State not seeking to form such a government.

Italics mine. If Congress were to reinstate the assault rifle ban (admittedly an unlikely prospect), there would be no more United States of America.

To repeat: this was passed by the stalwart patriots of the Georgia state senate by a vote of forty-three to one. According to Beutler, the South Dakota house passed a similar resolution, 51-18, and an Oklahoma version passed that state’s house, 83-13, and its state senate, 25-17. Oklahoma’s Democratic governor, Brad Henry, vetoed it, noting dryly in his veto message that it “does not serve the state or its citizens in any positive manner.”

Are we going to have to fight the goddamn Civil War all over again just because the country elected someone that the Republicans in the ex-Confederacy don’t like? And yet, somehow, criticizing President Bush and his rush to invade a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 was somehow treasonous?

Republicans are really insane these days. I mean it. Absolutely frickin’ insane. And these people are the elected officials of the state. What is going through the minds of the rest of the denizens (I now refuse to call them citizens) of these states? Yeah, I would like to see all these people start squealing when they realize what kinds of things they would lose if their state were no longer part of the United States of America.

UPDATE: It occurred to me that these people are not really serious, but are just in the process of thumping their shoes on the table, a la Kruschev, just to get people to pay attention to them because they know that the Republican party is no longer the dominant party in the U.S. "Pay attention to me or else I'll hold my breath 'till my face turns blue!!" Maybe... Tantrums seem to fit with the Republican mindset these days. But I am more than willing to be that many of these people are completely serious. You know, when liberals were upset with how things were going under Bush, I never once heard this kind of talk. I heard plenty of talk about moving to Canada, but never breaking up the Union because certain people didn't like how our President was running the country. Let's just hope that we don't see another John Wilkes Boothe pop out of the shadows of all this anger and hatred and into the limelight.

UPDATE II: It turns out that Hilzoy at Washington Monthly has thought about this development out of Georgia as well. Gosh, it turns out that the Georgia State Senate is not only totally out to lunch, they are a bunch of pliagerists as well! At least they used a very well informed source for their pliagerism, but using Thomas Jefferson to come up with language supporting the supposed rights for states to just ignore any laws they don't like and to remove themselves from the Union at their pleasure seems more than comically ironic.

Stop the presses! I think I have discovered the source of the swine flu!!

Photo from Whiskey Fire.

Wait a second! The GOP wants advice from Dana Perio!?!

From Talking Points Memo:
GOP Turns To Former Bush Aides For Communications Advice

The Politico reports that the House GOP conference is bringing in three former Bush advisers -- former Bush press secretary Dana Perino, former deputy press secretary Tony Fratto, and former Bush counselor Ed Gillespie -- to give advice to House GOP press secretaries at this Friday's annual workshop. "We are battle-tested," said Perino.

HAHAHAHA!!!! This is the person who, as official spokesperson for the Bush administration, didn’t even know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was:

Appearing on National Public Radio's light-hearted quiz show "Wait, Wait . . . Don't Tell Me," which aired over the weekend, (Dana) Perino got into the spirit of things and told a story about herself that she had previously shared only in private: During a White House briefing, a reporter referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis -- and she didn't know what it was.

"I was panicked a bit because I really don't know about . . . the Cuban Missile Crisis," said Perino, who at 35 was born about a decade after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown. "It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure."

So she consulted her best source. "I came home and I asked my husband," she recalled. "I said, 'Wasn't that like the Bay of Pigs thing?' And he said, 'Oh, Dana.' "

“It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I am pretty sure.” Yathink? Jeez. Well, if the GOP is going to be asking this person for her advice, I would guess the Democratic party is sitting much more prettily that I ever would have imagined.

I wonder what else Ms. Perino doesn't know much about.

Shorter Michael Steele: “Everyone’s welcome in the Republican Party, as long as you believe in exactly the same things we do.”

Here’s Michael Steele, via Balloon Juice:

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele appealed to the political middle Friday to join his party but added that the party itself wouldn’t moderate.

“All you moderates out there, y’all come. I mean, that’s the message,” Steele said at a news conference. “The message of this party is this is a big table for everyone to have a seat. I have a place setting with your name on the front.

“Understand that when you come into someone’s house, you’re not looking to change it. You come in because that’s the place you want to be.”

So, let me use what I hope will be a highly illustrative example of what M. Steele is saying here. Say you and your significant other are in mind to go out for dinner some Saturday night, and you really have in mind that you would like a nice filet mignon accompanied by a nice red wine, in a restaurant with a nice atmosphere and friendly waiters. It’s your anniversary, after all, and you have had your fill of fast food over, say, the last eight years. So, here comes Michael Steele. He owns the local Taco Bell. He tells you that you can come on in, you really should, this is a great restaurant. You can’t imagine how wonderful it really is. Just don’t ask for filet mignon with red wine, because he doesn’t have it and he isn’t going to be pandering to any potential customers who might not want a taco full of melty processed cheesefood, so don’t even bother asking. He’s telling you that you REALLY want a taco! There are lots and lots of people who like tacos, and you should really be one of them. Screw that whole filet mignon thing.

Now, with much less snark and minus the Taco Bell analogy, here is Maha discussing the exact same issue.

In many ways, IMO, the Republican Party is acting like an apocalyptic cult — a small number of true believers waiting for some Big Cataclysmic Event that’s going to change everything, to their advantage. For that reason, present reality doesn’t interest them, because present reality is just a temporary aberration (which it may be, but not in the way they think). Thus, movement conservatives brush off opinion polls that show their positions to be wildly unpopular. They don’t need to worry about election losses, shrinking party membership, an aging political base, or senior senators who jump ship. They don’t need to change with the times. They’ll be vindicated when the Mother Ship arrives. You’ll see.

And they must truly believe in the Event, because they’re betting everything on it. In 2000 they still were shrewd enough to market Dubya as a moderate — a “compassionate conservative” who liked to be photographed surrounded by smiling black children. Now they aren’t even pretending to make adjustments to political reality.

Well said. I think I like my Taco Bell analogy better, tho.

GOPasaur from Daily Kos.

As Inigo Montoya said, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

In this case, I am talking about the term, “checks and balances.” All of a sudden, Republicans are worried about Democratic control of the White House and both houses of Congress. Gee, after all that time when Congress acted as a rubber stamp to George Bush, and NOW they are worried. They handed Bush a blank check that allowed him to do pretty much anything he wanted to. Republicans at the time believed that it was their solemn duty to vote Yes on whatever Bush wanted. However, they really need to go buff up on the material they should have learned in their 8th grade civics class. “Checks and balances” is not talking about between political parties. It’s talking about between the Executive, the Legislative and the Judicial branches of the federal government. And that’s regardless of which political party controls each of those branches, something the Republican party seems to have forgotten completely. It is impossible, it seems, for Republicans to view any issue outside the prism of "Us vs. Them."

Duh.

Random thoughts and observations about traveling by air.

- The people who run airports seem to be under the impression that every single person waiting for an airplane must be able to see and/or listen to CNN, usually at a very high volume. They do not seem to think that a “quiet space” might be necessary. As a result, during my trip, I was continually “informed”, at each and every stage of my journey, about the swine flu (OMG, WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!) and Miss California’s breast implants.

- The 757-300 is a very long airplane. Let me repeat, very long. In fact, it is the longest single aisle airplane in commercial service. If you are, perchance, sitting in the very last row, it takes an exceedingly long time to exit the airplane. Let me repeat, an EXCEEDINGLY long time. On the other hand, there is a good chance you might have an empty seat next to you, even on a full airplane, as it appears that no one really likes sitting there.

- Tall, overweight, doughy looking white guys, no matter how passionate they might be about the college athletic teams they are supporting, are not very fashionable in the best of circumstances but certainly not when decked out in their college sports apparal. In fact, they look pretty damn stupid. Vivid displays of college affiliations may work really well at, say, an actual football or basketball game, but they do not work when out in the general public. Really garish colors, say orange and purple, make the entire presentation almost unbearable. Under no circumstances should doughy white guys ever wear college sports apparel.

- It is a useless task to try to listen to classical music on an airplane. Almost every aspect of a symphony orchestra is drowned out by the “white noise” (really damn loud white noise) associated with an airplane in flight. You cannot hear anything done at a subdued volume or low frequency, including most everything done by the string section, the bassoons, the oboes, etc. On the other hand, you really get to hear certain aspects of the music done by instruments like the timpani, the brass section, etc. I imagine a good classical selection for airplane travel might be the 1812 Overture.

- There will always be a certain type of person who sits somewhere in your near vicinity. This type of person has the unfortunate ability to talk about anything and everything, in great detail and at a loud volume. It doesn’t really matter to them whether or not they have an attentive audience or not. The presence of a someone not asleep is enough for them to share their wisdom and observations with everyone else. Sort of like a blog, but without the selective audience.

- Every time I fly coach instead of first class (which is always), I am reminded that all the people in steerage on the Titanic were the ones that didn’t get in the lifeboats and subsequently drowned. Not that I am ever expecting an airplane crash into the water where life rafts are necessary (but given what happened in NYC last month, the chances appear to be greater than zero), but I just find the existence of first class passengers, along with their “first class only” restrooms and dedicated line to get on the airplane, annoying. I don’t mind that many people and companies have the money to spend on first class tickets. I just think that if I am stuck in steerage… I mean coach, that everyone should have to sit there as well.

Picture from RR Picture Archives.

"Don't worry, Darlene. He'll be back. He hasn't forgotten you."

I'm on a business trip to the nation's capital. Be back in a week or so. Check out some of the lesser-known, but worthwhile, links over at the right.

Conservatives are taking the term “cognitive dissonance” to an entirely new level lately.

(For those who need a refresher on what cognitive dissonance is, check here.)

Conservatives apparently don’t understand how absolutely insane they collectively sound these days. Or maybe they do but continue to spout nonsense at a very high volume anyway. I don’t know which hypothesis is scarier. Either way, conservatives are lashing out and anything and everything these days, and they aren’t even stopping to consider what fools they look like while doing it. Historically speaking, raving lunatics standing out on the street corner, screeching at anyone who comes by, all the while drooling all over themselves, tend not to rate very high on the believability index. They contradict themselves with ease and have apparently forgotten all about the eight years that George Bush and his cronies were in charge. In a normal world, if you would like to have any sort of credibility at all, you normally do NOT go around shouting about how upset you are when what you are saying CONTRADICTS your earlier stated position that is STILL ON THE PUBLIC RECORD!

For example, remember when torturing detainees didn’t happen? But then it did happen, but it was only a couple of times by a few “bad apples?” That has now somehow morphed into a patriotic imperative on part of most (but admittedly not all) conservatives that we MUST torture anyone who MIGHT have any information at all that MIGHT be useful in breaking up a SUSPECTED terrorist plot, and anyone who believes otherwise is anti-American. Does no one even remember these various stumbling steps forward, which just happen to all contradict each other? And how does this jive with all the (past and current) statements that “America does not torture?”

Here’s some more ranting and raving from a prominent Republican on this subject. From Balloon Juice.

New York Republican Rep. Peter King thinks his party needs to go nuke if Bush era officials are prosecuted on torture charges.

King, the outspoken ranking member of the House homeland security committee, said Republicans should “shut down [legislative] activity across the board” if any Bush-era officials are hauled into court.

“We would need to have a scorched-earth policy and use procedural means to bring the place to a halt — go to war,” he told POLITICO.

He added:

“If we have another 2,000 people killed, I want Nancy Pelosi and [liberal philanthropist] George Soros, John Conyers and Pat Leahy to go to the funeral and say, ‘Your son was vaporized because we didn’t want to dump some guy’s head under water for 30 seconds.’”

So, the choice that seems to be put forth here is that we either “dump some guy’s head under water”, which is a very benign sounding thing indeed, or having someone’s son vaporized. Gosh, when you put it like that, WHO could possibly object to that?

If these “enhanced interrogation techniques” are so damn fire important, but they aren’t torture, then why must we do them? We keep hearing idiots like Rush Limbaugh say that these techniques are not torture, it’s just slapping, or like some college hazing. THAT’S what we have to do to keep this country safe? “College hazing?” “Slapping?” “Dumping some guy’s head under the water for 30 seconds?” (All those are very real quotes, I may or may not look up the links at this point.) How can anyone actually argue that these techniques are so benign that no one with any sense should object, but still maintain that we must do these things to protect every person’s safety? It’s really that easy? You are actually telling me that these Al Queda guys, who have been training for years to go on missions to kill as many of their enemies as they can, and kill themselves in the process, who are absolutely convinced in their own minds that God is on their side and they will receive all sorts of rewards after they die and take as many of their enemies as they can with them are actaully so wimpy that they are just going to give up after "dunking their head in water for 30 seconds" and tell the interrogators everything they know? THAT is what you are saying, Representative King? It isn't torture, it's really nothing at all, but yet, if we don't do it, everyone in this country will die? Does that make the SLIGHTEST BIT OF SENSE to ANYONE!?!

For a very detailed timeline of the history of torture as we know it, check out this post in DailyKos.

Here’s another version of the conservative oxymoronic universe. Remember when ANY sort of criticism leveled at President Bush or his policies immediately required a resounding response from Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, et. al., to the effect of “criticism of the President is unpatriotic in the time of war.” Dissenters didn’t “support the troops” or were “for the terrorists.” Remember that? The country had been stampeded into invading and dismantling the government, military, police force and infrastructure of a country who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, and no one in the Bush government had the FIRST IDEA of what do to with Iraq after the first two weeks because absolutely no one had done any post-invasion planning. But yet, if anyone dared criticize Bush and his policies, they were labeled as un-American.

Well, all it takes for the Republicans to change their minds about what is and is not un-American is President Obama’s plan to jump start the economy with a massive infusion of capital and to rescue some corporations who are “too big to fail” (a process not only necessary because of the policies of the Republicans in power for the last eight years, but a process started by then President Bush). A significant number of Texans believe that Texas should secede from the United States. From Talking Points Memo.

A new Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll finds that Rick Perry's suggestion at the Tea Party last week, that Texas might have to secede from the Union, actually has significant support from his home state's Republican voters.

One question: "Do you think Texas would be better off as an independent nation or as part of the United States of America?" The top-line number is United States 61%, independent nation 35%. Among Republicans, it's a dead-even tie at 48%-48%.

And then there's this one: "Do you approve or disapprove of Governor Rick Perry's suggestion that Texas may need to leave the United States?" The top-line is only 37% approval to 58% disapproval -- but among Texas Republicans, it's 51% approval to 44% disapproval.

This is not somehow “unpatriotic” or “un-American?” Protesting being stampeded into the Iraq war is un-American but actually saying that some states should secede is somehow NOT un-American? I cannot think of anything MORE un-American than publically state that you would like to start splitting the country apart because you don't like Obama's actions (which just happen to coincide, for the most part, with what he promised to do before he was elected). Gosh, it's like Obama was ELECTED by a large majority of the people or something like that! We can't POSSIBLY let him get away with this!

O.K., how about this one? One of the new Republican talking points is say that the U.S. is becoming a “banana republic”, all because Obama has released Bush-era memos trying to find a way to rationalize and legalize interrogation techniques that the U.S. has considered torture since the 1800’s, and that many people believe that those who were behind this actually BROKE THE LAW and should be held accountable. THAT, according to some Republicans, makes us a “banana republic.” Washington Monthly has a good throwdown of that particular exercise in name-calling.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of a "Banana Republic" is an accountable chief executive who ignores the rule of law when it suits his/her purposes. The ruling junta in a "Banana Republic" eschews accountability, commits heinous acts in secret, tolerates widespread corruption, and generally embraces a totalitarian attitude in which the leader can break laws whenever he/she feels it's justified to protect the state.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Rove, McCain, Bond, Hannity, Beck, et al are so caught up in their partisan rage, they've failed to realize they have the story backwards. They're so far gone, they're so blinded by their rigid ideology, they have no idea that they're projecting. It's genuinely pathetic.

If our goal is to avoid looking like a "Banana Republic," then we would investigate those responsible for torture, which is, not incidentally, illegal. The accused would enjoy the presumption of innocence and due process rights. The process would be transparent, and those who act (and have acted) in our name would be held accountable.

When you look at almost any of the polls these days, you find a very large percentage of the American people generally supportive of the President and his handling of the economy. A large number of people now think the country is headed in the right direction, as opposed to several months ago when that number was in the teens. In other words, the Republicans are losing the argument. They can stomp on the floor, and throw a tantrum like a very petulant four year old that has been told it is bedtime. What’s a good Republican to do, then? Why, it’s obvious!! Call Democrats name!!

From Balloon Juice:

A conservative faction of the Republican National Committee is urging the GOP to take a harder line against both Democrats and wayward Republicans, drafting a resolution to rename the opposition the “Democrat Socialist Party” and moving to rebuke the three Republican senators who supported the stimulus package.

In an e-mail sent Wednesday to the 168 voting members of the committee, RNC member James Bopp, Jr. accused President Obama of wanting “to restructure American society along socialist ideals.”

“The proposed resolution acknowledges that and calls upon the Democrats to be truthful and honest with the American people by renaming themselves the Democrat Socialist Party,” wrote Bopp, the Republican committeeman from Indiana. “Just as President Reagan’s identification of the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire’ galvanized opposition to communism, we hope that the accurate depiction of the Democrats as a Socialist Party will galvanize opposition to their march to socialism.”

So, let me get this straight. Republicans “drafted a resolution” to rename their opponents’ party. Can you do that? I had actually thought that organizations got to pick their OWN names. This is how far Republicans have gone around the bend. They want to rename the Democratic party. Actually, I hope they do. These jerk faces who insist on calling the Democratic party the “Democrat” party do not look like intelligent adults putting forth rationale ideas. They look like vindictive, petulant grade school kids who make up names to taunt whoever they don’t like in the schoolyard. If they take this one step further and go for the “Socialist Democrat Party”, that is REALLY going to make them look stupid. Of course, people like Michelle Bachmann are going to think that this is a great idea.

We even have, on public record, the reason why Republicans make up names to call their opponents. Because the old names DON’T WORK ANYMORE! From Sadly, No!

“Rhetorically, Republicans are having a very hard time finding something that raises the consciousness of the average voter,” said Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party who recently lost a bid to became national party chairman.

Workaday labels like “big spender” and “liberal” have lost their punch, and last fall, Senator John McCain of Arizona and Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska gained little traction during the presidential campaign by linking Mr. Obama’s agenda to socialism.

So Mr. Anuzis has turned to provocation with a purpose. He calls the president’s domestic agenda “economic fascism.”

“We’ve so overused the word ‘socialism’ that it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago,” Mr. Anuzis said. “Fascism — everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.”

Well, at least this guy is being honest about it. They’ve so overused the terms “liberal” and now even "socialism" that there is has no emotional content left in those words. They're just words. So, Republicans need to find another term that DOES upset everyone. And it doesn't really even have to make any sense, in the historical context. THAT’S the big Republican plan, everyone! Find a name-calling technique that gets a response!! "Ooh! Look at the Fascist!" How adult! How rational!

I might expect this kind of behavior, like I said earlier, out of grade school kids. But adults? Hardly. And elected officials to national and state positions? No. Absolutely not. In any sort of rational world, I would not expect that kind of behavior. The real problem here is that Republicans have absolutely NO IDEA about how to govern and actually get things accomplished for the good of the country. The just don’t. All they know how to do is push people around to get their way when they are in power and whine, name call, stomp their feet on the floor and threaten to hold their breaths until they turn blue when they are out of power.

And I have missed a few, like the overwhelming threat of a Republican filibuster on just about every piece of legistation, when I distinctly remember Republicans threatening the "nuclear option" if Democrats used the threat of a filibuster. Or blocking a very large number of Obama appointees, some for reasons unknown, when Republicans and their Limbaugh-like mouthpieces were decrying Democratic objections to Bush's appointees. "Republicans won the election, therefore WE get to pick the nominees we want! You Democrats should try winning an election now and then, if you don't like how this works!" Yeah, now that Democrats have convincingly won the last couple of elections, where is that concept now? Not hearing much about that these days, are we?

Here’s a good windup from Steven Weber at HuffPo:

In everything -- from defending torture to eschewing diplomacy to regularly engaging in Orwellian contradiction to its unctuous servility to radical religion to its blatant corporate cronyism to its obvious disdain for intellect -- the Republican Party shows few signs of being a viable political organization and every sign of being a condition, one which causes creeping, mean-spirited dementia; a virus which attacks the conscience and renders it inert; an infection which causes even the most sensible persons to engage in such behavior that, as though trapped within a robotically compliant body, they must watch in mute horror as they utter sentiments similar to those spoken by superstitious inn keepers from the year 1738.

I wish I had said that.

(My apologies for the many typos in this post. When I get really upset, I start typing very fast and that doesn't make for a very clean copy.)

Wow, is that Michelle Bachmann a dumbass, or what?

One of the things in life that really rankles is dumbasses who happen to think they are so much smarter than everyone else. I used to think Oklahoma with James Inhofe was the state with the stupidest elected official. I now think Oklahoma and Minnesota are now tied. (Texas is running a very close third.)

Bachmann apparently believes that not only is global warming a myth, but carbon dioxide is really, really good for all of us. She is apparently not familiar with the concept that too much of anything is poisonous. From Think Progress.

On the House floor on Earth Day, April 22, 2009, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) argued that threat of manmade global warming doesn't make any sense because "carbon dioxide is a natural byproduct of nature":

Carbon dioxide, Mister Speaker, is a natural byproduct of nature. Carbon dioxide is natural. It occurs in Earth. It is a part of the regular lifecycle of Earth. In fact, life on planet Earth can't even exist without carbon dioxide. So necessary is it to human life, to animal life, to plant life, to the oceans, to the vegetation that's on the Earth, to the, to the fowl that -- that flies in the air, we need to have carbon dioxide as part of the fundamental lifecycle of Earth.

Oh, my. CO2 is a “natural by product of nature?” Not only is she a dumbass, she’s a redundant dumbass. On Earthday, no less.

Here’s another one of her outlandish statements about global warming, also from Think Progress.

TPM notes that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) told OneNewsNow that the U.S. doesn't need environmental advocates such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) because Jesus saved Earth already:

[Pelosi] is committed to her global warming fanaticism to the point where she has said that she's just trying to save the planet. ... We all know that someone did that over 2,000 years ago, they saved the planet -- we didn't need Nancy Pelosi to do that.

Ah. I see. I… Um… You know, I can’t even come up with something snarky to say about that, it’s so stupid in its own right.

I am just amazed that someone on the Republican side of the aisle hasn’t pulled Bachmann aside by now and told her to sit down and STFU, because she is making herself, and by extension the Republican party, look like a raving lunatic. How did this person ever get elected, even if she is from a very conservative district? If I were from Minnesota, I am pretty sure I would feel obligated to personally apologize to every single person in the United States right about now.

The Ceiling Cat Bible, plus a couple of other alternative Bibles

My apologies to those who might be offended by this, but I am of the opinion that religion, just like all other things in life (including death) should be laughed at. I offer several different versions of the Bible, because that King James version has been around for quite some time. Here, for instance, is the Ceiling Cat Bible version of Genesis, written in LOLcat prose. This is just one small example of the learning you might find therein.

Boreded Ceiling Cat makinkgz Urf n stuffs

1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.

4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.

5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1

6 An Ceiling Cat sayed, im in ur waterz makin a ceiling. But he no yet make a ur. An he maded a hole in teh Ceiling.

7 An Ceiling Cat doed teh skiez with waterz down An waterz up. It happen.

8 An Ceiling Cat sayed, i can has teh firmmint wich iz funny bibel naim 4 ceiling, so wuz teh twoth day.

9 An Ceiling Cat gotted all teh waterz in ur base, An Ceiling Cat hadz dry placez cuz kittehs DO NOT WANT get wet.

10 An Ceiling Cat called no waterz urth and waters oshun. Iz good.

11 An Ceiling Cat sayed, DO WANT grass! so tehr wuz seedz An stufs, An fruitzors An vegbatels. An a Corm. It happen.

12 An Ceiling Cat sawed that weedz ish good, so, letz there be weedz.

13 An so teh threeth day jazzhands.

14 An Ceiling Cat sayed, i can has lightz in the skiez for splittin day An no day.

15 It happen, lights everwear, like christmass, srsly.

16 An Ceiling Cat doeth two grate lightz, teh most big for day, teh other for no day.

17 An Ceiling Cat screw tehm on skiez, with big nails An stuff, to lite teh Urfs.

18 An tehy rulez day An night. Ceiling Cat sawed. Iz good.

19 An so teh furth day w00t.

20 An Ceiling Cat sayed, waterz bring me phishes, An burds, so kittehs can eat dem. But Ceiling Cat no eated dem.

21 An Ceiling Cat maed big fishies An see monstrs, which wuz like big cows, except they no mood, An other stuffs dat mooves, An Ceiling Cat sawed iz good.

22 An Ceiling Cat sed O hai, make bebehs kthx. An dont worry i wont watch u secksy, i not that kynd uf kitteh.

23 An so teh...fith day. Ceiling Cat taek a wile 2 cawnt.

This web page invites everyone to take a shot at "updating" the Bible until it is completely done in LOLcat. I find the concept pretty amusing, but that might get JUST A BIT tedious after about three pages....

And here, for a radical change of pace, are some highlights of the Stinque Zombie Bible.

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth and the Zombies sprang forth from the roiling foam of creation, barking in uncontrollable rage, hungry for human flesh to eat and pestork, giving pause to our Lord who shat himself and uttered 'Oh, f**k' amidst the primordial celestial gloom.

Judges 5:6 In the days of Shamgar the son of Anath, in the days of Jael, the highways were unoccupied, and the travellers walked through byways, whereas the zombies sped through using EZPass.

Job 2:2 And the LORD said unto Satan, "Where the HELL did you come from? ha ha ha, that joke never gets old. Two drink minimum."

Psalms 1:1 Blessed is the man that shuffleth not in the gait of the zombies, nor standeth and stareth at nothing in the way of zombies, nor eateth the brains of the scornful.

Matthew 5:5 Blessed are the meek: for their brains shall be eaten first.

Here’s the Un-Bible. This one needs some work, methinks. (I was going to do some selective editing, as I think #2 below is quite a bit racist, probably unintentionally so. But if I did that, the whole thing loses whatever coherency it has. So I'll leave it as is, with the caveat that I didn't write this.)

Chapter 1 - Creation

In the beginning, as a failed attempt at making humans, God created aliens. However, God was unhappy with because:

1. They outsmarted him.

2. They all looked the same.

3. They don't believe he exists.

For these reasons, he banished them all to Space (hence its dense population). that's why most of Space's population is athiest and will not believe in this page.

Chapter 2, back to the drawing board.

God ,after realizing his mistakes, remade the alien but instead of big eyes he slanted them and made them see through gave them slits,(eyelids) and called them chinese, however after a few months the medical bills and lawsuits started pilling up, guess they were walking and falling into everything, dammit said god ,and not willing to give up sent them to build a great wall to keep them safe inside.

Chapter 3: the dog

after 2 assnumbing failures god decided he needed a spy so he created a four legged friend for his next project , a rere-atempt at the human, guess he didnt trust the slimy f**ks, why do you think your dogs always around , hes droppin the dime on ya homey.

Bow down before the Great and Powerful Oz!

Or, really stupid and infuriating quotes from Rush Limbaugh.


Discussing History Channel program, Limbaugh suggests the left wants "mass euthanasia.



Limbaugh on Earth Day: "I personally am going to see to it that we lose 2 acres of rain forest.



Limbaugh: "The Democrat Party has destroyed the black family"



Limbaugh: "So the people imprisoned by Stalin who cried when he died are the same kind of people we're dealing here with Obama"



Limbaugh: Obama's "ideas are not America's"



Hour 1: Limbaugh: "[I]f somebody can be water-tortured six times a day, then it isn't torture"


Limbaugh on response to interrogation memos: "I just slapped myself. I'm torturing myself right now. That's torture according to these people."



Hour 1: Rush defends Texas Gov. Rick Perry's secession talk




(Audio clips available at Media Matters.)

Dick Cheney has “formally requested” that the Dept. of Justice release more torture memos.

Cheney seems to think that waterboarding the mastermind of 9/11 182 times in a single month has really given us good information that “kept this country safe.” Most people are rightly asking, what could we POSSIBLY have gotten after the 182nd time that we didn’t have after the 163rd? Or event he 5th, if waterboarding is so damn effective (but isn’t torture)? Six times a day? And they think this guy wasn’t lying to them to get them to stop? And that was only a single month. How many times, overall, did this guy get waterboarded?

The question I would like someone to answer, however, is a bit different. Cheney “officially requested” that the DOJ release more memos, with the reason being that he believes that something out there will vindicate his position that torturing all these people (including over 100 that died due to these procedures) really produced information vital to the security of this country. So, how is Cheney able to request anything of the government? Other than having secret service protection for the rest of his life, how is this man, who did so much damage to this country, able to official request anything at all of the government? He is no longer in office. He has no power. He isn’t even an ex-president. He’s just an ex-vice president. Even George Bush is pretty much keeping quiet these days. Maybe Cheney is going the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request route. I kinda doubt it, though.

This guy is a monster.

I’ll have more to say later on President Obama’s decision to let everyone involved in this very dark chapter of this country to skate. No punishment for breaking the law. I am sick to my stomach and I am now no longer willing to give Obama much benefit of the doubt. I hope he rescues the economy of this country, but “unhappy” doesn’t even begin to describe how “unhappy” I am about this.

UPDATE via Washington Monthly. I guess I was not the only person who thought Cheney’s “request” very odd.

It's not all clear what "formal" request Cheney made to the CIA. He's a civilian with no authority at all, so what did he do, write Leon Panetta a nice letter? For that matter, what's the point of the declassification? Even if Cheney could produce instances in which torture led to reliable acquired intelligence, there's little chance that President Obama is going to say, "You know what? Cheney's right; committing war crimes isn't such a bad idea after all."

But Greg Sargent did a little digging today and found that the CIA apparently hasn't received any "formal" requests from Cheney.

"The agency has received no request from the former Vice President to release this information," [an intelligence source familiar with the situation] told me a few moments ago.

Last night, Cheney said he'd asked the CIA to release memos he had read containing all the intelligence that had been collected via torture. "I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was, as well as to see this debate over the legal opinions," Cheney said.

According to the source, there are several ways this could happen: Cheney could lodge a Freedom of Information Request (which is hard to imagine a former Veep doing); he could contact CIA officials; or he could submit the request via the White House. Cheney said he'd made the request to the CIA.

But at this point, the claim is at least suspect. And given Dick Cheney's record of breathtaking dishonesty, it seems safe to wonder if the former vice president just made this up out of whole cloth to impress the Fox News audience.

And then again, it could be that Cheney is just batshit crazy. As Wee Mousie suggests in the comments, it probably would be a good thing to get all these memos out there. "Sure, Dick. You want all these released? Sure thing." I seriously doubt that anything at this point would vindicate his position that torturing people really has kept this country safe. If anything, and many people have said this, all it has done is bring more people INTO the mob of people that hold a grudge toward the U.S. So, sure, let's get them all out there. I was just questioning how Cheney had any power to request anything like that. If he still DOES retain some sort of power within government, then this is yet one more thing that needs serious looking into.

Chinese Dragon Body Art

Well, just for a change of pace, I’ll post this. I am interested in many different kinds of art (click some of the links under “Visually Interesting Posts” over at the right). Body painting is an emerging art form, apparently well known in many circles but very unusual and esoteric to the rest of us. One of the most popular posts I have done is one about last year’s South Korean Body Art Festival.

How “serious” this is as a true art form I suppose is debatable. Much of its popularity is, no doubt, related to the very high titillation factor of female models being used as the “canvas”, such as the photos of body paintings that are now showing up in the yearly Sports Illustrated famous swimsuit issue. Yes, there is that. Men always have and always will enjoy looking at the female form. Famous artists throughout history, such as Bottcelli, Degas and Modigliani, to name just a few, have painted canvases featuring females in various degrees of undress. Body painting seems to have turned the “classical” art form upside down. Instead of the female being the subject of the painting, the female is now the canvas and the subject of the painting usually has very little to do with the female physical form.

I really do enjoy the artistic aspects of these photos. This particular body painting, for example, is very striking. (I like Chinese dragons as well.) I don’t usually post adult-oriented material on this blog, or something that would turn off any female that might come across it. But this photo, from Human Body Art, just really caught my eye. How much effort the artists put into these works is pretty astounding, given that, by its very nature, it is very temporary in nature. Somewhat like drawing on the sidewalk in colored chalk, you know it isn’t going to be around very long. That is when the photographic aspect of the artwork comes in. There is quite a bit of effort that goes into making the final photograph of the art in question getting the model posed correctly, getting the lighting just right, having a good background to bring out the subject, etc. So, there may be several different “artists” involved in making the final product.

For much more on this subject, go check out Human Body Art. There are some pretty amazing works of body art presented there. Warning, there is some significant nudity involved in many of the shots. However, I think it is presented in a very tasteful manner. There is much more overtly sexual stuff that can very easily be found on the web, so I doubt I will be corrupting any impressionable youngsters.

I just saw a clip where George Bush said, in a very loud and angry voice, “We do not torture!”

God, what a liar this person is. The four newly released torture memos give specific details about how to go about torturing someone. The only logic, however flawed, involved in the Bush administration’s position is that, since it is obvious that we don’t INTEND to torture anyone, then, by definition, it isn’t torture! We even have a doctor on the scene, so that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt we care mightily about the overall health of the person being interrogated. See how easy it is?

Republicans seem to be able to rationalize anything these days.

Three months into the Obama presidency, and some Republicans are talking about succession.

Oh, of course, they phrase it in such a way that there is “plausible deniability” there, so they can so, “Oh, I didn’t mean it that way.” Sure…. How can you possibly put a spin on this, from Rick Perry, the governor of Texas?

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R), who's been talking up the idea all week, tried to add some caveats yesterday to his secession talk:

"This is interesting that this has really kind of bubbled up, to uh... I refer people back to my statement, and I gotta a charge out of it. I was kinda thinking that, maybe the same people who hadn't been reading the Constitution right were reading that article and they got the wrong impression about what I said.

"Clearly, I stated that we have a great union. And Texas is part of a great union. I see no reason for that to change. I think that may not be the exact quote, but that is, in essence what I said."

Well, "essence" aside, what Perry actually said was that he saw "no reason" to "dissolve" the "union." He added, "But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that."

Forget "wrong impressions." What the elected chief executive of one of the nation's largest states is supposed to say is secession is ridiculous. That Perry has left it on the table only helps reinforce how completely batty some Republican officials have become. If the GOP wants to rejoin the American mainstream, the party needs to reject these absurdities out of hand. It's radical, fringe politics.

When George Bush was president, any sort of talk from anyone that openly disagreed with the President was labeled treasonous. But note that Democrats and liberals who were upset with the way we were stampeded into the Iraq war usually threatened to move to Canada or maybe New Zealand (my favorite choice). I do not remember anyone, ever, talking about certain states seceding from the United States. And keep in mind that this kind of crap is happening all the time. There is also this from Rep. Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican, who just happens to be thinking of running for governor:

Congressman Mark Kirk is standing by his earlier comments that Illinois residents "are ready to shoot anyone who is going to raise taxes" as much as Gov. Pat Quinn is proposing.

Kirk says the many people facing unemployment don't need a tax increase. Quinn has proposed a graduated income tax increase to help fill an $11.5 billion deficit.

And we all realize that Obama has already passed major tax CUTS for the middle class. I can maybe expect crazy talk from Rush Limbaugh dittoheads, but these quotes are from actual Republican elected officials. (Yeah, I have posted about Michelle Bachmann already.)

I just do not know what is in store for this country. Three months in and Republicans and their supporters are already frothing at the mouth about anything and everything. They don’t really even need to have a substantive reason (i.e., yesterday’s “tea parties” to protest tax increases that haven’t happened yet). They are just spitting mad that Democrats are in power, and want to “take back our country” or else take it one step further and secede from it.

It’s amazing how little Republicans and conservatives really believe in democracy now that they are no longer in power.

Hey, it’s nice to know that NASA has a sense of humor.

Any government agency that can laugh at itself is a good thing. This one happens to be NASA.

The backstory is that NASA ran a contest to name a module in the International Space Station. There was a huge write-in for Steven Colbert, after he sort of suggested it on his show. Well, Colbert won out over a number of other more, shall we say, traditional names. I am pretty sure that NASA never saw something like that coming. But you know they were not going to name something as high profile and expensive as the ISS after a fake news commentator/comedian. But NASA did find a nice way out of their dilemma. From Balloon Juice:

Colbert received more than 230,000 votes out of 1 million, but NASA reserved the right to be the final arbiter.

While it wasn’t the leading vote-getter, Tranquility was one of the top 10 suggestions submitted by respondents to the online poll, which ended March 20, NASA said in a statement. It was selected in part because of a connection to the 1969 first manned lunar landing.

“Apollo 11 landed on the moon at the Sea of Tranquility 40 years ago this July,” said William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations. “We selected Tranquility because it ties it to the exploration and the moon, and symbolizes the spirit of international cooperation embodied by the space station.”

As a consolation prize to the comedian, Gerstenmaier said NASA is naming “its new space station treadmill the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill, or COLBERT.”

That’s pretty damn funny. My hats off to NASA. (I just sort of happen to work for a different government agency, and I honestly can say that I seriously doubt we would ever do something like that. We’re too damn important and serious.)

It’s April 15, and you know what that means! Tea Party Day!!

I have been wondering for many days just what point these “Teabaggers” (I still can’t get over the fact that these morons (or should that be "morans") don’t know what that means) are trying to make. Obama has already enacted a tax cut for the middle class, so it can’t be protesting going back to the tax rate, prior to the Bush tax cuts, for those earning greater than 250K, right? That doesn't make much sense. Maybe it’s the outlandish deficit that we have going now, and is going to be worse given all the money we are pumping into the economy and to prop up failing banks and companies. I suppose that could be it, except for the fact that a huge portion of the current deficit came from the George Bush administration, including the cost of two simultaneous wars which he decided to never actually put IN the budget but ask for “emergency funding” ever six months. I never heard any protests about the deficit from conservatives then. In fact, Dick Cheney (that paragon of financial wisdom) famously stated, “Deficits don’t matter.” So, teabaggers (*snicker*) can’t be protesting the deficit, right? Or else, they shouldn’t be, if they want to retain any sort of credibility at all, I would think.

Turns out that Steve Benen at Washington Monthly, had the same problem. He posted about it this morning.

WITH AN EYE ON THE FUTURE.... Over at QandO, McQ wants to help me understand why the Tea Baggers are getting together tomorrow. Since I've been struggling with the point of the Tea Parties, I'm anxious to get some additional insights.

Much of the left, Steve Benen serving as a perfect example, are missing an essential point about the tea parties planned around the country. They aren't about the level of taxation now. Instead, those attending them understand that with the massive spending undertaken by the federal government and the massive amounts of currency pumped into the system by the Federal Reserve, taxes aren't going to remain anywhere near where they are now, no matter what politicians promise.

I see. So, at some point in the future (we don't know when), some politicians (we don't know who) might find it necessary to raise taxes. Whose taxes would be raised? It's too soon to say. How much would taxes go up? No one knows.

But the mere prospect of a possible future tax increase has led untold thousands of activists, an entire cable news network, corporate lobbyists, conservative bloggers, conservative talk-radio hosts, and Republican officials to organize a series of national events. With extraordinary foresight, they've organized thousands of rallies to register their outrage, not at existing tax rates, but at tax policies that haven't been proposed, but might exist at some undermined point.

Well, I suppose that’s somewhat believable. Otherwise, it just looks like everyone is getting ready to spend a whole lot of money to throw a lot of tea bags into a lot of water, just to protest the fact that there is a fairly elected Democratic president, with a fairly elected large Democratic majority in both houses.

Actually, that probably makes the most sense of any explanation.

Spain prepares to indict six ex-Bush administration officials for enabling torture.

This is going to so embarrassing to the United States. And make no mistake about it; this is embarrassing for both the Bush and Obama administrations.

This is from The Daily Beast, via Hilzoy at Washington Monthly.

"Spanish prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five top associates over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantanamo, several reliable sources close to the investigation have told The Daily Beast. Their decision is expected to be announced on Tuesday before the Spanish central criminal court, the Audencia Nacional, in Madrid. But the decision is likely to raise concerns with the human-rights community on other points: They will seek to have the case referred to a different judge.

The six defendants -- in addition to Gonzales, Federal Appeals Court Judge and former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, University of California law professor and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, former Defense Department general counsel and current Chevron lawyer William J. Haynes II, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff David Addington, and former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith -- are accused of having given the green light to the torture and mistreatment of prisoners held in U.S. detention in "the war on terror." The case arises in the context of a pending proceeding before the court involving terrorism charges against five Spaniards formerly held at Guantanamo. A group of human-rights lawyers originally filed a criminal complaint asking the court to look at the possibility of charges against the six American lawyers. Baltasar Garzon Real, the investigating judge, accepted the complaint and referred it to Spanish prosecutors for a view as to whether they would accept the case and press it forward. "The evidence provided was more than sufficient to justify a more comprehensive investigation," one of the lawyers associated with the prosecution stated. (...)”

A Spanish court is about to indict U.S. citizens for their role in torturing Spanish citizens. If convicted, these six would be in danger of being arrested should they ever set foot outside the United States. This is extraordinary. And what makes it even more extraordinary is that the current administration refuses to investigate the matter. Although I support President Obama on many things, this is not one of them. We, as a country, MUST know what was done in our name. Worldwide, the words “United States of America” and “torture” have become synonymous.

For a country that seems to believe in its own exceptionalism, we certainly have a double standard when it comes to our actions vs. the rest of the world. I, for one, hope that the Spanish courts go ahead with their prosecutions and then make all their findings public. I hope that one or more of these bastards gets arrested. My choice would be Yoo or Addington. I hope the U.S. gets fried in the Court of World Opinion. Maybe then we will learn something about what is really right and what is wrong. If we have, in the past, prosecuted and sentence Japanese military officials after WWII for essentially the same thing that many in this country are now defending, that should be a signal to us that we need to stop and take a very long look into ourselves.

Update: From Balloon Juice - I guess the Spanish are backing down and not going to investigate anything. I suppose they were worried that Bill O'Reilly wouldn't visit them, or maybe that Dick Cheney would shoot someone in the face... This figures. Everyone's going to get away with this and we will never know what exactly happened and what the Bush adminstration did in the name of the United States of America. I am really pissed about this, and will probably remain so until the day I die.

Republicans decide that all they need to do to win elections is "rebrand" the Republican Party.

Photo from Princess Sparkle Pony.

Glenn Beck announces a “Comedy Tour.”

Ah, this has “heaping piles of steaming goose poop” written all over it. Glenn Beck doing a comedy tour, and a “poor man’s Jerry Seinfeld” comedy tour as well. I can’t wait to see what comes out of this. Maybe he will cry for everyone while telling Obama jokes in front of a backdrop of marching Nazis.

I can't watch.

The ice floe of my childhood is melting.

Conservatives give the term "hysterical" a bad name.

I know I said I was going to take a blogging sabbatical for a month or two, but this has just been getting under my skin. Many bloggers have been talking about this, and I may end up linking to several of them. I am not going to add anything that hasn’t already been said.

Many people predicted that conservatives would go absolutely nuts after the ’08 election. I suppose I agreed with them, but I had absolutely no idea about how bad it would get so quickly. I am going to do this from memory, at first, just to see what I can come up with.

- Congressman Bachus from Alabama states that he has the names of 27 socialists in Congress, but of course does not produce those names. Where have I heard this one before?
- Michelle Bachmann states that the Obama adminstration is getting up “reeducation camps” for young people that volunteer that will essentially brainwash our impressionable teens and twenty somethings to support the Democratic party.
- Fox News, CNN and others go overboard in covering Obama bowing to the King of Saudi Arabia, saying essentially (I’m paraphrasing here) that Obama is acknowledging that Muslims are above all others, while ignoring that George Bush used to hold hands with this same king and kissed him on the cheek in one famous photo.
- One Texas state legislator called on Asian people to change their names to make them easier to deal with for Americans.
- Glenn Beck… What can one say about Glenn Beck? He talks about Obama’s coming police state while standing in front of an electronically generated background showing Nazis marching across the screen. He screeches that Obama is going to take away Americans guns.
- Republican congresspersons, directed by Republican whip Eric Cantor, try to ambush freshman Democratic congresspersons by shouting at them and disrupting their speeches in front of Congress, trying to get "You-Tube worthy moments” to embarrass the Democrats.
- Conservatives disparage Obama for the use of teleprompters and essentially say that he is verbally challenged, ignoring all the while that the last Republican president mangled the English language at every opportunity given to him and could not even pronounce the word “nuclear.”
- News organizations all over blast Vice President Biden for calling out Dick Cheney’s lies, but say absolutely nothing about Cheney’s initial statements declaring that Obama is making the country less safe by discontinuing the policies of torture and illegal imprisonment.
- Newt Gingrich wanted to go into North Korea and destroy their missile (which turned out to be a colossal and embarrassing dud) with “a laser.”
- Republicans go apeshit about Obama “cutting the military budget” and “gutting the military of the U.S.” when he is, in fact, actually raising the total dollar amount while redistributing the allocation among programs. This activity is being supported, if not directed, by George W. Bush’s last Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates.
- Conservatives everywhere, upset about something, after being prodded repeatedly by Fox News, organize massive “tea parties” to protest something. They do not acknowledge that President Obama has already passed a very large middle class tax cut. The protestors seem to be protesting setting the tax rates back to pre-Bush tax cut levels for the wealthiest Americans. They also fail to recognize that “tea bagging” has a previous, overtly sexual, meaning. Look it up in Wikipedia. I’m not going to link that one.

There are, no doubt, more examples out there from just the last couple of weeks. You get my point.

All this is occurring just about three months into the Obama presidency. Three months. The hard-core conservatives of this country are absolutely insane. They have lost all ability to reason and to actually try to act in a rational manner. All they know how to do is call their enemies names and to try underhanded tricks to score political points for them and/or undermine the Democrats who were elected fairly. Oh, that reminds me, I forgot to list that whole Norm Coleman thing in Minnesota, where Republicans would rather undermine the democratic process and deprive Minnesota of full representation in the Senate just so they can withhold one more Democratic vote in the Senate.

I’ll tell you one thing. Republicans and conservatives better get their last kicks in now, because after the midterm elections of 2010, there will be even a greater majority for Democrats in both houses. There will be a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, so it won’t matter what kind of stunts these clowns try.

I am actually all for a strong two-party political system. I think unbridled power, for either side, is not a good thing. Eventually, people start to overreach. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. But the current Republican party is not holding up their end of the bargain. Both sides need principled people willing to put national interests in front of political grandstanding and trying to demolish their sworn enemies, at whatever the cost to the country. The current Republicans are hard-core ideologues who spout off whatever comes into their pointy little heads. It does not matter they are all up in arms because they are accusing Democrats/liberals of doing things that they have been doing for the last eight years. They don’t care if they change their positions from statements they have made, on the public record, just so long as they can score some political points.

I suppose I can take some solace in the fact that, as the Republican party sinks deeper and deeper into insane rage, their ranks are growing continually thinner. They are condemning themselves to irrelevancy. If they continue this way, the Republican party will never be anything more than a regional political party. I am not saying that this is a good thing for the country. But before Republicans are ready to get back in the saddle, they need to do a massive amount of housecleaning. Until then, the whole lot of them can wander around in the desert for a while. Maybe that will bring them to their collective senses.

But I'm not holding my breath on that one.

UPDATE: Oh, yeah. How could I forget the Republican non-budget budget? The one that essentially RAISED the deficit by giving a HUGE tax cut to people making over $100,000 a year and freezing all spending in the midst of the biggest financial crisis since the 1930'S? And all the while making a huge show out of it, so much so that even the conservative media people made fun of them?

Many of these people can't even see how ridiculous they look.

You know what? I am going to take a blogging Sabbatical for a while.

This might last one or two months. I fully intend to come back in the near future, as it obviously fulfills some sort of need within me. I feel I really should come back eventually, for no other reason than for all the bloggers with much bigger and more influential blogs than I have who very nicely gave Barking Rabbits a link from their blogs (e.g., Needlenose, I Don’t Like You Either, Jon Swift, Seeing the Forest, Edicts of Nancy, etc.). Many thanks to you for those links.

I am just worn out. I was running on energy and pissed-offed-ness prior to the 2008 election. After that occurred, I found that any sort of momentum I had developed on this blog sort of collapsed. There is just too much going on to comprehend and try to write something that I feel is both a) coherent and b) interesting to someone else. Reading the daily news stories and blogs makes it difficult to believe that the end (e.g., environmentally, financially, intellectually) really isn’t near. Coming up with something to post, be it serious or just a stupid humorous reference, was becoming more of a chore than a pleasure. Plus, lots of stuff to do at work and remodeling the guest bathroom at home sort of has taken up a lot of my time of late. So, it appears that a little time off might be in order.

Thanks to everyone who looks in here and finds something they find interesting. Keep coming back, I’ll be back eventually. Or else try poking around the archives for a while. I think there is some interesting stuff in there that no longer shows up on the main page (even limited to the last 100 posts).

Keep it clean, kiddies.

Photo from here.

Republicans enthusiastically embrace new technology.

“This giant Pop-O-Matic will most certainly help win elections!”

How about that? An e-mail delivery service for those people who have been Raptured away.

Certainly, when Jesus swoops down to carry the deserving off to Heaven (which will no doubt happen any day now), people are not going to have time to stop and do mundane stuff like make sure the stove is turned off or maybe e-mail your friends and relatives, telling them just why they aren’t going to be seeing you around much anymore.

From OnePissedOffVet:

Ya gotta hand it to those Fundo-Xian folks. They're nothing if not thoughtful -- downright thoughty, as my old Granny used to say. They even have a website where the faithful can have a post-Rapture email sent to their friends and family who are "left behind".

Here's the URL: http://raptureletters.com/letter.html -- I didn't make it a clickable link because I don't want to drive up their Google stats. In it you will see the following:

This message has been sent to you by a friend or a relative who has recently disappeared along with millions and millions of people around the world. The reason they chose to send you this letter is because they cared about you and would like you to know the truth about where they went.

This may come as a shock to you, but the one who sent you this has been taken up to heaven.

Etc etc etc blah blah blah

They promise to send out this letter on the first Friday following the Rapture, and every Friday thereafter until...well, I guess until Hell freezes over. Or whatever. And, of course, "free will donations" to the cause are gladly accepted (checks, cash, major credit card or PayPal).

Paypal?!?

I guess either these people have a very dependable automated e-mailing system, or else the people who are selling this fine service aren’t going to be included in Group Ascending but figure that a little pocket change after the Apocalypse isn’t such a bad thing.

I am just amazed at the absolute arrogance and smug certainty that it takes to actually subscribe to this service. Buyers of this are absolutely certain that THEY will be among the chosen and those they are sending e-mails to won’t be. Otherwise, it might be a bit awkward up in Heaven. “Oh, hi, Aunt Harriet! Uh, what are YOU doing here? No, I didn’t mean that. Uh, no. I didn’t send you an e-mail… Say, you haven’t seen Bill Whittaker, have you? I owed him $20 back on Earth.”

And there is also the “gloat” factor involved in all of this. Yes, the sender of this e-mail went to Heaven. You didn’t. Nenernenernener…

I have a bit of an upset stomach right about now.

UPDATE: I actually thought of something that would be even MORE embarrassing. How about the case where you sent out all these e-mails to everyone you cared about (and probably also the ones you didn't like very much, just for the "gloat" factor I alluded to above), and then YOU DIDN'T GET CHOSEN! YOU WEREN'T RAPTURED AWAY! Now, that would be awkward. "Geez, Bill. What's with that e-mail? It said Jesus came down and took you to Heaven last week. Whatcha still doing here? Oh. Yeah, I see... Naw, that's perfectly understandable. I don't always pay my bills on time either."

Many times in life, Event A must precede Event B.

Some things are just difficult to comprehend without the use of a visual aid.

Here, for instance, is a good visual aid to help understand the state of our ecomony.

Voting fraud is real, and it isn’t coming from the Democratic side.

We all sort of suspected things like this were going on. I had read something a while back about county officials from Alabama just sort of “finding” a whole box of new ballots that just happened to tip the victory to Republicans. (No, I don’t have the link. It was during the 2006 elections, I am pretty certain.) But when Republican county officials from Kentucky are arrested for actual vote tampering, among some other very serious charges, one really needs to start wondering how deep this actually goes and what we can possibly do about it to fix this, or if fixing it is even possible.

From bradblog:

Five Clay County officials, including the circuit court judge, the county clerk, and election officers were arrested Thursday after they were indicted on federal charges accusing them of using corrupt tactics to obtain political power and personal gain.

The 10-count indictment, unsealed Thursday, accused the defendants of a conspiracy from March 2002 until November 2006 that violated the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). RICO is a federal statute that prosecutors use to combat organized crime. The defendants were also indicted for extortion, mail fraud, obstruction of justice, conspiracy to injure voters' rights and conspiracy to commit voter fraud.

According to the indictment, these alleged criminal actions affected the outcome of federal, local, and state primary and general elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006.
The article goes on to list some of the criminal actions listed in the indictment. Among them [emphasis added]:

· Clay County Clerk, Freddy Thompson, 45, allegedly provided money to election officers to be distributed by the officers to buy votes and he also instructed officers how to change votes at the voting machine.
...

· Election officer William E. Stivers, 56, allegedly marked votes or issued tickets to voters who had sold their votes and changed votes at the voting machine.

...

· Paul E. Bishop, 60, allegedly marked voters or issued tickets to voters who sold their votes and he also hosted alleged meetings at his home where money was pooled together by candidates and distributed to election officers, including himself. He was also accused of instructing the officers how to change votes at the voting machine.

Yet, we have loudmouth Republicans and conservative “pundits” that have been spewing nonsense about how Acorn is destroying American democracy. See my earlier post on what CPAC was saying about this. And then look at what they are doing. If a Republican is complaining about something they assert the Democrats are doing, you can bet your next paycheck on the fact that the Republicans are doing it themselves. If I were a Republican, I would be very hesitant to utter the words “stealing the election” ever again, lest it remind the listener of Florida 2000 and Ohio in 2004.

Take a moment to really contemplate what these charges really mean. These people were teaching others how to change votes at the voting machines and were actively buying votes. So, just how different is this from your basic Banana Republic, where votes are routinely fixed, or the old Soviet Union, where the “candidate” would win with 99% of the vote? In what bizarre form of democracy is this acceptable behavior? How do these people justify their actions to themselves when they try to sleep at night? This isn’t democracy.

Here is my very depressing conclusion about all this. We can try to make all the changes we can think of to the voting procedures, in oversight and in tamper-proof voting machines. However, there is no guarantee we are ever going to have anything that closely resembles a true democracy that is “for the people and by the people” unless the overall mindset of this country is changed. Elections are not some game that you can do anything you want in order for your side to win. People need to recognize the underlying rules and abide by them. Both sides must be willing to accept their losses gracefully and recognize what the voting public is saying. Democracy is not just a mechanism that can be manipulated in order to shove someone’s ideology down the nation’s throat.

I really don’t know if we are ever going to truly recover from the reign of George W. Bush. All this stuff that is going on now is embedded culturally in the far right of the Republican party. When you have nutcases like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin doing everything in their power to advance the notion that liberals are evil and must be defeated by any means possible, then that just further cements this concept that “everything is legal until you get caught” is THE way. Maybe the election of Barack Obama and the overall trend that shows Democrats are more popular and trustworthy than Republicans are good signs. (No, I am not providing links. You can easily go look them up yourselves.) Maybe the American people are not going to take this nonsense anymore. Maybe we really have reached the tipping point and are starting to really push back.

I am not so certain that, in the long run, we are going to be successful.

So, the wingnuts are now all FOR AIG bonuses.

These guys took huge financial risks with house money, because all possibilities penalties for failing have been removed. They ran their company into the ground and, in the process, made a huge contribution to sending the U.S. economy into the tank. They failed as completely as anyone can possibly fail, and they STILL believe that they are somehow entitled to huge bonuses, more money in one chuck, than most ordinary people will ever see in their lifetimes. And this money is coming from the taxpayers, which a lot of people supported because we believed then and still believe now, that we needed to do this or else our economy would melt down completely.

Ah, but since many people, including Democrats, liberals and the President of the United States, have expressed outrage over this, the wingnut right has decided that, due to their unwavering principles, they MUST support anything that the Democrats oppose.

From Washington Monthly, here are some examples:

Rush Limbaugh recently said: "I am all for the AIG bonuses" and attacked the Obama administration for trying to undo them. He also blasted Dem efforts to get the names of the AIG bonus recipients as "McCarthyism."

Fox News followed suit, also comparing Dems to "Joe McCarthy." And Sean Hannity has now derided efforts to tax the execs by saying: "In other words, we're going to just steal their money."

There's not really a direct contradiction between the GOP leaders' professed outrage over the bonuses and the conservative media's condemnation of efforts to recoup them. But the conservative attack on Dems is rooted in free market orthodoxy, which GOP leaders have implicitly ditched in order to get outraged.

This split could muddy the GOP message and even compromise the party's efforts to use AIG to damage Obama.

“McCarthyism.” That’s pretty rich, coming from Rush Limbaugh. These people are so out to lunch, they will oppose or support absolutely anything based solely on the fact that their sworn enemies have expressed an opposing position. These people are absolutely insane.

Photo from Christy at Firedoglake.

UPDATE: If you have read this far and are interested in my rant, you might want to go check out the comments. Someone called me a "retard" and went on to take issue with my post. I then responded... *Sniff* Why can't I meet NICE guys on this blog? Everyone just calls me names and then leaves...

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer goes softly into the night.

I know that many newspapers are in dire straits these days. The Rocky Mountain News just closed its doors several weeks ago, and many other companies operating newspapers in major cities are on the doorstep of bankruptcy. Now, it is the turn of the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

The Seattle P-I has been around, in one form or another, since December 10, 1863. This week, on Tuesday, March 17, the P-I will stop publishing a printed version of the paper. It will, as currently being reported, continue with an on-line version only operating with a “much reduced” staff. Some of the local stories have made it plain that those few people who have been offered a place on the web-based PI were unhappy with significantly reduced salaries and benefits that came with those offers. Not that this wasn’t expected. Still, it’s difficult to see how this “web based” version is going to be anything near the quality of the print version. David Horsey is an wonderful political cartoonist who has won two Pulitzers for his work. Art Thiel is an extraordinarily gifted columnist whose main job involves writing about sports, but always seems to be able to include a lot of “big picture” information. He was usually able to get in a few jabs in the political arena as well, which I enjoyed greatly. Those two alone were worth the subscription price of the P-I. (I have since heard on the radio that both of these professionals will be part of the on-line version. It remains to be seen what that really is going to look like. I also heard that this latest incarnation will make use of local "citizen journalists". Meaning lots of free content for them.)

Seattle will now be a one-newspaper town. The Seattle Times is also a pretty good paper. However, it is rightly considered to be the more conservative of the two and sometimes takes some editorial positions that I don’t really care for at all. But, if Seattle is to have only a single newspaper, then the Times is a whole lot better than nothing at all.

But there’s the rub. McClatchy, which owns a significant share of the Times, has been letting their staff go left and right, and there is a lot of reporting going on that the Times might go under as well. They have been losing millions of dollars per year for quite some time. Seattle could possibly go from a two newspaper city to one that has no major dailies in the space of a year or less. That would be a disaster, in my mind.

I am much in favor of maintaining the printed news capabilities of this country, and I am not talking about a stupid rag like U.S.A. Today, whose major usefulness is being able to see sports scores when traveling out of town and for lining a parakeet’s birdcage. Bloggers get a bad rap for many things which I believe are really unjustified. I am talking about the “good” blogs, not this stupid little one that I have. Firedoglake is a very good example. Talking Points Memo is another. But as much digging as they do starting from a very specific point of view, they cannot replace the access and reporting ability that newspapers have. Or, at least that they used to have back when newspaper editors truly believed their first and foremost responsibility was to the public and not to some nameless corporate ownership group that also might require reporting from a “certain political point of view.” To have a major city like Seattle face the prospect of having no daily newspapers would be nothing short of a calamity.

About the only good news that I can see is that the prospects of the outlaying newspapers like the Tacoma Tribune (although that is also partly owned by McClatchy) and the Everett Herald would be looking up.

I am extremely unhappy about this development. In the last few years, the Seattle area lost its first professional franchise in the NBA Supersonics to Oklahoma City, of all places, the Spirit of Washington Dinner Train, where you could take a leisurely train ride from Renton to the Columbia winery in Woodinville in vintage, restored railcars and enjoy a very fine dinner while watching some really cool scenery roll by, the waterfront trolley car, which made getting around the very long waterfront area very easy while you parked your car somewhere not terribly convenient to the rest of the waterfront, Boeing corporate headquarters, which moved to Chicago for some still not terribly clear reasons, and now one of its two daily newspapers. What’s next? Will the Space Needle be repossessed? Will Microsoft relocate to India? It seems as if the Puget Sound area is slowly losing some really vital parts of what really makes this a unique, vibrant place to live.

Shih-Tzu and raccoon blogging

"Boy, I sure showed that raccoon, didn't I? Where's my treat?"

If this isn’t terrorism, I don’t know what is.

This is from Crooks and Liars.

Progressives around the country can breathe a little easier today: James Adkisson has been sentenced to life behind bars for the deaths of Greg McKendry and Linda Kraeger, the Unitarian Universalist martyrs who died during his assault on their church in Knoxville, TN last July.

Many of us intuited at the time that Adkisson's rampage was exactly the kind of rancid fruit that would inevitably take root in an American countryside thickly composted with two decades of hate radio bullshit, freshly turned and watered with growing middle-class frustration over the failing economy. That suspicion that was verified in the days that followed, when police searched Adkisson's apartment and found it filled with books and newsletters penned by Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and other right-wing hate talkers.

But Monday, Adkisson told us himself -- in his own words -- just how central right-wing eliminationism was in driving him to his shooting spree. Shortly after he was sentenced Monday, he released a four-page handwritten "manifesto" -- which he'd intended to be his suicide note -- to the Knoxville News (the full .pdf can be downloaded here). In it, he unleashes the full measure of his hatred for liberals -- and encourages other would-be right-wing warriors to take up arms and follow him into battle.

Some choice excerpts:

"Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country & these liberals are working together to attack every decent & honorable institution in the nation, trying to turn this country into a communist state. Shame on them....

"This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn't get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people.

Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It's the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence."

"I thought I'd do something good for this Country Kill Democrats til the cops kill me....Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is to kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather. I'd like to encourage other like minded people to do what I've done. If life aint worth living anymore don't just kill yourself. do something for your Country before you go. Go Kill Liberals.
-snip-

Among Adkisson's ranting was a clear statement: "This was an act of political protest." Which means that it was, by definition and his own admission, an act of domestic terrorism.

Our radio hate talkers incited a man to commit an act of terrorism. Just sit a minute and take that in. And the next time you hear them foaming on about how liberals are "soft on terrorism," reflect on the fact that they'd better hope to hell we don't get any more serious about it -- because if we do, their asses are going to be the first ones in the dockets.

“Go kill liberals…” See, there’s the thing. Since this terrible incident involves domestic terrorism by someone who obviously subscribed to some very conservative thinking (i.e., all liberals are evil and should be killed), then no one wants to admit that’s terrorism. That would be admitting several things at once. One thing they would have to admit is that many people on the fringes of the conservative point of view are absolutely insane and view killing as a very reasonable response to liberals. Another is that some terrorists intent on doing bodily harm to citizens of the United States of America come from America! They are not scary Arabs or Latinos. They are, in many cases, white Anglo-Saxon Christians. Or at least they believe they are Christians. I am not sure the Jesus I envision would endorse this concept. They are also people who firmly believe that they are true “patriots”, whatever that means these days. Finally, people would have to admit that many people and organizations in our mainstream media are complicit in this terrible tragedy. Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc. etc. all had a hand in opening Pandora’s Box. It’s going to be a bitch to get it closed again.

Therefore, no one is really going to ever call this what it really was, which is domestic terrorism, even though this “Shooter’s Manifesto” flat out admits that is what drove this guy to do what he did. He hated liberals and thinks we should all die. But there will not be a story or article in the “serious” media about this. It’s just something that cannot be talked about. It must be dismissed. Ignored. This is the same blind eye that lets people pretend that blowing up family planning clinics or shooting doctors who perform legal abortions is either somehow heroic and patriotic or some outlaying nutcase that doesn’t merit any more than a couple of seconds of consideration. Ditto for the right wing “militias” who are armed to the teeth, waiting for a target to become available. No one, ever, is going to admit that this is going on, that terrorism can come in the form of right wing conservative insanity.

Just contemplate, for a moment, the reaction of the media if this shooter had been a liberal and had gone into some Baptist church in Oklahoma or Alabama, killed several of the worshippers present and left behind a “manifesto” that decried the evil of conservatives and a belief that conservatives should be killed?

How long before someone takes a real shot at President Obama? All that hatred and vitriol has to find release somewhere. And all this not even three months into Obama’s presidency. What might this all look like in about a year from now? Can these lunatics get even more wound up than they are now?

Joe Sudbay at Americablog nails Rush Limbaugh, EXACTLY.

"Rush is the GOP's Supreme Leader. I think he's combination of the fat, fiery head in the Wizard of Oz and Kim Jong-Il."

(link)

What is it with Oklahoma anyway?

I don’t really mind insulting individual persons, like the truly insane James Inhofe, senator from Oklahoma. However, one person’s insanity shouldn’t really be used to come to a blanket conclusion regarding a large population of people. But really. I am really beginning to wonder about who votes in the elections in Oklahoma. Do they really believe we are still in the 1700’s?

The state house in Oklahoma is considering a couple of bills. One of them registers their disapproval of teaching modern biology at the Univesity of Oklahoma. The other registers their disapproval that UO has invited Richard Dawkins (the author of “The God Delusion” and “The Selfish Gene”) to speak.

Here are some excerpts from the two bills. (From religionclause.blogspot via Washington Monthly.)

[T]he Oklahoma House of Representatives hereby expresses its disapproval of the current indoctrination of the Darwinian theory of evolution at the University of Oklahoma and further requests that an open, dignified, and fair discussion of this idea and all other ideas be engaged in on campus which is the approach that a public institution should be engaged in and which represents the desire and interest of the citizens of Oklahoma


...[T]he Oklahoma House of Representative strongly opposes the invitation to speak on the campus of the University of Oklahoma to Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, whose published statements on the theory of evolution and opinion about those who do not believe in the theory are contrary and offensive to the views and opinions of most citizens of Oklahoma.

One very astute commenter at religionclause noted the following:

Umm . . . aren't these two statements in open contradiction? The first statement valorizes the "open, dignified, and fair discussion of [evolution] and all other ideas." The second condemns Univ. Oklahoma for inviting Richard Dawkins to campus, presumably for . . . an open, dignified and fair discussion of his ideas. Seems the OK legislature needs to bone up on it's logic.

I am not a religious person and do not really understand the seemingly basic need to explain the universe in other-than-scientific terms. But I do try to be mindful of other people’s beliefs, and I try not to say insulting things (unless they insult my beliefs, or lack thereof, first). But really, folks. When fundamentalists start objecting to teaching biology, that isn’t being supportive of your religion. That is trying to impose a religion of ignorance on everyone else. I’m sure UO won’t buckle to these small-minded buffoons, but just ponder where a mindset like this might take us. Are we to go back to the days of blood letting (along with getting a haircut) as a way of maintaining good health? Shall we all go back to believing that the Earth is the center of the universe, because do to otherwise would infer that human beings aren’t all that important in the grand scheme of things?

I thought we, as a civilization, had dispensed with this nonsense hundreds of years ago. Sheesh.

UPDATE: More crazy, crazy stuff from Oklahoma. From Americablog.

Dunkley and his father, Daniel Reddy, who live in Tulsa, went to Broken Arrow on Tuesday night for a hunter safety course normally required to get an Oklahoma hunting license....

But when father and son arrived at the lesson, the volunteer instructor, Kell Wolf, asked if any of the students voted for President Barack Obama.

Reddy, a transplanted Californian — and former Marine — raised his hand.

According to Reddy and others in the room, Wolf called Obama "the next thing to the Antichrist" and ordered Reddy and Dunkley from the room. When Reddy refused, Wolf said he would not teach "liberals" and would cancel the course if Reddy didn't leave.

So Reddy and Dunkley left, as did a few others.

I've said it before and will no doubt say it again. The hardcore conservatives of this country have determined that liberals are not even humans. We are not to be tolerated, we are not to be cooperated with, there is nothing that can be gained from exchanging ideas with a liberal... No doubt if people like this were given total control, we would end up sewing a yellow capital "L" onto our clothes.

And people call liberals "angry".

Asteriod narrowly misses Rush Limbaugh. Catestrophe averted.

"I dunno, Earl. I was just about ready to sit down and listen to Rush on the radio when this here rock came right through the ceiling and dun squashed my favorite chair.!"



Apparently, the Earth just had a near miss (or actually, a “near hit” is more appropriate) with a cosmic visitor. From Yahoo News:

PASADENA, Calif. – An asteroid about the size of one that blasted Siberia a century ago just buzzed by Earth.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported that the asteroid zoomed past Monday morning.

The asteroid named 2009 DD45 was about 48,800 miles from Earth. That is just twice the height of some telecommunications satellites and about a fifth of the distance to the Moon.

The space ball measured between 69 feet and 154 feet in diameter. The Planetary Society said that made it the same size as an asteroid that exploded over Siberia in 1908 and leveled more than 800 square miles of forest.

Most people probably didn't notice the cosmic close call. The asteroid was only spotted two days ago and at its closest point passed over the Pacific Ocean near Tahiti.

You know, as comsic distances go, that’s pretty close. I suppose we can all do a collective “Whew!” and wiped our brows. It’s really only a matter of time, I suppose, before we take a direct hit. It may be next year, and it may not be for several hundred million. I still like our odds, even though an event like that gives one pause.

One upside of taking a hit from an asteriod, though, is that it might do wonders to clear up that nasty “global warming” thing we have going on.

Here's one, master! It belonged to someone named Limbaugh!

CPAC explores new and provocitive ideas to bring the Republican party back to prominence.

Conservative Political Action Conference is the annual gathering of the conservative faithful. Leading conservative politicians, media personalities and really, really angry white people get together and discuss cutting edge issues that matter dearly to the conservative cause. This year it was in Washington D.C. One of the speakers was Mike Huckabee, who had this to say (via Washington Monthy):

"The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics may be dead," said Huckabee, "but a Union of American Socialist Republics is being born." Democrats, according to Huckabee, were packing 40 years of pet projects like "health care rationing" into spending bills. "Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff."

I might point out that any comparison of the United States to the Soviet Union because of “pet projects” might have a bit more credibility if it weren’t for the fact that the Republicans held the purse strings for many years while the deficit ballooned, that no prominent Republican objected to budgetary items that benefitted their constitutients, and that no one, anywhere, is talking about health care rationing. And that if a prominent Democrat that ran for president said this about a Republican administration, where would have been much wailing, rending of garments and gnashing of teeth. But as Boone famously noted, “Forget it, he’s rolling.”

Here are some of the other items on the agenda.

Al Franken and ACORN: How Liberals are Destroying the American Election System

Because a poorly run voter registration outfit and an ex-comedian who wrote a book called “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot” that actually won an election by a very narrow margin are, without a doubt, destroying the American election system. (Of course, if I were a conservative, I would be VERY careful about saying anything about voting irregularities and stolen elections. Because, if they do, then what might pop into people’s minds might be Florida in 2000, Ohio in 2004, the New Hampshire phone bank jamming scandal in which at least one person was convicted and went to jail, Diebold voting machines manufactured by a company whose president was quoted as saying that he would do anything to get Republicans elected, etc., etc.)

Building the Conservative Hispanic Coalition

Because this is something that Republicans certainly need to work on. One problem, however, is to figure out how to be virulently anti-immigration and vilify anyone with brown skin while building that very important Hispanic coalition.

The Key to Victory? Listen to Conservatives

Because Conservatives have really had their collective finger on the pulse of this nation in the last two elections.

New Challenges in the Culture War

Because no one paid much attention to the old challenges, such as the War On Christmas, Barack Obama is a Muslim terrorist, George Soros is controlling the entire country with his shadow government, etc.

Sarah Palin Unplugged on the Media Video Interview

Because we all need a little more hilarity in our lives. Imagine, Sarah Palin unplugged!

Republicans hold a press conference regarding their plan to address the economic crisis.

"If we sit here long enough, things will eventually get better. Any questions?"

I love Michele Bachmann. She’s so cute when she’s insane.

I cannot, for the life of me, understand how some people get elected to public office. Michele Bachmann (R – congresscritter, MN) is a case in point. She’s the person, if you remember from before The Day The World Changed (i.e., 2008 election), who got herself noticed by calling on… someone to investigate her fellow congresspersons because they might harbor anti-American feelings. McCarthy, anyone?

Well, she recently went off on a tirade against the economic stimulus package that President Obama, most Democrats and a couple of less insane Republicans put together. Here is a bit of a summary of her statements, via HuffPo.

* ACORN is "under federal indictment for voter fraud," but the stimulus bill nevertheless gives ACORN "$5 billion." (In reality, ACORN is not under federal indictment and isn't mentioned in the stimulus bill at all.)

* many members of Congress have "a real aversion to capitalism."

* the stimulus bill includes a measure to create a "rationing board" for health care, and after the bill becomes law, "your doctor will no longer be able to make your healthcare decisions with you."

* the recovery package is part of a Democratic conspiracy to "direct" funding away from Republican districts, so Democratic districts can "suck up" all federal funds. Bachmann doesn't think this will work because, as she put it, "We're running out of rich people in this country."

* the "Community-Organizer-in-Chief" is also orchestrating a conspiracy involving the Census Bureau, which the president will use to redraw congressional lines to keep Democrats in power for up to "40 years." When the host said he was confused, noting that congressional district lines are drawn at the state level, Bachmann said Obama's non-existent plan is an "anti-constitutional move."

I can’t even begin to comment on this. “Making shit up” is now the normal operating mode of many Republicans.

Republican opposition to the economic stimulus plan mounts.