Doesn't Natalie Portman look strikingly like Audrey Hepburn?

Natalie



Audrey

Train wreck at Montparnasse, France in 1895

The engineer, to his horror, found out that he had no brakes while approaching the station in Montparnasse and could not stop in time. The train barreled through the station and ended up going out the window on the other end.

It's sort of like the ending of "Silver Streak", only without Gene Wilder. And the tracks happened to be on the second floor.

It’s not a chupacabra. I must say I am disappointed.

From Yahoo News.

SAN MARCOS, Texas - The results are in: The ugly, big-eared animal found this summer in Cuero is not the mythical bloodsucking chupacabra. It's just a plain old coyote.

Biologists at Texas State University announced Thursday night that they had identified the hairless doglike creature.

San Antonio television station KENS provided a tissue sample from the animal for testing.

"The DNA sequence is a virtually identical match to DNA from the coyote (Canis latrans)," bioligist Mike Forstner said in a written statement. "This is probably the answer a lot of folks thought might be the outcome. I, myself, really thought it was a domestic dog, but the Cuero Chupacabra is a Texas Coyote


It would be nice to have one of these mythical beasts actually be real, one of these days.

Petra

Petra is an archaeological site in Jordan famous for having many stone structures carved into the rock. One of Petra's most magnificent structures is the Treasury (Al Khazneh), a building carved in sandstone cliff. Incredibly, most of the buildings in Petra were carved right into the face of the rock and incorporated the numerous caves within the cliffs.

This probably looks familiar to many people, as the Treasury has been feeatured in several movies. The most famous one, of course, would be Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It was also used as a setting in Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.

I obtained these pictures from a very interesting blog called CrazyTopics, which unfortunately seems to have gone inactive.

And you thought you had a crappy commute; Bolivia's Road of Death.

Stremnaya road, situated in Bolivia, is called the Road of Death, for some pretty obvious reasons. I have heard that approximately 150 PEOPLE A YEAR die on this road. This is not some out of the way logging road. This is the major roadway between La Paz and some other major towns, I believe.

Updated per comment below.

Well, yes, actually, it IS art.

"Tim Nobel and Sue Webster take piles of trash and make art into them... but sometimes the art isn't apparent until you see it in a different light."

I have always been of the opinion that art takes both skill and vision. Sticking big rocks out in a park or burying Cadillacs up to their steering wheels has never really struck me as "art". It is SOMETHING, but art, it is not. Cristo was a con artist, in my estimation.

So, when I saw that someone was making "art" out of "garbage", I went "uh-huh." But when I really looked at these pictures, I was pretty floored.

Setting standards for propaganda the Soviet Union would be proud of.

This is from Christy at Firedoglake, talking about a “press conference” by Bush administration officials regarding the fires in Southern California.

He was apparently quite familiar with the reporters — in one case, he appears to say “Mike” and points to a reporter — and was asked an oddly in-house question about “what it means to have an emergency declaration as opposed to a major disaster declaration” signed by the president. He once again explained smoothly. …

“And so I think what you’re really seeing here is the benefit of experience, the benefit of good leadership and the benefit of good partnership,” Johnson said, “none of which were present in Katrina.” (Wasn’t Michael Chertoff DHS chief then?) Very smooth, very professional. But something didn’t seem right. The reporters were lobbing too many softballs. No one asked about trailers with formaldehyde for those made homeless by the fires. And the media seemed to be giving Johnson all day to wax on and on about FEMA’s greatness.

Of course, that could be because the questions were asked by FEMA staffers playing reporters. We’re told the questions were asked by Cindy Taylor, FEMA’s deputy director of external affairs, and by “Mike” Widomski, the deputy director of public affairs. Director of External Affairs John “Pat” Philbin asked a question, and another came, we understand, from someone who sounds like press aide Ali Kirin.

Christ, these guys are so damn underhanded. Time and time again, they have shown themselves that they don’t deserved to be believed about ANYTHING they say. Ever. They can’t even hold a press conference without loading the audience with phony reporters to asked scripted questions.

Jupiter and Io

Pretty damn amazing photo.

Are you ABSOLUTELY certain that's the runway?

The dark soul of the extreme right.

The amount of anger and hatred coming from conservatives these days is truly frightening. Digby, who normally posts at Hullabaloo, has a great post up at Campaign for America’s Future. She illustrates perfectly why I am so worried about the future of this country. The main point is that, as more and more people are rejecting the way of the Republican party and it’s extreme right wing, the angrier people are getting. There used to be social conventions and moral principles that people honored. Now, these restraints are no longer operative. The right thinks that they are free to say, and perhaps act upon (which is really what I find scary), anything they feel like saying. Here is a good example that Digby uses in her post. I am not sure if this was an e-mail or a handwritten note. Either way, it is beyond disturbing.

"You pathetic socialist pukes give me hope that one day the country will reach the frustration level necessary to take up arms and hunt you assholes down. I went to Viet Nam to kill communist and will kill them here if necessary. I can still part your idiotic hair with an M-16 at about 300 yards and I would find great satisfaction in having people like you in my sights... the time of tolerating you assholes is running out....so please keep it up...and a mountain is going to come down on your treasonous head and if there is a hell, it is reserved for stupid fucks like the writers and contributers to assholes like you..... I detest you...I am your enemy and WILL REMAIN your enemy....quit talking about the military...they consider you their enemy, and you don't deserve a military.... All you have is the trashcanisthan of the northeast...the fucking rust belt, and the third world of California.... you ain't got shit! You will lose again, and again and again, because your message is socialist bile....and that is ALL you are.... FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!"

And this is what Digby says about it, which I totally agree with.


Clearly, people on the right are very, very angry right now and they are lashing out at their most hated enemies: Americans who disagree with them.

That is what I find so astounding and frightening about today’s society. Why is it that some people are so threatened by someone whose only sin is that they have a different opinion of things think it is acceptable to treat them as some inhuman species that is deserving of extermination? I find this absolutely incomprehensible that any, supposedly rational, adult would actually think this way.

Now, I am sure that some people will argue, “Oh, there are irrational people on both sides. There are plenty of angry liberals out there as well.” To which I would agree. But you know, I read a lot of liberal blogs. I have never, ever seen the amount of hatred and threatening language from anyone on the left as I see in this example. And I have seen plenty more like this. Commenters at the conservative blog “Little Green Footballs” are known to be quite outspoken in their desires. One common theme seems to be that their side has all the guns, so our side better be very, very careful about what we say. This is reflected in the above example. This guy wants, in words that I doubt he would use, a jihad against all liberals and other people who don’t think exactly like he does.

“One day the country will reach the frustration level necessary to take up arms and hunt you assholes down.” That is how at least a small minority of the right wing of this country feels. They would like to hunt us down and kill us.

Thank you, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, and hundreds of other blowhards with a public megaphone, for bringing the level of public discourse in this country to the gutter.

The “Good Germans” among us.

Frank Rich, as usual, has a spot-on commentary in today’s NYTimes. What is going on with our country that we are actively turning our collective backs on the constant and widespread abuses of the Bush administration? We just don’t want to know. I just don’t understand this mentality. If it were another era, I could imagine the citizens and punditry of this country holding massive protests and saturating the print media and airwaves with articles pointing out how badly we have lost our way. Yet, we get this collective yawn, as Rich puts it.

In April 2004, Stars and Stripes first reported that our troops were using makeshift vehicle armor fashioned out of sandbags, yet when a soldier complained to Donald Rumsfeld at a town meeting in Kuwait eight months later, he was successfully pilloried by the right. Proper armor procurement lagged for months more to come. Not until early this year, four years after the war’s first casualties, did a Washington Post investigation finally focus the country’s attention on the shoddy treatment of veterans, many of them victims of inadequate armor, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military hospitals.

We first learned of the use of contractors as mercenaries when four Blackwater employees were strung up in Falluja in March 2004, just weeks before the first torture photos emerged from Abu Ghraib. We asked few questions. When reports surfaced early this summer that our contractors in Iraq (180,000, of whom some 48,000 are believed to be security personnel) now outnumber our postsurge troop strength, we yawned. Contractor casualties and contractor-inflicted casualties are kept off the books.

Instead of taxing us for Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax cuts. Instead of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to finesse the overstretched military’s holes. With the war’s entire weight falling on a small voluntary force, amounting to less than 1 percent of the population, the rest of us were free to look the other way at whatever went down in Iraq.


Currently, I am ashamed of this country. I am ashamed that our government is using tactics that we normally associate with Germany in the 1930’s or the Soviet Union. The United States tried Japanese military leaders as war criminals for the same things we are doing now. And a large percentage of our population either ignores this, or else condones it to such as point that they call anyone who disagrees with them “traitors”. I am ashamed of some of the infantile arguments that people use to justify the unjustifiable.

If there is such a thing as karma in this universe, then this country is going to get a massive comeuppance in the future. It may be soon, it may be fifty to a hundred years in the future. I don’t know what it will look like, but this country is not going to resemble the one that once stood as a beacon of enlightenment, justice, fair play and the defender of those weaker than us. World history may well relegate us to somewhere just above the Roman Empire of Caligula. And that, need I remind you, was not a very enlightened era.

Shorter Tom Tancredo: “Anyone who disagrees with me should be kicked out of America.”

Representative Tom Tacredo (R – Colo) on his plan to put up a fence on the entire U.S.-Mexico border, and the fact that many of the towns along the route of this proposed fence are objecting to his plan. Via TPM:

"These mayors have already demonstrated that their hearts and loyalties lie with Mexico," Tancredo said. "Perhaps they'd feel more comfortable if their cities were geographically located there as well."

Isn’t this part of the overall Republican game plan? “Anyone who disagrees with my position on fill in the blank should be fill in the blank.” Right now, Tom is saying that people who don’t believe in his fence should be deported to Mexico. I remember that some Bush administration person said something about letting the terrorists nuke San Francisco. I also remember some similar sounding statements about North Dakota, if ND didn’t want to house some advanced weapons systems, that someone said it would be acceptable if North Korea or whomever were to bomb ND. I may try to find those links later, I don’t have them right now. But here we have a sitting member of the House of Representatives suggesting that we give U.S. territory to Mexico because some inhabitants, including elected officials, might have the audacity to disagree with him! This is one more instance of, if a Democrat did this, the wingnuts of this country would go insane. However, if a Republican does it, it’s O.K.

These people have absolutely no empathy, no understanding that someone actually might have a different view of the world than they do. If anyone disagrees with them, then that disagreeable person automatically is a person non-gratia and deserves whatever comes to them.

What is it about Republicans and conservatives that absolutely insist that every single thing in this very, very complex world can be cast in a black or white, yes or no decision making process?

(Please excuse the long absence. I had a bit (understatement) of a healthcare scare last week. It all turned out negative, but for some time, I was not doing really well in the area of emotional deportment.)

Oh my God. Someone please tell me this one isn’t what it sounds like.

Via Crooks and Liars:

Ciara Durkin was home on leave last month and expressed a concern to her family in Quincy: If something happens to me in Afghanistan, don’t let it go without an investigation.

Durkin, 30, a specialist with a Massachusetts National Guard finance battalion, was found dead last week near a church at the Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. She had been shot once in the head, the Army says.

Fiona Canavan, Durkin’s older sister, said today that when her sister was home three weeks ago, she told family members that she had come across some things that concerned her and had raised objections to others at the base.

‘‘She was in the finance unit and she said, ‘I discovered some things I don’t like and I made some enemies because of it.’ Then she said, in her light-hearted way, ‘If anything happens to me, you guys make sure it gets investigated,”’ Canavan said. ‘‘But at the time we thought it was said more as a joke.”[..]


I mean, what terrorist is able to come close enough to shoot a soldier in the head and then escape unnoticed. Don't they use bombs and mortars?

I really, really hope that this doesn't turn out to be what it sounds like.

Flying with commercial U.S. carriers has become a nightmare.

This is not exactly news. Every day, if we were to look long enough, there are stories in the press about how terrible things have become. This latest example is in the Washington Post. The number of mishandled bags by the major airlines has increased steadily over the last four or five years. Of course, the response by the airlines is to blame someone else.

I have gotten to the point that I am going to refuse to go on any business trips that I cannot absolutely get out of. I just don’t dislike traveling by air. I detest it. It has gotten to the point of dread. It is physically and emotionally draining.

I took exactly two business trips this summer, both to points in the domestic United States. In those two trips, I have experienced the following:

- I spent three and a half hours sitting in a fully packed sweltering airplane on the tarmac at Dallas, waiting to take off for Atlanta. During this delay, there was no food and very little lukewarm water. The ice had disappeared long earlier. Even when the airplane was finally ready to leave, the flight attendants were still charging $3.50 for package of chips, instead of giving them away for free at the end of a long and uncomfortable wait.

- I have watched physical confrontations between a passenger and a flight attendant, and between two passengers. The first of these incidents ended in the passenger in question being take off the airplane at the destination by federal agents. The second of these incidents resulted in the flight attendant telling the passengers in question that they needed to calm down but they had to work out their problems by themselves. In other words, she was not going to get involved. Tempers are on edge and people believe that, by paying for an airline ticket, they are free to act like complete a**holes.

- I ended up with two tickets for the same trip. To make matters worse, American Airlines decided that I had used segments of both tickets, making a simple refund for an unused ticket out of the question. I was refused boarding on the second leg of the journey and was made to go back and get another boarding pass, even though the one I held was still valid. This resulted in me having a middle seat, after I had specifically gone to the trouble of booking the flight two months in advance just so I could have an aisle seat.

- American Airlines has absolutely no one, no one at all, that a person can talk with when dealing with billing issues. Everything must be done via e-mail. There are no hidden automatic telephone menus to push. There are no unpublished telephone numbers that anyone will give you, even if you badger them. Everything results in you being shuttled back to the same automated telephone menu and the same internet web address that you have already tried. What should have taken 20 minutes to fix took over two months and several hours on e-mail and the phone. In the end, when AAL finally did address my problem and give me a refund, they didn’t even notify me that this was done. I had to find out via my credit card company.

- Every single leg of every single flight was 100% full, with what seems to be ever decreasing amounts of legroom. United Airlines has now started charging extra for three or four extra inches of legroom. “Enhanced seating”, I think it is euphemistically called. I paid for the option on several legs, even though I was incensed by the thought of it,. I am a rather tall person and trying to fit into a “normal” airliner seat is almost out of the question. I just happen to be of the opinion that physical comfort should be part of the basic package, not something that you are required to pay extra for. If the person in front of me reclines their seat, my knees are trapped in the seatback for the rest of the flight. I cannot even reach my bag underneath the seat in front of me, much less put my table tray down or use a laptop computer.

I roll my eyes when I hear how wonderful and “passenger friendly” the new Airbus A380 and Boeing 787 are going to be. Well, I doubt that. There may be some new features on each that don’t exist on the airplanes flying today, such as larger windows and a greater percentage of fresh air. However, the airlines are going to continue with their trend of maximizing the number of seats in each airplane. The more passengers they fly on each flight, the more money they make, after all. The Boeing 787, to my understanding, was originally intended to have eight seats across (in coach). The seats were going to be several inches wider than the standard seats on today’s airplane. Of course, the airlines were not content with that. They each insisted on nine seats across, which results in the coach seats on the 787 being narrower than the airplanes flying today, even other Boeing airplanes such as the 737.

I don’t know another industry that seems to care so little for their actual customers. All they seem to be trying to do is to milk their customers for as much money as possible, while cutting as much customer services as they can, as they see that as “unacceptable overhead”. All the airlines care about maximizing their very small profit margin. They assume that, no matter how badly they treat the flying public, their customers have no other option, given that all the major airlines approach customers with the same distain, and will continue to fly in the future.

Not I. Unless it is absolutely forced upon me, I am not going to get on another airplane. Now, the circumstances which might “force” me are still undefined. If my family really, really desires to go on a Southern California theme park vacation, then I don’t have a lot of options. Nor do I have any options if I would like to go back to Hawaii. And there are going to be some business trips that I just cannot realistically avoid.

That is certainly not a glowing endorsement of the air travel industry. If I were the major airlines, I would be very careful about how much more distain you heap upon your paying customers.

Boy, the world sure would fall apart if liberals ran the U.S.

So says one John Hawkins. Via Mahablog:

If the left were able to totally dominate American politics starting tomorrow, all 50 governors, every seat in Congress, the presidency, and all 9 Supreme Court Justices, my guess is that they’d immediately start implementing the worst aspects of European socialism wholesale.

In other words, you’d see socialized medicine, government takeovers of industry, reams of new regulations on businesses, sky high tax rates, the military would be gutted, the national debt would grow to unimaginable levels, drugs, prostitution, gay marriage, and polygamy would be legalized, penalties for committing crimes would be greatly reduced, and draconian speech codes would be put into place.

This would of course have disastrous consequences for the country and the world. The US economy would start to fall apart, crime would explode, and conflicts would break out all over the globe as terrorists were given free reign, other nations rapidly escalated their conventional military spending, and dozens of nations built nuclear weapons.

Within a couple of decades, multiple “small” nuclear wars would probably break out in Asia, South America, and the Middle-East even as the global economy started to tank.
Now, you might think that if this were to happen, the libs would see the error of their ways and move back to the right — but, that doesn’t take into account the nature of the left.

When liberal idea fail miserably in practice, which is most of the time, their response isn’t to go in the other direction, it’s to go FURTHER in the direction that they were already moving. This is exactly what the left did in countries like China and the Soviet Union and it’s what it seems likely that they would do in the US as well when it became clear that turning the United States into a giant version of Belgium/Amsterdam wasn’t working out so well.

What you’d probably get then would be madcap combination of the world in George Orwell’s 1984 mixed with the dictates of Stalin. Religion would be banned, conservatism would be illegal, the state would take over ever larger portions of industry, and the Constitution would be scrapped and replaced with a 500 page tangle of bureaucrat speak that spelled out everything from what political ideas were to be made “thought crimes” to what sort of lightbulbs people were allowed to use.

Does that sound too fantastic to be true? Maybe it is. But, if people like Ted Kennedy, Rosie O’Donnell, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and Michael Moore were allowed to actually implement their ideas without having to worry about the voters, the wildest excesses of liberalism that you could imagine would probably pale in comparison to what they’d actually end up implementing.


Umm… Yeah. Of course. No doubt that is exactly what would happen. Of course, if, on the other hand, CONSERVATIVES ran the country with unfettered and unlimited control, not having to worry about the electorate (which was very much like what was happening before the 2006 elections), the world would be just peachy-keen. Everyone would have ice cream every day for lunch. No one would ever utter a word that didn’t totally agree with every other person in the country. All “moonbats”, especially Rosie O'Donnell, would be sent away to some island in the Aleutians, so no one would every have to acknowledge that people with opinions that disagree with theirs even exist.

I’ll tell you, introspection is NOT one of the strong points of these people.

It looks as if U.S. action against Iran is more and more likely, every day.

This is such insanity. Here are some snippets from Sy Hersh in the New Yorker.

In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran. “Shia extremists, backed by Iran, are training Iraqis to carry out attacks on our forces and the Iraqi people,” Bush told the national convention of the American Legion in August. “The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased. . . . The Iranian regime must halt these actions. And, until it does, I will take actions necessary to protect our troops.” He then concluded, to applause, “I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”

The President’s position, and its corollary—that, if many of America’s problems in Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran, then the solution to them is to confront the Iranians—have taken firm hold in the Administration. This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

--snip--

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said, “The President has made it clear that the United States government remains committed to a diplomatic solution with respect to Iran. The State Department is working diligently along with the international community to address our broad range of concerns.” (The White House declined to comment.)

I was repeatedly cautioned, in interviews, that the President has yet to issue the “execute order” that would be required for a military operation inside Iran, and such an order may never be issued. But there has been a significant increase in the tempo of attack planning. In mid-August, senior officials told reporters that the Administration intended to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization. And two former senior officials of the C.I.A. told me that, by late summer, the agency had increased the size and the authority of the Iranian Operations Group. (A spokesman for the agency said, “The C.I.A. does not, as a rule, publicly discuss the relative size of its operational components.”)

“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002”—the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency. He added, “The guys now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through.”


Lots of bloggers are all over this. Tristero at Hullabaloo is just one instance.

So, let’s recap. The Bush administration cherry picked intelligence information, if not just making it up, to sell their already-decided-upon war on Iraq. Regardless of the reasons behind the war itself, they totally botched it up completely in so many regards, it’s hard to keep track. They push the blame on everything bad on everyone else and never take any responsibility at all. George Bush hides behind the skirts of the military, except when they disagree with him, at which point, he forces them out. Polling results in this country have consistently, for the past year, shown a very significant percentage of the U.S. want us out of Iraq. The Republicans were soundly whipped in the last elections, yet Bush decides he is going to escalate his war.

Now, it seems as if Bush and his cronies, and most especially Dick Cheney, want to start an action against a much larger and more formidable country in Iran. They are already changing their justifications for this “need”. Initially, such action was necessary to stop Iran from gaining possession of an atomic bomb. However, as the American public seems a bit more skeptical of claims of that nature, the rationale has already changed to “protection our troops in Iraq from those nasty Iranians”. All of which points to the fact that, once again, the desire for military action has been laid and the justifications for that action are nothing more than a trial balloon, to see which is most palatable to the American public.

This is completely freakin’ insane. It’s a cross between Kafka and “Groundhog Day”. Has no one in the political arena or in the national media learned anything? Must we go through another “worst political blunder in the history of the U.S.”, just so we can have absolute proof that Bush and Cheney are completely out of control?

“Monsters, John. Monsters from the Id!”

Warning: Contains spoilers for those few of you who that haven’t seen “Forbidden Planet” but would still like to one of these days without knowing the ending.

“Forbidden Planet” is one of my favorite classic science fiction films. I think it is much more meaningful than another classic from the same time frame, “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, for several reasons. The primary reason I think it is a superior film is related to the message contained in the film. For those who aren’t fans of classic sci-fi, “Forbidden Planet” is loosely based on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”. The kicker in both is that the malevolent entity in each is based on the wishes of the main protagonists; Prospero in “The Tempest” and Dr. Morbius in “Forbidden Planet”. In the case of Dr. Morbius, a scientific explanation is given. The extraordinary machinery left behind by a dead civilization amplifies the subconscious, the id, of Dr. Morbius to the point that an invisible monster goes out and murders people who go against his wishes. Hence, the Monster from the Id is the dark side of Dr. Morbius himself.

Now, the reason I bring this up is not just to discuss one of my favorite films. I think the parable contained in this film regarding the damage that people can do to one another because of a person’s submerged personality is very relevant to today’s society. In other words, I am thinking that our society in the United States today is very much like the Krell of “Forbidden Planet”. We have created a vast, technological based civilization that is on the verge of getting out of our control. It sometimes seems as if technology must continue to change and advance for its own sake, and not because of any benefits that it may provide to individuals. Our subconscious wishes and desires are finding an outlet in the technology of today. In our case, the technology is the access to vast amounts of information and the ability, with the maturation of the internet, to give individuals a platform by which they can disseminate the information they desire.

Technology, by itself, is neutral. It is neither good nor bad. It just is. It is what people do with this technology and how it affects us as individuals and as groups that is important. It is not clear in my mind that the benefits of this almost unlimited exchange of information and ideas outweighs the harmful effects. Now, I am in no way advocating the restriction of information flow. That is the way to domination of many by a small group. One of the first things that occurs in a country that is run by a authoritarian government is that the government seizes all the newspapers, radio and television stations. What I am saying is that I don’t think we, as a society, have figured out how to counteract the ill effects of this technological beast that we have created.

I cannot help but think of people like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, at the rest of their ilk, as a manifestation of the subconscious id of this country. Their rants, which are given wide circulation because of the money they make for their masters, play directly to the baser instincts of many segments in our population. Racism, bigotry, intolerance, whatever you want, you can probably find it somewhere in the mainstream press now. It used to be that such talk was limited in scope. Now, because of the depth and breadth of the availability of information of all kinds, it appears that ideas that used to be somewhat shameful and not spoken directly are now considered to be “mainstream”. For any idea you care to advance, you can now find a forum. When these ideas are taken up in the national media, then immediately, that idea, however farfetched it may have been in the past, is now just part of the national dialog; one valid viewpoint among many. This cycle contains an element of self-actualization. Information repeated often enough becomes valid, and then it becomes “conventional wisdom”.

This is where Monsters from the Id come about. The monsters live in all of us. For most of us, we can successfully recognize these monsters within ourselves exist and deal with them accordingly. However, a large percentage of our population seems to revel in these monsters. Racism, in the guise of anti-immigration is just one example. Take the following passage from an article in the HuffingtonPost.

Before the massive May 1, 2006, "A Day Without Immigrants" protests, Iowa Representative Steve King (R) declared:

"What would that May 1st look like without illegal immigration? There would be no one to smuggle across our southern border the heroin, marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamines that plague the United States, reducing the U.S. supply of meth that day by 80%. The lives of 12 U.S. citizens would be saved who otherwise die a violent death at the hands of murderous illegal aliens each day. Another 13 Americans would survive who are otherwise killed each day by uninsured drunk driving illegals. Our hospital emergency rooms would not be flooded with everything from gunshot wounds, to anchor babies, to imported diseases to hangnails, giving American citizens the day off from standing in line behind illegals. Eight American children would not suffer the horror as a victim of a sex crime."

--snip--

Conservative radio talk show host Neal Boortz does him one better.

"When we yank out the welcome mat, and they all start going back to Mexico, as a going away gift let's all give them a box of nuclear waste.... Tell 'em it'll heat tortillas."


I have a hard time believing that an elected state official would have said something like that back in the 1980’s. Likewise, I am not certain when it became acceptable to say something like Neal Boortz is quoted as saying above. Both statements certainly seem to be a manifestation of the right’s bigotry and hatred of anyone who doesn’t look, act and sound just like them. Are they aware of how stupid and racist their statements make them look? I actually rather doubt it. Just like Dr. Morbius, they are unaware of the underlying issues that are driving to make such statements. Unfortunately, just like Dr. Morbius, they also have access to technology that amplifies their hatred and blasts it out onto a society, many segments of which would rather not acknowledge that such hatred exists in our society.

Monsters from the Id, indeed. We have not found a way to deal with them and, just like the Krell, they may ultimately be our downfall.

Rudolph Giuliani, the Pavlov's Dog of candidates.

Get asked an embarrassing question, blurt out something to do with 9/11. All the time. Lather, rinse, repeat. 9/11. 9/11.

This is from The Democratic Party web page, via Firedoglake.

Giuliani also addressed a cell phone call he took from his wife, Judith, last week during his speech to the National Rifle Association...

"And quite honestly, since Sept. 11, most of the time when we get on a plane, we talk to each other and just reaffirm the fact that we love each other," he said.


Uh, huh….. That’s pretty rich, but unsurprising, since Rudy brings up 9/11 for every single thing that he stands for, even for unfettered personal ownership of handguns. Like that would have stopped the 9/11 hijackers, unless everyone on those planes was armed.

But what is very amusing about Rudy’s statement above is that he wasn’t even married to his current wife on September 11, 2001! So, how stupid does his statement above look when cast in that light?

Really, really stupid. But these people don’t care. All they care about is trying to scare the crap out of every single American so they can either get or retain as much power as they can. And they know that the national media isn’t going to grab one of their gaffs, like they did John Edwards’ $400 haircut, and make hay with it. So, they feel free to pound away with the only hammer they have. This kind of stuff should make most people slink away in complete humiliation, never to be heard of again. But not Republicans. They thrive on this kind of crap.

I wonder if this country is every going to get back our moral focus ever again. Because it sure doesn’t look like it now.

“Liberal Press”, indeed.

O.K., a congresswoman who was on Dan Abrams’ show on MSNBC brought some pressure on the network and ultimately made Dan apologize for asking a “gotcha” kind of question when she was on his show blathering about how disgraceful the MoveOn.org ad was. So, Dan had to apologize.

On the other side of the coin, that is pretty much how the entire press operates when it comes to the Democrats. Make issues out of nothing (such as John Edwards’ haircut and the MoveOn.org ad) or try to nail Democrats at every turn (such as Tim Pumpkinhead Russert at the Democratic debate the other day when he threw in a loaded question in specifically to try to make Ms. Clinton look foolish). That’s O.K. As is Rush Limbaugh insulting soldiers who disagree with the war. Now, it’s his show, he can say what he wants on it. But expect for a few outlets like Keith Olbermann on MSNBC and McClatchy newspapers, everyone is silent on that. It’s fine to condemn the MoveOn.org ad, but Rush Limbaugh gets a pass. It’s apparently fine to speculate Edwards is a “phony” in the national media because he paid a lot of money for a haircut, but all the right-wingers that act like insane people get a pass. And then, to make matters worse, Limbaugh goes on his show and then pretty much denies that he ever said any such thing, even though it is all over the web right now.

These people don’t even care they are so transparently biased and hypocritical.

And please note that one of those links is from a newspaper in Malaysia. I couldn’t even find a link to Tim Russert’s loaded question in any U.S. papers.

Important things that have happened and then vanished from public consciousness.

Invasion of Iraq on false pretenses.

Major bridge in Minneapolis collapses.

Neglect of American military veterans at Walter Reed hospital.

Virginia Tech.

Katrina.

Scooter Libby found guilty but subsequently had his punishment lifted.

U.S. Attorneys fired for not properly pursuing Karl Rove’s political agenda.

The politicization of the Department of Justice and many other supposedly non-partisan government agencies.


On the up side, everyone can tune in to watch the new adventures of The Bionic Woman.

More stuff from Salon.com

This time about Dan Rather’s suit against CBS and how CBS tried to squelch the entire story about Bush not serving his time in the Texas Air National Guard. It is all but certain that Bush never did fulfill his obligations, yet he was given an honorable discharge.

I get madder and madder every time crap like this comes to light, that never gets any national attention. I am close to coming to the conclusion that about 70% of this country is crooked, on the take or have some other motivation other than to tell the truth. And 100% of those who control the national discourse. Well, 98%, when you subtract Keith Olbermann from the mix. I have no idea how that man still has a job at MSNBC, subset of mega-corporation GE. “We bring good things to light…” Not.

The Wit and Wisdom of The Manchurian Candidate, as applied to the administration of George W. Bush.

Thanks, IMDB.

Marco: Intelligence officer. Stupidity officer is more like it. Pentagon wants to open a Stupidity Division, they know who they can get to lead it.

Raymond Shaw: There are two kinds of people in this world: Those that enter a room and turn the television set on, and those that enter a room and turn the television set off.

Marco: It's not that Raymond Shaw is hard to like. He's IMPOSSIBLE to like!

[a general greets Medal of Honor winner Staff Sgt. Raymond Shaw on his return to the U.S]
General: Congratulations, son. How do you feel?
Raymond Shaw: Like Captain Idiot in Astounding Science comics.

Raymond Shaw: It's a terrible thing to hate your mother. But I didn't always hate her. When I was a child, I only kind of disliked her.

Mrs. Iselin: Oh, Raymond, what is the matter with you? You look as if your head were going to come to a point in the next thirteen seconds.

Bennett Marco: You Arabic?
Eugenie Rose Chaney: No.

Marco: [covering the microphones] Mister Secretary, I'm kind of new at this job, but I don't think it's good public relations to speak that way to a US Senator, even if he is an idiot.

Mrs. Iselin: [to her husband] I keep telling you not to think! You're very, very good at a great many things, but thinking, hon', just simply isn't one of them.

Here it is, my long-awaited, fer-real endorsements for presidential nominees, for both parties.

Knowing that this might well tip the balance-of-powers-that-be, I wanted to put sincere and thorough consideration into this. Like, during lunchtime.

My choice for the Democratic nomination is, shall we say, iffy. I think Hillary would make a dynamite POTUS, which wouldn’t be difficult, given who she would be compared to from the last 30 years. I was lucky enough to get a chance to hear her speak about three years ago. She is a dynamic speaker. It’s hard not to get carried away. I would like to go with her. But, I am a bit nervous about that “Hillary as Satan” thing that she has going with some demented evangelicals. I am afraid, by nominating Ms. Clinton, the Dems would guarantee a very large Republican turnout at the polls. However, given that the Democratic nominee is probably going to be either black or female, it is pretty much a given that those thirty-percenters that still think Georgie is a god, or at least a demigod, will be highly motivated to show up and vote AGAINST the person that actually ends up on the Democratic ticket.

Now, in all actuality, I like John Edwards. I like his emphasis on the “Two Americas”. That is the truth, and it is nice to see someone keep banging away on the subject. But, unfortunately, I just don’t think John is going to make it. He would have to get off to a rousing start in the initial primaries, which is possible. But I just don’t think that he can counter Ms. Clinton’s name recognition, charisma, and money.

Barak Obama…. You know, I just don’t know that much about him. I have absolutely nothing against a black man or woman becoming president. I think either of those things would be a very good thing in the history of this country. It would be like Jackie Robinson playing for the Dodgers, raised to the nth degree. The thing that I have a bit of a problem with Obama is not race, but youth and inexperience. He does seem a bit green, no pun intended. Not that it might matter much. John Kennedy was pretty green as well, and he was a very good president at a very difficult time. So, Mr. Obama might end up being a very good president, given the chance. I am just not sure he is going to get that chance.

Therefore, I am going to go with Ms. Clinton. As stated earlier, I think she would be a very good president. She would certainly have her weaknesses, but doesn’t everyone? I also think it would be a total hoot if she were to be able to reconcile her differences on the campaign trail with Mr. Obama and nominate him for VP. Now, THAT would be a ticket, a woman and a black man. It would be great fun to see the heads explode of all the followers of Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. Rather like a mass screening of Scanners.

On the Republican side, I really have a hard time of imagining anyone of those currently running making any sort of a decent president. Now, the entire equation might be being fogged up due to the fact that they all are pandering to the extreme right of the party, whose influence dominates the primaries. Once the nominee gets past those, maybe, just maybe, he would start sounding like a real, sane person again and not like some neo-con war-bot, as they will have to then appeal to a much broader spectrum of voters. It just appears to me that none of the frontrunners have shown themselves to have any sort of principles. They will say anything to pander to that right wing base of the party, just so they can secure the nomination. John McCain is no longer an Episcopalian. He is now a Baptist. It isn’t terribly clear when that happened. Giuliani is now for everything the NRA stands for, expect that he wasn’t when he was mayor of NYC. And Mitt, geez…. Pro-gay, anti-gay, pro-life, pro-choice... Who knows? Fred Thompson hasn’t said anything of substance about ANYTHING yet, so who knows what the heck he would be like. We do know that he has the ability to procure one mighty fine red pickup truck, when necessary. Otherwise, he drives a big honkin’ SUV, like most other rich, white Republicans.

I guess I would like to go with John McCain, even though he is nothing like the person that used to be associated with the “Straight Talk Express”. Maybe, after the primaries, he would start acting like a real person again. In the past, he hasn’t been hesitant to criticize his own party. But his pro-war zeal makes me very nervous. We would probably be in Iraq in greater numbers than we are now for the foreseeable future, if he were to win. But he does say some good things about some subjects, such as torturing political prisoners who have not been charged with anything.

I really hope the Republican nominee is not Rudy Giuliani. He is popular enough that he might actually have a chance of winning, and he also seems to be a certifiable nutjob. No one in NYC who knows anything about him seems to like him, at all. That would be a very scary proposition. I might actually consider that move to Canada I had been joking about four years earlier.

Truthfully, I wish we could somehow end up with Al Gore as president. But that is never going to happen for a multitude of reasons. So, I am thinking out best chance of extracting ourselves out of this absolute mess that we are currently in would be with President Hillary Clinton.

There. Got that out of the way. What’s next on the agenda? Oh, yeah…. My endorsement for the best automatic dishwasher detergent. I’ll have to give that sincere and deep consideration....

THIS PHOTO HAS BEEN FAKED BY PRO-WAR CONSERVATIVES!!

I originally wasn’t going to post this fake picture, I found it so disgusting. However, I decided that it is an attention getter, if anyone is out there still checking out this blog, and it also demonstrates perfectly the perfidy at work these days in the true-believer pro-war , pro-Bush conservatives of this country.

You can click on this link to go see the entire post at Sadly, No!, which is where I got this photo.

Here is the basic setup. There was an anti-war march in Washington D.C. recently. Lots of people were there, representing many groups, one of which is called Code Pink, a group of anti-war lesbians. Boy, if that isn’t enough to get the right’s collective knickers in a bunch, I don’t know what is. Lesbians AND anti-war! Mustn’t let that go unchallenged!

So, at the website of an obnoxious pro-war group called a Gathering of Eagles (this is the same group whose members just beat up the father of a young soldier who had been killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, because he was using his son’s picture during his protest). On their website, they had posted (which has since been removed without explanation) a photoshopped picture of a group of Code Pink ladies with pink umbrellas and holding a big pink sign that says, in this photo, “We Support The Murder Of The American Troops!” And, of course, this got picked up by lots of conservative, pro-war bloggers and the right wingers went nuts. The outrage, according to the post at Sadly, No!, went on even after the photo had been shown to be faked.

I just cannot believe several things about this whole incident. The first is, of course, that anyone would stoop this low in order to try to manufacture outrage at their “enemies”. They can’t even come up with a coherent, convincing rational for their own position on the war, so they feel they have no alternative but to try to make their opponents into unfeeling monsters that are actively advocating murder of Americans. That established, they can then beat their collective chests with self-righteous anger about how inhuman the anti-war people are. They get to avoid the illogic of their own position, since they are so focused on someone else’s, even though it turns out to be totally without merit.

The dishonesty behind this action is absolutely breathtaking. I wouldn’t expect that kind of action out of a vindictive 10 year old. Well, maybe, but I would certainly hope for better. Adults, no. Adults should not act like this.

The second thing that amazes me is how many people actually believed this photo was the real thing. All these people desperately wanted to believe this photo was legit, as it would validate all their hatred at anti-war groups and lesbians, so much so that they didn’t even stop to ask some questions that would immediately come to mind in any sort of self-aware primate. For instance, aren’t anti-war people the ones who want our troops to come home SO THEY WON’T GET SHOT AT, BLOWN UP AND KILLED? Isn’t that kind of the point of being against the war? Who, in their right mind, would openly advocated the murder of our brave troops? That’s beyond insane. Isn’t “wanting our troops out of harm’s way” and “murdering our troops” rather at odds with each other?

However, logic is not something that is driving the political discourse on the extreme right these days. No, these nuts are searching for something, anything that will validate their own beliefs, no matter how ridiculous. So, they grab onto this kind of insanity. When this fraud was exposed, at least one conservative blogger, Rick Moran, kept a firm grasp on his conviction that Code Pink really does hold those feelings toward our troops, even if the photo happened to be a fake.

Again, from Sadly, No!, I give you Rick Moran:

Then again, what does it say about Code Pink that I saw no reason why they couldn’t have marched down the street with such a sign? Seemed real to me as I’m sure it did to many readers.

I would say that this is entirely the wrong question, Rick. The question is not what your predetermined beliefs say about Code Pink. It is what your predetermined beliefs say about YOU! You and all the people like you.

These people are beyond disgusting.

I’ve been reading Sidney Blumenthal at Salon.com

We are SOOOOO screwed.....

(The clickthrough will take you to a short advertisement, then you get a site pass to Salon for an entire day. It’s pretty harmless.)

Republicans will try anything to win.

They know they have very, very little chance of winning the next presidental election, as things stand now. So, they are going to try to game the system. They have tried "voter fraud" as a way of supressing minority voting, which usually goes the way of the Democrats. That is a Karl Rove special. But that didn't work all that well in the 2006 elections. So, here is the latest thing they are trying.

There may be a ballot initiative in California , if it makes it on the ballot and then it passes, that would split the state's electoral votes along the percentage of ballots cast for each party. Yes, on the surface, that sounds "fair", I suppose. But no other state is going to do that. Every other state is a "winner take all" affair. This is just a ploy that is designed to siphon off electoral votes from the Dems and give it to the Republicans. It means giving the Republicans, without doing a single other thing, the electoral votes of a state the size of Ohio. The Dems would HAVE TO win Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania to counteract this.

This is fair? I am certain that the Rethugs would not have wanted to split the electoral votes from Florida in 2000 or Ohio in 2004. Either of those things would have given the presidential election to the Democrats. But no, this is just something that they will try in order to win. They know they can’t win on their abysmal record of the Iraq war, Katrina, race relations, the economy, etc. So, they must cheat. That is what this is, cheating. Make no mistake about it. This is a desperate, last minute ploy to rescue the Rethugs from an overwhelming defeat. The only positive thing about it that is out in the open and that we have the time to educate the voters in California about what is really going on.

I hope that the Dems will come out and hit this hard. I have heard lots and lots of silence about this up to now. They better not just let this slide and then complain about it later, a la John Kerry, after the Democratic nominee loses.

marcel marceau has passed away

I suppose, in his honor, I won't say anything.

The major hurdle facing the industrialized world in the next thirty years.

The major challenge, if not an outright hazard, to the industrialized nations of the world in the next thirty years is not going to be global climate change. Oh, that is surely going to be a very significant issue. But my bet is on the depletion of cheap energy sources, primarily oil, but perhaps also coal and hydroelectric as well. Our entire economic infrastructure is based on the existence of very cheap, readily available energy on which our entire economic engine is based. If you make energy into a very high priced, relatively scarce commodity that causes conflict between regions, states, or countries, and you have the makings of a global upheaval.

I, for one, do not want to see wars being overtly fought for control of oilfields. We are getting rather close to that scenario right now in Iraq. If we have regional conflicts that are exclusively about who gets the oil, then there will be some major-league players that will become involved. China, Russia, Japan and Europe are not about to sit still and let the United States gain control of foreign oil fields in the Middle East, Africa or South America. The U.S. could find itself at odds with countries that we now think of as allies. If it became a free-for-all, where each country was out to solely protect its own interests, then there could be a war that has never been seen before. It would not be the Red Team vs. the Blue Team. It could possibly be a war on many fronts involving many different nations, none aligned with any of the others.

If I were president, I would make finding some energy alternatives a national priority. It should be on the order of a 21st Century Manhattan Project. If we, as a global society, are to maintain any sort of structured civilization, we need to do something about this problem in the next twenty years.

More of that “unintended results” stuff, this time in our favor.

This is from T Rex at FireDogLake.

Dear MoveOn member,

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

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

YOU ARE OUR voice."

And then came the donations. By midnight, over 12,000 people had donated $500,000—more than we’ve raised any day this year—for our new ad calling out the Republicans who blocked adequate rest for troops headed back to Iraq.

The message from MoveOn members was loud and clear: Don’t back down. Take the fight back to the issues that matter.

That’s very nice of President Bush to make such an effort to bring the anti-war forces such visibility.

We do live in a Kafka-esque world.

The Senate just voted, twice, to condemn the ad from MoveOn.org, which played a bad pun on a name, calling General Petraeus, “General Be-tray-us”. But the Senate could not summon the votes to vote for either the restoration of habeas corpus or making the military follow their own rules about allowing military personnel just as much time at home as their have when stationed overseas. No, that was apparently just to much to ask or to even expect.

After everything that has gone on in this country for the last six years, the Senate votes to condemn a newspaper ad. John Kerry being called everything from a liar, a coward and a traitor in the last presidential election was O.K. A newspaper ad is over-the-line. And that still didn’t stop Bush from taking a staged question at his press conference to blast away at the Democrats anyway.

I am having a hard time writing about anything these days. Does anything actually make sense anymore? It’s difficult to summon up the indignation and energy to write about something seems to be totally without logic at its heart. I might as well write a post complaining about black holes.

I do wonder if historians 30 or 40 years from now are going to be able to sort this all out. Our current crop are not doing a very good job of it.

Imaginary conversations with my very conservative brother.

I always have imaginary arguments with people, usually ones that I am very upset with at that time. I always allow myself the maximum of righteous anger over a point on which I have the ultimate high-road position. Plus, since this is all imaginary, I also allow myself the ability to put together narratives and arguments of which Clarence Darrow would be proud. And I sound a bit like Orson Wells.

I have been in the holding pattern of various degrees of annoyance at my oldest brother. I sort of place him in the last of the 50’s generation. Cars are his passion, conservative are his politics. He went into the army during the height of the Vietnam war and somehow found himself stationed along the DMZ in South Korea. Therefore, although he was in Vietnam for a short period of time, he did miss most of the bloodshed that went along with the rest of his generation. He and my next to oldest brother, who was of the 60’s “hippy generation”, still don’t get along very well at all. That is an oil and water family situation if I have ever seen one.

He now says that the Army instilled discipline in his life and would not change a thing in his life. It is no surprise, I suppose, that he views the current political situation as do many ex-military types. He hated and still hates, I suppose, Bill Clinton and liberals, and believes that Democrats are about as dangerous as any terrorist might be.

In my imaginary arguments, I am always able to blast away into infinitely small bits any point he raises about how the war in Iraq is a good thing, or that George Bush is doing a good job. I am always able to take every single thing that I have read or heard from the progressive blogs and Keith Olbermann in the last four years and wrap it up into a concise and devastating argument that leaves absolutely no room for rebuttal. Any attempt to do so on his part looks amazingly foolish. I leave the fray victorious, not in the fact that I changed his mind on any of the subjects he holds so dear but on making him realize the absolute nonsense upon which he has built his belief system.

Of course, this points out several psychological points about me. One is that I am great when it comes to making imaginary arguments but pretty crummy about actually coming out and saying exactly what I think, especially to family, damn the consequences. Secondly, I still haven’t gotten over the older brother/younger brother dynamic, even though I am in my 50’s and he is in his 60’s. Like that time when I was about 10 and we were throwing a baseball. I missed the ball and got plunked. I immediately ran into the house, crying, while he stood there, calling me a pansy. O.K., there is still that millstone hanging around my neck, I suppose.

Speaking of "West Side Story" and zombies.....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x25jVzVP1bY

Sorry, I don't have the ability to embed a You Tube at my blog with my computer. Every time I try, it bombs the web browser.

Here’s a metaphor that I hadn’t thought of before.

Jane Smiley, at HuffPo:

The Republican Party now seems to work like a gang, in which the most valued qualities in members are loyalty to the gang and the leader, obedience to authority, and violence toward outsiders. The gang is constantly having to prove its dominance, and so candidates for leadership vie with one another for the most tyrannical or violent rhetoric, rhetoric which simultaneously demonizes those who don't accept the authority of the gang and the leader and removes all rules and laws for the gang and the leader. No one is exempt from the wrath of the gang. In this case, the Republican party has now separated itself fairly clearly from the general American population, and as Americans support it less, they come to seem to the Republicans to be more and more the enemy. The far away enemy is one thing, in terms of threat (think Al Qaeda, Shiites, Sunnis) but the enemy close at hand is more threatening because their enmity is seen as a "betrayal."

Well, what more needs to be said about that? The Republican party now resembles The Sopranos. Or "On The Waterfront". Or "West Side Story"....

More of the same: Attack anyone who disagrees with the Republican party.

This is apparently true, even if the person happens to be a soldier in the U.S. Army, and was just killed in Iraq. That has absolutely no bearing on the discussion. As George Bush famously said, “Either you’re with us, or you’re against us.” We just didn’t know to what lengths people would take that statement.

This is from MyDD, via KargoX at Daily Kos.

Montana Republicans Says Dead Soldier Too Stupid to Write NYT Op-Ed (Left in the West)

Sgt. Yance Gray hailed originally from Ismay, Montana. He died earlier this week. His death gained attention because he was one of seven authors of a recent New York Times op-ed criticizing the continued occupation. Now, a prominent Montana Republican is saying Sergeant Gray probably wasn't smart enough to actually write the op-ed.

Barely a week after the death of Montana soldier Yance Gray, Dave Rye is attacking him, suggesting that he was neither intelligent enough to have written an editorial expressing discontent about the war nor able to escape the clutches of liberal propagandists.

Dave Rye Says:

September 13th, 2007 at 10:08 am

Pardon my skepticism, and certainly no disrespect for the dead Montana soldier, but in my time in the Army I never heard such a word as "recalcitrant" escape the lips of any Staff Sergeant. I doubt if it’s spoken all that much in Ismay, either.

The soldiers had the help and probably the encouragement of a writer with an agenda, from a newspaper which has always had one. Its continually declining circulation now mainly consists of those who want desperately to consider themselves sophisticated as well as compassionate, even if that means always branding the U.S. as the chief villain on the world stage—-in fact, especially if it does.

I await the inevitable onslaught from outraged liberals. (Is there any other kind?)


This just shows, one more time, that there is no limit on what these people will do to get their own way. They will say and do anything. That’s part of their whole game plan. The rest of us were just having a hard time catching up, because no one in their right mind would think that civilized people could actually behave like this.

I detest these people who pull out their timeworn little mantra, “Support Our Troops!” whenever they feel threatened. They, of course, really never “support the troops” themselves. They let our brave soldiers fight and die for no particular reason anymore, while thumping their chests and telling everyone how evil Democrats and liberals are. They don’t fight for a better idea of why we are actually in Iraq. They don’t fight for getting them better equipment that might save their lives. They don’t fight for better conditions at Walter Reed Hospital for wounded vets. They are actually for cutting benefits for returning soldiers. They are for getting rid of all support for head trauma injury studies that might help out our wounded vets.

No, the only time that “Support Our Troops!” becomes an operational phrase is when they either want to deflect attention from some real problem or to bash their political opponents that they see as mortal enemies. This was just on display this last week. Don’t we all remember the “outrage” of those on the right regarding the MoveOn.org ad that criticized General Petraeus, calling him “General Betray Us”? How loudly and self-righteously they screamed that no one, absolutely no one, should criticize our troops. (As if the General getting in front of Congress and saying just what George Bush wanted him to is the same thing as “our troops.”) All we heard about was how awful it was that anyone would criticize our brave troops. However, now that the message is different, then a dead soldier is fair game.

Why not? That's the rules of the game, according to the Karl Rove doctrine.

.....

I did something incredibly lame and stupid the other day. I am not happy with myself, and am having a hard time gathering up the self righteousness required to write a post complaining about someone else.

Looks like Bush is getting hammered in the press.

After his speech last night, he deserves it. Now, I will admit that I didn't watch Bush. I never do. I have a hard time controlling my urge to throw a brick through the television screen. He pisses me off just by the way he talks and acts, much less the stuff that he actually does say.

Apparently, Bush thinks that parts of Baghdad are returning to normal life, and there are 36 different nations there to fight an evil enemy that threatens an ally of ours.

Almost every single thing I have read today is pointing out how much of a fantasy Bush's speech represented. (Again, I will admit that I don't read the hard line conservative columnists or blogs.) I am heartened by the fact that our media is now not swallowing this baloney anymore. But Bush seems to think that he can "surge" 30,000 more troops into Iraq, keep them there for almost a year when the original plan was in weeks or months, and then announce a "reduction" in troop levels when manpower levels don't even go down to the pre-surge levels. What kind of moron thinks that the entire country will buy such nonsense?

I predict that Bush is going to be judged by history much harsher than LBJ. LBJ at least knew he was in a trap and didn't know what to do about it. Bush apparently thinks that if he repeats something often enough, not only will he come to believe it but that everyone else who hears him will as well.

I really don't want to get into a conversation with a really uber-conservative who originally thought the war in Iraq was a great idea and Bush could do no wrong. But I really wonder what they are thinking now.

What was that about the “liberal media” again?

Media Matters for America did a rather comprehensive study about the columnists carried by the nation’s newspapers. Here is what they found.

· Sixty percent of the nation's daily newspapers print more conservative syndicated columnists every week than progressive syndicated columnists. Only 20 percent run more progressives than conservatives, while the remaining 20 percent are evenly balanced.

· In a given week, nationally syndicated progressive columnists are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of 125 million. Conservative columnists, on the other hand, are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of more than 152 million.

· The top 10 columnists as ranked by the number of papers in which they are carried include five conservatives, two centrists, and only three progressives.

· The top 10 columnists as ranked by the total circulation of the papers in which they are published also include five conservatives, two centrists, and only three progressives.

· In 38 states, the conservative voice is greater than the progressive voice -- in other words, conservative columns reach more readers in total than progressive columns. In only 12 states is the progressive voice greater than the conservative voice.

· In three out of the four broad regions of the country -- the West, the South, and the Midwest -- conservative syndicated columnists reach more readers than progressive syndicated columnists. Only in the Northeast do progressives reach more readers, and only by a margin of 2 percent.

· In eight of the nine divisions into which the U.S. Census Bureau divides the country, conservative syndicated columnists reach more readers than progressive syndicated columnists in any given week. Only in the Middle Atlantic division do progressive columnists reach more readers each week.

This is more of that “common knowledge”, opinion driven fact-less facts that I was railing against earlier. Everyone “knows” that the media is has a “liberal bias”. No one wants to really find out the truth, however, as it would interfere with the things they already know.

Here are some other observations I have about the media and its biases.

· Of all the cable news programs and hosts, only one, count them, ONE, can be considered to be liberal. That is Countdown on MSNBC with Keith Olbermann. Everything else on cable is primarily or exclusively conservative. Fox News in totality, not just their hosts like Bill O’Rielly and Sean Hannity, but also their anchors such as Brit Hume, Glenn Beck on CNN, the list goes on.

· Newspapers thought of as ultraliberal such as The New York Times and Washington Post are nothing of the kind. The New York Times, courtesy of Judy Miller and her publishers, became a leading advocate of war with Iraq when the White House would feed the Times selective information, it would be printed in the Times as fact, and then the administration would use that story to back up their own position. The Washington Post editorial board was very much pro-war prior to the invasion. Their ombudsman gets very testy when liberals point out the errors and inconsistencies of the stories in the paper, but become very apologetic when conservatives make criticisms.

· ABC is owned by the Disney corporation. Disney is not known for its liberal leanings. ABC was responsible for airing a very misleading “documentary” entitled “The Path to 9/11”, which attempted to blame the Clinton administration for not preventing the attacks of 9/11. CBS, along with Viacom, is part of the Sumner Redstone National Amusements empire. CBS terminated the contract of retired Army Major Gen. John Batiste, consultant to CBS News, after he appeared in a political ad for VoteVets.org critical of President Bush and the war in Iraq. Yes, CBS did employ Dan Rather who was not a fan of George Bush and went overboard on a story regarding Bush’s non-service during Vietnam. However, please note that he is no longer employed by CBS. NBC is part of the GE empire. The employment of Keith Olbermann aside, huge corporations are not normally liberal. Big business is the domain of the Republicans.

· Several newspaper columnists have been caught giving pro-Bush administration stories while getting paid for them. This is not objective journalism, this is shilling for money. That is extremely unethical behavior not to tell your readership that this isn’t an unbiased opinion instead of a paid political announcement.

· The Sunday talk shows on the major networks lean very much toward Republican and conservative guests. Statistics show that the trend seems to be running about 60% Republicans to 40% Democrats. In many instances, some of these shows (such as Meet The Press on NBC) have exclusively conservative Republican guests. There is no attempt to get an even-handed debate going with participants from both sides of an issue. Those Democrats that do get invited on are usually Joe Biden (not the most steady of liberals) and Joe Lieberman, who is now officially an independent but bashes the Democrats and praises the Republicans much more often than the other way around. And then there is that little matter of Tim Russert on Meet The Press, who never challenges his guests when they make controversial statements, and who (according to testimony during the Scooter Libby trial) always assumes, when talking to a politician, that the conversation is off the record and must get permission to use the information, rather than the other way around like reporters are supposed to do. Plus, on the many shows which he was on that dealt with the Scooter Libby trial, he never mentioned his role in the entire mess, as if that were nothing consequential. And there is also the little item where one of the staffers from Dick Cheney’s office stated, during that same trial, that they liked the Vice President “use” Meet The Press to “get the story out”. This does not sound like a liberal network to me.

· Local papers tend to get their national stories from national sources. Often, those national stories are just repeated without any attempt at analysis or fact checking. Local television markets are even worse. For years, one television station in my market constantly referred to the Iraq war as “The War Against Terror”, when it was not at all conclusive that there was any relationship at all between Iraq and any terror plot anywhere in the entire world.

There’s more. There always is. But you get the drift. By hammering away on the concept of a “liberal media bias” for decades, conservatives have totally reversed the situation such that it is now exactly opposite of the original complaint, which may or may not have ever truly existed. Due to the constant barrage of complaints and in an effort to appease the complainers, the national media has now become predominately conservative. But no one acknowledges that. “Common knowledge” still has it that our national media is liberal.

If that is true, I wonder why liberals, especially in the lefty blogs, rake the national media over the coals when they see the job of an independent press being ripped to shreds. That certainly doesn’t sound like a liberal press to me. What conservatives are REALLY complaining about, in my mind, is that the national media does not always mindlessly parrot the Republican talking points and actually does push back on the propaganda being fed to them at times. That is really what is ticking off the conservatives. It isn’t that the press is liberal, is that it isn’t a compliant tool to be used by the Republican party for any purpose that they please.

But I have also found that there is no arguing with “common knowledge”. Facts be damned, reality is what one wants to make of it, apparently.

UPDATED:



Here's the chart from the Media Matters study. You should be able to figure out the red and blue color coding. Gray is a "centerist". I would probably take issue with David Broder being called a centerist and Maureen Dowd as a progressive. She takes pot shots at Dems quite often, John Edwards' haircut being just one example.

Oh my God! Manos: Hands of Fate as a rock opera!

For all the Misties out there.

I feel compelled to write something.

My blogging these days has been slowed by several factors, including an increase of actual “work” to do while at work, a 12 year old who likes to play on the computer while simultaneously watching TV and playing a Gameboy, and a general sense of depression that nothing ultimately matters anyway. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen, regardless of whether anyone actually does anything or not. Certainly, beating away at a keyboard isn’t going to change much, especially in the harsh light of a readership that can truthfully be referred to as somewhere between non-existent and ethereal.

But, as I have a blog, it sort of demands some sort of care and feeding on my part. Perhaps not on a daily basis, but at least sort of a passing recognition of its existence. “Oh, crap! That’s right! I have a blog. Geez, I better go do something about that, I suppose. I’ll just check out what’s on television first. “Gilligan’s Island” on TV Land? Great! I hope it’s the headhunter episode.”

Today’s the seventh anniversary of that horrible day back in 2001. It doesn’t seem that long, although lots has happened since then. I still remember going home and sort of curling up into a fetal ball on the couch in front of the television. But today doesn’t seem to be much about that anniversary. There is a lot more attention about the Petraeus “report” in front of Congress. Lots of lights, lots of skepticism. Not much is going to change. We all know that now. One hallmark of the Bush presidency is the constant moving of the goalposts, the constant milestone just “six months down the road”. After that, everything will be crystal clear. Except that after the six months expires (also known as a Friedman Unit, or “FU”), many in the media seems to have forgotten the clarity that was supposed to emerge when Bush and his war machine asks for yet “more time”.

As many have already pointed out, just a few more “FU’s” and it will be time for Bush to leave office. At that time, Bush will be able to hand the entire mess over to the next person to inhabit the White House, and then let them take all the crap, from either or both sides, about how badly the war is going and how can we get out with a minimum of damage to everyone involved?

This is from Eugene Robinson at the WaPo:

The next six months in Iraq are crucial -- and always will be. That noise you heard yesterday on Capitol Hill was the can being kicked further down the road leading to January 2009, when George W. Bush gets to hand off his Iraq fiasco to somebody else.

It's clear by now that playing for time is the real White House strategy for Iraq. Everything else is tactical maneuver and rhetorical legerdemain -- nothing up my sleeve -- with which the administration is buying time, roughly in six-month increments. Appearing before a joint hearing called by the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees, Gen. David H. Petraeus probably won the respite Bush wanted when he said that U.S. military objectives "are in large measure being met."

Stalling, that grand old American tradition. Put off the bad things that are surely bearing down on you as long as possible. The unfortunate truth to the matter is that the United States is going to be embroiled in Iraq, and probably Afghanistan, for decades to come. This is what comes of the neocon “vision” of a limited engagement, in and out of Iraq in two months, the oil revenues will pay for the war, and there is no need for any post war planning for occupation or fighting an insurgency because it isn’t going to happen. Three months may end up being 20 years and thousands more Americans dead. And that is only the tip of the tallyboard of all the detrimental things that have happened or will happen because of the actions of George W. Bush and his gang of neocon thugs that wanted a war, regardless of the lack of a valid rationale driving the idea. They wanted a war, just because.

What a country. How the heck did we ever get to be the predominate country in the world?