Archive for the ‘News and Politics’ Category

So Newt Gingrich declares he’s not a citizen of the world to applause by the most prominent collection of misfit toys ever to gather on an annual schedule.  John Voight, the same whackjob who melted down on public airwaves a few years back over his superstar daughter Angelina Jolie’s estrangement, called Obama a false prophet and told us America is weaker.

Newt also told them the brand new economic plan has already failed.  This, despite news today that ten banks are set to repay almost ninety billion in stimulus money.  This,  despite it being way too early to tell.

This blog is for you Lo.  I understand that Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear.  The big picture is far more convoluted than most of us know.  It is far greater than the sum of it’s parts.  Both sides have bodies buried and there’s no innocence in Washington; I am not a Nuclear Playboy.

It’s just that people like Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich, whom I adore, have no real chance at influencing seminal policy, much less posturing for the highest office in the land.

You see this administration as a glass half empty.  I’m not ready to go there yet.

When was the last time a President of the United States told Israel in front of the world, in an Arabic Muslim nation, that her actions were intolerable?

You graciously offered an article on the similarities between Bush and Obama for this particular context: http://www.internationalpoliticalwill.com/2009/06/heard-it-all-before/

Ironically, it’s context that Will is ignoring.  Just about every speech by Bush that Will cites took place inside our own borders.  I commend him for his research acumen, as he’s painstakingly culled all these examples of congruence from over six years of lexicon, far more muted and less specific than that of Obama’s single speech in a Muslim country delivered to Arabs.

It’s a manufactured duck and weave befitting a high school research paper.  No score here Lo.  Your man Will has written a fluff piece.  I’ve taken it upon myself to post an edited version of this critique on his blog.

You know I hope, that I have immense respect for you.  Thanks be that you’re far better informed than most.  I wonder if you haven’t taken the wrong fork on your philosophical/ideological path.  You’re energy and intelligence is lost on wanna be demagogues  like Ralph Nader who only run for office out of hubris and the obstreperous notion they may upset a close election.  If Ralph Nader truly wanted to make a difference he would position himself politically to do so.  Perhaps an earnest and sincere attempt at a cabinet position or a prominent non-profit.

Ralph Nader may be as full of shit as the next guy.

And you my dear, would be better served by getting on board with a society and an ethic that is changing.  Just because I support Obama, doesn’t mean I can’t bitch at him.  It gives greater license to do just that.  See last night’s blog.

I’m not, by any means, hook, line and sinker.  He’s not perfect, I own that.  But in a few short months he’s managed to fundamentally change the way the rest of the world looks at us.  Take the recent elections in Lebanon as an example.  The amount of influence he brought to bear is debatable but there’s no denying he brought some.  This is big stuff.  He’s the best thing we’ve had in a very long time.  Work with me here.

Don’t look away, there’s plenty to see.

Drinks for my friends.

I gotta tell ya, Obama’s absence on all issues gay, specifically Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, is pretty disappointing.  He was unmistakably upfront about being a fierce defender.  He’s dropping this ball.  A civil rights ball that he needs to account for.  This is big picture stuff.  Us heathens deserve to know.  No free pass here, dude.

The sand dollar is underneath the stairs.  The blue juice is in the pantry.

So this is how it happened.  I gather they wanted Palin first and her staff gave the nod.  The fundraising dinner for the Senate and House Republican campaign committees.  The premier GOP money event of the season.  I don’t know if they have another name for it or not.  Anyway, they then discover somehow that Palin was never made aware of the invitation.  Um, yeah, allright, so then, they can’t get a confirmation from Palin.  So they ask Newt.  He jumps on it.  Newt goes on to immediately stick his own ass in his mouth by calling Sotomayor a racist.  They walk it back a little but can’t get word from Palin.  Newt walks it back too by saying he shouldn’t have called her that because he doesn’t know her.

So, Newt’s back in because Palin is being a cocktease, so Newt goes on television and says that Sotomayor might not be a racist but says racist things over and over.  Then he says she’s a “racialist”.

They work out some deal where they both will speak.  Then, Palin delivers some speech that was blatantly plagiarized.  Sheezus.  The GOP announces finally that Newt will be Mr. Keynote and Sarah will hopefully be in attendance.  They went on to acknowledge that Palin could maybe eclipse Gingrich in a popularity contest.

I got a degree in cartography.

Sarah shows up and commands copious limelight.  Steals the show by all accounts.  By the way, the speech she plagiarized?

Wait for it……

She lifted it from an article co-authored by Newt Gingrich in ’04.

Fuck me running, not even I could write this shit.

These are the stars of the Republican Party.  Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich.  The new Arsonists Laureate.  Their best and brightest.  The party of Lincoln.  That’s sick.  These two are empty.  Shallow, callow and retarded.  They have no idea what Americans want or need.  They don’t care.  That they haven’t bothered to figure it out is evidence enough.  That this is the best they have is outrageous to me.  Newt and Sarah are a low budget slasher flick that isn’t even funny on any level.

The good news is that more people label themselves Independent these days than Republican.  I got no problem there, at least until we see what they  become.  It could go either way.  From not so judgmental libertarian to deranged, fascist, Lutheran Nazis.  The great unwashed are migrating and that is cause for concern.  We must track them.  No need to shadow them in their own habitat.  No tranquilizer darts or tags with chips.  The science and technology of demography is now at our fingertips.  No chance we’ll lose sight of them.

This country’s bowels are percolating.  We may be on the verge of giving a shit.  I’m more than inclined to applaud the demise of the Grand Old Party but they will show up somewhere.  There’s that and the truth that chaos covets a power vacuum.

These are interesting times.  Better pay attention.

Drinks for my friends.

I like to have more gin than I can drink in one night on hand at all times.  Same goes with pot.  I don’t like to have to budget my recreational drug intake inside of  a 24 or even a 48 hour cycle.

This particular ideal is not necessarily a good one.  And that’s ok, because it’s an ideal I can rarely live up to.  What happens when I’m back in the saddle?  I don’t rightly know.  For now I manage to keep a steady supply of one or the other.

I get my brain to relax in the right way, manage to turn the noise down, and I’m golden.  Can I do that without a better living through chemistry mentality?  Maybe, but not consistently I fear.  Forgive me, it gets loud up in here.

Refreshments are welcome.  Maybe mandatory at this point.

There’s this great Mexican place across the street.  Nothing fancy but flavor perfect.  I’d put the cheese enchilada plate against any for the price.  Hard shell chicken tacos?  Say hello to my little friends.  The grease to freshness ratio is rudimentary culinary perfection.

I’ve grown to appreciate that frontal lobe burn brought on by just enough wasabi in your soy sauce.    And then a cold cold beer.  A little albacore and some salmon, some ginger here and there and you’ve got uncle who goes by Bob.

Ever notice the lack of cheese in any Asian cuisine?

The way white pills and cotton look inside bottles of apothecary brown or green glass soothes me.  Like the way an orange creamsicle tastes.

I tried to write a poem once about hot corn dogs and mustard, that greasy yellow glass on old popcorn makers and the colored lights of carnivals and gave up after six months.  Most poetry sucks because poetry is so damn hard to write.  Far more poetry in life than on paper.  Pick a flower.

Boxing is brutal poetry.  Ultimate fighting is brutality minus the poetry.

I’m sure people who wear sunglasses on cloudy days or inside are jackasses.

I do appreciate girls, but I adore women.

Kinda curious about Kentucky grilled chicken.  My first real job was at KFC you know.

Life is so goddamn slippery.  Rich or poor.  Black or white.  One day you’re the master of your destiny and the next day everything is whirring like a demonic gyroscope and completely outside of your grasp.

I hate that.  I like to have control of my shit.

We have a mutually beneficial relationship based on  individual prosperity that we share with each other.  Wonder twin powers are activated.  She thinks I’m Y chromosome impaired.  She’s wrong, of course.  I’m actually Y chromosome advantaged.

I really like chunky peanut butter.  I like the oily natural kind.

Music informs me.  it is my elixir.  It informs me.  A constant gift.  The power of music is unique among all of the artistic mediums.  There is no more immediate artform  than a single good song.

Man I lament stupidity and I hate willful ignorance.   Twin tragedies.  A friend of mine challenged my championing of Obama’s speech in Cairo the other day.  She called me out on facebook.  I invited her to bring it.  I didn’t hear back.  They never come at me.  I invite them but they don’t.  This woman is my friend.  I’m quite fond of her.  She’s smart and I want to know her mind on this.

What I get instead is wingnuts and whackjobs like Ralph and that asshole Trueblood from a year ago.  Nobody rational.  No big brains.  Where the hell are you who would engage me with intellectual honesty?  Retards like Ralph are entertaining but I tend to covet dialog more substantiative.

Lo, from Dandelionsalad, hasn’t posted anything of mine for at least a year.  My piece on Obama in Cairo she turned down because she is not an “Obama supporter”.  I wrote her back to say so what, it was a historic speech.

What I’m doing here is pissing, moaning and pining for responsible opponents.  I can’t be coming so correct as to intimidate legitimate contenders.  It does get lonely.  Talk to me.  I won’t bite, unless you’re  super dumb.

Somebody get Liz Cheney a ball gag.

Drinks for my friends.

“And I’m also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: Assalaamu alaykum.” -Barack Hussein Obama, President of the United States of America.

Awesome.

Honestly, I teared up.

I am so very proud of my President and my country.  Our Man was amazing today.  He said things no American President has ever said.  And they were all true.  I was transfixed.  Enchanted.  Slack jawed.  I’m grateful I was alone, just in case I drooled.

It’s worth pointing out that in light of the elaborate smear effort to paint him as some sort of extremist Muslim conducted during the Presidential  campaign, his speech in Cairo today was goddamn courageous.  Beyond that, it was an overt in your face to his neoconservative right wing Christian critics. You know, the ones that so desperately want you to believe that we’re in the middle of some war that is ultimately about our God being able to beat up their God.  The ones for whom ridiculous dogma and apocryphal ideology trump compassion, reality and common sense.

“More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.”

“So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, those who promote conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity. And this cycle of suspicion and discord must end.”

Oh man.  That’s the shit right there.

“As the Holy Quran tells us, “Be conscious of God and speak always the truth.  That is what I will try to do today — to speak the truth as best I can, humbled by the task before us, and firm in my belief that the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart.”

There it is.  We are all just people.  Humans first and foremost.  How breathtakingly refreshing.  How important and authentic.

Obama quoted John Adams: “The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.”

This notion, so widely held, that America is at war with a religion or an ethnicity or even a geographic region is so very wrongheaded, so perspicaciously misguided, that most Americans, along with too much of the world, have no realistic understanding of just exactly what is happening and why.

It’s understandable, given the litany of lies we’ve been force fed, and our own failure in laziness and apathy to not even bother to investigate for our own edification, the absolute crap the media has foisted upon us so irresponsibly, so relentlessly and for so long.  The failure of journalism in America is mirrored by the doppelganger of breakdown by Americans ourselves, to question what we’re told, to challenge what we are led to believe.  Exactly why we are in this mess.

Willful ignorance.

“The enduring faith of over a billion people is so much bigger than the narrow hatred of a few. Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism — it is an important part of promoting peace.”

As an agnostic,  I am moved  to say Amen.

“Let me also address the issue of Iraq. Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq was a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world……….Indeed, we can recall the words of Thomas Jefferson, who said: “I hope that our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power, the greater it will be.”

Sheezus.  Wow.  In Cairo, Egypt.  An incredibly bold admission about the abject failure of American policy.  I can’t tell you how impressed I am at this honest confession by Our Man on the world stage.  It’s true, America fucked up by invading Iraq.  We screwed the pooch.  Shame on us.

“And finally, just as America can never tolerate violence by extremists, we must never alter or forget our principles. Nine-eleven was an enormous trauma to our country. The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals. We are taking concrete actions to change course. I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States, and I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year.”

Of course I was aware of these steps by Our Man, but his restating of them beneath and behind the proscenium of a stage in front of the entire world is nothing less than golden.  And again, the admission of just how far this once great country has strayed, is so brave and nakedly honest, that I am at a loss for words.

He recounts these events, these egregious mistakes, because his intention is to put them behind us by reconstructing our integrity and pride with honesty and transparency, whenever and wherever possible.

Then, he swung the mother of all haymakers:

“On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they’ve endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations — large and small — that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: The situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. And America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own.”

“It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That’s not how moral authority is claimed; that’s how it is surrendered.”

“The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.  This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.”

Unbelievable.  Finally.  A sitting American calls Israel on it’s shit.

This is change.  I can’t speak for you, but this is why this man earned my vote.  It is why I didn’t hesitate to hope.  I believed him then.  I believe him now.  I believe in him.  As I write this, I am inspired and awfully proud.

This speech will no doubt be read, remarked upon and lauded for decades.

This guy is so fucking cool.

Drinks for my friends.

I hope you’re not yet tired of me railing against all things Dick Cheney.  I know I’m not.  History will will estimate him to be nothing more than a misanthropic war criminal.  Besides that, I admit again that it’s morbidly cathartic.  What began as an effort on his part to rewrite history and burnish his legacy, has morphed into a risible rhythmless boogie of dodging bullets fired at his feet by truth empowered gunslingers.

Today he tells us that there was never any evidence of a connection between 911 and Iraq.  Um, no shit.  This despite his persistent insistence that there was ample evidence, long after it was thoroughly discredited. He said:  “pretty well confirmed” that a 9/11 hijacker met with Iraqi intelligence officials before 9/11. -thinkprogress.org

Understand how deliberate this dog and pony show was.  In the ’04 Presidential election, over 70% of people who voted for Bush/Cheney believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the attacks on 911.  One could rightfully argue that these two assholes were re-elected by and large because Americans believed their lies and the spell of fear they so successfully instilled.

You gotta love the great unwashed.

He also tells us that those memos he wants declassified don’t necessarily prove, as he claimed just days ago, that torture saved thousands, if not hundreds of thousand of lives, but rather the entirety of the interrogation program did.  What the hell does that mean?  Olbermann wondered if he was referring to instances like the fact that we gave sugar free cookies to a diabetic terrorist.

Then, he has the audacity to blame his lies on George Tenet.  That’s right, the infamous dickhead in charge of the CIA at the time, who said that making a case for invading Iraq to the American people and the world was a “slam dunk”.  As if to say, it wasn’t his fault because that’s what Tenet told him.

After months of pressure and obtuse harangue by Dick truly and his mob.

For his part, Tenet received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

It’s gets better.  He now claims we missed 911 because of former terrorist czar Richard Clarke.  I suggest you read Clarke’s book on the matter.  One of the very first insiders to be overtly critical of the reckless and ideologically driven Dick-in-Bush administration and the Keystone Cops approach they took to every single circumstance after that fateful day.  If Clarke is to be believed, and I believe him, he had been ringing the bell since day one.  The book is titled “Against All Enemies” and it’s a page turning indictment of the whole crew, from Condoleezza Rice, on up.

While you’re at it, pick up of former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s book, “The Price of Loyalty”.  An astounding glimpse into the pre-911 days and the Bush administration’s determination, even then, to to invade Iraq.

What baffles me is how so many talking heads, Dan Rather included, seem wont to purchase that at the very least, Cheney is sincere, that he believes what he says.  No sale here.  He’s a charlatan and should be tried and convicted for war crimes.  Every prediction has been wrong.  Every “fact” he’s ever foisted has been a lie.  The idea that this prick is able to command a single American’s attention on any public airwave, makes me want to puke in technicolor.

Here’s where we are.  No WMD.  There never was and there remains no credible reason to tell Americans it was…..was.  No connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.  No connection whatsoever between Saddam Hussien and the events of 911.  Again, never was and no credible reason to tell Americans there was.  Nothing, no symbiosis between a secular dictatorship and an extreme religious movement.

No was.  None.

Here we are.  Not a single fucking reason for invading a sovereign country that posed no threat to us or even it’s neighbors in the foreseeable future.  No reason for killing hundreds of thousands if not more than a million innocent people.  No reason for displacing millions of innocents.  No reason for the deaths of thousands of proud American men and women.  No reason for the incalculable grief visited on millions and millions of fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers across the entire planet.  No goddamn reason at all for any of it.

No was and no is.

I usually endeavor to bring a little humor to you the reader, while drawing your attention to the horrible events that surround us all in this world.  Forgive me, this just isn’t funny.  There’s nothing funny about it.  It’s all tragedy kids.  A long slow, brutal and still developing nightmare that will disturb the world’s sleep for decades because Richard Bruce Cheney was somehow allowed to have far too much influence on the course of human events.

More than any other human, Richard Bruce Cheney is responsible for a consummately unjust war with Iraq.  More than any other human, Richard Bruce Cheney is responsible for the abject and utterly reprehensible torture America visited with malice and viciousness on America’s “enemies”.  More than any other human, Richard Bruce Cheney is culpable for America’s woefully reduced standing in the world.  More, than any single other human fucking being, Richard Bruce Cheney is responsible for the hole that we are now at the bottom of.

One of the prevailing messages of the Obama administration is to look forward and therefore not dwell too zealously on our recent past.  It is ever more apparent to me that however wholesome and well intentioned such sentiments are, they are naive and for lack of a better adjective, simple, in an increasingly complex world.

Richard Bruce Cheney shits where he eats.

Hold Dick Cheney responsible.  Show the world that accountability is still a respected idea in America.  Prosecute this prick.  In so doing, we will demonstrate the best we have to offer as a first step, to ourselves and the rest of the planet.

Fuck this guy.

Drinks for my friends.

Fuck that shit.  CHRISTIAN TERRORISM.

Timothy McVeigh was a domestic terrorist.

Whackjobs like Scott Roeder, who assassinated Dr. George Tiller yesterday in his own goddamn church, what should be a sanctuary, do so in the the name of their Christian God.  No surprise here that Roeder was a homophobe as well.  Christian Terrorist, nothing less.

Thank God I’m agnostic.  I crack me up.

“A man named Scott Roeder was convicted in 1996 of criminal use of explosives and sentenced to 24 months probation….” -CNN

Imagine this man was Muslim and he was known to stalk and then kill a Rabbi or a politician.  Think about it.  Really.

Like it or not, George Tiller was engaging in a legally protected activity.  Do these assholes really think these women simply wake up, watch an episode of Maury Povich and decide to seek a late term abortion as a matter of convenience?  I’m not even going to look it up, I’m confident that’s not the case.  Shut up, I will not entertain the issue.

Enter the glowering spectre of egregiously irresponsible “journalists” like Bill O’Reilly.  How much blood on his hands?

“Tiller, O’Reilly likes to say, “destroys fetuses for just about any reason right up until the birth date for $5,000.” He’s guilty of “Nazi stuff,” said O’Reilly on June 8, 2005; a moral equivalent to NAMBLA and al-Qaida, he suggested on March 15, 2006. “This is the kind of stuff happened in Mao’s China, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union,” said O’Reilly on Nov. 9, 2006″ -salon.com

As of today, no apologies from O’Reilly.  In it’s stead, Bill the pinhead offers that: “The far left is exploiting the death of [sic] Dr. Tiller to stifle any criticism of abortion.”  Note the euphemism “death of” in the the place of what should rightfully be “assassination”.  As though, “Tiller the Killer” some how expired or succumbed to natural causes.

There is no doubt in my mind that O’Reilly and his ilk are responsible in some degree for so recklessly fomenting the hate and fear for which such tragedies are an inevitable conclusion.  Inevitable, you douchebag.  Time to man up, you penisless reptile.  Do you imagine your useless vitriol to be without consequence?

To quote Snoop: “Fuck Bill O’Reilly.”

Man I hate these guys.

In other news, I’m thinking Sonia Sotomayor has benefitted  from the magic of rhinoplasty.  Good decision methinks.  She used to have a honker like a potato.  Seriously, she’s hot, smart and exotic, at least to me, self confessed trailer trash.  I’m saying that under the right circumstances, I’d hit that.

For the record, my current significant other is very smart and way hotter.

I gotta tell ya, I think Barack taking Michelle out for dinner and a show in New York is unbelievably cool.  He loves his wife and so do I.  Class and glamor.  A little Camelot for us all.  I am only able to muster a mere modicum of amusement at the FOX news talking heads invective over the cost of the outing.  Vainglorious and vituperatively disingenuous valor on part of their talking heads pretending to give a mad fuck over the expense to you, dear reader.  Did they complain, on your behalf, about Dumbya’s record amounts of vacation time to clear brush in Crawford?  I think not.

Assholes.

Man I hate these guys.

Drinks for my friends.

If Dick Cheney’s lips part at all, he’s lying.

I’m nurturing a man crush for Senator Carl Levin after he bitch slapped Darth Cheny and his little dog Liz with what I’m certain will be the facts.  You know those classified torture memos Darth and Liz persist ad nauseum in referring to? The ones they say prove torture works and saved hundreds of thousands of lives?

Senator Levin said last night that Darth and his little dog too, are full of shit.

“When former Vice President Cheney said last week that what happened at Abu Ghraib was the work of “a few sadistic prison guards” acting on their own, he bore false witness. And when he said last week there was no link between the techniques used at Abu Ghraib and those approved for use in the CIA’s secret prisons, he again strayed from the truth. The seeds of Abu Ghraib’s rotten fruit were sown by civilians at the highest levels of our government.” -Daily Kos

“Mr. Cheney has also claimed that the release of classified documents would prove his view that the techniques worked. But those classified documents say nothing about numbers of lives saved, nor do the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of the abusive techniques. I hope that the documents are declassified so that people can judge for themselves what is fact and what is fiction. Mr. Cheney has made other false statements. For instance, his claim that the techniques used on detainees were the “same exact procedures” used on our own people in the SERE training regime. That could not be farther from the truth.” -Daily Kos

Booya!

Bear in mind that Levin is no partisan firebrand and certainly not an ideologue.  Level headed, reasonable and very well respected on both sides of aisle, when Carl speaks, people listen and they are inclined to believe him.  In contrast, the Cheneys’s aren’t exactly the picture of sartorial splendor.  Dick is the most accomplished and prolific liar to ever sit at the second highest level of our executive branch.

Man I hate this fucker.

In the post Dick-in-Bush era, Darth Cheney has taken it upon himself, with earnestness, to incite and maintain the market for debate over all egregious actions and policies of his administration, despite legitimacy, credibility or even relevance.  My guess is that history will judge this man with an earned but graceful combination of malice and impunity.  He is without question evil and black of heart; his legacy will suffer accordingly.  It is my sincere wish that his charred and diseased cardiac will endure long enough to afford him a fulsome mouth full of what he has wrought and the disgrace he deserves.

It’s ironic that we’ve arguably heard more from this prick in the last few months, than his entire reign as puppet master and dark lord.

He got hammered, shot a man in the face, and somehow orchestrated for his victim to apologize for the inconvenience.  Who would even attempt to question his prowess for malignancy and obfuscation?

With such a thorough biography of lies and deceit, what will it take for America to stop listening to this vainglorious asshole?  No amount of pride or shame seems enough to compel him to shut the fuck up and disappear.  Are we a nation of masochists?

Fuck this guy.

I confess to a certain vulgar delight in writing about him.  Such an easy target.  So obviously flawed.  He is nothing if not compelling in a macabre sort of way.  I love to loathe him and perhaps that’s his appeal.  I can only hope it’s that simple.  Whatever the case, I’m certain his post Vice Presidential fifteen minutes do far more harm than good to the causes of conservatism and Republican ideology.  Perhaps he unwittingly performs a profound favor by not yet letting America forget just how much his administration sucked.

Drinks for my friends.

http://www.truthout.org/052209R

Cut & paste.  It’s unbelievable.  It scares me.

Darth Cheney.

I cannot countenance who we are.  I can’t stand what we’ve allowed ourselves to become.  I can’t stomach those who would defend these bastards and the actions they so relentlessly try to sell us as performed on our behalf.  For our safety, they tell us.

This is bullshit.  These are egregious crimes.  These people are lying.  The media pads around it with careful feet on deep pile Berber, giving them their say.  People died in custody of the United States government.  The sickest aspect?  They probably expired whilst we pursued our efforts to extract reason for a war that Darth fucking Cheney knew was complete crap.

Bullshit.

Despite all this, we still have to suffer through the airtime the mainstream media affords this lying, disgusting evil jackass who spent his eight years in office doing his damndest  to pervert, distort and destroy all things that allowed Americans to be proud.

I bet this guy is hung like a gnat.  Had a giant safe in his office.  Kinda the bureaucratic equivalent of a big stupid truck in the ‘burbs.  See what I’m saying?

Look, I’m not naive.  Any American who’s lived with eyes wide open for the past handful of years, understands all too well what the Dick-in-Bush regime has done in our name.  What chaps my ass with such profound cheese grating efficacy, is that this pinhead Cheney, is allowed for a single second to utilize public airwaves in an attempt to mitigate, in such an obvious fashion of puerile necropsy,  policies and actions that have indelibly stained us all. 

Actions and policies, for which he should clearly be behind goddamn bars.

It’s crap.  Elaborate falsehoods.  Complete shite.

The neocons and this dickhead Cheney in particular, are attempting to rewrite history as we let them into our living rooms every evening for such dubious ends.  Man, I hate these guys.  In the words of Reverend  Jeremiah Wright, “Goddamn America”.  Any asshole who even attempts to change the elaborate and true path of human events past, should be muzzled and pelted with rocks and garbage.

“They pelted me with rocks and garbage”.

History is sacred and Cheney will do his best, but his legacy will ooze a vile, stinking sewage.  Not even gulls will go near it.  The EPA will get involved.

Write your local network affiliate, tell them you don’t want to see the vulgar and vile visage of this man or any of his lackeys on your television anymore.  Lying to you and impugning the efforts of the man we elected by an unprecedented majority to right the wrongs his administration and office so recklessly and relentlessly pursued and wrought.

I’m all for free speech.  But not if what you say on our air is an incendiary lie.  It is crying fire in a crowded theater.  At the very least the crawl underneath should go bold and all caps when he lies.  Cheny’s kinda soft spoken so it would be like someone yelling from underneath.  I’ll call Rupert.

We, America, tortured.  We killed people in our charge.  Worse, we killed hundreds of thousands and visited life altering suffering on millions for no good goddamn reason.  I’m ashamed of my country and you should be too.

Who are we?  What have we allowed ourselves to become?

This tumor is us.

This parading of a simple dog and a forlorn pony is contemptible and absurd.  Stand up.  Be an American.  Do not tolerate this man man and his lies.

We are so much better than this.

Tell Rush Limbaugh he can blow me.

I’m trying to tell you something and you should listen.

Drinks for my friends.

Hello,

Fuck this guy.  Cheney is a vacuum of credibility.  A black hole.  He is a liar and a thief.  He and his cronies profited immensely from the war in Iraq by engaging in fraud perpetrated on our own troops and we the people as often as not.  Haliburton and KBR.  You think this guy gives a mad fuck about you?

Yet he deigns to flatter us with his opinions by the hour, or so it seems.  Who exactly does he think he is?  What new arrogance is this?  Dude, you were the Vice President and most of us agree you sucked.  Go away.

The CIA isn’t exactly a pillar of truth, justice and the American way these days.  They, both the CIA and Darth, deliberately “fixed the facts to fit the policy” that led us into one of the most unjust wars in history.  Can you say Downing Street Memos?  Nonexistent yellowcake uranium or mobile bio weapons labs that turned out to be balloon trucks?  The Keystone Cops in color.

This guy gets on TV.

They tortured in fact, to gain and supply reason and rationale for that very war.  With every fiber of my being and every ounce of conviction I can summon, I say fuck these guys.  Furthermore,  I invite Dick Cheney, with zero respect due, to shut the fuck up and go away.

Or, we get to waterboard the prick bastard.  I’ll settle for either and sleep soundly.

Dear Dick, You suck.  Please vanish.  Go gentle into that hot cave.

Fear, fear fear.  This is a mess created by our former arsonist laureate, the Dick-in-Bush administration.  “…if we continue to make decisions within a climate of fear, we will make more mistakes…..” -President Barack Obama.  Cheney calls Our Man’s policies, “recklessness cloaked in righteousness”.  I can’t help but wonder just what Darth Cheney knows about righteousness.

The past administration swore up and down that we did not torture.  Upon that lie of extraordinary magnitude becoming as common as the knowledge that one should avoid using motorized garden shears for personal grooming, they try to convince us that torture kept us safe, was justified and wasn’t really torture but “enhanced interrogation techniques”.  My guess is Cheney’s next career will be in real estate.  You know, bridges, swampland, timeshares in Baghdad, that sort of thing.

Or maybe the latest incarnation of Swamp Thing.

I am in awe that this douchebag Cheney is able to command any attention at all.  Why is anyone even listening to such a notoriously full of shit, black hearted blowhard?  Why?  He’s been wrong about everything, caught in more lies than Baron Munchhausen and he should be in goddamn Leavenworth.

It’s all smoke and mirrors.  It’s all they’ve got.  Fear wrapped in the worn gauze of  some obsolete notion of security.  That’s it kids.  There’s nothing more to see here.  It is exactly as it appears.  Move along please.  Please.

Understand, this man, our President, has more on his plate than you can possibly imagine.  The tasks he faces every morning require superhuman effort, attention and acumen.  Most of what our man struggles with in the shower, the great unwashed are willfully ignorant of.

This guy is inside a cat 4 tornado and he doesn’t need Dick Cheney’s irrelevant shit right now.  If Darth were an actual patriot, he would pull a fade starting now.  Cheney, of all people is intimate with the toxic pile he and that little monkey left behind.

This subject of torture has become far too convoluted.  Too nuanced even.  It’s simple.

Torture is immoral because it is cruel and inhumane.  At the very least it pollutes the soul of anyone who orders it and any who would administer it.    We must understand that these people, these candidates for and of torture, are human beings.  Right or wrong, these people believe what they believe just as fiercely as we do.  Under the last administration, anyone who believed differently than you or Sean Hannity, could literally be tortured for disagreeing, whether they knew shit or not.

Surveilled.  Wire tapped which means computer tapped.  ……..anything you say, can and will be used against you in a court of law……..

Torture is unethical because the result is at best dubious.  With resolute men, the decision about what they are willing to disclose, even when faced with death, has already been made. Count on such men to spew crap when tortured.  It’s useless.  Even the economy of the concept is bankrupt. They think it’s a game of Stratego.

Drinks for my friends.

I talked about it last night but didn’t realize that Senate Democrats had walked away.  Seems they want a specific plan.  As in, where exactly will the money go?  That seems reasonable to me.  $80 million is a lot of cake.

You know, Gitmo.

What baffles me is this:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    “I can’t make it any more clear,” Reid said. “We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.”  Was he quoted out of context?  As far as I know there’s no debate here about what town or city street they’ll be dropped on, they are to be incarcerated.  Harry is a friend of my Mother’s.  I got an inscribed, autographed copy of his book for my birthday.  I’m wondering if he’s getting a little old.  His handwriting describes the drawing of sea monkeys.

What is the deal?  There’s two hundred and forty of them and we already have more people behind bars per capita than any nation on earth.  There’s two hundred and forty and if America has a specialty these days, it’s locking people up.  Specialty?  Industry.  Bring them here, try them like Americans because we still have a system of justice and courts in which they may prevail if they aren’t guilty and are allowed to prove it.

Regardless of the outcome, the truly guilty ones will burn in a Christian hell.  Right?

What scares politicians so much about our justice system functioning as an equitable litmus for these particular “detainees”?

Anyway, it get’s better.

“Republicans are poised with an amendment by James Inhofe of Oklahoma that would block any of the Guantanamo detainees from coming to U.S. soil to stand trial or serve their sentences” -yahoo

Republicans just keep on sweetening  the elixir that will be the lubricant of their demise.  Ha!  Can I make that stick?  I’m way ahead of you.

“Shuttering this facility now could only serve one end: and that is to make Americans less safe than Guantanamo has,” said GOP Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.”  -yahoo

Guantanamo made us safe?  I’d say with the torture and death and all, the hawks would be lucky to slide into obscurity as opposed to jail.  Zero sum for them but a nasty stain on the rest of us.

Mitch McConnell is a scurrilous,  multi-chinned rodent of a Senator.  A nasty, long of tooth and sharp of teeth, a warm blooded, razor incisored dumbshit.  Even his dog hates him.

He warned that if the United States withdrew from Iraq, “the terrorists would come after us where we live.” -1/10/07 CNN

I can actually smell that sentence.

He loathes the idea of campaign finance reform.  He get’s giddy over the NSA listening to whatever and whomever blows their skirt up.  Sans warrant.  He’s very pro Iraq war as a central front for the war on terror.  I love how they accuse us of dangerous political stripes like socialist, when they stand to applaud fascism and nearly shit themselves with glee.

The cherry atop my shit sundae is the reality of scripture superimposed over  dramatic military landscapes as cover pages for top secret war memos to Dumbya.  While we were beating and abusing, torturing to death, people confined and bound.  Dumbya got a report with an inspirational poster for a cover.  I hear he really likes pears and carrots from a jar.  We did this to extract corroborating evidence for what we were about to do and then continue to do in Iraq and everywhere else.  On the off chance there was to be a super secret memo on Sunday, it was wrapped in Easter themed paper.  A candy bar tied in the bow.

Spuriouser and spuriouser.

Dumbya knew there would be pretzels later.  With supervision of course.  Plenty to wash them down with.

Drinks for my friends.

So the titular head of the GOP says, “The era of apologizing for Republican mistakes of the past is now officially over”.

Huh.  You think?  In light of all the malice, avarice and incompetence your party has fomented and been complicit in for the last eight years, you’re no longer accountable?  Not to be asked or even compelled to apologize?

Michael Steele issued this proclamation.  He has giant balls made of flaky, semi solid, foamy stuff.  Premier asstard of the GOP.

Hey Mike, wanna bet?

Mike is a loose lipped cashier.  He’s also an idiot.

Looks like somebody picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.

This dark stain is your legacy.  I’m thinking you guys need to make peace with that.  It’s a blood stain.  You won’t be taken seriously until you do.

It is this exact brand of arrogance that keeps Republican stock in the shitter.  That, and the looming visage of dickheads like Darth Cheney and  the Human Shitsmear.  These two aren’t the only ones tripping over themselves while waltzing  through the GOP’s intestines.  I adore how jacked up they are.

Somebody doesn’t get the difference between consonants and vowels.

Meanwhile and just in time, swine flu rears it’s ugly head again.  Somebody died!  Quick, call Mr. Little, first name Chicken.

In other news, two groups are seeking disbarment of twelve Bush administration lawyers.  Despite a rather overt political posture, their argument is pretty airtight:

“Just as the bar would suspend an attorney who advised a police officer to torture and brutalize a detained immigrant or criminal defendant, the bar must suspend these attorneys for advocating and causing the torture of war detainees,” said Kevin Zeese, a spokesman for the groups. -UPI

Fuckin A, I’m good with that.  All the assholes were named.  Yoo, Ashcroft, Gonzales and Mukasey et al.  Don’t know about you, but I’m getting a half leaner over here.  It won’t amount to shit.

Hi.  I oppose birth control and abortion in the same breath.  I really believe you should get married to experience live dick insertion.  Who am I?  I’m the Catholic Church and I’m okay, I lust all night and I hypocrite all day.  Premarital sex is a sin but ass raping young boys isn’t even outre’…………

When did prisoners become detainees?

John Boehner actually said “our constituents don’t want these terrorists in their neighborhoods”.  He fucking said it.  The subject was Gitmo detainees.  Boehner’s neighborhoods are in Ohio.  How do you say that with a straight face at a press conference in front of cameras?  John Boehner’s neighborhoods in Ohio, are light years from a military prison in Kansas surrounded by a military base.  This whole debate is regoddamndiculous.  Boehner needs to lay off the bronzer.  His eyes are particulary reptilian in contrast with his earnestness to become a lite skinned black man.

Who is this fuck?

Boehner is creepy weird and an astoundingly magnificent dickhead.  He’s so full of shit his caramel orange pallor may just be benefiting from the tremendous output and efficiency yielded by his super human shit producing capability.  It’s all he can do to keep from vomiting actual warm crap while speaking.  Several times a day he burp-pukes and swallows turds back down into his gullet.

Let me tell you how I feel about John Boehner.

This guy is more queer than a pole vaulter in an ice storm.

What the rest of us need to remember, is that are we to march jackbooted in lock step like the Republicans did until the obvious consequence of rot and implosion transpired, events will be eerily similar.

Or, diversity will emerge as strength.  It already has.

Diversity could be the next exclusivity.  Beware.  Don’t laugh, because I’m not kidding and that could be scary.  Ubiquitous caucasian males would be in for a tough time.  Too many of us.

White power!

Drinks for my friends.

Republicans are a hot mess.

This poor bastard, Sgt Russel, and the five brothers in arms he felled. All the families too. A big bag of tragedy for no good reason. Not that all involved weren’t brave committed men who’d sacrificed for America more than we can comprehend. All the more sad.

It’s just that it didn’t have to happen. A man on his third tour of hell lost his shit. It seems so random but it’s not. He was in treatment for “stress”. These guys are fucking tough. They are crackerfuckingjack. They tipped Iraq over in weeks. Lots of things are very wrong with this story.

A badass soldier whom I presume was sane before he arrived, killed his own, not just his own, but his fellow soldiers. The antithesis of anything like heroic bravery. Almost as curious as it is tragic. PTSD. A political potato of some heat. Inconsistent to nebulous in terms of definition or perception. Through the roof nonetheless. Our veterans are struggling on a scale we’re not even aware of.

This is a gift from the Bush administration that will keep on giving for years to come.

Just like Vietnam!

The dude does not abide and neither do I. This is insane. See what I’m saying?

I really need for you dear reader, to concentrate here. I’m going to cut and paste a news item from today below, and I want you to compare and contrast the news I’ve written about above with this actual piece that appears below inside quotes. All I will say is that I think the two issues at hand are symbiotically entwined:

“In an interview on Fox News, the daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney sharply criticized the new administration for agreeing to release photographs depicting alleged abuses at U.S. prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush administration.

“I think it is really appalling that the administration is taking this step,” she said in the interview. “Clearly what they are doing is releasing images that show American military men and woman in a very negative light.”

“I have heard from families of service members from families of 9/11 victims this question about when did it become so fashionable for us to side, really, with the terrorists,” she continued. “You know, President Obama has a lot of rhetoric about support for American military families, support for our men and women who are fighting for us overseas. But if he really cares about them, then he wouldn’t be making such an effort to release photos that show them in a negative light.” -CNN

Ok, I can’t help it. Liz Cheney you stupid fucking cunt. What about this whole egregious clusterfuck do you not understand? You actually seek with all gallows composure to spin this tragedy into some lame evidence that the Obama administration attempts “….to side, really, with the terrorists”?

In a war started by your father without reason?

Look up her name and insult her personally. Liz, you ignorant slut. You have betrayed your country and if Olberman or Stewart did the same schtick I swear I just turned on the glass teat.

Time for a fireside interlude. Picture me with a blanket over my legs in a wheelchair beside a crackling hearth:

A tale related by an excellent friend.

This story is about a man named Donald.

Donald farts in the car, back on a sweltering day. Turns out to be a withering expulsion, weakening the senses of the propagator. He’s impressed by his own ability to generate an odor that would be a captain of any industry. So inspirational that he wonders about his own health.

He then ventures into a video emporium of the strip mall variety. He feels the build. Pressure in his lower abdomen. And it’s hot. It’s temperature is like heat from a crack in the Earth. As though his bowels are about to volcano.

The gastrointestinal expulsion is nuclear but not cacophonous.

He’s grateful he’s not shat himself.

Get my drift? More or less silent but indisputably toxic.

He understands the affront he’s just committed. He flees to the right, past the first few letters of the alphabet. He works his way quickly to the D’s and F’s. Doctor Detroit to Fargo.

A fresh couple enter the emporium. They immediately ventiure into a cloud of Donald’s anal vapor in the A through C sectiion. They are apalled and disturbed. Their faces are an ugly mask of assault and disgust.

This is Donald’s story.

Drinks for my friends.

So Jessica Simpson lost weight and now her head looks too big. I thought she was kinda hot when she was thicker. Another disproportionate pop star.

I really hate any kinda bottle with a pump dispenser at the top. You have to tip the bottle upside down to get all the useable product out. Who does that? It would take forever.

See, the architecture of a pump dispensered bottle doesn’t allow for easy upside down storage. Whether it’s a lotion or a soap or hair conditioner, it’s stupid. The smartest design is those bottles that have a fat top with a simply attached stopper, flush with the lid when closed and they rest easily upside down or were actually designed be stable with an ever lowering center of gravity until you’ve gotten every last snotty barf of product out of the fucker.

Nobody walks in LA.

Far be it from me to overlook the most practical packaging ever for any consumer consumable no matter it’s viscosity. The toothpaste tube. Squeeze from the bottom, be methodical and there’s no fisherman would cut her open once she goes dry.

I know something pissed me off today and I’ll remember it soon.

So I’ve got this buddy Matt. Owner operator of The Arb Pizza Cafe, 11946 Ventura Blvd, Studio City 91604 (Btwn Carpenter & Radford Ave). Actually, he’s a client. He sells salads and paninis etc. I mean to try them. I bet they rock.

I go there, for his pepperoni by the slice. It’s flawless. The grease from the meat and the cheese pools ever so naturally into the small craters created by the expansion of the crust and bubbling cheese going from solid to liquid to less than aqueous. Chewey. Not too much. Very flavorful little slicks of lube from the sauce and cheese.

The architecture of pizza is brilliant. Still it’s not hard to fuck up. I’ve made a few pizzas and fucked them up all too often by neglecting texture.

Sprinkle it liberally with garlic powder and parmesan, then use your index finger with force to start a crease, and since you’re a primate with opposable thumbs, fold the triangle in two before you tear off the biggest bite you can manage without offending your own poetic correctness.

Any eaterie’s first arbiter is the pizza. Just go get two slices of pepperoni and a soda. Give them a ten dollar bill. It’s less than that but you’ll leave feeling cheap otherwise.

Two things. Napkins and a soft drink. Free refills. I prefer diet sodas myself, but what’s pivotal is the carbonation. It’s texture relief from the hot saucy garment you’ve just clothed your tongue and mouth with. Beer is good. Champagne is the answer to most things. This pizza would be excellent with a nice Veuve Clicquot.

At the same time it makes me think of New York. It is better than Manhattan street pizza but the ethic is way intact.

Come to think of it, Matt has an awesome white pizza that would be a force to be reckoned with were you to have a few jars of caviar laying around. You think I’m kidding. They deliver. Chill some bubbles. (818) 358-2233

Matt’s dad is named Andy. They call him “Deluxe”. Walk in and ask for a free soda. Tell them a guy named “Deluxe” sent you. Order two slices of pepperoni pizza and pay for them.

Do it. Tell me you liked it.

Let’s do some headlines from CNN.

“Same-sex marriage gets OK in N.H., Maine”:
All I can say about this is FUCKING A!! The right coast is leading by example. Lookit them school us on civil rights.

“Colin Powell comment angers Limbaugh”:
Who fucking cares? Not me. Powell’s reputation may be scarred by severe blemishes to the face but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt when it involves The Human Shitsmear. Limbaugh rushed again to claim Powell’s endorsement of Obama was explicitly racial. I would, if given the chance, I’d drop that fuck with a haymaker.

Cracks me up that people pay attention to this asstard.

Powell reffered to Limbaugh appropriately as an entertainer and said “I think what Rush does as an entertainer diminishes the party and intrudes or inserts into our public life a kind of nastiness that we would be better to do without,” Powell said. -CNN

I believe Powell was as polite as as possible by saying that Limbaugh should fuck right the fuck off. More power to him. Limbaugh is rapidly becoming irrelevant. Limbaugh is the epitome and distillation of the growing canker, the cancer indeed that has the GOP on it’s knees. Archaic and obsolete ideology that I’m fascinted to watch them cling to. It’s not unlike watching a reptile slither towards a dark flat rock.

The new racism is homophobia. Send Rush the memo. He sits way back in the back.

Fans of Limbaugh suck relentlessly. They are the worst America has to offer. He said he would like for our President, a man we elected with a sincere hope for success at changing our country, it’s culture of fear above all else, he said he would like for him to fail. Were I a right wing dickhead, I’d accuse the Shitsmear of treason and scream for his head. We liberals are not as anxious as our counterparts to malign and impugn those who’ve not committed an actual crime. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t hesitate to invite him, to his face, to lick my taint.

Cancer indeed.

If you like, admire, worship or even follow this clown, let’s talk. I’m right here. I will blow up in your face and make you cry in front of your friends. Let’s go.

Drinks for my friends.

It would be nice if we could simply choose our own channels. If I don’t pay my bill, Direct TV shuts me down in a heartbeat. I call them on the phone, arrange payment and within thirty seconds, access to like three hundred channels is restored. I don’t believe for a second that making individual choice available to customers isn’t possible.

I’d do the networks, they should be free and I’m a news junkie, including FOX, CNN,and MSNBC. Part of my addiction is to monitor the mainstream. Comedy Central, HBO and Showtime for movies, excellent series’ and boxing. One local affiliate. They all suck but I need access to at least one local news outlet. Maybe some nature channels, IFC and that other one……..

I need to step off this topic for awhile. You who read me regularly understand I am wont to do.

I am moved by this President. He takes complex questions and answers them with intelligence and nuance. He talks to us and explains himself with an earnestness and sincerity that make plain his need for us to understand. He does want to include and engage the lowest common denominator. I believe I’d be remiss were I not to point out the glaring contrast between Mr. Obama and our previous President, who catered to and exploited the lowest common denominator almost exclusively.

Our man was asked this evening, what about his first one hundred days suprised, enchanted, humbled and troubled him the most, on live television. He answered adroitly, compassionately and honestly. This is the kind of question that would never even be allowed under the Dumbya regime. Were such a question somehow allowed to slip through, trust that Dumbya would have stuttered, paused and visited abuse of malapropisms to hitherto unseen depths of national embarrassment.

He’s a primate at best.

His eyes are too close together.

I couldn’t help but remember Clinton. He would appear on television in the middle of our dark years and answer any question by framing it’s context, explaining the variables and then recommending a course of action so expertly that you knew he’d wrestled with it until he understood the issue thoroughly and had arrived at a solution that he grasped completely and had no reservations about endorsing. The man was flawed but he was whip fucking smart and he gave a shit. He was a lighthouse in the dense fog of Dick-in-Bush.

First 100 days? I’ll give Obama a B+. Not bad for his first semester midterm. About what I expected and I’m pleased. My biggest concern is the financial swamp thing. I can’t really pretend to understand it. It goes without saying I don’t have an opinion worth sharing. I will tell you that the more I learn and understand, the more I wonder about moving somewhere I can have a garden.

Those fuckers left us hanging. Cheney won’t shut the fuck up and neither will Rove but have ya heard from Dumbya? The barn door was banging at the start of the storm when those three bastards ran out. Man they were bad news.

Say our man gets us to 911 of this year without a domestic terror attack of similiar scale. Will you then shut the fuck up about your keeping America safe audacity? Allow me to date myself by saying you people sound like a broken goddamn record.

Some advice. The sky has been falling for some time now. You just looked up. You just noticed it could really crack you hard. By the way, if you did just notice all this, part of this is your fault. So anyway, settle down.

What we really need is for you mouthbreathers to be calm. Don’t stir shit up. Try not to shoot fellow humans. Stop turning out like zombies for corporate lobby funded tax protests when you’ll all do better under what you’re marching against. Have some dignity. Pull your pants up.

More of my advice to you is to wade back in. Forego ideology and sincerely look at what progressives are attempting to do here. Find fault with the policy or find flaw with the process. Stop dropping the ‘socialist’ bomb and find a way to participate. Start rolling up your sleeves and stop crapping your pants.

Hannity and Limbaugh are the clown princes of the conservative stagnation and they will be your demise.

Drinks for my friends.

Cable is out. Chose not to pay the bill.

What people fail to understand is that Obama cannot afford to even address this issue of guns, to do so would ignite an already hot pile of insanity. These fucks, these crazy zealots, are lying in a puddle of their own excrement waiting for Obama to utter the words “gun control”. It will be an excuse for them to snap.

Patient but dumb.

Wouldn’t be prudent.

Most of you are just stupid enough to not understand how dangerous you are. It really bugs me.

Sorry boys and girls. The issue of guns will see no play this season. Understandably so methinks.

Unless assholes keep shooting shit up. Give it a rest already. I refuse to to fear this.

I got comic books on the brain. I bought a thousand bags & boards and five long boxes the other day. For the last three days I’ve bagged and boarded. Surreal. Amazing nostalgia. I adore comic book art. My collection is perfectly preserved. Exactly the way I left it. Beat up books are still beat up books, but pristine ones are still pristine.

Crazy. I touch each one as I place it on a board and manuever it into a bag and I remember reading them, almost everyone of them stirs something in my head and there’s over a thousand. Damn. They were gathered with care as well as abandon. As I rember them, I understand they have informed me as much as they are going to.

They are everywhere in my apartment now. Leaning or stacked, grouped by title. Huge swaths of Ironman, Spiderman, The X-Men, Daredevil, Avengers, Fantastic Four……The Flash, Superman, Batman, The Justice League……….Star Trek, Adam 12, Richey Rich, Zoro and Archie……Boris Karloff, Ripley’s……….Swamp Thing, an assload of MAD magazines, Heavy Metal, Conan and Epic.

An amazing historical capsule. Late sixties to early eighties. The breadth and diversity of my collection affords me permission to brag and be proud because I was a child when I assembled it.

My folks are heros for packing them, storing them and delivering them to me when I bought my first house.

The way they smell and the way they look and my absolute romance with them when I barely had opinion about anything. I began to obsess when I was twelve. I was twelve.

John Byrne, Jim Starlin, Chris Claremont, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Bernie Wrightson, Barry Windsor Smith, Frank Miller…… Jack Kirby

Life is so sticky I feel the need for a bath about every hour. Sign of the gypsy queen. As thick as an old Supertramp record.

Everything I ever did you could hear the fucking kick drum.

The kick drum is lichen on a boulder.

When I was a kid there was lichen on boulders.

Primus grooves way hard.

My sincere advice to you is to Sail the Seas of Cheese and clean your house.

A little Tommy The Cat will cure whatever ails ya. I’m also a spokesperson for Alka Seltzer and fragrant pinecones.

Anyway, today Michele “We’re Running Out Of Rich People In This Country” Bachman (R-MN), by far the biggest assclown in the US House of Represenatives, gracelessly attempted to infer that flu epidemics somehow only occur under Democratic administrations. See if you can follow her logic:

“I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter…….” -Huffington Post

The Human Shitsmear had this to say:
“[E]verywhere Obama is spreading Obamaism, there is a deadly disease taking place, either in the TARP community or in the newspaper business … Obama goes to Mexico — they have an earthquake. Obama goes to Mexico — get pig flu,” -wowwowwow.com

Awesome. Do the math. You’ve got an evil humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize winning philanthropist, and our current President, a nefarious community organizer and two, count ’em two, outbreaks of flu related to pigs of all things. Oh, and, they’re both Democrats. I bet they used the same lab. It’s probably deep in the basement of some Red Cross shelter or maybe a Salvation Army thrift store.

Sheezus! That’s iron clad. A slam goddamn dunk! But wait. The original swine flu epidemic occured under Ford. I feel dizzy. I think I smell yellowcake uranium……my vision is clouded by pockmarks not unlike those littering the visage of George Tenet.

In late March 1976, President Gerald Ford emerged from a meeting with 27 health advisers with an ambitious request: “I am asking every man, woman and child in the country to get an inoculation this fall.” -dumpbachman.blogspot.com

It’s fair to say I love to loathe this woman. I adore her stupidity. I covet her retardation.

Why, just the other day she deigned to lecture Congress about Carbon Dioxide. She posited over and over that it’s a natural gas. She’s right about that but then so is the methane in my flatulence. What’s the point? She’s sure it can’t be bad for us because it’s from “nature”. She goes on to inform the esteemed deliberative body that there exists not a singly study proving this natural gas is harmful to humans. Five syllables Michele, asphyxiation.

She gives truth to the concept of failing upward:

In response to a question from host Chris Matthews, Bachmann said on the Oct. 17 show that she was “very concerned” that Obama “may have anti-American views” and that the news media should investigate the views of members of Congress. -Miami Herald

Hello McCarthy.

Then there’s Arlen Spector. Booya! I’ve always thought this guy to be inconsistent but obviously of his own mind. He confuses though not predictably. Maybe he actually has his own mind. Just can’t tell with these damn white collar tweekers.

Franken will get to sit and Spector makes sixty. A nice number. The Democrats, should they choose to act in concert, will have a majority immune to fillibuster. It’s something they rarely do regardless of whether they’re formidable or not. I’m not about a lockstep majority in the Senate but we need to be able to swing haymakers and roundhouses. Change won’t take unless we land some.

Homogeny is not a given among the jackasses.

Whatever. What these two stories point to is serious structural damage in the GOP. Take Mehgan McCain’s remarks:
“Karl Rove follows me on Twitter. That’s creepy, and ” Later, she wrote: “I can’t shake the fact that Karl Rove is following me-it can be creepy. So watch out.” and “Call it savvy marketing, but I find it disingenuous,” she said. “And it’s a bit weird to think his people-not even Rove himself-are following me.” -CNN

This thing will heat up. It will be a battle of the titans. Not so much between Democrats and Republicans but a contest between progressive and ignorant. Between smart and stupid if you will. Pro peace, pro choice, not fooled by creationism or abstinence, unafraid of gay people, tired of organized religion in our face rational humanists, versus desperately afraid war pigs that believe shit like Democrats are responsible for the fucking flu.

Guess who wins.

Drinks for my friends.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Stress Tests: Down the Rabbit Hole
Category: News and Politics
There were many things that were deeply disturbing about the Bush Administration, but perhaps nothing was more so than its willingness to make blatantly false statements in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary. When a government commits itself to upholding obviously false positions, all rational discourse and debate is short-circuited. Once that happens, there is no limit to the atrocities that the government can commit in the name of protecting the public interest.

Whereas it is possible for reasonable people to disagree as to whether it is acceptable to use military force against a country that poses a threat but has not actually attacked us (e.g. Iraq, Iran, North Korea), when Dick Cheney repeatedly asserted that Iraq was linked to 9/11, logic and reason were left without a foothold. How do you argue with someone who states that up is down and down is up? Ordinarily we put such people in mental institutions, but when these people are our leaders, the entire country becomes a nut house. And unfortunately it seems that the Obama Administration is picking up right where its predecessors left off.

Case in point is the current hubbub surrounding the Federal Reserve’s “stress tests” of our nation’s banks. The stated purpose of the stress tests is a reasonable one – i.e. to analyze how the banks will fare in the event of a further deterioration in the economy. However, as we learn more about the methodology of the stress tests, it becomes clear that the whole thing is nothing but an exercise in fantasy every bit as divorced from reality as the most outlandish statements of Bush & Co. A careful reading of a recent article by the Associated Press highlights the many ways in which the Administration is trying to sell a blatantly false bill of goods.

In the second paragraph, the article states that, “Federal Reserve officials held top-secret meetings with bank executives to give them preliminary findings of how each bank would fare if the recession got much worse.” However, in actuality the stress tests look at how the banks would hold up under two different economic scenarios. The first assumes an unemployment rate of 8.8% and a decline in housing prices of 14%. The more negative scenario posits unemployment of 10.3% and a 22% fall in real estate. Later in the article it is pointed out that the actual state of the economy is already close to the latter case. Therefore, the original assertion that the stress tests will reveal how banks will fare if the economy gets “much worse” is obviously false.

The article then goes on to report that the Fed announced that the banks under examination would be required to raise additional capital in order to supplement their reserves against continuing credit loses. However, the Fed cautioned that this should not be taken as a measure of the “current solvency or viability of the firm”. In other words, the government has lent, and will continue to lend, hundreds of billions of dollars to keep these banks afloat, yet the public should rest assured that the companies are solvent and viable. (At the same time, banks are being chastised for their unwillingness to lend. What is glossed over is the fact that simultaneously asking the banks to increase their reserves while also increasing their lending is impossible. The two are in direct contradiction to each other. This is a level of absurdity that would make Lewis Carroll proud.)

The article concludes by discussing the possibility that the stress tests might harm the weaker banks by highlighting their precarious financial positions and encouraging speculators to bet against their survival. However, it goes on to say that, “Friday’s announcement put some of those fears to rest, underscoring that the Fed will not say any bank lacks the reserves it needs to survive (italics added).” In other words, pay no attention to logic and facts – just listen to what we tell you. And, to me, this is the most frightening aspect of the whole situation.

Regardless of whether the government is able to prevent a total collapse of the financial industry, the results of such an all-out assault on the truth could have far-reaching consequences that extend way beyond our current financial problems. Proving himself to be a typical politician, rather than the straight-shooter that we all hoped he would be, President Obama is overseeing a deliberate effort to obscure the truth about the banking industry. One can almost imagine him borrowing the immortal words of Colonel Nathan Jessup…”You Can’t Handle The Truth!!”

April 24, 2009 – Friday

Usury
Category: News and Politics
“The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender”
Proverbs 22:7

“If you have lions and zebras, and the lions are eating too many zebras, you can’t tell the lions to stop eating too many zebras. You have to build a fence, the lions won’t build one themselves.”
A ditty I read somewhere that I can’t find 😉

Usury:

1. The practice of lending money and charging the borrower interest, especially at an exorbitant or illegally high rate.

2. An excessive or illegally high rate of interest charged on borrowed money.

3. Archaic. Interest charged or paid on a loan.

“What do Hammurabi, Plato, Charlemagne, Dante and Queens Mary and Elizabeth have in common? They all condemned, outlawed or regulated the charging of interest on loans. In fact, until the early 1900s interest rates in the United States were kept at or near 10%. And until 1979, loan laws provided some interest rate cap in every state.

Then everything changed. Governments and banks put profits before people. And now the lending industry is spiraling out of control.”

James M. Ackerman, Interest Rates and the Law: A History of Usury, 1981, Arizona St. L.J.61 (1981)

Here’s why:

1978 – The US Supreme Court decides that national banks may export the state interest rate law of their home state into any state where they do business. In response, South Dakota eliminates its interest rate caps. Several credit card issuing banks move to South Dakota and operate nationally with no interest rate cap.

We have gone from two types of lending in our society, legal lending, and illegal loan sharking.

Now we have many kinds, but in general I like to break them down to these three:

1. Bank lending, mortgages, car loans, business loans …
2. Credit Cards
3. Payday loans (AKA Legal Loan Sharking)

Back to history:

1980 – South Dakota’s economy was a mess. So was Citibank (Hmmmm), and they called on South Dakota. The bank had lost more than $1 billion on its audacious foray into the credit card business, and the future looked even worse. The trouble, simply put, was that the rate of inflation exceeded the amount of interest Citibank was allowed to charge its credit card customers under New York usury laws.

But the bankers saw opportunity and salvation in the plains of South Dakota. Within days of those first phone calls, a team of top executives arrived from New York with a proposal for Mr. Janklow: If South Dakota would quickly pass legislation that would enable Citibank to move its credit card operations to the state, they would bring hundreds of high-paying white collar jobs to the state.

The unlikely alliance would clear the way for Citibank to turn a money-losing credit card operation into a vastly profitable business. “All of their senior people used to say it,” Mr. Janklow said. “That South Dakota saved Citibank. I believe it did. That South Dakota saved Citibank.”

Link

What was once offered to only the best customers was being offered to everyone. The saying used to be, the loan must be paid, in 1980 it became, just keep paying on the loan. And since then, that’s what most of us do, every month, month in, and month out. Talk about a money maker.

I’m not sure if you realize this, or not, but the profit of lending money is so high, that we, Americans, have gone from being a country that investes in manufacturing to a country that invests in finances. If you think NAFTA killed manufacturing, it was already dead.

And with money, comes power, political power. Why haven’t loop holes in credit card lending been fixed? Lobbying! Money!

Today Obama met with credit card lenders, and laid down the line. Since the crash last year credit card companies have been jacking up rates. Why? They can. They can even jack it up on past due amounts. So, if you are charged one percent this month, next month they change what you owed last month.

Read that again, and tell me how that is legal. It is!

Here’s another one. Let’s say you have a $5,000 credit limit on your card. You’ve been trying to pay down your card, you’re unsure about you job, so you have your card down to $3,000. You get a letter in the mail telling you that your limit has just been dropped to $1,500, you owe $1,500 RIGTH NOW!

You don’t have it, you’ve been paying $300 a month, and think you can go a little higher, but not $1,500 RIGHT NOW.

From that day forward you will be charged a penalty on what you owe above your limit, and your interest rates will probably go up 36%. With penalties, more like 56%.

This is legal right now.

I am glad that Obama is getting involved. There is a bill that just passed the House, and the Senate has a bill ready as well.

What do you think? Should we be protected from usury? Has the finaincial industry destroyed manufacturing?

Peace,
J

I have no problem with Miss California’s answer to the question put to her on same sex marriage. I disagree, but it was an honest answer. I don’t think she was particularly inarticulate; she was plain spoken and sincere. She did the best she could, I’m fine with it.

Having said that, I’ve long maintained that the legitimacy of same sex marriage fits succinctly and logically in the context of civil rights, obviously a much broader issue. I heard Dennis Prager say the other day that it can’t be a civil rights issue because there is no difference between a black man and a white man but there are profound differences between any man and any woman. It’s not an entirely weak point, he’s on the nose about substantial biological differences at least.

But that’s easy. And weak.

What a firebrand.

Maybe he wasn’t deliberatly being intellectually dishonest, but his argument is just that. I think it’s stupid. The most salient flaw being a presupposition that homosexuals choose to be homosexuals. I’m here to tell you that they do not. They will tell you the same. Individuals have no more control over who they are attracted in terms of gender, than they do over whether they end up with an innie or an outie.

Some of these things do go together.

I cannot wait for the day when science bears this out so people will shut the hell up about it or at least look ignorant.

I want to talk about the instructions posted at the trash chute.

I started to tear the laminated sheet from above the very well maintained, door to the trash chute. Right away I knew that was a mistake. I’m no longer twenty five years old. Stainless steel handle with a locking lever handy to your thumb.

If I ever get to design my own house, I’m going to include a dumbwaiter.

The Rules:

1) All trash bags must be placed inside the chute.

2) Do not leave trash bags on the floor.

3) Do not clog the chute. Use smaller bags.

4) Do not leave recycalable boxes or bags on the floor.

I have some observations I’d like to share. First, rule #2 is really just an extension of rule #1. What they are trying to tell me is to make sure I put my bags in the chute. In addition, they caution me that my bags are not welcome on the floor. In a sense, they posit that the only place for my bags, is the chute. Well, inside the chute.

I understand and agree with where they’re going with this. It’s the only place I really want to put my bags.

I’m a bit of a rebel but so far, there’s no conflict here.

I’m just a little troubled by how fucking stupid they must think I am or maybe how dumb the people around me are. It gives me pause.

I’m not looking to go in there swinging a Hefty sack full of holes, filled with yogurt, cat litter and rotting meat. Are they worried about that? I hope not. It’s this tiny little room just off the elevator.

I’m happy to follow the rules. They make sense.

Drinks for my friends.

April 23, 2009 – Thursday

Befehl ist Befehl UPDATE: Final – Taxi to the Dark Side
Category: News and Politics

From Wiki:

The Nuremberg Defense is a legal defense that essentially states that the defendant was “only following orders” (“Befehl ist Befehl”, literally “order is order”) and is therefore not responsible for his crimes. The defense was most famously employed during the Nuremberg Trials, after which it is named.

Before the end of World War II, the Allies suspected such a defense might be employed, and issued the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), which specifically stated that this was not a valid defense against charges of war crimes.

Thus, under Nuremberg Principle IV, “defense of superior orders” is not a defense for war crimes, although it might influence a sentencing authority to lessen the penalty. Nuremberg Principle IV states:

“The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

This defense is still used often, however, reasoning that an unlawful order presents a dilemma from which there is no legal escape. One who refuses an unlawful order will still probably be jailed for refusing orders, and one who accepts one will probably be jailed for committing unlawful acts, in a Catch-22 dilemma.

I have been watching all of the torture talk the last few days, it brings back all the talk over the Bush years. Cheney’s desire to “Go to the dark side”, Rumsfeld’s torture memo, a few bad apples, dripping water on people’s faces, Saddam and Al Qaeda enemies, but working together, …

In essence, this is what has come out thus far. After 911, people were scooped up in Afghanistan and else where, and they were interigated. Several died in custody.

Within weeks of 911 the CIA started using “enhanced techniques” that included, but was not limited to, waterboarding, electrodes on genitals, sleep deprivation for many days. A few months later, the “enhanced techniques” were run through lawyers in the Whitehouse, and the DOJ resulting in memos that were released days ago.

Essentially, these letters were used to justify what has been accepted through history, and through conventions which are signatories of. This was an attempt to legalize torture. It did not start at the bottom, the few bad apples, it started at the top.

Note, I wonder how badly Saddam wishes he had gotten a legal decision to approve gassing the Kurds. He might be in Miami today playing golf.

At least two Al Qaeda suspects were water boarded over a hundred times each in a month. I know what you are asking, if it works, why does it take hundreds of times, and after a few times, wouldn’t you think the suspect would say anything?

I don’t want to entertain what Cheney is trying to prove, and it seems most Republicans are also trying to prove, that the end justified the means. Or that the “enhanced techniques” provided evidence. The reason I don’t want to entertain it is that the end does not justify the means. Morals 101!

The most common example used is that one of KSM’s many supposed admitances (waterboarded 183 times in a single month, do you have brain cells left after being drowned 183 times in a month?) the planned attack in Los Angles. The problem with this is that the plot was broken up, if it ever really was a “GO” plot, a year before KSM was captured. But why be mindful of details, and why argue that torture is ever right.

Then perhaps the most outrageous part was what McClatchy reported:

“for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were…demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq…(former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi” and these techniques were seen as the quickest way to make the connection.

So, how many people were tortured, some to death, to prove what was not true, that Al Qaeda, and Iraq, two enemies who were actually working together.

Oh, and these techniques were perfected by the likes of Chinese Communist forces during the Korean War, and Pol Pot the de facto leader of Cambodia in mid-1975. One of Pol’s waterobarding devices is on display in the genocide museum.

Note, we should never forget about the Spanish Inquisition… or that some how this makes Obama a fascist?

I suggest that you all get on the right side of this issue. I know that when I was in the military, and went through military education, and throughout my career we were always taught that in part, if you are ever captured you give your name, number and rank. That is it. Sure, you’ll get a hard time, but in the end, you will be enprisoned until the end of the war, and treated humainly. That is what we signed up to do, and that is what we were supposed to do.

How can we ever be that shinning city on the hill, if we torture people?

Peace
J

…

UPDATE 2:

The Junta Party

This analogy isn’t close to being complete. And it doesn’t match up at every point. But where it does connect, it’s so spot-on that I must share it with you.

In former Banana Republics, in their post-transition- to-democracy phases, you’ll often have a Junta Party. It’s an opposition party whose main goal isn’t to get elected so much as to maintain the legacy of the former junta regime, defend its record of service to the state and most of all keep its former leaders from being put on trial or shipped off to the Hague. Often the party will be headed up by the former Generals themselves. But if they’re dead or otherwise occupied in the slammer or abroad, maybe you’ll have their relatives or the one-time cronies and lickspittles of this or that el jefe of the old regime filling the leadership roles.

And today, as we watched the on-going parade of Cliff Mays on TV or Dan Burton praising waterboarding as essential to the American dream, Eric Kleefeld pointed out to me that that really is pretty much the role the GOP — at least for the moment — has taken in our present politics.

Yes, Republicans have tried to distance themselves from President Bush’s fiscal profligacy. But on the core value issues of militarism and human rights violations and keeping faith with the war criminals of the previous regime they really couldn’t be more unified or on message. If you were plopped down on earth today in front of a TV set in the United States, on the testimony of the party members themselves, you might easily get the idea that state-sanctioned torture was the main policy legacy of the outgoing administration. Sort of like Democrats looked back on late 90s budget surpluses with a proud defiance in the aftermath of the Clinton years.

I can’t be the only one who this resonates with. Who else has some examples?

–Josh Marshall

I’ve heard a cornucopia of justifications. Reasons from ratiocination to mythical fables, about why today is THE day to celebrate pot day. Makes no difference to me. Marijuana never hurt anybody and hemp fiber and oil is the answer to more of our problems than you know.

I visited a dispensary in a past neighborhood today.

This place was barely two blocks from my old apartment. In Koretown. I got a glimpse inside my old window right before we pulled up in front of a bright green door with green balloons whipping in the hot breeze. I didn’t see much, it was fleeting, but the window was dirty and that gave me pause. It was at least a hundred fucking degrees today.

I was with this guy Fred, who is a friend of Evil Lars and works with the institution now. He’s like six four and handsome. We’re in his pick-up and he has an excellent air conditioner. It was a hundred goddamn degrees today. We’re here to replace a terminal that’s gone down. It’s April twentieth, they sell pot and their machine has shat itself.

I lived here during the riots. Two blocks off Vermont and Third. There was lots of shit on fire. Heavily armed personnel in black and the reek of destruction for months after. It freaked me out. I remember convenience stores and liquor stores looking like they puked into the parking lot after being looted. That smell of burnt. The sky was black west to east from Mulholland that day.

I fled to the valley.

I left in a hurry seventeen years ago.

It was cathartic to see it on a hot sunny day today. People on the sidewalks, fruit & vegetable corners. The only thing that’s changed seems to be that it’s healed. It’s bustling.

We walk up after being buzzed in and go up two flights of stairs. There’s a nice palm or fern every six steps or so on the right under the rail. I notice Fred has huge feet and he’s well dressed. His clothes are nice. I have no idea if he’s fashionable or not but he’s very well dressed. Me, I’m a sweaty pale primate.

We’re first greeted at the top of the stairs by a smaller black guy with neck tattoos and a gun. Hindsight tells me I was moving through this place way too fast. I was following Fred and neither of us seem to have a confidence problem. We arrived behind the counters and into the backrooms pretty fast.

Fred moves immediately to do the install and I start asking for Larry, that’s who Lars said to ask for. There are two empty eyed pitbulls that keep smelling my legs. Pale blue eyes that look scared more than anything else. A frightened animal is a dangerous one. I’m telling you this now and thinking I should have been more respectful.

I should have pet the dogs but everything was going well and I didn’t want to touch them.

Fucking hot up there. This place was crazy. Not my first dispensary, but easily the most ghetto. I liked it. I was comfortable there. There was an older woman walking around with a paper cup the size of a shot glass full of water. People buzzing in and out. A small grow operation in the back. A flat screen with at least six different angles of security. I stopped short of looking for myself on the monitor.

Utensils everywhere. I swear I saw a Crouch piece on the desk. Wham. I walked out with two fistfulls of the most aromatic herbinacionous addition to any entree you can picture. Fish, fowl, mammal or mollusk. A flower for any meal.

Ipso Facto, I’m back at my car with two pinecones of earthy. I drive home.

I have the back of Evil Lars.

Happy Holiday.

In other news, the truth is bubbling to the top about America’s role in torture. Regardless of your position, you were lied to on national television by your dipshit retarded President about it. America has tortured. And as The Daily Show so adroitly pointed out, all we can do is be outraged over the secret getting out.

Weak. Fuck me.

I can’t believe these retired, retarded fucking clowns on television trying to mitigate the fact that we torture. We prosecuted the Japanese for waterboarding. Were we more morally advanced back then?

Fuck me in the neck.

Drinks for my friends.

I felt compelled to share this. It really is remarkable.

Steve Schmidt, former campaign manager for John McCain while speaking to Log Cabin Republicans today, had this to say:

“There is a sound conservative argument to be made for same-sex marriage,” Schmidt, who was McCain’s campaign manager, told the group. “I believe conservatives, more than liberals, insist that rights come with responsibilities. No other exercise of one’s liberty comes with greater responsibilities than marriage. In a marriage, two people are completely responsible to and for each other.”

He added: “If you are not willing to accept and faithfully discharge those responsibilities, you shouldn’t enter the state of matrimony, and it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if you’re straight or gay. It is a responsibility like no other, which can and should make marriage an association between two human beings more fulfilling than any other.” -CNN

Gorgeous. Eloquent, fluent and beautiful.

This kind of thinking and honesty is precisely what the Republican party owes America.

Yep, I said “owes”. Given the damage the Republicans have wrought the last three decades and particularly the last eight years, well, I feel they are beholdin’ to the rest of us.

Mr. Schmidt also had this to say:

“If you put public policy issues to a religious test, you risk becoming a religious party,” Schmidt declared. “And in a free country, a political party cannot be viable in the long term if it is seen as a sectarian party.” -Huffington Post

Hallelujah! Pun intended. Wow. This is one man who understands what the future of the GOP will look like if it has one. I am impressed. Social issues such as these, as opposed to those of policy, are our biggest divide. To table such concerns, might could be an envelope for allowing vibrant philosophical debate to once again rise to the watermark of legitimate. Without such violent and vigorous clouding and muddying of what is actually an important and vital set of issues, this country stands a real chance of moving forward and so then, does the rest of the planet.

America was never intended to be the world’s police anymore than it was to be the world’s moral arbiter. We’ve become mired and lost in that as a nation and have as consequence, lost our way on the world stage. It is exactly because of this that we are estimated by every other State to be anything from silly to hypocritical to lethally wreckless.

Guilty as charged. We are all of those things.

Far too long we’ve neglected tragedies that demand our attention and devoted it instead to situations that were barely our business. A lumbering giant, recklessly careening, who’s size and stature shrinks by the day.

A modicum of humility is therefore in order.

But wait, there’s more:

Hugo Chavez said to Obama today, “Eight years ago I greeted President Bush with this same hand. I’d like to be your friend.” -Fox News

Let the record show it was an interlocking opposable thumb shake. A ‘bro’ shake. I like this guy Chavez, he called Dumbya “The Devil”.

On Cuba, Obama said:

“decades of mistrust” must be overcome, but noted that he has already loosened restrictions that limited Americans from traveling to visit relatives in Cuba and from sending money to them.

Obama lifted all restrictions Monday on the ability of individuals to visit relatives in Cuba, as well as to send them remittances.

That may be just the beginning. “I am prepared to have my administration engage with the Cuban government on a wide range of issues — from human rights, free speech and democratic reform to drugs, migration and economic issues,” -CNN

This comes a day after Cuban President Raul Castro said he was prepared to discuss “everything, everything, everything” with the United States. -CNN

The neocons will no doubt bristle over this. I anticipate high comedy for my witness. Yet, this is the change we voted for. The one we Americans turned out in overwhelming numbers to endorse. We are beginning to understand that saber rattling is far from our only option. It’s stupid to assume that’s all we have to offer countries in our own hemisphere who pose no military threat to us whatsoever.

We could probably kick Venezuela’s and Cuba’s ass on any Thursday afternoon. That’s not the point.

The same way our opinions about our own citizens must change, so does our thinking about the rest of the world. Our bigotry and bias has led us to this precarious point in human history. America has within her reach, the potential to allow itself and the rest of humanity to progress beyond and above where we find ourselves now. If we can only learn to accept and tolerate a little more ourselves and then, the rest of the world.

See, I’m not here to endorse torture, terror, fascism, dictatorship or anything resembling. I’m trying to tell you that we’ve been going at this assbackwards. Archaic and absurd.

All good change comes from inside. We are all people, humans. We all bleed and suffer. It’s time to abandon the notion that to prevail, other humans must suffer and bleed.

Mr. Steve Schmidt has said and done a wonderful, cognizant thing.

Drinks for my friends.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

NASA Sucks!
Category: News and Politics

For those who haven’t been following the evolving NASA/Steven Colbert controversy, let me briefly recap. NASA recently decided it would try to increase public interest in the International Space Station by holding a contest to allow people to vote online and choose a name for a newly built section of the space station. Brilliant self-promoter that he is, comedy-show host Steven Colbert mobilized his large viewing audience to try to get the section named after him. At the end of the contest period, “Colbert” had the most votes by a huge margin. However, the contest rules stipulated that NASA reserved the right to name the section themselves, and last night they rejected the public’s wishes and instead named the section “Tranquility”.

I’m sorry, but I’ve got to call it like I see it. NASA is a bunch of pussies! What possible harm could be done by naming the section “Colbert”? Instead the end result of the whole fiasco will be to reinforce the stereotype of NASA as being filled with a bunch of self-important, humorless eggheads. And what could be better calculated to decrease public interest in the space agency than to run a contest soliciting public opinion and then reject the overwhelming public choice? Come on guys, its not rocket science…

A trifecta of issues have been chapping my ass of late.

ITEM ONE:

Is there a more appropriate term for the completely contrived “protest” by whackjob flat-earthers other than “teabagging”?

Methinks not.

“the insertion of one man’s sack into another person’s mouth. Used a practical joke or prank, when performed on someone who is asleep, or as a sexual act.” -UrbanDictionary.com

I love this shit.

In effect, they will protest the single largest tax cut on America’s middle class, working poor and impoverished in our history. They will actively lament an increased tax burden on America’s wealthiest five percent that still ends up being less than what their sacred small government charlatan Ronald Reagan imposed.

These people are idiots.

Not only does it pervert and vulgarize the original defiance by colonists who orchestrated and participated in The Boston Tea Party, it’s a knock kneed, anti-intellctual parody of genuine patriotism. I’m here to tell you these fuckers heads are as round as the average potato. Think pineal.

The lockstep conservatives have chosen the wrong week to quit sniffing glue. They are retarded and unable to wipe their own snot bubbling noses and drool weeping, recessed chins. Pathetic.

No one but Fox News seems to notice. Can you say ‘marginalized’?

ITEM TWO:

Looks like the GOP is resolute in blocking the release of actual legal opinions produced by the Bush administration’s OLC (Office of Legal Council), regarding torture. There are in fact three such memos issued by the OLC, one of the highest legal offices in the land, permitting and allowing for, under the auspices of American legal authority, the sadistic treatment and physical violence upon captured individuals in violation of Geneva Conventions as well as human decency and longstanding American ideals related to the treatment of prisoners of war.

Actual legal opinions proffered by the Bush administration that are apparently so profound and disgusting that Senate Republicans are willing to engage in blackmail to prevent their being released to media and the public.

“A reliable Justice Department source advises me that Senate Republicans are planning to “go nuclear” over the nominations of Dawn Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as State Department legal counsel if the torture documents are made public. The source says these threats are the principal reason for the Obama administration’s abrupt pullback last week from a commitment to release some of the documents. A Republican Senate source confirms the strategy. It now appears that Republicans are seeking an Obama commitment to safeguard the Bush administration’s darkest secrets in exchange for letting these nominations go forward…” -Scott Horton, The Daily Beast

Fuck me running.

They all stood right in front of us and swore up and down that America does not torture. That we don’t kidnap and “render” to countries that attach electrodes to the genitals or nearly drown “detainees”. That we don’t beat and humiliate or emasculate. They are fucking liars. And now, sitting members of the Senate, the world’s ‘greatest deliberative body’, openly engage in foul and despicable brinksmanship designed to keep the official sanctioning of that truth from our citizens.

Fuck you John Yoo. Fuck you Alberto Gonzales. Fuck you Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. There is nothing and no things any of you could possibly do to right this wrong you all so willingly and zealously fomented and encouraged. The stain you leave will be visible for centuries and the damage you have wrought will be your legacy long after worms have consumed your rotting corpses and shat them into soil.

ITEM THREE:

Al Franken.

Hey Norm Coleman. Shut the fuck up and start looking for a job. Al Franken didn’t clean your clock but he won. Have some dignity or maybe some vanity. Sheezus. You lost. Everyone agrees. Have you no shame? A whip smart comedian bested you in a public contest. Ten out of ten dentists agree, time to look for a job. Maybe you could be Michele Bachmann’s pool boy.

This shit is ridiculous.

Drinks for my friends.

April 7, 2009 – Tuesday

Sure, crazy people do crazy things.
Category: News and Politics

“And, of course, when you point out that certain individuals with all their talk about “revolution” and “armed insurrection” are inciting this kind of behavior in unstable people, you will get howls of protest about the 1st Amendment and what not. Sure, crazy people do crazy things. But that doesn’t make it responsible to encourage them, which is what a lot of really foolish people are doing right now for purely political reasons.”
John Cole

This from the reports of the Saturday Shooting of 3 Pittsburgh Police Officers:

A man opened fire on officers during a domestic disturbance call Saturday morning, killing three of them, a police official said. Friends said he feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.

Three officers were killed, said a police official at the scene who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. Police spokeswoman Diane Richard would only say that at least five officers were wounded, but wouldn’t give any other details.

One friend, Edward Perkovic, said the gunman feared “the Obama gun ban that’s on the way” and “didn’t like our rights being infringed upon.” Another longtime friend, Aaron Vire, said he feared that President Obama was going to take away his rights, though he said he “wasn’t violently against Obama.”

Perkovic, a 22-year-old who said he was the gunman’s best friend, said he got a call at work from him in which he said, “Eddie, I am going to die today. … Tell your family I love them and I love you.”

Perkovic said: “I heard gunshots and he hung up. … He sounded like he was in pain, like he got shot.”

Vire, 23, said the gunman once had an Internet talk show but that it wasn’t successful. Vire said his friend had an AK-47 rifle and several powerful handguns, including a .357 Magnum.

He feared an Obama gun grab? Gee, I wonder where he could have heard that.

Indeed, a story replete with NRA-style fearmongering about the looming “grab” — which has been fueling a run on guns at local shops — ran just three days ago in the Pittsburgh Tribune.

Over the last few weeks, as most of the country has fomented over AIG Bonuses, the rewarding of failure, the fring right has taken a swift turn to oppose the make believe assult on their guns.

A person sent me a video of a Fox reporter dispelling what Hillary Clinton said about Mexico’s weapons coming from America. She said that 90% of traceable weapons come from the United States, but the Fox reporter notes that only a percentage of the guns are traceable, so those that aren’t must be from somewhere else, like China.

First of all, who cares how many come from the US. The fact is you can’t legally buy weapons in Mexico like you can in America, so we should stop the flow of illegal guns to Mexico. No matter if it is 90% or 10%, it’s still against the law.

We have moved to a state where no matter what the gun issue is, it can’t be true, and under all of it remember, Obama wants to take your guns.

Since Obama was elected guns sales have gone through the roof. How many more police killings will we see from this explosion of gun ownership? How many of the fring right will be incited to violence by the crazy ravings of loons like Glenn Beck, or Sean Hannity?

But as the populace movement of pitch fork welding Americans attempts to lynch those that were at the center of the economic crisis, the fring right is fomenting “President Obama’s eeeeevil plans for taking away Americans’ guns — no doubt just the first steps that will eventually lead to eradicating the Second Amendment, rounding up gun owners and placing them in FEMA camps, and installing a blue-helmeted United Nations dictatorship in America.”

Crazy you say, yep, but there are people that believe it. Heck, the guy that shot the police officers in Pittsburg once had an internet radio show. Hmmmm, maybe he was a myspacer too? I can think of a few that fit the profile.

As usual, it’s not the Obama administration that is talking about going after guns, it’s the fring right. Look at Obama’s agenda. See anything about guns? Nope!

I am retired military, and I can tell you, if you want to protect your country, don’t buy an assault weapon, don’t join a militia, join the United States Military.

A student paper in Buffalo manages to ask the pertinent question here:

“It’s all well and good to talk about the sanctity of constitutional rights, but when our constitutional right to possess AK-47s ends up arming a bloodthirsty criminal organization in a neighboring country thanks to the strength of the American business ethic, doesn’t that make us the bad guys?”

“Believe in something — even if it’s wrong. Believe in it!”
Glenn Beck

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

I Almost Regret Voting For Obama
Category: News and Politics

The “almost” is due to my firm belief that electing John McCain would have led to World War III. That being said, in terms of the economy, I don’t believe McCain could possibly have done worse than Obama is doing.

Those who read my blog regularly may have noticed that despite supporting Obama in the election, I quickly became critical of him when he took office. I felt somewhat bad about doing so – as if he deserved some kind of “grace period”. So, although I made a number of criticisms, I felt conflicted – like maybe I was being a little too hard on the guy. As of now though, I am convinced that Obama is either a) incompetent, or b) a bought-and-paid-for stooge of the banking industry.

The new Geithner Plan is an unmitigated disaster. I haven’t heard one reasonable defense of the glaring injustices at the heart of this plan. In essence, the plan boils down to an illegal subversion of Congress in order to improperly transfer wealth from the general public to large financial institutions. There are two aspects of the plan that ought to outrage every citizen of this country. The first is how the plan works, and the second is how the Administration is using the FDIC to circumvent Congress.

The essence of the plan is to encourage large financial institutions to make enormous bets which, if they turn out well will earn giant profits, and if they turn out badly will dump the losses on the American public. The plan selects a few large institutions and allows them to buy the so-called “toxic assets”, but it only requires them to put up around 5% of the purchase price (while the companies and the government share the profits 50/50). The government then guarantees that it will absorb 90% of any losses on these investments. (Keep in mind, this opportunity isn’t available to you or me – or even to medium-sized banks – its only for the very largest institutions.)

As an analogy, imagine that I was offered the opportunity to bet $100 on the Super Bowl, but I only had to put up $5 of my own money. If I win, I get $50 (the other $50 goes to the bookie), and if I lose I’m only out my original $5. With such ridiculous terms, I don’t need to be a football expert to make a profitable bet. In fact, I don’t even need to know who’s playing.

So, of course the Geithner Plan will generate a lot of enthusiasm among financial institutions. They are being offered the bonanza of a lifetime. But the truly disgusting aspect of the plan is the way it is implemented at the governmental level.

As everyone knows, the FDIC has one basic function. It insures depositors against bank failures. The Geithner Plan gives the FDIC a function that it was never intended to have. It uses the FDIC as the agency that will backstop the $1 trillion in toxic-asset purchases. The reason for doing so is that it enables the Administration to guarantee the asset purchases without the approval of Congress.

And hey, what about the recent talk of the FDIC itself becoming insolvent? How is a nearly insolvent agency supposed to backstop over a trillion dollars of highly questionable assets? Well, obviously it can’t, but we all know what will happen if push comes to shove. If the FDIC runs out of money, Congress will have no choice but to recapitalize it. The alternative would be financial Armageddon.

Truly, this kind of disregard for our system of checks-and-balances is every bit as blatant as the abuses of the Bush Administration. All I can say is, Mr. Obama, I am very disappointed in you.