Dyerama (Say Cheese)

Gertie

2009-06-19T21:00:00.000-07:00

In 2003 or 2004 I bought this bitchin' 1975 BMW sports coupe. Pristine condition, silver hardtop that purred like a million Raquel Welches lining up to suck my dick. Got it for a song and $3000. I didn't care that the gas mileage might be bad (turned out it was okay). I didn't care that the only serious repair shop charged up the ass (got one of their super sportsters for the two days I had to leave it overnight and probably did more damage to that than I did to mine).
I had a touring 1975 BMW that was gorgeous (turned the heads of two high school girls once until they actually saw me) and smooth, sleek, sexy and stately.
I mean I rocked in this beast. It weighed almost 2000 pounds. Solid steel. Get in an accident with me and your SUV would pay for it. If it made contact and didn't just roll right over. But you know what I mean.
I've had other cool cars. I had an old Fiat Spider that was the shit. Run over a puddle and the sparks would give out, causing me to pull over and wait for them to dry so I could start the car again. The convertible roof leaked, but who cared? It was a Fiat and I had short hair.
I had a 1969 VW bus that looked like it had been rolled through a breadmaker and painted by the Mary Kay Commandos. It only leaked oil through the oil pan when I was driving uphill. And it only didn't start when it was an absolute emergency.
After all of these cool cars I remember the VW best, because of its driveability. And I remember the Fiat best for its because it got me sex. Lots and lots of sex.
But the BMW...I remember it best, because it's the car that made an old woman feel like a princess.
For 20 minutes. For one ride. From her house to the church. She rode in the back and saw life anew and marvelled in how much a simple ride in a pretty car could make her feel young again. She saw houses she hadn't seen before. She noticed trees and flowering bushes she hadn't before.
She giggled and pointed and preened. She felt like a princess and I have no doubt saw the throngs lined up on the side of the road to wave to her, because this was her ride and her moment and her time.
As much as she caused me no end of consternation, frustration and heartache in the years both before and after I will always remember that day, that ride and that beautiful woman remembering and living a moment she may never have had until then.
Others will, no doubt, have more memories and closer ones. I will have only that one. And it will carry her (in my heart) into Heaven or what she and I consider Heaven to be. Because I will miss that cantankerous old witch. May she smell lavender all the way there. And may her son live through this and know the relief that eventually will come.

2009-06-17T17:39:00.000-07:00

I planted asparagus this year for the first time. I've done some online reading about fertilization and soil requirements, but what I haven't found is what to do with the this year's shoots. Do I clip them down to keep them from flowering or let them do their thing? I've got a few that are turning ferny.
Does anyone have any advice or suggestions?

Man, I Love These

2009-03-19T14:49:00.001-07:00

Hello, It is my pleasure to reach you after our unsuccessful attempt on our business transaction. Well I just want to use this medium to thank you very much for your earlier assistance to help me in receiving the funds without any positive outcome. I am obliged to inform you that I have succeeded in receiving the funds with the help of a new partner from Paraguay Mr Fernando Alvaro Gomez, Everything was perfectly done because we strike a deal with one of the Lady Accountant who works with the Federal Ministry of Finance (F.M.F) and she rendered a tremendous help to us .My new partner initiated this idea and everything worked out successfully . In appreciation of your earlier assistance to me in receiving the funds I have decided to compensate you with the sum of $850,000,00. Eight Hundred and Fifty Thousand United States Dollars issued in ATM MASTERCARD. . This is from my own share. I did this simply to show appreciation to you for your kind support.Presently I am in Paraguay for i! nvestment project with my own shar I am happy to inform you that I registered the ATM MASTERCARD inform of Diplomatic Security Parcel with FedEx Delivery Services to deliver it to you. Since I did not hear from you, I traveled out of the country for investment and I will not come back till end of this year.kindly contact fedex with the information below. Contact FedEx with your shipment code of: Shipment Code: CPEL/OWN/9856 Parcel Number: EG2272-NG Delivery Officer: Mr. Andrew Bolton E-mail: wwwfedex_courier@live.com Tel: +234 - 8055245117 Please reply FedEx with your address and shipment code for re-confirmation. Please,let me know immediately you receive it so that we can share the joy together after all the suffering at that time. At this moment, I am very busy here in Asuncion the capital city of Paraguay because of the investment projects which the new partner and I are having at hand. Once again, Insurance and delivery charges have been paid for, but the only fee remaining is the security safe keeping fee of $150 USD, which you will be required to pay before delivery will take effect. Also note that FedEx Services do not know the content of the parcel, I registered it as a Diplomatic Security Package, they do not know it contains ATM MASTERCARD inside. The ATM MASTERCARD has pin number 8876. Regards, Rev Vincent Fisher

2009-01-05T23:15:00.000-08:00

So, tonight my wife and I went to this thing put on by Shalom Ministries that my mom had talked to us about and gotten us to volunteer for.
We finally said we'd go and see what it was that Mom was going on about and pitch in if needed.
What we encountered and came to love almost immediately was a supper for homeless and in need people.
Every Monday evening Shalom serves up a cafeteria style dinner for those who are in need. The needy don't have to be homeless. In fact, anyone can come down for what is really a very good meal. But Shalom does cater to those in serious need. It has a lot of regulars who are definate characters.
Mom, Dad, Katie and I got there late, because the snow had reduced streets during commute hour to a crawl, but I quickly found a spot on the serving line and got to hand out beets to whoever might want them (fewer than you'd think). Katie handled the coffee. Mom and Dad did the greetings at the door and made sure everyone had a seat and helped them carry food to their tables.
We met many colorful people. We met many wonderful people. We had a hard time not crying for some of the people.
As I stood and listened to a young man play the piano after he was done eating, another man walked up and stood beside me. A minute later, he got in front of me and asked me if I was scared. I said, not yet.
Insane people don't scare you? Not so much.
He looked at my shirt ( my George Bush "I bet you vote this time hippie") and said
you can't wear that here.
Why not?
They'll kill you.
Who will?
They will.
Who?
Anyone here. Everyone. You can't wear that. It's wrong. It sucks.
Why?
George Bush. he's why the poor people are still poor.
You're not reading the shirt right. It makes fun of Bush.
Oh? It still sucks.
Yeah, well, I'm going to wear it anyway.
Yeah? Til it wears out?
Sure. Til it wears out or I find another one.
It still sucks.
Good thing it's a free country then. Cuz I'm going to keep wearing it.
(pause, then shuffling in front of me as I try to walk away and blocking my progress for 30 seconds) Yeah, good thing it's a free country so I can walk wherever I want to.

He and I ended up hugging and laughing when we realized we liked each other's sense of humor. On the way out, he walked my mom across the intersection through the slushy snow and he and I hugged and laughed again after. Katie, also, told me that he was the one we saw driving in who was holding up traffic by walking down the middle of the one lane open on the street as if he was leading the parade.
One story I was told by a woman on the serving line right after we had filled the plate of a drunk Native American:
Oh, that's the guy who, a couple of months ago, got through the food line, then turned around and yelled "all you white people need to get back on the boat and go back to wherever you came from!". She didn't know whether to laugh or not at the time, but she said she couldn't help it. So, she laughed. I thought it proper, because most of us Whities don't know where we came from.

We'll be going back with my parents every Monday that we can. It felt good and right. The kid who played the piano after eating was wonderful. he just sat down and started playing. Couldn't have been 18 years of age. Probably didn't want to leave. Old folks who were politically active and passing out leaflets.

Hell of a time. And the volunteers were cool, too. No boundaries, no commonalities. Just friendly.
Just happy.

Just wanting to help.

HI!!!

2009-01-02T17:13:00.000-08:00

Hi. I'm unemployed, but eager. I left my last employer, because I wanted to move and help take care of my parents who are feeble and demented (not to mention they have halitosis and constantly soil their undegarments). I am happy to take care of them and wipe their buttocks when they whoosh. In fact, my motto is: You whoosh, I floosh.
However, being a wonderful son and selfless giver does not pay well in the coin of the realm (so to speak since shit flows downhill and I am at the bottom). So, I am putting myself on the market to the highest bidder.
What do I bring to the market table? Only this:
I can drink 12 beers without puking;
I can write my name in the snow;
I can shovel shit;
My name is not Ishmael;
I can kill a mockingbird;
I once made red soda fly out a friend's nose without touching him;
I can read an entire book in one day;
In the home library, I like to play with my shelf;
I once hit a foul ball really, really far;
I once got a telephone salesperson to say "I am not looking for Dick" 20 times;
I once got a telephone salesperson to tell me that her company's online service would give me better access to donkey porn than the one I already had;
I eat radishes and Fritos together, because the belches make my wife run in terror;
I've sharted at least 5 times in my adult life;
I envy no penis, but I am a little bit jealous of Oscar Meyer;
I can start a week from tomorrow unless it's a workday.

You know what Fresno has that Spokane doesn't? A helicopter that circles around and around with its spotlight on for no apparent reason.
You know what else Fresno has that Spokane doesn't? Bars within walking distance.
You know what else Fresno has that Spokane doesn't? Streets and sidewalks free of snow.

You know what Spokane has that Fresno doesn't? Blue laws for liquor. And churches on every corner. And five fucking feet of snow!!!

Geronimo!

2008-11-26T16:27:00.000-08:00

dis·am·big·u·ate
play_w2("D0250000")
(dsm-bgy-t)
tr.v. dis·am·big·u·at·ed, dis·am·big·u·at·ing, dis·am·big·u·ates
To establish a single grammatical or semantic interpretation for.

Harakiri (disambiguation)
Harakiri (or hara-kiri) most often refers to a form of seppuku (or ritual suicide), often miswritten as "harikari".

Seppuku (切腹, Seppuku? "stomach-cutting") is a form of Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment. Seppuku was originally reserved only for samurai. Part of the samurai honor code, seppuku was used voluntarily by samurai to die with honor rather than fall into the hands of their enemies, as a form of capital punishment for samurai who have committed serious offenses, and for reasons that shamed them. Seppuku is performed by plunging a sword into the abdomen and moving the sword left to right in a slicing motion. The practice of committing seppuku at the death of one's master, known as oibara (追腹 or 追い腹, the kun'yomi or Japanese reading) or tsuifuku (追腹, the on'yomi or Chinese reading), follows a similar ritual.

I thought of this tonight, because when I opened the door to the refridgerator just now, the sushi we brought home from Wassabi last night jumped from the top shelf and quite literally disemboweled itself on the kitchen floor.
It wasn't pretty. But it was perhaps noble since I had disgraced it by reaching for an American beer.
Then again, it was ronin and carried the ignoble names of 2nd Climax, Mango Tango, Orgasmic and Crunchy. Ronin carry pride and are traditionally reserved. But they take no slight in stride. They display complete loyalty and would rather die than live without honor. So, perhaps it was the beer. Perhaps, it was the salmon steak. Perhaps, it was the Velveeta.
But I know it was Crunchy who was the most disconsolate.

With that name, wouldn't you be?

They're Getting Better At The Sting

2008-11-05T16:32:00.000-08:00

ROBERT MUELLER III
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR FBIFEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION FBI.
WASHINGTON DC.
Email:
washington.field@ipe.fbi.gov
+15096434458

FBI SEEKING TO WIRETAP INTERNET GOOD DAY:

We the Federal bureau of investigation (FBI) Washington, DC in conjunction with some other relevant security Agencies here in the United states of America have recently been informed through our Global intelligence monitoring network that you presently have a transaction going on with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), regards to your over-due contract payment which was fully endorsed in your favor accordingly. It might interest you to know that we have taken our time in screening through this contract payment notification as stipulated on our protocol of operation, and have finally confirmed that your contract payment is 100% genuine and legal with due process of law, and it is as well free from all illegal activities,which you have the lawful right to claim your fund without any further delay.Having said all this, we will further advise, that you should go ahead in dealing with the Central Bank office accordingly as we will be monitoring all their services accordingly with our intelligent monitoring network device, and with your cooperation. furthermore, we want to place this on your notice that we recently had ameeting with the Executive Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, in the person of Prof. Chukwuma Soludo and Mr. Emakpo Sam Banks along with some of the top officials of the Ministry regarding your case and they made us to understand that your file has been held in abase depending on when you personally come for the claim. They also told us that the only problem they are facing right now is that some unscrupulous element are using this project as an avenue to scam innocent people off their hard earned money by impersonating the Executive Governor and the Central Bank office. We were also made to understand that a lady with name Mrs. Joan C. Bailey from OHIO and another person named as Mr. Wachovia who reside in Missouri as well has already contacted them and also presented to them all the necessary documentations evidencing your claims, claiming to have been signed personally by you prior to the release of your contract fund valued at about US$10,000,000.00 (Ten million United States dollars), but the Central Bank office did the wise thing by insisting on hearing from you personally before they go ahead on wiring your fund to the Bank information which was forwarded to them by the above mentioned names, the main reason, we the federal bureau of investigation were contacted by the CBN is to assist them on making some investigation regards to this issue. They further informed us that we should inform our citizens, who must have been informed of the contract payment which was awarded to them from the Central Bank of Nigeria, to be very careful prior to these irregularities so that they don't fall victim to scam. We the FBI are instructing you personally, that if you were already dealing with anybody or office claiming to be from the Central Bank of Nigeria, you are further advised to STOP further contact with them in your best interest and then, contact immediately the real office of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) only with the below information accordingly:

NAME: PROF. CHUKWUMA SOLUDO (CBN GOVERNOR)
MR. EMAKPO SAM BANKS (FINANCIAL SECRETARY)
OFFICE ADDRESS: Central Bank of Nigeria
Central Business District,Cad astral Zone,
federal Capital Territory,Nigeria.
TEL: +234-802-906-3949
Email: remittancepaybank1977@gmail.com

NOTE: In your best interest, any email or fax that doesn't come from the aboveofficial email address or addresses and phone number should not be replied to and should be disregarded accordingly for security reasons. Meanwhile, we will advise you to contact the Central Bank office immediately with the above email address and request that they attend to you payment file as directed so as to enable you receive your contract fund accordingly. Ensure you follow all their procedure as required by them in order to hasten Up the effective procedures,of transferring your funds to you as designated by you. Also have in mind that the Central Bank of Nigeria equally have their own protocol of operation asstipulated on their banking realm, so any delay could be very dangerous. Once again, we will advise you to contact them with the above email address and make sure you forward to them all the necessary information which might be required from you prior to the release of your fund. All modality has already been worked out even before you were contacted and note, that we will be monitoring all your dealings with them as you proceed so you don't have anything to worry about. All we require from you henceforth is an update so as to enable us be on track with you and the Central Bank of Nigeria. Without wasting much time, will want you to contact them immediately with the above email address so as to enable them attend to your case accordingly without any further delay astime is already running out. Should in case you need any more information in regards to this notification, feel free to get back to us so in order to brief you more, because we are here to guide you and serve you better during and after this contract fund has been completely perfected and you have received your contract fund as stated.Thanks, for your anticipated cooperation in advance as we earnestly await your urgent response to this matter.

Best Regards,
Robert S. Mueller III
Federal Bureau of Investigation
J. Edgar Hoover Building
935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, D.C.
20535-0001, USA
+15096434458
Email:washington.field@ipe.fbi.gov

Joe the Plumber Lands In His Own Pile

2008-10-16T16:35:00.000-07:00

Oh, snap!
Joe the Plumber of the third presidential debate fame owes $1,200 in unpaid taxes for the year 2007.
Further, he would not be subject to the tax hike Obama Barack has promoted for the rich and bloated if he buys the very comapny he has complained about not being able to if Obama is elected. Why? Because he would not be taxed on the price of the company, but the profit generated. Oops.
And it turns out:
"When asked whether the McCain campaign had told him he would be a prominent part of the debate and whether McCain's people had approached him before he met Obama, Wurzelbacher was unclear.
"Oh no. No one's contacted me as far as being on the debate or as far as my name being used," Wurzelbacher said. "I have been contacted by them and asked to show up at a rally, but other than that, I just happened to be there and Barack Obama showed up."
Joe the Plumber evidently deals out all kinds of shit, especially bullshit.

Update: Bwaahaahaa!!! According to a blog on the Washington Post:
"Let me note that, on deadline late last night, our crack researchers were unable to find any record of a person by that name with a plumbing license in the state of Ohio. (Update: The Toledo Blade confirms.)".
(I must admit that I didn't bother to find out if this guy's crack researchers were a pair of Peruvian racing squirrels or not, but since the Toledo Blade verifies it it must be golddamned true).
Oh, and he owes something like $1,500 to a local hospital. I understand owing more than I can pay at one time (or 10 times), but how is this guy thinking he can buy a business when he owes state taxes and hospital bills? Doesn't happen when the country is in a financial catastrophe and the banks and credit card companies are withdrawing all friendlies from the consumer landscape.
By the by, do you owe on credit cards? Are you close or even semi-close or even remotely within the neighborhood of where you would think that maybe you should think about not using your credit card anymore (like you have a $10,000 limit and you have charged $3000 on it)? Expect that company to, within the next 6 months, begin to lower your limits without explanation. If you are much closer to your limits, expect that company to lower your limits to below what you already owe and then charge you overlimit fees. Expect that company to jump your interest rates as well (like from 10-15% to 30% or more). It's legal and no one is talking about it yet. Because that's the next tsunami to hit our economy as creditors look to shore up the levees against more losses.

Food For Thought

2008-09-25T14:03:00.000-07:00

(from Alternet)
Has Sarah Palin Been Picked as the Titular Head of the Coming Police State?

By Naomi Wolf, Huffington PostPosted on September 24, 2008, Printed on September 24, 2008http://www.alternet.org/story/100069/

Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah "Evita" Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state.
You have to understand how things work in a closing society in order to understand "Palin Power." A gang or cabal seizes power, usually with an affable, weak figurehead at the fore. Then they will hold elections -- but they will make sure that the election will be corrupted and that the next affable, weak figurehead is entirely in their control. Remember, Russia has Presidents; Russia holds elections. Dictators and gangs of thugs all over the world hold elections. It means nothing. When a cabal has seized power you can have elections and even presidents, but you don't have freedom.
I realized early on with horror what I was seeing in Governor Palin: the continuation of the Rove-Cheney cabal, but this time without restraints. I heard her echo Bush 2000 soundbites ("the heart of America is on display") and realized Bush's speechwriters were writing her -- not McCain's -- speeches. I heard her tell George Bush's lies -- not McCain's -- to the American people, linking 9/11 to Iraq. I heard her make fun of Barack Obama for wanting to prevent the torture of prisoners -- this is Rove-Cheney's enthusiastic S and M, not McCain's, who, though he shamefully colluded in the 2006 Military Tribunals Act, is also a former prisoner of war and wrote an eloquent Newsweek piece in 2005 opposing torture. I saw that she was even styled by the same skillful stylist (neutral lipstick, matte makeup, dark colors) who turned Katharine Harris from a mall rat into a stateswoman and who styles all the women in the Bush orbit -- but who does not bother to style Cindy McCain.
Then I saw and heard more. Palin is embracing lawlessness in defying Alaskan Legislature subpoenas -- this is what Rove-Cheney, and not McCain, believe in doing. She uses mafia tactics against critics, like the police commissioner who was railroaded for opposing handguns in Alaskan battered women's shelters -- Rove's style, not McCain's. I realized what I was seeing.
Reports confirmed my suspicions: Palin, not McCain, is the FrankenBarbie of the Rove-Cheney cabal. The strategy became clear. Time magazine reported that Rove is "dialed in" to the McCain campaign. Rove's protege Steve Schmidt is now campaign manager. And Politico reported that Rove was heavily involved in McCain's vice presidential selection. Finally a new report shows that there are dozens of Bush and Rove operatives surrounding Sarah Palin and orchestrating her every move.
What's the plan? It is this. McCain doesn't matter. Reputable dermatologists are discussing the fact that in simply actuarial terms, John McCain has a virulent and life-threatening form of skin cancer. It is the elephant in the room, but we must discuss the health of the candidates: doctors put survival rates for someone his age at two to four years. I believe the Rove-Cheney cabal is using Sarah Palin as a stalking horse, an Evita figure, to put a popular, populist face on the coming police state and be the talk show hostess for the end of elections as we know them. If McCain-Palin get in, this will be the last true American election. She will be working for Halliburton, KBR, Rove and Cheney into the foreseeable future -- for a decade perhaps -- a puppet "president" for the same people who have plundered our treasure, are now holding the US economy hostage and who murdered four thousand brave young men and women in a way of choice and lies.
How, you may ask, can I assert this? How can I argue, as I now do, that there is actually a war being ramped up against US citizens and our democracy and that Sarah Palin is the figurehead and muse for that war?
Look at the RNC. This is supposed to be McCain's America. But you see the unmistakable theatre of Rove's S and M imagery -- and you see stages eight, nine and ten of the steps to a dictatorship as I outlined them in The End of America. Preemptive arrest? Abusive arrest? "Newly released footage, which was buried to avoid confiscation, shows riot cops arresting and abusing a giant group of people for nothing."
Journalists were arrested -- for reporting. Amy Goodman and ABC producers were arrested. Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake and others were forced to lie face down as armed agents tied their hands behind their backs. The riot police wore the black S&M gear of the Rovian fantasy life and carried the four foot batons cops carry in North Korea. All this is not John McCain's imagery or strategy: it is Karl Rove's.
In McCain-Palin's America, citizens who are protesting are being charged as terrorists. This means that a violent war had been declared on American citizens. A well known reporter leaked to me on background that St Paul police had dressed as protesters and, dressed in Black -- shades of the Blackshirts of 1920 -- infiltrated protest groups. There were also phalanxes of men in black wearing balaclavas, linking arms and behaving menacingly -- alleged "anarchists." Let me tell you, I have been on the left for thirty years and you can't get three lefties to wear the same t-shirt to a rally, let alone link arms and wear identical face masks: these are not our guys. Agent Provocateurs framing protesters and calling protest "terrorism" constitutes step ten of a police state:
"In what appears to be the first use of criminal charges under the 2002 Minnesota version of the Federal Patriot Act, Ramsey County Prosecutors have formally charged 8 alleged leaders of the RNC Welcoming Committee with Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism… [they] 7 1/2 years in prison under the terrorism enhancement charge which allows for a 50% increase in the maximum penalty."
"Paid, confidential informants… infiltrated the RNCWC on behalf of law enforcement. They allege that members of the group sought to kidnap delegates to the RNC, assault police officers with firebombs and explosives, and sabotage airports in St. Paul. Evidence released to date does not corroborate these allegations with physical evidence or provide any other evidence for these allegations than the claims of the informants. Based on past abuses of such informants by law enforcement, the National Lawyers Guild is concerned that such police informants have incentives to lie and exaggerate threats of violence and to also act as provocateurs in raising and urging support for acts of violence."
Under the Palin-Rove police state, you will see escalating infringements on your access to a free internet:
"Sarah Palin was baptized at Wasilla Assembly of God…Last Sunday our research team released a video, a ten-minute mini-documentary, focusing on the Wasilla Assemblies of God and the video seemed on the verge of a massive "viral" breakthrough when YouTube pulled it down, citing 'inappropriate content'. At the point the video was censored by YouTube it had been viewed by almost 160,000 people. The short of it is that YouTube has censored a video documentary that appeared to be close to having an effect on a hard fought and contentious American presidential election…"
Under the coming Palin-Rove police state, you will witness the plans now underway to bring Iraqi troops to patrol the streets of our nation. This is not McCain's fantasy: it is Rove's and Cheney's.
Under the Palin-Rove police state, there will be no further true elections. Mark Crispin Miller has done sensational and under-reported investigating t o establish that -- as I warned -- indeed the GOP staffers on the US Senate Judiciary Committee have been .
The evidence is also buried on the Website of the Majority House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
WASHINGTON -- Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe. >From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications witho ut a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.
-- "Senate panel's GOP staff spied on Democrats" By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff January 22, 2004
Do you think that spying like this will ever end under a Palin-Rove regime? Dream on. If she and McCain are elected, then every single strategy memo and speech and debate prep note from every opposition candidate from now and on into forever will be read by the regime in power while it is still in the computers of the challengers.
Under the Palin-Rove police state, citizens will be targeted with state cyberterrorism. Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda, a former Reagan official, warned me three years ago that the Bush team went after a Republican who had crossed them through cyberstalking: they messed with his email, messed with his phones and I believe messed with his bank account -- he became a cyber-pariah, unemployable and haunted. With modern technology, there really is less place to hide from the state than there was in East Germany in the Cold War era. I remember feeling a chill: of course. That is the wave of the future once we breach the protections around citizens of FISA and the fourth amendment. That way lies the abyss for us all.
Am I trying to scare you? I am. I am trying to scare you to death and ask you to scare your Republican and independent friends most of all. How do you know when it is war on citizens? When there are mass arrests, journalists are jailed, the opposition is infiltrated, rights are stripped and leaders start to ignore the rule of law.
Almost everyone I work with on projects related to this campaign for liberty has been experiencing computer harassment: emails are stripped, messages disappear. That's not all: people's bank accounts are being tampered with: wire transfers to banks vanish in midair. I personally keep opening bank accounts that are quickly corrupted by fraud. Money vanishes. Coworkers of mine have to keep opening new email accounts as old ones become infected. And most disturbingly to me personally is the mail tampering I have both heard of and experienced firsthand. My tax returns vanished from my mailbox. All my larger envelopes arrive ripped straight open apparently by hand. When I show the postman, he says "That's impossible." Horrifyingly to me is the impact on my family. My childrens' report cards are returned again and again though perfectly addressed; their invitations are turned back; and my daughters many letters from camp? Vanished. All of them. Not one arrived. Try explaining that to a smart thirteen year old. Try explaining it in a way that still makes her feel secure and comfortable.
I am not telling you this because it's about my life. I am telling you this because it is about your life -- whoever you are, Conservative or Liberal, independent or evangelical. Your politics will not protect you in a police state. History shows that nothing protects you in a police state. This is not about my fear and anxiety: it is about what awaits you and everyone you love unless you see this for what it is:
Scharansky divided nations into "fear societies" and "free societies." Make no mistake: Sarah "Evita" Palin is Rove and Cheney's cosmetic rebranding of their fascist push: she will help to establish a true and irreversible "fear society" in this once free once proud nation. For God's sake, do not let her; do not let them.
Naomi Wolf is the author of 'The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot' (Chelsea Green, 2007).
© 2008 Huffington Post All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/100069/

Sarah Palin: Moose Knuckle Lover!

2008-09-15T17:08:00.001-07:00

Sarah Palin: possibly the next in line to running the Free World (as we Americans continue to delude ourselves into believing).
Not having a clue as to what the Bush Doctrine is? Yup.
Blocking a clinic that provides the option of having an abortion? Evidently.
Convinced that humans walked with dinosaurs? Evidently (see above link to salon.com).
Trying to ban a book that didn't condemn homosexuality? Possibly (see above link to salon.com).
Believing that the End Times will happen before she dies? Definitely (see above link to salon.com).
Supporting abstinence only sex ed in public schools while her own high school age daughter is pregnant and single? Double check.
Voting for Obama to keep this incompetent, unqualified liar and hypocrite out of higher government? Priceless.

News For The Rest

2008-09-10T14:59:00.000-07:00

Some tidbits of news to tickle the cerebellum (courtesy of Pronoia Network News):

IMPOSSIBLE DREAM FULFILLED
The world's largest private bank, Citigroup, has agreed to stop financing projects that damage sensitive ecosystems. It has promised to invest more in projects that use renewable energy and to pursue policies that protect indigenous people. How did this impossible dream come to pass? The humble but dogged environmental group, Rainforest Action Network, creatively pestered Citigroup for years until the corporation gave in to its demands.
+IT'S IN THE GENES
Researchers at Emory University found that humans are biologically programmed to be nice. Their study used magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of women who were playing a game called the Prisoners' Dilemma. While seeking the goal of financial gain, the women could choose between collaborative or self-aggrandizing strategies. Whenever they opted for the former, the parts of their brains correlated with reward-seeking behavior lit up."The longer the women engaged in a cooperative strategy, the more strongly flowed the blood to the pathways of pleasure," wrote Natalie Angier in her account in *The New York Times.*
+THE IMMORTALISTS
Current human life expectancy, already at age 78 for Americans, is steadily increasing. Men now live an average of 27 years longer than they did a century ago, and women 31 years. Many scientists believe there is no absolute limit to the human life span. Some expect that by 2070, life expectancy will be 100.
+SHARING YOUR BREATH
Quoting geneticists, Guy Murchie says we're all family. You have at least a million relatives as close as tenth cousin, and no one on Earth is any farther removed than your 50th cousin. Murchie also describes our kinship through an analysis of how deeply we share the air. With each breath, you take into your body 10 sextillion atoms, and—owing to the wind's ceaseless circulation—over a year's time you have intimate relations with oxygen molecules exhaled by every person alive, as well as by everyone who ever lived. Right now you may be carrying atoms that were once inside the lungs of Malcolm X, Christopher Columbus, Joan of Arc, and Cleopatra. (Source: Guy Murchie, *The Seven Mysteries of Life*)
+MOOSE LUXURY A
Canadian moose can now walk in peace and safety all the way to South America, thanks to Harrison Ford. He and other celebrities with wealth and influence quietly worked together for years to purchase land along corridors that connect various wildlife refuges and national parks.Meanwhile, Canadian government officials report that their country, the second largest in the world, plans to create ten giant national parks and five marine conservation areas. The new sanctuaries, when added to the existing 39 national parks, will double the amount of protected land.
+TEEN ANGST UPDATE
Crime committed by teenagers has plummeted to its lowest levels in more than two decades. Drunken teens are still killing themselves while driving cars, but the rate is half what it was 20 years ago. The overall teen death rate from accident, homicide, or suicide dropped 28 percent between 1990 and 2000.In 60 years, there hasn't been a lower birth rate among teenage girls than there is now. The overall dropout rate among American high school students has declined by four percent in the last two decades, with an eight percent improvement among African Americans. Three-fourths of high school students say they get along very well or extremely well with their parents, and only three percent say they don't get along well.
+EPIC COLLABORATION
You are a metropolis of 50 trillion citizens, says biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton. Each of the cells in your body can be considered a sentient being in its own right. They all act together as a community, performing an ongoing act of prodigious collaboration.
+ADORATION REBORN
"The insulted waters of New York City are again sacred passages, as they once were to Native Americans for millennia. Raw sewage no longer pours into vital waterways, and industrial pollution has largely been checked. We are witnessing the ecological resurrection of our rivers and bays, from the return of wood-eating gribbles and shipworms that devour our piers to winter visits by a small seal community. People are coming down to the water again to see rare birds, to kayak and to swim. And responding to an ancient call, they're coming down to the water to pray. Among the worshipers are Hindus, Shintoists, African Americans of the Yoruba-influenced Spiritual Baptist faith, Wiccans, Zoroastrians, Christians, and Jews." - Erik Baard, *Village Voice,* http://tinyurl.com/3ya6y5
+GREEDY GIANT VERSUS GENEROUS GIANT
Wal-Mart is famous for the stingy pay and benefits it offers its employees. But another giant chain store, Costco, takes a different approach. Full-time workers there average $15.97 per hour, which is almost 40 percent higher than their Wal-Mart counterparts, who earn $11.52. After four years, a Costco cashier's yearly salary can rise to $44,000. The company also covers 92 percent of most of its workers' health care costs. While the industry-wide turnover rate averages 66 percent, Costco's is just 23 percent.Costco is so unusual in its benevolence that some business gurus disapprove. "From the perspective of investors, Costco's benefits are overly generous," says retail analyst Bill Dreher, quoted in The Wall Street Journal. He thinks that the company's largesse depresses its stock value because investors are afraid its profit margins aren't as high as they could be.But the fact is that Costco is very successful. Its five-year growth rate has been 10.1 percent annually, better than Wal-Mart's 9.8 percent. Its annual earnings were expected to rise from $41.7 billion in 2003 to $47.2 billion in 2004.
+THE INNER VOICE SPEAKS
Scientists have confirmed what we all knew: You do indeed have a little voice in your head that warns you when you're about to do something dumb. It's called the anterior cingulate cortex, according to white-coated authorities at Carnegie-Mellon University. If you're receptive to it, it's as good as having a guardian angel. "Don't do it," the voice whispers when you're on the verge of locking your keys in your car or leaving the bar with the cute drunk you just met. "Go back," it murmurs as you start to walk away from a huge, though initially inconvenient, opportunity.
+THIS DAY IN PRONOIAC HISTORY
Early last century, marauding boll weevils devoured the cotton crop that was the main product of Enterprise, Alabama. Local farmers had no choice but to diversify the plants they grew. As a result, the town's per capita income tripled what it had been when cotton was king. In response, grateful citizens built a huge bronze monument to the insect that had forced them to grow richer.

Pot Calling Kettle

2008-09-09T16:25:00.000-07:00

(the National Enquirer, the newest bastion of accurate reporting, claims that Sarah Palin had an affair with her husband's business partner. The following is McCain's campaign's response)

"The smearing of the Palin family must end. The allegations contained on the cover of the National Enquirer insinuating that Gov. Palin had an extramarital affair are categorically false. It is a vicious lie," said McCain senior adviser Steve Schmidt. "The efforts of the media and tabloids to destroy this fine and accomplished public servant are a disgrace. The American people will reject it."

(other quotes from John McCain himself concerning respecting Pain's family's privacy follow)

–“This is a very personal matter for the family. We should all respect the love they have for the child and the desire all parents would have for their children’s privacy.”
–“The media should respect Bristol’s privacy. That’s always been the tradition and practice when it comes to the children of candidates.”...
–“The children of candidates do not choose to run for office and be thrust into the spotlight.”

(and now for the coup d'hypocrite)

From a John McCain speech during a Republican Dinner in June 1998 published in the June 25, 1998 version of Salon:
"Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno."

Sarah Palin: Too True To Be Good

2008-09-06T23:26:00.000-07:00

John Dean has written an insightful and very lawyerly screed as to exactly why Sarah Palin is not qualified to become second in line to th presidency. Check it out here.
Frank Rich of the New York Times goes even further (complete with lots and lots of links) in suggesting that the Republicans did not bother to do even a passing vetting of Alaska's governor. Go here.
Alaska's largest daily paper is wondering why Palin is suddenly trying to stonewall the Troopergate investigation after previously tellng them to investigate her and hold her accountable. Here.
And she is a liar.
And she is a scary religious nut to boot.
On a different note, Fannie and Freddie (no, not hurricanes) are poised to be taken over by the government to make sure they stay in business, but it'll cost ya. "Ya" as in y'all taxpayers, because F & F control half of all home mortgages in this country. That's $5,000,000,000,000 in layman's terms. Effin' trillions. Word should be out by Sunday afternoon since the Asian markets open then. Deregulation's a great thing, isn't it? Hand over the reins to the private sector and let them run with it. Yeah. Greed only happens when the government is involved. Incompetence only happens when it's the government. Was it only 8 short years ago that this country was mired in a nasty massive budget surplus, lots and lots of jobs, respect overseas and at home, mostly peace abroad, no dead soldiers and only one hummer of a scandal and the conservatives were all pissed off, because the government was too big and intrusive?
Thank goodness they got back into power and fixed all of that crap. And thank goodness they are now putting forth a reformer to reform the reforms they instituted 8 years ago. Because just think what state this country would be in were those damn Liberals allowed to continue running this nation instead of another fucking Republican.

Palin: Didn't See That Coming!

2008-09-04T16:28:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, religion is playing a bigger and bigger role in determining who is electable and who is not. This is allegedly an example of what Sarah Palin's church believes. Also, when she ran for mayor of whatever little town it was in Alaska, one of her main platforms was the anti-abortion ones. In a town of 7,800 who really should give a shit? And why is being a member of the PTA considered a strong rationale for choosing someone for a VP nomination? And what the eff was Cindy McCain thinking when she touted Alaska's closeness to Russia as all we need to know about Palin's foreign policy experience? Semi-quote: "Alaska is right next to Russia, so she knows what it's like."
Also, she had been quoted as saying that if her daughter were raped and became pregnant as a result she would force said daughter to have the baby. But when Palin was 7 months pregnant with her 5th baby, she went ahead with a 30 minute speech even though her water had broken prematurely, then caught a multi-hour flight back to Alaska before seeking medical attention. As any health professional will tell you, water breaking means get your ass to the hospital now! The chance of infection is not small and can endanger both the mother-to-be and the fetus. So, does she believe in human rights at conception for everyone but her own offspring?
Palin was for the "bridge to nowhere", but then she was against it once the firestorm hit about pork barrel earmarks (and her state had already been given the money and spent it all on other projects).
Speaking of earmarks, she was a notorious abuser of special pet projects until this year when she suddenly became a reformer in the mold of McCain. Yet, her earmark requests this year still totaled something like $91 million (albeit on fewer projects). That comes to about $300 per Alaskan, much much higher than any other state. The average per person in all states combined is $34. She may eat moose, but she's raising pigs.
She's for oil drilling anywhere she can. She's a born-again Evangelical (and that right there is enough to nauseate me; they are the worst proselitizers and hypocrites ever to walk this earth). She has been endorsed by none other than Joe Leiberman who is the most flagrant political opportunist Congress has ever seen. Truly bipartisan in a sense. He'll go to whichever side holds sway. In fact, if obama wins in November, expect to Joe sucking up to the Dems in order to save his chair seats that he holds with the Dems. If McCain wins, expect him to push for a Cabinet position and chastise the Dems for not being bi-partisan.
Back to Palin, she was on the PAC that donated the tainted money to then-Gov. Ted Stevens who is about to be indicted on multiple counts of corruption (e.g. bribes through the PAC). She and her husband were once members of a political party that wanted to secede from the United States (allegedly she even spoke at their 2008 convention).
And last, but not least: she has as little political and leadership experience as George W. Bush. She went from PTA to PAC to Mayor to Governor. And it was all paid for the mayoral level by the National Republican party. When she ran for Mayor, her town saw political ads paid for a political party for the first time ever. At least in Alaska, Mayoral races are supposed to be non-partisan. But she was backed by the RNC and ran on platforms like anti-abortion, pro-heterosexual marriage, being born-again and the NRA. What does any of that have to do with a town of 7,800? Although, now in my city of 500,000, I have the two Mayoral candidates slugging it out on issues such as same sex marriage (both are against and I again wonder what this has to do with running my city). In any town, I think most people really want to know about fixing roads and widening streets and cutting down on crime and lowering water bills and stopping drunken driving.
But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's all about the idealogy and not at all about the real.

War Crimes (Shame On Us)

2008-08-25T16:02:00.000-07:00

(an update by Chalmers Johnson and, then, the original article from 2005; this is perhaps the most damning of war crime accusations against my country I have ever read. I knew all about the National Museums and the National Library being looted and burned. I knew that the soldiers on the ground watched it unfold and were told by their commanders to do nothing. I knew that the oil fields and Oil Ministry had been secured and protected. I knew that Iraqi weapons caches and weapons supply depots were not secured until weeks or months after the initial invasion. But I did not know the extent of the destruction done to the written history of our world until i read this back in 2005 and, again, today. It is not a pleasant read, but it is important in light of the lies and deception we now know to have occured under the guise of "liberation". -fishstick)

The Past Destroyed: Five Years Later
On April 11, 12, 13, and 14, 2003, the United States Army and United States Marine Corps disgraced themselves and the country they represent in Baghdad, Iraq's capital city. Having invaded Iraq and accepted the status of a military occupying power, they sat in their tanks and Humvees, watching as unarmed civilians looted the Iraqi National Museum and burned down the Iraqi National Library and Archives as well as the Library of Korans of the Ministry of Religious Endowments. Their behavior was in violation of their orders, international law, and the civilized values of the United States. Far from apologizing for these atrocities or attempting to make amends, the United States government has in the past five years added insult to injury.
Donald Rumsfeld, then secretary of defense and the official responsible for the actions of the troops, repeatedly attempted to trivialize what had occurred with inane public statements like "democracy is messy" and "stuff happens."
On December 2, 2004, President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, to General Tommy Franks, the overall military commander in Iraq at that time, for his meritorious service to the country. (He gave the same award to L. Paul Bremer III, the highest ranking civilian official in Iraq, and to George Tenet, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which had provided false information about Saddam Hussein and Iraq to Congress and the people.)
In the five years since the initial looting and pillaging of the Iraqi capital, thieves have stolen at least 32,000 items from some 12,000 archaeological sites across Iraq with no interference whatsoever from the occupying power. No funds have been appropriated by the American or Iraqi governments to protect the most valuable and vulnerable historical sites on Earth, even though experience has shown that just a daily helicopter overflight usually scares off looters. In 2006, the World Monuments Fund took the unprecedented step of putting the entire country of Iraq on its list of the most endangered sites. All of this occurred on George W. Bush's watch and impugned any moral authority he might have claimed.
The United States government seems never to have understood that, when it began the occupation of Iraq on March 19, 2003, it became legally responsible for what happened to the country's cultural inheritance. After all, the only legal justification for its presence in Iraq is U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483 of May 22, 2003. Both the United States and the United Kingdom voted for this resolution in which they formally acknowledged their status and obligations as occupying powers in Iraq. Among those obligations, specified in the Preamble to the resolution, was: "The need for respect for the archaeological, historical, cultural, and religious heritage of Iraq, and for the continued protection of archaeological, historical, cultural, and religious sites, museums, libraries, and monuments." Every politically sentient observer on Earth is aware of the Bush administration's contempt for international law and its routine scofflaw behavior since it came to power, but this clause remains an ironclad obligation that will stand up in an international or a domestic U.S. court. On this issue, the United States is an outlaw, waiting to be brought to justice.
In 1258 AD the Mongols descended on Baghdad and pillaged its magnificent libraries. A well-known adage states that the Tigris River ran black from the ink of the countless texts the Mongols trashed, while the streets ran red with the blood of the city's slaughtered inhabitants. The world has never forgotten that medieval act of barbarism, just as it will never forget what the U.S. military unleashed on the defenseless city in 2003 and in subsequent years. There is simply no excuse for what has happened in Baghdad at the hands of the Americans. Chalmers Johnson, August, 2008
The Smash of CivilizationsBy Chalmers Johnson
In the months before he ordered the invasion of Iraq, George Bush and his senior officials spoke of preserving Iraq's "patrimony" for the Iraqi people. At a time when talking about Iraqi oil was taboo, what he meant by patrimony was exactly that -- Iraqi oil. In their "joint statement on Iraq's future" of April 8, 2003, George Bush and Tony Blair declared, "We reaffirm our commitment to protect Iraq's natural resources, as the patrimony of the people of Iraq, which should be used only for their benefit."[1] In this they were true to their word. Among the few places American soldiers actually did guard during and in the wake of their invasion were oil fields and the Oil Ministry in Baghdad. But the real Iraqi patrimony, that invaluable human inheritance of thousands of years, was another matter. At a time when American pundits were warning of a future "clash of civilizations," our occupation forces were letting perhaps the greatest of all human patrimonies be looted and smashed.
There have been many dispiriting sights on TV since George Bush launched his ill-starred war on Iraq -- the pictures from Abu Ghraib, Fallujah laid waste, American soldiers kicking down the doors of private homes and pointing assault rifles at women and children. But few have reverberated historically like the looting of Baghdad's museum -- or been forgotten more quickly in this country.
Teaching the Iraqis about the Untidiness of History
In archaeological circles, Iraq is known as "the cradle of civilization," with a record of culture going back more than 7,000 years. William R. Polk, the founder of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, says, "It was there, in what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, that life as we know it today began: there people first began to speculate on philosophy and religion, developed concepts of international trade, made ideas of beauty into tangible forms, and, above all developed the skill of writing."[2] No other places in the Bible except for Israel have more history and prophecy associated with them than Babylonia, Shinar (Sumer), and Mesopotamia -- different names for the territory that the British around the time of World War I began to call "Iraq," using the old Arab term for the lands of the former Turkish enclave of Mesopotamia (in Greek: "between the [Tigris and Euphrates] rivers").[3] Most of the early books of Genesis are set in Iraq (see, for instance, Genesis 10:10, 11:31; also Daniel 1-4; II Kings 24).
The best-known of the civilizations that make up Iraq's cultural heritage are the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Parthians, Sassanids, and Muslims. On April 10, 2003, in a television address, President Bush acknowledged that the Iraqi people are "the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity."[4.] Only two days later, under the complacent eyes of the U.S. Army, the Iraqis would begin to lose that heritage in a swirl of looting and burning.
In September 2004, in one of the few self-critical reports to come out of Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense, the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication wrote: "The larger goals of U.S. strategy depend on separating the vast majority of non-violent Muslims from the radical-militant Islamist-Jihadists. But American efforts have not only failed in this respect: they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended."[5] Nowhere was this failure more apparent than in the indifference -- even the glee -- shown by Rumsfeld and his generals toward the looting on April 11 and 12, 2003, of the National Museum in Baghdad and the burning on April 14, 2003, of the National Library and Archives as well as the Library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowments. These events were, according to Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, "the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years." Eleanor Robson of All Souls College, Oxford, said, "You'd have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale."[6] Yet Secretary Rumsfeld compared the looting to the aftermath of a soccer game and shrugged it off with the comment that "Freedom's untidy. . . . Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes."[7]
The Baghdad archaeological museum has long been regarded as perhaps the richest of all such institutions in the Middle East. It is difficult to say with precision what was lost there in those catastrophic April days in 2003 because up-to-date inventories of its holdings, many never even described in archaeological journals, were also destroyed by the looters or were incomplete thanks to conditions in Baghdad after the Gulf War of 1991. One of the best records, however partial, of its holdings is the catalog of items the museum lent in 1988 to an exhibition held in Japan's ancient capital of Nara entitled Silk Road Civilizations. But, as one museum official said to John Burns of the New York Times after the looting, "All gone, all gone. All gone in two days."[8]
A single, beautifully illustrated, indispensable book edited by Milbry Polk and Angela M.H. Schuster, The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), represents the heartbreaking attempt of over a dozen archaeological specialists on ancient Iraq to specify what was in the museum before the catastrophe, where those objects had been excavated, and the condition of those few thousand items that have been recovered. The editors and authors have dedicated a portion of the royalties from this book to the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.
At a conference on art crimes held in London a year after the disaster, the British Museum's John Curtis reported that at least half of the forty most important stolen objects had not been retrieved and that of some 15,000 items looted from the museum's showcases and storerooms about 8,000 had yet to be traced. Its entire collection of 5,800 cylinder seals and clay tablets, many containing cuneiform writing and other inscriptions some of which go back to the earliest discoveries of writing itself, was stolen.[9] Since then, as a result of an amnesty for looters, about 4,000 of the artifacts have been recovered in Iraq, and over 1,000 have been confiscated in the United States.[10] Curtis noted that random checks of Western soldiers leaving Iraq had led to the discovery of several in illegal possession of ancient objects. Customs agents in the U.S. then found more. Officials in Jordan have impounded about 2,000 pieces smuggled in from Iraq; in France, 500 pieces; in Italy, 300; in Syria, 300; and in Switzerland, 250. Lesser numbers have been seized in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. None of these objects has as yet been sent back to Baghdad.
The 616 pieces that form the famous collection of "Nimrud gold," excavated by the Iraqis in the late 1980s from the tombs of the Assyrian queens at Nimrud, a few miles southeast of Mosul, were saved, but only because the museum had secretly moved them to the subterranean vaults of the Central Bank of Iraq at the time of the first Gulf War. By the time the Americans got around to protecting the bank in 2003, its building was a burnt-out shell filled with twisted metal beams from the collapse of the roof and all nine floors under it. Nonetheless, the underground compartments and their contents survived undamaged. On July 3, 2003, a small portion of the Nimrud holdings was put on display for a few hours, allowing a handful of Iraqi officials to see them for the first time since 1990.[11]
The torching of books and manuscripts in the Library of Korans and the National Library was in itself a historical disaster of the first order. Most of the Ottoman imperial documents and the old royal archives concerning the creation of Iraq were reduced to ashes. According to Humberto Márquez, the Venezuelan writer and author of Historia Universal de La Destrucción de Los Libros (2004), about a million books and ten million documents were destroyed by the fires of April 14, 2003.[12] Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East correspondent of the Independent of London, was in Baghdad the day of the fires. He rushed to the offices of the U.S. Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau and gave the officer on duty precise map locations for the two archives and their names in Arabic and English, and pointed out that the smoke could be seen from three miles away. The officer shouted to a colleague, "This guy says some biblical library is on fire," but the Americans did nothing to try to put out the flames.[13]
The Burger King of Ur
Given the black market value of ancient art objects, U.S. military leaders had been warned that the looting of all thirteen national museums throughout the country would be a particularly grave danger in the days after they captured Baghdad and took control of Iraq. In the chaos that followed the Gulf War of 1991, vandals had stolen about 4,000 objects from nine different regional museums. In monetary terms, the illegal trade in antiquities is the third most lucrative form of international trade globally, exceeded only by drug smuggling and arms sales.[14] Given the richness of Iraq's past, there are also over 10,000 significant archaeological sites scattered across the country, only some 1,500 of which have been studied. Following the Gulf War, a number of them were illegally excavated and their artifacts sold to unscrupulous international collectors in Western countries and Japan. All this was known to American commanders.
In January 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, an American delegation of scholars, museum directors, art collectors, and antiquities dealers met with officials at the Pentagon to discuss the forthcoming invasion. They specifically warned that Baghdad's National Museum was the single most important site in the country. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute said, "I thought I was given assurances that sites and museums would be protected."[15] Gibson went back to the Pentagon twice to discuss the dangers, and he and his colleagues sent several e-mail reminders to military officers in the weeks before the war began. However, a more ominous indicator of things to come was reported in the April 14, 2003, London Guardian: Rich American collectors with connections to the White House were busy "persuading the Pentagon to relax legislation that protects Iraq's heritage by prevention of sales abroad." On January 24, 2003, some sixty New York-based collectors and dealers organized themselves into a new group called the American Council for Cultural Policy and met with Bush administration and Pentagon officials to argue that a post-Saddam Iraq should have relaxed antiquities laws.[16] Opening up private trade in Iraqi artifacts, they suggested, would offer such items better security than they could receive in Iraq.
The main international legal safeguard for historically and humanistically important institutions and sites is the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, signed on May 14, 1954. The U.S. is not a party to that convention, primarily because, during the Cold War, it feared that the treaty might restrict its freedom to engage in nuclear war; but during the 1991 Gulf War the elder Bush's administration accepted the convention's rules and abided by a "no-fire target list" of places where valuable cultural items were known to exist.[17] UNESCO and other guardians of cultural artifacts expected the younger Bush's administration to follow the same procedures in the 2003 war.
Moreover, on March 26, 2003, the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), headed by Lt. Gen. (ret.) Jay Garner -- the civil authority the U.S. had set up for the moment hostilities ceased -- sent to all senior U.S. commanders a list of sixteen institutions that "merit securing as soon as possible to prevent further damage, destruction, and/or pilferage of records and assets." The five-page memo dispatched two weeks before the fall of Baghdad also said, "Coalition forces must secure these facilities in order to prevent looting and the resulting irreparable loss of cultural treasures" and that "looters should be arrested/detained." First on Gen. Garner's list of places to protect was the Iraqi Central Bank, which is now a ruin; second was the Museum of Antiquities. Sixteenth was the Oil Ministry, the only place that U.S. forces occupying Baghdad actually defended. Martin Sullivan, chair of the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for the previous eight years, and Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and a member of the committee, both resigned to protest the failure of CENTCOM to obey orders. Sullivan said it was "inexcusable" that the museum should not have had the same priority as the Oil Ministry.[18]
As we now know, the American forces made no effort to prevent the looting of the great cultural institutions of Iraq, its soldiers simply watching vandals enter and torch the buildings. Said Arjomand, an editor of the journal Studies on Persianate Societies and a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, wrote, "Our troops, who have been proudly guarding the Oil Ministry, where no window is broken, deliberately condoned these horrendous events."[19] American commanders claim that, to the contrary, they were too busy fighting and had too few troops to protect the museum and libraries. However, this seems to be an unlikely explanation. During the battle for Baghdad, the U.S. military was perfectly willing to dispatch some 2,000 troops to secure northern Iraq's oilfields, and their record on antiquities did not improve when the fighting subsided. At the 6,000-year-old Sumerian city of Ur with its massive ziggurat, or stepped temple-tower (built in the period 2112 - 2095 B.C. and restored by Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century B.C.), the Marines spray-painted their motto, "Semper Fi" (semper fidelis, always faithful) onto its walls.[20] The military then made the monument "off limits" to everyone in order to disguise the desecration that had occurred there, including the looting by U.S. soldiers of clay bricks used in the construction of the ancient buildings.
Until April 2003, the area around Ur, in the environs of Nasiriyah, was remote and sacrosanct. However, the U.S. military chose the land immediately adjacent to the ziggurat to build its huge Tallil Air Base with two runways measuring 12,000 and 9,700 feet respectively and four satellite camps. In the process, military engineers moved more than 9,500 truckloads of dirt in order to build 350,000 square feet of hangars and other facilities for aircraft and Predator unmanned drones. They completely ruined the area, the literal heartland of human civilization, for any further archaeological research or future tourism. On October 24, 2003, according to the Global Security Organization, the Army and Air Force built its own modern ziggurat. It "opened its second Burger King at Tallil. The new facility, co-located with [a].... Pizza Hut, provides another Burger King restaurant so that more service men and women serving in Iraq can, if only for a moment, forget about the task at hand in the desert and get a whiff of that familiar scent that takes them back home."[21]
The great British archaeologist, Sir Max Mallowan (husband of Agatha Christie), who pioneered the excavations at Ur, Nineveh, and Nimrud, quotes some classical advice that the Americans might have been wise to heed: "There was danger in disturbing ancient monuments.... It was both wise and historically important to reverence the legacies of ancient times. Ur was a city infested with ghosts of the past and it was prudent to appease them."[22]
The American record elsewhere in Iraq is no better. At Babylon, American and Polish forces built a military depot, despite objections from archaeologists. John Curtis, the British Museum's authority on Iraq's many archaeological sites, reported on a visit in December 2004 that he saw "cracks and gaps where somebody had tried to gouge out the decorated bricks forming the famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate" and a "2,600-year-old brick pavement crushed by military vehicles."[23] Other observers say that the dust stirred up by U.S. helicopters has sandblasted the fragile brick façade of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon from 605 to 562 B.C.[24] The archaeologist Zainab Bahrani reports, "Between May and August 2004, the wall of the Temple of Nabu and the roof of the Temple of Ninmah, both of the sixth century B.C., collapsed as a result of the movement of helicopters. Nearby, heavy machines and vehicles stand parked on the remains of a Greek theater from the era of Alexander of Macedon [Alexander the Great]."[25]
And none of this even begins to deal with the massive, ongoing looting of historical sites across Iraq by freelance grave and antiquities robbers, preparing to stock the living rooms of western collectors. The unceasing chaos and lack of security brought to Iraq in the wake of our invasion have meant that a future peaceful Iraq may hardly have a patrimony to display. It is no small accomplishment of the Bush administration to have plunged the cradle of the human past into the same sort of chaos and lack of security as the Iraqi present. If amnesia is bliss, then the fate of Iraq's antiquities represents a kind of modern paradise.
President Bush's supporters have talked endlessly about his global war on terrorism as a "clash of civilizations." But the civilization we are in the process of destroying in Iraq is part of our own heritage. It is also part of the world's patrimony. Before our invasion of Afghanistan, we condemned the Taliban for their dynamiting of the monumental third century A.D. Buddhist statues at Bamiyan in March, 2001. Those were two gigantic statues of remarkable historical value and the barbarism involved in their destruction blazed in headlines and horrified commentaries in our country. Today, our own government is guilty of far greater crimes when it comes to the destruction of a whole universe of antiquity, and few here, when they consider Iraqi attitudes toward the American occupation, even take that into consideration. But what we do not care to remember, others may recall all too well.
Chalmers Johnson's latest book is Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, now available in a Holt Paperback. It is the third volume of his Blowback Trilogy. This piece, originally posted on July 7, 2005, at TomDispatch.com, has also been collected in The World According to TomDispatch, America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008)
NOTES
[1.] American Embassy, London, " Visit of President Bush to Northern Ireland, April 7-8, 2003."
[2.] William R. Polk, "Introduction," Milbry Polk and Angela M. H. Schuster, eds., The Looting of the Iraq Museum: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), p. 5. Also see Suzanne Muchnic, "Spotlight on Iraq's Plundered Past," Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2005.
[3.] David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Owl Books, 1989, 2001), p. 450.
[4.] George Bush's address to the Iraqi people, broadcast on "Towards Freedom TV," April 10, 2003.
[5.] Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication (Washington, D.C.: September 2004), pp. 39-40.
[6.] See Frank Rich, "And Now: 'Operation Iraqi Looting,'" New York Times, April 27, 2003.
[7.] Robert Scheer, "It's U.S. Policy that's 'Untidy,'" Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2003; reprinted in Books in Flames, Tomdispatch, April 15, 2003.
[8.] John F. Burns, "Pillagers Strip Iraqi Museum of Its Treasures," New York Times, April 13, 2003; Piotr Michalowski (University of Michigan), The Ransacking of the Baghdad Museum is a Disgrace, History News Network, April 14, 2003.
[9.] Polk and Schuster, op. cit, pp. 209-210.
[10.] Mark Wilkinson, Looting of Ancient Sites Threatens Iraqi Heritage, Reuters, June 29, 2005.
[11.] Polk and Schuster, op. cit., pp. 23, 212-13; Louise Jury, "At Least 8,000 Treasures Looted from Iraq Museum Still Untraced," Independent, May 24, 2005; Stephen Fidler, "'The Looters Knew What They Wanted. It Looks Like Vandalism, but Organized Crime May be Behind It,'" Financial Times, May 23, 2003; Rod Liddle, The Day of the Jackals, Spectator, April 19, 2003.
[12.] Humberto Márquez, Iraq Invasion the 'Biggest Cultural Disaster Since 1258,' Antiwar.com, February 16, 2005.
[13.] Robert Fisk, "Library Books, Letters, and Priceless Documents are Set Ablaze in Final Chapter of the Sacking of Baghdad," Independent, April 15, 2003.
[14.] Polk and Schuster, op. cit., p. 10.
[15.] Guy Gugliotta, "Pentagon Was Told of Risk to Museums; U.S. Urged to Save Iraq's Historic Artifacts," Washington Post, April 14, 2003; McGuire Gibson, "Cultural Tragedy In Iraq: A Report On the Looting of Museums, Archives, and Sites," International Foundation for Art Research.
[16.] Rod Liddle, op. cit.; Oliver Burkeman, Ancient Archive Lost in Baghdad Blaze, Guardian, April 15, 2003.
[17.] See James A. R. Nafziger, Art Loss in Iraq: Protection of Cultural Heritage in Time of War and Its Aftermath, International Foundation for Art Research.
[18.] Paul Martin, Ed Vulliamy, and Gaby Hinsliff, U.S. Army was Told to Protect Looted Museum, Observer, April 20, 2003; Frank Rich, op. cit.; Paul Martin, "Troops Were Told to Guard Treasures," Washington Times, April 20, 2003.
[19.] Said Arjomand, Under the Eyes of U.S. Forces and This Happened?, History News Network, April 14, 2003.
[20.] Ed Vulliamy, Troops 'Vandalize' Ancient City of Ur, Observer, May 18, 2003; Paul Johnson, Art: A New History (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), pp. 18, 35; Polk and Schuster, op. cit., p. 99, fig. 25.
[21.] Tallil Air Base, GlobalSecurity.org.
[22.] Max Mallowan, Mallowan's Memoirs (London: Collins, 1977), p. 61.
[23.] Rory McCarthy and Maev Kennedy, Babylon Wrecked by War, Guardian, January 15, 2005.
[24.] Owen Bowcott, Archaeologists Fight to Save Iraqi Sites, Guardian, June 20, 2005.
[25.] Zainab Bahrani, "The Fall of Babylon," in Polk and Schuster, op. cit., p. 214.
Copyright 2005 & 2008 Chalmers Johnson

John McCain: Liar and Hypocrite

2008-08-22T15:22:00.000-07:00

A great little article from the L.A. Times, which truly does highlight the economic differences between the two Presidential candidates and, perhaps more importantly, the difference in attention to speaking honestly to the very people they wish to elect them.
McCain is a liar and a hypocrite.

"...The goal is to be seen as a man -- or woman -- of the people.Recall George H.W. Bush, the senator's son and scion of upper-crust Kennebunkport, Maine, munching on pork rinds on his way to presidential victory in 1988. Four years later, he marveled aloud at his first apparent encounter with a supermarket bar-code scanner -- and lost to Bill Clinton, who knew the price of a gallon of milk...
Remember that McCain is the man who told a bunch of bikers at a rally that he would rather listen to them revving their hogs in his honor than anything else. To him, he said, it was the sound of freedom...all that gas being wasted and exhaust being propelled outward (and among those many bikers were representatives of outlaw gangs that traffick in drugs, guns and murder). Then, remember this is the man who "jokingly" claimed that being wealthy involved being worth or making in a year $5,000,000. Further, remember this is the man who claimed that he would run a civil campaign, but stood to the side while his staffers questioned Barack Obama's patriotism, religious affiliation, closet cigarette smoking and even his familial heritage. Then, McCain said to the press that he was proud of these ads and didn't see them as negative or underhanded.
"...Bloggers already have made light of McCain's standard footwear: black leather Ferragamos that retail for $520. But no presidential candidate has ever owned so many homes that he couldn't come up with a number when asked.... "
And remember when we thought John Edwards's $400 haircut was outrageous?
...Most of Obama's income stems from his two bestselling books and an advance on a children's book. He and his family stayed at a friend's home last week in Hawaii, where beaches, in fact, are all public. Obama spent part of his childhood in Hawaii, and his grandmother lives there...
So, "elitist" doesn't seem to play as big a factor in his vacation as McCain said it did. Also, it is McCain who doesn't like to get up before 8 a.m. on the campaign tour and who regularly hides out on the weekends in order to "rejuice his battery". There's an oldness factor in play here that scares me. McCain claims he should be the one with his finger on the red button, but is he really the one who should be woken up at 3 a.m. when a national crisis occurs? He would be the oldest president ever elected. Nothing wrong with the wisdom that comes with age, but he has actually admitted he gets tired easily sometimes and needs extra rest. And this is before he even takes the most important office in our country, which stresses and taxes even the seemingly young and ages them beyond their years.
"...McCain, who huddled with advisors [sic] at his desert compound in Sedona, Ariz., said nothing in public. A nine-car motorcade took him to a nearby Starbucks early in the morning, where he ordered a large cappuccino. McCain otherwise avoided reporters..."
I have a co-worker who, two weeks ago, was fretting that she wouldn't be able to make it to the company's summer picnic, because she didn't know if she could afford the gas. And the picnic was at our office, which means one more trip to work than she would have done in a regular week. How would she feel upon finding out that McCain needed nine cars to get to and from a Starbucks for his precious cappucino?
I may not be totally enamored of Obama Barack, but I am definitely outraged by John McCain and his supposed connections to the common working class person. He has less in common with me than any evidence of past life we may someday find on Mars. At least, extinct Martian lichen may have one day breathed the same type of air as me. McCain never has held a real job in his life, one that involved getting a paycheck from an employer who provided no vacation or sick leave or medical insurance or one that involved balancing the weekly budget to find out what small luxuries could be afforded (like a movie or a dinner out or an evening down at the local watering hole. No, he was born into wealth, went into the military, crashed 4 planes, went straight into politics (via his family connections) and eventually married a beer fortune heiress after cheating repeatedly on his first wife. Oh, and along the way he spent time in a Vietnamese prison camp (the last plane mishap), which he gladly trots in order to prove he's a better American than almost everyone else.
McCain is a liar and a hypocrite. And, in my opinion, a sad commentary on our society's inability to parse the difference between those who try to do positive things for the country and those who claim entitlement through sheer happenstance while denigrating anyone who stands in their way.

Bwaaahaaahaaaa!!!!

2008-08-11T15:20:00.000-07:00

Dear friend I have a project I want you to run with us. It involves exportation of 100,000 barrels of crude oil daily from Kirkuk, Iraq. If you are interested, email me via: ccyun12@live.com Mr. Yan.

(the newest variation of "my father is former king of nigeria. he have lot money and wish to put in your bank. please help.")

2008-08-08T18:23:00.001-07:00

Well...John Edwards admitted to cheating on his wife after lying about it for a couple of years to the Press. Makes one think that he is not presidential or vice-presidential timber, don't it? The only reason he 'fessed up is because the (of all rags) National Enquirer got wind and wouldn't let it go. Who'da thunk the Enquirer would actually be telling the truth for once? Makes me wonder about their other stories that I once scoffed at, like: alien babies, aliens visiting every sitting president since Truman, crop circles, every celebrity ever known in a life and death battle with AIDS/cancer/weight, two-headed babies, lizard men, 1,200-year-old people walking the streets of New York, placentas in our Cheerios, Kirstie Alley making a comeback, Tom Cruise really being straight...really out there stuff.
But since they got this one right I have to truly reassess.
Back on track, though, is John Edwards really washed up now, because he finally admitted to an affair he had in the not-so-distant past? He's been named as a possible vice-president nominee. He was promised speaking time at the Democratic national Convention this year. Is he no longer washable and saleable to the American Public, because he transgressed, because he commited adultery? Because he lied to a tabloid and then was forced to eat crow in a very loud manner?
Well, if you say "Yes, he is done. Turn him over and stick a fork into him, because he is a sinner/liar/adulterer/cheat/traitor to the ones he claims to love, then let me introduce you to someone who is, also, political and involved in a much larger arena of growth:
John McCain. Thirty years ago, John cheated on his wife. Not only cheated once, but many times. And he documented all of this in a book written in later years when he was safely married to the last woman he cheated with (so far as we know). And the last woman he cheated with and eventually married? A heiress to a catsup (or ketchup for you Indianans) fortune. I say, John: good time to stop and smell the 57th spice.
So, if one John is to be condemned for an affair, is the other not as well? Or does 30 years wipe out the sin? I can guarantee that the one John's sin is too new to allow him to accept a nomination if such were to be offered (which I can say with all conviction it won't be), because the American Span of Attention is especially strong and harsh within the first 24 hours unless Paris Hilton tapes a rebuttal and dilutes the initial idiocy with more.
Suffice it to say, Edwards is done and forked for the amount of time it will take to uncover at least two more politicians' personal scandals that don't involve money, yachts or cocaine. Where the hell is Eliot Spitzer when you need him?
But let's get back to the man running for the White House. He cheated numerous times on his first wife, then documented it in a book fer cryin' out loud. But only after he was safely married to a very rich tomato and suger combo heiress. And everyone seems to have forgiven or forgot.
This is McCain: a man who claims to be a maverick for many years and actually voted in a manner that supports that supposition, but who recently began to mirror everything that the current Bush stands for in order to placate his constituents. He actually told supporters that offshore drilling would benefit us at the gas pump within months. He has, also, resorted to attack ads against Barack Obama, which defy everything he said after his ill-fated 2000 run against Shrub. He claimed then that he would never engage in that type of behavior against anyone of any stripe. But, now, he has.
So, he is a liar, an opportunist and a hypocrite.
Yet, it will be John Edwards who pays for right now, because our national memory lasts only as long as the newest tabloid headline.
Personally, I can't wait to hear what happens next to Britney's hair.

Highest Paid List For 2007

2008-07-24T15:26:00.000-07:00

Well, who woulda thunk it? Senor Mulva (rhymes with...) sits atop the heap. And it just gets better. Click here for the list of the top 100 and note how many are involved in the oil business. Of the top 25 I could only count 4 who are not directly connected to Big Oil. Pretty impressive for a group that annually cries at the door for government handouts. Y'know, all that "alternative research" for "alternative sources of energy" really leaves them in a hand-to-mouth existence. Oh wait, I read in yesterday's paper that last year the oil industry's percentage of profit spent on "alternative sources of energy" was under 3. Now, why is that? Hmmm, perhaps because they're counting on John McCain to replace Dumbya and push for offshore and Alaskan drilling. And if that becomes a reality...why, they can put off wind, solar and hydroelectric research for another (maybe) 20 years. Never mind that we control 2% of the world's finite oil fields while we consume 25% of the global product each year. And most experts agree that it will take 7-10 years before the oil companies can actually begin to pump oil from the ground and another three years to get it into our gas tanks. And that's if they started tomorrow.
And don't forget that McCain has blamed Barack Obama for high oil and gas prices. Not the current war or OPEC or China's, Indo-Asia's and Russia's new found thirst for it as they push forward in a mad race to replace us as the world's leading economy.
Nice to see that purchases of SUV's has hit an all-time low. Nice to know that registration of mopeds and scooters has hit an all-time high in the 'No.
Anyhoo, read on for the #1 douche in the top 100 bag o' buttspritzers (and don't get me wrong, I like what currency can help me do in this life; but there's a limit to how much anyone really needs. Enough to help out your children when you expire? Great. Enough to buy a third world country? Maybe a tad excessive).

Rank
1

James Mulva

Chairman, CEO and President

ConocoPhillips

Get current stock price
Total compensation
$50,549,026
Salary
$1,500,000
Bonus

Stock awards
$37,949,152
Option awards
$5,542,175
Non-equity incentive
$3,442,500
Change in pension value
$1,727,552
Other compensation
$387,647
Total cash
$4,942,500
Total long-term incentives
$43,491,327
Termination of employment
$28,557,587
Fiscal year end
December 31, 2007

Slow Food Nation 2008

2008-07-24T14:53:00.000-07:00

Now, this looks like fun. Slow Food Nation 2008 in San Francisco over Labor Day weekend. Gavin Newsom (mayor hottie extraordinaire) even allowed the group to dig up a quarter acre in front of City Hall in order to grow crops as a learning tool for those seeking to be self-sustaining gardeners. Some people look on this group as elitist and non-diversified (mostly Left-leaning Whites), but who really cares? It will be a gastronome's delight and perhaps an environmental education as well.
Click here for the banner page of the festival. Click here to visit Slow Food USA's main web page.
Oh, but it ain't free. There are tasteshops, workshops, pavilions, trips, whatnot. And it can be a bit pricey. So, maybe they are a little bit snobby in terms of affordability. But I would love to attend the heirloom tomato tasting (they're served in wine glasses) just for the sheer weirdness of it. Hopefully, there's some free stuff to attend open to the public. Hopefully.
I, however, will be camping and being self-sustaining in a whole other way, ifyouknowwhatImean.

Watchmen in 2009

2008-07-17T13:47:00.000-07:00

Rorschach from Watchmen (the greatest comic series ever; and, yes, I own all twelve books. I am uber-geek!):
9from MSNBC):

Based on the critically acclaimed graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, "Watchmen" has been in development for years but finally got the green light under the auspices of "300" director Zack Snyder, who took the story back to its roots by setting it in 1985, the year the graphic novel came out. The story depicts a world where superpowered humans slowly began to appear in the United States after World War II, and the Cold War still looms between the United States and the Soviet Union, which seem destined for a nuclear confrontation.

(from Wikipedia):

Watchmen is a twelve-issue comic book limited series written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. Originally published by DC Comics as a monthly limited series from 1986 to 1987, it was later republished as a trade paperback,[1] which popularized the "graphic novel" format. To date, Watchmen remains the only graphic novel to win a Hugo Award,[2] and is also the only graphic novel to appear on Time Magazine's 2005 list of "the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present."[3]

The movie will premiere some time next year and I can only hope against hope that it partially lives up to the comic series. With "300"'s director at the helm with his unique stylization of graphic novel tableaus, though, it's very possible. Alan Moore (the writer of the series) is, also, responsible for the graphic novel "V For Vendetta".

A Love Story, Part Two: Unrequited Passion and Betrayal

2008-07-07T15:15:00.000-07:00

2008-07-02T15:00:00.000-07:00

(Emailed to me by my sister)
A Love Story In Three Acts:

Yes! From June 27th We Get Animals Who Hate Humans

2008-06-30T15:23:00.000-07:00

One day after we left Yellowstone to journey back home a tourist of the smaller variety got what was coming to him. We witnessed total stupidity at the Park and it's a wonder this type of thing doesn't happen every freaking day (the above shot is Katie-did's):

Bison injures boy posing for photos at Yellowstone
2 days ago
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. (AP) — A 12-year-old boy is in the hospital after a bison he was posing near flipped him in the air at Yellowstone National Park.
The Pennsylvania boy's condition was not available after the attack Thursday.
Park officials say the boy was posing with family members within a couple of feet of the mature bull bison.
Park rules require visitors to stay at least 25 yards from bison.

Ha! Park rangers give everyone who enters the Park a complete set of rules concerning wild animals and no one reads it! So, when tourists are gored, mauled, trampled or just plain killed and eaten I say "YAY!!!!!" and "GO WILD BEASTS!!!!" and "ALL TOURISTS SHOULD DIE!!!", because I am not a real tourist. I am a law abiding drive by-er who parks in the designated area and flips the finger to those who don't abide. In fact, I think one of them has my digit on video from when they parked in a no-parking quarter mile that was protecting a nesting pair of bald eagles. Another has a vivid memory of more than one finger after they stopped in the road, got out and took a picture of a bison ambling down the East-bound lane ( and standing within 5 yards of the arrogant beast) and then stopped again within 45 seconds because (gasp!) an Elk was hanging by the side of the road.

Puttin' Your Trust In A Nonvengeful God

2008-06-21T08:41:00.000-07:00

Allegedly taken at Alabama Medical Center:

I figured since we're going to Yellowstone for my family reunion, but staying in Idaho, this is a good image to leave on.

Ah, The Bedfellows We Sleep With; Sun Myung Moon Is The Man

2008-05-26T16:37:00.000-07:00

As US Threatens Iran Over Enriching Uranium, Bush Promises to Give Enriched Uranium to Saudi Arabia
The Bush administration has pledged to support Saudi Arabia’s nuclear power program, including supplying enriched uranium for nuclear reactors. The agreement came out of President Bush’s visit to the Saudi kingdom last week, during which Bush also pledged new US assistance in guarding Saudi oil reserves. [includes rush transcript]

And this is just the Christians:
Jesus: Reverend Sun Myung Moon! Thou art the Second Coming who inaugurated the Completed Testament Age! The 120 people, who have brought light to the history of Christianity, pledge to take part in all that the True Parents do, and resolve to strive toward the ideal, the original garden where there is no original sin, through the guidance, the words of the Completed Testament, and the Unification Principle, of the Savior and Messiah, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. (2001.12.19)
Peter (Disciple of Jesus): I, Peter, representing the twelve disciples of Jesus, pledge to attend the Lord of the Second Coming, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, as Messiah and Savior.
Paul (Missionary): I, Paul, pledge to believe and attend the Lord of the Second Coming, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, as Messiah, Savior and True Parent, with the fire I felt when I met the resurrected Jesus on the road to Damascus. I will live with the words, "You must save the saints" in my heart.
John Calvin (Religious Reformer): God is the Parent of humankind and Reverend Sun Myung Moon is the Messiah, Savior and Second Coming. Therefore, I shall live by the teachings of the Lord, and I, John Calvin, pledge to become a pioneer in helping those who are still waiting for the Lord, who are in agony, following a theology of bigotry.
Martin Luther (Religious Reformer): I believe that God is the Parent of humankind. I believe that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is the Lord of the Second Advent. I proudly proclaim that the Unification Principle is the new gospel for humanity. I, Martin Luther, pledge that I will believe in these truths, and live a life of attendance, to become a pioneer for humanity.
John Wesley (Missionary and Revivalist): I, John Wesley, proclaim that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is the True Parent of all humankind and I pledge and pledge again to live according to the direction and teachings of the True Parents.
Karl Barth (Modern Theologian): Dear Reverend Sun Myung Moon: Although I am late in doing so, I, Karl Barth, wish to live a life of attendance to, and receive guidance from, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who is the Second Coming and Savior. True Parents, I wish to receive the messianic teachings. Please guide me in this. I pledge to live in attendance to the True Parents.
David Livingston (Missionary to Africa): Reverend Sun Myung Moon! O Second Coming of Christ! Dear True Parents, I, Livingston, wish to create a land of God's ideal, even if it is a modest place. Can you give me a place in which to do this? I pledge to live according to the guidance of the will of the Second Coming.
Jonathan Edwards (Leader of American Great Awakening): Reverend Sun Myung Moon! Lord! I am so grateful to you. Please forgive and save America with the magnanimity of True Parents. America is God's Garden of Eden. Let it remain as the eternal Eden on earth. I know that the ideal of the Lord is that of God, and only Godism can save America. I, Jonathan Edwards, promise to never change my heart attending the Second Coming.
John Smyth (Founder of the Baptist Church): O esteemed Reverend Sun Myung Moon! Please allow the grace of your blessing unto the whole of humanity, so that they may start a new life. Please open the way for humankind to be able to live together as brothers and sisters in a Garden of Eden without original sin as soon as possible. I, John Smyth, shall go anywhere, if the Lord goes with me.
John Harvard (Founder of Harvard University, Puritan): I, John Harvard, truly wish that not only the youth of Harvard University, but those of all the universities in the world, can be armed with Unification Principle and receive the guidance of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. I pledge to participate actively in Reverend Sun Myung Moon's movement for world peace.
St. Augustine (Bishop of Hippo, who laid the cornerstone of Catholic theology): I, Augustine, will move forward strongly in realizing the ideal of the Completed Testament Age, to allow all of humanity to have the Unification Principle as their truth and Reverend Sun Myung Moon as their Messiah. I respect, believe and depend on all the words and theology of Reverend Sun Myung Moon and I give my oath and pledge, raising my hands, to do all that I do together with the Lord.
Horace Underwood (American Presbyterian, first missionary to Korea): I, Horace Underwood, joyfully celebrate the fact that the Second Coming has come to Korea, an eastern country that takes polite etiquette very seriously. I put my hands together and bow to the Messiah. I pledge and give my word of honor to devote all that I possess in attendance to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

McCain and The Two Step Dissemble

2008-05-22T16:59:00.000-07:00

Shortly after "repudiating" the Reverend John Hagee's statement that Adolph Hitler's actions were merely the Will of Gawd (but not necessarily last testament) John Mccain made sure to let everyone know:
"I have said I do not believe Senator Obama shares Reverend Wright's extreme views. But let me also be clear, Reverend Hagee was not and is not my pastor or spiritual advisor, and I did not attend his church for twenty years. I have denounced statements he made immediately upon learning of them, as I do again today."
All well and good, I suppose. Except that McCain actively sought this guy's endorsement at a time when he was neck and neck with the Reverend Mike Huckabee for the hearts and votes of evangelical psychos and used them to pull away and earn the Republican endorsement for President. Except that McCain's actual spiritual guide (the Reverend Rod Parsley) says this:
"Islam is an anti-Christ religion that intends through violence to conquer the world."
And
"America was founded with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed and I believe Sept. 11, 2001 was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore."
And McCain has yet to "repudiate" Parsley. Not that extremist Islamics don't intend to conquer the woeld and force Islam down everyone's throats, just like the extremist Christians intend to do (see Ann Coulter and "Let's go in and convert them or kill them").
Hmmm, "rupudiate Parsley" sounds like something one would do with a zester or a slicer or something. I'd be satisfied with a boiling and basting.

Worst Album Ever?

2008-05-16T15:42:00.000-07:00

In no particular order (and many vomitous thanks to Generik for the link) are my votes for Worst Album Ever based on the list provided.
Supernova? Or Chevy Nova?

Convoy Pit Crew?

I think "He Touched Me" might not be about the Lord.

Featuring the smash hit: "Going Postal Blues".

...which made for very small sales.

Love Songs For Serial Killers

...ing.

Lick 'Em, Stick 'Em And Send 'Em

2008-05-14T17:48:00.000-07:00

Something I blogged a bit about sometime previously has finally reared its ugly head in the mainstream Press (oh yes, do I ever feel omniscient and overbearingly important). This article from the Washington Post speaks to the secretive disloyalty of our government when it comes to openness and transparency concerning legal moves. Why is it so important to drug up illegal aliens when removing them from our soil? is it because they could be a danger to those around them? How? How, when they are obviously going to be unarmed and surrounded by CIA or FBI or Secret Service or Federal Marshal goons who are armed and the subject will have obviously been searched and relieved of anything that could be thought of as a potential weapon? Most likely, it's because those "officials" concerned don't want to run the risk that the detainee might talk to other passengers, because these "undesirables" are being deported on commercial flights (something the Washington Post did not report, but I did some time ago...ooh, that feeling of self-righteousness is getting even more powerful). This is so fucking Big Brother...if we are to be seen by ourselves and the world as a true (cough, cough) "beacon of hope", then we cannot allow our leaders to engage in or otherwise condone this type of action against anyone. And these are not necessarily aliens being flown to secret foreign prisons (renditions in case any one's forgotten those). They are often simply being kicked out of the country. If they are in the country illegally, by all means make them leave if it's such a dangerously big deal. But drug them, sedate them to the point of unconsciousness or inability to speak? That is not American, that is not the hallmark of a Democracy that wants to "spread" its "love" (ala OB/GYNs and female patients to semi-quote the Commander in Crawford) to every corner of the world. That is Syrian and North Korean and Iranian and Libyan and Lebanese and Israeli and Russian (okay, to be honest, most of these countries would just kill the poor son of a bitch and dump him just on the other side of their borders if they cared even that much, but you get the idea...).
But what are we doing here and why? And what message are we sending out? This, obviously, is an action that the administration hoped would never be seen in public print. It is, also, an action that someone in the Administration decided was not only good for our country, but was somehow potentially legally defensible like electronic eavesdropping without a warrant (national security trump card) or waterboarding because no international treaty we ever signed actually spelled that one out (although one or more did).
Are we truly being protected by this activity, because foreigners are outstaying their visas or lied on their applications about crimes committed in their home countries? The Saudis who flew planes into the Trade Center Towers didn't lie about past crimes. I don't know if any of them outstayed their visas. But they were doing stuff that should have raised red flags from here to the moon (like wanting to learn to steer a plane but not take off or land) and no one in power paid any attention to the alerts from field agents (FBI). Now, they're taking out anyone who doesn't toe the line to a T. And physically abusing them to boot whether it's warranted or not.
I am not a supporter of the Wall On The Rio. I think it's a waste of money and penalizes those who actually help our economy (keeping produce prices low) and do their best to stay on the right side of the law (minus that little matter of coming into the country illegally) and deflects our attention from more important problems like our economy crumbling because of a certain war in Iraq and a certain dependence on oil and politicians and Big Business stealing as many of our freedoms as they can in as short a time as they can by crying out that more people could fly a plane into a building at any given time and they'd love to tell us how many times they've saved us from this exact scenario since 9/11, but they are constrained by the National Security Act so we just have to take their word for it. How many times have we been told that, by the way? 100? 200?
But back to the Washington Post story. It's been reported many times before over two or three years and now, finally, a big paper is talking about it. Why? Are the big papers just now getting over their fear of Big Government? Or do they know that Bush is a lame duck and is too involved in putting out so many other fires created by his and his advisers' incompetency? Are they now truly pissed off at and shamed by their involvement in this Administration's Covert War On Americans that they feel a need to atone for their sins? I mean, I'll take it for whatever reason even if it's only this one topic. But there is so much more for the big papers and overall media to do before they can make it up to me for the last seven years of lapdog complacency.
But I'll take it.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.
The newspaper said it has identified 250 cases in which the government has, without medical reason, given drugs meant to treat serious psychiatric disorders to people it has shipped out of the United States since 2003.
Involuntary chemical restraint of detainees without medical justification is a violation of some international human rights codes, the Post reported.
Records show that the government has routinely ignored its own rules, which allow deportees to be sedated only if they have a mental illness requiring the drugs, or if they are so aggressive that they imperil themselves or people around them.
The Department of Homeland Security's new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) took over deportations in 2003.
ICE has stepped up the arrest and removal of foreigners who are in the United States illegally, who have been turned down for asylum or have been convicted of a crime in the past, the Post reported.
A spokesman for the agency was not immediately available for comment.

McCain's Other Ear

2008-05-08T21:07:00.000-07:00

"I can't begin to tell you how important it is that we understand the true nature of Islam. That we see it for what it really is. In fact...I do not believe that our nation can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam…I know that this statement sounds extreme. But I am not shrinking back from its implications. The fact is that...America was founded in part with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed. And I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we no longer can afford to ignore."

These are the words of Rod Parsley, a so-called Man of God, a Preacher, who is described by John McCain as John McCain's "spiritual guide". McCain refuses to denounce these words or any others uttered by Parsley or reject parsley's endorsement of him for President. I wouldn't normally care, because everyone famous has nutjobs riding their coattails. But, in this instance, McCain has called on Barack Obama to denounce Jeremiah Wright's feiry rhetoric and to reject Wright's endorsement.
And when exactly did our Founding Fathers decide that one of the overriding directives of our new democracy was to wipe out Islam? I don't recall reading that or being told that in school. While we, as a part of Western civilization, have been at odds and intermittent war with Islamic countries for quite some time I don't think that the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution call for the demise of Islam. Colonial monarchy, yes. Islam, not so much. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. Please.
Other things Parsley has said:

"I just love to talk about your money. Let me be very clear -- I want your money. I deserve it. This church deserves it."
"Only 1 percent of the homosexual population in America will die of old age. The average life expectancy for a homosexual in the United States of America is 43 years of age. A lesbian can only expect to live to be 45 years of age. Homosexuals represent 2 percent of the population, yet today they're carrying 60 percent of the known cases of syphilis."

Like I said, I don't usually lend much of an ear to those who surround those who seek public office, because some are always going to be extreme in their opinions. But for McCain to publicly embrace Parsley and Hagee and basically tell the nation that these two people will have his ear if he's elected to the highest office in our land is irresponsible, unethical and downright two-faced when he's calling for Obama to completely reject Wright.

Full Court Press

2008-05-08T15:53:00.000-07:00

U.S. lease of Waterloo fairgrounds raises questions
By WILLIAM PETROSKI • REGISTER STAFF WRITER • May 6, 2008

Federal officials have imposed a news blackout at the National Cattle Congress fairgrounds in Waterloo, where they have leased almost the entire property through May 25.Tim Counts, a Midwest spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, declined to say Monday whether an immigration raid is pending that would use the fairgrounds as a detention center.
"ICE never talks about our investigative activity or possible future enforcement actions," Counts said. "Regarding the exercise in Waterloo, there is currently no publicly releasable information about that, so we aren't releasing any."He declined to say whether the "exercise" involves training or an immigration enforcement operation."We expect that at some point there will be additional information available, but I can't speculate at what point that might be," Counts said.
In December 2006, ICE conducted an immigration raid at the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Marshalltown. Many workers were transported to Camp Dodge in Johnston, where military barracks were used as temporary detention facilities. A total of 1,282 Swift workers were arrested in Iowa and five other states in the biggest crackdown in history on immigration violations at one company.The Waterloo Courier on Sunday reported that contractors have installed generators adjacent to many buildings at the fairgrounds.
In addition, windows on many buildings have been covered up, blocking views inside. A number of mobile-home-size trailers have been transported to the privately owned grounds.Doug Miller, general manager of the Cattle Congress, declined Monday to release a copy of his group's rental contract with U.S. General Services Administration. He also indicated he was in the dark about what's happening inside the fairgrounds."I have no idea. They are conducting whatever exercise they are conducting without telling me all the details of it. I don't have any information to share with you, really," Miller said.
Representatives of Gov. Chet Culver and U.S. Sens. Tom Harkin and Charles Grassley said they had no information about what was happening at the Cattle Congress fairgrounds.At Grassley's request, his staff called ICE officials on Monday."During the call, the ICE officials would neither confirm nor deny anything to Senator Grassley's staff," said Beth Pellett Levine, a Grassley aide.Armando Villareal, administrator of the Iowa Division of Latino Affairs, said he hadn't heard any reports about impending immigration raids. But he added that many Latinos in Iowa are feeling tension and fear.
"Folks have resigned themselves that something terrible is going to happen between now and the election. It is more like a resignation that something is going to happen," Villareal said.

Directive 51 (just for us conspiracy theorists):
(from Wikipedia)
The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive (National Security Presidential Directive NSPD-51/Homeland Security Presidential Directive HSPD-20, sometimes called simply "Executive Directive 51" for short), signed by United States President George W. Bush on May 4, 2007, is a Presidential Directive which specifies the procedures for continuity of the federal government in the event of a "catastrophic emergency." Such an emergency is construed as "any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions." [1]
The unclassified portion of the directive was posted on the White House website on May 9, 2007, without any further announcement or press briefings,[2] although Special Assistant to George W. Bush Gordon Johndroe answered several questions on the matter when asked about it by members of the press in early June 2007.[3]

(The Directive specifies that all three branches of government will work together, but be coordinated by the president even though all three branches are designated as equal in the Constitution and no one branch can dictate the actions of another.)

My Version Of Generik's Lyric Contest (And I Give you Both Answers Right Off)

2008-04-30T16:54:00.000-07:00

Which of the following quotes was not spoken by the Rev. John Hagee and which two were spoken by Sen. John McCain. (Hint: McCain's is the very last two)
"The Quran teaches that [all Muslims have a mandate to kill Christians and Jews]. Yes, it teaches that very clearly."
" I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans...I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are -- were recipients of the judgment of God for that...There was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades...The Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before the day of judgment."
"...the president's support for Israel fulfills a biblical injunction to protect the Jewish state," which "will play a pivotal role in the second coming."
"Do you know the difference between a woman with PMS and a snarling Doberman pinscher? The answer is lipstick. Do you know the difference between a terrorist and a woman with PMS? You can negotiate with a terrorist."
"[T]he feminist movement today is throwing off authority in rebellion against God's pattern for the family."
"The military will have difficulty recruiting healthy and strong heterosexuals for combat purposes. Why? Fighting in combat with a man in your fox hole that has AIDS or is HIV positive is double jeopardy" (blogger's note: doing anything with someone in my "foxhole" would be difficult, so Hagee may actually have a point here)
"It [Gay marriage] will open the door to incest, to polygamy, and every conceivable marriage arrangement demented minds can possibly conceive. If God does not then punish America, He will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah."
"It is impossible to call yourself a Christian and defend homosexuality. There is no justification or acceptance of homosexuality.... Homosexuality means the death of society because homosexuals can recruit, but they cannot reproduce."
"Homosexuality means the death of society because homosexuals can recruit, but they cannot reproduce."
"As millions of people anticipate the release of the latest Harry Potter book and film, we're reminded once again of Satan's ongoing attempt to deceive and destroy. The whole purpose of the Potter books is to desensitize readers and introduce them to the occult."
"Only a Spirit-filled woman can submit to her husband's lead. It is the natural desire of a woman to lead through feminine manipulation of the man. .... Fallen women will try to dominate the marriage. The man has the God-given role to be the loving leader of the home"
On the Antichrist: “He’s going to make a seven-year treaty with Israel and set up his image to be worshiped in Israel. And that is where I’m convinced that a Jewish person who understands who he is shoots him, because the Bible says he’s wounded in the head and recovers wondrously, emulating the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. At this point in time when he comes back to life he has the personality of a Hitler. He now pursues the Jewish people. The Jewish people then go to Petra, which is a place in Jordan that is a natural fortress. And that God is going to provide for them there protection from him. And as he gets ready to pursue him, the Bible says that he, the Antichrist, hears tidings from the east that disturb him. The tidings from the east is that… the Chinese army is marching up the Euphrates River, 200 million of them, and they’re moving toward the battle of Armageddon, because they want the oil that will make them a superpower.”
On the Israeli-Palestinian peace process: “When the Annapolis Conference was being planned and the topic of dividing Jerusalem came up, one man asked me, ‘Where do you stand on this based on the Bible?’ I responded that ‘the plan of the Antichrist is to divide Jerusalem.’ If America puts pressure on Israel to divide Jerusalem we are following the blueprint of the Prince of Darkness. Amos 3:2 states that any nation that divides the Land of Israel will come under the severe judgment of God.” (blogger's note: there's an Amos in the Bible? Really? Suddenly, Kevin Smith's 13th apostle Rufus has more credence)

“I am very honored by pastor John Hagee’s endorsement.”
“Anyone who worries about how long we’re in Iraq does not understand the military and does not understand war." (blogger's note: evidently, neither do Bush and McCain since they can't decide on how long we're supposed to be there or how long we might be there or why we're actually there or who we're supposed to be fighting or...well, dammit, what the you-know-what is actually going on at any given time)

Your Fingers, Fogeddaboutit!

2008-04-25T21:19:00.000-07:00

Um...uh...wow...
QUESTION: Some are raising that the privacy aspects of this thing, you know, sharing of that kind of data, very personal data, among four countries is quite a scary thing.
SECRETARY CHERTOFF: Well, first of all, a fingerprint is hardly personal data because you leave it on glasses and silverware and articles all over the world, they’re like footprints. They’re not particularly private.
Go here for the article.

I'm Just Dreaming: Kill Rush Limbaugh! This is a Joke, In Case the FBI Has Nothing Better To Do Like Prosecute Rush For Advocating Violence On Others

2008-04-25T20:27:00.000-07:00

Rush Limbaugh 'Dreaming' Of Riots In Denver
Talk Show Host Wants America To See Actions Of 'Far Left'

DENVER -- Talk show host Rush Limbaugh is sparking controversy again after he made comments that appear to call for riots in Denver during the Democratic National Convention this summer.
He said the riots would ensure a Democrat is not elected as president, and his listeners have a responsibility to make sure it happens.
"Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don't elect Democrats," Limbaugh said during Wednesday's radio broadcast. He then went on to say that's the best thing that could happen to the country.
Limbaugh cited Al Sharpton, saying the Barack Obama supporter threatened to superdelegates that "there's going to be trouble" if the presidency is taken from Obama.
Several callers called in to the radio show to denounce Limbaugh's comments, when he later stated, "I am not inspiring or inciting riots, I am dreaming of riots in Denver."
Limbaugh said with massive riots in Denver, which he called part of "Operation Chaos," the people on the far left would look bad.
"There won't be riots at our convention," Limbaugh said of the Republican National Convention. "We don't riot. We don't burn our cars. We don't burn down our houses. We don't kill our children. We don't do half the things the American left does."
He believes electing Democrats will hurt America's security and economy and appeared to call on his listeners to make sure that doesn't happen.
"We do, hopefully, the right thing for the sake of this country. We're the only one in charge of our affairs. We don't farm out our defense if we elect Democrats ... and riots in Denver, at the Democratic Convention will see to it we don't elect Democrats. And that's the best damn thing that can happen to this country, as far as I can think," Limbaugh said.
Later, Limbaugh downplayed his "dreaming of riots in Denver" statement, and said that he wasn't calling for riots and was referring to warnings of trouble if superdelegates decide the nomination at the Democratic National Convention.
Limbaugh's comments prompted Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper to say, "Anyone who would call for riots in an American city has clearly lost their bearings."
Democratic Sen. Ken Salazar also responded to Limbaugh's comments Friday, asking Lee Larsen, senior vice president of Clear Channel Radio Rocky Mountain Region to reprimand Limbaugh.
"As I read Mr. Limbaugh's comments about riots at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, they appear to me to be a clear exhortation that those riots are exactly what he wants to happen," Salazar said in a letter to Larsen.
Denver will host the DNC on Aug. 25 to Aug. 28.

You want to know what I'm dreaming of? Riots outside Limbaugh's studio ala Fallujah and the contractors who were killed, quartered and strung up on a bridge. Not that I would ever call for or advocate it. That would be wrong. Right? And in no way should I ever be held responsible if the millions of people who listen to my treasonous tripe should act upon it. Because I'm just dreaming here. Pure fantasy, afternoon woodie stuff that reflects nothing other than my own moral turptitude and the fact that I have a huge johnson for the days of segregation and White is Right and my Daddy telling me that "this is our little secret". It's just me, folks, having a bit of fun. Just because I named it "Operation Kill Limbaugh" means nothing. What's in a name after all? Nothing. So, if any of you who read this decide to act on it, just remember that I'm joking. I don't want Limbaugh dead. No! And I don't seriously want him hacked apart and strung up. No! No! Even though he represents everything I find deplorable and amoral and dehumanizing and pettyminded and vindictive and anti-American and unpatriotic (whatever that means) and downright inbred and cowardly. Even though all of that. No! Don't go out and riot in front of his station or home and kill him and take machetes to him and hang him from the highest streetlight. No! That would be wrong. And it would be stooping to his level (if such a level could be stooped to without the minutest of calipers to judge the measurement). And I don't want that.
I'm just dreaming, after all.

Daily Kos Hits One Out Of The Park

2008-04-23T16:24:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I just gotta love the Daily Kos:
(excerpted from her latest blog)
ME: First off, Mr. Ashcroft, I'd like to apologize for the rudeness of some of my fellow students. It was uncalled for--we can disagree civilly, we don't need that. (round of applause from the audience, and Ashcroft smiles) I have here in my hand two documents. One of them, you know, is the text of the United Nations Convention against Torture, which, point of interest, says nothing about "lasting physical damage"...
ASHCROFT: (interrupting) Do you have the Senate reservations to it? ME: No, I don't. Do you happen to know what they are?
ASHCROFT: (angrily) I don't have them memorized, no. I don't have time to go around memorizing random legal facts. I just don't want these people in the audience to go away saying, "He was wrong, she had the proof right in her hand!" Because that's not true. It's a lie. If you don't have the reservations, you don't have anything. Now, if you want to bring them another time, we can talk, but...
ME: Actually, Mr. Ashcroft, my question was about this other document. (laughter and applause) This other document is a section from the judgment of the Tokyo War Tribunal. After WWII, the Tokyo Tribunal was basically the Nuremberg Trials for Japan. Many Japanese leaders were put on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including torture. And among the tortures listed was the "water treatment," which we nowadays call waterboarding...
ASHCROFT: (interrupting) This is a speech, not a question. I don't mind, but it's not a question.
ME: It will be, sir, just give me a moment. The judgment describes this water treatment, and I quote, "the victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach." One man, Yukio Asano, was sentenced to fifteen years hard labor by the allies for waterboarding American troops to obtain information. Since Yukio Asano was trying to get information to help defend his country--exactly what you, Mr. Ashcroft, say is acceptible for Americans to do--do you believe that his sentence was unjust? (boisterous applause and shouts of "Good question!") ASHCROFT: (angrily) Now, listen here. You're comparing apples and oranges, apples and oranges. We don't do anything like what you described.
ME: I'm sorry, I was under the impression that we still use the method of putting a cloth over someone's face and pouring water down their throat...
ASHCROFT: (interrupting, red-faced, shouting) Pouring! Pouring! Did you hear what she said? "Putting a cloth over someone's face and pouring water on them." That's not what you said before! Read that again, what you said before!
ME: Sir, other reports of the time say...
ASHCROFT: (shouting) Read what you said before! (cries of "Answer her fucking question!" from the audience) Read it!
ME: (firmly) Mr. Ashcroft, please answer the question.
ASHCROFT: (shouting) Read it back!
ME: "The victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach."
ASHCROFT: (shouting) You hear that? You hear it? "Forced!" If you can't tell the difference between forcing and pouring...does this college have an anatomy class? If you can't tell the difference between forcing and pouring...
ME: (firmly and loudly) Mr. Ashcroft, do you believe that Yukio Asano's sentence was unjust? Answer the question. (pause)
ASHCROFT: (more restrained) It's not a fair question; there's no comparison. Next question! (loud chorus of boos from the audience)

Give Me liberty Or Give Me Gingrich!

2008-04-19T18:45:00.000-07:00

What unmitigated gall! What chutzpah! What vanity! What a donkey's ass! That we would give up ALL of our liberties and freedoms to ensure protection from any unidentified and nebulous threats. We have been giving up our liberties for about 8 years now based on unjustified threats. And for what? So an illegally seated president and his cabal could line the pockets of Big Business. And foreign governments. Not that any other president hasn't taken advantage of uncertainty to reward loyal investors, but this one has taken the practice beyond the pale. And to have a disgraced politician (one who had divorce papers served on his wife while she was in the hospital undergoing cancer treatment) pushes it even further. To have this...this...this chihuahua of a man, this land piranha tell me that I would give up all of my most profound beliefs because hesays I would without even asking me is the epitome of arrogance.
But don't believe me. Please read:

Contradicting His Hero Ben Franklin, Gingrich Says Americans ‘Will Give Up All Their Liberties’ For Safety »
Yesterday, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich visited Drew University in New Jersey, where he took questions from 20 political science majors there. When one asked him how the government could justify stripping rights from Americans in such pieces of legislation as the Patriot Act, Gingrich said that the government has a “right to defend society,” and when under threat, “people will give up all their liberties“:
“If there’s a threat, you have a right to defend society,” Gingrich said. “People will give up all their liberties to avoid that level of threat.“
Gingrich is directly contradicted by Benjamin Franklin, who rejected the notion that one should give up one’s liberties out of fear:
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
This disagreement is significant, because Gingrich considers Franklin one of his heroes. He prides himself on his Pennsylvania upbringing, where he says “it was easy…to imbue a deep sense of the freedom that is at the heart of the American tradition,” and he frequently invokes Franklin to buttress his conservative claims about individual responsibility and religion in public life:
“Only Franklin personified the striving, ambitious, rising system of individual achievement, hard work, thrift and optimism found at the heart of the American spirit. Only Franklin worked his way up in the worlds of business and organized political power in both colonial and national periods. Only Franklin was a…creator of the American mythos of the common man.”
“During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin (often considered one of the least religious of the Founding Fathers) proposed that the Convention begin each day with a prayer. … [T]he Founding Fathers, from the very birth of the United States, saw God as central to defining America.”
“Franklin, who was quite old and had been relatively quiet for the entire Convention, suddenly stood up and was angry, and he said: I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men, and if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it possible that an empire can rise without His aid?”
Gingrich accuses “the secular Left” of trying to rid religion from public life, thereby “distorting the Constitution to achieve a goal that the Founding Fathers would have found to be a fundamental threat to liberty.” Yet it his own cavalier subordination of civil liberties in the name of national security that would truly offend the Founders.

Oh Goodness. Really. "Patriotic Zeal".

2008-04-18T14:58:00.000-07:00

Mood turns ugly in Beijing
Posted: Friday, April 18, 2008 2:16 PMFiled Under: Beijing, China
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News producer
What a difference a couple of months can make.
As people returned to work following the end of the Chinese New Year holidays in February, there was a palpable sense of anticipation for the Olympic Summer Games. The intense winter cold snap lasted longer than the holidays, but there was a spring in everyone’s step.
Friends working in professions as diverse as business and the arts spoke of an accelerated rate of activity; people seemed to be jetting back and forth from the United States and Europe in a frenzy to meet deadlines on special projects before the Games begin August 8.
AP
Chinese youths protest outside a Carrefour supermarket, a French owned company, in Qingdao in east China's Shandong province on April 18.
My e-mail inbox was getting clogged on a more regular basis with press conference notices from the Beijing Olympic authorities, BOCOG. And I was fielding dozens of requests from far-flung friends to crash on the floor of my apartment in the months leading up to August.
It was as though Beijing had become the center of the world and everyone wanted to be here.
And then, the protests and violence in Tibet and surrounding regions happened.
In response to international condemnation of its policies in Tibet, the Chinese government has taken a hard line against critics. At the same time, Chinese people have become more upset over what they perceive as Western media bias against their nation.

Targeting the Western press CNN has been the target of intense criticism and threats for allegedly biased coverage of the protests in Tibet, and particularly for remarks made by commentator Jack Cafferty, who referred to China’s leaders – not the Chinese people – as a "bunch of goons and thugs."
On Thursday, CNN’s bureau chief in Beijing was summoned to China’s Foreign Ministry, where officials demanded an apology and a retraction of Cafferty’s comments.
CNN has apologized for any offence, and Cafferty clarified on air earlier in the week that his comments were referring specifically to the government and "not to Chinese people or to Chinese-Americans."
But even before this latest incident, we had heard from CNN staff that non-essential personnel had been asked to stay away from the CNN Beijing office because threats from angry Chinese activists were growing serious.
A Chinese friend who once worked for CNN learned Friday that his name and personal information had been posted on one of the more virulent anti-Western media Web sites in China. He said he was shocked by the coarse language people used to accuse him of being a traitor.
Not just CNNAn acquaintance at a top-selling U.S. newsmagazine described an incident in which someone rang the doorbell of her home and tried to set off a fire extinguisher in her face when she opened the front door.
NBC News hasn’t been subject to the same level of harassment as some other media outlets, but for several weeks now in the late evenings our bureau has received prank phone calls from Chinese people asking whether we are CNN or just randomly cursing all Western media.
The anxiety isn’t confined to journalists.
Chinese furious over how the Olympic torch was received in Paris on April 7 are planning a demonstration Saturday in front of a branch of the French supermarket, Carrefour. And a more widespread boycott of all Carrefour branches planned for May 1 is gathering steam.
A friend with French relatives coming to visit Beijing next week is anxious about how they might be treated and is reluctant to leave them on their own to explore the capital.
In a way, however, this French family is lucky they can even be here.
Crackdown on visitors and residents Chinese authorities are cracking down on entry visas. Reports are circulating among U.S. businessmen that many companies are starting to suffer from a restriction on business visas for legitimate employees.
Every foreign freelancer or independent contractor I know here is looking for a sponsor, as they’ve been warned their current – and legitimate – business visas are not likely to be renewed. Even a college student whom NBC agreed to take on for the summer has had to cut short his internship, because he won’t be allowed to extend his student visa beyond August 1; extending a visa was previously a common practice.
It’s believed that the visa restrictions are to prevent foreign activists from entering China ahead of the Olympics and staying through the games.
One of our local staffers told me that five security people showed up at her home at 9:30 p.m. Wednesday, pounding on her front door and demanding to see her local residency permit. They were rude, she said, and they examined parts of her apartment without her consent.
"They wanted to know if I was the only one living here," she said.
Of course, some of this might appear trivial compared to the domestic political housecleaning taking place across China. Many dissidents or potential noisemakers have been rounded up since December.
In the wake of these incidents, one can only wonder if this is the image China’s government and its people really want to present to the outside world as they prepare to host an Olympics bearing the banner "One World One Dream."
Perhaps not. A commentary posted on the state-run Xinhua news agency Web site Friday urges the Chinese people to contain their "patriotic zeal."

Hee. Hee hee. Oh, the similarities between our two countries. Other than they make things for really, really cheap and sell their girl-children into slavery or something like that. Patriotic zeal, indeed. Sounds more like what we were doing to Muslims and all other dark-skinned folk after 9/11. Not to mention the attacks on those Cheese Eating Surrender (Hey Hey We're The) Monkeys, I mean Le French.
So, those of you who claim that we and the Chinks have nothing in common and they are just damn dirty Commies, think again. They are becoming more and more like us. Or us like them. Not sure. Hmmm....Either way, power do corrupt, do it not? And unchecked power, it do make for strange phrases. Patriotic zeal...ah crap, that's funny.

An Argument (in a way) For Eliot Spitzer

2008-03-14T15:57:00.000-07:00

The Fed announced a $200,000,000 bailout to the unfortunate banking dildos caught up short by the current housing foreclosure/subprime mess. Immediately following, the Stock Market took a shit (again). Greg Palast has a very good article about this , much better written and researched than a lowly nyuck like me could do (and that is why he gets paid for what he does, though often ignored by the mainstream press). But isn't it coincidental that Eliot Spitzer gets nabbed in a prostitution ring sting right before the Fed pulls off this megapayoff at the expense of...US! That $200 Billion wasn't private money. It was ours. We, in effect, paid off the very banks and lenders that instigated this type of predatory loaning and flexible APR. Countrywide is now "under investigation" by the "Justice Department" for its immoral and (not quite yet) illegal actions. Countrywide is now, also, owned by Bank Of America.
Spitzer was the main man in charge of attacking these greedy bastards and stopping them from raping those of us who, through ignorance or lack of any other opportunity, agreed to what we thought was a fair and above-board deal. He was hated by the lenders, the banks and George Bush. He stood in the way (not very well, actually) of those entities and Saudi Arabia of making hundreds of Billions individually and walking away with none noticing.
Most of what Greg Palast writes in his newest missive I knew about in general. I did NOT know that B of A had bought Countrywide.
I DID know that Congressman Greg Vitters ( a Republican, by the way) had been caught in the same kind of sting and was being treated with kid gloves by the Feds. In fact, they tried to keep his name silent. He still hasn't been convicted as far as I know of whatever it is that Johns get convicted of. And he was using public money to get his rocks off. Unlike Spitzer who paid out of his own pocket.
What was my first thought when I read that Spitzer had been connected to a call girl ring?
Answer: What a dumbass dickhead!
Unlike the so-called "moral" morons who sprinkle this country with their holier-than-thou attitudes and "I read it in the Bible, so it must be true" tripe, I don't care what a man or woman does on their own time so long as no one is injured by it (and by "no one" I mean "other than themselves", and by "injured" I mean neither physically, financially or empirically). You might say "But Fishstick, his wife and children WERE injured".
To that I reply: yes, but so what? He is as human as human gets. More so in one sense of the word. Those who do not fuck up are, in my eyes, less than human, so caught up as they are about being better than everyone else and closer to "perfection".
Spitzer fucked up. But his true sin (if there is such a thing) was to do it as a Public Figure dedicated to rooting out crime and corruption. He committed crime and it showed us the perception of corruption. He let down so many of the wage earners who believed that he was "better" than them and those he was after. He disappointed all of the blue collars hoping for justice against all those who benefited from deceptive legal practices and the protection of the government. He had stood up to the powers that be and spit in their eyes as a mouthpiece for us.
And, because of that, he was watched. And he knew that. And, still, he partook of pleasures forbidden by law and the Puritans who have ruled our country for too long. Puritans who, in turn, break these very laws and expect to get away with it. Who know they will get away with it so long as they have the proper walls and buffers in place. Spitzer forgot that rule: when you run afoul of those making the money, you will be crushed on the reefs of their power.
And it's a shame. He was doing good for us the taxpayers. He was shining a spotlight on the greed still espoused by the same small cabal for so many, many years.
Did he succumb to the pressures of the job? Did his homelife suffer from the demands of his calling? Probably yes to both. Did he use good judgement while hiring a prostitute? Definitively NO. The corrupt and immoral can get away with this type of activity much easier than the torch bearers for they have set the groudrules.
And the ground rules are simple: those who speak out against unlawful or unethical or immoral actions will be the first to get caught in these actions, because that is part of the ground rules set forth by those who have the money and power to engage in them. Those who speak out against must held to a tighter leash by the very ones who are for.
Spitzer gets caught for being a John and the Bush government then allows the Fed to ship $200 million of our money to banks and lenders who raped us. An action Spitzer was trying to point out and not allow.
And yet. Does Spitzer deserve a rebuke for being a dumbshit? Yes. Does he deserve to feel the wrath of his wife and family? Yes. Did he do well to admit he let down the people he claimed to represent? Yes. Did he take the higher moral road in quitting his office? Yes.
And yet. Was he caught with thousands of bribe dollars in his freezer and then claim immunity (Jefferson)? Did he claim that he would wait until all the facts were in before saying that he was being taken out of context just because he had a "meeting" with a known hooker and still manage to serve more time in Congress (Vitter)? Did he plead guilty and then try to retract his plea, because of a misunderstanding about public bathroom behavior (Craig)?
Also, why was Spitzer outted so quickly? Vitter wasn't. Craig wasn't. The press had to actually dig for those. Spitzer was handed to the press immediately on a silver platter. By whom? The only enemies he had were those in the banking business and the Bush administration. So who blew the whistle? Who had access to an undercover federal sting operation? Well, that would be the Feds, wouldn't it? And why would they want to blow the whistle on a major player?
Sort of smells like a Don Seigelman whitewash. And I want to know who the other major players are who the Feds have names for in this sting. So far, only Spitzer, even though the UK papers are saying that member of the Queen's family is involved (but if he had relations with a female hooker, then they are probably breathing a huge sigh of relief).
So, who else? Or is Spitzer enough for the Feds? Or is Spitzer the only one they wanted? I don't defend him, because he's a Democrat. I don't defend him at all. It's been a long time since I really differentiated the two parties when it comes to corruption and personal lust for power at the expense of all others (see Clinton v. Obama v. McCain). What I want to know is how many others of notable repute were caught up in this web? And why are they not being trotted before the fawning press corps? I will not believe he is the only one who should come tumbling down. This was a very discreet (so they thought) and expensive prostitution ring spanning two continents and numerable countries. So, where are the others?
And why are we not screaming for their heads as we did when we found out about Eliot Spitzer?

Smoke and Mirrors

2008-03-06T16:35:00.000-08:00

Clinton Wins Texas!!!
Clinton Wins Texas!!!

Or did she?

What many, including me, didn't know about is the "Texas Two Step", which involves Texas holding its primary and its caucus votes on the same day. If you vote in the primary you can then vote in the caucus of your district (or the other way around; it's a weird dance). So, Clinton wins the primary garnering her X number delegates, but the caucuses control delegates as well. And the caucus numbers are looking like Obama will win that majority giving him a total of four more delegates for the entire state when the primary and caucus delegates are totaled up.
So, Obama actually wins, just like Gore in Florida in 2000 (though that wasn't known until over a year later when all legal ballots were recounted as a sort of academic exercise). But the public at large will be left with a mental picture like the one at top and think that Clinton pulled off the sweep she and her husband said she had to. And the media blares out that she is on the comeback trail, because of her impressive wins in Texas and Ohio and Rhode Island (she did actually win the last two). And her husband's statement that she must win both Ohio and Texas to stay in the race are obscured in the dust raised by the stomping and backslapping of her campaign in the wake of the primary vote.
Perception is everything, is it not?

Not In My Name

2008-02-27T14:27:00.000-08:00

It seems to me that no people ever like to admit shame or culpability concerning atrocities committed by their government in their name in times of war. To do so, to be willing to step back and view the carnage and say aloud that it is not acceptable for a civilised people to knowingly engage in acts that target innocent bystanders (especially as a form of intimidation to the survivors and neighboring areas) would be seen as unpatriotic and sympathetic to the enemy. As we all know by now, you can't win a war no one likes. You can't win a war that turns a populace's stomach.
It's been said in many quarters that one of the primary reasons we did not leave victoriously from Viet Nam is because of the international TV coverage carried out on the front lines with the grunts in which the international audience saw the realities of war. Specifically, the US audience saw what what was being done in its name to and by its military and government.
Therefor, it comes as no surprise to most that in the ensuing wars/conflicts/police actions the US engaged in a program of embedding journalists as a counter to a free and unfettered public through the media lens. By embedding journalists with certain divisions or brigades, the government could more effectively control the dissemination of information to the public.
War is not pretty (as someone once said). And certain things done in the name of freedom are better left unseen (as someone probably never said). However, certain things done "in the name of freedom" during the Viet Nam war were condemned and it was agreed they should never be repeated. I refer at this time to Napalm.
The immediate effects of Napalm were seen repeatedly by US citizens and it turned them off to what was being done "in our name". The number of innocent casualties greatly outweighed those of certified enemies. And the pain inflicted by it, the utter physical agony it thrust on a victim was abhorrent by all standards. And so it was that the USA eventually signed international agreements to never use it again in times of war/conflict/police actions on any populace in any manner (one might argue that the agreements contain the word "indiscriminate", but it is universally held that Napalm cannot be use "discriminately"). And, so far as I can find, our government has fairly managed to uphold its end of the bargain.
Until recently.
While perusing and following threads and links on my usual list of political news sites I came across this and this.
According to a major UK newspaper, the US lied to the UK in 2005 about use of a chemical weapon called MK 77. While it is not Napalm exactly in its makeup it evidently brings the same results---a chemical which attacks flesh, air and water, causing them to ignite. It bypasses clothing for the most part, but it burns to the bone. In one sense, it is more discriminate than Napalm. Napalm burned clothing as well. MK 77 is a respecter of fashion.
The site to which I travelled in order to find the above links has a documentary that speaks directly to the use of a Napalm-like chemical on the city of Fallujah when US forces attacked it. On the documentary are interviews with two US soldiers (one of whom confirms the use of white phosphorus as well, which is another chemical that burns through flesh on contact), two Italian journalists, an Iraqi journalist and a former UK parliamentarian. It runs 27 minutes and should be viewed only by those with strong stomachs. Perhaps the most chilling video clip is that which arrives at the very end of the piece as we watch US snipers take out three suspected terrorists and their trucks. And the most chilling audio is that of the soldier stating that all of the soldiers were told that anything moving in Fallujah was to be considered a target. Anything and anyone.
But there is ample video evidence that Napalm or something like it was dispersed at large over the population of Fallujah. And the US's denials that no civilians were killed during this "operation" can now be seen to be utterly without merit and, indeed, a bald faced lie.
War is, indeed, not pretty. No one should ever live under the delusion that combat can be anything other than uncivil. In war, soldiers do things that we civilians would find repugnant, but they are mostly responding to any given hostile situation with the only means they have: weapons and adrenaline. They respond to deadly force with equally deadly or dominant force. It is their urge to survive that creates what we sometimes see in hindsight as unnecessary mayhem.
But to use Napalm or anything akin or white phosphorus defines premeditation. It signifies that our government and our military commanders authorized its use. Otherwise, it would not have been included in the arsenal taken to that city.
War is not pretty, it is Hell (as someone, again, once said).
But, while war is not pretty and should never be illused as such, even more horrendous and barbaric and without conscience or any semblance of moral defense is a "civilised" country's indifference to the welfare of those it is claiming to protect as it carries out mass murder in order to intimidate those who watch.

60 Minutes Blacks Out Part of Its Story

2008-02-25T15:04:00.000-08:00

Interesting. Part of 60 Minutes' broadcast was blacked out in a couple areas of Alabama last Sunday night. But only the parts dealing with the story about Don Siegelman were affected. Don Seigelman, as you may not know, is the former governor of Alabama who was imprisoned for bribery and conspiracy. There are allegations of vote count changing during his failed bid to retain the governorship in 2006 as well as allegations that Karl Rove (you know, Turd Blossom) was at the heart of the vote count change that may or may have not occured at a very late hour of that voting night and at the heart of the campaign by the Justice Department to convict Siegelman of whatever it could (at the very least, to tarnish his name enough so that his bid to get back into the Alabama State House would fail).
A Republican operative/lawyer involved in some of Rove's crimes (I mean shenanigans) even came forward to present evidence to Congress about the attacks made on Siegelman. Subsequently, her house burned down in a fire and she was run off the road by an unknown driver (I say subsequently, but both of these events happened in the weeks leading up to her testimony).
But I must ask WTF!?! is up with 60 Minutes? Only Alabama was affected by the blackouts? And 60 Minutes' parent company (CBS) is located in New York? How does a technical gaffe in New York only affect those in the very state being discussed and only during that particular segment? Someone find me a statistical dweeb and get me the odds on that. Because I think it would be in the area of Not Possible:1.
CBS's 60 Minutes story is here and I would urge you to read it.

P.S. For an update, this article from Harper's Magazine states that it was the local CBS affiliate that blacked out the story and told viewers it was New York's fault. According to New York, they had no transmission difficulties. Plus, the story is written by someone who was interviewed multiple times for the story itself so he has inside knowledge of a lot.

Who Says the Arab World Won't Learn From Democracy?

2008-02-15T15:56:00.000-08:00

(apologies to those who feel it unamerican to visit al jazeera's website [or are afraid they'll be put on someone's terrorist watch list], but i doubt we'll be seeing this bit of news in any american newspaper)

"Al Jazeera has said a code adopted by Arab states to govern satellite broadcasting could shackle freedom of expression.
Arab information ministers meeting on Tuesday in Cairo endorsed the charter, which allows host countries to annul or suspend the licence of any broadcaster found in violation of the rules it sets...

...The Cairo document stipulates that satellite channels "should not damage social harmony, national unity, public order or traditional values".

Anas al-Fiqi, the Egyptian information minister, said his country would be the first to implement the charter.
"Some satellite channels have strayed from the correct path," he said...

...The Cairo charter stipulates that channels should " refrain from broadcasting anything which calls into question God, the monotheistic religions, the prophets, sects or symbols of the various religious communities".

sweet, the 22 Arab League members are actually very american (just like jesus) in their irrational fears about outsiders and infidels. this could be the New Coalition of the Willing To Kill All Who Disagree.

We should have a summit (by "we" i mean Bush), cut some brush, shoot someone in the face and attack Iran.

i mean, we should sit down, discuss our differences and how to reconcile them since we seem to agree on the "outside agitators" thing, then attack iran.

no, i mean, we should let them redress our women with their eyes, become our AA sponsors, butt into our need to Butt Out From Smoking, then attack iran.

um, i mean, we should fuse our two gods, destroy Tibet and Nepal, eat a cow for christ and asparagus for allah, ban the obese, the unwashed and those who wear bowties, bow to the East (which works for me, because washington, d.c. is in that general direction from where i sit), and then attack iran.

wait, i mean, we should destroy all gods but the true god (and east or west, we all know which one that is, right?), spread social hegemony, refrain from "bombasting anything which calls into question Cod, the mannishbeastic digestions, the poppets, sex or cymbals of nefarious incisions", then (finally) attack iran.
okay, i think i've got it right. yeah. let's do it!

No One Expects The Spanish Inquisition!

2008-02-15T14:19:00.000-08:00

hee. hee hee. hoo hoo. snork! oh, my sides. my ribs. can't breathe. oh, the hilarity. oh, oh, oh...bwaaahaaahaaa!!!...sniffle, snark, snark...

The CIA's use of waterboarding was legal and not torture, a Justice Deparment official argued this morning, because it was a "procedure subject to strict limitations and safeguards" that made it substantially different from historical uses of the technique by the Japanese and the Spanish Inquisition.
Steven Bradbury, the Justice Department official who heads up the Office of Legal Counsel, is testifying before a House Judiciary subcommittee this morning. And he made an unexpected argument when Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) asked him whether waterboarding violated the law against torture.
It did not, he said. And he argued that what the CIA did bears "no resemblance" to what torturers in time past have done. "There's been a lot of discussion in the public about historical uses of waterboarding," he said. But the "only thing in common is the use of water," he said.
The Spanish and Japanese use of "water torture," he said, "involved the forced consumption of a mass amount of water." Asked by a Republican whether Bradbury was aware of any "modern use" of waterboarding that involved the "lungs filling with water," Bradbury said no.
The Japanese forced the ingestion of so much water that it was "beyond the capacity of the victim's stomach." Weight or pressure was then applied by standing or jumping on the stomach of the victim, sometimes leading to "blood coming of the victim's mouth." The Spanish Inquisition would use the technique to the point of "agony or death."
But the CIA wasn't doing that, he argued. "Strict time limits" were involved -- presumably governing the length of time that interrogators could induce the sensation of drowning. There were "safeguards" and "restrictions" that made it a much more controlled procedure. Because of that, he said, the technique did not amount to torture.
But Bradbury said that subsequent laws and Supreme Court decisions passed in 2005 and 2006 had changed his office's analysis, and in 2006 the CIA removed waterboarding from its authorized battery of interrogation techniques.

oh man, i think i just crapped my pants! that's good stuff there. i guess the writer's strike really is over. woof!
p.s. this next one sounds like a great idea (as oppsed to signing a petition), especially the "going back to bed" part since i'm not getting Presidents' Day off:

Veterans For Peace today kicked off its March 19, 2008 “Sick Of It Day” campaign to end the war in Iraq.
March 19 is the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and the campaign is designed to give every person sick of the corruption, the lies and the war an opportunity to join with others in the classic civil resistance tactic of “withdrawing consent” from the system.
Based on the principle taken from the Declaration of Independence that government requires the consent of the governed, everyone who joins Sick Of It Day will be actively withdrawing their consent, one by one, until the collective economic impact reverberates through Washington and politicians are faced with a choice: end the war or have an ungovernable country. (Read more about this powerful form of civil resistance…)
Giving his personal reason why he is “sick of it,” campaign originator and member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, Adam Kokesh said, “I am sick of seeing America in denial about how much we have been lied to.”
Veterans For Peace member and campaign organizer, Mike Ferner, explained “I’ve seen the pain on the faces of the people of Iraq and the soldiers who come back from war. It’s something I can’t get out of my mind and there are days when it really does make me sick.”
People who call in sick on March 19 can choose from a wide variety of other things to do that day – from contacting Congress and going back to bed, to more ambitious ideas like helping quarantine military shipments in U.S. ports. Campaigners are invited to come up with their own “Sick Of It Day” activity and post it to the site.
Sick Of It Day web designer, Scott Blackburn, said “We’ve made the site easy to use and easy to pass along to others. The success of Sick Of It Day depends on the idea going viral on the internet. With so many people sick of this war, we think there’s a good chance it will.”

unlike petitions to impeach the pResident, this will truly hurt them where they live. i don't know how just yet (i don't even know who "them" truly is), but i will by the time i turn off my alarm, call in to work with my most indignant, pissed off and (just in case) flu-ridden voice to announce my unavailability for work that day and that my bosses need to do something about ending the war in Iraq and the lack of Paydays in the snack machine in the break room. mmmm, i do love me a good Payday. so nutty and nugatty.

www.votetoImpeach.org

2008-02-11T17:59:00.000-08:00

yeah, it's a site's address i stole from the gentelman who will not be named.. it wants you to sign on to their petition to impeach Bush.
wow. what a drive. put your name on a petition that will go nowhere, because the Dems in Congress have repeatedly stated they will do no such thing, because it would be detrimental to our society.
hey, a blow job was worth an impeachment vote for republicans and some democrats, but crimes against humanity aren't.
so, save your breath and your internet time. concentrate instead on the important matters, like a $600 rebate to stave off the impending recession. or forcing fat people out of restauarants in mississippi. or shoving ethanol down the throats of a gullible populace. or an announcement to push for the death penalty for foreigners "involved" in the 9/11 bombings. or supporting the death penalty for chinese guys trying to steal nuclear secrets for china.
and make sure to get out and vote those people back into power the next time they come up for review. because they truly have our interest at heart.
as do the petitioners who rake in the signatures that do nothing. i mean, wow. "let's make it a million signatures" and this will force the government to listen.
really? not even the opposition is listening. so, what do you do now? get those million signers to jump and down all at the same time and cause an earthquake?
you're preaching to the choir when you start a movement like this. all of the signers are sheep who hope that the repository will do something for them. and the repository tends to do nothing but send in the signatures and then wait for a non-response so they can say that the government is non-responsive and afriad of the power of the people.
bullshit. the government knows that the people's power couldn't accelerate one hybrid car past the speed of stall.
all we seem to do is spit and stare.

It Takes A village To Raze A Nation

2008-02-11T16:28:00.000-08:00

HOUSE BILL NO. 282
An act to prohibit certain food establishments from serving food to any person who is obese, based on criteria prescribed by the state department of health; to direct the department to prepare written materials that describe and explain the criteria for determining whether a person is obese and to provide those materials to the food establishments; to direct the department to monitor the food establishments for compliance with the provisions of this act; and for related purposes. Be it enacted by the legislature of the state of Mississippi:
SECTION 1.
(1) The provisions of this section shall apply to any food establishment that is required to obtain a permit from the State Department of Health under Section 41-3-15(4)(f), that operates primarily in an enclosed facility and that has five (5) or more seats for customers.
(2) Any food establishment to which this section applies shall not be allowed to serve food to any person who is obese, based on criteria prescribed by the State Department of Health after consultation with the Mississippi Council on Obesity Prevention and Management established under Section 41-101-1 or its successor. The State Department of Health shall prepare written materials that describe and explain the criteria for determining whether a person is obese, and shall provide those materials to all food establishments to which this section applies. A food establishment shall be entitled to rely on the criteria for obesity in those written materials when determining whether or not it is allowed to serve food to any person.
(3) The State Department of Health shall monitor the food establishments to which this section applies for compliance with the provisions of this section, and may revoke the permit of any food establishment that repeatedly violates the provisions of this section.
SECTION 2. This act shall take effect and be in force from and after July 1, 2008.

really, i shouldn't even bother to comment. the mississipians' legally elected have done more than enough with this one. but i just can't help myself. i see the food and i gotta snarf at the trough.
so, no fatties at the public table. okay.
let's start with the obvious.
how do they define obesity? ah yes, it will defined as "per criteria" provided by a state based group after consultation with another group (not so state based). well, let's hope they don't include any of the national diet and/or weight loss organizations that want you and me to buy their products. a few years ago i was privy to nutrasystem's chart to determine obesity and i was three pounds under the limit for my height. 5' 8" and 185 pounds, mostly rugged marbled fat and muscle. overweight? yes. to a dangerous and possibly fatal point? not by a long shot in anyone's eyes.
next. will there be scales at the entrance to each and every restaurant and a government employee present to check for noncompliance? or will they rely on fit patrons to call in to a special hotline and "out" the offending patrons/restaurateurs?
and are 7-11's and AM/PM's and the like included? these establishments are notorious for selling absolute crap to anyone who trundles it to the checkout counter. they even provide carry carts for those too weak to bear the weight of processed food and sugar laden heart attacks.

while the state government is at it, why not go after obese restaurant employees who get a free meal after each shift?

so, what's next for the wonderful state of mississippi? ban bars from serving "known" alcoholics? restrict tobacco sales to those who smoke less than a pack a day? force fiancees to disclose any and all previous sexual encounters?

hey, here's an idea: how about it gets its state out of the lowest tier for income? how about it tries its damndest to push its education scores out of the gutter? how about it cleans up its river so the fish can swom and the fishermen can make a living again? how about it reads mark twain again and his rantings about state government?

obesity is a terrible disease, whether genetic or environmental. but to regulate who can and cannot eat at a public establishment is a callous slap in the face to those who suffer from it. if you are not willing to treat the disease as opposed to punishing it, then you will only paint yourself further into a corner of being perceived as stupid, ignorant, biased, redneck, zealotrous, phobic, narrow-minded and backwards.

i, for one, cringe at the children i see in the supermarket. grossly overweight, coddled by parents, throwing what they want into the cart and getting away with it. i find it hard to make eye contact with obese adults, because i am afraid they will see the pity and revulsion i know i can't quite hide. maybe it is a bleeding heart liberal thing to wince inwardly at the excesses perpetuated by our society, but not speak outright to those indulging in them. but i don't see the other side doing it either. i see them passing laws to punish those who don't fit in to their narrow view on life. i see them expelling those who don't fit. i hear them saying "bless her heart" behind scented handkerchiefs and then passing judgement.

what i don't see from any of us is a willingness to work with them. we give money to charities and then call it a day. we pass laws to protect and then don't follow up to make sure the law is doing what it said it would. we turn a blind eye to those in need and then chastise them for being who they are.
do i have the right to go up to a mother at savemart and tell her she's killing her obese child by buying it insta-meals and pop tarts? yes. it's a free country and speech is protected. it may be rude and self-serving, but it is a right.
do i have the right to regulate where and when families or individuals can eat on a night out? no. or, rather, i should not. but even in our nation of citizens' rights i find that those who do not fit within any majority group's predetermined list of rules can be forced out or into subjugation.
we are a nation of laws, but we seem more and more willing to let a select few write and enforce those laws. and as long as we are satisfied to concentrate on our individual ills we will continue to allow the city and the state and the national governments to pass any and all laws without our consent.

you know the saying:
"it takes a village to raise a child".

historians may look back on America and say "it took a village to raze a nation".

or it took a populace afraid of speaking out to acede to domination. we are, indeed, a global village. every nation, no matter their politics, looks to us as the compass. we have become THE empire for the 20th and 21st centuries. whether they agree with us or not, all fate is tied to ours.

and if the best we can give them is to ban obese people from dining out, then we are truly fucked.

2008-02-06T13:23:00.000-08:00

Vote, Goddamit!!!!!!

2008-01-24T17:04:00.000-08:00

supposedly neutral groups are now saying that the Iraq War is costing us $720,000,000 a day. that's $21.6 billion per month, up from the $12 billion i posted about last year.
i forget what it cost per hour, minute and second back then, but i will do what i can do update it at this time.
so. okay. that's $30 million per hour (vs. $13,333,333).
$500,000 per minute (vs, $555,556).
$8333.33 per second (vs. $9259.26).
i make $.29 a minute.
$.oo49 per second.
neither of my numbers has gone up. in fact, with inflation and rising gas prices, both have gone down in terms of buying power.
so, here's to you, george bush, and your powerful cabal. i raise my bottle to those who reap the rewards of an illegal war. i tip the hat to those running away with multi-million dollar bonuses as their companies crash and burn. i remove my hat for the fat cats and their ability to seduce an entire country into supporting policies and laws that take and take and take from the pockets of the average work-a-day person. i sit in awe and shock at the shameless fornication going on between the two major political parties as bush runs our economy into the ground via his wonderful war in iraq.
cheers to you, george and dick and nancy and harry and hillary and tom and john and colin and condoleeza for the lies which led us to a war we can't win and never could through violence and privatization and immunity to those who commit crimes on a foreign person.
i can't thank you enough for the WMD lies, the ties to al quaeda lies, the outing of a covert CIA operative, the eavesdropping on americans in contravention of standing U.S. laws, the hyping of illegal immigration as a threat to our way of life in order to make us look away from the other problems; for waiting until we are on the brink of a global recession created by you and your obsession with not admitting that you might be wrong about a host of issues that have pushed this country into an economic hole to allow the federal reserve chairman to announce an historic rate cut that would have worked a month ago, for the subprime mess created by banks unregulated and unleashed, for FEMA and its inability to address even the smallest of emergencies, for the Homeland Security Department and its inability to address even the largest of nuclear/biological attacks without offering up duct tape and saran wrap as a means to sterility, for smudging out the line of separation between church and state and inviting evangelicals to sit down and help write domestic policy as it pertains to gynocological health, premarital sex, planned pregnancy, evolution vs. creationism, forced prayer in schools and pushing the ten commandments back into the halls of justice.
thank you one, thank you all. it takes a lynch mob to set a country back 100 years.
and it takes one vote to help set it right again. whoever you vote for, make sure they want to move this country forward again. make sure they want to balance the budget. make sure they only want to kill those who truly deserve it. and make sure you can live with your chioce for the next eight years.

Tom Cruise: Masked Crusader For Thye ShortBus

2008-01-16T19:09:00.000-08:00

Poll time. Which do you prefer:

the gay magazine Paree spread?
tom portraying himself in the movie "magnolia".

Greg Palast On Bush And Our Future

2008-01-16T19:06:00.000-08:00

from greg palast comes this new, scary thought about president bush's visit to the middle east. some of it i knew, some i imagined in fevered dreams, a bit i had no idea about.

"Bend over, pull out your wallet and kiss your Abe ‘goodbye.’ The Lincolns have got to go - and so do the Hamiltons and Jacksons.
Those bills in your billfold aren’t yours anymore. The landlords of our currency - Citibank, the national treasury of China and the House of Saud - are foreclosing and evicting all Americans from the US economy.
It’s mornings like this, when I wake up hung-over to photos of the King of Saudi Arabia festooning our President with gold necklaces, that I reluctantly remember that I am an economist; and one with some responsibility to explain what the hell Bush is doing kissing Abdullah’s camel.
Let’s begin by stating why Bush is not in Saudi Arabia. Bush ain’t there to promote ‘Democracy’ nor peace in Palestine, nor even war in Iran. And, despite what some pinhead from CNN stated, he sure as hell didn’t go to Riyadh to tell the Saudis to cut the price of oil.
What’s really behind Bush’s hajj to Riyadh is that America is in hock up to our knickers. The sub-prime mortgage market implosion, hitting a dozen banks with over $100 billion in losses, is just the tip of the debt-berg.
Since taking office, Bush has doubled the federal debt to more than $5 trillion. And, according to US Treasury figures, on net, foreign investors have purchased close to 100% of that debt. That’s $3 trillion borrowed from the Saudis, the Chinese, the Japanese and others.
Now, Bush, our Debt Junkie-in-Chief, needs another fix. The US Treasury, Citibank, Merrill-Lynch and other financial desperados need another hand-out from Abdullah’s stash. Abdullah, in turn, gets this financial juice by pumping it out of our pockets at nearly $100 a barrel for his crude.
Bush needs the Saudis to charge us big bucks for oil. The Saudis can’t lend the US Treasury and Citibank hundreds of billions of US dollars unless they first get these US dollars from the US. The high price of oil is, in effect, a tax levied by Bush but collected by the oil industry and the Gulf kingdoms to fund our multi-trillion dollar governmental and private debt-load.
The US Treasury is not alone in its frightening dependency on Arabian loot. America’s private financial institutions are also begging for foreign treasure. Yesterday, King Abdullah’s nephew, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, already the top individual owner of Citibank, joined the Kuwait government’s Investment Authority and others to mainline a $12.5 billion injection of capital into the New York bank. Also this week, the Abu Dhabi government and the Saudi Olayan Group are taking a $6.6 billion chunk of Merrill-Lynch. It’s no mere coincidence that Bush is in Abdullah’s tent when the money-changers made the deal just outside it.
Bush is there to assure Abdullah that, unlike Dubai’s ports purchase debacle, there will be no political impediment to the Saudi’s buying up Citibank nor the isle of Manhattan.
So what? I mean, for the average American about to lose their job and their bungalow it doesn’t matter a twit whether it’s Sheik bin Alwaleed who owns Citibank or Sheik Sanford Weill, Citi’s past Chairman.
It’s the price paid to buy back our money from abroad that’s killing us. Despite the Koranic prohibition on charging interest, the Gulf princes demand their pound of flesh, exacting a 7% payment from Citibank and 9% from Merrill. That hefty interest bill then pushes adjustable rate mortgages into the stratosphere and pushes manufacturing into China by making borrowing and energy costs impossible to overcome. Forget the cost of health care: General Motors’ interest burden quintupled in just two years.
As the great economist Paddy Chayefsky wrote in the film The Network:
“The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. … It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity…. There are no nations, there are no peoples. There is only one vast and immense, interwoven, multi-national dominion of petro-dollars. … There is no America. There is no ‘democracy.’ The world is a business, one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work.”
In 2005, the US consumer paid Arab and OPEC nations a quarter trillion dollars ($252 billion) for oil - and the USA received back 100% of it - and then some ($311 billion) via Gulf nations’ investment in US Treasury bills and purchases of US businesses and property. Bush’s trip to Abdullah’s tent is all about this vast business of keeping this petro-dollar treadmill spinning.
The Bush Administration, rather than tax Americans to cover our deficits or make the banks suffer the consequences of their predatory lending practices, is allowing the Saudis to charge us big time at the pump with the understanding they will lend it all back to us - so the party never has to stop.
It has been reported that the President’s Secret Service men traveling with him seemed embarrassed by the eye-popping loads of diamond and gold gifts which they have to carry back for President Bush. They need not feel they have taken too much from their hosts: Bush has assured Abdullah that the King can suck it back out through our gas tanks."

Greg Palast is the author of The Network: The World as a Company Town, in the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse. Hear Ed Asner read from the book and the film ‘The Network’ at www.gregpalast.com

Get Right With Mike

2008-01-15T14:19:00.000-08:00

just when you thought the evangelical hordes of the right wing of the republican party couldn't get any zanier, along comes the rev. mike huckabee with another installment of "Insane People Say The Darndest Things":

“[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that’s what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards,” Huckabee said, referring to the need for a constitutional human life amendment and an amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
Huckabee often refers to the need to amend the Constitution on these grounds, but he has never so specifically called for the Constitution to be brought within “God’s standards,” which are themselves debated amongst religious scholars.

well, if you read the link therein you will find a valid argument against making ours a theocratic government. and you will find that homo sex ain't the only problem we got re: getting into heaven.
for example, from another pensito review piece:

Abomination: Eating Leftovers
Leviticus 19:7: “If it is eaten at all on the third day, it is an abomination.”
The Bible says that eating three-day-old leftovers and being gay are equivalent sins.

so, there. all little kiddies and old biddies are going to hell. as are adulterers (that covers just about every evangelical preacher of any reknown), cheaters, folks with haughty eyes, them that eats snakes and birds and centipedes, liars, sunday workers (kiss your paperboy goodbye), it just goes on.
and these should all be written into the U.S. Constifriggintution if an amendment banning gay marriage is. so, vote for mike. get right with the lord. and save the country from the likes of me...uh, and you. and you and you and you. yeah, and you in the corner there. and you and you and you....

White vs. Night

2008-01-11T14:12:00.000-08:00

well, kiddies. isn't this going to be a fun democratic campaign for the presidential nomination? you have two fronrunners: barack obama and hillary clinton.
one is a black man with a light history of political experience. the other is a white woman with a light history of political experience (not counting her time as fist lady), but who is heir to a two-term political "dynasty".
the others (well, john edwards) can only hope to be a burr in the side of whomever needs his votes added to theirs in order to catch whoever's in front of them or to distance themselves from whomever's breathing down their necks.
and the battle has already been couched in words: change vs. experience.
do we stick with the tried and untrue (clinton) or opt for the unknown and unknowable (obama)?
or is it really that complicated? i, for one, think that the issue at hand for most democratic voters is a much simpler one. one that reflects not the voter's need to understand the inner workings of a health care plan that couldn't pass muster within the hallowed confines of a congress working for the insurance companies and that clinton intends to resurrect (having learned her lesson in the 90's).
nor do i think that the issue is about which candidate will bring the troops home from iraq by the earliest possible date.
nor do i believe that abortion, homosexual rights, immigration legislation, the leaning of the supreme court or federal prosecuters or free trade or universal health care (slightly different from that which clinton endorsed as fist lady) or global warming will play a significant factor.
no, i think that when it all gets boiled down most voters will be swayed by one of two things:
black vs. female.
it will have almost nothing to do with the candidate's stances on anything.
it will have almost everything to do with how black obama is; or, more specifically, how black he is not. being black will get a lot of black votes. being too black will lose a lot of white votes.
and it will have almost everything to do with how female clinton is; or, more specifically, how feminine she is not. being female will sway a lot of female voters. appearing emotional and easy to break down will lose a lot of male votes.
and the political machines are already in high gear exploiting this. the rev. jesse jackson has stated that clinton's tears (during a recent q and a session) "need to be analyzed". in other words, he is putting out the inference that she faked them in order to appear a bit more feminine (and human).
andrew cuomo (a big clinton backer) used the words "shuck and jive" to describe obama's supposed inability to answer hard questions about the issues of the day. these words are being touted in the press (as expressed to them by clinton campaign aides) as subtly racist.
we can expect the campaign process to get much uglier as we venture further into the primary season. and i don't think that the pr machines on either side will shy away from playing the race/gender card at any given opportunity while ignoring the fact that neither candidate is willing to giving any real hint as to what their real actions will be once assuming office or how they expect to overcome the entrenchment of the house of representatives and the senate against change of any sort that doesn't line the pockets of lobbyists and special interest groups.
at least, the republicans are up front with respect to their lunacy. their campaigns are all about who believes in god the most and who can kill the most muslims and who can pass on more money to those who need it the least(the only exception being ron paul, but since he's supported by david duke and other likeminded individuals representing extremist fringes of our society...i'll pass). to wit:
mike huckabee: hates the federal income tax and the irs and would institute a 23% sales tax nationwide, okay with the iraq war, loves lower taxes for the rich, once discoed with paul reubens, but wouldn't pardon him.
mitt romney: loves bush, hates gays. by bush, i mean the president. by gays, i mean anyone who isn't a mormon (or mer-man!) and stays in the closet. loves lower taxes. loves killing terrorists unless they're white, loves lower taxes for the rich. once drank coffee, but claimed he didn't swallow.
john mccain: loves bush (both kinds), loves the iraq war, wouldn't have it any other way (though, not too long ago, he was slamming bush over the iraq fiasco), loves lower taxes for the rich. twice kissed a guy on the mouth, claimed they were both animatronic cpr dummies and it was all was taken out of context despite what the dummies may have told the press.
rudy giuliani: loves the iraq war, hate gays, loves bush (the other pink meat), loves 9/11 (i mean really loves loves looooves 9/11 in a cheat on your wife sort of way). moved his mistress into the family home before he and his wife were divorced. children (his) don't really talk to him.
ron paul: hates the iraq war, loves lower taxes for the rich, loves .50 calibers and bigass machine guns in every home, doesn't much care for non-whites and homosexuals. married a blonde woman, because, "there was something, i don't know, eva braun-ish about her".

so, what's the skinny here, democratic lads and lasses? to dine in the dark or pick the chick? because, no matter what the average person says, i believe that is what it comes down to. as low and ignorant as it is.
note: idealists, cast your vote as you will. symbolism is great. i may just do it myself. but know that your doing so means you've given up on the two-party system. doesn't mean you're wrong. but you'd better be out there publicly giving your all to help usher in a new era. otherwise, you're pissing up the rope i'm hanging onto. and i will kick your ass if my hands get wet.

p.s. for those of you deciding between obama and clinton, obama is the one the conservatives are most scared of. while they will say publicly that clinton is the most to be feared , because she is a clinton, the pr points being put out to fox news are those that attack obama. his color, his ethnic background, the madrassa that he didn't actually attend and the u.s. flag pin he decided to not wear after a while have been the main talking points that fox news has pushed. with clinton they just bring up the soiled dress and her masculinity. she plays the game much more than he does. and the conservatives and fox news hate him for it. the fact that he has boycotted fox news since early 2007 says a lot.

huichol huichol huichol

2008-01-09T19:09:00.000-08:00

huichol art (yarn and bead) is now legal to export from mexico. the huichol people live high up in the sierra madres and their art reflects their religion, which is mainly comprised visually of maize, the blue deer and peyote. traditionally, shamans go on vision quests aided by peyote and then try to put into art the visions they saw. i've bought a couple of pieces so far for myself from a group that practices fair trade with the mountain huichol and helps them to maintain their autonomy. below is a picture of a yarn painting i just bought for my father on his 81st birthday.

it is non-traditional in the sense that it was made for trade and it doesn't depict maize, blue deer or a peyote button. but it is a celestial equinox and that plays a large role in the lives of the huichol. some day i will win the lottery or get a kickass work bonus or find a creaky, leather tanned, botoxed sugar mommy and i will purchase some of the more intricate work i've seen done. some day, perhaps, i will be able to actually visit the huichol to watch their work and their ways and witness a 3000 year old way of life that has managed to maintain its integrity and dignity in the face of unstopped encroachment by younger and hungrier cultures whose sole intent has always seemed to be that of total conquest. the mexican government was the one that stepped in to protect the huichol from outside interference by labeling them a living historical artifact. it was only when the huichol began to suffer at the hand of drought (or something, i'm making this up as i go) that fair trade co-ops asked to be let in to trade with the huichol (money, seed, flour, whatever it was the huichol might need) for their art.
below is the yarn painting i own. absolutely amazing. drawn by hand with yarn 1/16" wide and laid onto a beeswax/resin compound, it must take amazing patience to create.

Looking For Backers

2008-01-04T18:05:00.000-08:00

Item:
New Parental Control Unit
Use:
Stopping Babies From Crying, Inducing Nap Time
Cost:
Unknown At This Time
Status:
Planning Stage

how many of you have endured the endless crying, mewling, whining and general stubbornness of the average american baby? how many of you have had to stop everything to pick it up, hold it, cradle it, rock it and cater to its every whim?
how many of you have suffered a loss of sex and/or sleep due to a baby's demands on your time?
how many times have you said to yourself:
"if only i had a way to stop my precious baby from crying at inopportune times, like when i'm trying to do the nasty?"
"if only that damn brat would shut up i could study for my GED."
"how, if it won't stop that goddamn bleating, will i ever convince mr. moneybags to have sex with me and accidently knock me up thereby relieving me of all future monetary worries?"
"mom said she'd have her revenge and i guess this is what she meant."
"i need a tv with higher volume."
"AA didn't tell me about this."
"i miss my bar friends."
"dear god, just one fucking night..."
"i'm feeling really pro-choice right now."
"duct tape! where's the fucking duct tape?"
"so, let's try two parts bourbon to one part milk."
"is there a CSI episode that covers this?"
"i have a new-found empathy for britney right now."
"you know, honey, in china they sell the girls to stupid americans."

well, this is your salvation. now is your time. today you can change your life. henceforth, you can be liberated from your chains of childrearing, freed from your baby bondage.
with my simple revolutionary invention you can return to the life you once had and still want.
need an hour to shop or rest or party or sex it up or read or get with mr. lucky and his d cell carnival? want an extended moment of quiet? craving that extra cigarette? needing to slip down to the corner bar for a double irish car bomb?
here it is. here is the golden ticket to your new freedom, to your magic carpet ride out of this craptastic life of slavery at the grasping hands of an infant no smarter than the average house spider clinging precariously to the corner of a hermetically sealed room.
presenting the latest in homecare help, primal child repression, kiddie outburst suppression, we give you:

TAZER TOTS

featuring a low level voltage, this handy homehelper will put you back in the driver's seat when it comes to personal space and private time.

TAZER TOTS

at a low low hit of 1000 volts it will put your little loved one down for a nap for no less than two hours depending on weight. if that's not enough, the TOT has an adjustable volt-o-meter ranging from 50-10,000 volts. practice makes perfect and, with this added feature, you can find the ultimate voltage needed to keep your kid quiet.
don't have children yet, but think this is a good item to have? buy it and check it out on your partner. 5,000 volts has been proven in the prison system to induce erection, but not to kill. 2,500 volts right on the money and the little lady can have fun and know that her beautiful offspring are protected and prepared.

TAZER TOTS

the TAZER TOTS will come in a velvet lined case, complete with sterile wipes. measuring at 8" by 1", it's both intimidating and not too large. it comes with a money back guarantee and limited replacement warrantee. use voids all agreements. we will check all returned equipment with UV light.

TAZER TOTS

invest now. get in at the ground level. we expect orders in the millions. this is a surefire item. expect to see this on every "as seen on tv" commercial, QVC, in the Martha Stewart magazine, on Oprah and the Colbert Report. this is groundbreaking, history making.
be the first to to say that you had a hand in shutting up the next generation until they actually had something to say. help bring back civility and respect for one's elders in this century before the pre-pre-teens can utter anything more than "ow-zzzzz....."

TAZER TOTS

do it for the breeders. do it for yourself. do it for the children.
just do it.

Merry Chris-, er Solst-, uh Day (Late)

2007-12-27T20:16:00.000-08:00

allegedly from 1960:
heh. my late christmas present to y'all.

2007-11-21T18:25:00.000-08:00

"JACKSON, Mo. -- A collision with a semi-trailer truck seven years ago left 52-year-old Deborah Shank permanently brain-damaged and in a wheelchair. Her husband, Jim, and three sons found a small source of solace: a $700,000 accident settlement from the trucking company involved. After legal fees and other expenses, the remaining $417,000 was put in a special trust. It was to be used for Mrs. Shank's care.
Instead, all of it is now slated to go to Mrs. Shank's former employer, Wal-Mart Stores Inc."
(go here for the entire Wall Street Journal article)

can anyone say single payer health care? while i understand the recouping of certain unneeded costs by insurers and employers if the costs are found to be ridiculous and/or frivolous, i cannot in any way understand this. and, yes, it could happen to you. or me. this is our future. more and more loopholes to allow companies and CEO's a larger slice of our money at our expense, all made legal by our government and our Supreme Court.
and they will get away with it, too, because we as a nation have become inured to the machinations of those in power. we expect to be screwed and they know it. we have turned deaf and dumb to even the most egregious of crimes perpetrated by the very individuals we elect to the halls of congress and the presidency in an effort to pretend that life is good, rosy, not smelling of the very shit we are being drowned in.
what is the line? "if you are going to lie, lie until you're blue in the face". so long as we don't bother to delve too deeply into the actions of our "leaders" the easier it becomes for them to rely on that.
it's time to wake up, smell the bullshit, and do more than simply say "i voted". because voting doesn't seem to be doing much anymore.

You Want Lies With That, Mister?

2007-11-14T17:10:00.000-08:00

so, let's see here. blackwater mercenaries gun down something like 16 unarmed iraqis, get backed by the bush administration who claim it was defensive fire, then they get investigated by the FBI and the FBI finds that blackwater mercenaries actually did kill innocent iraqis and it passes the benchmark into murder. hmm, sounds like blackwater is in the shit, right? done and done. no more free handouts, bad doggie, no bisquit.
but, oops. just the other day comes this:

"Presidential Airways, Inc., an aviation Worldwide Services company (d/b/a Blackwater Aviation), Moyock, N.C., is being awarded an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) type contract for $92,000,000.00. The contractor is to provide all fixed-wing aircraft, personnel, equipment, tools, material, maintenance and supervision necessary to perform passenger, cargo and combi Short Take-Off and Landing air transportation services between locations in the Area of Responsibility of Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. This contract was competitively procured and two timely offers were received. The performance period is from 1 Oct. 2007 to 30 September 2011. "

Presidential Airways is the aviation wing of blackwater. so, blackwater is under investigation for, well, murder and it is still receiving contracts to operate in, huh, countries other than iraq, but still either border iraq or are in the general area.
and, then, there's this:
"During today’s House Oversight Committee hearing on the performance of State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) revealed that Krongard’s brother — former CIA Executive Director A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard — sits on Blackwater USA’s board. Krongard vehemently denied the allegation, calling it an “ugly rumor”..."
what the fuck...

Hey Chinese Subs: La La La, We Can't Hear You!

2007-11-12T15:43:00.000-08:00

The uninvited guest: Chinese sub pops up in middle of U.S. Navy exercise, leaving military chiefs red-faced
When the U.S. Navy deploys a battle fleet on exercises, it takes the security of its aircraft carriers very seriously indeed.
At least a dozen warships provide a physical guard while the technical wizardry of the world's only military superpower offers an invisible shield to detect and deter any intruders.
That is the theory. Or, rather, was the theory.
(good thing we're the world's only superpower and our ability to detect really, really big machines with really, really big bombs is as good as our ability to detect toothpaste tubes weighing more 3.5 ounces at airports)

Bush's bishops: Exit Iraq now
President Bush’s church, long at odds with him on matters of public policy, called on the United States and its partners today to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq immediately.
(i was born, baptised and raised a methodist and have never been very comfortable with the national leaning towards conservatism. christ was a radical, condemned by almost all, so it should be that a church who claims to follow his teachings should truly follow it and not fear the label. yet, mostly, this church has. so, it's nice to read that it is breaking with some of its old blindness)

So, Uh, Like Stay Healthy And Insurance Will Protect You?

2007-11-09T13:00:00.000-08:00

One of the state's largest health insurers set goals and paid bonuses based in part on how many individual policyholders were dropped and how much money was saved.Woodland Hills-based Health Net Inc. avoided paying $35.5 million in medical expenses by rescinding about 1,600 policies between 2000 and 2006. During that period, it paid its senior analyst in charge of cancellations more than $20,000 in bonuses based in part on her meeting or exceeding annual targets for revoking policies, documents disclosed Thursday showed.

Two hugs equals two days of detention for 13-year-old Megan Coulter. The eighth-grader was punished for violating a school policy banning public displays of affection when she hugged two friends Friday.

Lookin' For Some Wheels

2007-10-29T13:56:00.000-07:00

"NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- With oil prices setting records over $90 a barrel - and $100 looking ever more likely - experts say there's a good chance drivers will see $3 gasoline before the end of the year."

heh. where do these people live? because i want to move there if they haven't seen $3 a gallon gas yet.

"But so far drivers have been lucky. The national average price for gasoline has risen barely one cent, going from $2.81 last month to $2.82 this month"...

the cheapest i see on my way to and from work is $2.95. and, yes, i know that fresno and the valley always have higher averages than most of the rest of the country due (in part) to the massive amount of trucking that rumbles through here.
so, does anyone know anyone who sells mopeds for relatively cheap? i am now officially in the market for one.

2007-10-28T10:48:00.000-07:00

more camping

2007-10-23T20:23:00.000-07:00

Ah Wilderness!

2007-10-22T20:12:00.000-07:00

ah, camping. the great outdoors. fresh air. pitting one's will against the ambiguous evil of nature. battling the elements mano a mano. guy stuff. man way. ugh!

Going Camping... Again.

2007-10-11T21:42:00.000-07:00

and, yes, it will look somewhat like that. multiplied by 7.

DUR???

2007-10-04T14:08:00.000-07:00

Bush: 'I make a lot of decisions'
By DEB RIECHMANN -- Associated Press Writer
(Updated Wednesday, October 3, 2007, 2:36 PM)

LANCASTER, Pa. (AP) Give the man a microphone and he'll talk about anything. For 76 minutes, President Bush prowled the stage Wednesday in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, giving a speech and answering questions about everything from his opposition to tax increases to his veto of a bill to expand children's health insurance.
But he covered a lot of other ground, too.
Bush gave an intriguing description about what happens when businesses expand, as was the case here at a company run by a woman.
"You know, when you give a man more money in his pocket - in this case, a woman - more money in her pocket to expand a business, they build new buildings. And when somebody builds a new building, somebody has got to come and build the building.
"And when the building expanded, it prevented (sic) additional opportunities for people to work. Tax cuts matter. I'm going to spend some time talking about it," the president said.
He offered a pointed description of his job.
"My job is a decision-making job. And as a result, I make a lot of decisions," the president said.
He elaborated on that point later.
"I delegate to good people. I always tell Condi Rice, 'I want to remind you, Madam Secretary, who has the Ph.D. and who was the C student. And I want to remind you who the adviser is and who the president is.'
"I got a lot of Ph.D.-types and smart people around me who come into the Oval Office and say, 'Mr. President, here's what's on my mind.' And I listen carefully to their advice. But having gathered the device (sic), I decide, you know, I say, 'This is what we're going to do.' And it's 'Yes, sir, Mr. President.' And then we get after it, implement policy."
Bush, known for his impatience when fellow leaders rattle on, acknowledged he was doing the same himself in his opening remarks.

Members of the audience snap pictures of President Bush, front foreground, during his speech in an event sponsored by the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2007 in Lancaster, Pa.
Pablo Martinez Monsivais -- AP Photo
"I'll be glad to answer some questions from you if you got any," he said. "If not, I can keep on blowing hot air until the time runs out."
Asked about global warming, he gave a lengthy account of alternative fuels.
"I'm not quite through," he said near the end. "And it's a long answer, I'm sorry. It's called filibustering." After one answer about American views of the Iraq war, Bush said sheepishly: "I think that was your question, wasn't it? The answer was so long I lost track."
He had some fun with a woman who seemed slow on the draw when Bush called on her.
"You want a little chance to collect the thoughts, you know? I mean we're talking national TV here, you know?" he said.
"I actually wrote it down so I wouldn't get flustered," the woman said.
"It didn't work," Bush said.
Bush gave an upbeat assessment of being president, despite polls showing the public overwhelmingly disapproves of the job he's doing.
"I told somebody behind stage, this has been a joyous experience being the president," Bush said. "My buddies in Texas just simply don't think I'm telling them the truth. But it is."
He forgot that he had promised a question to a woman. "When you're getting over 60, sometimes your mind slips," said Bush, who is 61.
Finally, he decided he had said enough.
"And I got to go, I hate to tell you. You're paying me too much money to be sitting here talking."

(huh??? can anyone who speaks "drunk president" please translate this?)

2007-09-27T19:39:00.000-07:00

here's your shadow government.

Cheney to address secret group

The conservative Council for National Policy will meet in downtown Salt Lake

if that doesn't say it all, i don't know what does. no press, no public, no leaks as to where or when they'll meet or what they'll talk about or who will be there. the second coup in preparation? it takes two to finish one, you know.

2007-09-19T16:51:00.000-07:00

2007-09-15T21:46:00.000-07:00

2007-09-13T14:11:00.000-07:00

A man walks into a bookstore with his young son. The boy is
holding a quarter. Suddenly, the boy starts choking, going blue
in the face. The father realizes the boy has swallowed the
quarter and starts panicking, shouting for help.

A well dressed, attractive and serious looking woman in a blue
business suit is sitting at a coffee bar in the store reading a
newspaper and sipping a cup of coffee. At the sound of the
commotion, she looks up, puts her coffee cup down, neatly
folds the newspaper and places it on the counter, gets up from
her seat and makes her way unhurried, across the bookstore.Reaching the boy, the woman carefully drops his pants, takes
hold of the boy's' testicles and starts to squeeze and twist
gently at first and then ever more firmly. After a few seconds
the boy convulses violently and coughs up the quarter, which
the woman deftly catches in her free hand.

Releasing the boy's testicles, the woman hands the coin to the
father and walks back to her seat in the coffee bar without
saying a word.As soon as he is sure that his son has suffered no ill effects,
the father rushes over to the woman and starts thanking her
saying, "I've never seen anybody do anything like that
before, it was fantastic. Are you a doctor?"
"No," the woman replied, "Divorce Attorney."

WTF???

2007-09-06T20:52:00.000-07:00

sometimes there comes a darkness of the soul. at that moment one can no longer see the greater good that is the overlying fabric of a people. one cannot see the monuments created, the kindness passed on, the gleaming line that connects all.
sometimes it is merely the small insanity of one that affects you or me and no one else that tips us over into the abyss. an abyss that mocks our screams. and makes one wonder if screaming is even worth shouting about.
we have no control over the actions of others, nor should we. but when events conspire to affect our very lives for no better reason than another person has gone over the edge with no thought to how it may ripple out like a stone in a pool then i think that i may no longer be able to stand idly by.
what do i do, though? fly away? provoke a confrontation? assassinate from behind the curtain?
i just don't know.
i have watched many of those i know miscalculate their lives. they have watched me do the same. mostly, though, these events have not made me concerned for my own welfare, my own being.
now, however, i see something happening with someone i do not know as a friend or as a colleague, but the actions being undertaken have the ability to force me out of my current life as i know it in a catastrophic way.
so, fuck it. i'm going camping.

US civil rights hero Oliver Hill dies at 100

2007-08-06T14:22:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A key fighter in the struggle to end racial segregation in US schools, the black civil rights lawyer Oliver Hill, died at the age of 100 on Sunday, local media reported.
He died at his home in Richmond, capital of the western state of Virginia, the city's Times Dispatch newspaper said.
Hill helped change US society by fighting in the courts to end segregation of blacks from whites in areas of public life such as voting rights, jury selection, access to school buses and employment protection, it said.
His triumph was his role in a series of lawsuits against segregated schools that led to a 1954 Supreme Court ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional.
In 1999 he received the presidential medal of freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

Debt Of Service

2007-07-28T08:00:00.000-07:00

Debt Of Service. probably you will be misled by that last sentence. unless you read the article it's linked to.

bushism of the week

2007-07-25T16:26:00.000-07:00

this from a man who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth:

After the Senate Finance Committee approved an expansion of the federal Children's Health Insurance Program to cover nearly 10 million kids, President Bush offered a strange rationale for threatening to veto it.
"People have access to health care in America," he told an audience in Cleveland. "After all, you just go to an emergency room."

have any of you ever been to an emergency room? i can guarantee you that president bush never has.

Just So You Know...

2007-07-17T14:42:00.000-07:00

...our activities in and pertaining to iraq and afghanistan are now costing us $4,630 per second. or $12,000,000,000 per month.
in real terms i can understand it equals my annual salary in just under 8 seconds.
and they say only nature can make one feel small and insignificant.

250,000:1

2007-07-16T19:10:00.000-07:00

There's a report out that says our brave forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are firing 250,000 rounds of ammunition for every insurgent they claim to have been killed. An excerpt of the article reveals:
"The Department of Defense's increased requirements for small- and medium-calibre ammunitions have largely been driven by increased weapons training requirements, dictated by the army's transformation to a more self-sustaining and lethal force - which was accelerated after the attacks of 11 September, 2001 - and by the deployment of forces to conduct recent US military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq," said the report by the General Accounting Office (GAO)." (italics are mine)
So, some of this ammunition is being used in training. And it has been used to make the soldiers better shots. And more lethal. And self-sustaining.
And yet...we have witnessed a large surge in deployments to Iraq. We have witnessed more of our soldiers being killed. We have not witnessed a real surge in insurgents being killed. And we have read about another report from our experts and generals stating that none of the requirements (aka benchmarks) set forth for the Iraqi government and military have been met.
250,000??? Evidently, bullet manufacturers can't even keep up with our demand for bullets. Evidently, it's still a great time to be invested in the War Machine. Of course, when is it not? There's always another dirty little conflict just around the bend.
What I'd like to know is what the ratio of bullets to kills is when you factor in the civilian death rate. Maybe Bush and Cheney need to start doing that if only to get that ratio down to a numerical amount that we, the people, can understand. Because 250,000:1, while still better than winning the Lotto or getting struck by lightning or dying in a plane crash, makes our troops look like dumb ass, suburban weekend can poppers. Or like Red Coats marching a straight line while the Revolutionaries hid behind trees and rocks and shot them at will. Or Custer not listening to his scouts.
I've always loved that about empirical armies. They feel they just need to march in, show superior force and a strong chin and the natives will quake in their peasant shoes and acquiesce immediately. No matter how many times history has proved them wrong.
One thing I know we did wrong this time as opposed the Indian Wars: we didn't offer civilians a chance at free land. If we had been promised all the free land we could stake in a day, many of us would have taken up arms against Iraq and Afghanistan. We would have enlisted at an accelerated rate if only to get out of a country that was war-taxing us to death and ignoring our basic needs (i.e. medical insurance, a good education, retirement without fear of ending up on the streets, freedom from religious persecution by those in power, civil liberties being shredded while those in foreign lands were being promised those liberties), unlike those in Iraq and Afghanistan. While they may have appeared in need of rescuing to us, most of them now wish they could go back to the way it was. And we are stuck here with less of what we used to have and no apparent way forward.
Oh, and the Air Force has stepped up aerial bombardments that the mainstream press and the White House are not talking about (because that's bad press and makes it look like we're not willing to face the enemy face to face, which any military expert will tell you is a quick route to a shallow grave).
If you read the article, you'll find that we are relying increasingly on foreign manufacturers of bullets. Funny. But I'll bet it's from one or more of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. Because, "oddly" enough, the U.S., the U.K., Russia, France and China are the five leading arms exporters in the world (whether through normal or abnormal means).
So, those of you who who claim that we are a nation of compassion for ourselves and others, I have a large bridge shaped exactly like my penis to sell you.

p.s. abcnews has an interesting video clip of a journalist rif-ding along with soldiers in Baghdad. you should check it out.

Ethics and U.S.

2007-07-12T17:34:00.001-07:00

p(resident) bush actually admits that someone within his inner staff leaked valerie plame's name to the press. and no one is fired. remember when he said at the outset of this investigation that if anyone working for him did this they would be fired? huh? huh? anyone? bueller? and then he defends his commutation of scooter libby's prison sentence.
a workmate of mine asked me today if i had any "ethical conundrums" for his philosophy class. i gave him our outcry now concerning the genocide in rwanda. i told him that we, as a country, had turned a blind eye to it for a long time while hundreds of thousands died and many more became refugees. i contrasted that with the hundreds of thousands now accepted to have died at coalition force hands and the over 2 million refugees fleeing from iraq. but now it is okay for our administration to look to rwanda and condemn it even as we commit as many or more atrocities in iraq. and the question was: where do we, as american citizens, stand on condemning the one, but ignoring the other?
but now i have a another good one: where do we, as american citizens, stand on a president promising he will fire the person responsible for a security breach only to commute the sentence of one of the very people involved in that breach and not being willing to delve deeper into who the ultimate responsible person is? when do we demand that ethical lines be drawn and those we voted into power stand by them?
in my next post i will answer the question by a commenter who asked in resignation what any one of us can do to change government? i won't be able to answer on a national level, but i will on a local one.

How Many HAve Died?

2007-07-10T22:07:00.000-07:00

ahem. not that i don't like rwandans. hell, some of my best friends are sort of look like rwandans without the accent or the skin color. mostly because of meth. but when it comes to genocide i have to give it up to (drumroll, please) US!!!
most independent studies are coming to the same conclusion: somewhere between 300,000 and 650,000 iraqis have been killed since our dirty little "war on terror" began. and most of those deaths have come at the hands of our coalition forces. we hear almost daily of the sectarian suicide bombings, but almost nothing of the daily aerial bombings and artillery barrages happening at the behest of our president (or whoever signs his name and pours his drink for him).
not that i have anything against a man who likes a stiff shot once in a while. hell, if i had a war to run i'd pound a few myself. but i wouldn't claim not to.
and, hell, if i had this war to run i'd throw up a prayer or two each morning, asking some deity or another to forgive me for the massive sins i was about to commit. and to forgive me for not believing in them. but i wouldn't shout it to the country as the only way in which to proceed.
and, if i had any war to run, i most assuredly would want to fire a few of my minions when they came back to me at the end of a day and said that my ideas were full of crap and i just got another 500 people killed to no avail.
poor president bush. he may actually be that dumb (and i've posited this from the beginning), he may actually be that dim and idolatrous to believe that we as a nation and an idea are so superior to all other forms of civilization that we have a moral obligation to spread ourselves across the globe and over all other people like napalm jelly in order to obtain global harmony.
however, his righthand men- karl rove and dick cheney - are not that dumb or dim. they are smart. they understand the short term goals are worthier than the long term, because short can be achieved for the few. short term can make the worthy wealthy. long term makes the unwashed masses restless. so, they have george at the front making his pontifications about fighting them there instead of fighting them here. and iraq is the reason we are over there. and al qaeda is iraq. and karl and dick continue to line the pockets of their friends who have wanted this war since the early 80's.
so much better to be a smart billionaire than a dumb president. no hindsight will prove you wrong when you've got the dim son to smoke your tracks for you.
and all the while, we are making dafur look like another day in new york in comparison.

2007-07-05T15:51:00.001-07:00

2007-07-05T15:50:00.000-07:00

2007-07-05T15:44:00.000-07:00

2007-07-05T15:40:00.000-07:00

2007-07-05T15:38:00.000-07:00

2007-07-05T15:36:00.000-07:00

Badger Badger Badger

2007-07-03T15:15:00.000-07:00

what's that, steph? you wanted scooter? okay.
scooter scooter scooter.
commute commute commute.
bullshit bullshit bullshit.
happy fucking independence day:
to whomever still truly believes in it and feels like the government serves us and has our best interests at heart;
to us, as a nation and an idea, who depend on celebrities to titillate us and distract from those issues not nearly as important (like civil rights, group morality, justice for all, equality, honesty, humbleness, compassion for those in need, transparency of government, protection of the weak, an open ear to the powerless, a turned cheek to the angry, not casting the first stone if one is not completely innocent of any wrongdoing) so that we may while away our days feeling superior to those coke sniffing, beaver flashing, head shaving, bible in prison carrying, wife join the scientologists making, little black baby stealing, next unnecessary pregnancy announcing, overblown steroid denouncing, nascar fist fighting, posthumous porn star dna paternity testing, dead pregnant housewife idolizing miscreants who make our country the star of hope that it is to the rest of the world (and why we are held above all others in god's eyes);
to the brave men and women (unless they're fags or dykes) who are overseas shooting at insurgents and terrorists ranging in age from 5 to 95, because their commander-in-chief is too busy commuting the sentence of his little buddy and preparing for a full pardon (even though he didn't consult the Justice Department, the prosecuting attorney, wait until all appeals are finished as is the normal doctrine or the convicted actually asked for the commutation) and can't be concerned about a "minor uptick" in military casualties, which he said should be expected for the next unforseeable future, and the soldiers are in fear for their lives, because they still don't have enough body armor, plate protection on their trucks and tanks, proper directions from their field commanders or protection from the enormous amount of depleted uranium they have unleashed into the air and ground;
and to those among us who merely want to blow shit up in a safe and sane environment on the one day of the year when it's sort of allowed and don't really intend to hold a silent vigil or a moment when we remember all of those who have fallen or whatever.

join me at you know where for festive fireworks, food and drinks. all religions, ethnicities and sexual lifestyles are encouraged (except fags, dykes, muslims, vegetarians, and methodists).
Commies and fascists okay so long as you agree to hold the fireworks while i light them.

WAR

2007-07-02T15:25:00.000-07:00

the bane of the tomato grower. that pesky little critter that i've been told is part of the sphinx moth family (those huge ones that used to fly around on hot august nights whose wingspan would easily reach 6 inches...alas, no more due to decades of insecticide). below is the damage i returned to (i show not nearly all of what hapened in a 2 day span) from san francisco. i caught two mammoth caterpillars that evening, 4 moderate sized the next day and 2 moderate and 6 babies the next. and i've been checking those plants since the first sign of damage a couple of months ago.

sucks to be popular.

WTF???

2007-06-29T16:57:00.000-07:00

when the State Equalization Board sends you a Cigarette and Tobacco Products Use Tax Return and it turns out to be a form on which you are supposed to tell them how many untaxed cigarettes you purchased iin the last year, you gotta wonder.
when you call and tell the representative that you've never purchased untaxed cigarettes before in your life and she then insinuates twice that you're lying, you gotta wonder.
when you ask for her superviser and are told that he is unavailable and you ask for his number and are told that she doesn't give out that kind of information and you ask how to get in touch with him and you are told that she will take your name and number and you try to give her your name and number and she begins repeating a federal code while you are reciting your name and number and when she hangs up on you as you are still trying to relay your contact information, you gotta wonder.
snippet:
"what's your account number?"
"--------."
"and how can i help you?"
"i got this form in the mail today and not only did you spell my name wrong, but i've never purchased untaxed cigarettes before."
"it say right here on my computer that you bought 98 cartons of untaxed cigarettes over the past three years and stopped in early 2007."
"did you just call me a liar?"
"sir, we received sales receipts from ----------- with your name and address. now, why would this company pull your name out of thin air?"
"you just called me a liar again."
"no sir, i never used that word."
"oh, i'm sorry. you insinuated i'm a liar."
she hung up on me shortly thereafter.
i called back immediately, made my complaint and was transferred by the main switchboard to one of their supervisers. hmmmm.....
turns out my SSN and driver's license are not in their system, which greatly worried the superviser (he gave me his direct number and his extension should i decide to call through the 800 number).
the quote of the conversation with him was:
"i hate to tell you this, but you're not lying."
coming on the heels of a collection agency coming after me even though they had my first name completely wrong and being told by a creditcheck group that i worked at a hardrock cafe in las vegas for a year i'm beginning to hear little paranoic bells in my head (sounds like my alarm going off in the middle of me sleeping off a particularly bad bender).

2007-06-27T16:51:00.001-07:00

now he's part of the executive branch, but the order still doesn't apply to him? or the president? excuse me for coughing sputum violently into my hand while i try to keep from shitting out the Constitution i was forcefed a while back by republican operatives. give me a fucking break.
first, dick cheney claims that the National Archives have no oversight concerning his emails, letters, etc, because he's not amember of the Execiutive Branch seeing as how he technically presides over the House of Representatives (if there's a tie vote he's called in to break it). then, under massive scrutiny and witnessing massive outrage, his lawyers realize he's not actually disassociated from said branch. but he still says he's exempt from congressional oversight.
whose government is this, people? his or ours? huh? we have an administration that's been rewriting the rules since day one and we've sat passively by as the Constitution has been trampled and our civil liberties have bee taken away and yet we do nothing.
we let this cretin come in and rule by fiat. and fear. and intimidation. wake the fuck up, folks. as long as you say nothing, we all lose.

2007-06-27T15:37:00.000-07:00

this, too, started very innocently. we knew generik would meet us at a certain spot, so we exited the cable car early in order to sneak up on him (much like when i was in the jungle and had to snare the wily crocodile)...
we got closer and the prey remained unaware, too consumed with his immediate surroundings...
we knew that eventually we would have to make a dash for him if we wanted to eat that night...
...too late, he saw us...
as i held up and took a picture of the elusive beast, katie turned and went for the crosswalker...
the inside of generik's lovely wife's outstanding fabric shop...

one place we did not frequent...
...and another...
...still one more...
...negligee, cowboy hat and boots and accordian...sigh...
...um...

woamn playing mandolin while teetering on a totter...
...even the aliens think they should get a handout...
view on the way to the ballpark...
lady giving birth...
one more view on the way...

barry bonds swings and...misses...
arod
arod swings and...connects four friggin' times!!!!
bonds swings and...actually makes contact, even though it was foul and he later settled for a groundout...

home dugout. lots of seeds, spit and paper cups. whoo hoo. but what a game. 13 innings, a massive homerun hit by arod, plenty of good fielding and a comeback by the giants. what a day.

oh, and one more place we didn't get to go...

Dick Out, Fred In?

2007-06-26T18:48:00.000-07:00

what the hell is going on washington, dc? i mean, i've seen this shit on three or four blogs and a couple of newspapers (albeit their online stuff).
cheney out this summer as republicans make a visit ala nixon? anf fred thompson in as his replacement? what the fuck?
rumors, baby, rumors...

san francisco again

2007-06-26T16:29:00.000-07:00

most of these are pics taken while on the cable car and were shot from my crotch region (as in: i didn't focus or train the lens).

2007 San Francisco Gay Pride Parade

2007-06-24T19:41:00.000-07:00

it all started so innocently...a pair of naughty little 70's calf warmers...
then the Dykes On Bikes revved up the crowd...
(could have been as many as a thousand bikes and mopeds)
(outrageous who they'll let watch this thing)
(never mind...)
generik and i had a raging argument over whether she meant the president or some secret lesbian conspiracy...

hooray for titties!!!
some of them were mighty cute...
some of them were mighty brutes...
some of them actually shaved their pits...

then the actual parade began...

ah yes, the GAY AGENDA!!! besides converting all of our children and making Dancing Queen the new national anthem...
somehow, the leis this year resembled thai stick...
later on she got rid of the seat...
the Son of God was chillin' and spreading His love...
unlike Jerry Dyer, S.F. cops got to walk with their "work-out buddies"...

the Balloon Brigade made sure that condoms were not available for any unauthorized hijinks...

a robert beltran look-a-like got his Hydra on...
da mayor of da city, mr. gavin newsom (fresh off an affair with an ex-aide's wife) let the masses know he was OUT and DOWN with the funky groove goin' on...what a hottie...

the police commissioner was HEP, too...
the Board of Equalization gave props...
and a state senator got jiggly with it...
yeah, "work-out buddies"...riiiiiiiight...
a man on three legged stilts (katie still has the vapors...)...

the 'No was represented!!!!!!
so was Barbie!!!!

but god they hope he isn't...

says it all right there...happy and proud...

kabuki...
atlantis?...
struttin'...
...yum... female or not...

all in all, a whopper of a good time. could have had pot brownies from a stranger had i been wise enough to stay another day and call in sick tomorrow. could have bought multiple cans of beer on sale by vendors on the side walk. the cops and the mayor had decided a few years ago to look the other way for these events. their concern was safety and fun.

but shit. the mayor, police chief, police commissioner and state senator all wanted in on the parade? that is so fucking cool. unlike any of our elected officials...

what a fucking cool parade, vibe, turnout (totally packed for miles) and almost to tears joyous time (cops walking with their partners almost got me, it was so open and accepting).

wish you were there.

and thanks to katie's and my wonderfully gracious host Generik for his inclusion of we two gay parade virgins.

more pics in the next post about the rest of our s.f. visit, including the baseball game and the cable car ride during which i photographed lots of architecture. whoo, whoppin' good time.

2007-06-20T14:49:00.000-07:00

in idaho a newspaper performed investigative work (a phrase mostly unheeded by the larger national syndicates) to uncover pedophilic activities within the local Boy Scout troops at the behast of a Scout who had been molested. for their hard work it was rewarded with attacks by parts of the community and the local religious powers (including the outing of a gay reporter who was covering the story and pushing to expose the pedophiles). despite the fact that what it uncovered was insidious and pointed to a larger problem within the heirarchy of the Scouts and the Morman church.
wow. a fine example of the free press in action, working locally and standing firm in the face of fear and hatred. if you read it, especially note that the Boy Scouts of America hired lawyers to suppress and hide the civil action suit from the public.

Club Fred

2007-06-10T18:02:00.000-07:00

had to get cigs today. normally i buy a carton at drugfair or costco and be done with it for ten days, but today being sunday and me being at home and lazy (despite the kitchen floor on my hands and knees scrubbing) i decided to walk three blocks and buy just two packs. it was nice to walk and see the neighborhood a bit. the "for rent" signs". the "street closed for repairs" signs. the families who speak no english, at least to me. which is okay. i refuse to speak their language to them. whatever it may be. so, we're even.
at the store i found myself behind a woman generously endowed in the hip (and lower) and breast (and lower) regions wearing terrycloth short shorts and whatever it might be called that cover the bittie titties (not that she had those). the store owner was very happy to see me while she spent 5 minutes digging in her purse to find a penny so he wouldn't have to give her 99 cents change.
he, also, had a very nice incense rack.
on the way home i decided to stop in at club fred. club fred was once the olympic tavern, the greatest dive to ever exist in the tower district. when fred took it over in the late 1980's (?) he managed to maintain the essence of that dirtiness.
when fred sold it in the early 2000's the new owner didn't. the new owner wanted it to become a hip-hop bar. his boyfriend wanted it to be trip-hop...i think hip to trip is some kind of stephen hawkings equation for "how gay can you possibly get"?
but that owner is goen and fred is back. as are some of the employees from before. and today felt so much more relaxed. i got a rant or two from a body piercer. i got the "whazup" from the new manager. i got to say hi to the only cop in town who would be seen alive inside one of the tower bars on his off hours.. it felt good.
and bruce was there again. bruce is the only individual drinking institution the tower should ever know. when he likes a place, then you know it's good. when the bad owner took over club fred, bruvce left. when the bad owner was gone, bruce returned. nuff said.
club fred feels good again.

WAAAH! Saddam Wouldn't Let Us In! WAAAH!!!

2007-06-08T16:38:00.000-07:00

this is what absolutely kills me about our politicians, the media and the populace that doesn't read, ask or wonder.
anyone who followed the rush to war with iraq knows that the UN had inspectors in iraq for quite a while and, towards the end, they were being given unfettered access to sites, because saddam realized the serious situation he was in with george bush. when the inspectors "left", they did so because bush told them to get out as he was about to bomb and couldn't guarantee their safety.
for a presidential candidate to say otherwise shows him to either be a liar or a fool. for the media to allow him to get away with it (and, as well, the other presidential candidates to not call him on it) shows it to hold the populace in utter disregard. meaning: the politicians and the media look upon us as a foot does the cockroach.
that we, as a nation, have continued to swallow bush's load of bullshit disgusts me.

one result of all of this is this.

2007-06-06T16:07:00.000-07:00

an interview with someone connected to Fair Trade products (and the website) if anyone is so inclined. Fair Trade does business with and sets up co-ops with poor farmers who would normally sell their produce at a very diminished cost to larger corporations. in this manner the farmers reap a larger profit and protect their land for future farming. my mom often sends me Fair Trade tea and i must admit it's okay. maybe not the best, but better than the norm. oddly, though, one quote from the interview caught my eye and made me remember a housemate in seattle who had been on the frontlines in the first iraq war:
"I met one farmer who had his gall bladder removed because of the effects of working with pesticides, and he talked about three waves of physical effects for other farmers, from rashes all the way up to cancer.In fact, almost all the farmers I met had had some sort of physical effect. This damages not only people but also the eco-system and animals."
when bill went to war he was one of the many soldiers told to take certain unnamed pills to protect them from biochemicals that saddam hussein was certain to unleash. he refused (so he said), because he had no idea what they were and his superiors wouldn't or couldn't tell him. in hindsight, it seems to have been the right choice, because as it turns out the military machine had grouped together with the major pharmaceutical companies and agreed to try out unapproved medicines on unsuspecting GIs. medicines that had nothing to do with the possibilities within a war. bill was, however, exposed to Depleted Uranium (DI). DI was and is still used as bullet points for piercing tank armor. DI was a major problem for the military in terms of its long half-life and had no recyclable use up until someone figured out that (because of its extemely high burning temp) it would cut through thick steel like butter. some experts estimate that up to 1000 metric tons of the stuff was left behind in iraq after the first war, most of it in dust form (the estimate for the current war is 10,000). and the only way for it to get into your system is to breathe it unless you wait long enough for it to infiltrate the water table. our GIs breathed it. a UN estimate says that over 500,000 iraqi children have died since the first war of complications due being exposed to DI.
bill breathed it. he came back already complaining of intestinal pains and migraines. he became an extremely mean drunk. he could be found writhing on the living room floor after eating certain types of produce, because his body could no longer break it down enough to pass through the duodenum. eventually, he had to have his gall bladder removed. the military never admitted responsibility nor did it ever admit that DI is radioactive enough to harm humans. at first, they even tried to deny DI was being used (as did the first Bush administration). they called it White Phosphorous. they tried to call it that again during the first stages of the current war, but eventually had to admit it was DI. while denying that it could have any long-term effects on those who breathed it.
anyway, the effect of pesticides on farmers and that of DI on soldiers seems to be similar and that is what got me on this.
i encourage the purchase of Fair Trade products unless you don't like the taste of it. it's one small way in which to help the needy who help themselves and to stick it to conglomerates of the world. although, it most likely helps them financially, too, in some sickpervertedmorallywrong way.

2007-06-06T15:20:00.000-07:00

(from P M Carpenter comes this awesome rant about the last Republican Presidential debate. oh, that it were not true...)

Imbecility²

First, let's settle any dispute as to the the winner of last night's Republican cluster conference. The victor was, of course, candidate-in-waiting Fred Thompson. There's something about a man running for the nation's highest and most demanding office who advertises his stupendous incompetence right off the bat by avoiding any public test of his abilities. Now there's a man for this hapless century for you.
As for the others' 120 minutes, it seemed to me it was all over after Q&A #1. What followed Wolf Blitzer's question about the advisability of a touch of thermonuclear destruction laid on Iran was a veritable geyser of mindless bellicosity. Excepting Ron Paul, the Republican candidates suited up in brownshirts and armbands and went to work on yet another preemptive catastrophe thrust upon hundreds of thousands of utterly innocent human beings.
Their bloody pandering to the basest of human beings here was a national embarrassment that made me, and, I would hope, millions of others, cringe at the thought of its airing around the world.
I watched every preposterous, flag-waving minute of the "debate." Although there was nothing that topped the tactical nuking episode last night, this morning both the New York Times and Washington Post led their reporting with the immigration issue. Either the GOP itch to launch unprovoked warfare has become a commonplace yawner, or both papers arrived at the debate late, missing its defining moment.
At any rate, my friends, the others, my friends, jumped all over, my friends, John "My Friends" McCain for his compromising and compromised stance on the matter. McCain's only defense was to tie everything -- and I mean everything -- to national security, two little words he uttered with monotonous regularity. I almost felt sorry for him; it was a too-late-to-change-now, desperate display of "I'd rather be right than president," which nobody ever swallows.
The most civilized among them was Ron Paul, as mentioned, and the most articulate was Mike Huckabee, both of whom haven't a prayer. The most laughable were Tommy Thompson and Mitt Romney. Thompson as president, he kids you not, would send the current one around the country to lecture "the youth of America about honesty, integrity, perseverance, passion, and serving the public," while Romney, whose every utterance was backed up by a chorus of angels singing 'God Bless America,' proved he has yet to look up the meaning of "non sequitur."
But when it came to pure, unadulterated rambling, Rudy took the prize. Wolf simply could not shut him up as he, for example, discoursed endlessly about the "very, very important" issue of Scooter Libby's righteous pardon, since "a man's life is at stake." The irony of Rudy's improperly placed concern and compassion was thunderous.
Other than the near-unanimous urge to waste any potential foe who so much as looks at us cross-eyed, the thrust of the debate was that of a tent revival meeting. There is no earthly collectivity that loves God more than these boys, and they let us know that at every opportunity, even the inopportune ones -- invoking His name 24 times.
Whenever I watch another of these tours de force in imbecility, I quake for my country. If these men are the best that democracy has to offer, if they are what democracy calls forth, it's all over.

Court's In Session: You're All Anguses!

2007-05-28T00:28:00.000-07:00

(heh. i found the jack in the crack ads to be quite amusing, especially the "where does the angus meat come from?)

Jack in the Box Ads Called Misleading
Competitor Sues Jack in the Box Over TV Spots Mocking Burger Meat
The Associated Press
By GARY GENTILE AP Business WriterLOS ANGELES May 25, 2007 (AP)

The parent company of the Carl's Jr. and Hardee's fast food chains sued rival Jack In The Box Inc. on Friday to stop TV ads that it says suggest Carl's Jr. and Hardee's use cow anus to make Angus beef hamburgers.
CKE Restaurants Inc. sued Jack In The Box in U.S. District Court on Friday over an ad in which executives laugh hysterically at the word "Angus" and another where the chain's pingpong ball-headed mascot, Jack, is asked to point to a diagram of a cow and show where Angus meat comes from.
"I'd rather not," the pointy-nosed Jack replies.
The employee asking the question traces a circle in the air with his pen while pronouncing the word Angus.
CKE claims the ads create the misleading impression that Jack In The Box's new 100 percent sirloin burgers use a better quality of meat than the Angus beef used by Carl's Jr. and Hardee's. CKE claims the spots confuse consumers by comparing sirloin, a cut of meat found on all cattle, with Angus, which is a breed of cattle.
Executives at San Diego-based Jack In The Box had not seen the lawsuit and could not respond, company spokeswoman Kathleen Anthony said.
Restaurants owned by Burger King Holdings Inc. and McDonald's Corp. also serve Angus beef burgers.
CKE is known for running controversial ads for its chains, including one featuring a scantily clad Paris Hilton washing a car while eating a burger. But CKE claims the Jack In the Box ads go too far.
"They're not being funny," CKE chief executive Andrew F. Puzder said Friday. "They need to stop misleading people about what Angus beef is."
Puzder said that the company asked Jack In the Box to drop the ads, but that the chain refused and pointed to a Carl's Jr. TV spot suggesting Carl's Jr. milk shakes were superior to those served by competitors.
Puzder said the comparison was not valid because the Carl's Jr. ads did not suggest that Jack In the Box shakes were made from milk that came from an unsavory part of the cow.
(one thing about the carl's junior ads that disgusted me is that the actors' chewing sounded like a microphone had been placed inside their mouths and one of the things i find most unacceptable is people chewing noisily and with their mouths open. the paris hilton one, however, was...um...savory)

2007-05-26T22:33:00.000-07:00

why do the texans seem to have all the fun? tom craddick (speaker of the house) is holding onto his position by a thread by using parlimentary rules to not allow state senators to bring a vote to the floor to boot him. the parlimentarian resigned, democrats were physically restrained from speaking, craddick was booed when he called for a two hour recess to escape questions and more requests that he kiss his ass goodbye...california's soooooo boring...
...how cool is this? in houston they have begun building and donating homes to injured vets to help them get back on their feet and take some of the financial load of their backs...
..."Houses on the south side fly American flags and cars with green Vermont license plates sit in the driveways. Across the street, a sign says "Arret" (French for "stop") and cars have white Quebec plates. Anyone who crosses the street without reporting to its customs houses can be prosecuted."...love it, want to live there...

I Love Email

2007-05-25T15:04:00.000-07:00

Dear Speaker Pelosi,
While not a constituent of yours (different district) I am still a dirtborn resident of California. And I have questions for you as such:
1) Why, with all of the previous research done concerning alternative fuel, have you as Speaker not pushed into action any law dictating an aggressive attempt to fully introduce electric cars or hydrogen cars or hybrids that actually use much, much less petroleum than what is now being "considered"? Are you not aware that companies like Shell and Chevron buy up the patents to car prototypes like these and shelve them so as to not let them be made? Are you not, also, aware, that the electric car was actually put into production and sold to consumers only to be yanked off the streets for no reason (some car owners were even sent letters threatening them with legal action if they didn't hand the cars back to the maker)? There were no defects in these cars made public to my knowledge.Also, what, if any, defense can you give to the bills pushed through Congress that relate to hydrogen-powered cars? President Bush has merely planned for "research" during his tenure in office. That research has already been done. It's been proven to work and economically at that.
2) The Earth is bombarded with more solar energy in one hour than it would take to provide for its energy concerns in an entire year. We, of course, could never harness anywhere near that amount on a real-time basis, but I see almost no news of solar power being used in our country on a comprehensive scale. Why are we not introducing large-scale solar panels to cities and populations in an effort to combat our dependence on heating oil?
3) Wind power is the cheapest power commodity there is. It takes no electricity or oil to run the turbines that generate electricity. There is only the initial cost and susequent maintenance to be considered. Why is this avenue not being aggressively pursued?If you truely want out of Iraq and all subsequent wars based a need for fossil fuel, then you need to look immediately for answers already etched in decades of proven research and positive results.If you merely want to try and throw egg in the President's face in order to "look good" to those you think voted you into office or those over whom you now preside, then by all means keep jerking his chain over Iraq as a moral issue while you do nothing to get us out. But if you're serious...then hear the woe of the People's pocketbook and look to staunch the blood flowing therefrom. Most of us can't afford to care about a war in another country. Most of us will never know someone who died "over there". We don't have the time or the energy to expend on that sort of grieving. What we need in order to get us back on our feet and feeling good about our country, our Congress, and our President (whoever he may actually be) is some good, old-fashioned positive movement on the economical scale. Positive movement on the moral scale wouldn't be that bad, either, but let's start with our pocketbooks and our faith in Government.I am a lifelong liberal and I supported your ascendence into your current position of power, but I can see no difference between now and a year ago other than a lot more squabbling and posturing.You serve me as well as millions of others on both sides of the political aisle. Do something to save us from an infinite struggle for the one energy commidity that can never be renewed.

2007-05-23T22:17:00.000-07:00

(allegedly) at the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado, California:

if you can't see it, then it's just too late for you....

From NPR.com

2007-05-14T15:38:00.000-07:00

Legal Affairs
Two Immigrants Say U.S. Agents Drugged Them
by Rob Schmitz
Weekend Edition Sunday, May 13, 2007 · In Los Angeles, the unusual case of two immigrants whose deportations were botched by U.S. immigration officials has allowed a rare glimpse into internal proceedings within the Department of Homeland Security.
The men say that U.S. immigration officials drugged them in order to ease their removal from the country — but airline officials ultimately put a stop to the deportations.
Both immigrants are back in Los Angeles, appealing their deportations. And they've now obtained government medical records that seem to confirm their accounts.
One of the men, Raymond Soeoth, is a Christian minister from Indonesia who came to the United States in 1999 to flee religious persecution. But on Dec. 7, 2004, immigration agents told him he was going to be deported.
Soeoth says that an agent asked him if he needed medication to relax him for the trip. He replied that he did not. But a few hours later, says Soeoth, several agents came into his cell. One of them, he says, was a medic. He was holding a syringe.
"Two officers grabbed my legs, two officers grabbed my hands. Then they opened my pants. And then I said, 'Why are you guys doing this to me?' and I was crying and crying, and I said 'Why? I'm not animal.'"
Soeoth says the medic injected him in the buttocks. He says he lost consciousness on the way to the airport. The deportation was eventually cancelled because agents failed to notify airline security.
According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement medical records, Soeth was injected with Haldol, a very powerful sedative.
In Soeoth's case, his government medical records say a physician prescribed Haldol because Soeoth threatened to kill himself if he was deported.
Soeoth denies that he said this; there is no documentation in his medical records of any other suicide threats, or any history of mental illness.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Mark Raimondi says sedation is sometimes necessary, but that he cannot talk about Soeoth's specific case.
Still, Raimondi says that before drugs were administered, "First there would be an attempt to do verbal counseling to get the detainee to comply and calm down. If that failed, the attempt would be to do physical constraints. If that failed, then, as a last resort, a sedative could be administered."
Raimondi says forcefully injecting a detainee with a sedative would only occur in extraordinary circumstances.
That appeared to be the case in February of 2006, when immigration agents told Senegalese immigrant Amadou Diouf that he was going to be deported. A federal court had given Diouf a stay of deportation, but agents brought him to the airport anyway.
On the plane, Diouf asked to speak to the pilot. He says this angered his government-appointed medical escort, who tried to force Diouf into the plane's lavatory.
"He took the bag out, and he took the syringe," Diouf said. "At that point I knew that, you know, they're going to sedate me. Next thing you know, I refused to get inside the lavatory anyway, and I was pushed to the back and wrestled to the ground."
Diouf says agents injected him with a drug, and then they were kicked off the plane. He says his legs were so numb that on the way out, he fell down the plane's stairs onto the tarmac. Diouf's medical records confirm that he was given medication. It does not list the type of medication.
The American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who is representing both Soeoth and Diouf says his organization is investigating whether to file a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security.
Rob Schmitz reports from member station KQED.