Crudely Written

Why I continue to call them "tea baggers"

2011-11-06T08:40:00.000-05:00

I greatly lament the death of nuance in our culture, and it's perfectly exemplified by the so called 'tea party' movement. A 'movement' so removed form popular culture that they initially referred to themselves, they picked their own name, with a euphemism for someone having balls dunked in their mouths. They picked their name, we just laughed at them for it.

But that's not the reason I continue to call them tea baggers. I do that because they're the people that were carrying signs of such nuanced political insight as "Keep Government Out of my Medicare." The sheer weight of their intellectual curiosity is scary. These are the same people that carried signs of Obama as a monkey, or eating bananas, or a tribal witch doctor with a bone in his nose and claimed they were not racist. These are the same people, like Michelle Bachmann, how decried Rick Perry's HPV program, that actually can save lives, as an unacceptable intrusion into personal choice but then says if elected she'll pass a law forcing women seeking abortions to have an intrusive medical procedure designed specifically and unapologetically to push women to not have the abortion, using government to force her moral and religious ideology on the rest of the country.

It's not government these people have a problem with, it's other peoples government they have a problem with. Anything that empowers someone else by default threatens them. It's a zero sum game for them. I've stated this before. If someone else has their rights expanded, then by their faith based math their rights are being restricted. it goes hand in hand, it's accepted faith for these people. They hate other peoples government.

Lastly, the entire "movement' is bogus. It's 90% disaffected Republicans that left the party for various reasons since Reagan, and the other 10% are the same old small l libertarians that have been sniffing around the GOP for decades, showing up at caucuses and voting for Ron Paul and generally being a pain in the party's rear end. The entire thing is being paid for and organized by establishment GOP groups and fronts like AFP and the Koch's as well as American Crossroads, which is a Gingrich op for God's sake.

And that's why I continue to call them tea baggers, because they continue to open their mouths and prove their ignorance every day. They have no clue they're being used, though they're starting to find that out, same as the evangelicals did when Bush and the party leadership dumped them after the elections. These people are tools, and not themselves, but for someone else.

Why raising taxes is the right thing to do.

2011-07-06T10:52:00.002-04:00

The vast majority of Americans support raising taxes on the super wealthy. A majority supports raising them on the merely wealthy. And a significant minority supports raising them on everybody. Americans want to pay down their debt but the Republicans won't let them. Remember when paying for wars was patriotic? Remember when just paying your taxes was patriotic? But that was before the government became the problem.

Here's what it boils down to;
Democrats; We want to raise taxes but will compromise and cut spending too.
Republicans' Okay, we'll let you compromise.

The Democrats have cut spending. They've cut a lot of spending. It's time to let temporary tax cuts expire. It's time to make a real effort to pay off our war debt. It's time the American people actually paid something for the wars 1% of our population is fighting in our name. Tax cuts during war time, how hollow our patriotism, how cheap our freedom.

It's time for all Americans to step up and do their duty, including the rich and industry. It used to be the American way.

Bigotry is not racism.

2011-06-17T10:32:00.001-04:00

Okay people, let's once again consider the differences between racist and racism with bigotry and bigot. Most of what gets labeled as racism today is nothing more than simple bigotry. A racist believes in the superiority or inferiority of one or more races over the other. A bigot is someone that treats a group of people with intolerance or some level of animosity because of what or who they are. A bigot doesn't have to think someone is genetically inferior, a racist does.

Racist and racism have been so grossly misused and abused that they've all but lost their true meaning. They're nothing more than sound bites now. And that's a shame, because when real racists come along we're likely to ignore them until it's too late. It's also a shame that the words have lost all their power with their meaning. Please stop to make the distinction instead of adding to the knee jerk reactionary moralistic outrage bull crap that permeates our national discourse today.

Everyone is bigoted in some way, everyone is fearful of something, the new, the different, change, the loss of control. That's an evolutionary defense mechanism. But God gave us the good grace to rise above our base instincts. Some just more grace than others.

Florida's modern day poll tax; Pt. II

2011-06-01T09:17:00.002-04:00

So what about clinic certification and inspection costs? What tests do the state accept? Do they inspect testing facilities? Do they contract with local companies? What if there are no testing facilities in a large rural area? What if the people are in home due to health issues, do they have to pay extra for the tester to come to their home?

People knee jerking their support for this law aren't thinking it through. The percentage of over all welfare recipients on drugs is not going to be that high. if you think it is, you're completely ignorant of the stats. So called 'generational welfare' recipients are a low percentage of people on welfare nationally. It's going to be high in places like maybe Miami slums, but lower in more rural or other areas. It's not going to be the same everywhere.

No one is considering the ongoing costs to both businesses and the state in enforcing and certifying these testing facilities and results. Is there a provision for false positives? Even people in prison if they get tested positive, the sample gets sent to another facility to get retested for a false positive. Does it factor in medication people might be on?

This is nothing more than a modern day poll tax, specifically designed to discourage people from applying for welfare at all. It's not going to lower costs in the long run, it's nothing more than base, empty politics. If they were serious about it, they would have made the law pay for all tests upfront and then bill or sue the people that fail. Instead, they're treating everyone as if they ALL use drugs. It's knee jerk puffy chest partisan politics, nothing more.

Florida's modern day poll tax.

2011-06-01T08:58:00.001-04:00

Governor Rick Scott (I won't even get into his personal history or how the hell the piece of shit got elected in a state full of fucking old people) just signed a law in Florida requiring everyone applying for welfare to pay for and take a drug test first.

Now, at first glance that might not seem so bad. But rethink it. People have to pay for the drug test first. They can get reimbursed by the state once they are accepted into the program. If they do not get accepted, for any reason, even unrelated to the testing, they do not get reimbursed. They have to pay to apply for a government service they might not even get accepted to.

This is blatantly a modern day poll tax, designed specifically to keep people from applying for welfare in the first place. You think the state is going to accept just any old drug test result? No, they are going to contract with private testing agencies, either by subcontracting some company directly or by making them pay to get 'certified' by the state to be an 'official' program tester, which is almost certainly to lead to ongoing re-certification fees by the state, inspecting fees so people aren't running 'clinics' out of the home or a garage. So there's more fees and more costs.

When they first passed the breathalyzer law in Michigan the state contracted two companies to run it state wide. Of course they didn't have facilities everywhere so they had to contract with local businesses like truck and car accessory places. What the fuck did these sub sub contractors know about anything? The program was a fucking mess. You had two choices, period. And depending on where you lived, you might have only one choice if there is only one place in town and they only contract one service. It was a state sanctioned monopoly, and it didn't work for shit. Even the people that worked at the local car accessory place admitted the program was fucked up, so bad at the time, only a couple years into it, they were think of dropping it.

But back to the current ideological war on society. This is just one more front in the ongoing war against social programs. It's designed specifically to prevent people from even applying. If they were serious about it, they would have written the law to allow the state to pay for all pre-application testing and then bill or sue the people that fail. But they didn't. On purpose.

They're applying for fucking welfare! They don't have any fucking money! And if they get denied for reasons other than drugs, they're still out the fucking money!

It's a modern day poll tax. It's open war on poor people. It's nothing less than the abdication of social responsibility to consumer market capitalism.

The new color of racism is green.

US politicians; On Sale! Buy Now!

2011-05-28T07:46:00.002-04:00

So I thought Citizens United wasn't supposed to open the flood gates of corporate money? Wasn't that the line from the conservative majority of the USSC that ruled on it as well as every other conservative in the country spouting out their ass about it?

The point here, or rather what should be the point but obviously isn't, is that businesses do business as a "person" for business purposes only. Rather than listing every corporate officer by name on every transaction they do, they do it as a business instead. But being a "person" doesn't mean you're a citizen, or that you have the same rights as a citizen. Just ask the sorry bastards down in Gitmo.

And that's the kicker for corporations. Just because they're "people" doesn't mean they're citizens. Can they vote? I would think the primary basis of claiming citizen rights would be to be able to vote. They can not. They are not citizens, and they have NO inherent right to free speech what so ever. The people that work there can do whatever they want, the business can not. Or, again, rather, should not. But here we are, flood gates open, up to our necks in corporate influence on our national policies.

People have long claimed that US politicians were for sale, now we know they are. All they need now is a price tag around their necks.

Is Newt out already?

2011-05-17T16:48:00.003-04:00

I knew it was only a matter of time before Newt blew himself up, but I had hoped he would at least make it to the actual debates and bloody up the field some before he imploded.

But here we are, showing his circus contortionist training by screwing himself in the ass.

In short, he called Paul Ryan's Medicare plan "right-wing social engineering." That is a direct out of the mouths of too smart for their own good babes quote. But that wasn't enough for a pro like Newt, he had to go on a mini rant on how he would push for an individual mandate which, of course, though trumpeted at first by The Heritage Foundation, has now been sullied and dirtied by Obama's filthy black socialist hands.

This is Newts problem, he's too smart. He knows too much stuff, it makes it hard to stay on the myopic ideological talking points, especially when they don't make sense. Newt simply forgot and started talking truth and, actually, previous conservative dogma. It's hard to keep up with what they support and oppose at any given point in time.

The only way of keeping the private for profit insurance driven health care system is some form of an individual mandate. Everyone has to be included or it won't work, the costs won't go down, and it'll fall apart. This is why conservatives are now pushing so hard for state exemptions, they know if enough states opt out it won't work nationally.

So minus the individual mandate, the only other option is government health care. Conservatives need to swallow this nasty load and get it over with. Short of an individual mandate forcing the vast majority of people to buy insurance, or direct government health care, the current system will collapse.

Newt knows this, he just forgot he's not supposed to say it out loud.

The new and imrpoved House Un-American Activities Committee

2011-03-06T08:44:00.004-05:00

Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Islamic faith?

Or are you one of those 'First Amendment terrorists?'

On the editing of Huck Finn

2011-01-05T11:43:00.001-05:00

It's lame, but it's not the end of culture as we know it, Jesus.

The trick any teacher would have with this book would be explaining in an understanding way the context of the use of the word and the times in which they were written. That, in this day and age of 'reality' TV and instant fame for being famous would be tough on its own, let alone in the aforementioned quote unquote culture we live in today.

If I found myself teaching an edited version of the book, I would do the same as before, and let the students know the real word used as well as the context and times in which it was written. I lament the editing, but I don't think it detracts from the power of the book at all, nor does it really change the context of the story, as the old and new words were at the time interchangeable.

What bothers me FAR more is the outright and blatant false history being taught in the new text books in Texas and other states, omitting politically 'incorrect' founding fathers, deemphasizing or outright ignoring important civil rights issues and individuals, teaching religious doctrine as science and claiming slaves were just fine with slavery really they were it was a war of Northern aggression don't you know.

Compared to that, editing Huck for one of the most reviled and hated and divisive words in the history of our culture seems not that big a deal to me. Don't let it blind you to the true travesties going on.

Uniquely American.

2010-10-15T08:15:00.001-04:00

It's uniquely American that while I have no right to life saving health care I do have a right to a lawyer to sue after I died, if I weren't dead. So access to a lawyer is more important than access to health care in this country.

Health care is social policy. You can not base social policy on for profit industry. No one else in the entire world, IN THE ENTIRE WORLD, has a for profit national health care industry. And we're half way there anyway, by the time you consider the VA, Medicare/caid, WIC and everything else.

If we had comprehensive, preventive oriented national health care, it would save us money in the long run. It's fact, it's proven. But then, the same people that want to gut health care want to gut education too, even though, again, every country in the entire world knows how important education is and all have some higher level of government subsidized education than the US does. Countries like India and Pakistan pay for their students to come and learn in the US, then go back home with the best education a foreign government can buy. Higher educated people get better jobs, live healthier lifestyles, commit less crimes, are less likely to be abusive in any way.

All this is proven fact, and people still want to gut public education and health care. Uniquely American, thinking that everyone else in the entire world is wrong and only we, by God's Own Grace, know the truth; Capitalism as social policy. I mean, Jesus was all about the Benjamins, amirite?

To the people opposing the Islamic Center in lower Manhatten

2010-09-08T07:55:00.001-04:00

People against the Islamic center are the same people that rounded up the Americans of Japanese decent and put them in camps, or herded the Native American across the country like so much cattle and put them in 'reservations,' or who honestly thought that American slaves were better for it than their savage cousins back on the continent. You should be rallying to the sides of your countrymen, your fellow Americans. Instead, you vilify and ostracize them to cover your own shallow bigotries. You stand against your fellow citizens. You're small and pathetic. You embarrass me as an American.

And that's all I have to say on that.

So now I support illegal immigration?

2010-06-27T09:05:00.002-04:00

Okay people, let's get a couple things straight. Just because someone opposes the Arizona immigration law doesn't mean they support illegal immigration. That's stupid, to say the least. What's being lost in the conversation here are the Hispanic people in Arizona that are going to be constantly asked for the ID now, and not just a drivers license. If this was happening to primarily white people, well, it just wouldn't be happening. We pick out Hispanics and Arabs because they're 'other' and easy to point out and focus on. It's easy, and it's lazy. That's what we've come to.

The other thing to remember is that like it or not, immigration is part of foreign policy and the Constitution is crystal clear on the fact that the federal government alone is responsible for foreign policy. This is not opinion. This is a literal reading of the words written in the Constitution. Literalist, textualist, consitutionalist, it's all right there.

The last thing to consider is that Arizona already has sufficient laws on the books to enforce immigration on the state level. If employers were sufficiently afraid of hiring illegals, no illegals would go to Arizona. No job, no illegals. It's that simple. Period. But instead of putting resources into enforcing these existing laws they decided to pass at best a Constitutionally suspect law trying to enforce federal authority they have no authority to enforce. Do you know what they will do with illegals after the new law kicks in? The exact same thing they do now, turn them over to federal immigration authorities. Nothing changes, except the fact that Latino looking people will now be targeted for suspicion on the basis of their ethnicity alone.

This will happen, it's only a matter of how often. It can't be avoided, there will be racial profiling. If someone is white, they won't get asked for the same ID that Latino looking people will. That is based purely on race, people. And what you're saying by supporting this law is that you've decided that it's okay for some people to have their civil rights abused to give you some level of satisfaction. Just as long as it's not your rights being abused.

But then, considering that a majority of people support torture, let alone the fact that the vast majority of us supported our country in its time of need by going shopping and seeing a movie, I can't say that I'm surprised that people now support infringing other people rights and liberties to vaguely "protect" their own.

One last word on fences; they don't just keep people out.

Fear is the new southern strategy

2010-06-20T08:17:00.001-04:00

They can't be bigots out in the open anymore, so they try to hide it behind the law. That's why they want their names kept secret, they know they're bigots.

It's going to get worse, far, far worse, before it even starts to get better. And it comes as no surprise to me when America sighed a collective *whew* when Bush told us we needn't serve our country in a time of war, we only needed to spend the tax cut money he was paying us to not fight the war.

Tax cuts during war time!

Jesus Lord Christ but we suck mightily. We have failed on so many levels as a people.

Also, just to toss it out there, Clarence Thomas is a piece of fucking shit. There's simply no nice way to say it. He'll help ruin this country.

To say the second civil war is coming is almost trite today, but it is. Maybe not in my lifetime, as we're going to have to fall so much further than we have to get to the boiling point. It'll be preceded by a 'revolution' form the right, when they come for your guns. And make no mistake, when they come for your guns, they'll be coming from the right. It's the only side with the moral self righteousness to actually try and pull it off. But that will be the spark, and from there it'll be effectively civil war, and in the end, American will emerge far more to the left than we are now.

That's the funny part in all this, and there are a lot of funny parts, is that the right, or fragments of it, are going to be the very ones to push the country over the edge into the socialist abyss they claim to fear so much, even when they willfully stay ignorant of what it is they actually are afraid of.

Hyperbole rules the media, outrage sells, shock value is no longer shocking; it's the norm. It's all over the top, all the time, all emotional, all self righteous causes. Bush wasn't just bad, he was Hitler. Obama isn't just wrong, he's Hitler. How that works out is only explained by the fact that Hitler and the Nazi's are about the only ones we can rag on anymore, because it's certainly impossible otherwise, and in fact are both grossly wrong. Not just wrong, but grossly wrong. As wrong, and just plain stupid, as it is for people to simultaneous claim Obama is a Nazi, a communist and a socialist all at the same time. As wrong as Glenn Beck's Holy Crusade to forever tie progressives with socialism, when in fact the founding fathers themselves were progressives at heart, so there the Federalist Papers they masturbate to, and all just a little bit socialist in their own way.

What's also funny, is that original socialism should fit the modern rights ideals to a tee. It was based on individual merit and the amount you contributed to society. What's even funnier than that, is that no one on the mainstream and fringe right even seems to know that fact.

We continue to use labels that have lost all context in their modern abuse and misuse. Racism for example no longer carries any weight, it's abused and misused so often. Most people are simple bigots, not racists, but no one even knows that racism is based on the genetic superiority or inferiority of the races, not some political ideal. Not even conservative or liberal means what they used to, not even what they meant 30 years ago under Reagan. Conservatives under Reagan were fiscal cons, evangelicals are not fiscally conservative, as they proved so disastrously under Bush. Liberals are also not what they were 30 years ago. Some of the red lipped here might choke on it, but liberals are actually more moderate than they were 30 years ago, even with the so called health care reform, which was barely reform, and cemented a for profit health care system into law. A socialist health care system would be government owned hospitals with government employed staff and nothing else. That would be socialist, you inane twits.

Anyway, excuse my early morning rant, I just got off work, I'm wound up anyway, and reading about Clarence fucking Thomas always pisses me off.

Obama failes to call down wrath of the heavans.

2010-06-16T08:18:00.001-04:00

I certainly couldn't imagine it before his election, but I'm glad I didn't vote for him and that I didn't really support him even in the primaries. That way I'm not so bitter over his failure to live up to my unrealistic and unwarranted expectations of him.

Give people a little hope and they get all stupid with it. This is why our politicians are such cynical bastards today, they give people hope then they have expectations, and the more general the hope the higher and more unrealistic the expectations are. And when reality sets in, reality that never should have been over looked in the first place but Gosh it's just so much fun making history I can pretend anything is possible and what the hell I want a pony too!

Obama caused his own problems though when he started believing his hype and broke the promise he made after his 2004 convention speech when he said he wouldn't run in 2008. He should have waited, he could have been Hilary's VP, could have snagged the White House for decade and a half. But instead he goes in as the perfect blank slate candidate, where everyone can paint him any color they want, pun intended, and no one can prove them right or wrong. It was perfect, since we already had hollow patriotism that cost nothing but vague platitudes towards the 1% of the population doing all our dirty work for us so we have more time to puff our chests and wear the flag like a BBQ bib. Pigs at the trough one and all.

Two active, stalled wars. Worst financial crises in 80 years, second worst in our entire history as a nation. Massive tensions around the world with North Korea and the Middle East. Constant terrorist threats against the country. A nation more divided than in the last 150 years, not since the Civil War tore us apart. A political Balkanization fracturing the very basis of our representative democracy.

And By God he failed to fix it all, worst president in history according to many, after less than two years of constant obstruction from the right, constant chaos from the left, and there's Obama, stuck in the middle with me, clowns to the left and the right of us.

He gave a good speech. He called us to action. And we jumped right in, criticizing him from all sides.

A people don't get the government they deserve, they get the government they allow. You want to blame someone, look in the mirror. I have.

Health care rant.

2010-05-16T19:36:00.001-04:00

Someone asked me what I wanted, did I want to go back to 1970's prices on health care. I said no, I want government prices. I want government funded and managed national health care. The government is the only entity big enough to control costs in any even semi reasonable manner. The increasing disparity between wages, inflation and health care costs proves the for profit business based system does not work in the modern world and economy. When blue collar semi skilled laborers could plan on working for the same company until the day they died while paying off a mortgage and college for two kids is long, long gone. Those days are never, ever coming back.

So how can we cling to a health care system that was designed to operate under economic realities that no longer exist? This isn't political, or ideological, or a threat to freedom, or anything else besides simple economics. Workers and employers can't afford to pay for health care anymore. You want to end illegal immigration? Pay day laborers a living wage with full health care and retirement benefits and there won't be any jobs left for illegals to take.

Some dumbass Republican, maybe Bachman don't care, couple weeks ago claimed people could paint the doctors house or trade them a fucking chicken, for what? For an MRI? For chemotherapy? For drugs that cost tens of thousands of dollars a week? A 100 years ago when health care consisted of a doctor coming by and shoving some caster oil down your throat yeah, fine, you could trade some livestock, but not today, not even close, that someone actually thought that was viable is past hilarious, past parody, you can't parody shit worse than that.

Government is the only entity big enough to manage the costs of modern health care. Unless you think that poor people should die because they're poor, then you have to admit that government is the only one that can do it. And instead of looking around at other nations systems and seeing if we can come up with one that's better and more efficient, which used to be the American way of doing things, instead of doing that we're calling each other fucking Communists, Glenn Beck is on Fox showing the links from Obama to fucking Hitler on a blackboard, and people cheer him on. Because apparently that's the American way of doing things today.

The Glenn Beck Reality Show

2010-04-30T08:07:00.003-04:00

Flipping through the channels at work, I like to drop in on my favorite reality show network, Fox News. I especially try to get in on Beck, as he never fails to entertain. Last night was no exception. Though I was only able to catch a small part of it, I took it that the main 'focus' of his show that night was the financial reform legislation. He was explaining how, as we all know of course, that Wall Street and the govenrment are exactly the same and for his nightly visual aid (he always uses the ever lovable blackboard but sometimes adds in other stimuli when that 2D prop fails to convey the weighty issues he's so delicately explaining) consisted of a film clip from the "Oceans 1x" movie franchise, in which the criminal gang fakes being the authorities and when the casino calls the cops they intercept the call and respond as fake policemen to their own robbery. Which, of course, was the same as the feds responding to the financial crises.

I only have one question; Does Glenn Beck really think that his audience is that stupid, or does he know they are?

There is no "deeper meaning" to the Brown/Massachusetts election

2010-01-20T08:01:00.000-05:00

Lets get a few things straight; first, the seat was not held by the Democrats for forty years, it was held by Ted Kennedy for forty years. If someone like, say, Patrick Kennedy had run for the seat, he'd of won and we'd all be talking about the confirmation of Obama's policies, and getting it wrong too, just as we are now.

It was also special election, less than half the registered voters bothered to vote. Special election, as everyone knows, are driven by the most pissed off segment of the voting public. It's coincidence that Kennedy died in the middle of the situation we have now and that it swung to the right as that side is the most pissed off. Doesn't mean they're right, the Democrats were the most pissed off in 2006 and they took back Congress because of it, and then the White House in 2008.

Ad to that, that Coakly sucked ass and Brown kicked ass as a candidate. Coakly ran a shitty campaign, and the people noticed. That Brown was lesser known was far more to his advantage than it was against it. Coakly fucked up and let him define himself and by doing so defined herself, and not in a good way.

Now lets talk about the sate of Massachusetts, where there are more registered independents than there are Democrats and Republican combined. But of the lesser half of major party voters, the Democrats outnumbered the Republicans at least 2-1. But the Democrats alone are outnumbered by more than that against everyone else. The state is more libertarian than it is liberal, and the only reason it's been the "bluest of blue" states so long is that a Kennedy has lived there for so long. The blueness of the state is as much illusion as fact. It's more a turquoise.

And what the hell, let's talk about the fact the state already has MANDATED insurance, you know, they're forced to buy it just as 'Obamacare' would force you. There's a state run insurance exchange! Signed into law by a Republican governor, who then distanced himself from it when he ran for national office, and is now embracing it again like he honestly believes no one is paying attention. Luckily for him, no one on his side is.

So, you have a special election, for a seat held by one person from a true American political dynasty for four decades, two candidates ideally suited to win and lose, respectively, a libertarian state dominated by independents, who also already have state government mandated health care.

And this is a referendum on Obama?

/Que bad Dr. Evil impression; Riiiiight.

This election was about nothing BUT local politics. Certainly there was a side element at play with respects to Obama, as as he is the president and the leader of the Democratic party, who's policies Coakly represented, but to play that off as the deciding factor in this election is beyond stupid, it's willful ignorance at best, blatant bald faced bullshit at worst.

Brown closed the gap in less than a month. We got more than a year of GOP obstructionism in Congress, which is about to get ratcheted up a notch, if thats even possible. A lof can happen, or in this case, not happen in a year. Obama plays it right and this election hurts the GOP in the long run, not help it. All it can do to help them now is to stop the Democrats, not get anything passed on their own. And we all seen what they can do the last time they got ahold of all the marbles. They palmed like Capt. Queeg in the witness stand.

To Republicans this is the second Reich rising from the ashes of the 'permanent majorty' of the Gingrich revolution. I think it's more than hilarious that old Newt is actually publically talking about running in 2012. Maybe them Mayans do know something after all.

Obama shames nation by winning Nobel prize.

2009-10-10T08:04:00.003-04:00

There is no nice way to say this, and it doesn't warrant a nice way to say it anyway; anyone pissing and moaning about president Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize needs to fuck the fuck off.

I would be as proud of any president winning a Nobel prize, I don't care who the fuck it is. I hate Bush, bad president, worse in modern history, but if he had somehow pulled a Nobel fucking peace prize out of his ass while in office I'd damn sure be just as fucking proud as I am now over Obama.

There are people in this country that are offended by this! They are offended by the president winning a Nobel prize! Who the fuck do they think they are?

A sitting president of the United States wins a Nobel prize, I'm fucking proud. I don't care who it is, how long he's been in office, or what he's done or not done. He's my president, and he won a Nobel prize. That's a proud day for America, you flaming fucking assholes from Hell.

And that's as nice as I can put that, you pricks.

In defense of a clown

2009-10-06T07:54:00.001-04:00

This is great;
In defense of Glenn Beck

This is what the conservative movement is reduced to, feeding the vacuum they live in, feeding off each other, reporting on each other, treating each other like they're news.

Dude starts the article off right by likening Beck to a rodeo clown, which apparently Beck does himself. Then talks about his meteoric rise, but states his most impressive achievement is how big of a cross section of people hate him. Not really a bragging point I'd push, but then I'm not a flaming fucking asshole. Hint; if everyone in the room says you're an asshole, then you just might be an asshole.

And of course he bothers to disclose that he likes Beck personally, Beck pimped his book on his show, and his book is titled 'Liberal Fascism,' as well as the fact that he's a Fox News regular and appears regularly on Becks show as well.

Well, at least he's impartial.

But it gets better. He goes on to compare Beck with John Stewart. Beck, who has a nightly news show on Fox News, a major cable news network, compared to Stewart, who's a fucking comedian on a fucking cable comedy network that even has the word "comedy" in it's fucking name! This is more apt than the author of the article ever intended, I'm sure.

Even more to the point, he closes the article by claiming that the 'left' never sees the antics of it's more "flamboyant celebrities" as a bad thing. But that's just the point, dumbass, they're celebrities!

If the right wants to admit that Beck is nothing more than a clown entertaining us with his comedy show that happens to be on one of the major cable news networks, fine, then we can all agree. But if they want to claim any respectability from the man, then he needs to get his own comedy show on Comedy Central so he can finally stand toe to toe with John Stewart on his own turf.

After all, he's just a clown.

Glenn Beck wants to save 'white culture'

2009-09-13T08:42:00.002-04:00

"This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture," Beck said. "I don't know what it is."

The white culture? What the fuck even is 'white culture?' There is no such thing as white culture in this fucking country! There is European culture. There is Asian culture. There is African culture. What do these things all have in common? They're fucking continents! That is where our culture comes from, a people, not a fucking race.

I'll tell you what 'white culture is; it's all the cultures in all the world we've by equal parts stolen, suppressed, co-opted, integrated, welcomed, celebrated and copied as our own.

White culture is American culture, it's African culture, European culture in all its varied forms, Asian culture, popular culture, world culture, hell we even invented fucking Kwanzaa! We just made up a new holiday just to give the blacks something of their own. I know white people didn't make it up, but Americans did.

American culture is a sponge, we soak the rest of the world up into our own. That's a plus, not a negative. People like Beck and the tea party assholes, the people that hate Obama because he's Obama, they're the ones that don't like American culture. They want it to stagnate and atrophy, they want it to stand still.

America don't work like that, bitches. Get used to it, or get the fuck out. Head over the France, they lock their minorities up outside the city limits in slums. They make an official language. They ban the use of foreign languages in the government and media. They even mandate French be used primarily on French web sites. They banned the Burka.

That's how twisted this shit is when these so-called Americans have more in common with France than they do with their own country.

So we're back to the so called "conscience clause"

2009-05-18T07:41:00.000-04:00

Obama in his Notre Dame speech made a point to suck up to the anti-choice crowd by promising to get some 'conscience clause' in effect, don't know the details, not read the whole speech just blurbs.

But the fact that it was blurbed at all disturbs me. I'm sorry, but if your moral or religious convictions are going to directly interfere with your job and your job is in an integrated societal aspect such as health care, you need to find another fucking job. If your belief system will not allow you to prescribe or perform perfectly legal and safe medical procedures or operations, again, you need to find another fucking job. At the very very least you should not be getting government funding or tax breaks of any kind. You want to refuse people, do it on your own damn time.

Let's say a pediatrician, you know, a child doctor, let's think of the children after all, let's say a pediatrician does not believe in vaccinations based on his religious beliefs. He refuses to vaccinate someones child that wants their child vaccinated. How long would this pediatrician keep his license?

A judge in Minnesota just ruled a family can't refuse chemotherapy for their 13 yr old son, but we're going to allow a pharmacist to refuse to dispense medicine, or let doctors refuse to treat patients? I guess since the family's refusal isn't based on religious beliefs, they don't matter.

Are we really going to let someone elses personal moral or ethical opinions limit or grant other peoples access to health care that they willingly and knowingly choose by an informed decision? Religion now dictates at what level we have access to legal and safe health care?

How in God's name can anyone argue that the rights of the medical professional takes precedence over those of the informed and consenting patient? Did the doctor have a choice of what field of medicine to go into, or even to go into medicine at all? Did they have more of a choice than people have when they only live anywhere near one medical facility or pharmacy? They knew going in that they were ethically opposed to aspects of their industry, yet they choose to go anyway. Patients don't have that same choice, especially not lower income patients most likely to seek birth control or abortion services, both of which are, again, perfectly legal and safe.

This 'conscience clause' is bullshit. By this same reasoning my ethical belief says black people can't mix with white people, thus as a landlord I don't have to rent to black people not because they are black, but because of my ethical beliefs. Perfectly, exactly the same thing.

Following this reasoning anyone can discriminate against anyone for any reason, as long as the claim their 'conscience' doesn't allow it. It either works for everyone or no one, there is no middle ground, because then someone is picking and choosing whose ethics and beliefs count. My Christian sensibilities are offended by Muslims, can I then refuse them service or employment? Fuck no, and neither can medical professionals refuse safe and legal medical services based on ethical beliefs they knew they held long before they decided to enter into medicine.

If you don't like it, leave.

Been waiting for the blacklash from the 'black community'

2009-01-24T07:31:00.000-05:00

And here it is starting already, the fucking day after he took office.

How dare Obama even mention nonbelievers and Muslims and other non Judeo-Christan beliefs. Doesn't he know that atheists are only 3/5's of a person?

Just wait for the shit storm over abortion and gay rights.

For a short time, maybe a day or two, I kind of wished I were black so the significance of Obama's election would mean more to me. But now I'm glad I'm white, because when Obama does something I don't personally agree with based on my own personal morality I won't feel betrayed by a race traitor.

Race is nothing compared to righteous personal morality. Obama's due for a nasty reminder of just that.

Gays need to forget any help from other minorities

2008-11-08T11:25:00.001-05:00

Backers of the California ban used audio clips of Obama in push style robo-calls saying to the effect of "I believe that a marriage is between a man and a woman." I'm sure you can find a news article on it easy enough.

Many gays made a major miscalculation when they thought they'd get support from blacks claiming some like minded prejudiced history between them. Not only did a lot of black leaders not agree with that but many of them took straight up offense at the mere suggestion.

I can't presume to speak for gay people but IMO they got too pushy. Not because they're pushy, personally I think anyone should be able to marry anyone else, but with all the responsibilities and commitments that most straight people don't even feel the need to observe anymore. It's far too easy to both get married and divorced IMO.

But they should have pushed civil unions instead. Especially in California where they should have been smart enough to know that the state as a whole is not as liberal as San Fransisco, and is in fact fairly socially conservative. I blame the gay mayor dude for starting the jump straight to marriage.

A lot of people get married every day in simple court house civil ceremonies. They could have started with that, and should be working for just that on the federal Constitutional level. But forget about marriage, it ain't happening in my lifetime and if they keep pushing it soon enough enough states will have their own constitutional amendment in place to push one into the US Constitution.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/us...rriage.html?em

30 states already have bans on gay marriage, with another ten or so with some kind of law short of the constitution. It only takes 38 states to adopt a Constitutional amendment.

In the same story, over 70% of black voters supported the ban, as did over half the Latino voters. 53% of white voters opposed the ban. Both major minority groups helped pass the gay marriage ban in California. The gays ain't getting no help from the other minority groups and would do well to completely forget about them and start focusing in civil unions, which they could conceivably push to the federal level at least for benefits and insurance. That's what's called a start. Gay marriage, on the other hand, is what's called a non-starter.

Some perspective Obama should consider

2008-11-05T13:55:00.000-05:00

When Clinton took office in 1992, he had a 58 seat majority in the Senate and a larger majority in the House than the Democrats have right now, maybe even larger than they'll have after all the election results are in.

Clinton came swaggering into town ready to shove through his own brand of 'change' of the time and the Republicans pulled back and left him hung out to dry with his own party. With the GOP disengaged the Democrats squabbled and got nothing of substance done for two years and the people threw their asses out and the Republican revolution started.

Minus the Republican takeover midterm I'd say that Clinton would have had a much harder time moving his agenda and being the effective president he was. It was only after the Congressional shift that Clinton was able to co-opt enough of the GOP's agenda, free trade in the form of NAFTA and welfare reform the two most significant, and get enough clout of his own to start pushing his own agenda.

Again, if not for that opportunity to take welfare reform and free trade away from the Republicans Clinton could have conceivably been another Carter, unable to staunch the squabbling in his own party and risk be marginalized as a result.

This is the dilemma for Obama, to not get in the same rut that Clinton was in with an even bigger Congressional majority than Obama is going to have. The GOP is going to be even more conservative and more reactionary after the election than it was before. The Democrats stupidly targeted vulnerable moderate Republicans with their own conservative Democrats and the GOP as a result has been condensed down to a more radical base than they were where at the same time the Democratic party has been diluted with even more conservative Democrats that are going to have to deliver lest they lose in 2010 what they took in the House 2008.

This is why I think Obama should reach out to McCain after he takes office, or even before, the sooner the better. If he doesn't, if he lets the GOP pull back into itself thinking he doesn't need them, then he's gonna have the same problems that Clinton had his first two years. And I don't see the GOP taking back the House let alone the Senate after only two years, which makes it even worse for Obama come 2012.

If Obama can't draw the GOP out and all he can do is pass partisan crap for four years he's likely to be a one term historical foot note in the history books.

How far can we go?

2008-07-28T20:07:00.001-04:00

After watching some car company rape yet another classic rock song, this time Heart's Barracuda, I was struck with the thought that this song is now tame by any measure compared to current music, but what will be current when the current music becomes tame?

Technology has allowed many things, though mostly just to augment mans inherently selfish ability to shit in his own bed, so to speak, but one of the things it has allowed is modern generations to distance themselves much further than ever before from the generation of their parents form which we all eventually rebel.

At one time, rock music like they play in middle aged targeted car commercials was what kids listened to to piss off their parents. Music is a significant generational divider. But before that, the mainstream music of the day was before that what their parents listened to to piss of their parents, and on down the line through modern history, probably until about the 20's or so. Before that everything was chamber music or vaudeville/carnival music.

So what technology has allowed in this instance is the rapid advancement of generational division. But by doing so it has also accelerated the devolution of popular culture as each subsequent generation strives to find something to set itself apart from the previous generations.

My question then, being, how far can we go? We've already mainstreamed so called gangsta rap, how far can you go from killin' cops and cappin' ho's and doing it all with a gold tooth smile? Where do you go from there?

Maybe we hit a wall, and experience a backlash, sort of devolve back a few generations, reset our clock so to speak?

Or do we just keep marching blindly into the unknown?

Rachael Ray, Michelle Malkin, Dunkin' Donuts and the Jihad

2008-05-28T15:32:00.001-04:00

Just Google 'Michelle Malkin Rachael Ray' and you'll get the picture.

Basically, Rachael Ray, Dunkin' Donuts spokesperson and cooking show host, wore a scarf that apparently, at least to right winger nutbags, looked too suspiciously like a claimed popular scarf worn by Jihadist terrorists the world over, apparently in some secret sign of brotherhood to the holy fucking cause or some shit.

I've been a fan of Dunkin' Donuts for years. Their Munchkins are heaven. Their coffee is better and cheaper than Starbucks. And the company's management has taken a brave and lonely stand in support of immigration enforcement -- refusing to hire illegal aliens and blowing the whistle on applicants with bogus Social Security numbers.

So it was with some dismay that I learned last week that Dunkin' Donuts spokeswoman Rachael Ray, the ubiquitous TV hostess, posed for one of the company's ads in what appeared to be a black-and-white keffiyeh.

The keffiyeh, for the clueless, is the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad. Popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos, the apparel has been mainstreamed by both ignorant (and not so ignorant) fashion designers, celebrities and left-wing icons.

It's a fucking scarf, you breeding cow whore for the cause!!!!!

Oh, but Thank God she's willing to give them the benefit of the doubt because they bother to follow the freaking law and not hire illegal immigrants?

And they pulled the ad.

Personally, it makes me not want to eat their donuts, and while I can't promise to never frequent Dunkin' Donuts again in my lifetime, I mean, a donut is a donut after all, it'll be the last fucking choice on my donut list from now on for bowing to this paranoid isolationist bullshit.

So no one can ever wear a checkered print scarf again unless they are clear and blatant supporters of fucking terrorism?

It's people like Malkin that make me support building wall around the United States. But only certain parts of it, and only where she and others like her are.

Does anyone else agree with this shit? I'm just curious, heh, now that we've banned certain clothing print patterns based on little more than vague guilt by association.

This is how the swastika got a bad name, people. It was around for thousands of freaking years and along comes dumbass Hitler and *Boom!* it's a symbol of fucking evil forever more.

You should read some of the comments in some of the blogs posting her little peon to Dunkin' Donuts. Many of them, far too many for my taste, can barely hold back their obvious thought that she's a blatant supporter of terrorists, that there's no way she could wear the scarf, a checkered print pattern scarf, for any other reason than being a freaking terrorist supporting American hater. I mean, do we want our children buying donuts based on this womans clothing accessories?

The horror, the horror....

The new racism of America

2008-05-15T10:12:00.002-04:00

Marie Cocco of the Washington Post has a beautiful OpEd in todays paper. Not that it will matter, or change the discourse of public dialog, but I tip my hat to her, give her a bow, some applause, props and any other accolade I can think of.

For a number of years now I've stated that the new color of racism in America is green. It doesn't s much matter today the color of your skin as it does the color of what's in your wallet, and more importantly how much color is in it.

This is good news, all in all, in a forest fire clearing out the dead wood kind of way, as it takes race out of the equation but ad's the cost of economy based discrimination instead of race based.

But people need something, they need an avenue of derision, they need something to look down on, disparage, and simply just to make fun of, and now that race has been largely taken off the table something had to replace it and that something is what I'm going to call gender based racism.

Yes, I know it doesn't quite fit, but I can't think of a better way to put it after this sad ass Democratic campaign we've had. Only one side has been able to use the biology of the oppoistion candidate to degrade and disparage them. No one has dared to being up Obama's race except in positive ways, how it's going to unite us even as it tears our own party apart. Meanwhile, it's open season on the fact that Hillary is a woman.

In the OpEd, Marie Cocco quotes Radni Rhodes, a liberal radio personality on Air America last I knew, as calling Hillary, and this is a quote mind you, a "big fucking cunt." The reference to her being a woman is pretty clear, as if she were a man it would have probably been a big fucking dick.

Was there outrage?

On the contrary, many people simply nodded in silent agreement.

Now imagine the outrage that would have ensued if someone had said the same of Obama only with reference to his race, maybe calling him Sambo, or better yet something as base and vulgar as Rhodes description of Hillary. You know, something along the lines of N*gger.

See? I can't even bring myself to type it. Will I get censored? Will my post get removed? Would anyone even read this stupid fucking thing? No one reads this shit, but if I posted a rant on Obama's blackness in as crude of terms as people have ranted against Hillary based on her gender, well By God someone would probably notice.

Racism is receding in this country, and that's a good thing. Sadly, people are inherently bastards and something has to replace racism. People simply need something to piss on, and apparently that something is women.

From Hillary "nutcrackers" to the crudest possible comments of her anatomy, it's open season on Hillary's gender. Go ahead, say whatever you want, the media and Democratic leadership have all but issued a statement condoning it with their silence.

Just don't bring up her race.

I blame Americans

2008-05-01T19:17:00.002-04:00

I've simply come to the point where I blame Americans, all of you, us, me, everybody. What do I blame Americans for? Fucking everything!

It's said that a people get the government they deserve, I used to not believe that, now I view it as irrefutable fact. I just see no way to continue to deny it as fact. I could go into details, but why? Read the news, follow the Bush administration, follow the Iraq war, the economy, everything. Follow a country like China being allowed, nay almost begged to host the fucking Olympics the details are reality all around us all over the globe.

I had no problem with Bush being elected, hey, even I get fooled once in a while, though this was not one of those whiles. I bothered to know what a retard Bush was when he was fucking up Texas. I mean, the man lost money looking for oil in fucking Texas! It taks a special kind of man to achieve that. But I do have some sympathy for Bush, I won't say what kind, but it could only suck really bad to be growing up in the shadow of a man who himself grew up in the shadow of a man that made them both look like pussies.

But I give Bush Sr. his props, the man served his country. He served, and he served in combat. Flying combat planes in WW II isn't like flying them now, that was spooky shit back then and whatever else you can say about George Herbert Walker Bush, one of them isn't the fact that he bailed from his patriotic duties. He served, honorably, and then did everything in his possible power to get his punk ass kid out of serving in the same way. So that kind of negates his service a bit, but not much for me, can't say I wouldn't have done the same, especially since it was almost assuredly that Jr. went to Sr. looking for a way out.

And those were the hopes I had of George W. Bush when he was elected, a quick four years and out the fucking door just like his old man. George W. Bush's rightful place in history should have been as a footnote to his Daddy's footnote to Reagan. That truly is all he deserved.

But for some reason God had different plans. I don't believe God appoints specific people to do specific things at specific points in time, because that would denote a large level of predestination that I'm not prepared to accept from a God that purportedly prizes free will and the fact that we come to Him willingly. Otherwise, He'd just show himself and we'd all worship Him because we'd all know He existed.

But I do believe that He uses people in the position to be used at that point in time. I don't think God used Reagan to fight the Godless Commies with the Pope because he was Reagan. But even I can admit that Reagan's insanity played a role in breaking up the Soviet Union. We broke them fuckers, ain't no denying it.

But then you could argue that God used Clinton to spur some economic growth to help us pay that Cold War bar we wrung up like drunk college kids at an open bar. Yes, I know I said wrung, heh, because we *squeezed* them bastards.

But then if He d id all that, what was the point of the GOP takeover of Congress? I think God decided that they'd become a bit of a pain in His Ass, and decided to show them a little freaking humility Old Testament style, and they might as well convert to Judaism now, because they're going to be wondering the Congressional wilderness for a while. You can only claim you're morally superior for so long before you start to believe your own press, people, come on.

And even if McCain wins, it's still part of His plan, because who do you think is more willing to cross over political lines to get things done? Either Obama or Clinton are both going to be going into office, depending, with an even larger Democratic majority than there is now. There will be no reason to cross over, they can finish their transformation to Republican Lite (Not 'Lite' because they aren't as bad, just because they aren't as good as it. That level of self-righteous morality is generational shit, baby) and completely ignore a large section of the American populace and decidedly shorten the GOP's wilderness trek. And no one wants that.

But even so, maybe the Democrats will find their voice again, or maybe they will continue down the faith based politics path the GOP forged starting with Reagan and confirmed as the new order under the second Bush. Smart money's on the later.

But look to what Bush has left us, and tell us we don't deserve it. We re-elected him, in the middle of a failing war. It wasn't failed yet, but it was clearly going that way, and we re-elected him, with an actual majority of the popular vote this time! We don't even have that the second time!

What, was the prospect of electing a man who actually saw combat in war time (Sorry, serving the the 'champagne squadron' of the Texas ANG keeping the Gulf Coast save from swimming NVC's doesn't count was actually seeing action), the thought of electing someone that might actually *gasp* ask Americans to sacrifice, you know, to actually pay some price of involvement past repeated fucking tax cuts during full scale war, that thought was just to frightening to us that we had to re-elect the man that led us to that horrible prospect in the first place?

Hm, the freedom to get tax cuts during a war that I don't have to even notice we're waging if I don't want to, versus having to pay some level of price, any level at all, for that same freedom.

Hm.

We get the government we deserve.

Not only that, but I can take the concept even farther and saw we get the media we deserve. People like to blame the media for, I don't know, pretty much sucking all around, and yet there is not one media company I can think of that is not profit based. Can anyone help me out here? Does Fox News operate on a government or prive funding grant of some kind, or do they have to actually make money to operate? Is CNN a devision of NPR? Does the Dora Duke Foundation (NO disrespect to Mrs. Duke intended, please, it's just the only one that popped into my head as I'm writing, don't send me nasty lawyer letters) fund CNN, or do they, also, have to make money to operate?

Our American society is the peak of consumer whorism. It's not even cliche'd anymore, it's fact, it's reality, it's happening, it's now, hip, cool, okay to be greedy. Has been since St. Ronnie graced us with the golden shower trickling down the inside of his leg. But hey, even then we got something out of it, we won the Cold War, right? Russia is a pussy, weak, inconsequential, right? I mean, Bush did look into Putin's soul. And we re-elected him, heh.

Capitalism based social policy is what we increasingly operate under. Tell me Beverly Hills doesn't have better police and fire protection than Burbank. I don't know, just pulling places out of my ass, but that's the point. Law enforcement and basic civil services like fire protection and waste disposal are dependent on how rich the local are you live in is. This is indisputable. And if you agree with it, then you agree that people should be subject to substandard government services and protections, basic services and protections that any government is required to supply to it's citizens, because they are poor. Well, I mean, who would want to have them live next to you, right? They must be poor for a reason, certainly the economy plays no role.

And through this all, through all this shit, all this war, all this being payed off to not sacrifice for our freedom to be paid off, in all of this the biggest fucking political story for a week was Obama's pastor. Certainly the news networks ratings must have plummeted as Informed and Caring Americans tuned out of the tawdry display in record numbers, right? Certainly the Nielson ratings will damn this networks as they deserve, right?

And we re-elected him.

That's me recurring theme by the way, heh.

So who do we blame for Bush's malfeasance and failures? Who do we blame for the media's culpability, if not complicity, in leading us to support those failures, repeatedly? Did the media fail to inform us of the military costs, the loses? Did they fail to report the casualties? Or did the administration, with all but the explicit consent of the American people, simply hide that cost from us in the dead of night? Pun intended, as we did re-elect him.

The government is elected by the people. The media makes money from the people. Consumerism is driven by the people. Wars are supported or denied or ignored by the people. Sadly they only need be fought by a fraction of the people today, however. Loving technology has all but absolved us from our civic duties and patriotic responsibilities.

And finally, and most damningly, the people accepted the pay off tax cuts during war time, a first in all our history, one I'm sure we'll proudly look back on in the future. Not only did we accept the pay off, we bent over and took it in the ass. We didn't even have to, but we did anyway. Maybe that was some small penance for our larger failure, I don't know, that's deeper than I'm prepared to go right now. It's also too much depth and nuance than I'm willing to give the American people.

In my as always humble opinion, the continued lack of outrage or willingness to hold any responsible for any failings of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is simple shame. The American people can't hold anyone responsible for the failing wars Bush is waging, because ultimately they would have to hold themselves responsible, and the longer they put it off the deeper their guilt and shame goes.

And so we focus on the failed veteran care after the failed wars, something both sides can get worked up about, not that either side would hold anyone, again, you know, responsible for those failures either, no one that really matters anyway, because even that little bit of responsibility would drive them dangerously close to whose fault these wars really are.

In a nutshell, a sound bite, a sentence if you will; The Vietnam generation simply will never admit that they not only let another one slip by, but actively supported it. That, they will never do.

Fucking pussies, all of 'em.

If people are tired of the shit, then fucking do something about it. Stop spending money on materialistic crap. Stop owning and driving a fucking car for every licensed drive in your house. Stop thinking it's your divine fucking Constitutional right to have fresh strawberries year 'round. Stop demanding that the only thing that matters to your purchasing is price. Decide what's important to you, for God's sake!

And for fucks sake, stop fucking embarrassing me!

Stop taking tax cuts to pay for a war, stop watching American Idol and Survivor peeping tom style voyeuristic bullshit, you're life probably doesn't suck that much to justify watching shit like that! Turn off Fox and CNN, change the channel when Rush comes on, find some local independent news and get a fucking clue for a change. Stop hanging around only people that fucking agree with you! If everyone was just like you, how boring ass boring would that be? Do you really want conformity on that scale? And yet you live it, don't you?

You know who you are, Americans. *pfft!*

The dumb ass Reverend Jeremiah Wright had it wrong, he couldn't see the forest for the trees because like the rest of America, he is the tree. God isn't damning America, it's people are. We are the driving force, the life's blood of this country. We are the consumers, we are the funding, we pay the taxes, we buy the goods, we create and delete the jobs.

Here's an idea for next Christmas; instead of buying some cheap ass Chinese made plastic crap you know your brat punk whiner of a kid is going to ignore, break or lose in a month, spend a little extra on something made in American and slap a little sense of worth and pride of ownership and responsibility into the little fuckers head.

If you keep buying cheap throw away crap that's all they're going to make! Industry goes where the market is, people, and we are the fucking market! You can either change it, or be a part of it, and as long as you're a part of it, I blame you.

Bastards.

On mankinds greatest 'invention.'

2008-04-28T12:20:00.002-04:00

I've been part of aconversation on a message board concerning what people thought was mankinds greatest invention. Ofc ourse, you hqave to narrow down what the word "invention" even means before you can fully get into that, in my opinion. But here was a reply I posted regarding some people's claims of God and feelings such as compassion would apply to mans greatest invnetion title;

Man did not create God, but man does interpret God to his own needs and ends. The idea of God, or a supreme being of some kind higher than ourselves, has been around since long before written language. To claim that man invented God is the ultimate act of hubris and vanity, claiming that not only we are the highest lifeform on the planet, but only we know of the one that is higher than us. Finally, to claim man invented God would be tantamount to claiming man invented his own sense of morality.

I believe there are some larger truths that can not be claimed by man, and one of those is God. Another is gravity. No one invented gravity, and I have a hard time even saying someone discovered it, as it's always been there. All we did was interpret it into our perception of reality.

I can't add compassion and other emotions because they also have always been there, and are not even exclusive to our species. The only emotional concept man might lay claim to, and only might, is war, as no other species can wage it on the same scale as we do, but other species have waged it before, and even used sticks or rocks as weapons to extend their reach beyond themselves. More species than just man uses tools.

If you're going to get into conceptual inventions such as ideals and emotions, then I'd have to simply bring up civilization or the concept of inherent human or civil rights. That people, regardless of their station, have a basic set of human rights (note the use of the term 'human' to describe those claimed rights) inherent in nothing more than belonging to the species.

But in the end, regardless of conceptualism or tengible 'inventions' I'dstill have to say the written word. Not just language, as language can get bastardized and changed and mutated over time. But the actual written word, the written language, that can be passed down from generation to generation. Even with that you get interpretation, as current politics and court proceedings have clearly shown, and the language we're arguing about now isn't even that old.

Language, and the written word, along with the ability to translate between all the desparite is what allows mankind to do everything he has done. Without the ability to translate ideas and beliefs, as well as teach and impart knowledge, man would be a far lesser animal than he is today.

Some Democrats fear 'racial divide' from continuing primary

2008-04-26T09:16:00.005-04:00

Who exactly is fearing this 'racial divide' if the primary continues as it has?

African Americans and wealthy liberals.

You know, Obama's main supporters.

"We keep talking as if it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter that Obama gets 92 percent of the black vote, because since he only got 35 percent of the white vote, he's in trouble," James E. Clyburn (House Majority Whip) said. "Well, Hillary Clinton only got 8 percent of the black vote. . . . It's almost saying black people don't matter. The only thing that matters is how white people respond. And that's what bothered me. I think I matter."

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762156.html

White-----------------------237,854,954----80.2%
Hispanic or Latino-------------42,687,224----14.4%
Black or African American------37,909,341----12.8%

I don't know, Jimmy, you tell me what group matters more in the general election.

So is it racist to consider that the wider general population of the US is vastly white? Apparently it's only racist to consider that Hillary is losing the black vote, not that Obama is losing the white vote.

"I think she is destroying the Democratic Party," said New York lawyer Daniel Berger, who had backed Clinton with the maximum allowable donation of $2,300. "That there's no way for her to win this election except by destroying [Obama], I just don't like it. So in my own little way, I'm trying to send her a message."

There is also no way for Obama to win this election, you simpering little man child. Neither candidate can get the required fucking delegates, but because Hillary is behind by a few lousy percentage points, it's her that's out to destroy the party instead of Obama.

Apparently the Democrats, mainly blacks and wealth liberals, are just now realizing something that the larger population has always known; race still fucking matters!

It could matter in a good way or it could matter in a bad way. In fact, it matters both ways, right now, today, in this campaign. How about we have a fucking conversation on this reality instead of blaming the white candidate?

Heh, black people are voting for Obama in the 90% range, and yet, somehow, to them and only them, race doesn't matter. A 9 to 1 black voting margin for Obama isn't racial, but Hillary pointing it out in context to the general election is? A majority if blacks voting for a black candidate isn't racist, but a majority of whites voting for a white candidate is.

So let's remember the new ground rules for Democratic primaries;
Black people voting for black candidates in massive majorities is *not* racist, but white people voting for white candidates on a smaller but still significant majority *is* racist.

Maybe someone forgot to send out the memo.

How fast can you stop having sex?

2008-04-24T13:26:00.002-04:00

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2008/04/22/mg.morrow.eiglarsh.int.cnn

Basically, in the case in question, a 16yr old girl agreed to have sex with an 18yr old boy, but then during the sex decided she didn't want to keep having thesex and told the boy to stop, which he did, but it took all of five seconds, and now the girl is claiming rape, or rather, it wasn't clear, the judge decided it was rape, because it took him [I]five seconds[/I] to stop having sex.

According to the clip there are like a half dozen states that allow women to "withdraw" their consent [I]during sex![/I]

I can see it happening, I can see the sex going wrong and the woman wanting to stop, and the man has some level of responsibility to stop or it certainly can cross over the line to rape, but that is so far from the case in this case.

First thing that happens when a woman tells a man to 'stop' in the middle of sex is the man says "What?" while not stopping, just in case he heard it wrong. That's simple biology, people. Stopping sex for a man is like stopping peeing in the middle of a nice piss. It's not a freaking faucet, people!

Now the kid has a felony conviction of rape, gonna be listed as a sex offender the rest of his life, letting people just guess and imagine what he did all based on their own fears and prejudices, and the kids life is basically fucked all because he didn't stop screwing immediately. Which is, simply, factually, biologically, physically impossible.

The clip is almost worth watching just for the role reversal in the chick and dude arguing the others traditional stances, which us a very annoying aspect of modern media and news reporting for me, in that they go out of their way to find someone that doesn't fit the traditional perception of one side or the other of an argument or social issue, if for nothing more than shock value.

And just think, with the United States Supreme Court getting ready to allow states to execute baby rapers, it's just a hop, skip and a jump to offing scumbags like this one too, eh?

Should non citizens have the same legal rights as Americans?

2008-04-24T12:53:00.001-04:00

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/04/23/ksm.attorney/index.html

Link is just for context, but the question is, in general, whether non US citizens should be allowed the same legal rights as American citizens.

I probably obviously believe they should, because once you start excluding certain segments of people it's very easy to expand that exclusion. Remember when the suspension of habeas corpus wasn't going to effect American citizens. It has, and will continue to do so, because the justifications will keep being expanded and widened and more and more vague as to cover almost any ideological or political abuse.

But more importantly for me, it's the inherent hypocrisy of saying someone is undeserving of the same basic rights as Americans for no other reason than they are not American citizens. Whether you or I agree with or even see this hypocrisy isn't even the most important aspect of it; Appearance is everything, especially in the techno-linked world we live in today. We simply can not hide anything anymore, it's just not possible, unless we want to be like Russia and China and Iran. And even those countries can't clamp down all the way, technology won't allow them to.

We claim to the world that our legal process and form of government is the best in the world, and yet we pick and choose those who we allow to participate in the legal process and who is protected by our form of government. We have the best system, but you can't be a part of it, nor have access to it, or be protected by it. There is no inherent hypocrisy in that sentiment?

Anyway, I've long been a proponent of leading by example. If we have an open government and legal system then the world gets to see how it works, see it in action, and judge for themselves. Instead we close it off and hide it behind closed doors and in secret military courts with little to no legal protections or access to those we wish to execute for their crimes.

Are we really that secretly ashamed of our government and legal system?

Bush picks a new HUD secretary

2008-04-19T18:28:00.002-04:00

You may or may not, considering the sheer volume of things coming out of the administration, know that the previous HUD secretary had recently decided to leave public office and *cough* spend more time with his family.

In response to his earlier mistake of appoint a complete fucking retard to run a $40 odd Billion a year federal agency like HUD, Bush lept into action and appointed someone with absolutely no housing experience what so ever

None, not a bit, zero housing experience. He was the head of the Small Business Administration. That I can't think of anything in the news about the SBA in the last few years means at least that he knew how to not fuck that agency up anymore than it was, if not possibly, or impossibly in the case of this administration, improve it. And by most accounts the dude is a competent manager.

But he knows nothing about housing.

The sheer number of unqualified politically appointed hacks in this administration is just amazing. The biggest fucking hack of all of course is the vice president, and he's set the tone for the entire administration. Not even Nixon was this incompetent or stupid. Nixon was a lot of things, a real right bastard the least among them, but at least he was smart enough to put smart partisan people in charge of shit instead of complete idiots.

But this administration has always been, form Day One, about keeping power centralized in the White House. Put someone in charge of something they know something about and they might do something on their own, or worse yet, not do what the White House tells them to do, and even worse still say publicly why they didn't do it. You know, tell the truth.

I won't even get into the clear and orchestrated assault on science for base political purposes by this administration.

No one, no one, has ever stacked an administration like this. I mean, maybe sometime way back in the freaking 1800's when men were men and cattle were scared and the really old skool good old boys network was still in power, but still, I bet they were still either smart enough to run things to their advantage or the incompetence was on a much smaller scale, or at least just not as orchestrated and purposely implemented.

275 days.

Misc socioeconomic rant

2008-04-16T17:28:00.000-04:00

What manufacturing do we have on the US anymore? Heavy machinery, barely, even Boeing is outsourcing the bulk of their latest wonder plane and it's so far behind schedule it's a fucking joke, heh. And the outsourcing was supposed to streamline shit and work better than before and it's been nothing but worse all the way around.

We don't even make fucking Levi's in this country anymore! You seen a pair lately? The quality is piss poor compared to what it used to be but American consumers demanded lower prices and they obliged by taking their manufacturing off shore.

As I've said before IMO there are only really two ways to lower costs of goods and that's lower material costs or lower labor costs. Materials have been about as cheap as they're going to get for some time now, and labor is the last bastion of cost cutting in retail manufacturing. We've cut manufacturing, we've cut labor, we've cut management, we've cut support costs, all sent over seas to cheaper labor markets with government subsidized health care among other perks, like weaker labor and safety and pollution laws.

The US used to manufacture just about everything it needed, and we still could if we tried but we won't. And we won't because it would be inconvenient. And convenience is the only thing that matters today. Convenience drives every aspect of our social culture. Technology has allowed it, but the culprit is mankind's inherent laziness and selfishness. We want what we want and we want it now and that's been the social norm since at least the 80's. Fucking Reagan, heh.

So as jobs flee and benefits and income dry up, there's even more pressure on manufacturers to lower costs, and again material costs ain't moving, so labor costs are the only thing left. The jobs the US outsourced to India barely ten years ago are already being outsourced to cheaper labor markets.

Everything is going up because everything has to be shipped because nothing is made locally anymore because it's cheaper to make things in one big ass group than in smaller spots spread out over area. It's cheaper for Wal-Mart to buy everything there is and sell everything there is because they sell so much of it so by the very same concept of competition choice in the marketplace is reduced as smaller competitors can't compete on price because the bottom line is always price.

The forces have been circling the toilet bowel for a while now, but the centrifugal force has picked up enough speed that it's self perpetuating now. It's moving on it's own and there's not much we can do to stop it. The world's gonna take one massive economic dump real soon, but then 'real soon' is arbitrary.

Eventually we're going to run out of emerging labor markets to exploit, and what then? What happens when there's no place else that's cheaper? Well then we'll have some semblance of stability. It's just insane that it's so much cheaper to make plastic fucking clothes hangers in China than the US while having to ship the fuckers all the way here. That it's that much cheaper to make cheap crap in China and then shit it all the way to the US is just insane. It's nuts and we can't keep on this track.

We need to stop pretending the idea of a 'free market' is even attainable let alone desirable or even possible. There is no free market. Every country on the planet has subsidies, tariffs and quotas of some kind. Ever. Single. One. So lets stop pretending we all don't protect our own markets.

The problem for the US is we don't protect the right ones or the ones we do protect for the right reasons or in the right way. Fucking ethanol subsidies a perfect example of stupid. That's the dumbest God damned thing I can think of that's going on right now domestically. Fucking farm states are really starting to piss me off, and the industry is dominated by massive nationals now anyway, why are we still pretending that family farms are a force or consideration in this country anymore?

Any form of government is only as strong as it's protections of it's citizens, and any economic model is only as honest as it's protections of it's consumers. We're failing on both accounts and it's because people are greedy fuckers, but even the people that are being screwed won't change the system because they think they can be one of the greedy fuckers themselves. Once they make it they want the same shit the people got that are there now.

Will Obama supporters call Kerry a racist?

2008-03-25T11:34:00.002-04:00

Kerry on the fact that Obama is, uhm, you know, black.

“It would be such an affirmation of who we say we are as a people if we can elect an African American president, a young leader who is obviously a visionary and got an ability to inspire people,” Kerry said. “It will give us an ability to talk to those countries, to in some cases go around their dictator leaders to the people and inspire the people in ways that we can’t otherwise.”

The Massachusetts senator said Obama has an ability to perhaps even empower moderate Islam “to be able to stand up against the racial misinterpretation of a legitimate religion.” Asked by a reporter what gave Obama the credibility to do so, Kerry said, “Because he’s African American. Because he’s a black man, who has come from a place of oppression and repression through the years in our own country. We only broke the back of civil rights, Jim Crow, in the 1960s here. Everybody in the world knows this is a recent journey for America too. And everybody still knows that issues of skin and discrimination still exist.”

Huh. Gee, so will Kerry be called a racist for pointing out that Obama is black? How would the US otherwise *not* be able to inspire moderates Muslims? Oh, right, because our president would be white.

Huh.

Harry Potter and higher education

2008-03-25T11:27:00.004-04:00

Harry Potter and higher education

Wtf?

I thought about leaving it at just the 'wtf' line, but then I read further down into the article and got to this;

"If somebody says this isn't worth a Yale class, I would say if we were just reading the Harry Potter books for their literary merit ... I would probably agree with them. [But] the lens of the Harry Potter books actually makes theology ... easier to understand," she said. "It's amazing how many connections you can draw between the theology that we're reading outside of class and the Harry Potter that we've known for 10 years."

"Wtf" doesn't do this justice, I have to spell it out. What the fuck are you talking about? Connections between theology and Harry fucking Potter? What, because both could be argued as fantasy? Or are you talking more about the literally endless "connections" between almost any freaking work of literature in the last two thousands years and theology?

It's called the human fucking condition, you moron! And this dumbass got accepted to Yale? Ever since mankind became aware of his own mortality every single thing we've ever done, written, painted, built, destroyed or worshiped has "connections" to theology. In short, everything about humanity itself has "connections" to theology.

I love how every generation or two people suddenly 'discover' something that has already been known since pretty much time immemorial. The human condition itself has "connections" to theology. Every man, woman and child that ever existed has "connections" to theology.

But it takes a Yale class in Harry fucking Potter to explain it to the current crop of morons that think they've discovered some new twist, some new wrinkle that no one before them has discovered. This, in and of itself, has "connections" to theology, as it's all connected to our mortality and understanding of it.

I got my GED over 20 years ago while in jail for drunk driving and even I can figure this shit out. These people have to go to Yale for the same thing?

The time for federaly regulated national health care is now, people!

2008-03-25T11:06:00.001-04:00

Taking into consideration the abuses and incompetence of the Bush administration and the larger GOP failures and abuses over their time in power, is everything the federal government does really a failure?

Social Security, despite it's many failings, is not a failure. It has, in fact, worked almost perfectly as planned. It is one of, if not the most, successful federal programs ever. The FDA has provided us with one of the worlds safest food supplies. The EPA, once again taking into consideration the Bush administration, ensures we have clean water and air, has it been, over all, a failure?

For the most part, most federal programs have been mostly successful. Of course there is waste and abuse, just as there are in any private sector industry. Efficiency alone is not the end all be all measurement of success. Cheaper does not mean better, and some things shouldn't be forced or even expected to turn a profit anyway.

Private for-profit health care has been a disaster in the last couple of decades. As the world labor market turns against us, it's becoming clearer and clearer that the private sector is unable to provide health care for the entire country based on profit and loss alone. I honestly don't see where people can argue continuing the private sector only health care system as 'effective' in any way.

And yet, watch out for the knee jerk, any mention of federally regulated health care will immediately be pounced on as a looming failure of epic proportions. It can not be worse than what we have. You can always buy extra insurance, in fact you can do so right now. People buy it all the time, and they will continue to buy it.

Employer provided health care was the aberration, not the norm. The US was well on it's way to emulating European style national health care before the industrial revolution kicked us and the US economy into over drive. Because our labor pool was so spread out and competition for manual labor intensive workers was so fierce, employers had to compete for workers and thus the employer provided health and retirement system was born.

Now the market dictates manual labor is shit. No more can someone just put in a 'good days work' and expect a living wage. There are so few new jobs being created in the US employers can pretty much pick and choose who they want to hire. Buddy of mine manages the local Papa Johns and the last ad they ran they had like 50 applications the first day for a pizza place job, and the apps ran the gamut from high school kid to middle aged with a wide selection of education and experience.

We can not continue to compete alone against the rest of the world. It's market fucking reality, people! It has nothing to do with whether you think government regulation is good or bad, it's simple market fucking reality. As long as the entire freaking world subsidizes it's workforce with government supplied health care the US will continue to bleed jobs like a stuck pig.

And despite what Romney claimed in Michigan, these jobs are NOT coming back. Other countries have lower pollution standards, lower labor and work safety standards, and they subsidize their industries with government paid health care. How the fuck are we supposed to compete against that? How is our vaunted 'American ingenuity' going to stand against that?

It's market fucking reality, it's capitalism, bitches. The same consumer system that people so hate to love is what's driving US jobs away, and it's our insanely stupid adherence to all facets of profit and loss that keeps us at an extreme disadvantage against the entire rest of the world.

What other nations health care systems look like, how they operate, how efficient they are, or how readily available services are doesn't matter dick squat. The only thing that matters is it's there and it allows everyone in the world to compete at an advantage against the US.

For profit health care and retirement is not the line to draw to make a stand behind. Keeping to it will kill us economically, it's already strangling us. Pretty soon it will choke us to death.

Obama's time is not now.

2008-03-20T12:44:00.000-04:00

I really don't see how people think Obama is all that different than any other politician. Babel I believe has posted a number of links about how he came up through the old Tamany Hall style political system, even his early quest for church support even though he wasn't really all that religious to begin with. Then he 'attends' a church for 20 years and only just now, when everyone else notices it, rejects and denounces his preacher of 20 years? If that isn't old skool political pandering I don't know what is.

I see Obama's claims of 'change' and 'hope' hinging mostly on one thing, the fact that's he's bi-racial with hints of other than Christianity in his background and that as a result he can presents a fresh new face to the world.

All his talk about bipartisanship is hooey, as neither side wants to reconcile with the other. They make their political bread and butter demonizing each other, why the hell would they want to work together, lose their respective base support, and further marginalize themselves by increasing voter apathy and disinterest in the political process? Because you know that as soon as both sides start working together to get things done no one is going to pay attention anymore. We only pay attention to train wrecks and freak shows, that's the reality today.

So how is Obama gonna change a system neither side of the two party system wants to change? They change the system, they can't game it when their in power. Yeah it sucks when you're in the minority, but when you get in the majority you got it made, and neither side wants to change the status quo. I just don't see how Obama is going to change squat.

Instead I see the minority GOP running circles around him while he talks pretty and compromises to get them to and they never do, and they never will. Modern Republican politics are based on morality, and just as with morality itself the pious will never compromise. The Democrats will compromise, the Republicans won't. Most of the big name Republicans retiring this cycle, or that have retired in the last couple of years, have been the old skool fiscal cons and moderates. The GOP is becoming even more radical in it's morality based politics, that McCain has had to do and say what he has, even after the utter failure of Bush, is proof enough of the path the GOP has chosen.

We need Obama like when we needed Clinton, after the shit is over, when we can afford to take chances and try new shit and compromise. Obama's time is coming, I just don't think it's now.

What's in a number; Part 3 of an ongoing series.

2008-02-29T15:17:00.001-05:00

$2.2 Trillion dollars ; the amount in purchases and cash advances made by Americans on their credit cards in just the last year alone.

315% ; the amount credit card debt has grown from 1989 to 2006.

What's in a number; Part 2 of an ongoing series.

2008-02-29T15:15:00.000-05:00

45% - the amount the price of an average home has risen in the US in the last six years alone.

4% - the amount average wages have dropped in the US since 2000.

What's in a number; Part 1 of an ongoing series.

2008-02-29T15:09:00.001-05:00

22 Million - the number of votes cast in Democratic primaries so far.

14.1 Million - the number of votes cast in Republican primaries so far.

These numbers do not include caucuses.

Hillarious fiction by an ex-Bush speech writer

2008-01-22T17:19:00.000-05:00

How My Party Lost Its Way

One really must take the whole article at once to fully appreciate the extreme lack of understanding of reality the man wallows in.

The mission of the article is obstinately to explain the downfall of the Republican party. It brushes up against that just enough to remove some lint but never really pushes against the established grain.

And in the end, when he finally decides on a unifying figure for the Grand Old Party to rally around, it's Hillary Clinton.

Nothing like shared hatred to base your party's political philosophy on, no? So all they need do now is get her elected to president for life and they're all set.

But what would a post be without a few choice excerpts? The articles not long, two short pages in fact, because, well, you know, there's nothing really wrong with the GOP a little community hate aimed directly at Hillary Clinton can't cure.

What caused the Republican unraveling? It began with the Bush administration itself. Through the intense experiences of 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq, the Republican Party became closely identified with President Bush—and President Bush became closely identified with Iraqi violence and chaos. The slow response to rising sectarian conflict in 2005 and 2006 left an impression of stubbornness in a losing cause. Every element of the Republican coalition the president had offended during his political rise—budget hawks, anti-immigration activists, libertarian critics of compassionate conservatism—felt liberated and emboldened by Bush's weakness, and reasserted their claim on the party's future. The president's embrace of the surge in Iraq has dramatically improved the situation—but the damage was done. The cracks in the Bush coalition began spreading.

See? It was all just a misunderstanding! All because Bush was identified with Iraq, well because he started it, ran it and is pretty much solely responsible as Commander in Chief for it. And then, well, gosh golly, the Republican party itself was wrongly identified with blindly supporting Bush and all his failed war policies. I guess, silly as it can be, because they DID blindly support his failed war policies as long as he blindly supported their outrageous spending habits.

There's cursory mention of Republican fiscal malfeasance but it's a thin, bitter gruel.

But of course, the ender is the caper;

...there is, perhaps, one large American political figure who could cause depressed, fractious Republicans to bind their wounds, downplay their divisions, renew their purpose, and join hands in blissful unity at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Republican convention.

And that figure is Hillary Clinton.

Ah yes, the gold old fashioned shared hatred the modern GOP was built on and rose them to power in the first place. Just think if hating Bill Clinton as much as they did got them in power in 1994, just think what hating Hillary could allow them to accomplish!

Personally, I'm dying to find out. Let's elect Hillary and have a newly reborn and refocused GOP. It's the least we can do for them.

And I do mean the least.

The problem for Romney...

2007-12-22T17:25:00.000-05:00

...is the dude can't speak a word of truth. You want to talk about flip flopping, here's your poster child. But the best part is he keeps lying even as he gets caught lying again and again.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/21/romney.details/index.html

"I'm not going to distance myself in any way from my faith," Romney told NBC's Tim Russert. "But you can see what I believed and what my family believed by looking at, at our lives. My dad marched with Martin Luther King. My mom was a tireless crusader for civil rights."

But Romney never did witness his father march with King, as the campaign now acknowledges.

Romney's presidential campaign says that the elder Romney marched with the civil rights leader, that he told his sons he had, and that written accounts from the time back up the claim.

But experts quoted in a Boston Globe investigation this week concluded that the event never happened.

"It's a figure of speech," Romney said this week of the claim he'd witnessed his father and King together, like saying "You know, I speak in the sense of 'I saw my dad become president of American Motors.' I wasn't actually there when he became president of American Motors, but I saw him in the figurative sense of he marched with Martin Luther King."

Guns have been a particular problem for him. Earlier this year, he told a New Hampshire voter: "I've been a hunter pretty much all my life," but he admitted later that he did not own a gun or possess a hunting license, and had been hunting only twice in his life.

During Romney's recent Meet the Press interview, he said that his gubernatorial bid had received a National Rifle Association endorsement -- but later conceded that the group's support had been limited to phone banking efforts, "which is not an official endorsement."

"That's what happens in the course of a campaign, when everything you say gets jumped on," Romney spokesman Kevin Madden said Friday. "Do you think every word that came out of your mouth this month was completely accurate? Can anyone's speech stand up to that kind of scrutiny?"

When campaign reporters pressed him on his King claims this week, Romney explained that he "saw" his father march with the civil rights leader "in the figurative sense," but did not literally see the two men walk side by side.

"The reference of seeing my father lead in civil rights, and seeing my father march with Martin Luther King, is in the sense of this figurative awareness of and recognition of his leadership," he said. "I've tried to be as accurate as I can be. If you look at the literature or look at the dictionary, the term 'saw' includes being aware of -- in the sense I've described."

"I'm an English literature major. When we say, 'I saw the Patriots win the World Series,' it doesn't necessarily mean you were there," he said.

A CNN poll conducted earlier this month found that a quarter of New Hampshire's Republicans found Romney the most believable candidate in the race -- enough to give him a tie for the top spot in that category.

Why yes, as a matter of fact, everything that has come out of my mouth in the salt month was completely accurate, and I take offense at Romneys campigns inference that it was not, that everybody lies and that when he said he "saw" something, he only meant it figuratively.

Not everybody lies, nor do they lie all the time, nor do they lie about stupid shit like saying they saw something and then saying it was only mean 'figuratively.' Yeah, I saw that man kill that other man, figuratively speaking that is.

I give Giuliani props in one respect and one respect only, in that he finaly gave up trying to fudge his record and just said look, assholes, here I am warts and all, take it or shove it. That in no way lessens his idiocy or incompetence or egregious and blatant misuse of authority, nor his humongous ego and arrogance, but at least he's not blatantly lying anymore.

By the way if anyone is interested, do yourself a favor and check Merriam-Websters's online dictionary and decide on your own.

New Jersey bans death penalty

2007-12-17T18:16:00.000-05:00

The first state in over 30 years to stop executions, it's fairly significant don't you think?

I kind of like Corzine, even if I do think he's probably as dirty as my week old underwear.

In signing Monday's bill, Corzine called it a "momentous day" and made New Jersey the first state to ban capital punishment since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated it in 1976.

"It's a day of progress for the state of New Jersey and for the millions of people across our nation and around the globe who reject the death penalty as a moral or practical response to the grievous, even heinous, crime of murder," Corzine said.

Society is not forgiving criminals, the Democratic governor insisted, but the law is necessary because "government cannot provide a fool-proof death penalty that precludes the possibility of executing the innocent."

"Society must ask," he continued, "is it not morally superior to imprison 100 people for life than it is to execute all 100 when it's probable we execute an innocent?"

The state Assembly approved the measure Thursday by a 44-36 vote after the Senate OK'd it 21-16.

New Jersey has not executed a prisoner since 1963.

Not as heavy as it could be seeing as how they haven't offed anybody in my entire lifetime, but still significant, again IMO.

The only argument one can make for killing them instead of life in prison is based on the false premise that somehow being in prison for the rest if your life isn't all that bad. We're talking no possibility of parole here, ever, so that straw man is burned.

And anyone that think state prison is a fucking country club where you just hang out and and pump up and learn to be a lawyer so you can dick with the system on our by God dime doesn't know anyone that's ever been in a state prison, let alone been there themselves. I never have, though I've visited, but I know a few, sadly, not for knowing them just for them being there, that have been in state prison.

We're not talking where people who screw tens of thousands of people out of their life savings go. But I won't get into the gross disparities between 'white' and 'blue' collar crimes, they speak for themselves as far as I'm concerned.

And one could argue that being in prison possibly getting ass raped for the next couple of decades and maybe even shived in the process would be harsher than being offed nice and quiet like with a nice buzz and an audience and all your pain and suffering ended.

If you want to go the religious route, to the best of my knowledge there's only about one or two things that God won't forgive you for is forsaking Him and taking other gods as your own. Murder is not one of them. If there people truly repent and truly ask forgiveness, God pretty much supposedly will grant it and into Heaven they will go. So isn't a lifetime paying for your sins a little more satisfying on the base human level than ending their pain and suffering and even possibly hastening their ascendancy to Heaven?

OT, how would that work in Heaven? You get murdered, you got to Heaven, your murderer repents, goes to Heaven, do you meet in some way? Is there any base human feelings left over or is it instant forgiveness or do we even have the same semblance of emotions we have in life? Funaky shit there.

Though I personally think the death penalty is wrong, I'm not God nor do I play Him on TV, my only real opposition to the death penalty is the very real threat of offing an innocent person. You put someone in prison for 20 years by mistake, you can still let them out. Even a lame ass 'oops our bad' is still significantly better than being dead, and dead is what you are after being executed. Dead is dead. Done. Gone. Fini'. No Give Backs.

I started to write or let a guilty person go free, but we aren't, we're talking life in prison with no possibility of parole. Make it an act of Congress, or the state legislature on the state level, and it'll never happen with the politics we have, so no claiming we're letting guilty people walk.

So it is, at it's most base, a question of whether we are willing to risk executing an innocent person or imprison a guilty one for life. I really don't see the problem?

What Joe Biden meant about Barak Obama

2007-02-02T16:27:00.000-05:00

He meant cleans up as in he's not a nigger. Let's just get the word out there right now.

But that's eactly what he meant. That's why Jesse Jackson has never been a real nationaly viable candidate and why Colin Powell was, and now Obama. It's exactly what he meant. His problem was in trying to make it sound polite when he shouldn't have said it at all.

Even Powell himself, when asked about his national appeal, basicaly said because he was not that 'black,' meaning both in color and speaking. He mentioned both specificaly, that he was light skinned and was articulate.

If anything, conservatives should be defending Biden because, as they could plausibly argue, a black man like Powell can say that and everybody nods in silent, respectfull agreement. But a white man like Biden says it and all the sudden he's a racist bigot.

And what this truly speaks to is white America's continued inability to put racial and ethnic stereotypes behind them and judge people as they are and not how they look or sound. We are a very superficial celebrity culture, not to mention the inherent bigotry that comes from simply being human beings.

That is the problem here, society and it's stereotypes. Hell, Biden's a prophet far as I'm concerned.

How the US will bail from Iraq

2006-10-05T11:28:00.000-04:00

Conservative pundits are laying the ground work right now, with none other than Rush Limbaugh leading the charge. Rice is over in Iraq right now informing them it's coming soon. Don't know if it's Roves promised 'October surprise' or not, but would be kind of disappointed if it were, as it's just so blatant.

The Republicans will dust off that old canard of "tough love" and apply it to Iraq. Rush the other day said, to the effect, that we should pull back.., I mean redeploy along Iraqs borders to seal the borders (like we should have done three years ago) and then let the Iraqis clean up the mess we made. He used phrasing such as 'stepping up to the plate' and 'taking responsibility,' or some such nonsense.

So the premise will be, the only way the Iraq's can make it is we abandon them and they do it themselves. Tough love, like curring off welfare recipients so they're forced to take care of themselves. No matter there's no jobs, no health coverage, no daycare, no transportation, and no skills.

Similarly, the same applies to Iraq; no matter that the insurgency is better armed, better organized, better trained, or even that the current Iraqi government is filthy with insurgent supporters and terrorist sympathisers, none of that matters. All that matters is the Iraqi people must do it themselves, and the only way for that to happen is for us to leave them to their own devices.

On a completely unrelated note, that will happen right before the coming elections. Nothing more, I'm sure, than a very happy coincedence.

And that's how we will bail from Iraq.

The terrorists have aleady won

2006-09-28T20:55:00.000-04:00

Soon after the attacks on Sept. 11th, 2001, president Bush extolled us to not let the terrorists win by changing our daily routine. Go shopping, he said. Go to a movie, he said. Show the terrorists they can't beat us by changing our daily lives.

Lets leave out the obvious implications of offering up consumerism as the definitive shape of our daily lives.

Instead, lets focus on what we have changed, just so we could keep on with our shopping and movie going.

With the changes in the bill that just went through Congress, there is no clear definition of torture. Torture in the United States of America is, for all intents and purposes, solely up to the desecration of the president. Not only does he and only he decide what constitutes torture, he doesn’t even have to tell anyone what he decides. The great decider apparently isn't the great letter of knowing what the hell he's up to.

Not only does the president and the president alone get to decide what torture now is, he also gets to decide solely, and based on nothing more than his opinion, who our enemies are. This new authority to see enemies where ever they may or may not exist also includes the authorization to include any American citizen into the decision of who's an enemy. And guess what? It doesn't matter if they're Americans or not.

But the best part of not having to change our shopping and movie going habits, is that we never even need to worry about any of this, because Bush doesn't have to tell anyone what he's doing, ever. Because he also gets to have secret prisons that no one but him and whomever he personally decides needs to know where they are or who is in them or what is being done to whom is in them.

This is not a stretch, people. From this day forth, the president of the United States of America can snatch an American citizen off the streets, detain them in a secret location, and torture them, and never have to tell anyone about it. If they die, well, no one knows where they were, right?

And now for my obligatory swearing, just one word though, nothing heavy, just to illustrate a point; If anyone here thinks that this extreme level of secret authority will not be abused, they're a fucking retard.

And I'm talking a retard of the highest order. The sheer magnitude of their retardedness is simply overwhelming. It's monstrous. I'm talking so retarded that if breathing wasn't a reflex they'd suffocate in the open air.

By Bush's own words, the 'war' on terror will never end. That means these powers will never be given back. Everything we do in this knee-jerk happy election cycle will not be easily undone. When was the last time the federal government, under ANY party, gave back expanded or even temporary authority? How do you think we got the federal income tax?

I'm amazed, outraged and saddened, in that order, that so many American, despite their political affiliation, are so willing to alter our core ideals of liberty, justice, and the law, so they can go continue shopping and seeing a movie. I never, in my darkest thoughts, that America would fall so far in fear and loathing.

This is the price of free war. No war is free. But Bush not only wants to wage free war, he wants to pay us off with tax cuts during full scale war for our support. At NO time in history, never in our history, have we not increased revenue to pay for war time operations. Until now. Hell, not only were we told Iraq would cost us nothing, we'd make money off it!

We bailed out of Afghanistan and shoved that onto NATO. We're failing in Iraq. We're crippling the ability of the military to respond to any subsequent threats, of which we currently face many that are growing in urgency. We now have, because of the Iraq War, a greatly limited capacity to protect our interests across the world.

Iraq by many measures was one of the weakest nations in the Middle East. Saddam’s vaunted army was a shadow of its former self, a ghost of an army. It was more threat to itself than to us. Iraq only has 27 million people in it, not much more than a third of Iran’s population. And we couldn't even pacify it. We couldn't even beat the weakest nation that we perceived as a threat to our national security. WE picked the weakest punk in the neighborhood and couldn't even kick his ass.

But it's not so bad, I went shopping at the mall earlier (no local stores around anymore selling what I was looking for). And later on tonight I'll probably watch a movie I reanted, so at least I haven't had to change my all important consumer habits.

But we have fundamentally changed our very understanding of rights and freedoms. We have now restricted who they apply to and given the power of that restriction to one man with no oversight what so ever. And in this way, in the only way that truly matters, the terrorist have already won.

US reliance on foreign oil

2006-09-05T16:30:00.000-04:00

Does the US need to decrease its reliance on foreign oil?

Or do we need to decrease our reliance on oil period?

Seems we have a possibly very significant new domestic oil find off the Gulf Coast. Of course this is good news, as anything that lessens our reliance on volatile Middle East oil is a good thing, even if it's simply finding more oil at home.

And this is nothing like the oil in the Alaskan refugee, this find is actually significant, it has the possibility of raising our known reserves by 50%, that is truly significant.

And personally I'm certain that as technology progresses we'll find new reserves, as well as newer more efficient refining and extraction capabilities that will all improve our yield.

But it seems like every time we get to a point as a nation of accepting that we have to kick oil itself, not just our source of it, we find something that makes us backslide into our old thinking of it's our right as Americans to drive gas guzzling SUV's and to own as much cheap plastic crap as possible.

Someone here not long ago argued that, in fact a few people have, they argued that because 'poor' people in America could afford cell phones and TV's they weren't really poor. They have no health care, no retirement funds, and possibly not even a land line phone which might be why they have a cell phone, but the fact that they can afford to buy cheap plastic crap from China means they aren't really poor.

Poverty, like everything else dealing with human existence, is subjective. But the fact that we are addicted to cheap plastic crap from China is not, it's simple reality. Having poor people in America owning cheap plastic crap from China doesn't mean they aren't poor, just means China sells really cheap plastic crap. Besides, cell phone manufacturers make their real money in lease plans with service providers, not off the phones themselves. And pretty soon after everything goes digital, if it ever does, people won't have to buy cheap TV's anymore anyway unless they can afford the cable bill as well, because broadcast TV as we know it will end.

But what does our reliance on oil and the availability of cheap plastic crap from China have in common? it's simply that plastic is made with oil. It's made from petroleum byproducts. Or at least it used to be, but that was low grade plastic of the 60's and 70's. Today’s plastic is high tech and pure, it takes a lot more petroleum to make plastic today when it was more of a cast off novelty 30 or 40 years ago. And China makes a *lot* of plastic crap.

And neither China nor America seems ready any time soon to slow their reliance on cheap plastic crap. In fact, as China industrializes and spreads the wealth at home, their standard of living rises, and they can start affording the same cheap plastic crap we do.

America is at the zenith of its gluttony. At no other time has America used so much to produce so little. When we raped our mountains and forests and polluted our waterways during our industrial revolution, at least we were advancing something. Now our advances are in science and technology, not manufacturing, and the populace loses out on even that as the related jobs go overseas for cheaper labor costs.

We are in Iraq because of oil. Oil is intimately tied to our national security. Our military runs on it, our infrastructure runs on it, our very social fabric is held together by oil and our continued access to it.

I had hoped that we were finally accepting that gasoline was going to go up. Actually, as much as I gripe about it, I was hoping it would hit $5 a gallon in the next year or two. Only that kind of system shock is ever going to get us out of our oil dependency. Now we find reserves right off our cost that can up our know reserves by half. But even before that gas prices have been not just falling but in a free fall almost.

I'm sorry, there just is not enough going on the world that's going so good as to warrant that kind of drop in gas prices. Gas has dropped locally from a high of $3.37 not six weeks ago to $2.71 or less today. That's almost 0.70 a gallon in five or six weeks. Please tell me what situation in the world improved so dramatically as to initiate that kind of a slide in gas prices. Did we suddenly win in Iraq? Did Israel crush Hezbollah? Did Iran not tell the world to fuck off?

Tell me there's not some pressure going on somewhere here. Either there's unknown pressure from somewhere pushing gas prices down, or all the increases over world instability have been total bullshit lies. Plus, oil itself has not dropped enough to warrant this much of a drop in gas prices. Donning my tinfoil hat, I'd say this is payback from the Saudis for Bush's continued support of their corrupt, despotic, Islamic fundamentalist fanatic breeding regime.

There are, at least there should be, certain things that societies need to be willing to do for the greater good. This is not socialism. During WW II, the entire nation conserved rubber, tin, coppre, green dye among other needed supplies for the war effort. They grew victory gardens, bought war bonds, and drove the same style of car for five years in a row. They decided, as a nation, to sacrifice for a greater good.

If we are truly at 'war' with some vaguely defined 'terroristicaly inclined' culture of hate, that hate us for being free enough to rape and pillage their homeland to the point that we have over the last 100 years, then we have to take a few things into consideration.

One; there is no free war. War is not free. It costs a nation to wage war, no matter whether the people fighting it 'volunteered' or not. We're paying the price right now, with a national mood so ugly and divisive the like of nothing seen since prior to the Civil War. We're paying the price of the hubris of one party rule. It's costing us, literally, trillions of dollars in the long run, none of which is funded. In fact, not only are we not paying for the war, we're giving away tax cuts during God Damned war time!

*sigh*

Two; they do hate us, and it's not because we're free or because of our morally self-righteous beliefs. They don't hate us for our wealth, or even for our decadence and gluttony. They hate us because we built it all on their backs. Pont of fact #1: In 1953 the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran because it was going to nationalize it's own oil industry and kick out the greedy US oil companies that had been sticking it to them with impunity until then. we installed the Shah, who was by all measures a despot and tyrant. He was overthrown and here we are today, a direct result of our involvement in that country. Pont of fact #2: we sold Saddam anthrax spores and gas gangrene, as well as other controlled substances used in the creation of various nerve gasses. Pont of fact #3: We have consistently propped up the Saudi royal family despite decades of knowing for a fact they are every bit as despotic and tyrannically as Saddam was, they just have a lot fewer people to grind under their boot heel. The Saudi regime in the 70's was particularly bloodthirsty. Point of fact #4: Most Middle Eastern nations were ruled until recently by a minority Sunni block, whereas the majority of the downtrodden were Shiites. This is true especially in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, but also in some other ME countries as well. For decades we have propped up and rewarded despotic regimes in the Middle East while they oppressed their Shiite minority, and it's supposed to be a wonder why the Shiites now coming to power in the ME hate us?

Three; All the terrorists are coming from the Middle East, where we've supported despotic regimes for the last half plus century. Is that just coincidence? Do they really hate us for our freedom? Or do they ahte us because we've historicaly denied them the very same freedom we claim to be fighting for? We have to acknowledge the sins of the past before we can move forward.

And finally, Four; if it weren't for oil, we'd have never been over there in the first place. Our over reliance on oil and cheap plastic crap has forced us to compromise the very morals and values we now claim to be pushing onto the Iraqi people whether they want it or not. That's called hypocrisy, people, and it's far easier to hate for that than because of some subjective moralistic claim of freedom that somehow makes us better than they are.

In short, they hate us because of oil.

We can never have enough domestic oil to supply our current level of demand. A demand that puts cell phones in peoples hands even if they're homeless. A demand that forces us to compromise our values to secure some notion of national security, a way of life that has no natural bases or reason to exist or to even be expected. So we either continue to fight 'terrorists' that 'hate' us in a 'war' that will never end, ever. Or we change our very culture, we make sacrifices for the greater good, we pull together as patriots and believers. We sacrifice.

One of the greatest let downs of Bush for me, on a personal note anyway, was his failure to ask the American people to sacrifice in any way after the Sept. 11th attacks. Not only did Bush not ask us to step up to the plate, he told us to sit back down and the plate would be brought to us. That he actually said, that in the aftermath of the greatest attack on our nations shores since Pearl Harbor, that after that emotional trauma on an indescribable scale, he tells us to go shopping. See a movie. Don't change your daily routine. We had, in his words, had war declared on our very existence, yet we were to not sacrifice, not pay, not even be inconvenienced in any way because of it.

That ain't war, people, that's 'war.' Like the 'war' on crime or poverty or drugs. It's a fucking sound bite. Bush reduced it to nothing more than an evening news sound bite, nothing more than a fucking campaign slogan, electionering at best, the height of cynicism at worst.

I say cynicism because Bush seemingly has no faith in the American people. He thinks we're all like him. He had no faith the people would stand up, step up, and offer themselves in sacrifice to the greater good. That’s something that Bush has never had to offer, and in my pointed opinion he simply has no concept of it.

It's oil, people. It's always been about oil, and it'll always be about oil, as long as our cheap plastic crap economy is based on it. It's also an illusion. We can keep thinking people aren't going hungry, or without shelter, or without a means of support as long as they can afford a cell phone or a cheap plastic crap TV. we can feel better about ourselves, living in a nation where if even the 'poor' can afford a cell phone, certainly those without must simply be lazy. But in the reality of it all, even Jesus would have had a cell phone.

Republican politics at its most cynical

2006-07-30T19:16:00.000-04:00

House approves sweeping pension reforms
Lawmakers also vote to lift minimum wage and lower estate taxes

While lawmakers had largely come to agreement on the pension measures, a disagreement over whether to include popular tax measures wasn't resolved. In the end, House GOP leaders chose to remove the tax measures in an effort to combine them with controversial legislation to reduce the estate tax.

Republican leaders chose to remove the tax measures, which included the renewal of the already-lapsed research-and-development tax credit and a college tuition credit, from the pension bill. Instead, the measures were married to House legislation boosting the minimum wage and reducing the estate tax.

Fuck them.

Changing American influence and pressure

2006-07-09T14:09:00.000-04:00

When it was us agaisnt the Godless Soviets, we had a legitimate projection of power we could claim and use to either bribe or coerce the rest of the world, lest they face the threat of Soviet hegemony.

But that died with the USSR.

With the new 'war' on terror, we simply don't have tfat same level of influence or leverage. It is a different kind of threat, mainly in the fact that it's localized. When Britain was attacked by terrorists, they were attacked by terrorists already in their country. When Spain was bombed, it was by terrorists that were already in Spain. It's an internal threat. And other countries simply don't have the same need of US force or power with an internal threat that can't be countered with nukes and bombs.

Regardless of politics, I can't see how any inteligent person can be blind to the clear illustrations in Iraq of the limits of an all volunteer army to wage a protracted, full scale war and occupation. A very important part of that limitation is, of course, the are we're in and the people we invaded and occupied, but there are clear indications of our limits in logistics and support regardless of the location of the operation.

Private contractors in a war zone is just stupid on a purely military level, and yet our forces couldn't support themselves ifthey had to. Now it's to the point that the private contractors are luring away our best, most seasoned troops with much, much higher pay. If I'm gonna be in a war zone regardless, you're damn skippy I'd rather get paid better for it.

The Iraqi military was a joke. Saddam was a paper tiger. He was easily the weakest and seemingly easiest target in the Middle East tha twe could somehow justify attacking, and the thing has been one arrogant miscalculation after the other. And now it's costing us our military.

Which leads us to my point of our true owrlkd influence in the post Cold War, 'war' on terrorism environment; our economy.

Not long ago, some knob of a administration official publicly and with a perfectly straight face claimed somehwat increduously that Amnerica was simply being a good world citizen by racking up massive debt so as to fuel the worlds economy. By going into debt, we were lifting others out of poverty and improving the lives of all those people getting our outsourced jobs. My, but it was glorious.

The complete idiocy of this claim aside, we do fuel the worlds economy. Sadly, our addiction to cheap crap will prevent us from wielding this influence to our favor. Bush should have gotten on Chinas ass long ago for pegging the yuan to the dollar. It's killing us. Bush knows it, or at least his advisors know it, everyone knows it, yet he does nothing.

We want Jordon to do something for us? Fine, ban Wal-Mart from buying any clothes made there. Same with Yemen, and the UAE, where massive factories pay poverty wages to grind out clothes for Wal-Mart. There's a factory in Jordan that employes thousands that make nothing but shirts for Wal-Mart. Damn skippy they be kissing our ass if we shut that down. But then we'd have to *gasp* pay slightly more for shirts.

We used to make everything we needed in the US. 50 years ago there was not one major or minor consumer appliance or product that was not made in America. All our clothes, all our food, all our cars, all our electronics, all our appliances, every single thing we purhcased was either made here or there was a domesticaly produced equivalent available.

But capitalism knows no borders, it's not bound by nationality. It by design falls to the lowest common denominator, and thus the rise, once logistics allowed it, of the national box stores. The closes thing previously to them was maybe Sears or Montgomery Wards, who largely at their peak did more catalogue sales than retial.

Our economy is false, our wealth is hollow, it's a sham, a facade. I can get a free cell phone with a three year contract that they'll give to anyone regardless of credit history and I can buy a 20" TV at Wal-Mart for less than $90, but I can't afford health insurance or a retirement fund. I can buy a DVD player for $30, but I buy cheap high fat and sodium food because it's more affordable.

Where is the trade off? Which is more important, continued access to cheap crap from China or better health and more productive living?

A free market is a lie. We do not have a free market. Even the Republicans have shit loads of regulations and laws and fees and subsidies. If we had any true semblance of a free market then we wouldn't have any farm subsidies. For Gods sake, we still have a wool subsidiy left over from WW II! Why?

So lets not even pretend we have a free market, we don't. And once past that, we can talk about how to wield our economy in the post Cold War times. But it would take some sacrifice at home, and I just don't think we have it in us anymore. Bush didn't even ask us to sacrifice after the Spet. 11th attacks. He not only didn't ask us to sacrifice, he paid us off with multiuple tax cuts during major war time and told us to go fucking shopping or see a movie. Don't let the terrorists win by changing your daily routine, but in the meantime I'm going to rewrite the Constitution in my vice presidents image.

If we couldn't even sacrifice for Sept. 11th, how will we ever sacrifice cheap crap? The bad side of captialsim, and why it utterly and totaly fails as social policy, is that in the end it lowers itself to the lowest common denominator. Beta-Max kicked the crap out of VHS inquality, but VHS was cheaper and "good enough." Windows sucked compared to Mac, but it was cheaper and good enough.

The media, the market, industry, even politics all lower themselves to the lowest common denominator at some point in time, and all because of the one commonality between them all; the need to make money. They all have to go for the biggest return on thesmallest investment. And that's the fallacy of captialism as social policy, and that's why we'll never truly use our economic influence to it's fullest advantage.

The world needs us more than we need them, if we have to, we can make anything we need here. It'll just be more expensive. But hey, that might be one way to get back some manufacturing jobs, no? Nah, who wants higher prices, am I right?

Ann Coulter, runaway PC and the rise of morality based politics

2006-06-24T11:58:00.000-04:00

Great article, touches on a few angles I've thought of myself in recent years, the main one being morality based politics and guilt by political association.

THE HATRED OF ANN COULTER.
Trash Talk
by Michelle Cottle
Only at TNR Online

I especialy liked the line about how that some of the authors friends honestly and sincerly believes that anything "Democrats/liberals/lefties do/believe/advocate by definition must be either irredeemably wicked or irretrievably stupid." For no other reason than that it coems from "the left" it's already discounted, already debunked, already unbelievable, for no other reason that it comes from people that are moraly, intelectualy and spiritualy less of a person than they are.

The sanctamonious, self-righteous hypocricy from the right has been instiutionalized as accepted fact by the party faithfull. Never mind the fact that the Republicans control every single aspect of federal government, or that 10 out of 13 federal courts have solid Republican appointed majorities on them, and the USSC is now 7-2 Republican appointed. Never mind that, it's *still* the liberals/democrats/leftists fault about everything.

To be able to simply discount everything you disagree with as coming from moraly shallow, inept, and simply plain bad people must be a singularly freeing feeling. To free yourself of all doubt, to never have to explain or justify, let alone support your opinions because simply by questioning them the person is questioning God, it just has to be liberating.

God is not on your side, people. Nor is He on our side. God is on no ones side. You are on His side, or not. It is not the same thing. It's more than semantics, in fact it's the most relavent point of the discussion.

By no means do I lay this legacy on the feet of conservatives alone. Political correctness ran amok in this country for too long, and the left pushed it too hard. People shouldn't not call other people names because it's "politicaly incorrect,", they should not call other people names simply because it's the polite thing to do.

But rather than pointing that out, the right threw a fit of backlash, striking out at their own reluctance to simply treat people the way they would like to be treated, and here we are, hating each other based on differing ideals and politics, the very differences that should bring us together in discussion and compromise.

But how can you compromise your morals? You can't, and, again, here we are.

Declare victory and bring them home

2006-06-04T20:57:00.000-04:00

We've passed the trheshold of anything that happens in IRaq that results in civilian casualties, no matter the truth or circumstances, is going to automaticaly be not only seen negatively by the Iraqi people, but will be increasingly endorsed and pushed by the elected government. With democracy comes pandering, and boy will they pander.

If we stay in Iraq one more year or five more years, I don't see a whole lot of difference between the two timelines except less US and Iraqi civilian casualties. For one, with us gone, there's that much fewer 'collateral damage' simply because we're no longer there to be attacked. We're also no longer there to cause damage by our actions against insurgents.

Elected Iraqi officials are proclaiming that "resistance" against the occupation is a legitimate action uner international law. I could look for the quote, but I posted it in another thread before. Was some parlamintarian knob. The point being, members of the elected government are saying reissitance to our occupation is legitimate. It's time to leave.

The Iraqi's won't be any better prepared than we can make them if we aren't patriling the streets. Bush has already said he won't spend anymore on reconstruction, so they're screwed on that. When they're forced to rebuild their own country, which they should have had the chance to do form the start, then they'll start protecting it more when it's theirs that they're fighting for, not Haliburtons.

The claimed security we provide by being there does not, IMO, outwiegh the downside of increased attacks against us and the inevitable splash damage we do on our own, not to mention simple traffic accidents in an operational war zone.

We leave, and the vast majority of targets for the insurgents leave. The main reason for their even being there leaves with us. We're too far in debt, we're too overdrawn, we're crippling our military, and it's going to take decades to build our fighting strength back up to pre-war levels in both hardware and manpower. We won, Saddams gone, let's go home.

Why no riots in the US?

2006-06-03T22:01:00.000-04:00

Seems like every other country in the world with a sizable Muslim/Islamic population, and even a few that are a majority, have had major if not violent riots over the 'war' on terror the US is almost unilaterally waging.

The biggest protest, let alone a riot of any kind, was over Mexican illegals.

Why has the US, the country that declared and is largely waging alone the 'war' on terror that, no matter how you slice it, still targets primarily Muslims and Islamists, why have we not had any riots of our own? We haven't even had any real major protests, not of Muslims or Islamists anyway. More white yuppies in California have protested the war that Muslims and Islamists combined, I'd feel pretty safe in saying.

There's only a few explanations for the lack of similar action here in the US. Some on the left will say they're too scared, that they're terrified of being labeled 'enemy combatants' or arbitrarily arrested, beaten or tortured, but I find that explanation too pat.

Some on the right, believe it or not I had one person somewhere, can't remember who or where, but some right of center soul actually told me that Muslims/Islamists don't have to riot or protest because they've scared the American people, media and government into leaving them alone lest they become suicide bombers en mass, but I find that explanation to be stupid.

So they aren't scared of us and we aren’t scared of them. Make no mistake that I believe there is more than a little intimidation, real or imagined, in the US Muslims/Islamic population, I just don't think it rises to the level of why we've not had any riots or major protests.

They certainly wouldn't be unorganized, any group of people of any similarity worth their salt have a frickin' lobby in this country, certainly any ethnic or racial minority is going to have some kind of social network. If they wanted to be organized they easily can be.

I would count out laziness as not a relevant choice. So I can't think of much more than my opinion on it, which is that the US does a very good job of integrating people into our society, no matter the perception that we're separate or different.

France has an "official" language. It pretty much fosters bitterness and resentment in their minority populations. Not that they have to learn French, but that it's written in law and religiously enforced. They're also largely alienated by the French born population. They pretty much park them out in slums on the outskirts of cities, I mean, who wants to look at a bunch of poor slobs, am I right?, where they get more bitter and pissed off until the throw a freakin' riot and burn shit down.

As much as some people might want to pack up the poor and ship 'em out of town, that would be a bad thing, just as France and most European countries that operate largely the same are finding out too late.

As well, despite the whining some do over our perceived overly generous welfare system, you really do need to work to get anywhere in our system. In this way, capitalism is a dynamic that forces people to interoperate with the general population on their level, and are thus integrated into society. While I firmly believe that government can do more but it needs to be targeted, I in no way want an overly comprehensive system that doesn't require any interaction or effort what so ever with the general society like in most European countries. There is a happy ground between the two extremes, and for the most part, we do hit it.

While America was founded largely along a certain racial and ethnic/religious line, the diversity we required over the generations has turned into our greatest strength. Everybody has a different perception of what America is and stands for, but the one commonality has been that everyone counts.

And I have no illusions over government abuse of power or how bad government can be when it wants to be or people let it be, but in the end we correct it together. When you start restricting access, when you start limiting opportunities, you start limiting our growth and diversity and strength. We lose cohesion, we lose that commonality that binds us. We lose that thread, and it all comes unraveled.

Anyway, that's what I think.

Think of the children! No, wait, terrorism!

2006-05-30T22:39:00.000-04:00

Terrorism invoked in ISP snooping proposal

The 'war' on terror truly is the perfect war. No clearly defined enemy, so everyone is suspect, even Americans. No clearly defined borders, so you can fight it anywhere, even in America.

And the best thing of all, is you can keep it all secret because enemies could be anywhere, and simply talking about it can provide them support and comfort.

I gotta give Gonzales and by proxy whoever told him to say it props for at least being honest about it. The "think of the children" shtick is just so tired by now.

However, it's not because they're honest about it that Gonzales said it, it's because they're so blatant. They don'teven pretend. It's like Rove and Cheney were out drinking and hunting one night and one of them, probably Rove, drunkenly boasted he could get people to go alone with anything just by being totaly blatant about it. Just in their face no way to deny it just justify it with national security or some shit. Cheney would be the old skool sneaky bitch type, all secrets and closed doors, so of course he'd be skeptical.

Honestly, this is the only way I can imagine that they're getting away with the shit they are. Fine, here, yes we're restricting your freedoms and wiping our ass with the Bill of Rights, but it'zs to protect you and if you don't believe us just ask us and we'll tell you. Oh yeah, I'm not really from Texazs, but I act like it, and even though I'm a privliged north eastern elitest I own a "gentelmans" ranch and talk stupid, so I'm just like you.

And they fell for it.

And now it's the norm. They don't even pretend, they don't play the game, nothing. Just in your face fick you it's for your own good and if you disagree you're lsoing the war for the allies.

This is what happens when you take civics out of school, people! Shit like this happens and no one knows they're supposed to care!

When will the 'war' on terro be over? Bush himself said never. Just openly admited it, all the while ursurping special 'war' time authority and cutting Congress's balls off, of which they freely provided as long as Bush didn't point out their spending habits.

So this is the norm, people. This is America at 'war' from now and forever, according to Bush. Persoanly, I refuse to live in a country that's at a constant state of 'war' that requires the government that I put in power to force private industry to collect massive wide ranging information on consumers for government data mining projects. No, I do not trust the government to not abuse that authority, I don't care who's in power.

It often seems like some people don't understand the ramifications of the Republicans ramming all this shit through and giving up all this authority to Bush carries over to when a Democrat holds the office or majority of Congress. Everything the GOP is doing now we can do later, shit, you're setting the legal precedent right now, you twats.

I guarantee the Democrats abuse this fucking power when they take office or the majority, they're God damn politicians, that what politicians do, Christ, how stupid are you people? When was the last time the govenrment gave back any expanded authority? When was the last time the government made itself smaller? Sure as fuck wasn't when the Republicans took over, damn.

The deial has to be insane, doesn't it? The constant denial thatthey've turned their backs on so many core ideals they espoused so self righteously all those years? Republicans of 30 years ago never would have dreamed of jumping into the Terri Schiavo shit like they did. It would have been the Democrats and the Republicans would have been all aghast at that level of federal intervention into private family lives.

And man, the spending! Can any conservative claim that spending under Bush has not outstripped Clinton in every way, in every stage, in ever sector of the federal government? This doesn't even include the unfunded appropriations bills they've been charging the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to. They aren't even officialy on the fucking books!

At least they're sticking to some of their historical roots, though. You can take the party out of the sourthern but you can't take the southern strategy out of the party. Got all kinds of voting restrictions coming on, of course not overtly racialy based anymore, but then the new color of racism is green. It's actualy gonna hurt them some in the hick south. And please, I was born in Missouri and raised in northern Michigan, I am the hick south.

The party of Lincoln, heh. Not even the party of Reagan anymore. Could have been the part of Newt, but the dumb bastard wound up being serious about shrinking government and cutting spending. What a putz. Got rid of his ass right off. Now he thinks he's some elder statesmen, like anyone in the GOP really wants to cut spending. Sure, other peoples spending, not mine.

And that takes us to my last point, morality based politics will rip the GOP apart, if not in this election cycle then the next. Can't compromise on morals, people. The wing that made you the majority will be the wing that brings you down when they abandone you because you can't deliver what they want. Not that you don't want to, you just can't. It's unconstitutional. So when you can't stack the courts with total nutbags and you start cutting their funding, which you will to pay for more tax cuts, they'll stay home in droves. The greatest thing about it is how righteous they'll feel doing it. Punish that bad old GOP for abandoning God to the Constitution, for shame.

Splitting the country along moral lines, I think, will in the long run of history, if we last that long, be Bush's true legacy, not Iraq. The only point in which the US was this split along partisan lines was before the Civil War. And it's plain to any honest shcolar and even an idiot like me that it was done intnentionaly. Evangelicals don't support the GOP because of thrift spending habits and smaller government, they support them because of abortion and gay marraige, period.

And that's the problem, because you're limited to those two issues to bind the party together. You think the evangelicals fund the GOP? Hell no, the corporations do, and what they want is increasingly counter to what evnagelicals want. Now who do you suppose the GOP is going to go with when push coms to shove? WHo's got the most butter for their bread is who, and that ain't the evangelicals. Without 'em, the GOP doesn't have the votes to hold their majority.

And if the evangelicals don't bail, conservationsit minded conservatives will, and already are starting to. Conservation, which runs mostly counter to industry, is also picking up steam with the evangelicals, further splitting the party. Only the most hard core will stick with the GOP over only abortion and gay marriage, and the GOP can never deliver on either of those, anyway. All they can do is continue to use it as a boogeyman to fire up what's left of their base.

The Democrats kept their majority intact for what, fifty years, give or take? The GOP will lose theirs in less than 20, 25 on the outside.

I wanted to end off with some bitting snipe but I can't really think of one that makes sense. Mind the typos, my typing not so well is.

If you're going to build a wall

2006-05-01T20:17:00.000-04:00

What would it be like?

How tall? How long? How deep? How many people would be manning it? Topped with razor wire? Electrified, maybe? Guard dogs? Armed military patrols? Armed guard towers?

Minus any of these, what's to keep people from just propping up a ladder and climbing over it?

Would you support raising taxes to pay for it? Or should the poor and elderly pay for this too? Maybe we could finaly end Medicaid since Bush fucked it up so much, that should cover it, no?

Just think of all that money we'll be saving from not educating and caring for and healing all those dirty immigrants? Oh, wait, we'll need to round up the one's already here.

So now how do you propose to do that? Round up anywhere from 5 to 15 million people, house them, transport them. Ooh, bet we could use some trains, maybe pack them into some box cars, eh? Pass them through that razor wired gate past them guard dogs and military personel. Think maybe we could get some German Shepards, just for the nostalgia effect?

These actions and ideas in and of themselves are not an issue for me, the fact that the US is the one contemplating implementing them is.

Is America as welcoming light of freedom to the worlds oppressed and hungry done? Is that just quaint nostalgia in todays reality? How do we celebrate our diversity and wall off our borders at the same time?

I hear too many cons on here espouse the tired line of everyone else is doing it, other countries seal their borders, other countries limit their immigration. Would these other countries be 'old Europe'? You know, France, maybe? Are we to act like other countries now, but only in this instance, not like in law or anything that effects us directly? Do we only emulate other countries when it's convenient or self serving?

And the slippert slope arguement os overused by all sides. On one hand, lets say for example, legalizing gay marraiges is a slippery slop that will lead to legalizing sex with babies and animals. But on the other hand, for further example, restricting our liberties and freedoms won't lead to a slippery slope of further restriction.

The left uses this arguement in reverse, too, so I'm not laying exclusive claim on it by the right. But since I'm the one posting, I get to choose the example, heh.

Once you start it's hard to stop, on anything. It's all a slippery slope. But I'd rather slide towards inclusion and diversity than exclusion and atrophy. Who do we limit next? Hell, we're at war with radical Islam, doesn't it make sense to limit access to Arabs?

Oh, right, we already are.

Protesting in America is an old tradition, happening quite often in the heady days of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Industry and corporate interests effectively shut it down by the early 2th, though, with only sporadic outbursts in the last 70 or so years, mostly ineffective and short lived.

But hey, we could al go back to those glory days of slave labor sweat shops where over see'ers beat their workres with whips and locked them into rat trap fire hazard buildings, forcing them to pay for their meals and clothing and shitting themselves rather then going to the bathroom.

Because that's what it was like before all the ethnic protests related to labor in America as aforementioned above.

Republicans need to press their leaders over this issue. Many of you have admited here over and over that you take away the jobs you take away the labor. Heavy enforcement on business's that hire illegals is the only realistic course on decreasing illegal immigration, and it will never happen, because the GOP is very business friendly.

And it's not jsut the GOP, Democrats have local interests as well, but nationaly, it's the GOP that won't slap business like it needs to be. So when will you hold your leaders responsible?

Hey, how about this election? Why not all you all just stay home in protest? Or maybe vote for their other side?

Oh, right, right, I forget, no matter how bad your side is the other side will always, always be worse. So, you keep voting for your side, and you keep getting nothing done about it, and you wonder why.

That's the inherent limitation of morality based politics, you can never, never compromise on your coe issues, no matter how bad they fuck up everything else.

Pissed off at the deficit? Gay marraige! Booga Booga!

Upset over highways and railroads that go nowhere? Terrorists! Booga Booga!

Ticked off over the craptacular Medicaid drug bill? Abortion! Booga Booga!

I've been vocal and consistent on my ability to support certain Republican candidates. I could vote for McCain with no remorse, or Powell, or possibly Warner, and maybe even that Mormon dude, whatisname. Or was that Warner?

Regardless, too many on both sides, and more on the right than the left, simply can't get past their false moral convictions or hatred and disgust of the other side to ever contemplate comrpomising.

And that's why the GOP majority will last a third as long as the last Democrat reign did. In fact, the reason the Democrats lost isn't so much that the Republicans won, it's the Democrats that stopped compromising on issues like gay marraige and abortion. They froze out the moderates, same as the GOP is doing now.

Only the Dems took 40 years or more to do it, the GOP is doing it in less than 20, tops.

But hey, no sweat, hold that line, stay that course, by God don't compromise on my account. Far be it from me to keep you from your destiny.

Oh, right, back to the poll, how would you build a wall?

This is what I get for 'lucid' before I post, I tend to ramble. So read or answer or not, this was more for me than you anyway :D

Nothing has changed

2006-03-28T09:21:00.000-05:00

From the start, from the very begining, the very first time I heard someone say "Everything has changed.", I cringed, for two reasons.

First reason is historical. Go down the checklist throughout all of human history, and whenever a catalyst on a large enough scale has occurred and people started saying "everything has changed" it's mostly turned out poorly. Almost to a one, it has been little more than excuse to suppress dissent and push an agenda.

The second reason I cringed is a lot simple; it's just plain bullshit. Nothing has changed, and nothing ever will change. Since the dawn of human history we've ran the gamut of petty little bastard's to saints walking amongst us mere mortals. For every Hitler there's a Mother Theresa, for every Ghandi a Saddam, and for every guy that lets you into traffic there's that prick that cuts you off.

Does anyone honestly believe that prior to Sept. 11th, 2001, no one ever tried to pull a terrorist attack in the US? There's not really a lot of relevant difference between 2001 and, say, 1981. Planes still circled the globe, flight schools still trained, and people still hated us. Christ, Reagan was in office, half the world wanted us dead and the other half were too freaked about his Alzheimer shaky ass finger on the button to piss him off. But at least he had Nancy to worry about his legacy.

Discounting the Oklahoma City attack which we perpetrated on ourselves, does anyone really believe that the Sept. 11th attacks were the first terrorist attacks on the US? Oh, right, forgetting the prior WTC attack, but that was too recent to count IMO.

Either we were a lot better at stopping shit before it happened or the governments been a lot better at lying about them that we thought of either one before now.

The only thing that changed on Sept. 11th, 2001, was America woke up and jined the rest of the world. You want to know what's going on in the world?

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/

Here's the hot spots; an insurgency in Colombia, approaching genocide in Congo despite UN peace keepers, the Palestinian Intifada against Israel, civil war in the Ivory Coast, Chechnya, genocide in Darfur Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq.

That's eight major conflicts going on that all have the ability to cost tens of thousands of lives, and at least four of them already have.

Go back and check a similar list of 20 years ago.

Nothing has changed, only the players.

I read something earlier that prompted me to write this but I can't remember what now. Oh, right, some knob of a Republican spoke up on it over the fact that a couple years ago we apparently ran an undercover operation to test border security and were able to sneak in radioactive equipment past security. The material was detected, which is good, but the undercovers convinced security they were cool with fake documents, which is not cool. But come on, it's the fucking government forging the documents! I have to imagine they were *very* good forgeries.

So the Republican git said the border agencies were operating with a 'pre 9/11 mentality in a post 9/11 world.'

Ok, for one, let me state that I emphatically despise the use of a fucking acronym to describe one of our countries most horrific tragedies. It offends me, to be honest. It turns the tragedy into nothing more than a fucking sound bite in our ADS addled world and it pisses me off. Show some fucking respect and take the time to write the God Damn date out.

But having said that, at the end of the quote the Republican dude felt the need to add, of course, that 'everything has changed' or some shit to that effect, and it's just really, really getting old. I mean old as in old as dirt old. That old, past old, we're talking prehisfuckingtronic.

Nothing has changed, it's always been like this, we just finaly noticed.

The collective we, of course, because I knew this shit 25 years ago when I was still in high school. And we're doing fuck all about it. we're doing the same knee jerk bullshit we've always done. Bomb it and forget about it. Anyone that thinks we're going to be in Iraq ten years from now is confused. Oh we might have a base on the outskirts, something along the lines of Gitmo probably, some new no mans land that doesn't exist in regular reality. But we'll bail, and when we do, we'll blame the Iraqis. Remember where you heard it first.

On Sept. 11th, 2001, America pulled it's collective head out of it's collective ass. On March 20th, 2003, we put it back in.

After all, everything had changed, hadn't it?

The US attorney general is a liar

2006-03-07T08:58:00.000-05:00

Just stands right up there and lies, blatant, in your face lying. Says we abhor torture and respect the rights of detainees. Of course we don't, since we *do* torture and we give detainees no rights. But that doesn't stop us from lying about it.

Also says we don't snatch people off the streets of other countries and send them to get tortured, even though we just paid some German dude $300,000 for doing exactly that to him. Doesn't matter what we, you know, actually do, as long as we just say that we don't.

Also said we never used European airports, or anyone elses airports for that matter, to move detainees to other countries to be tortured. Even though, you know, we did. But as long as we *say* we didn't, then it's the truth.

Also says that he's aware of "no other country in history" that has offorded 'enemy combatants' procedural protections like those we offer our 'detainees.' Of course, failing to mention that no other country in history has relied on the 'enemy combatant' designation to the extent that we are isn't really relavent, no need to pay attention to that fact at all, really. Just trust us when we say it.

The US attorney general, the nations top law official, charged with protecting the people and their rights. Not just working for the president, he's emplyed by the people themselves to ensure that the president follows the law. And he's a lying mother fucker. Blatant, in your face, bombs going off behind him ala' Baghdad Bob lying mother fuckre.

By every international standard of law, many of them treaties that we have signed, and by any definition of our own, we *have* tortured people. We have snatched them off the streets in the dead of night and flown them to other countries to be tortured. We've tortured by our own hands. These facts are not indisputable, they are, simply facts.

But that doesn't stop our attorney general from lying, repeatedly, over and over. But then, he's just doing his job.

No exception for rape or incest in the new SD abortion ban law.

2006-02-25T00:11:00.000-05:00

Is that the vaunted conservative compassion we hear so much about? Forcing a minor raped by her family member to have the child? And please don't say that isn't likely, it's happned before, it'll happen again.

If these compassionate asshats were talking serious adoption reform to go along with their assault on abortion, I could at least discuss it. But minus that, this is nothing more than another sick, cynical self righteous morality play like the Terri Schiavo cluster fuck.

Also keep in mind that the rapist, family member or not, will have a valid claim on fucking parental rights. Or is it once the baby is born who cares what father figure they have in their life?

What about poor women? You force them to have unplanned children and then cut them off their assistance and make it that much more likely the kid will grow up in poverty.

But once it's born, not your problem, right? Is that it? I don't like abortion, I think it's sad and ugly. But it's a fact that needs to be dealt with, not swept under the rug and ignored by passing knee jerk feel good legislation for no other reason than because you can pass it. This does nothing to address the larger issues of single parent families, poverty and generational welfare. In fact, it perpetuates them.

Comments on the port operations sale

2006-02-22T17:39:00.000-05:00

What's hillarious is the 'show' opposition from the Republican party, especialy Frist and Hastert. Tyring to have it both ways leading into midterm elections, they can't suck Bush off like they used to, but no way will they force a veto with their own president leading into elections.

The port sale, for good or ill, is a done deal. It was a done deal before it was even announced. No way will the GOP force a showdown over anything with Bush leading into elections. This is all posturing. And the cries of racism from people like Snow from Treasurey is disgusting considering the source. Snow, some may know and most not, was the head of some big old rail company that sold it's port operations off to the same Dubai company now for over $1 Billion before being annointed by Bush to Treasurey.

Failing the Iraqi people

2006-01-15T15:57:00.000-05:00

We failed to prevent country wide looting in the immediate aftermath of the invasion that cst us and the Iraqi people precious infrastructure. We failed to secure the borders and allowed tens of thousands of foriegn insurgents to flood into the country and blend into the population. We failed to prevent the total evisceration of the standing army, the only local force able to restoreand hold order in the country. We failed to stop the Iraqi consitution from being written long ethinic and religous lines which further alienates significant percentages of the general population to the point of pushing them towards the insurgency as they increasingly have nothing to lose.

And now, we're failing on our promise to rebuild their country, all directly due to our previous failings mentioned above. Most significantly, so much money has had to be divereted to pay for out of control security costs do to our inablity to reign in an out of control insurgency, that most rebuilding funds have been drained off.

Let's not even get into the blind, arrogant fantasy of waging a war with private contractors, let's just stay on the fact that we've seriously faild in our promises to the Iraqi people, and if some modicome of democracy miraculously emerges from Iraq after we bail, it will be despite or worst efforts, not in spite of our best.

'Marshall Plan' for Iraq Fades

# Once the $18.6 billion for reconstruction is spent, the nation might have to rely on private investment. 'No pain, no gain,' a U.S. official says.

By Doug Smith and Borzou Daragahi, Times Staff Writers

BAGHDAD — After more than 2 1/2 years of sputtering reconstruction work, the United States' "Marshall Plan" to rebuild this war-torn country is drawing to a close this year with much of its promise unmet and no plans to extend its funding.

The $18.6 billion approved by Congress in 2003 will be spent by the end of this year, officials here say. Foreign governments have given only a fraction of the billions they pledged two years ago.

With the country still a shambles, U.S. officials are promoting a tough-love vision of reconstruction that puts the burden on the Iraqi people.

"The world is a competitive place," Tom Delare, economics counselor at the U.S. Embassy, said this month during a news briefing. "You have to convince the investor that it is worth his while to put his money in your community."

An embassy spokeswoman later said that the Bush administration was not abandoning the Iraqi reconstruction effort. It "remains committed to helping build Iraq and continues to assess needs on the ground," she said. No decisions on future funding requests have been made, she said.

But embassy and reconstruction officials outlined a program of private investment and fiscal belt-tightening by the new Iraqi government as the long-term solution to the country's woes, even if that causes short-term suffering for Iraq's people.

"No pain, no gain," Andy Wylegala, whose job at the embassy is to help Americans do business in Iraq, said at the same briefing. "It's a very difficult procedure to pass through. But when I look from my side, I see it as a long-term, very favorable development."

After touring Baghdad early this month, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) questioned the new direction.

"I think we're fooling ourselves if we think we can simply just pass this on to the Iraqi people immediately or to the international community," Reed said. "We've got to continue our efforts…. That requires money."

Iraq's new government will embrace market policies, but it still needs more help with reconstruction, said Movad Ubaidi, deputy chief of the newly elected National Assembly's economics committee.

"If these donations were spent, the American government is asked to give more so that Iraq can recover from the damage it suffered," Ubaidi said.

But the commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Iraq, Gen. William H. McCoy, said at a recent briefing that the last of 3,100 reconstruction projects would soon be awarded, and almost all would be completed before the year ends.

"We were never intending to rebuild Iraq," McCoy said. "We were providing enough funds to jump-start the reconstruction effort in this country."

Although U.S. officials say the projects have given a needed jolt to the economy, most Iraqis have seen little effect in their lives.

"If they say they have spent money, where is it?" asked Salah Qaragholi, 30, a barber in the poor neighborhood called Zafraniya. "Where are the projects? The electricity is only four hours a day."

Baghdad's roads are an obstacle course of barriers, potholes and debris. Many government and office buildings are either still gutted or strung with webs of electrical wire connecting to generators that run 12 hours on good days. A brown haze fouls the air and pools of sewage overflow dot the streets.

The U.S. Embassy credits the reconstruction effort with restoring sewage treatment to more than 7.7 million Iraqis, opening 21 berths at the Umm al Qasr port, building nearly 600 miles of freeways and primary roads, and developing three new international airports: at Basra in the south, and Irbil and Sulaymaniya in the north.

It says 124,000 Iraqis are employed under reconstruction and military contracts.

But from its inception, the program has been troubled by contracting scandals and rising security costs that have drained as much as a quarter of the funding.

Some completed projects were destroyed by insurgents or damaged by poor operation.

McCoy conceded that the Army Corps had overreached in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood.

"The initial strategy was, 'Let's put some big capital investment here so that we can improve their water, their electricity, their sewage treatment quickly.' " McCoy said. "Over the course of time, we saw that those, while important, weren't helping us quickly."

Instead, he said, the Army Corps is now placing 27 compact water units around the community that will dispense drinking water.

State Department officials say the program's overall success is evident in increases in employment, imports and gross domestic product, which has climbed above $1,000 per capita for the first time since the 2003 invasion.

"In spite of difficulties and shortfalls, it is an undeniable reality that huge progress has been made in the last 2 1/2 years, both on the physical infrastructure and the mercantile infrastructure," Wylegala, the embassy official, said at the briefing.

But declaring victory on the economic front hardly makes sense while American troops are still needed to maintain security in Iraq, said Frederick D. Barton, who tracks Iraqi reconstruction at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"It sounds a bit like another 'mission accomplished' moment," Barton said, referring to President Bush's premature declaration of the end of combat after Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled.

"They just don't want to give any more money for this," Barton said.

With public support for the U.S. presence in Iraq weakening, a new reconstruction package probably would face an even tougher sell in Congress than in 2003, when the Bush administration had a tough time winning over conservative Republicans.

To rally support then, L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the coalition occupation authority, coined the comparison to the Marshall Plan, saying Iraq needed the kind of assistance that lifted Germany out of the rubble of World War II to prevent it from sinking into economic despair and extremism.

Although the Bush administration has not said that it intends to let the program end, a senior U.S. official told The Times that the decision was "pretty much taken."

He said Bush had not decided how much money to request for other purposes in Iraq, and said that some in the administration were pressing for substantial sums.

Such programs could include police training, economic and governance development, humanitarian relief and small development projects, an embassy official said.

But without new reconstruction funds, the large projects to repair electrical, water and transportation systems would be dependent on a trickle of aid that has been coming from among the 40 other countries who made pledges at a 2003 donor conference in Madrid.

An internal State Department accounting obtained by The Times indicates that only about 30% of those pledges has been received. In a speech to a veterans group Monday, Bush pressed those nations to pay "as quickly as possible."

Japan, the largest donor, has paid less than half of the nearly $5 billion it pledged, according to the report.

Two of Iraq's neighbors, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, have given less than 10% of their combined pledge of $1 billion, the report shows, and Spain, Britain, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, Italy and Canada owe more than $100 million apiece.

State Department officials would not comment on the report, but the senior official said the U.S. was applying pressure on the other nations to come through, especially the oil-rich Persian Gulf states.

"We will be urging them more and more pointedly," the official said. "They are the beneficiaries of a huge oil price windfall. This is their neighborhood. Their security is at stake. They can have disagreements with us on how we're carrying out our security policies, but they serve everyone's interests."

It isn't unusual for countries to not keep promises made at highly publicized conferences, foreign policy experts say, and often the pledges come with terms.

Asked by The Times about its pledge, the Japanese government said it had already disbursed almost all the "grant aid" it pledged, and that the $3.5 billion outstanding was for loans to be given through 2007.

"Yen loan projects take a long time to set up," said Akira Chiba, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo.

The Spanish government gave a detailed list of projects it had funded, including schools and hospitals, but with much more going to humanitarian aid and assistance to Iraq's central bank. It said it was on target to complete its spending.

"We still have two years," a source in the Spanish Foreign Ministry said.

Officials in Baghdad say that far more important than all the aid is the debt restructuring agreement reached in December with the International Monetary Fund that will forgive as much as 80% of the $120 billion that Iraq owes.

"This removes the terrible crushing burden on the Iraqi economy," Delare, the embassy economic counselor, said at the briefing.

Delare said both the U.S. and world financial markets would be pressing the new Iraqi government to embark on a crash course of economic restructuring.

It would include privatizing companies that were run by Hussein's socialist regime, getting rid of employees who aren't needed, tackling the corruption that pervades the economy on "a grand scale," and ending subsidies.

"We believe the Iraqi population does not understand the true cost of subsidies," Delare said. "They do not understand that that these are monies that they don't see, monies that don't benefit them and monies that for the most part go to the benefit of the few or corrupt society in general."

I'm ashamed as an American at our performance in 'liberating' Iraq only to cut them loose to fend for themselves. It's like freeing the slaves after generations of slavery, totaly dependant on their masters, and just shaking their hand and saying "Good luck!"

We failed in our justification of war, we failed in the occupation of Iraq, and we're failing in the rebuilding of it, and we know it, and we're not doing anything about it. It's already a done deal, accepted as inevitable reality.

This is Bush's patriotic compassion, this is his dream of democracy and freedom. This is what he considers 'staying the course', as long as the course doesn't jeapordize his authority.

Weak.

The old axiom was wrong

2005-12-27T18:33:00.000-05:00

There was a great quote I don't remember where I read it, but it was relaed to the old US/USSR cold war rivalry, and some KGB officer was making the rounds and he commented to his CIA counterpart about how much respect he had for American 'propoganda', which to him was what our system of commercial advertising was. To paraphrase, he said the difference between the US and the USSR was that the US believed their own propoganda, where as the Russians didn't believe their own.

And I can so see that in America, just not today, but throughout our history. We've only recently entered the cynical stage of nationality, where as Russia has experienced it almost from the begining, heh. The more they knew someone the more the distrusted them almost, where as we trust people explicitly that we've never even met.

I mean, why do people trust Bush? Or Clinton, or any president for that matter. The vast, vast majority of people have never met them, never seen them in person, never saw how they acted in social settings, knew nothing about them except what they were spoon fed by the media.

The American media is not liberal, nor conservative, nor of any specific ideology, other than consumerism. They sell what we'll pay for. We don't buy it, they don't offer it. It's brutaly efficient, sadly.

The old axiom was wrong; you don't get the government you deserve. You get the media you deserve, and by proxy the government they sell you.

The bitch of it is, though, is that they aren't even trying to do it. If there was some nuderlying ideology, some nefarious plot to weaken our spines and loose the ar for the Allies, at least then it would be explainable.

Lacking that, I can only conclude that man is a selfish piece of shit at heart, and that's jsut a drag to have to admit your species sucks nads.

Is being a 'Nam vet a political liability?

2005-12-23T13:38:00.000-05:00

I've said before here and there, that I've come to believe that having served in Vietnam, and worse, being decorated for that service, is a liability in todays political climate.

By serving, they only illustrate they were too stupid or not connected well enough to get out of serving, and any decorations earned were nothing more than the pursuit of political gain later on.

How many Republican Vietnam veterans are there in Congress today? I'm honestly asking, I don't know of any, though of course that doesn't mean there aren't any. Conversly I can name off a handfull off the top of my head that are Democrats that have subsequently had their patriotism very publicly and savagly questioned.

Oops, I do forget McCain in this, but again, he was savaged by those that were smart enough or connected enough to get out of serving their country when she called.

Murtha only escaped the phenomenon as long as he did because he's also a Korean War vet.

I can't help but view this as a form of contempt for those that served in the only war we lost. Is there some risidual blame trickling down? Is it resentment to being reminded of the loss, or is it actual contempt for service as beneath them?

I blame the WW II generation for part of this, though by no means all of it. George H.W. Bush was a true hero in WW II. He served his country proudly and deserves respect and thanks for that service. And yet, he did everything he could to get his own son out of serving in the same capacity. Was it because he knew the true horrors of war and naturaly wanted to spare his son as any father would? Or was it because he knew the war wasn't worth dying for?

So many of the WW II generation did the same for their sons as Bush Sr. did, there has to be some connection, or disconnection, as it were, between the two causes.

And now, of course, we have the 'all volunteer' army, so no one has to worry about a sense of shame in not serving. Others will do it for me, it makes it all nice and neat and manageable. I can support the war and never have my own patriotism questioned because others volunteered to fight it for me. In fact, I don't even have to sacrifice, I get tax cuts during war time.

No one likes to be reminded they lost. How many Iraq War vets are running for office as Republicans? Again, there could be some, but I follow national news pretty good, and with the amount of party line trash on boths sides posted here, if there were some I probably would have read of them by now. And certainly the Republicans would want to be making a big deal out of it, what with their naturaly puffy chests and such.

Actualy, a quick Google of 'iraq war vet running office republican' turns up a story in the Boston Globe of one Iraq War vet running as a Republican. Of course, of the nine vets running, eight of them are running as Democrats, heh. And even the Republican is running against the prevailing leadership in Washington.

Said the lone Republican candidate profiled;
"Both parties have pursued policies of division, and there is this gaping whole in the middle where I think most Americans reside, Those people need to be represented," he said. "I don't know how we go from a country as united as it was on Sept. 12, 2001, to one as divided as we are today. That is what is propelling me in this race."

Good call, my man.

Deathwatch, day 15,558

2005-12-15T22:37:00.000-05:00

It's been 15,558 days since I began dying. From the moment I breathed, I started to die. Lucky is the animal man that knows his mortaltiy, blessed and cursed by equal measure.

I used to write a lot, back when I was younger and had a few more catalysts happening in my life. Mostly when I was drinking. But I was also dating, having relationships, confrontations, interactions, catalysts, things that pushed my feelings. I haven't had that for some time. I've been alive, but the spark is gone. I don't drink anymore either.

For a long time I drank the old axiom; write drunk, edit sober. But that was just a filter for my feelings. Still, it was like a valve that opened and let my thoughts roam. Now I feel restricted, not empty, more like idling in neutral.

Oh I still have my recreations, but nothing so raw s drinking. Drinking was primal, from the pit. Not good or bad, just was. Now it's more cerebral, but unfortunately I'm a bit less capable in that department. I can still talk a good game, but I can't put it down in the way as I used to.

And it's not the same for me anymore. For me it was personal, I was connected to my writing. I held the pen and paper, with my own actions I formed the words on the paper. It all goes back to putting pen to paper, the ideal, the freedom, the speaking of one to many, the liberation from the confines of my mind as it passed physicaly through my arm to my hand to the pen to the paper.

I've never been able to quite capture that depth of feeling with a computer. But then it never clicked for me with a typerwriter or word processor either. It's not just the keyboard as agent of medium, it's the whole historical ideal of speaking to the masses. The liberation of the printed word.

I don't view fire as an invention. It was just a matter of time before lightening struck a tree and caught it on fire and some knob ofa caveman figured out he could light a stick with it and carry it back to the cave. Discovering it was chance circumstance, not deliberate design. Now the guy that figured out you could chip some flint, that I could give some props to.

But the first real invention to me was the wheel. And it was the literaly the mother of all inventions. So much sprang from the wheel, it wasn't jsut the wheel that impacted us but what it begat. For one, the pully or the block and tackle, ball bearings, gears, axles. Mostly the pully I guess. Pulley?

Anyway, the next truely significant invention for me was movable type, my little love of words. Liberated from the confines of a repressive religious state, for good and ill, and there's been plenty of ill, disimination of information to the masses was unleashed like a hellish Pandoric, uh, Pandora, I guess.

The next invention to spawn more parts then it's sum is the Internet. I put it no less than in the ranks of the wheel and movable type in it's significance in the advancement of the human race. But even so, I find it distant in so many ways.

I talk to people in other countries on a daily basis more than I talk to people in the next room. Ok, that's allegorical, but still apt. And I actually do converse, at least in type on forums every day with people in a dozen different countries. Which is really freaking cool, all in all. But the expanded freedom and knowledge has come at the cost of lessening my interaction with those more immediatly around me. Why should I go out into the cold, cruel world and risk embarrasment when I can get online and talk to people worlds away with no fear of personal risk?

The temptation is alluring.

China really sucks

2005-12-09T21:30:00.000-05:00

I can't believe we buy so much cheap crap from China when they suck so fucking bad on human rights. Fucking bottom God damn dollar is that that matters. And no, it wasn't always this bad. And no, I don't blame Bush, though him and his ilk certainly push it to their profit. Capitalism works fine for an economic structure, not a fucking social one though. We'll be down 3,000 lives in Iraq and a half a billion fucking dollars in the hole by the time we're done there, and for what, to liberate the Iraqi people? To push fucking freedom and democracy? We give China MFN status, Wal-Mart is China's thrid fucking largest export market behind Germany. Of course the US is first by far. No one touches us on buying cheap Chinese crap. Get that folksy white trash vibe going in Wal-Mart, no need to bother with a social conscience or anything, better to get that cheap price instead, that's all that matters. You're as likely, or even more so, to see fucking SUV's and new Buicks and Caddy's in the local fucking Goodwill parking lot as you are rust buckets and winter beaters. Are people hurting that bad? Or are they just cheap bastards? My parents businss will probably close in the next year because we don't lie and cheat our customers like our local competition does and we can't compete when they're better at lying then we are at being simply honest. But we don't push bottom line price, even though that's what they want. Very few people care about quality anymore, all that matters is it's cheap. China buying up all our debt has kept our inflation artificaly low. That and tying their fucking currency to ours has done nothing but hurt the US and enrich a repressive Communist fucking regime that arbitrailty kills and imprisons it's people for their political and religious beliefes, ostensibly in the name of national security. Hm, sounds familiar, doesn't it? China fucks us and we just spread our cheeks wider, we can't get enough of it. If iflation was were it was supposed to be, and China wasn't such a piece of shit, we wouldn't be on this crap spree to the extent we are. Our fucking trade dificit is a fucking joke, poeple! Our countries being sold out. At least the fucking Japanese were our allies, the Chinese hate us! They want to supplant us as both the dominatn military and fucking economic superpower of the world, you shit for fucking brains! But hey, those plastic food dishes are just so damn cheap at Wal-Mart.

Witnesses: Chinese protesters shot, village sealed

60 years after the Nuremberg trials

2005-11-20T16:31:00.000-05:00

Have we learned anything?

Or are we taking a step backwards?

You know, I get tired of the same old 'greatest generation' shtick, I really do. It grates on me actually, as no enemy has come close to task us on the same level since. All the enemies of my time have been insidious little pissants and not much more.

Nothing even approaching the fanaticism and horror of the Nazi's has come along since. Saddam is nothing compared to Hitler. Iraq is nothing compared to WW II Germany. The 'war' on terrorism is nothing compared to the scope and totality of WW II.

So was it, while certainly not easier, but at least somewhat more reasonable and logical to rise to the hights they did to combat an evil on that scale?

The Nuremberg trials were unprecedented, a whole world united in trying history's most heinous criminals for crimes largely unspeakable on an almost unimaginable scale.

The world as a whole has not learned from history. Never Again fails to rally when everything after simply pales in comparison. Rwnada is a black, black stain on humanity's conscious. After all, 600,000 is only 10% of 6,000,000, did it warrant total commitement and immediate action? Nay, let it play out, not our problem, not spilling over to us, not disrupting the worlds oil supply.

Today the US refuses to join the International Court for fear of losing sovreignity, even though more then enough safeguards are built into the law. Instead of leading the world in human and civil rights we let the UN HRC be taken over by despotic, tyranical regimes. We aren't even on the council anymore, and the Bush administration shows no real concern about ever being on it again. Guess it's inconvenient to argue human and civil rights when your're one of a handfull of countries who refuse ot ratify the land mine ban or the child labor agreement.

We lack a level of clarity and purpose our fathers before us and their fathrs before them had in spades. We know the truth now and it's made us cynical. Even the good guys can be bad, so why should we care about the bad guys as much? I mean, we're arguing over whether torture should be allowed or not. WE shouldn't even be having this discussion. It should be a no brainer. Instead the administration is pushing to officialy sanction what all world treaties agree consitute torture.

The more technology advances, the more we learn, the more we're exposed to, the more we deal with, the less we can work up the indignation to carry us through to a resolution of what we've learned.

Tsunami in Aisa, flod in New Orleans, quake in Pakistan, quake in Iran, world flu pandemics, world wide war against an enemy that doesn't exist in any traditional sense. No wonder we shut down, it's called denial, it's a basic human defense mechanism. Without it we'd be frozen with inaction over the supreme realization that we will die no matter what we do about it. A heavy burden for the only senient race on the planet to not only comprehend it but to express rage, acceptance and abviliance all at once about it.

But often we rise as a people to confront and beat back the insidious nature of our base mammalian selves and prevail for our ideals over our instincts. At least once, in WW II, we rose such not as just a people, but as a race. We held ourselves accountable for our crimes against ourselves in a truely remarkable fashion.

But was it an abberation? Was it simply the circumstances that took us to that lofty hight? Could we do it again? Would it take a threat on that same level again? Honestly the next time mankind rises as a race on that scale will be either when Jesus Christ decends from the Heavens to call us home, or we're invaded by aliens. If not for Rwanda, what less could move us, then?

I don't envy the 'greatest generation' the cost of their humility, however, even though I do admire it. And I also hold them responsible in no small part of belittling everything that came after. Too many WW II generations fathers did all they could to get their Vietnam generation sons out of the same selfless service to their country they so proudly wear on their sleeves. And today too many of those sons who were never tasked by service and sacrifice now call on others to do what their fathers did, even couching it in like, stark contrasts of black and white evil and good.

And so we try to emulate them, but on the cheap. We want to make the stand but we don't want to pay the price. No sacrifice. Go about your daily lives. Don't let the enemy win. Tax cuts during war time.

Sorry, that one slips out now and then. It really rankles me.

And so we are a product of our times, defined by our enemies, and failing as ever to learn from history. Rather then lead we trip up those in line. Rather by example instead we choose exemption of ourselves from the same calls of justice and right we impose on others, forever living in the shadow of the greatest sacrifice a generation has ever been called on to make, bereft of the kind of enemy that could raise us to the same level. Instead we wallow in our piety and point to past glories as justification and proof of our current actions, never asking of ourselves the same accountability our fathers held themselves to.

And that's my Sunday rant for today, November 20th, 2005, this day in history.

Have we already lost the 'war' on terror?

2005-11-17T18:40:00.000-05:00

Back in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11th, 2001 attacks, president Bush implored Americans to not let the terrorists win; to go on with your daily lives, and, most famously, to go shopping or to a movie, to prove we were still going about our daily lives.

And yet at the same time we were told that everything had changed. What had changed? According to president Bush, not our daily rutine, that of shopping and seeing movies would be held intact, and that therefore we would not let the terrorists win.

So what had changed? Apparently, the role of the federal government in our lives and their ability to investigate Americans on a whim.

Bush wants to make the Patriot Act permenant. Permenant. Forever. For all time. Never changing. The norm from now on.

So, on one hand, we still go shopping and to movies, but on the other we will forever revocably alter the very underpinings of our freedom and civil rights. So the most important thing in Bush's new world order is to continue our consumre based capitalist system, and not our deocratic republic.

Which is more significant? The false veneer of stability of going to a movie and shopping, or the restricted rights and freedoms? I would have to classify changing our very foundation of democracy as on a bit higher plane then simply going shopping and to a movie.

Therefore, we have already *significantly* altered our way of life. The terrorists have forced us to alter our very concept of freedom. Haven't they, then, already won?

I'd rather have less shopping choice, and restricted movie access then to live under a government that can investigate any American anytime for any reason whenever they want to. Under current law, they don't even have to show why they want to wire tap someone or dig into their financial records. Any time, any reason, anywhere. That is the current law.

We have for the first time in our history openly condoned torture. Federal authorities have totaly unrestricted access to any Americans private personal information and never have to even say why. Also for the first time in our history as a nation we preemptively attacked a soverign nation with no overt provocation or tangible threat, that, by the way, happened to be based on totaly wrong intelligence.

Maybe they'll make it all into a movie.

We don't have to torture

2005-11-14T20:07:00.000-05:00

We let the Iraqi Interior Ministry do it for us.

This is the greatest hubris of the whole 'bringing democracy to the Middle East whether they want it or not' mentality of neocons and the current administration; they don't want democracy!

If democracy means they have power and authority over their enemies, hell, they'll be all for it. If it means giving up power or sharing authority, hell no.

Did anyone, anywhere, ever truly believe we could force democracy onto Iraq from the outside?

The Sunnis didn't want it, they had it fine the way it was. The Shiites don't want it, they want what the Sunnis used to have. And the Kurds don't want it either, they want their own fucking country!!!!

By a number of masures, Saddam's Iraq was one of the more progressive Arab regimes in the ME. That doesn't speak well for Saddam, it speaks worse for all the other peices of shit ruling around him.

If you consider Iran to be a democracy, then in 5 or 10 years Iraq will be a resounding success, because that's exactly what it's going to look like.

For a far too high majority of Iraq's, tribe and religious sect play a much more significant role in their personal identity. Are they Iraq's first, or Shiites? Or even Muslims first?

Iraq was founded in 1920 when Britain carved up three distinct tribal regions and forced them together. And even then it was only about oil. Even the first king England installed was from a different fucking area! He wasn't even an 'Iraqi'!

Did you know at one time the Kurds in Iraq claimed Kuwait as part of their 'country'?

The British shat on Iraq from the day they created it. It was so bad in WW II that there was an attempted coup by pro Nazi officers in the then Irqi army. Pro Nazi Arabs. Nazi's. Arabs. For them. That's pretty bad. 3,000 Iraqi troops killed and 3,000 officers purged by the British over that little snafu.

This is where it gets interesting from our perspective;

In 1961, after Kuwait had gained independence from Britain, the Iraqi leader, General Kassem, claimed it as an integral part of Iraq and concentrated his troops on the frontier, with the intention of taking it by force. Britain was ready, however, and dispatched troops stationed in the Gulf region to dissuade the Iraqis from armed conflict. The crisis was settled temporarily by a coup in Baghdad that overthrew Kassem, and was organised - it would seem - with the help of the United States. Iraq agreed to recognise Kuwait, but continued to make claims for an adjustment of the borders - claims that were to be the cause of further trouble in the future.

The 1979 Islamic revolution in neighbouring Iran offered Saddam, so he believed, the opportunity to invade Iran when the country was in a weakened state. This invasion would stifle the potential threat of revolutionary Islam, assert Iraqi hegemony and readjust the borders between the two countries. In September 1980 Iraqi troops crossed into Iran, but the quick success Saddam had hoped for turned into a bloody conflict that lasted eight years. During this period the west, Germany, Britain, France and the United States all armed Iraq - in an effort to create a bulwark against the spread of the Islamic threat. Help was given to develop all kinds of weapons.

And yet, they hate us for our freedom.

They hate us for our freedom to be the oppressors and not the oppressed, more like it.

You people do realize that the CIA coup'ed the fuck out the democraticaly elected government of Iran in 1953, don't you? You know why? They wanted to privatize the oil industry.

Oil.

And yet they hate us for our freedom.

I won't even get into Saudi Arabia, they're their own special kind of fucked up there. People in the US in general have no idea how fucked up that country is. Yet we have unfailingly supported the royal family for decades. Because they are a freedom loving people? Oh, right, they have a SHITLOAD OF OIL!

Nothing we do, I repeat NOTHING we do will persuade or disuade the insurgents in Iraq to pick up or lay down their arms. They hate us, a generataional hate that they've been pushed down by for close toa century. You don't just wipe that kind of hate away with soft platitudes and a few fucking trinkets.

We sold saddam fucking anthrax! This is fact, people! Anthrax! Fucking gas gangrene! The fucking nerve gas he used on the Kurds we fucking sold him the agents for! OF COURSE HE HAD FUCKING WMD!

That the Kurds still sucked up to us clearly shows they're smarter then we are. They played us like a fiddle on Pappy's back porch while drinkin' mint julips and listening to the negro's singing in the cotton fields. Yes,they played us that bad.

No one has a clue in Iraq, or the Middle East, least of all me, but I'm smart enough to admit it.

Iraq at one time had the greatest university system in the Middle East, before Saddam came along. Even under Saddam Iraq had a sizable Christian minority that was largely left alone. Women went full face in public, they drove for Allah's sake! They even held positions of authority in the government and academia under Saddam. Don't remember if they could vote though, could they?

But the point being, is that while Saddam was bad, and he was, he was faaaar from the worst in the area. What he was, was the easiest to pick on. After knocking his books out of his hands every time he walked by in the hallway for 10 years, he was easy pickin's. And for the chickenshits in washington that have never had the misfortune of doing their patriotic duty and serving their country in a time of war and naitonal sacrifice, he was the perfect 'make my dick look big' adversary.

Well apparently the administrations dick is so big they tripped over it. Oops!

And yet they hate us for our freedom.

Every major claim of an immenant threat by Iraq was wrong.

Countries that actually posed an immenant threat like Iran and Syria and N Korea were largely ignored, to the point of the British having to pull off the Gadhafi disarmament.

Every major military and policy decision made in Iraq by the US in the first year of occupation/invasion was wrong.

How's that deBaathification coming along?

How's that Iraqi army coming along?

How's that Iraqi constitution that grants the Shiites and Kurds power to succede or lock out the Sunnis from any oil money coming along?

How's them flowers and sweets?

How's that missing $1.5 BILLION from vet's health care funding?

How's that kicking the disabled veteran's groups out of the joint session of the House and Senate Veterans' Affairs Committees?

How's the fucking Guard and Reserve?

Got mother fucking armor!!!?

Been to a movie lately? Do you get all puffy chested when you do? Or do you have better things to do?

Maybe they hate us for our freedom to ignore the truth.

The war in Iraq was based on wrong intelligence. Purposfully misrepresented or not, it was almost *all* wrong. The initial invasion went so fast the administrations colective dick swelled so much all the blood drained from their heads and they let all the future insurgents fade back into the populace.

Best quote of Iraq war ever, voiced by one US soldier rising on top of a tank to another soldier when an Iraqi civilian male waved to them from the side of the road: "Look, the Iraqi military is waving at us."

While it was probably meant more towards the fact that the Iraqi military did one quick ass fade when we invaded, it takes a slightly different meaning now, to say the least.

All pre war intel wrong, all basis of a threat wrong, occupation wrong, fighting insurgents wrong. What about Iraq has gone right?

For the first time in our countries history that we preemptively attacked a soverign nation with no overt provocation against us, and far too many of us don't really much care. He was a bad man. Doesn't matter, there are far worse.

That Saddam desreved to be taken out is something less then even a paltry rationalization for the larger fuck up of the bogus pre war intelligence.

Doesn't matter that Clinton thought the same. Clinton didn't invade. The GOP Congress wouldn't have let him anyway.

Doesn't matter that Democrats in Congress voted for or against anything. They didn't send the troops. They didn't conduct the invasion. They didn't write the occupation policy. Iraq is Bush's and Bush's alone.

The war in Iraq directly contradicts every major tenet of freedom and democracy our naiton was founded upon.

Maybe they really do hate us for our freedom.

New twist on the Niger email scam

2005-11-08T18:53:00.000-05:00

Just got one from a dude 'in Taiwan' about some Iraqi official depositing $44 Million he needs my help in withdrawing. Just thought it was nice someone at least bothered to update the scam.

But the better of the two is one I just got supposedly from someone in England, Mark Anthony.

I shit you not, Mark Anthony.

This one goes even one more step in updating the story, as it uses Rafik Hariri, the ex Lebanese PM that was assinated a few months ago, and limits the deposit in question to $4 Million dollars. Oops, I mean, $4 Million Pounds Sterling.

The England/Hariri scam is fairly well written, without going so overblown as to be comical like so many of the African related one's were/are. But the kicker, after all the big words and exact Queens English spelling, he signs it as;
Mark Anthony
Unitad Kingdom.

Unitad Kingdom.

Is that over by France somewhere?

Let's say being gay is a choice

2005-10-31T13:56:00.000-05:00

For the sake of this arguement, let's just say that people choose to be gay.

Currently Texas is poised to be the 19th state to pass a state constitutoinal amendment to ban gay marraige. In Main, a conservative group is urging people to quash a new law prohibiting descrimination based on sexual preference. Meaning, of course, that they want to descriminate against people based solely on the fact that they are gay.

Now, let's say that being gay is a choice, and that's why they are against gay marraiges and gays in general, that because it's achoice there's no inherent right to it, but isn't religion a choice?

No one is born Catholic, no one is born a Christian, or Jew, or Muslim. Even if they are born into a family thereof and raised in a society that heavily promotes a certain religion, people still choose to be of one religion or another.

So why can't I descriminate against people based on religious choice?

Some religions accept homosexuality, Protestants for one. So can I then descriminate against Protestants because they accept gays, and that's against my religion? If I can descriminate against gays, can't I descriminate against religions that accept gays?

This isn't even a slippery slope, people, it's a sheer cliff dropping off into the void.

The United States Constitution is inclusive, not exclusive. It's designed to include people, not exclude them. It's designed to accept people, not descriminate agaisnt them. One person's religious freedom does not trump another person's religious freedom, and yet that's exactly what we're looking at with this.

Is law inherently liberal?

2005-10-27T22:51:00.000-04:00

I've thought about this before of course, but it just pooped into my head again reading Dahlia Lithwick's latest article on the failed Miers nomination.

The line that triggered it was, while writing about Bush's 'coded' message to the faithfull about Miers' supposed stand on abortion, she wrote;

"The code also didn't suffice because the right had heard the same coded promises about Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter—and had dejectedly watched them go on to uphold Roe."

And it hit me as I wondered again *why* O'Conner, Kennedy and Souter leaned towards the left over time. Of course not all justices have, and even some liberal one's have leaned to the right throughout the history of the court, but they all trend towards the middle, and for the most part from right to left, as it were.

It's not just a trend, I think it's more then human nature, in fact I think law, in and of itself, is liberal. It's supposed to give a voice to those that lack it, it's supposed to lift the oppressed and downtrodden. That's the whole point of civlized law, to give the weak a voice and self determination.

Of couse there are abberations, but not many. Rehnquist changed over time, and while he didn't go liberal technicaly he did trend away from federal authority, in a lesser sense championing the perceived weaker states being oppressed by the federal government. Sad that we'll lack that form now on.

I think given enough time even Scalia will trend that way as well. He's too smart to be an ideologue forever. Thomas, however, I don't think is smart enough to grow and evolve. Best we can hope for with him is profound mediocrity.

Roberts is already close to where Rehnquist wound up in the end, so it's even more likely he trends liberal over time. Becasue law comes down to personal choice, self determination, master of your domain, so to speak. And that includes, in the end, allowing people to do things you may not moraly agree with, to a point that civilized society would allow at any rate, so that you have the same freedom as they.

And that, my friends, is liberal, and why it dosn't really matter that much in the long run who you appoint. As long as they're sharp enough to see the truth, they will over time trend liberal, because law itself is liberal in it's conception. Certainly not always in it's application, but we're talking freedom based laws here.

There are a number of underlying parralels in liberalism and conservatism, the problem is splitting them on the few differences, the major one being religious and moralistic attitudes that advocate and excuse restrictions on personal freedoms because for no other reason then they are a perceived affront to one persons personal belifes.

There are people of all stripes on both sides. Black, white, brown, Christian, Jew, Muslim, male, female, gay, straight, urban poor and rural salt of the Earth, certainly no one credd, ethnicity of moral belief system is exclusive in every aspect, and yet we continue to define ourselves in just such a way.

In the end, conservatism will either wane and evolve to the left because it has to to conform with civlized interpretation of law, or it will forcably dominate. Personaly, I'd rather be liberal, heh.

Bigotry is not racism

2005-09-30T15:01:00.000-04:00

Bill Bennet is not a racist, he's a bigot. Most people today that are called racists are not, they're bigots. There s a difference, and it's an important one. By labeling all bigots racists you cheapen the fight against true racism and lessen the impact those who practice true racism have on society as a whole.

People on *all* sides of the debate freely toss the word racist around like a fucking catch all. It's so bad that bigoted conservatives can now plausibly claim 'reverse racism' as a defense of their bigotry.

Stop giving them a rational. Bigotry is bad enough in it's own right and certainly nothing to be proud of, as it highlights their ignorance and prevalent lazyness to remedy it.

Even openly discriminating against someone based solely on their skin color is not racism unless that discrimination is based on a superior/inferior classification of race.

From Websters on racism:
"...a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race"

racial differences produce an inhernet superiority of a particular race.

Read that again and again untill it sinks in.

Again from Websters on bigot:
"...a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices"

his or her own opinions and prejudices.

Read that again and again untill it sinks in as well.

They are not the same thing, and they are dissimilair enough to where you do the cause of righting one a disservice by associating it with a lesser form.

Racism is pure hate. Bigotry is simply ignorance and prejudice. Fear and mistrust of things and people thatare different, simple ignorance, and nothing more. Don't cheapen the cause of fighting true racism, or even that of aleviating simple ignorance, by slamming the two together.

Is corporate speech/advertising the same as freedom of speech/expression?

2005-09-21T22:59:00.000-04:00

I'm finding it increasingly hard to deal with the level of whoreness our consumer society has reached. America is not alone in this, it's a small world after all, but we do pretty much represent it's current zenith.

This is a queasy feeling I get now and then, like eating spicy food even though you know you're going to pay for it later. I constantly can't believe I ate the whole thing.

And personally I'm as guilty in my own ways. I bought this big ass 52 oz Thermos brand insulated cup at 7-11 for I think it was $4.99, with a free initial fill, and subsequent fills from then on for $1. Hell of a deal really. Problem is, I don't really need to drink one of these suckers a day, or often more then one, but I buy it because it's a better deal.

I could pay half as much more then that for a 20 os can, of course. Bulk packaging is killing us. It makes perfect economic sense that the more you buy the less you pay. I mean, I have a basic understanding of economics and supply and demand. I know the routine. But can society exist in a system so pure as to almost be a vacuum of all else?

America is some fat bastard’s. I don't know if we're the fattest, but we up there. I myself could lose 50 lbs and still be overweight by a fair margin. I'm single, so I cook for one. What do I do, go buy family freaking sized packs of hamburger for a decent price? Or do I pay half as much again more for a one pound package., or do I go get a freaking double hamburger for $1 at McDonald’s?

People aren't fat because they're lazy, they're fat because they're cheap. And by proxy greedy. Consumers are cheap and retailers are greedy. That's the way the system works. You don't make money, you go out of business, plain and simple. The system works against poor people doubly so in that cheap food is almost without the fail the least healthiest. So the most vulnerable segment of our population, by design of the system we operate by, is put at the greatest risk with the least ability to deal with circumstances.

It's cheaper to drop your employees health insurance, so companies do. It's cheaper to pay low wages, so companies do. It's cheaper to hire temp workers then full time, so companies do. 15 years ago there was maybe *one* temp agency in town, and it was largely focused on office workers. Now there's at least a half dozen, with the larger local outfits having multiple offices at the edges of town or in nearby towns. Business is booming.

15 years ago we had one pawnshop 15 miles out of town in an area called Grawn, know affectionately locally as the armpit of Traverse City. Our hick version of the ghetto, though we had the good sense to push them out of town instead of the other way around. The point being, is it was out of town. Now we have at least again a half dozen of them, with one or two having multiple locations, and though they are right on the edge of town, I don't think there is one actual inside the city limits. Although one is barely a half mile out of them.

We've also had the inevitable coming of the check cashing stores, a handful give or take, and we've long had one regional chain rent to own store, we gots more now. But really, the rent to own never grew as much as everything else.

Local color; one of the pawn shops was started by early retiring local cops. Hey, I'm not saying anything, just saying.

What's the point of the pawn shops and such? Why that's the second stage of whoring ourselves out. When we ran out of money, we invented credit. Yeah yeah, credit as a concept has existed since wandering cavemen vied for a place to sleep before paying off the debt the next day by killing something. But we did invent the credit card. The Diners Club card was started I believe in New York by some wealthy shmoe who kept forgetting his wallet at home and, tired of the continued embarrassment of doing so he started a 'diners club' at local restaurants so wealthy patrons could charge their private accounts and not have to wory about the indignitiy of washing dishes to pay off their bill.

Ok, I embellished a bit, but that is who it happened, Google it *grrf*

And not only did we offer credit, it was taken, then abused, and now we have predatory lending. What a concept. Predatory lending. That a civilized society could even let it happen, yet our entire system revolves around it in the final and most important trifecta of inequities, we market it.

We lie to people and make them want things they don't need. In fact, we're damn good at it. Which brings me I guess, since my buzz is starting to wear down and I'm gonna need a pick meh up so the floor show is over.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2126685/

The article concerns one aspect of commerce that the Chinese have yet to master and take from us. That they have effectively stolen the last tired vestiges of our consumer manufacturing base and made a fine eastern art out of making cheap crap, they seem to have yet mastered how to sell that same crap.

Which is where we apparently come in; We can make money by showing them how to effectively sell us all the cheap crap they make.

The enormity of that sentiment blew me away. Is that what we're reduced to? Is that a bright spot in our national economic scene? That we're reduced to showing our competitors how to more effectively push ourselves out of the market?

Man, that is just messed up.

For a closing, I was listening to NPR in the car a while ago, as I went to Burger King for dinnre because it's easier and quicker. But I kept my integrity, I didn't super size. Anyway, they were talking about some dudes book, and while it sounded interesting, the thing that struck me ws a comment on Jefferson or Harrison, don't remember, who back before the War of 1812, they slapped a total ban on all goods going in or out of the country. No imports or exports.

The point was to get the British to stop harassing our ships, and there was something in there about Napoleon offering up Florida or something, but that's just filler here. And that came back to me as I started writing this. I wasn't originally going to include it but it seemed to cap the train of thought off nice.

At the time we grossly overestimated Europe’s and Britains needs for our then exports. They could last longer then we could, and did, and we eventually had to send some ships down there and smack 'em around. Ah yeah, that was part of the discussion as well, how Oliie Wendell was creating some officer corps or some such.

Anyway, they underestimated then, but we could do it now. The world doesn't need what we got, they need us to need what they got. If the US ended all imports and exports and suddenly went self sufficient (yes I know it's improbably, just illustrating), half the world would be put out of a job.

Not long ago there was some Bush administration hack, can't remember who, I'd Google it but I'm a lazy slut, actually put US debt in the perspective that by creating that debt, America was simply being a good world citizen, by providing all those people in other countries with our jobs. Our debt was actually a good thing for the world.

We aren't the fount of evil in the world, but we do create the atmosphere for it to thrive in; cheap greed. Capitalism, while being a great boon for capitalism, has failed society. The Dad that works a well paying job with good health benefits while Mom stays home and raises the kids is dead. They died long ago. That is so far from the norm it's almost fantasy.

We've elevated it to such a hight that advertising rests on the same lofty level as individual freedom of speech and expression. A corporate entity enjoys the same level of freedom of speech as an individual citizen, and advertising the same level as freedom of expression.

Well crap, that's an inglorious end to my otherwise playful romp. Just spent the last 20 minutes from when I typed the above paragraph and now this one talking to my Dad about work and other crap, and I have no bearing what so ever now.

And so I close.

Our health care system is fucked.

2005-09-20T20:46:00.000-04:00

WASHINGTON (AP) - The FDA has approved the first generic versions of the AIDS medication AZT, a move that could reduce the expense for people in the United States being treated for the disease.
AZT, an anti-retroviral drug that is also known as Zidovudine, helps prevent the AIDS virus from reproducing in the body. It is often used in combination with other medications to treat an HIV infection.

Generic versions of the drug have previously been unavailable in the United States because patent or market exclusivity restrictions prevented them from being marketed. Now that those patents have expired, versions of drug manufactured by Roxane Laboratories of Columbus, Ohio; Ranbaxy Laboratories of Guragon, India, and Aurobindo Pharma of Hyderabad, India, can go on the market.

The original, sold under the name Retrovir, is manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline. The Food and Drug Administration first approved Retrovir in 1987. A 300-milligram tablet can cost $7.

``These approvals will now allow those infected with HIV more access to these life-saving drugs within our country,'' said Mike Leavitt, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, in a statement.

I'm sorry, call me a Commie socialist pig dog, I don't care, but drugs that are so integral to treatment such as this simply belong the public domain. Half the shit they come up with is funded partly or better by federal grants and such as well. Too much university stuff gets sucked up by corporations after being developed on the taxpayers dime, who then have no access to the damn thing they just funded.

We give this crap away in third world countries, but it was unaffordable to a significant percentage of our domestic population. That's simply wrong, period. Capitalism should not trump people's lives. Have the feds buy them out after development or something, but make it happen.

Drug companies spend more, a fair amount more actualy, on marketing then they do development, and the marketing is suspect as it is. They give away free stuff to doctors, pay for related 'seminars' at luxery resorts, and constantly fudge findings and risks. They don't deserve the protection they receive, let alone the free giveaway contained in the Medicare bill.

It's time we took back our health.

Role Reversal

2005-09-15T21:10:00.000-04:00

Despite anything else these last five years, it has been interesting watching the extreme role reversal between the two major parties.

There is no one alive or dead that could seriously argue that Bush is in any way shape or form a traditional fiscal conservative. His tax cut and spend has put the Democrats to shame. If Democrats were pigs at the trough, then Republicans are the trough.

No, the 'war' on terrorism or even Iraq both don't come close to covering the deficit, so don't even go there. The drug bill giveaway and the recent highway bill (which by the way no Republican (or Democrat) is offering to revisit in the wake of the Katrina disaster)being only the two most egregious examples, Bush has yet to meet a special interest he doesn't like.

Verbatem, copy and paste, it's been proven again and again that Bush has inserted industry lobbyist memo's into federal regulations. Our laws are being written, literaly, but industry lobbyists.

Anyway, Bush has proven that while they may have historicaly cursed the Democrats penchant for throwing money at a problem, Bush has taken it to new hights. No bid contracts abound. He just upped the limit on federal credit cards from $2,500 to $250,000. There's a reason there was a limit on them. In fact, they put the limit on them. Now in the name of national tragedy, Bush has opened them up for abuse again. Money, toss it that way.

The only thing Bush hasen't thrown money at is his 'signature' NCLB Act. That, sadly, stays horribly underfunded. Bah, who needs to pay for federal mandates on states anyway, eh?

Which takes us into a whole new area, states rights and federal authority. Let's just toss the Patriot Act out of the conversation, I won't even argue that point. The aforementioned unfunded NCLB, pushing for Constitutional amendments when they can't pass their morality plays. Buying off religion with the Faith Based initiative, more money to another special interest. Bush has been horrible on states rights.

Should we talk about entitlement spending increases? Nah, they speak for themselves.

And now we have Bush promising to throw hundreds of billions at Katrina. Administration officials are even bragging about how much they're going to spend. Strangly absent, as it has been since Bush took office, has been any discussion on how any of this will be paid for. OR how anything will be paid for for that matter.

Deficits no longer matter, didn't you hear? Reagan proved it. At least for getting re/elected anyway. Fiscal policy is a whole other matter.

Toss in fixin' the Congressional rules to marginalize the Democrats further then they ever marginalized the Republicans, and you get Bush the uniter being the greatest divider we've ever had. The country is more ideaologicaly divided then anytime since before the Civil War. The country is Nalkanizing along political lines, and political increasingly, thanks to Bush personaly, has become synonymous with ideology.

Bush ran an active campaign to tie morality into ideology and thus political affiliatoin. On purpose. He injected morality into the scene on purpose to get elected and reelected. That was the plan all along. Meh, who cares, that's just politics, right?

I'll tell you why the Republicans are still in the majority and why the Democrats aren't; The Republicans are willing to do what it takes to win and the Democrats aren't. That includes doing *anything* to win, not just the bare minimum necesary.

Bush bear out McCain in 2000 in no small part because he effectively questioned his sanity and ability to run the nation. Hell, he mighta been brainwashed? Far fetched? Sure, but you want to take the chance? *Brrr*

Politics of destruction, social spending on a scale not since, well, since when? Ever? Limiting states rights, unfunded federal mandates, massive entitlement spending, federal intrusion into family and personal matters, started a war based on wrong intelligence, and let's admit it, Iraq could be going better then it is.

When the rebels become the tyrants.

Will the neocons regret their wins later on?

2005-09-12T18:37:00.000-04:00

Right now I'm just plain lazy and reposting rants and shit from other boards/forums. This one I posted on Slate's The Fray, Ballot Box. Which is like a fucking biker bar of a forum. You want to throw down some piss and vinigar, viniger, vinegar, you want to throw some shit down, head on over there.

Doesn't the whole premise of the neocon agenda seem to balance on the fact that they will stay in power indefinatly?

If Bush, from reading a number of recent articles on the subject, looks to Roberts as someone that will bring power back to the president, won't that kind of play against them later when they lose the precidency? Doesn't their mechinations all depend on them staying in the majority pretty much forever?

I would think there would be some planning, some back door put in place, to counter that eventual reality. I mean, no one party holds the reigns forever, especialy in the White House, so don't they play against themselves by strenghtening the one prospective avenue the Democrats have to challange them in the immidiate future?

Or would Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and whomever Bush appoints next be so blatant as to tailor their rulings to match the party in office; strengthening one side while in office, weaking the other when not?

Is it simple hubris? Man's inherent arrogance? Or are they just stupid?

I'll go with hubris. They're so arrogant in their percieved righteousness that they can't perceive ever being out of power again.

And I say 'immediate future' because I'm not convinced the Democrats are doing enough on the ground localy to change the Congressional makeup enough to shift the actual balance of power. However, Dean, contrary to Republican blather, is doing great things on the ground. That's he's coordinating the effort and occasionaly says something stupid doesn't matter. His job is ti fire up the faithfull, who are the one's out actualy hitting the pavement, and that's what he's doing.

But, having said that, I live by the old axiom that "all politics is local", and that's why the GOP are in the majority; they played a better ground game for the last ten years. However, the same emotional forces that pushed the evangelicals out of their stupor and divided the nation on moralistic lines is starting to shift focus. More and more the outrage is going agasint the grain for the right.

Anyway, despite the why, I find it highly entertaining watching them limit themselves in the future. Do the Republicans somehow think that if they lose the majority, that the Democrats are going to graciously give them back the minority power they so uncerimoniously took away while they were the majority?

Get a fucking clue, heh. When Newt so piously chimed "Now it's our turn!" upon the completion of his rebelion, but before his party ostracized him and cast him out like the hindersome true conservative he was, he had no idea the true consequences of his revolution or he might have scuttled the movement himself.

With us or against us, everything has changed, bring it on.

Rehnquist was a junkie.

2005-09-10T16:04:00.000-04:00

http://slate.msn.com/id/2125906/?nav=tap3

What it boils down to;

...for the nine years between 1972 and the end of 1981, William Rehnquist consumed great quantities of the potent sedative-hypnotic Placidyl. So great was Rehnquist's Placidyl habit, dependency, or addiction—depending on how you regard long-term drug use—that by the last quarter of 1981 he began slurring his speech in public, became tongue-tied while pronouncing long words, and sometimes had trouble finishing his thoughts.

...to illustrate the ugly double standards that excuse extreme drug use by the powerful, especially if their connection is a prescribing doctor, and condemns to draconian prison terms the guy who purchases his drugs on the street.

...am I unfair to link the reluctance of journalists to zoom in for a close-up on a dead person's warts to a general deference to authority or, in the case of Rehnquist, a class bias that predisposes them to look past his drug habit as purely a medical problem? I think not.

His main gripe was that no one bothered to mention anything about his drug problem in his obituaries. I don't know if that would have been the correct medium to foster a conversation on drug policy and it's inherent class bias, but it does bear exploring in other veneu's.

For the rich and famous, drug abuse is a medical problem. For everyone else it's a criminal problem. The double standard is so blatant and ingrained into our society it's become a cliche'. First thing after OJ was indicted was he was rich and famous and would never be convitced because of that. And famous people do get preferintial treatment, whether by design or not, it's inherent in a capitalsit system. They're rich, they're famous, they got money, they can buy public opinion. Or in the least rent out a shit load of add space to influence it.

The article does bother to point out that there's no proposed degredation of Rehnquists work during the period he was popping hallucinogenic No-Doze, which I find lends credence to some drugs offering insights into how our minds work, but that's another thread.

Celebrities constantly adopt children as single parents. You ever talk to a regular person who was single and tried to adopt? WHy do you think so many foreign babies are being brought into the US? It's not because we're short of babies, it's because other countries are more likely to let anyone adopt, single or not, if they got the money.

Back when i was living in Boulder, Colorado, must have been around 1997/98, I really thought we had a chance to get some meaningfull drug policy discussion going. Some big name federal judge in Denver even wrote an editorial decrying the draconian economic disparities in national and state drug policy.

Nope, nadda, nothing happened. Again and again over the course of my lifetime, only four decades, there have been feelbe attemempts to force a disucssion on faled drug policy that has made the prison industry the fastest growing industry in the late 80's and early 90's. Again and again they have failed. And I think a major factor in tha failing is that we as a society continue to excuse behavior by our celebrities and leaders that we ourselves would otherwise be held harshly accountable for.

We want them to be better then us, but then don't hold them accountable when they aren't, and revel in the spectacle they create to enable us to forget our own existance for a while. It's a self perpetuating distraction.

9/11 24/7 365

2005-09-09T20:42:00.000-04:00

WASHINGTON (AP) - The administration dumped FEMA Director Michael Brown as commander of Hurricane Katrina relief operations Friday as President Bush stoked memories of the 2001 terror attacks, hailing the ``extraordinary bravery'' of rescue personnel.
-----------------------------------------------------

What the motherfuck does Sept. fucking 11th have to do with the fucking hurricane?

9/11! 9/11!

Can't criticize me, 9/11!

Hurricane? 9/11!

Iraq? 9/11!

Social Secutrity reform? 9/11!

Why doesn't he just tattoo the fucker on his forehead and save us all time having to listen to the shit dribbling out of his open mouth?

What, if anything, is not related to Sept. 11th?

And I refuse to refre to the attacks from my point as '9/11'. I think it cheapens the tragedy into nothing more then a fucking talking point. Take the God Damn time to spell it out!

/end rant.

And they shit can Brown from the reliefe efforts becuase he's incompetent, but he's still had of the fucking agency? How the fuck does that happen? Can I get a job in this administration?

Damn man, the only way you can get fired from this administration without getting a Medal of Freedom is to do your job right!

Christ, people, can we take a reality check here? I mean it should be past partisanship. The Bush administration has *serious* flaws, even to conservatives, in the deficit and social spending and entitlement program expansion and massive corporate welfare, but no one is holding his feet to the fire for breaking these historicaly Republican tenets!

He turns the whole party's ideology upside down, and no one says a thing! But ti's OK now, becuase WE'RE the one's doing it!

Right.

After five years there's not ONE thing that anyone in the administration should be held accountable for? We seriously underestimated Iraq, that is fact. Rumsfeld admits it, and he's the one responsible for it. Shouldn't someone be held accountable?

The drug bill was a lie! The administration forced the actuary to LIE to Congress about the true cost to keep it under the $440 Billion the GOP leadership said they would support. Everyone in the administratoin knew the guy was lying. Everyone knows it now. Shouldn't someone be held accountable for it?

Lack of armor TWO YEARS into the Iraq war, simply unacceptable, way to support our fucking troops. Shouldn't someone, anyone, be held accountable for that failing?

They snitched out a CIA agent! Spin it all you want, but the legal fact remains is whoever gave her name out in the first place shouldn't have. It did threaten our national security just in the fact that it showed the world the Bush administratoin really doesn't give a shit about the CIA, and in fact has actively worked against the agency. Shouldn't someone be held accountable? For anything? Ever?

And before you scream "Meltdown!", it's my country too, fuckers. It spins both ways, it cuts both ways, it divides both ways.

If I ever had the chance to fuck a man in the ass, it would be Tom DeLay, and I'd do it dry.

2005-08-18T00:08:00.000-04:00

Republicans slamming on Clinton (so totaly ripped from dailykos) when he sent troops into Bosnia, how soon the self righteous fucks forget;

"You can support the troops but not the president."
--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Well, I just think it's a bad idea. What's going to happen is they're going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years."
--Joe Scarborough (R-FL)

"Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?"
--Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/6/99

"[The] President . . . is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation's armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy."
--Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA)

"American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy."
--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy."
--Karen Hughes, speaking on behalf of George W Bush

"I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning . . I didn't think we had done enough in the diplomatic area."
--Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)

"I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our over-extended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today"
--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is."
--Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)

You might notice that great statesman Tom DeLay's name cropping up a number of times in that listing. That would be because he's the biggest hypocritical cockfuck to occupy elected office in the history of mankind.

Exit strategy, plan of attack, explaining body bags, supporting troops but not presidents, no stated cost, policy a mystery, feel good policy (what's more feel good then patriotism?), clear mission, achievable goal, not enough done with diplomacy, no timetable, no clear definition of victory, no agenda to bolster over extended military, no strategic plan, no exit strategy again and again, why, it's like they could see into the future!~

Yeah, that's it, future seeing cockfucks!

If I ever had the chance to fuck a man in the ass, it would be Tom DeLay, and I'd do it dry.

On discussing what the Democrats need to do

2005-06-11T20:35:00.000-04:00

From a reply I made on another forum discusing what the Democrats need to do, in general, in all it's unadulterated and spell checked glory. Don't mind the typos, they just add character.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

First thing the Democrats need to do is find their balls.

Second thing they need to do is start acting like a minority party and not the liberal wing of the majority party.

Will kids heed the call? If you're registered to The New Republic read this article.

If you're not registered, it's free for web content, which that article is, and it worth reading. The author discuss's going back to his home town to see his younger brother graduate from the high school class that just started class when the Sept. 11th attacks happened. For one it's a freak over achiever town that pushes it's kids to excell in academics and pretty much everything else, but you might think that these high achieving kids might want to serve their country. You would be thinking wrong, however. I'll let the article speak for itself.

The war in Iraq can be won with what we got there, eventualy, but it'll take restructuring the whole aproach to it, and the Republicans don't ave the world clout or the domestic will to make it happen. The Democrats won't institute a draft any more then the Republicans will, but they would be more responsible and accountable to the fuck ups going on in Iraq. They need to emphasize the immediate benefit the US would get from the Republicans losing the majority of Congress as wel las the White House. Bush has killed us on the world stage. Countries deal with us because they *have* to, not because they *want* to. The Democrats can change that, bring in more help, the UN, have some people with some fucking military brains actualy running the war instead of civilian armchair chickenhawks.

Point on the economy, Bush jsut forced his head of the SEC out. He hired the dude to implement corporate reform and clean shit up, and he did. He actualy did the fucking job he was appointed to do, and the whole time all he had to do was rely on the two Democrat members to over ride his two fellow Republicans that kept voting against him. Well you can imagine the consternation that was coming from Wall Street getting actual reform shoved down their throats, so when one Democrat left for personal reason, Bush never filled his seat, which he doesn't have to if he dosn't want to, there's been as few as 2 (out of 5) people on the SEC baord before. But by not filling the vacant Democratic seat, Bush robbed his man Donaldson of any ability to push reform as everything was deadlocked between him and the lone Democrat and the two other Republicans 2-2.

Now ain't that fucked up? No wonder no one in the Bush administration does their job right; they'd get fired for it instead of medals and promotions.

Taxes? Roll back every single fucking tax cut Bush has shat out his ass. Fucking TAX CUTS during WAR TIME!!!!!

I can not emphasize the serverity of how messed up that is.

What the Democrats need to be running on is accountability, of which currently there is none on the federal level. They need to emphasize shenanigans from DeLay like forcing lobbying firms to hire only Repbulican lobbyists and fire the Democrat one's. They need to be pushing the fact that Bush's man in the EPA or somewhere has been editing every fucking scientific report the administratoin has put out on pollution and global warming. They need to remind people that Bush forced Whitman to lie about air quality at 'ground zero', this is fact, Whitman resigned over it.

Accountability. The Democrats need to hold themselves to it, and Bush especialy. They need to slow Conbgress down, they need to push their agenda; wage parity, corporate reform and accountability, protecting the environment, being accountable in the war in Iraq, getting the troops the fucking armor they need, protecting the elderly, not giving the drug companies non God Damned negotiable Medicare drug giveaways, deficit reduction, states rights, personal responsibility not big Christian brothre breathing down your neck.

But the main thing the Democrats need to get back is their balls. Confrontation time, people. In their face time. Let Dean lose, not shut him up. They need to pull together and stand united, not wander across the fucking aisle for pet projects; they need to obstruct everything!

The Republicans learned nothing from the Democrats about being an effective majority party. And the Democrats learned less then nothing from the Republicans about being an effective minority party.

The war in Iraq is not related to the war on terroris,. The peopl eknow that now. Bush is losing the people on Iraq. The Democrats need to grab that fact and shake the living piss out of it. They might even lose another term or two. But it took the Republicans 40 years to get back into power,and now they own everything. The Democrats need to do some long term planning and bite the bullet.

Classic example was Gingrinch pulling everyone down including himself to an extenet in the House check scandle. SOme Republicans lost their careers on that, but it mortaly wounded the Democrats. They had no effective counter to it. Instead of eating their own like the Republicans did, they tried to say everyone did it, it was no big deal. Meanwhile Newts cutting the life lines of the drowning GOP'rs and taking the only life raft.

But when Newt shut down Congress, while having a majority, he just came off as a whiner. And if Congress screached to a halt right now, with them owning all three branches, no matter who's fault it was it would just hurt the Republicans. The Democrats have nothing to lose and everything to gain by bringing it down on top of them.

They pussied out on the filibuster though. If they weren;t willing to fight as a united party for the filibuster, then they can't hold it togethre for nothing. The Republican took control because they *always* towed the party line. NO ONE walked across to the left side and helped on anything during Newts 'revolution'.

They changed the rules.

Meanwhile the Democrats are still under the impressiong they're still playing tha game, not realizing the Republicans were playing a totaly different game. Not just not the same rules, not even the same fucking game!

I think too many Americans don't realize the extent of the Republicans fukcing of everything up. DeLay with his "K Street' lobbyist campaign, to the copy and paste from industry lobbyists and lawyers being inserted word for word in laws and regulations, to the fact that so many billions from Iraq are unnacounted for, lost completely, and that none of the $300 Billion so far has been included in any budget. Appropriations bills only people. Guess what happens when the bill comes due? The long term on the economy is shit as the world transitions to the east and leaves us eating dust and no coherent, no even incoherent strategy from the Bush administration.

The cost of corporate supplied health insurance add's on average $1,400 to the cost of a car made in th eUS as opossed to Canada, and even more compared to Mexico, which is where all the manufacturing is going to go if Bush get's his fucking CAFTA, if not even further south. Plus that'll give him incentive to 'intervene' in countries in the OAS. Go ahead, read up on it.

Random Bush Rants.

2005-06-06T20:50:00.000-04:00

Price of invading Iraq? - $300 Billion US and counting.

Price of occupying Iraq for two years and counting? - 1,600 US military personel and counting.

Price of democracy in Iraq? - Priceless.

Does that seem harsh? And yet that's what we're dealing with. The price is clear, though concentrated into a very small percentaqge of the population. In the end was it, or will it be, worth the price? I'm not qualified to answer that, and I'm not the only one.

Sadly, too many won't understand that last part about not being qualified. By not qualified I mean to say that Iraq has cost me pretty much nothing, not counting indignant outrage at how it all came about. I know a few people that are currently serving in the military, but luckily not on person who is currently serving in Iraq or Afgahnistan. I say luckily, because I'm selfish; I don't like people I know dying before their time or potential. It sucks.

This is my blog.

2005-06-06T19:12:00.000-04:00

I have not posted anything of relevance in it at this time. Currently, you are reading filler. Yes, I know how that must feel, as I am the one writing said filler. But patience..., well, never mind, patience don't mean dick. But check back soon, or maybe late, and something should be done. Or I might forget I even made the damn thing, we'll see.