On August 9th, two unrelated yet related videos were posted on Youtube. The first was sent to me by regular reader Lennhart. It features Iraq war vets talking about the indiscriminate killing of Iraqi civilians, killing that thus far has been done, aside from the occasional show trial, with complete and utter impunity.

The next video you'll see was posted on the same day and shows us the human toll that this virtual genocide takes on the Iraqi people themselves.


We who value human life, who value the quaint concept of safeguarding the young of our species, we who honor the rule of law and not the edicts of men, we will not forget Iraq and Iraq will certainly not forget us.

No, this isn't a post about Iraq, thought the title might as well be.

We are back home, thanks to a pilot who resembled one of the Jersey Boys far more than the chiseled, Midwestern, affectless WASP we usually associate with airline pilotry. Yesterday's flight was the first time I'd ever heard a pilot tell the flight attendants to "prepayeh faw depawtcha", and while it made said pilot sound like he should be hanging out on a street corner instead of flying a 737, it obviously struck fear into the hearts of air traffic control at Newark.

Yesterday saw what must have been one hell of a big line of thunderstorms in the New York area, and since our flight had arrived late into Montego Bay, it obviously wasn't refueled before we took off. Therefore, there wasn't fuel to spare circling Newark for an indeterminate period of time. But for some reason, someone decided that we had enough fuel to get to Pittsburgh, and that's where we headed -- until a half-hour later, when the announcement came that we'd been cleared to land at Newark -- a good thing, since they'd been turning the air conditioning off and then on again only as necessary for the last hour to conserve fuel. So I have no idea how we were expected to make it to Pittsburgh.

It was the only glitch in a relatively smooth trip home from Jamaica. After 18 trips over the last 21 years, it's hard to get used to the fact that now the tour companies realize why the bus to take you back to the airport has to show up on time, and that you no longer have to worry about rickety vans that break down on the way to the airport, or buses that pick up passengers along the road who then die on the way to the airport -- both things we've experienced over the years.

But this minor hassle is nothing compared to what Jamaicans are about to endure by tomorrow, as Hurricane Dean, now a Category 4 storm with winds of 150 mph, slams the island with full force. The relief factor at getting home before the storm hits is offset by concern about those whose homes are likely to be destroyed and their lives affected by this storm. I'll be continuing my Jamaica diary over the next few days, with reports on the upcoming election on August 27, Jamaica's growing ethanol industry, and how while Jamaica is still one of the most homophobic countries in the world, at least where hetero sex is concerned, it's a far less prudish media culture than ours.

Labels: Jamaica

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

"Ozymandias", by Percy Bysshe Shelley

"The fact is that Americans have been squandering the infrastructure legacy bequeathed to us by earlier generations. Like the spoiled offspring of well-off parents, we behave as though we have no idea what is required to sustain the quality of our daily lives. Our electricity comes to us via a decades-old system of power generators, transformers and transmission lines—a system that has utility executives holding their collective breath on every hot day in July and August. We once had a transportation system that was the envy of the world. Now we are better known for our congested highways, second-rate ports, third-rate passenger trains and a primitive air traffic control system. Many of the great public works projects of the 20th century—dams and canal locks, bridges and tunnels, aquifers and aqueducts, and even the Eisenhower interstate highway system—are at or beyond their designed life span.

"The blind eye that taxpayers and our elected officials have been turning to the imperative of maintaining and upgrading the critical foundations that underpin our lives is irrational and reckless.

"America’s gross domestic product in 2006 was $13.2 trillion—we can afford to have world-class infrastructure. As a stepping-off point, we should insist that our elected representatives publicly acknowledge the risk of neglecting the bridges, roads and other essential hardware that goes into making a modern civilization. Then we should hold them accountable for setting priorities and for marshaling the requisite resources to repair our increasingly brittle society."

--An editorial from Popular Mechanics magazine

Labels: Disintergrating infrastructure, Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley

Houston Chronicle:

Short of Purple Hearts, Navy tells vet to buy own

PEARLAND — Korean War veteran Nyles Reed, 75, opened an envelope last week to learn a Purple Heart had been approved for injuries he sustained as a Marine on June 22, 1952.

But there was no medal. Just a certificate and a form stating that the medal was "out of stock."

"I can imagine, of course, with what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, there's a big shortage," Reed said. "At least, I would imagine so."

The form letter from the Navy Personnel Command told Reed he could wait 90 days and resubmit an application, or buy his own medal.

After waiting 55 years, however, Reed decided to pay $42 for his own Purple Heart and accompanying ribbon — plus state sales taxes — at a military surplus store.

If this bullshit doesn't piss you off, you're a ghoul.

What the fuck is next, huh? Are soldiers gonna have to buy their own ammo and Humvees?

Labels: Purple Hearts, The Iraq invasion and occupation, The Korean War, U.S.Military

(I'd say this pretty much says it all.)

Yep, you've done some horrible things in your life. Embarrassing things. Stupid. Mean. Violent, even. Eaten dirt. Smacked a baby. Kicked a kitten. Stomped some flowers. Stole. Lied. Cheated. Beat up a tree. Spit instead of swallowed. Drank bad wine. Voted Republican. Shared a needle. Promised to call and then didn't. You know, the usual.

But maybe some of these things now make you cringe and recoil and slump down a little lower in your chair when you think about them, because, well, maybe you've developed something resembling a conscience over the years, or maybe you've even gone so far as to consider the possibility of karma, of cosmic consequence, of the dire effects of wallowing for far too much of your life in all that goopy, stupid low vibration we sometimes call war or hate or religious dogma or the Olsen twins.

Yes, perhaps you can now admit you've wasted far too much of your time simmering like bad meat in a gloomy stew of illness and ugliness and ignorance and now maybe, just maybe, you're trying to evolve to a point where you can step back and look over it all with a bit of wisdom, sly perspective, a big healthy healing sigh.

Whew. It is, as they say, a hell of a lot to process. It is, after all, one hell of a messy life.

But then, something happens. In the midst of all this consciousness review and energy sifting, you pause. You take a karmic time-out. You lift your head from the hardscrabble tumult of your cosmic computations and look around, maybe read the papers and take in the recent headlines and suddenly it hits you like a dominatrix spanks her evangelical preacher in the hot fetish dungeon of cosmic irony: The stuff you've done? That horrible little army of things you think are so dire and awful and mean? Child's play. Trifles. Piddly little nothingness of who-the-hell-cares, barely registering on the Richter scale of pain and injustice and true human misprision.

Because now perhaps you are reading up on the rise and fall and much-desirable end of this one particular man, this dank, sweaty, adipose embodiment of a sad political caricature, this shockingly powerful force of darkness and cruelty and pure, unfiltered iniquity known to the world as Karl Rove.

And somehow, looking at him, seeing the glistening, pallid face of true contempt as he finally, blessedly exits the main political stage, you feel better. Much, much better. In fact, somehow you feel like falling to your knees and offering sincere thanks, hot heaps of glorious gratitude to the gods of fate and time and love that you are not Karl Rove.

It is, in its way, a simple acknowledgment, a supremely fundamental idea. But trust me when I say, it holds tremendous power.

You are not Karl Rove. You are not, so far as you know, the master orchestrator of what is increasingly recognized as the most disastrous, divisive, scandal-ridden, secretive, abusive, warmongering, hate-inspiring, homophobic, morally debilitating neoconservative administration in modern American history.

This is not you. This is not your life. You did not put into power the most embarrassing, bumbling, ethically dangerous leader the modern free world has ever known, and that includes Dick Nixon and Warren Harding and that guy from the 1800s who beat his kids and drank paint thinner and died after two weeks in office.

You did not work like a feral dog to rally the most narrow-minded and intolerant and easily terrified segment of our society, the hardcore evangelical Christian right, to support your candidate and his childish, good vs. evil worldview by employing an insidious message of hate and fear and homophobia, all rife with a rather shocking misunderstanding of God and sex and love and complex foreign policy. This, you can be assured, is not you.

Can you feel the prayer start to roll? To gain momentum and brighten your dreary day and illuminate your very soul? You bet you can.

You did not steer the nation so far to the hard right the wheels broke off, thus causing the rest of the world to look at America with a wary, mistrustful eye. You did not intentionally commit treason by leaking the name of a CIA agent to reporters in an insidious attempt to silence critics of your boss' horribly failed war.

You did not help forcibly reconfigure, to the brutal detriment of the nation's core values, the Justice Department, or the Supreme Court, or the General Services Administration, among others. The Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the gutted U.S. Treasury do not bear the stain of your devious perfidy. You did not, in short, maul the Constitution the way a vulture mauls a sick rabbit in an attempt to create a totalitarian GOP regime that was, at least in your giant gleaming head, designed to wreak moral and political havoc for another 50 years.

But wait, is this perspective a bit too unforgiving? Is this sort of talk, in its own way, just as spiritually corrupt and of equally low, repulsive vibration as Rove's own? Is it, in other words, somehow karmically wrong to see another's choice of sad, destructive path and be so deeply thankful you will never come anywhere near that quotient of pure, clear vileness? Could be, could be.

After all, the reincarnation set will happily inform you that, in truth, we've all been, at one point during the great cosmic continuum, a Karl Rove. We've all been a murderer, a rapist, a thug, a dictator and a witch and a peasant and a queen and a victim and sea slug and a rutabaga and a savior and a minion and a mindless megachurch Christian zealot and yes, even an Olsen twin.

As such, we are all here to learn in the same sort of glorious/tortuous way, and hence in the grand view no one's path is really any different than anyone else's and to judge one is to judge them all and etc. and so forth and oh my God it's all so vast and lovely and true.

But in this case, let us just say, no. Because this is the here and now. This is the moment we are in and this is the one that matters and it is just too delightful to repeat: You are not Karl Rove and I am not Karl Rove and therefore we can join hands right now, you and I, we can connect across this vast media chasm and via these very wires and we can, together, find a deeper understanding, a shared universal truth, a more profound coming together over the fact that, no matter how bad things might get, we will never have to be Karl Rove.

Hey, what's more karmically delightful than that?

And who lives at that dead end? Well, all of us, of course, since we all, for better or worse, have to claim American citizenship. But this goes out to you noshers o’ Republican knobs who can always be counted on to vote against your own interests and for those who work tirelessly against progress and parity and are bound and determined to keep you in your lowly, circumscribed stations.

Among the Dead End Kids are black and Log Cabin Republicans and all sorts of minority Republicans, people who are ignored, defamed, short-changed and politically sodomized to the point where we’re about to feel pity for them until we realize that they’re begging for more and get the bottom 80% earners dragged kicking and screaming into the prison shower.

In short, those who don’t know whether to shit or wind their watch or shit on their watch because they dimly realize that their master plan from 2000 and 2004 didn’t quite work out so well because, well, our reich of a thousand years only lasted about as long as The Fugitive and good riddance to Turd Blossom because he just wasn’t a good enough Republican.

Forget that he may’ve helped to cripple our nation’s weapons defense capability by outing a secret agent. Who cares that he turned the DOJ into a Democrat-hunting pogrom? Who cares if he hurt the nation?

He hurt the party.

And as any right-thinking Republican-American will tell you, it’s not our democracy or our republic that contains the Republican party but it’s the other way around.

Yes, liberal America, you bleeding heart al Qaida types who live and love too much, you with your clean air and clean water and socialized health care for everyone, this also goes out to you. It’s the Republican party that contains the nation. And you, conservative America, the unsilent minority, are the reason why Washington, DC needs just a roof to qualify as an insane asylum.

The Onion had you clowns pegged almost three years ago with the headline, “Nation’s Poor Win Election for Nation’s Rich.”

After countless decades, isn’t it obvious by now that they remember you only when election time rolls around, that they remember the “flyover states”? You know the type, or you should: The kind of politician, which is about 99.7% of them, who come off looking like those philandering fucks trying to hide that white band of skin on their newly denuded finger, looking a little too earnest as they feel the pressure of backed-up semen and will say anything, anything at all, just to get that itch satisfied?

Yeah, that type. You never see them very often in the dawn light, do you? That’s because once they’ve had their way with you, they slink out of bed, throw on their pants and carry shirt, socks and shoes all the way to the bathroom window where they then continue slinking out to rejoin their real spouses on K Street and dozens of boardrooms across America (the slime trail left by their asses makes this pretty verifiable). They haven’t even got the courtesy to leave money on the dresser.

And after all the millions that are briefly lavished on your local economies, what’s going to replace Romney’s pig roasts and Mike Huckabee’s rock concerts?

Cremating the remains of our war dead and listening to “Taps.”

Oh, and hostile farm subsidy reductions. Warrantless wiretapping and data-mining. And lots and lots of good ole down home cooking after all them war funerals.

Yeah, that’s an equitable trade, you stupid fucks.

And what about you black conservatives who form organizations such as Republicans for Black Empowerment?

Year after year, you come out in political whiteface courtesy of the neverending neocon bukkake festival. You still insist on hitching your wagon to this falling star after half your wheels have fallen off.

And when you’re reminded that the bwanas who run your adopted party have denied your people their right to vote by being branded as felons, that they studiously avoid the NAACP for years on end, that they left your brothers and sisters for dead on the Gulf coast and then blamed them for the poverty that they keep visiting on them, when they refuse to apologize for lynching, for slavery (suggesting, instead, that we should devote a whole month to honoring the never-risen confederacy), when reminded of this massive K2-sized mountain of evidence…

…you sputter, “B-b-but… Lester Maddox! Bull Connor! George Wallace!”

All of whom are dead and gone and have anything whatsoever to do with latter-day Republican racism… how? Those are Dixiecrats you’re thinking of, a small, rabid splinter of the Democratic party who don’t represent progressive liberal principles anymore than neocon racists represent your beloved Republican party. Don’t you dare lump in with those sheet-wearing psychopaths JFK and LBJ, people who brought about the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts that today’s southern faction of the GOP actually opposed being renewed. Let’s not forget the GOP-dominated Department of Justice these days is more interested in rooting out Democrat bad guys than in enforcing the Voting Rights Act or even civil rights through its own civil rights division.

And have you forgotten all about Nixon’s “southern strategy”? Here’s Bob Herbert’s simple but mercilessly dead-on definition of it: "The truth is that there was very little that was subconscious about the G.O.P.'s relentless appeal to racist whites. Tired of losing elections, it saw an opportunity to renew itself by opening its arms wide to white voters who could never forgive the Democratic Party for its support of civil rights and voting rights for blacks."

Is it southern liberal progressive voters who are keeping your people out of the Senate and have done so since Reconstruction? Have Democrats forced Republican administrations to keep your people out of the Oval Office?

You Republican-enablers are the Dead End Kids, the ones who are really holding America back. It’s not the GOP that’s stiff-arming the 21st century from America, it’s people like you who keep voting them in. Because you’re too fucking stupid to know that you keep voting against your own interests, that a vote for the GOP is a vote for white Richistan, a vote for Halliburton, a vote for another four years or more of Iraq, while their yellow elephant progency prefer to trumpet from the sidelines and send your kids in their stead because, well, let's face it, they haven't got as much to live for...

…that the last guy who links his hands and hoists some GOP lard-ass over the wall always get left behind.

3 Rescue Workers Killed at Utah Mine

HUNTINGTON, Utah (AP) -- The search for six miners missing deep underground was abruptly halted after a second cave-in killed three rescue workers and injured at least six others who were trying to tunnel through rubble to reach them.

It was a devastating turn for the families of the six men trapped in the Aug. 6 collapse at the Crandall Canyon mine and for the relatives of those trying to rescue them. It's not known if the six are alive.

All rescue workers were evacuated from the mine Thursday evening and work underground was stopped. Asked if the search would be suspended, "that's something to be determined," said Rich Kulczewski, a U.S. Department of Labor spokesman.

The cave-in at 6:39 p.m. was caused by a mountain bump in which pressure can force chunks of coal from walls of the mine with great force. Seismologists say such a bump caused the Aug. 6 cave-in that trapped the six men more than 3 miles inside the central Utah mine. That led to the frenetic effort by rescuers to dig through the mine toward the men and drill narrow holes atop the mountain in an attempt to learn their whereabouts and perhaps drop down food and water.

It was not immediately clear where the rescuers were working or what they were doing when Thursday's bump occurred.

Underground, rescuers had advanced only 826 feet in nine days. Before Thursday's cave-in, workers still had about 1,200 feet to go to reach the area where they believe the trapped men had been working.

Mining officials said conditions in the mine were treacherous, and they were frequently forced to halt digging because of seismic activity.

New York Times:

It is beyond belief that in this Information Age, when new technologies can eavesdrop on any conversation and track people around the globe, rescue teams have no way to communicate with the six miners trapped underground in the Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah. Instead they are drilling holes in the ground to where they guess the miners might be.

It needn’t be so. For too long, the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress allowed mine operators to put off making needed investments to ensure their workers’ safety. And last year when a string of coal-mining disasters — that killed 48 miners — forced Congress to enact new safety legislation, it still gave companies far too much time to install communications systems that might have helped find the Utah miners.

There is technology available today that combines cable and wireless systems to link miners far below the surface and teams above. This technology does not guarantee perfect communications in the case of a cave-in or other accident, but it is certainly much better than nothing.

Rather than requiring that such systems be installed immediately, the mining legislation passed last year gave mine operators — many of whom resisted all new safety standards — until 2009 to develop and install more sophisticated two-way wireless communications systems that could resist cave-ins and penetrate through the layers of rock and coal. The bleak outlook for the six miners in Utah, who have been trapped underground for more than a week, underscores how urgent it is to have some way, even if imperfect, to track and communicate with miners in case of another disaster.

There have always been invisible people doing the dirty work that nobody else wants to do.

They're the people who clean the filthy toilets, remove the road kill from our highways, and mop up the vomit and blood left behind. Throughout the years the invisible people picked cotton, built the railroads, fought in wars, and worked in the toxic waste dump called Ground Zero. Most of the time we forget that everything in this country that we enjoy has been brought to us at a terrible cost. Some of the invisible people that we ignore are miners. They help keep us warm. However, it's uncomfortable to think about it too much, so we pretend it's magic and make it go away. Sometimes it works.

We only see them when they're dead.

Labels: Mining Disaster

510 dead, almost surely more, in Peru, courtesy of an earthquake.

Hurricane Dean is picking up steam and will slam the Caribbean and quite possibly the Gulf coast.

Flooding in the Philippines.

God only knows how many dead in northern Iraq after four suicide bombers claimed the lives of perhaps 500 or more, wounding many hundreds more.

Growing worldwide panic over a crashing stock market here at home, in Brazil, India and elsewhere thanks to the imploding credit industry and its incestuous relationship to the home lending industry. People are defaulting on home loans given to homebuyers by the failing Countrywide and investors don’t want to offer them “commercial paper” which is short-term debt and it’s took risky for banks to take on as foreclosures soar.

The miners in Utah still have not been rescued after three drillings with a fourth being prepared and it doesn’t look good.

Another heat wave across the South and Midwest has killed 37 people so far.

And, to top it all off, Elvis died 30 years ago today.

But take heart, people: Jenna Bush has finally gotten up off the floor and is engaged! And to an old aide of Karl Rove! Someone who helped Daddy’s re-election campaign!

And al-Qaida’s master terrorist, former Chicago gang-banger and wouldbe tough guy Jose Padilla, will be off the streets for the rest of his natural life!

Well, I guess we can get that terror threat level back down to a nice Lucky Charms shade of Kelly green, right?

I’m usually a fan of stare decisis but not in this instance. Because God forbid that judges and juries in the future respect this abominable precedent (I almost wrote “respect this abominable president“, which essentially amounts to the same thing).

Because what does Padilla’s conviction today teach us?

That a United States citizen can be arrested because his name was mentioned by a psychopath with no record of divulging any useful intelligence and tried on charges that quickly turn out to be trumped-up as much as the case for war against Iraq (which also dried up yet nonetheless condemning Iraq to what could turn out to be decades of American imperialism).

That said citizen’s case can then be Velcroed to another case of a laughable “terrorist plot”.

That said citizen can be held for up to three and a half years suffering cruel and unusual treatment such as sensory deprivation even while on his way to the dentist, driving him to the point of insanity.

That said citizen can be convicted for aiding a terrorist organization by speaking in a code that thus far hasn’t been proven or vetted, which is obviously enough for jurors terrified of terrorists because, after all, how could federal prosecutors be wrong about the existence of such a code (just like how could Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell possibly be wrong about Iraq's WMDs? They're the government, too, for crissake, and if you can't trust the government, who can you trust?)?

That said citizen can then be spirited away and kept in prison for the rest of his life where he will no doubt continue to be interrogated by George Bush’s goons in black after said government kept changing the rules and stacking the deck until there was no way the defendant could win, including denying him legal presentation during his interrogations and not telling him his Miranda rights.

That the same thing could happen to you some day if the NSA or FBI overhears you say the word “zucchini” to someone of Middle Eastern descent or someone points a gnarled finger at you and whispers, “Terrorist” like some bad movie about the Salem witch trials.

Labels: guilty, Padilla

Wait for it...wait for it...



Crossposted at Poor Impulse Control.

Labels: Dick Cheney, Jon Stewart

Kos is seemingly everywhere this week, and even though I'm starting to feel like the tiny fringe edge of some sitcom career prep course, it seems to me like these guys might be just making sure that even the folks who really do only get their news this way understand free speech...or something like that....
Stephen Colbert is one of my hero's, and I have to say that ever since he stood up at the White House Correspondent's dinner in '06 and smeared the President, he has not disappointed.

From the goose stepping blogschtappo pillow fort:


It occurs to me that this is sort of scripted, and it annoys me a little that Markos talks as if he is speaking to his child...but actually, Colbert in his Papa Bear persona is alot like a child.

Have a good day everybody...I'm off...

Labels: Stephen Colbert

The humiliating failure of The Half Hour News Hour told me two things: 1) Comedy should only be left in the hands of professionals. 2) If comedy is based on a lie, it's not funny.

And comedians make a living being honest, especially when it comes to talking about politics. For example, during the promotional tour for I Think I Love My Wife, a reporter asked Chris Rock if he thought the United states was ready for an African-American president.

“Why not?” Chris replied. “We already got a retarded president, so a black one shouldn’t be a big deal.”

Boom.

Move along folks, nothing to see here. Just step over the chalk outline.

It says something about our current political system that it doesn't allow a political candidate to speak his mind until he's not a political candidate anymore. Whistle blowers are fired from their jobs when they try to do their jobs. And most of the talking heads supposedly reporting on the news simply read whatever is put in front of them.

But it’s different if you tell jokes. It’s amazing what those guys get away with. As the late Richard Jeni said, "Comedians are the only people given permission to tell the truth."

Isn’t it a shame when you have to go to The Daily Show to hear Jon Stewart and his crew of Merry Pranksters for the "real" news? Bill Maher will say things about Bush that would make Anderson Cooper dirty his Armani diapers. Lewis Black loves kicking Republican ass.

These smiling assassins don't lie.

Comedians have to speak in clear language when they talk about what they see going on around them, otherwise their audience doesn’t know they’re trying to say and the jokes don’t work. Politicians, on the other hand, are isolated from the real world so they use a slippery gobbledygook that nobody can understand. Bigots like Ann Coulter spew "jokes" based on racial and gender stereotypes. But comedians are insightful, pissed-off, card-carrying members of the reality-based community. They can make you think and laugh at the same time.

Still, it bothers me that most people look for truth in a comedy monologue because we can’t take the pre-fabricated news in papers, magazines and television seriously. But as long as the corporate mainstream media continues to treat the public like brain-damaged children and spoon-feed us artificially-sweetened bullshit, we’ll go to Chris, Jay, David, Conan, and “Weekend Update” for a reality check when the bad craziness is everywhere.

Sometimes it ain't funny--even when it is.

Labels: Comedians, Political commentary, Real Time with Bill Maher, The Daily Show

WASHINGTON - Former Wisconsin governor and Republican presidential hopeful Tommy Thompson told Jewish activists Monday that making money is "part of the Jewish tradition," and something that he applauded.

Speaking to an audience at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington D.C., Thompson said that, "I'm in the private sector and for the first time in my life I'm earning money. You know that's sort of part of the Jewish tradition and I do not find anything wrong with that."

Thompson later apologized for the comments that had caused a stir in the audience, saying that he had meant it as a compliment, and had only wanted to highlight the "accomplishments" of the Jewish religion.

Labels: Anti-Semitism, Tommy Thompson

Dildos.

That's the first word I thought of after listening to these damned chickenhawk Republicans brag about how tough they are. Yeah, Rudy gonna bomb this and that, Mitt gonna put a wall here and there. We men. We no eat quiche, we nuke.

They're dildos. Their juvenile braggadocio is contemptible. I won't call 'em dicks because they're not real men.

But Mark Poutenis, the guy behind The Thinking Ape Blues, reminds us what a real man is and what a real man does. In the political world Aquino lived in, a rigged Diebold machine wasn't the worst thing to worry about. But he spoke his mind anyway.

Do we honor these Portraits in Courage? Of course not.

Monsters erase them.
(click on image to enlarge)

Labels: Benigno Aquino, Mark Poutenis, The Thinking Ape Blues

10) Letter opener still caked with human brain matter.

9) 14 pages of emails from Mel Martinez at the RNC filled with jokes about Jerry Falwell’s death.

8) Expired contract with Satan with loopholes circled in red ink.

7) Heavily annotated Cliff Notes on 1984, The Trial and Mein Kampf.

6) Google map printout of Plame-Wilson home with directions and note in Rove’s handwriting that says, “Remind Novak not to publish this until 9/1/07.”

5) Pawn shop ticket stub for “ring, Sauron’s.”

4) Half a spool of bloodied piano wire.

3) Blank applications from Augusta Country Club and the John Birch society.

2) A paper ballot from the 2000 election, with a note in Rove's handwriting: "Ha ha! Remember these quaint things?"

1) 47 empty Trojans packages and a block of stuck-together pictures of Abu Ghraib prison.

(Cross-posted at Cheek and Bluster)

Even in this era of with-us-or-against-us partisanship, I never cease to be amazed at the neocons' mendacious, irresponsible, utterly illogical denial of the escalating environmental crisis. You can arm yourself with Coby Beck's excellent syllabus, but what can you ultimately do about people who are shallow enough to play politics with the habitability of the planet?

I have beaten my head against this particular wall in far too many conversations, so today I'm sending in the cavalry.



Who's a puppet now?

Labels: climate change, global warming, House Republicans, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog

In a memo to senior producers this afternoon, FNC's SVP of programming, Bill Shine announced the network "will not continue the Half Hour News Hour beyond its current 15 episode run." Shine did leave the door open, however: "we are considering ways to retool the show for future scheduling needs."

The TV news satire show which airs Sunday nights, stars faux anchors Kurt McNally, played by Kurt Long, and Jennifer Lange, played by Jennifer Robertson.

Even Karl Rove couldn't buy this show a joke.

Other than P.J. O'Rourke (who isn't a right wing conservative but a misanthropic grouch that bitterly disdains both political parties), the hard-core lunatic fringe that falsely claims to be "Republican" doesn't really have any genuine humorists. Why? I believe their funny bone was surgically removed, along with their compassion.

Funny, ain't it?

Labels: Fox, the Half Hour News Hour

Labels: An Inconvenient Truth, global warming

First they poisoned our pets. Now it's our children:

WASHINGTON - Mattel announced recalls Tuesday for 9 million more Chinese-made toys, including popular Barbie, Polly Pocket and "Cars" movie items, and warned that more could be ordered off store shelves because of lead paint and tiny magnets that could be swallowed.

The recalls came nearly two weeks after Mattel Inc., the nation's largest toy-maker, recalled 1.5 million Fisher-Price infant toys worldwide, which were also made in China, because of possible lead-paint hazards for children.

The government warned parents to make sure children are not playing with any of the recalled toys.

Tip of the iceberg. If you've taken the PATH train across the Jersey Meadowlands you've seen the sky-high stacks of China Shipping containers. What's in them isn't always what's on the shipping manifest. Chinese manufacturers & their American importers routinely mislabel shipments to get around what few import restrictions are still enforced. But that's not enough to satisfy the lust for profit. American toymakers - not many left, I suppose - have to obey stringent & ever-changing safety regulations. But who's watching China? Where were Mattel's on-site inspectors?

On the 13th, the day Karl Rove had announced his resignation as Chief White House Strategist, Ron Fournier from the AP had written a deeply disturbing article that, as far as I can see, has gotten no feedback from anyone on our side of the blogosphere. At least, if anyone’s addressing it, they’re not getting to the heart of the matter.

The article states that 40 Democratic consultants, party chairmen and so forth are worried that Hillary’s skeletons will come dancing out of the closet and send Republican voters to the polls in droves.

OK, let me switch gears here for a minute and I promise this is all germane to the point that I’ll get around to making:

There’s an old saying in baseball: Games aren’t won; they’re lost. That could apply for all sports. The meaning behind that is simple: Capitalizing on your opponent’s mistakes plays at least a part of a sport as native athletic ability or strategy. And major league managers or NHL, NBA or NFL coaches never go to work hoping and praying that the other team doesn’t show up or that their fans won’t be there to support their home town team. You tune out the jeers and the noise and play the game.

The Boston Red Sox can be used a role model here for Democrats: Where ever they go, their fans are legion. Some follow the team, others are transplanted or converted citizens of Red Sox nation. In cities with bad teams, the stands are often awash with crimson Red Sox jerseys and when a Sox pitcher gets a strikeout or a crucial RBI hit, you could close your eyes and swear you’re sitting in that “lyrical little bandbox”, to quote John Updike, of Fenway Park.

A little under 15 months from Show Time and we’re already fretting that Hillary Clinton will polarize battleground states (such as Indiana) and hurting the campaigns of Democrats who’d be running under her, should she get the party’s nomination. Republicans would come out in droves, the zeitgeist is muttering, and Republicans could get swept into office in a virulent backlash of anti-Hillary votes.

Next thing you know, there’ll be democracy busting out all over our republic and we can’t have that, now can we? Throw in an improbable Al Gore candidacy and you’re talking about a possibly even more polarized set of purple and red states as Gore would be the other major refugee from the Clinton years. However, there are two problems with this doom-n-gloom Democratic scenario:

Number one, Republican voters storming the polls next year is something that, frankly, we can afford to not worry about. Mitt Romney’s popularity contest in Iowa last Saturday didn’t prove his popularity so much as prove the GOP’s unpopularity in what used to be a Republican stronghold. Romney spent $5,000,000 on 14,000 votes, less than half the expected 29,000 and far less than half the 33,000 voter turnout of the last Iowa GOP straw poll.

Secondly, if the national Democratic strategy for victory heavily involves praying that Hillary won’t tempt Republican voters into leaving their homes, then we should all just pack it in and have our names legally changed to Sean fucking Hannity.

Because remember when Sean Hannity got on the radio just before the mid term elections and told Democrats to “stay home on election day”, that our votes didn’t count and how we all laughed and laughed and pointed our fingers at him like Nelson Muntz and ridiculed him for how desperate he’d sounded? Well, 40 Democratic campaign managers, candidates, party chairs and various and sundry other pundits are coming thisclose to saying the same thing less than a year later, even though we have the majority in both chambers of Congress.

Republican voters have every bit as much of a right to vote as Democratic and Independent ones. And if we’ve turned into a party that prays for conservative voters to stay home in order to keep our majority in Congress and win back the White House, then that just points to a fundamental flaw in the national Democratic campaign strategy, one that I suspect isn’t shared by Dr. Howard Dean.

That isn’t winning: That’s capitalizing by default.

Republicans voting for the candidates of their choice is part of what’s known as Democracy. You remember that, don’t you? If they come out and cost Democrats some elections, fine. In a perfect world, Dunkin’ Donuts would deliver, the Three Stooges would’ve played the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion and everyone of voting age in America would be politically active or at least aware.

We used to be that nation, people who made time for town hall meetings (before they became pre-screened mini GOP conventions), a people who used to know who stood on what side of what issues before we began electronically anesthetizing ourselves watching American Idol or Cops.

We and our ancestors helped bring into being brief, shining moments of Democratic leadership such as getting us out of the Great Depression and getting through WW II, the creation of the Peace Corps, the launching of the Apollo space program, the War on Poverty, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.

Now, we’re the party that hopes the bad guys stay home on Election Day. Just like Sean Hannity.

Sure, we could field a candidate who’s just as strong as Hillary in the polls, has as much money as her and doesn’t bring out the wingnuts like sugar attracts cockroaches. Don’t be put off by the fact that such a candidate doesn’t exist, yet.

Or… we could let the Republicans have their fun at the polls and still beat them by putting out candidates that actually don’t suck, whose campaigns aren’t run by nervous Nellies who are fearful of a legitimate democratic electoral process.

I keep driving home the point that in both 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush was voted for by 20-25% of the voting age public. There are approximately 101,000,000 registered voters in a nation of roughly 220,000,000 adults. 75-80% of the electorate said through their actions or inactions that they did not want George W. Bush to be their commander in chief. Unfortunately, two thirds of that demographic chose not to say that out loud at the polls.

Think of what we did with just 40% of the vote last November. We took back both houses of Congress and sent the GOP a clear (yet still misunderstood) message that we’re sick of Iraq, we’re sick of Bush and Cheney and we’re sick of you. Think of what we can do with 50%. Or 60%. Or…?

In part one, I’d covered the pros and cons of the three major presidential candidates that the Democratic party has so far offered us.

As I’d begun part one, there’s no such thing as a perfect candidate and less such thing as a perfect incumbent. If Fox “News” had been around, they would’ve had a field day with the candidacies of JFK and Bill Clinton, two of the left’s biggest heroes. That’s not to say that both men didn’t have massive character flaws. But in the pitiless partisan scrutiny of the electronic media and its consumers, those same glaring defects would’ve been made virtually the entire campaign. But even in the absence of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity bloviating supremely about the evils of the liberals from a Big Tent Neocon network, the dinosaur networks were all too glad to oblige in torpedoing Kennedy for a second time and were certainly doing so to Clinton in 1992.

Under the microscope of the camera lens, Nixon’s unconquerable 5 o’clock shadow made him look sinisterly unelectable in 1960 (even though he was), Dukakis was too swarthy and hirsute and Barack Obama is not dark enough (or too dark, depending on one's proximity to the Mason/Dixon line).

Statements, too, can be taken completely out of context in the game of telephone as only television and the blogosphere can play it. So Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet, Dan Quayle misspelled the word “potato” and how can we forget the scream heard ’round the world that possibly lost Howard Dean the presidency?

Not only were these three instances taken out of context, wasting ink and valuable air time in the process, it seemed to offer a revealing glimpse into each man’s fitness to lead or unfitness to do so. And of course, they did not in the slightest.

Yet, curiously, a candidate’s public record of service, when they have one, goes untouched. The most egregious example extant, moreso than Giuliani’s presumed sainthood that rose from that accident of fate known as September 11th and the near end of his incumbency as Mayor of New York City, moreso than George Bush’s record as Governor of Texas and as a rapacious yet incompetent business executive, was the complete lack of attention paid to the Senate campaign of his own grandfather, Prescott Bush in 1952.

It was never brought up that Bush was not only the chief American financier of Adolph Hitler (ironically, the very bogeyman whose toothbrush moustache right wingers gleefully superimpose over the faces of socialists, tyrants recently fallen out of favor and liberal bloggers), Bush also tried to engineer a fascist takeover of our democracy nearly two decades earlier. It’s a tragic blindness worthy of a Sophoclean or Shakespearean play, a blindness that renders impossible one seeing the forest for the campaign stumps.

I’d like to continue my appraisal of the Democratic presidential candidates with someone who’s probably the most high profile of the B listers, Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE, the other RI). Back in 1987, Biden was running for President and a huge Fox-class scandal erupted over Biden “plagiarizing” a passage from British politician Neil Kinnock. When Biden set the record straight that it wasn’t plagiarizing but “heavy lifting”, as it’s known to speechwriters, Biden was able to save his candidacy for a little while longer before he finally fell to the wayside.

But to this day we hear about it and his valiant but ultimately failed adventure into hair plugs. How does this define Biden as a potential Chief Executive? Well, if you need me to answer that for you, then you ought to be barred from the polls by an act of Congress.

What troubles me about Biden, even though he has stronger foreign policy credentials than any of the other seven candidates, was him saying before a Republican crowd, before the 110th Congress even convened that Republicans need to get back on their feet, which is sort of like telling a mugger to get up so he can continue robbing and beating you and fucking your wife after you kicked him in the sack. Bipartisan outreach is one thing. We already have Joe Lieberman for that. That was just plain stupid.

All the same, Biden scored big points with when he’d recommended taking up the offer from other nations, in particular France, when they’d offered to train Iraqi security forces on their home soil to resist the temptations of corruption and sectarian warfare. When the White House unrolled its own Strategy for Victory months after Biden revealed his, it smelled suspiciously of plagiarism and hair plugs.

All the same, Biden is top-heavy with foreign policy and is a little light when it comes to health care and a workable solution to the Iraq war. Not to mention the fact that Biden didn’t find out until two years ago that he wasn’t allowed to be present when the flag-draped coffins of slain soldiers coming back from the Persian Gulf came off the transports at Dover or be allowed near the mortuary to console the families.

So how come it took until over two years after the invasion before Biden found out that Rumsfeld and his undersecretary barred senior senators from the transports? What else doesn’t Biden know?

If my only criteria for voting for a Presidential candidate was their ability to verbally body-slam rabid right wing blowhards like Bill O’Reilly, then I’d vote for Sen. Chris Dodd in a New York minute.

However, this is the beginning of a presidential election, not Wrestlemania or a multimillion dollar popularity contest (Mitt Romney notwithstanding). Dodd lost any vote that he could’ve possibly gotten out of me when he hemmed and hawed about abolishing earmark reform. That waffle fest alone, in my mind, qualified Dodd as just another well-oiled Washington, DC townie, yet another Goddamned good ole boy Beltway insider that can’t be trusted to be committed to the kind of real reform that our democracy desperately needs.

And, I’m sorry, but charisma counts for something and in the charm department, Dodd’s got all the charisma of a dead engineer.

Bill Richardson brings with him impressive credentials. He was one of Bill Clinton’s three Energy Secretaries and he’s the current Governor of New Mexico. He was also a Congressman and a UN ambassador. He stood eyeball to eyeball with Saddam Hussein himself and helped negotiate for the safe release of two aerospace contractors who’d been seized after they wandered across the border into Iraq. Eleven years later, he did it again by securing the freedom of journalist Paul Salopek when the Sudanese government had accused him of espionage.

His simultaneous tax cuts and more responsible spending make him look less like the stereotypical tax and spend Democrat and more like a New York Democrat like Mayor Lindsay (who switched parties in the final two years of his political career), who was fiscally conservative and socially liberal.

He also thinks homosexuality is a choice and is against gay marriage and, like his old boss Bill Clinton, is for the death penalty.

His astounding ignorance and refusal to let go of the rope tied to the elephant going over the cliff that is the fight against gay marriage, to me, undercuts everything he’s ever worked for regarding gay rights as Governor of New Mexico.

About the only thing that I like about Richardson’s health care plan, which is also short on details, is his idea of the “hero cards” that would enable a veteran to pick the doctor and hospital of their choice anywhere in the nation.

But, as Melissa Etheridge ably revealed for us, Richardson’s not a very adroit debater and it’s obvious that, like HW Bush in 1980, Richardson’s just angling for a running mate spot and ride on the coattails of a stronger candidate.

Phil Rizzuto, 1917-2007
Before my time as a player. Decades listening to Phil calling Yankee games, even after I became a Mets fan in the 70s. Sometimes infuriating when he lost track of the count as wished happy birthday to all the nuns on his list for that day. There'll be Rizzuto memories everywhere for the next week. Start with The Contrarian's dad, & this from the New York Times obit:

Rizzuto met Cora Ellenborg in 1942, after substituting for DiMaggio as a speaker at a communion breakfast in Newark. He had been invited to her home afterward for coffee and cake by her father, a Newark fire chief. “I fell in love so hard I didn’t go home,” Rizzuto recalled. He rented a hotel room nearby for a month to be near her.

Phil Rizzuto Park is three blocks from here, done with a baseball theme, but there's a soccer field, not a diamond. Huckleberries.

If I'd known it took me going to Jamaica to get Karl Rove to resign, I'd have come sooner.

AUGUST 11, 2007. By the time our flight touches down in Montego Bay, the reality of not having slept my required 7-1/2 hours per night in more than a week hits me like a ton of bricks. Sangster Airpoert is a mix of the sleepy airport it used to be and the modern international airport it's struggling to become. I debate whether to warn the Chinese man next to me on the plane, who is going to Beaches for his son's wedding, that wearing the huge diamond-and-sapphire ring he is wearing on the beach in Negril is probably not a great idea, then decide not to traumatize him.

At immigration, a sign that was there last December reads, "Please bear with us while we work on the air conditioning." A winding hallway with open ceilings containing ductwork that promises improved air conditioning "soon come", but for now gives the place the atmosphere of a techno 1970's disco leads to two new baggage carousels and Customs. Usually Customs is just a formality for tourists, but today a family of seemingly a dozen people, having ignored at least two directives on the plane and at three checkpoints in the terminal to complete BOTH sides of the immigration card holds up the line for 10 minutes pretending to be literate enough to complete the two entry fields and five checkboxes on the form. Finally, we arrive at the Tropical Tours desk, where the change in our travel dates threatens to cause one of those patented Jamaican Logistical Meltdowns that is nearly impossible to resolve.

(More to come, including the upcoming Jamaican election, audio and video of Jamaican political ads, and how Jamaica plans to become energy independent, even if it means Appleton Rum becomes more expensive.)

Labels: Jamaica

Raina Rose is a seriously talented singer/songwriter/guitarist from Oregon who doesn't take herself too seriously. Some musicians create black holes that suck all the light, warmth, and laughter from the room because they're trying so hard to educate the audience that there's terrible injustice in the world and we're doing nothing about it. Usually, after listening to these bleak poets, what I want to say to them is, "You're right! Why am I sitting here?", turn off the CD and run away. I want to hit them in the face with a gooey cream pie. No, I'm not saying art shouldn't be informative, but there has to be a necessary balance so people don't feel like killing themselves. There has to be space for hope somewhere in there. And Raina Rose, her tongue not-so-firmly in cheek, is a mischievous tease who enlightens you without insulting your intelligence. Her music is joyful, buoyant, exhilarating, and radically silly. It's smart, grin-inducing artistry that's thankfully grounded in the real world. As George Clinton said, "Move their asses, and their minds will follow." Enjoy.

Labels: Raina Rose, Under thr Weight of Gravity

If the Bush administration had an official narrator, it would have to be Jerry Reed. Can’t you just imagine hearing Reed’s rich baritone drawl accompanying a new scandal or defection from the ranks? Today we would’ve heard,

“Well, right around this time, Cousin Karl, having fulfilled his contractual obligation to Ole Scratch to make the world an infinitely worse place than he’d found it, packed up his cardboard suitcase and shoved off into the blood-red sunset of democracy.

We’ll never know if it was the tenacious Henry Waxman, he of the million investigations or the equally tenacious and triangulating Patrick Fitzgerald that got ole Turdblossom to thinking’ a year ago to get off the omnibus of the neocon agenda while the gettin’ was good. Who knows what it was?”

Well, I’ll tell you what it wasn’t. I will refuse to believe until my dying day that, Waxman aside, it was the political eunuchs currently doing a 1st grade Halloween dress-up of actual Democrats and the “policy battles” they impotently promised Rove had anything to do with his own defection. After the military spending bill and FISA renewal, Rove will pull out of the White House parking lot in his fat-ass SUV, his middle finger raised high to salute the Capitol rotunda.

Yet another Republican ducking even the improbable hazard of congressional retribution.

In a way, Rove represented at once a rancid yet fresh breath of air in a fiercely partisan executive branch populated by dissemblers, liars and whitewashers. Rove was almost refreshingly candid and honest in his delusions about matters such as the Iraq war, the 2006 mid-term election and even Bush’s poll numbers. According to Rove’s surprise announcement to Paul Gigot of the Wall St. Journal, the surge will work and Bush’s numbers will shoot up higher than a Nazi salute.

Oh, sure. Rove lied like Bush’s prized rug in the Oval Office. Political operatives have to or they wouldn’t last a minute in this game.

Yet when Rove surely outed Valerie Plame back in 2003, he came out and said it without actually taking blame for it. When Rove was about to rig the 2006 election, he came out and admitted it with veiled references to his “October surprise” and telling television talk show hosts who had accurate exit polls close at hand, “You have your math and I have the math.”

Turns out math isn’t Rove’s long suit, which is why he’s been publicly blamed by neocons for losing the GOP’s majority in that election (there were voting irregularities but Rove underestimated the number of liberals and moderates who would go to the polls just as much as Romney overestimated the number of Republican voters who came out for last weekend’s straw polls in Iowa).

Essentially, even though this smirking dung heap wrapped in a Brooks Brothers bolt of cloth did his level-headed best to jeopardize national security by outing a covert agent, her support network of nearly a hundred agents and the front company the CIA had set up to protect them, kept a child-molesting Republican in Congress against his will by using his lobbyist ambitions against him so he could keep the cash flowing and jeopardizing underaged aides in the process, rigged up to four elections, politicized the Justice Department, subverting Bush’s own executive order forbidding White House staff to use non-White House email accounts for official business and a hundred other perfidies of which I’m sure we’re blissfully unaware…

…the White House is losing at the end of this month the only guy who even approaches honesty and transparency in his supreme arrogance and sense of his own invulnerability.

Should we be relieved that Rove’s leaving? Yes and no. It’s always good when a snake in the grass like Rove leaves the White House. However, he won’t be so much in the public eye, which makes him infinitely more dangerous.

Finally, to give you an idea of how much our political landscape resembles the chaotic, topsy-turvy one in Broomhilda, David Corn is saying in The Nation that Bush’s Brain should stay while in my inbox came Rove’s political eulogy from Richard Viguerie, who says good riddance because Rove failed to give the GOP Viguerie’s long-held and completely insane wet dream for a “permanent Republican majority.”

God I love email, perhaps even moreso than Karl Rove.

Labels: Instant Rove, Karl Rove, The Bush Administration

The Boston Globe:

Army to expand recruiting incentives

WASHINGTON --Need a down-payment for your home? Seed money to start a business? The Army wants to help -- if you're willing to join up. Despite spending nearly $1 billion last year on recruiting bonuses and ads, Army leaders say an even bolder approach is needed to fill wartime ranks.

Under a new proposal, men and women who enlist could pick from a "buffet" of incentives, including up to $45,000 tax-free that they accrue during their career to help buy a home or build a business. Other options would include money for college and to pay off student loans.

An Associated Press review of the increasingly aggressive recruiting offerings found the Army is not only dangling more sign-up rewards -- it's loosening rules on age and weight limits, education and drug and criminal records.

It's all part of an Army effort to fill its ranks even as the percentage of young people who say they plan to join the military has hit a historic low -- 16 percent by the Pentagon's own surveying -- in the fifth year of the Iraq war.

And what's making it harder for recruiters is the reality that African-Americans aren't signing up to join the Army like they used to.

In a racist culture that brutalizes and marginalizes them, people of color have died in white men's wars throughout history because that was the only way to finance a piece of the American Dream. Sure, it was inequitable and dangerous, but I know too many brothers and sisters that were able to get good jobs and buy houses only because they enlisted. My father was able to open his barber shop because he earned a degree during his time spent in the Navy in World War II. The military has always been the biggest employer for minorities.

Of course, the nasty contradictions staring African-American soldiers in the face were as clear as a "White Only" sign. It was a bitter joke to fight and die for "freedom" overseas when you couldn't even shit in the same place as a white man. Every black man during the turbulent years of the 60s knew what Cassius Clay aka Muhammad Ali meant when he defiantly said, "No Viet Cong ever called me nigger." The struggle of people of color wasn't just confined to the United States. It was global.

So what happens when the black pawns refuse to play this game of imperialistic chess anymore?

In a fascinating and provocative essay, Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson explains how and why enlistments of African-Americans are at their lowest numbers since the all-volunteer military was created in 1973. "This is not a black people's war," an African-American veteran of the Iraq war said. "This is not a poor people's war. This is an oilman's war."

Gregory Black is a retired Navy diver who created the website Black Military World.com. Black says that quote is representative of how African-American veterans feel about the Iraq invasion and occupation.

"African-Americans detest this war," Black said yesterday in a phone interview. "Everybody kind of knows the truth behind this war. It's a cash cow for the military defense industry, when you look at the money these contractors are making. African-Americans saw this at the beginning of the war and now the rest of the country has figured it out. It's not benefiting us in the least."

Asked about the reference to an "oilman's war," Black said, "It's basically about oil, basically about money. It's an economic war." He said veterans are saying they are tired and burned out. "Guys are saying we're halfway around the world fighting people of color under the guise of democracy and we can't see how it's benefited anyone," Black said. "It's hard to fight halfway around the world for people's freedom when you're not sure you have it at home."

People of color wearing khakis and carrying guns are the hired help, that's all. To the aristocracy, the soldiers are no different than the faceless non-entities who wash the cars, mow the lawn, and clean up the stinking mess in the kid's diapers. Yeah, I hear all sort of noise from chickenhawks about "supporting the troops", but you and I know that's code for "Hell, no, I ain't going."

Except African-Americans have translated the code, too. "In 2000," Jackson reported, "23.5 percent of Army recruits were African-American. By 2005, the percentage dropped to 13.9 percent. National Public Radio this week quoted a Pentagon statistic that said that African-American propensity to join the military had dropped to 9 percent."

Hell, no, I ain't going.

Black said that he still believes "without a shadow of a doubt" that the military still provides one of the best opportunities for African-Americans to advance in a nation where civilian opportunities remain checkered. But he said the military may underestimate how young people are absorbing the horrific images in Iraq's chaos. Pentagon officials largely attribute the drop in African-American interest in the armed forces to "influencers," parents, coaches, ministers, and school counselors who urge youth not to enlist.

"I think some of that is true," Black said. "But I taught ROTC in high school, and the kids themselves are a lot smarter about this stuff. They see the news and they can't justify going into a fight for something they have no faith in."

I remember seeing a poster that read: "What If They Gave A War And Nobody Came?" Still, it's a good thing for the military that there's enough poor whites in this country to make up the difference, huh?

And if you join now, you get a new toaster oven.

Labels: Army Recruitment Incentives, Black Military World, Derrick Z. Jackson, The iraq War

What do you think of Karl Rove's resignation?

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Karl Rove, President Bush's senior political adviser, will voluntarily step down from his White House post at the end of the month, senior administration officials said Monday.

Karl Rove was dubbed by President Bush as "the architect."

"Obviously it's a big loss to us, said deputy White House press secretary Dana Perino. "He is a great colleague, good friend and a brilliant mind."

Perino said Rove "wouldn't be going if he wasn't sure this is the right time to be giving more time to his family."

The president and Rove are expected to speak before boarding Marine One at the White House at 11:35 a.m. ET. Bush will head to his Crawford, Texas, ranch where he will remain for the rest of the week.

Rove, who has held a top position in the White House since Bush took office in January 2001, is to stand down on August 31.

Is it too soon to watusi?

Crossposted at Blanton's & Ashton's.

Besides being a successful Hollywood screenwriter, J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5) is pretty good at comic books, too.

It's a big deal, because other big-name authors have tried before and have found out that comics ain't easy. Think of Samuel Delaney's awful "Seven Moons Cast Complex Shadows" or how a clumsy, in-over-his-head Stephen King wasted Berni Wrightson's superb artwork in "Creepshow". The use of narrative flow, dialog, foreshadowing, and characterization is different in comics than in books or film, and good comic book writers understand that. It's more than pasting word balloons and boxes of captions over the pictures.

Kevin Smith gets it. So does Joss Whedon. And as he's doing with Requiem, J. Michael Straczynski shows off his artistry in skillfully rebooting Thor.

Sometimes a franchise superhero icon can have an identity crisis, especially a character who has been around not just for years, but for decades. As Frank Miller warned, "The legends of the comic book universe are like fat 'n' happy guys in the suburbs wearing PJs." The raw passion of youth fades to a dull nostalgia. One of Straczynski's strengths as a writer is recognizing the primal essence of a comic book superhero. Straczynski remembers what got us excited about a superhero in the first place. In the new series Thor, written by Straczynski and illustrated by Olivier Coipel (House of M), the duo reminds us that Thor isn't another generic hero in a cape with bulging muscles. Asgard isn't a theme park by Disney.

Thor is a God. An immortal older than history, an entity who commands the lightning. Certainly, there's a rich, deep well in Norse mythology to use. Instead, the God of Thunder has been mired in confusion, disinterest, and a loss of purpose ever since the end of the glory years with Lee and Kirby.

But J. Michael Straczynski and Olivier Coipel do their best to make every one of us believe in gods again.

(click on images to enlarge)

Labels: J. Michael Straczynski, Marvel Comics, Norse mythology, Olivier Coipel, Thor

To Mitt Romney, about $1000 & change. His campaign spent in the vicinity of five-million dollars to collect 4,516 votes in the Iowa Repug straw poll. Not even real votes that got him elected to anything. He would have at least that number & saved a lot of money had he simply handed out five crisp hundred dollar bills to anyone promising to vote for him.

Labels: 2008 election, Mitt Romney

When they start attacking eachother over credit for writing and stuffing them in George Bush's mouth.

As a serious writer myself, someone who'd regarded being away from home without a Zebra pen and a notebook as a life-or-death matter loooong before he got suckered into the thankless and ultimately losing and futile venture called political blogging, I recognize the need for speechwriters in our day and age. Even our greatest statesmen had to use speechwriters. To me, they're a necessary evil, like AZT for AIDS victims, or the old-fangled mercury-for-VD cure.

The boobs that we elect and re-elect to office every other year are so feeble-minded and/or triangulating and dissembling by genetic mandate that it necessitates the need to hire wordsmiths (as opposed to actual writers) to chisel blocks of prose with surgical precision not to explicate and clarify complicated and weighty policy decisions to the American public but to brainwash them in a way that they can never feel the Brill-O pad against their gray matter.

It's this art of choosing words for maximum effect and telling the public one thing while meaning and doing another is what keeps etymological Pla-Doh artists, verbal alchemists who turn bullshit into plowshares like Frank Luntz rolling in filthy Republican lucre. Speechwriting is the art of providing politicians to the front door of their personal ambitions while simultaneously giving them an emergency back door if and when their dishonesty, venality or corruption blows up.

Michael J. Gerson's diaper is saggy these days because Mike Scully, fellow wordsmith and liar to the American public, claimed in The Atlantic that no more than a third of Bush's post-war speeches were written by the much-lionized Gerson.

Oh, say it ain't so, Mike, that the immortal phrase that had proven so prescient, "axis of evil", wasn't penned by Gerson, after all, but was a collaboration between David Frum and Mike Scully himself.

So, the Man himself behind the words didn't write the words and the Man behind the Man behind the words didn't write the words, although Scully never pointed to a single example of Gerson taking credit for speeches that he didn't write.

But he's still a glory hog, insists Scully from the pages of one of America's most august publishing institutions.

Perhaps if we were talking about them fighting over who wrote, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" and "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country", I could see these bozos climbing all over eachother like the Three Stooges trying to get out a narrow doorway at the same time while water and sharks are gushing through the portholes.

But these are guys fighting over who wrote what lies, lies that helped get thousands of people killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But such men and women are necessary to Republican America because they don't want to have their compassionately conservative, war-loving brains to have to do a U-turn in ideological thinking. They need to be comforted by lies told by their political elders and godfathers. Republican godfathers such as Mitt Romney, that oleaginous preppy fuck with his five war-dodging Osmond Brothers boys when he repudiates Bush while embracing his most disastrous decisions, such as, oh I dunno, attacking Iraq then blaming everyone under the sun except for himself and his closest circle.

"I'm not Bush," Romney and the other 9 clowns in the GOP field say, "nor should we be but you gotta love his policies!" How wonderful that Republicans are so flexible in their thinking that they can separate the man from his failings.

Because Republican voters need lies as much as that fat lady at Lane Bryant trying on that pants suit two sizes two small, the wall-flower daughter on prom night or a war family putting the remains of their son or daughter to rest and needing to be told that there was some justification for it all.

Because some lies are just worth fighting for, as Republicans remind us every day, while those same lies are worth others dying for.

I know Who Killed Me is a bust.

Captivity came and went.

And Hostel II, as they say in the business, "underperformed".

Can it be that the public is losing their taste for these vile movies? I don't know, let's see how Hatchet (premiering September 9) does.

As you probably guessed, I loathe horror movies, especially that diseased sub-genre known as "torture porn".

I never subjected myself to Cabin Fever, The Hills Have Eyes, Feast, Saw, High Tension or The Devil’s Rejects either. I won’t go to a movie theater to see any type of splatter flick, or rent one from Netflix.

Usually, when it comes to cinema, I try to be open-minded. I’ve enjoyed Dances With Wolves, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Singing In The Rain, Yojimbo, and Bananas. I don’t care how my local Blockbuster chooses to file these films on their shelves. Genres are meaningless to me. Either I like it or I don’t.

However, except for films by the brilliant and subversive David Cronenberg (The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch), I despise the horror movie genre. Yes, I know I’m prejudiced. As with Cronenberg, there are exceptions. Se7en, for one, comes to mind. It’s unique, disturbing and powerful. Still, after I saw David Fincher’s brooding, gore-splattered thriller, I knew I never wanted to see it again.

Why? Well, because the majority of them remind me of bad pornography. And it doesn’t matter to me whether it’s a big-budget motion picture from a major studio by Eli Roth or an amateurish pile of shit finished in a weekend by a soon-to-be-forgotten hack, there’s a nasty but familiar subtext underneath that I recognize and I don’t like it. What horror movies and pornography have in common is in how much it hates us.

Pornography is misogynistic, clumsy, vulgar, simplistic, and mean-spirited, and doesn't pretend to be about anything else but sex. As long as you're willing to lower your expectations, leave subtlety and genuine human feelings behind and enter an ugly world of anonymous genitalia and meaningless orgasms, you'll never be disappointed.

In horror movies, these same principles apply, except you replace sex with violence. Blood 'n' Gore 'n' Guts is the fuel which runs this infernal machine. In Cronenberg’s oeuvre, there’s nuance and a rigorous intellectual philosophy behind the violence. But for everybody else, violence is all there is. The only artistic utensil to be found in their toolbox is an old hammer encrusted with dried blood and a few blonde hairs from a dead cheerleader.

And most of the time, other than the occasional token male becoming a screaming, bone-splintered lump of hamburger, it's always violence against women, isn't it? Just substitute scenes of women being gangbanged for scenes of women being stabbed and tortured to death. Women are objectified and turned into meat puppets that exist solely to be used as toys for naughty little boys with chainsaws.

Remember that repulsive scene in the beginning of High Tension when the homicidal psycho fellates himself with a women's disembodied head? And how much do you want to bet there were idiots--male, of course-- who probably laughed their asses off? Did they smoke a cigarette afterwards?

At least the guys who sell pornography pretend to try and keep children away. If they’re smart, the more reputable porno movie houses won’t let anyone in without checking their I.D. For those X-rated sites online there‘s parental control software you can use like Net Nanny. Blockbuster Video doesn’t have “adult” DVDs available at their stores, and the ones that do keep them in a separate section.

On the other hand, since horror movies are usually rated “PG” and playing at your local cineplex, they’re wholesome mainstream entertainment the entire family can enjoy. And yes, I swear to God, while I stood in line I’ve seen families wheeling in their baby carriages to see Wolf Creek. I want to punch the parents in the head.

These movies scare the hell out of me. They’re nightmares that don’t go away when you wake up but instead follow you the rest of the day. And what frightens me the most is knowing that there are people who will watch Feast and react as though it’s a sitcom. Worse, there are others in the audience who’ll be turned on by it.

So, was it good, huh baby?

Did you come?

Labels: David Cronenberg, David Fincher, Eli Roth, Horror