Does a man have to be a self-destructive asshole to be a "real man"? Why the fuck was there even a need to hesitate about this?

Sure, there's world wars and toxic pollution and corruption and Social Security reform and a few other things like trillions of dollars in debt to worry about.

But before getting to those easy issues, politicians who want to be chief executives must first get elected. And to do that they must decide if they're going to wear funny hats.

It's the bane of most big-time campaigns. And why you don't see candidates so often visiting construction sites; hard-hat zones, where they must don those funny-looking helmets that sit so high on their head. They may save lives, but they scare image-conscious campaigns.

Remember in 1988 Gov. Mike Dukakis driving that tank? It's a lot of fun. Looked good on paper to associate him with defense issues, a traditional Democratic weak spot. But you gotta wear the XL helmet. So he did. He looked like a pretender. And the rest is doofus history.

Long before him, there was the classic headgear disaster, Calvin Coolidge in the Indian headdress. Scroll down for that baby.

So, even though he's a freshman senator and a rookie national campaigner, Sen. Barack Obama faced a quandary last weekend.

Should he wear one of those stupid-looking bicycle helmets that legislators say we must wear but only look good on Tour de France racers? And get mocked? Or should he go without the hapless headgear and get criticized for defying the law? Who does he think he is? Above the rules that apply to everyone else?

These are everyday decisions now. Obama opted for the hat. At one of two lucrative campaign fund-raisers in Chicago Thursday night, at the home of a businessman who donates bicycles to charities, Obama couldn't resist a little boasting. He explained that he faced a tossup: Risking ridicule or sending children the right message about bike gear.

"I had an internal debate," Obama admitted when a supporter thanked him for wearing a helmet. "Because I knew that the AP was going to take a picture, and they were trying to portray it like Dukakis wearing that tank helmet.

"But I wanted to make sure that the children who saw that picture knew that even the Democratic nominee for president wears a helmet when he goes biking," he said to applause.

"Now, obviously the rest of my apparel was apparently not up to snuff, because I got a hard time from all sorts of blogs ... who said I looked like Urkel."

There was a need because Barack Obama has learned that anything he does, any step he makes, is going to be closely scrutinized to see how well it fits the "wussy-ass Democrats" meme so beloved by the mainstream media that is spending the day congratulating itself because it knew Tim Russert.

The photo of Obama that accompanies this article shows him riding on a city strett. I live in New Jersey, and if you DON'T wear a helmet you are taking your very life in your hands. Whether Obama is elected or not, he has two young daughters. So why should he even have to think twice about whether wearing a helmet is the right thing to do when riding in city traffic?

I guarantee you this guy never thought twice about whether the media would paint him as a wuss for wearing a helmet:



Of course that guy showed he was a real man by dressing up in a flightsuit, stuffing the crotch with socks, and sending 160,000 kids off ot Iraq to die. And he said lots of tough stuff like "Bring 'em on" and "Dead or alive" and all that cowboy stuff the pencildicks in the media so adore to hear.

(h/t)

Labels: Barack Obama, icepick meet forehead

Let's report some actual news, shall we? Today we're focusing on the midwest floods. Here's some video taken by "citizen journalists" -- you know, people who are documenting events while the news industry holds its wake.

Downtown Cedar Rapids:

Labels: Midwest storms

How the hell do you end up with six figures in credit card debt when you're worth a hundred million fucking dollars and have eight houses?

Senators John McCain and Barack Obama released their Senate financial disclosure statements on Friday, revealing that Mr. McCain and his wife had at least $225,000 in credit card debt and that Mr. Obama and his wife had put more than $200,000 into college funds for their daughters.

The bulk of the McCains’ obligations stemmed from a pair of American Express credit cards that are held in Cindy McCain’s name. According to the disclosure reports, which present information on debts in a range rather than providing a precise figure, Mrs. McCain owed $100,000 to $250,000 on each card.

Another charge card, held by what was described as a “dependent child,” had also accumulated debts of $15,000 to $50,000. In addition, a credit card held jointly by the couple was carrying $10,000 to $15,000 in debt, the filing indicated, at a stiff 25.99 percent interest rate.

First of all, you've got to love the part about the Obamas, with a net worth of 1/10 of that of the McCains, managing to put away $200,000 for their daughters' college expenses. You know, fiscal responsibility and all that. Second of all, why the hell is a couple with a net worth of over $100 million paying an interest rate of over 25%? Make a few late payments there, perhaps? Think that deadlines and rules don't apply to you, perhaps? And what are you teaching your child when you allow her to rack up $15,000-50,000 in credit card debt?

With Americans piling up credit card debt by the thousands in an ultimately vain attempt to sustain their standsard of living, and credit card debt being the next debt crunch to hit us, it's hard to take John McCain seriously as a beacon of financial responsibility when his own financial house is such that he's paying over 25% interest on six figures of credit card debt.

(h/t: John Cole)

Labels: financial irresponsibility, hypocrisy, John McCain

I may just make this a regular feature.

Today's Idiot: Tennessee Democratic Party Executive Committee member Fred Hobbs, for this remark about why he thinks Democratic Rep. Lincoln Davis has not yet endorsed Barack Obama:

“Maybe [it’s] the same reason I don’t want to — I don’t exactly approve of a lot of the things he stands for and I’m not sure we know enough about him,” ...He’s got some bad connections, and he may be terrorist connected for all I can tell. It sounds kind of like he may be.”

Labels: idiocy

Intro....Musical interlude: Born Freeeee. As Free as the Wind Bloowwwwsss....



Dear Missuz B
Not to make things worse or anything, but we were here before you and we will be here after you. You know that saying: The meek shall inherit the earth? Well, here we are! The Meek!...we are everywhere...we spit on your expanding foam and pine sol!
Hope your catz is OK, ...we so love it make that one crazy!...but really, thats what you get for trying to kill us!
See, we got RIPCoco trained to catch and release...Sure, we go right back inside and help ourselves to the bird seed right from the bottom of the bird cages at night, and we tunnel into the garbage bags, make nests in everything...Thats because we own everything and we can fit anywhere!...not afraid of no dogz...not afraid of no onez!

Just remain calm...the assimilation will be painless....;-)

Labels: cat blogging

I'm not going to sit here and tell you how much I thought of Tim Russert as a journalist. That would be hypocritical. I always thought he was far tougher on Democrats than he was on Republicans. I frequently expressed frustration with him, because I thought his "20 years ago you said A and now you said B" game on Meet the Press was partially responsible for the lionization of guys like George W. Bush as "resolute", when what they offered was really just a foolish consistency. That said, there's no denying his importance to television journalism, and there's also no denying that broadcast journalism is far poorer today without him.

But I didn't know the man and I filtered my view of him through my own politics and perceptions. What I'll always remember is THIS interview:



(Part II here)

So it's better left to those who knew the man to share their memories of how Tim Russert enriched their lives, and in this way shall WE know him as well.

(UPDATE: John Cole says what the rest of us don't dare to...and he's right. Skippy too picks up the baton. And they're right. I don't begrudge the folks at NBC pre-empting their programming yesterday for a video wake. Russert was one of their own, and a Very Big Gun in the arsenal of what they do. But enough already. Doing on-air group therapy in the immediate aftermath of a shocking and sudden death is one thing; holding a week-long on-air wake is quite another, I don't care how much you loved Tim Russert as a co-worker. Skippy and John are absolutely right, that this continued rending of garments on national television is a symptom not of the love that these people had for Russert, but of their own egotistical need to be Part Of The Story™. Of course in an odd way, this is quite a fitting tribute to Russert, who was often guilty of the very same kind of egotism.)

Labels: Tim Russert

No cute pictures for this one, folks.

As some of you may know, we at Casa La Brilliant have been dealing with an intermittent mouse problem. For all I know, it's not intermittent at all, given the assertions by one handyman and two exterminators in the aftermath of the Great Squirrel Adventure of 2007 that there are one hell of a lot of mouse droppings inside the celotex ceiling in the basement.

Maggie the Idiot cat is, for all her stupidity, quite the little predator. She usually takes care of the various pantry moths and spiders who manage to find their way into our little abode, while Miss Jenny sits placidly on the bench in front of the living room window saying "Fuck that...you do it. I spent a year fending for myself in a park before I was rescued and I'm retired." For all that Jenny was the stray, it's Maggie who parades around the house with a crocheted ball in her mouth yowling.

And yet she has caught absolutely nothing.

Last spring I went around the entire perimeter of the house with a can of expanding foam, a bundle of steel wool, a tube of Phenoseal caulk, and a caulking gun and closed up everything that looked like so much as a caterpillar could get in. And still there are droppings in the garage, and I've even found droppings in my kitchen base cabinets a few months ago, which caused much hue and cry and use of Pine-Sol as I scrubbed the cabinets out, trying mightily not to retch.

Earlier this week, Maggie began finding the kitchen base cabinets fascinating again. Sometimes I think she just does this to fuck with us. It's her way of doing that thing of chasing something nonexistent on the wall. Of course savvy cat owners know that what they're looking at is greeblings, but greeblings are not commonly found in kitchen cabinets. Now, there are no signs of new mouse droppings in the kitchen, but when Maggie begins staring intently at the corner where the blind corner cabinet and the sink base cabinet meet, I immediately smell a -- well, let's not get carried away here -- a mouse.

Since it's time for our annual termite inspection, I called our trusty exterminator with a heart of gold and called him out to kill two pests with one stone.

When I arrived home yesterday, "Bob" (not his real name) the exterminator and Mr. Brilliant were at the computer foraging through HP's web site for information on how to deal with "Bob"'s fried PC. Outside our home office was a closed bucket that I just assumed was the one "Bob" carries around with him for deposit of mouse corpses. I should have known when Maggie showed interest in the bucket to close her in the bedroom upstairs, but I had just gotten home. By the time I put the milk in the refrigerator, there was Maggie next to the bucket, having pried it open and knocked a piece of Final Blox onto the floor -- because in Maggie's world, EVERYTHING is a cat toy.

It became clear that whatever little tiny bit she had bitten off this block had proven unpalatable and spit out, given the little pink crumbs on the floor, but suddenly we were faced with the same issue that faced me in 1996, when I had been bitten by a cat in Antigua: you can take your chances, but if you're wrong, there's no turning back. After the Antigua incident, I elected to do the whole rabies thing, and with this I elected to start the ball rolling to get Maggie treated.

I called our vet's office and was told to call the Animal Poison Control hotline for a treatment recommendation. This hotline is set up by the ASPCA, and for sixty bucks you get to talk to a vet versed in poison issues. Bottom line: we either do blood tests Saturday and Sunday, or put her on Vitamin K-1 for 30 days, but either way, she has to be seen by a vet. Our vet is only in for three hours on Friday, so off Maggie and I went to the local Big Impersonal Animal Hospital, where it costs you $160 just to walk in the door. I managed to get out of there for only $170 -- the emergency fee plus the cost of the first K-1 treatment, but now we are going to have to medicate this idiot cat for 30 days and then get her a blood test.

There's plenty of blame to go around here, and at this point the priority is to get Maggie what she needs. Of more concern is the heart murmur that the vet at the BIAH says she has and which warrants an echocardiogram -- a murmur that our vet has never heard. Of course, the BIAH is ferociously aggressive about treatment, which is one reason we stopped using them with our previous generation of cats after they were going to charge us $700 in 1987 to repair a dislocated knee for one of our cats -- when a less-invasive surgery was done by another vet for half that. So the BIAH is sort of like taking your car to the dealer for service -- you always suspect that they're trying to sell you services you don't need. I'm not knocking the BIAH at all; it's a godsend that it's there, even if they do charge you one arm, one leg, and your first-born child just to walk in the door. And it's supposedly one of the best animal hospitals in the country. But until my vet tells me there's a cause for concern, color me skeptical. It's something to be checked out when she goes for her blood test.

The irony is that I had just spent a chunk of time yesterday explaining to a co-worker that her daughter's vomiting cat should see a vet because cats will get into ANYTHING.

And as far as Maggie's concerned, the world is her oyster. Or her batty bag. Or her bally. Or her crumpled cigarette pack. Or her milk jug ring.

Labels: cat blogging

Oliver Willis:

...it’s a mighty amazing trick the McCain camp is pulling. Somehow they’ve gone to the most diverse city in America (New York City) and are seemingly unable to find minorities willing to attend.

Labels: bloggers, John McCain

Another city. More images of men hauling sandbags. More families driven from their homes in boats to be deposited in emergency shelters with nothing but the clothes on their backs. More images of Michael Chertoff spouting platitudes like "When officials tell you to leave, leave."

The floods in the Midwest have been going on for a month, and the first steps in a disaster declaration began only yesterday.

It isn't just black people and the white poor being ignored by the Bush Administration anymore. These are the farmers growing the corn that's fed to cattle and used to make ethanol. These are the very white heartlanders that Republicans have been using as campaign props for a generation. And even they are seeing the government that's supposed to work for them turn its back on them.

This is what smaller government looks like. This is what happens when you leave everything to the states and the states are too overwhelmed to handle disasters on their own. This is what happens when you shovel money into the pockets of military contractors and the defense industry and run trillion-dollar defcits. This is what happens when you elect someone you think you'd like to have a beer with instead of someone with a half a brain in his head who's oriented towards problem-solving.

That John McCain, who promises more of what we've endured for the last eight years, is even competitive in this fall's presidential race shows how the Democrats have failed in demonstrating to the people now trying to rescue their belongings that programs like federal disaster assistance and Social Security and Medicare are the product of the very liberalism that Republicans have derided for a generation. With a wide swath of swing states now under water, and $4 gasoline, and skyrocketing food prices, and a dwindling job base, and foreclosures up 48% this year, it's hard to imagine Republican supply-side, feed-the-rich policies as being anything but completely discredited.

And yet, there's John McCain, with a tax plan that once again shovels even more cash into the pockets of the wealthy (when DOES that stuff start "trickling down", anyway?); a tax plan widely derided by economists as being -- dare I say it? -- McSame.

I would hope that by now American voters have begun to do the math. Meanwhile, the Cedar River is expected to crest today at 32 feet -- a full eight feet above yesterday's projections.

Labels: FEMA, Midwest storms

I wonder when the Obama campaign is going to start framing the issue of military contracting in the context of money taken directly from taxpayers' pockets and stuffed into those of contractors who operate with little to no oversight. As fuel becomes more expensive (and isn't it funny how they KNOW that $4 gasoline will last through 2009 -- and they aren't talking $5 -- you'd think that the oil cabal of producing countries, refiners, and traders would have set that as a price goal), the issue of "Where Do Our Taxes Go" will become more prominent -- and Republicans, of course, will frame it as the fault of "n----- and sp---". They won't call it such, they'll talk about "hard-working Americans" and "those who do their part" and they'll demonize illegal immigrants and Fox will continue to call Michelle Obama her husband's "baby mama" and Floyd Brown will run his ads about how "the n----- candidate is soft on the crimes of the brothers", but we'll all know what they're talking about.

But the lack of oversight is an outrage, and needs to be treated as such:

Double-billing. Bribes. Kickbacks. Military contracts are big targets for serious crimes — and there aren't nearly enough investigators to catch them all.

The Army's contracting budget has exploded since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began — from $46 billion in 2002 to $112 billion in 2007. Yet the number of people who hunt down crooked companies and corrupt officials has stayed about the same, according to Associated Press interviews and research.

Army investigation chiefs told the AP they need a dramatic increase in agents to fight contract fraud.

[snip]

In combat zones, deals can be made quickly, often with foreign companies in countries where bribes are a routine part of doing business. Yet to monitor those billions in contracts, just under 100 civilian agents are assigned to the Army Criminal Investigation Command's procurement fraud office.

Even with more fraud police, there would be no guarantees. Flaws in how the Army awards and manages contracts, especially overseas, also need repairs to curb criminal activity.

"It's sort of like an assembly line for cars and having more checkers at the end of the line when the people aren't building the cars right," said Jacques Gansler, a military acquisition expert. "What we really need to eliminate the abuse is people doing it right in the first place."

95 ongoing investigations
Until that happens, the Army's procurement fraud team faces an increasingly complex workload that requires frequent overseas travel and specialized training to spot foul play in mountains of arcane paperwork.

"There's obviously more going on out there today than there was five years ago, but I have the same number of people," said Wes Kilgore, director of the command's Major Procurement Fraud Unit.

I'm sure that's by design. There are far too many Bush family friends and cronies making too much money to allow the kind of oversight that might stop the money spigot.

Labels: Bush Administration, corruption, greed

Here we go again.....For the third time, the Supreme Court has ruled that foreign detainees at Guantanamo Bay have the right to challenge their detention in civilian courts in the U.S., and that they have been denied their right to habeas corpus, and all that silly stuff that the Bush administration would have us believe is less important than our "safety."

The 270 men held at Guantanamo as suspected enemy combatants have been in limbo, some for over 6 years, as the lack of due process, evidence, and justification for their imprisonment, has created a smokescreen preventing any realistic procedure or outcome. Many of these men have been tortured, and since the evidence gained by such treatment is not reliable, its been impossible for a full case to be made without the issues becoming bigger than the particular case trying to be heard.. But really, according to first hand accounts of the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo have left many of them in such states as to make it hard to release them to their home countries, much less any other country that might agree to take them. The longer this goes on, the more we look like the bad guys, (too late,) and if there ever was a case to be made, we have lost it completely ethically and morally, and we have lost the ability to punish the guilty in any reasonable way.

The emotional and physical fallout from this sort of imprisonment and torture will leave lasting effects that should not be underestimated. I guess that John McCain could be cited as an example of a POW who emerged seemingly unscathed from his ordeal, but then the stories of his vicious temper and his vile treatment of those around him, as cited by Cliff Schecter in his excellent book, The Real McCain, coupled with his seeming disconnect with reality and always changing beliefs and opinions, leads one to think that he is still deeply effected by PTSD, and driven by some deep anger to wage more and more war and to get some sort of revenge. Surely some of the detainees could walk among us with little sign of where they've been; like McCain, they will be time bombs ready to explode at any time.

Without due process, its been impossible to classify these prisoners as true "illegal enemy combatants." With no clear classification and with the republican led congress blocking the last 2 SCOTUS rulings on this by passing laws and limiting judicial oversight, a ripple effect has caused any cases that have made it to a court or tribunal to be sent back to lower courts to sort out the legalities. So, how can we know if this new decision will amount to anything at all before the next administration takes office? Since the designation of the detainees is decided by the president himself and his top cabinet, and is very confidential, its impossible to know what it is based on. Add to that the fear that hovers around the disinformation and/or PR campaign that has painted these prisoners as criminals, terrorists, and enemy combatants, and it's unlikely that they will ever see the light of day in any meaningful way. Its also unlikely that justice will be done or that any deterrence that might be fostered by America's ability to kick the collective asses of the bad-guys, will be evident at all.

America, as it stands, appears to be run by a bunch of heartless, bungling, idiots, with an administration that doesn't even follow our own laws or the rulings of our own court. If they don't like the rulings of the highest court in the country, they just go about circumventing them. With this kind of leadership and the track record of the last 7 years, we have no way ever again to claim the moral high-ground, or to claim that spreading our brand of freedom or democracy is superior to the individual evolution of any country.

The really troubling part of this mess is that the dissenting members of the court, being the usual suspects, joined Alito's written dissent which assumed the guilt of the prisoners and stated a political opinion about the danger that America is in (with the implication being that these prisoners who have not been charged or tried are the reason,) as noted in the Washington Post:

Justice Antonin Scalia took the unusual step of summarizing his dissent from the bench, calling the court's decision a "self-invited . . . incursion into military affairs," and was even stronger in a written dissent joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

"America is at war with radical Islamists," Scalia wrote, adding that the decision "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."

I thought that the court was in place to ensure the sanctity of American laws and the way that we do things. If the reason why Scalia dissents as he does, (joined by certain of his colleagues,) is that he feels that these prisoners are, in fact, enemy combatants, with no evidence or due process stating such, or even alleging it, then he is stating mere opinion based on gut feelings and stories drawn out of tortured prisoners who have likely not seen the light of day or another human being, except their torturers, for months. Our justice system doesn't work this way and the highest court is not supposed to issue dissents or opinions based on personal feelings about issues that are clearly political, (and unproven, at that!)

I don't believe that the court's job is to tell us that their decision is based on the danger that America is in if certain prisoners happen to be what one or another of them thinks they may be. I believe that they are supposed to comment on whether the information presented and the treatment of those prisoners follows the LAW! isn't the Supreme court the last stop in decision making and a place where the information and evidence is looked at as already revealed and consideration is given to process? If not, then I would like to see where new evidence...real evidence...was introduced that might indicate that these people are combatants of any kind. If not, and if this is purely an oversight of law decisions, then why is the dissent written in terms of political opinion regarding the safety of Americans? The laws of our country are not in place so that we can cringe behind them, but rather so that we can stand boldly and die to protect them...right? This is just more of the Karl Rovian "Be Very Afraid" brand of fear-politics.

We can guess that these prisoners are bad guys. We can know that they are hardened and hateful, and even that some of them have been driven crazy. We can also guess that they come from a place where bad guys hide out, and we can go with the gut feelings of military interrogators that has filtered down through layers and layers of pundits, informers, and gossips, but unless these guys stand before an open court with independent lawyers, we've got nothing.

The fucking Bush Administration, in person as it turns out, have made the world incredibly less safe by not following the law as it stood. If they hadn't had a field trip to Guantanamo to witness actual interrogation techniques and take it upon themselves to shape a policy that has pieces of the TV show 24, and techniques that have been proven to not work within it, then we might have been able to prove if these guys are criminals or not; we wouldn't have to have them walking free among us if they are guilty. But I think that this whole thing really wasn't about combatants, or safety, or the law; it was about being macho and showing the world that they can change and defy American law anytime they want. That probably buys some sorta tough street cred in the higher echelons of power where the real dealing is done, just for the rush of the huge chess game that is Planet Earth.

So, forgive me if I am not counting my prisoners before they get their hearings. An administration that bends the law wherever they see fit, and a senate with Joe Lieberman leaning to the right, and that slim of a majority, will stand in the way of this too. Soon it will Be Obama's problem, and a mark on his record that he had this horrible war and had to house these poor guys forever because they had nowhere to go....I like to see as much of this as possible get on the record, but honestly, unless we impeach Bush and Cheney (and indict Gonzalez and Rumsfeld, and do something to Condi Rice, which I haven't figured out yet,) we've got nothing.

...except other secret prisons around the world, most notably in Afghanistan, that are doing the same thing, but reportedly worse....

c/p RIPCoco

Labels: guantanamo, John McCain, Supreme Court, torture

Bomb bomb Iran is back on. The only question is whether we're going to do the bidding of Israeli hawks:

Six months ago, after American intelligence agencies declared that Iran had shelved its nuclear-weapons program, the chances of a U.S. or Israeli military strike on Iran before President Bush left office seemed remote.

Now, thanks to persistent pressure from Israeli hawks and newly stated concerns by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the idea of a targeted strike meant to cripple Iran's nuclear program is getting a new hearing.

As Bush travels across Europe to gain support for possible new sanctions against Iran, Israeli leaders have been working to lay the psychological foundation for a possible military strike if diplomacy falters.

In public threats and private briefings with American decision-makers, Israeli officials have been making the case that a military strike may be the only way to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions.

"Temperatures are rising," said Emily Landau, an Iran specialist at the Institute for National Security Studies, an independent Israeli research center.

Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert have met twice in recent weeks for extended talks on Iran. America's intelligence chief, Mike McConnell, has traveled to Israel for private briefings, and Israeli Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz publicly declared that a military strike on Iran may be "unavoidable."

In Germany on Wednesday, Bush said that "all options are on the table" if Iran doesn't abandon its uranium enrichment programs.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad greeted Bush's initiative by mocking the latest international efforts.

"They've tried by military threats ... and political pressure to stop you from your luminous path," Ahmadinejad reportedly told a rally in Iran on Wednesday. "But today they have seen that all their planning has failed.

"Today the Iranian nation is standing on the nuclear height."

Intelligence analysts disagree over the likelihood of a military strike on Iran before Bush leaves office. But there's little disagreement about the possible repercussions, which could include missile strikes on Israel, an attack on Saudi Arabian oil facilities, renewed attacks on Israel from Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon, a resurgence of Shiite Muslim resistance to U.S. forces in Iraq or an attack on oil shipping in the Persian Gulf, which could send crude oil prices well above $200 a barrel.

Some analysts view the latest Israeli threats as an attempt to put pressure on Iran to capitulate to Western demands. Other analysts see the Israeli campaign as intended to press the Bush administration to take the lead if the two nations decide to launch a military strike on Iran.

"The most likely scenario is that the Israelis will train and prepare as if they are very serious — and that's part of the bluff to get the U.S. engaged," said John McCreary, a retired intelligence analyst for the U.S. Department of Defense.

Anyone who thinks more terrorism and $200/barrel oil is going to be somehow "good for Israel" is nuts. This is absolute madness, guaranteed to sabotage WHICHEVER candidate gets the White House in November....assuming the BushCheney regime even allows elections to happen. The real scenario looks more like this:

Labels: Bush Administration, insanity, Iran attack

Just in case you think it'll somehow "show" Barack Obama something if you vote for John McCain, here's what you'd be voting for. Now go sit down and start writing down how you'll explain that vote to your daughters.

Labels: cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, John McCain

It looks like the entire Jim Johnson "scandal" (sic) is a tempest in a teapot -- and yet another case of a partisan rag, in this case the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal setting out bait for sloppy journalists to lap up and spit back out to an ignorant public.

Go read why.

Labels: hack journalism

Joan Walsh, freed of her task of crying "foul!" because the rules weren't being bent to ensure Hillary Clinton's nomination, can now focus on the travesty that is media coverage of the campaign we face this fall:

I know a lot of Democrats are worried that, with Hillary Clinton out of the race, her media critics will fall out of love with Barack Obama and remember that their hearts belong to John McCain. There's plenty of time for that, but I've seen no evidence yet. Today on "Hardball" Chris Matthews set up the November contest as a decision between whether to stay on the Titanic with McCain or get into a lifeboat with Obama. Is that really a choice? The loyal Pat Buchanan said he'd go down with the ship, but I don't see a lot of other people joining him.

[snip]

Matthews did point out that a lot of people chose to go down with the Titanic rather than jump into lifeboats, as though that was a possibility that could buoy McCain in November. I noted that the problem was really that the doomed ship didn't have enough lifeboats -- a point he granted me, remarkably. Obama has room for everyone who wants to row in a different direction, and McCain is making their choice easier by the day.

The Titanic example is a bad and unfortunate one, though perhaps not as bad as it would have been a few years ago when James Cameron's movie was still fresh in people's minds. Cameron's movie is still available on DVD, and even without the film, Rivetmania predated the film and will continue forever. Still, it's an example that should be discouraged, because far from creating a "life vs. death" choice, or even a "smart vs. stupid" choice between Obama (smart, lifeboat and rescue) and McCain (stupid, stubborn refusal to admit the truth), if the talking heads of the media are allowed to continue this, we'll end up with the metaphor being Obama as the fictional "Cal Hockley" figure in Cameron's film and the real Bruce Ismay, first class "elitists" weaseling their way onto a lifeboat, and John McCain as the noble, tortured Thomas Andrews, meticulously setting the clock as he prepares to go down with the ship he loves so dearly.

A better metaphor would be a car headed towards a "road closed" sign, behind wihich is a 100-foot sheer drop cliff ending in roaring rapids below. The car being driven by a shitfaced drunk George W. Bush, with McCain in the passenger seat and Obama (heh) in the back seat, and McCain and Obama are arguing over who should take the wheel. McCain is arguing that the drop isn't really all that bad, they just need someone who's sober to continue driving in the same direction, and Obama is saying the only way they can be saved is if they change direction.

Labels: 2008 election

You callous bastard. This is why the idea that how long soldiers stay in Iraq is "not important" is so repellent:

Maj. Lance Waldorf took pride in what he did during two tours in Afghanistan as a civil affairs officer, helping villagers build schools, roads and hospitals.

And, his wife said, he was looking forward to a third tour in Africa in the coming months. As she prepares for his funeral, set for Saturday, Lana Waldorf is comforted by the good her husband did while deployed and her deep Christian faith.

Lance Waldorf, 40, was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head Monday at the Great Lakes National Cemetery in Holly Township. A note, his will and family photos were nearby. While he exhibited signs of depression, Lana Waldorf, 51, said her husband seemed to be doing better in recent days. He was in the U.S. Army Reserves.

"The appeal of being at peace in heaven was greater than the thought of enduring the pain he was in," Waldorf said Thursday from her Bingham Farms home. "I know Lance is at peace with the Lord. I'm not angry with him. I have forgiven him."

Waldorf said she supports military efforts in Afghanistan. And one of her husband's proudest moments in Afghanistan came in 2004, at the end of his first tour, when he was with a group of soldiers feted by villagers.

They feasted on a whole cow, an honor, and a village elder gave Lance Waldorf his ring.

"The man wept openly," Lana Waldorf recounted. "He said his children and his children's children would remember what Lance did for his people.

"He made a tremendous difference there."

But while her husband shared positive stories of his time in Afghanistan, he kept the darker, more difficult tales to himself.

"I saw some symptoms" of depression, she said. "But what I didn't know were the details of what he was experiencing emotionally or psychologically."

Officials from the Michigan State Police said a handgun was found near Lance Waldorf's body. Waldorf, who was part of the 414th Battalion out of Southfield, was wearing a camouflage military uniform.

His struggles are not unique. Last month, U.S. military officials released a report that there were 115 suicides in 2007 by active duty and reservist troops, a 13% increase over 2006.

Labels: Iraq casualties, John McCain

According to Faux Noise, there's no such thing as marriage in the black community. If you are a black man, oh, say, a black presidential candidate, your wife of some fifteen years isn't your wife at all -- she's your "baby mama":

(Note: Those with sensitive stomachs that are triggered by the site of Michelle Malkin are also advised to leave the room)

Labels: idiocy, racism, right-wing hatemongers, sexism

If it hadn't been for John McCain's remark yesterday that it just wasn't important how many troops we keep in Iraq for how long, the media would have been out there beating the drum all day about how Obama's bad judgment made him unfit to be president because Jim Johnson got a below-market-rate loan from Countrywide Mortgage.

The McCain camp wasted no time before the loans were discovered in extrapolating an overall lack of judgment as a disqualifier -- if the candidate is a Democrat: "Jim Johnson's resignation raises serious questions about Barack Obama's judgment," said McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds. (Tucker Bounds? TUCKER FUCKING BOUNDS??? Where do Republicans FIND guys with names like this?)

But since Barack Obama is no John Kerry, his camp fired right back: Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton fired back, saying:

"We don't need any lectures from a campaign that waited fifteen months to purge the lobbyists from their staff, and only did so because they said it was a 'perception problem. It's too bad their campaign is still rife with lobbyist influence and doesn't see a similar 'perception problem' with the man currently running their own vice presidential selection process, a prominent DC lobbyist whose firm has represented Exxon and a top Enron executive, or their campaign chair and John McCain's top economic adviser Carly Fiorina, who presided over thousands of layoffs at Hewlett Packard while receiving a $21 million severance package and $650,000 in mortgage assistance," said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

Does McCain really want to have a campaign based on judgment about associates?

Where IS Vicki Iseman, anyway?

McCain's VP Search head is Arthur Culvahouse -- yup, you guessed it: a lobbyist.

Do you REALLY want to go there, Senator McCain? All right, then, let's go there:

How about the 134 lobbyists currently active in or raising money for you?

Want to talk about Charles Black, Senator? You know, the guy paid by Angolan dictator Jonas Savimbi?

Should I go on? Or shall we just distill your own bag man connections nicely into an easy-to-understand video?



Before Johnson resigned from the search time, Barack Obama said that he doesn't vet his people's mortgages. But it's clear he has to, because the media rule of "It's OK If You're A Republican" still holds. We know this because nothing about McCain's many, many sweetheart relationships with lobbyists (where IS Vicki Iseman, anyway?) was even mentioned yesterday. Perhaps the media can't hold two ideas about a candidate at once, let alone draw a possible conclusion that it's in the interests of his lobbyist friends and contributors to keep over a hundred thousand troops in Iraq indefinitely.

Labels: Barack Obama, double standards, IOKIYAR, John McCain, lobbyists

Would somebody, somewhere, PLEASE give this man a radio show? Save a career. Save a LIFE!

Abrading the Dentition, Part I

Labels: Marc Maron

Via Sam Seder:



"You know....morons."

Labels: satire

Intelligent people of goodwill can argue about whether the U.S. needs to spend as much as it does on defense. The same people who are willing to go along with John McCain's refusal to support the G.I. Bill because it's too expensive (and might keep kids with no other prospects from re-upping until they're killed in the war that McCain promises to continue indefinitely) are the same ones who screamed bloody murder at the thought that a sick child whose parents aren't living on the street might be getting SCHIP coverage. But you'd think they'd scream equally loudly at the money being squandered at and by war profiteers in Iraq -- money that could pay for half the GI Bill or 2/3 of the expansion of SCHIP:

A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn (£11.75bn) may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq.

The BBC's Panorama programme has used US and Iraqi government sources to research how much some private contractors have profited from the conflict and rebuilding.

A US gagging order is preventing discussion of the allegations.

The order applies to 70 court cases against some of the top US companies.

War profiteering

While Presdient George W Bush remains in the White House, it is unlikely the gagging orders will be lifted.

To date, no major US contractor faces trial for fraud or mismanagement in Iraq.

The president's Democratic opponents are keeping up the pressure over war profiteering in Iraq.

Henry Waxman, who chairs the House committee on oversight and government reform, said: "The money that's gone into waste, fraud and abuse under these contracts is just so outrageous, it's egregious.

"It may well turn out to be the largest war profiteering in history."

In the run-up to the invasion, one of the most senior officials in charge of procurement in the Pentagon objected to a contract potentially worth $7bn that was given to Halliburton, a Texan company which used to be run by Dick Cheney before he became vice-president.

Unusually only Halliburton got to bid - and won.


Missing billions

The search for the missing billions also led the programme to a house in Acton in west London where Hazem Shalaan lived until he was appointed to the new Iraqi government as minister of defence in 2004.

I hope the Obama campaign is prepared to confront John McCain on his curious silence on war profiteering, which may be partially due to this.

Labels: corruption, greed, John McCain, war profiteering

If the Republicans are insisting on linking Tony Rezko to Barack Obama despite the fact that nothing in Rezko's trial had anything to do with Obama, then it seems to me that Saint David Petraeus' association with his less-savory associates deserve some closer scrutiny as well -- particularly since John McCain plans to leave his Iraq policy in Petraeus' hands.

Blue Girl, Red State has the story. It's too much to excerpt, just go read it.

Labels: Bush Administration, corruption, General Petraeus, Iraq

John McCain's web site has taken down your ability to review the many fine products you can purchase to show your support for the Googler you can believe in. His web administrator didn't consider that John Cole was already on the case and has screengrabbed the reviews of the John McCain Father's Day Golf Pack for your enjoyment.

Because nothin' says "change" like old white guys playin' golf.

Labels: comedy, idiocy, John McCain

If you don't want to read the rantings of a cranky old person, don't bother reading this post. I may have sidestepped the Parent's Revenge of "When you have children...", but at least I can give my mother the satisfaction of sounding like her for one blog post.

Is there really such a dearth of imagination in this country that animation studios and toymakers can't come up with new and marketable characters that resonate with today's children? In a world that's seen Pixar rake in money, do you mean to tell me that toy companies have to not only commit the sacrilege of "updating" the venerable Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, but also updating characters that should have been tossed in the sketch artists' circular file when they first appeared? Did Warner Bros. learn nothing from "Loonatics"? Character makeovers are nothing new; look how Nancy Drew has been updated over the years, and worse, look how her "tomboyish" friend George Fayne was feminized. Nancy Drew survived because the character started out as being anachronistically more "modern" and independent than the many time periods in which girls read the stories in which she and her friends figured. Here was an adventurous girl who tended to bring her girlfriends, not her boyfriend, on her sleuthing expeditions.

But what's happening with many of these updates is a reflection on a society in which there are parents who think dressing a four-year-old like a hooker is cute and in which little girls' birthday parties are now "Diva Spa Party Makeovers".

This is the reimagining of "Strawberry Shortcake", a ridiculous character that was dorky in the 1980's:



Aside from the fact that the original Strawberry Shortcake was a flagrant Raggedy Ann ripoff that it's hard to imagine resonating among kids who were born during the Disco Years, this character has been more than updated -- she's been slimmed down significantly. She's no longer a little girl with baby fat -- now she's a Tween who's ready for her close-up, Ms. Liebowitz.

The New York Times on this phenomenon:

Strawberry Shortcake, part of a line of scented dolls, now prefers fresh fruit to gumdrops, appears to wear just a dab of lipstick (but no rouge), and spends her time chatting on a cellphone instead of brushing her calico cat, Custard. Her new look was unveiled Tuesday, along with plans for a new line of toys from Hasbro.

She is not the only aging fictional star to get a facelift. An unusually large number of classic characters for children are being freshened up and reintroduced — on store shelves, on the Internet and on television screens — as their corporate owners try to cater to parents’ nostalgia and children’s YouTube-era sensibilities. Adding momentum is a retail sector hoping to find refuge from a rough economy in the tried and true.

Warner Brothers hopes to “reinvigorate and reimagine” Bugs Bunny and Scooby-Doo through a new virtual world on the Internet, where people will be able to dress up the characters pretty much any way they want. American Greetings is dusting off another of its lines, the Care Bears, which will return with a fresh look this fall (less belly fat, longer eyelashes).

And 4Kids Entertainment, which licenses the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, will revive them next year in new video games, where they will have more muscles and less attitude.

[snip]

Reinventing these beloved characters without inflicting indelible damage is one of the entertainment industry’s trickiest maneuvers.

[snip]

If the classic characters look less stodgy, the companies hope, they will appeal not only to parents who remember them fondly, but also to children who might automatically be suspicious of toys their parents played with. For parents, nostalgia is considered a bigger sales hook than ever because of the increasingly violent and hyper-sexualized media landscape.

So what the hell do these parents think they're getting with Ninja Turtles who are as buff as the steroid-era Schwarzenegger and nymphet Strawberry Shortcakes? If you'll click through to the article, you'll see a picture of another 1980's character, Angelina Ballerina, a dancing mouse who in her original incarnation was a little girl mouse complete with baby fat, and has now been "reimagined" as a long, lean, leggy mouse worthy of George Balanchine's American Ballet Theatre.

I realize that it's fashionable to have the vapors over the so-called "childhood obesity epidemic" (which interestingly, seems to have levelled off coinciding with the reduction in the use of trans fats in commercially-prepared foods). But is "reimagining" characters geared toward small children by primarily making them thinner and sexing them up the way to do it?

A study released in the fall of 2000 found that chldren's television viewing habits have marked effect on body image (emphases mine):

In a new study to appear this fall in the journal Communication Research, Harrison surveyed about 300 students, aged 6 to 8 years, at 2 mostly white elementary schools in the Midwest about the amount of television they watch, their favorite television characters, and their beliefs about the ideal body shape and fat stereotyping.

She also measured the students' disordered eating symptoms by using the Children's Eating Attitudes Test, an empirical scale containing more than 2 dozen cognitive and behavioral self-report items. Sample items include "I stay away from foods with sugar in them" and "I think a lot about having fat on my body."

Even after controlling for the fact that some children with eating problems specifically seek out body-related information on television, Harrison found that television viewing, in general, predicts eating disorder symptoms for both boys and girls.

"The fact that the correlation remained suggests that even for children who have little or no interest in fitness and dieting television content, increased television exposure is still linked to increased disordered eating," she says.

However, while children's television viewing may indicate the development of eating disorders, Harrison did not find that children necessarily favor thin body-shape standards. This suggests that children may begin modeling the dieting and exercising behaviors they see on television even before they actually begin to internalize the thin-body ideal.

In fact, the girls in the study who watched the most television chose a heavier figure as representing the ideal body size for adult women and a thinner figure as representing their own. This is opposite the pattern one might expect, in which television viewing would predict the overestimation of one's own body size and the choice of unrealistically thin standards for the ideal size of females in general, Harrison says.

"Girls who were interpersonally attracted to average-weight female characters reported the healthiest (or normal) body-size choices and believed thinness to be relatively unimportant," she says. "This suggests that adopting normal-weight role models on television could be beneficial for girls."

In contrast, those girls attracted to thin female television characters are more likely to view their own bodies as heavier, while boys attracted to thin male characters favor a thinner ideal-body size for males, the study shows.

So if all you're going to put out there are "thinner" female television characters, guess what you're going to get?

Labels: rant

John McCain, looking scarier by the day, tells Brian Williams in no uncertain terms that he is ready to commit as many troops as needed in Iraq for as long as it takes:



With many soldiers on their third, fourth, and fifth deployments, and the National Guard already decimated here in the U.S., is anyone going to ask John McCain from whence he plans to obtain these troops?

Here's what the military is doing even now to try to step up recruitment (emphases mine):

The “Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict” was ratified in December 2002. It is supposed to keep children under 18 from being preyed on by recruiters and guarantees basic protections to former child soldiers seeking refugee protection in the United States or who are in U.S. custody for alleged crimes.

Victor Jackson witnessed violations firsthand after being approached by a recruiter while in high school.

“He (the Air Force recruiter) made a lot of promises to me and the only promise they kept was the part about me getting hollered at and bossed around,” said Mr. Jackson, who was discharged after serving 13 months. “He lied about the options I would have once I got in, the opportunities for me were altered and even the dream sheet they have you fill out is a lie.”

Mr. Jackson signed up to make money as he awaited the birth of his daughter, but later regretted it. “They moved me from Texas to Delaware, which wasn’t my place of choice. I was told that I would get at least 6 months to prepare myself to go overseas but within 3 months I was in Saudi Arabia. They made us watch videos to put in us hate for people across seas but I saw that everyone over there is not like that. They are a bunch of liars,” he said.

“Military recruitment tools aimed at youth under 18, including Pentagon-produced video games, military training corps, and databases of students’ personal information, have no place in America’s schools,” said Jennifer Turner of the ACLU Human Rights Project. “The United States military’s procedures for recruiting students plainly violate internationally accepted standards and fail to protect youth from abusive and aggressive recruitment tactics,” she said. The ACLU report was released May 13.

The report notes that recruiters disproportionately target poor and minority students and use public schools as prime recruiting grounds. The ACLU charges exaggerated promises of financial rewards, coercion, deception and sexual abuse by recruiters nullify so-called “voluntariness” of recruitment. A 2007 survey of New York City high school students by the New York Civil Liberties Union and other organizations found more than 1 in 5 students, including students as young as 14, reported the use of class time by military recruiters.

Jeremy Jenkins, a high school senior, was first approached by a Marine recruiter at 16-years-old. “They (military recruiters) are always at school career days and other events with attractive setups to entice young people. I think the national defense is important but recruiters should only impart knowledge to young people and not influence them under the age of 18,” he said.

Mr. Jenkins is on his way to the Naval Academy because of his dream to be a pilot. “It had nothing to do with a recruiter or the Jr. ROTC because I didn’t want to join on. However, the Navy has presented me with an opportunity to achieve my dream but of course they make no guarantees,” he said.

Statistics from the New York survey noted nearly 1 in 5 respondents at selected schools did not believe anyone in their school could properly advise them about the risks and benefits of military enlistment. Additionally, almost 1 in 3 students surveyed were unsure if such a person was available in their school. Nearly half of respondents did not know who should be told about military recruiter misconduct.

“I wanted to join the Marines in the 8th grade because they had brochures at the carnivals we had at school,” said Toni Cervantes, who is now college bound. “But I quickly changed my mind after hearing stories from my friends who joined and discovered that it was nothing like the recruiters promised. The so-called free ride is a long process.”

Are Blacks and Hispanics the primary recruiting targets? According to information from the Department of Defense, from 2000 to 2007, the percentage of Blacks enlisting in the various armed forces decreased by 6 percent while Hispanic enlistment jumped about 30 percent. Defense Department population studies revealed most recruits are from lower income backgrounds and only 8 percent of recruits have a parent who is a professional. With over $1 billion a year spent on recruiting efforts, the Defense Department examines long term trends in the youth population and evaluates how to increase interest in the military.

“It’s no mystery that the armed forces target the urban areas,” said an Army military recruiter in Houston and the country’s southwest region. “We go to a lot of Black and Hispanic schools for career days, programs, and other functions because we have a quota to meet every year as it relates to Blacks and Hispanics. It is true that those students are more adamant to join on with us because of the opportunities that are given to them—although many may disagree. But we do help a lot of people who don’t have any other option coming out of high school.”

Isn't it funny how conservatives have no problem with quotas if those quotas are for Black and Hispanic youth to be sent to Iraq to die for George Bush's and John McCain's fragile egos?

And what does it say about a country in which for those unlucky enough to be born into low-income families, the only option coming out of high school is to be cannon fodder for leaders who send them to war based on lies, and would-be leaders who want to continue those wars as a means of resolving their own war demons?

Bob Herbert writes today on the meager prospects for these kids:

These are the teenagers and young adults — roughly 16 to 24 years old — who are not in school and basically have no hope of finding work. The bureaucrats compiling the official unemployment rate don’t even bother counting these young people. They are no one’s constituency. They might as well not exist.

Except that they do exist. There are four million or more of these so-called disconnected youths across the country. They hang out on street corners in cities large and small — and increasingly in suburban and rural areas.

If you ask how they survive from day to day, the most likely response is: “I hustle,” which could mean anything from giving haircuts in a basement to washing a neighbor’s car to running the occasional errand.

Or it could mean petty thievery or drug dealing or prostitution or worse.

This is the flip side of the American dream. The United States economy, which has trouble producing enough jobs to keep the middle class intact, has left these youngsters all-but-completely behind.

“These kids are being challenged in ways that my generation was not,” said David Jones, the president of the Community Service Society of New York, which tries to develop ways to connect these young men and women with employment opportunities, or get them back into school.

It is extremely difficult because, for the most part, the jobs are not there and the educational establishment is having a hard enough time teaching the kids who are still in school.

“Schools have not made much of an effort to bring this population back in,” said Mr. Jones. “Once you fall out of the system, you’re basically on no one’s programmatic radar screen.”

So these kids drift. Some are drawn to gangs. A disproportionate number become involved in crime. It is a tragic story, and very few people are paying attention.

The economic policies of the past few decades have favored the wealthy and the well-connected to a degree that has been breathtaking to behold. The Nation magazine has devoted its current issue to the Gilded Age-type inequality that has been the result.

Just a little bit of help to the millions of youngsters trying to get their first tentative foothold in that economy should not be too much to ask.

It’s not as if these kids don’t want to work. Many of them search and search until they finally become discouraged. The summer job market, which has long been an important first step in preparing teenagers for the world of work, is shaping up this year as the weakest in more than half a century, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

Now, with the overall economy deteriorating, the situation for poorly educated young people will only grow worse. As Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies, told The Times recently:

“When you get into a recession, kids always get hit the hardest. Kids always go to the back of the hiring queue. Now, they find themselves with a lot of other people in line ahead of them.”

As the ranks of these youngsters grow, so does their potential to become a destabilizing factor in the society.

...or cannon fodder, which is the plan the Republicans have for them.


(h/t for Williams/McCain video: JedReport)

Labels: draft, John McCain, military readiness

A good-sized swath of America's heartland is under water, and you'd never know it from reading the newspapers or watching the news. Via Warren Street at Blue Girl, Red State comes this on-the-scene report from Le Grand Orange:

Darrell in Iowa writes:

I am in Mason City.  Our levees broke Sunday morning.  Flood stage is 7 foot and waters are now at 19 feet.  Hundreds of homes and businesses are underwater.  The City's water plant was flooded and the entire city of 30,000 is without potable water.  A couple of hours ago the main electric substation flooded and failed and much of the city is without power.  People remain in flooded homes.  Early tonight I saw people wandering the streets not knowing where to go.  There are entrie areas of the city with NO emergency personnel on hand.

NOBODY from the outside has come to help.  Our local first responders are exhausted and overwhelmed.  Small rural towns downstream tonight are being devasted.  Levees everywhere are failing.  Calls for help in these small towns have been unmet.  Portions of our local guard are in Iraq.

The homeland has been left unprotected and people are suffering horribly.

"Darrell in Iowa"'s updates are here. Obviously someone chastised him for drawing parallels with New Orleans and complaining that the National Guard was not there to help. That seems a shame and uncalled-for. That Iowa was similarly left to fend for itself in no way diminishes what happened to New Orleans three years ago -- a tragedy that continues to this day. This gets back to that unfortunate concept of "a patent on suffering" -- that there is only so much empathy to go around. That our government is letting white communities drown as blithely as it did black communities should tell us that it isn't even about race -- it's about a fundamental contempt for EVERY American not in the Bush Family Circle.

As for the National Guard, complaints that the Guard just isn't there isn't a knock on Our Fearless Troops™ it's a knock on their Commander-in-Chief, who has sent them off to fight in a war based on lies so that he doesn't have to institute a draft.

The fact of the matter remains this: that once again, a section of this country is flooded, and the attitude of the Federal government is "Fuck you...you're on your own." This is what Republican policies look like. This is what making the government so small you could drown it in a bathtub looks like. This is what the domestic consequences of a war fought on the cheap look like. And it isn't over yet:

A dam near the Wisconsin Dells resort area broke on Monday, sweeping away some homes, as torrential rains caused more flooding across parts of the U.S. Midwest, authorities said.

No deaths or injuries were reported, though residents living beside a few rain-swollen rivers in central Wisconsin were urged to evacuate, the Columbia County Sheriff's office said.

The failure of the Delton Dam on Lake Delton caused mudslides that swept away a few homes. The water rushed to form a new tributary to the Wisconsin River, which eventually empties into the Mississippi River.

Police issued a warning about debris swept into rivers from collapsed buildings and roads.

Other dams in the Wisconsin Dells region, which is famous for its scenic lakes and resorts, were also threatened by a series of drenching storms in recent weeks, authorities said.

Gov. Jim Doyle declared a state of emergency in 30 counties in the southern half of Wisconsin. Similar declarations have been made in recent days in Iowa and Indiana, with flooding also affecting parts of Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota.

"This is an area that's been bombarded with rain over the weekend, anywhere from 5 to 10 inches, and you're dealing with saturated soils. So any rain that falls becomes run-off," the National Weather Service's Pat Slattery said.

Nearly one-third of Iowa's 99 counties were experiencing flooding, according to Gov. Chet Culver.

Flood damage estimated in the tens of millions of dollars were being added to recent storm damage in Iowa, including a tornado that flattened the town of Parkersburg two weeks ago.

The water treatment plant Mason City, Iowa, was swamped this weekend by the Winnebago River, three of four bridges in the town of Charles City were swept away by flooding of the Cedar River, and the town of New Hartford was evacuated.

Many corn and soybean acres were under water in Midwestern states, hurting farmers' prospects after a wet spring that had already delayed planting in many places.

Iowa and Illinois alone produce one-third of U.S. corn and soybeans, usually the world's biggest harvests of those crops.

And that's another side note: What happens to the prices of gasoline and meat when the crop used to make ethanol and feedstocks for farm animals are under water? If you think food and gasoline prices are high now, just wait till these shortages work their way through the system. Jimmy Higgins at Fire on the Mountain has some thoughts on this. Photos from yesterday in Cedar Falls, Iowa can be found here. And over at Culture Kitchen, a reminder of just who was laughing and posing with a cake (that was never eaten, just thrown away, like everything -- and everyone -- else used in Republican photo-ops) the last time floods devastated an entire region of the country.

Where is the so-called President? Where is the national media? Is trying to perpetuate the myth that John McCain is a popular, likeable maverick so taxing to the news organizations that they have no time or resources to cover what's happening in our own country?

Labels: incompetence, media, Midwest storms

In McCain World, Vladimir Putin is the President of Germany:



Nice going, Republicans. You've nominated a guy about whom the only question is this: moron or senile?

Bigass h/t to Cernig)

Labels: John McCain, moron or senile

Awesome news via Greg Sargent:

Obama's speech in Raleigh launching his economy tour is underway, and towards the end, during a discussion of health care, he drops a surprise aside that wasn't in the speech's prepared remarks:

"By the way, I'm going to be partnering with Elizabeth Edwards, we're going to be figuring all this out."

More on this when we can establish the details.

Late Update: The key political context here, of course, is that back in April, Elizabeth revealed that Obama's health care plan wasn't her favorite. Enlisting her as a public voice on health care could obviously help with the Obama camp's outreach to women and help win over skeptics in general.

Late Late Update: For an idea of just how effective Elizabeth Edwards might be as a surrogate on health care for Obama and against McCain, take a look at this take-down by Elizabeth of McCain's plan.

Smart move, especially since Elizabeth Edwards was cool on the original plan sketched out by the Obama campaign. Now we'll see if the presence of The Mighty Elizabeth is enough for the Hillarions or if they will insist on having their warrior princess in the VP spot or else they'll sell out their daughters.

Labels: Barack Obama, Elizabeth Edwards, health care

They must think we're stupid; that we aren't wise to the tactics used by wingnuts to make it look like Democrats are radicals. Another Republican ratfuck busted:

Earlier today, some extreme rightwing blogs went into outrage overdrive as someone "discovered" an anti-semitic blog over at the open-registration "community blog" my.barrackobama.com. Israel Matzav declared “Barack Obama Explains how the Jewish Lobby Works.” Doug Ross was a little better off with the “Official Obama Blog.” LGF, in a classic pot-calling, said that there was "something deeply wrong with a presidential candidate who attracts so many of these hateful psychotics."

Kyle and Matt over at Comments From Left Field, however, would like to point out that - as usual - the outrage is entirely manufactured. The truth is that it's a "ratfuck" operation, reminsicent of Roger Stone's infamous "Socialists for McCloskey" scam in 1972.

How? Matt explains:

- The original “Jewish Lobby” post, copy-pasted to my.barack.com by a “Juan Carlos”, appeared in April in on a site called “Real Jew News”, run by anti-semite nutcase “Brother Nathaenal”.

- All anti-semitic comments originally appeared on the Real Jew News post, with corresponding timestamps. For some reason the comments at my.barack.com have my.barack urls, even though they appear to have been directly copy pasted from Real Jew News.

[snip]

Let's repeat that for the hard of understanding : The anti-semitic post and its hateful comments were ported directly over from the rightwing Real Jew News site; the names and time stamps weren’t even changed to protect the innocent. Only two comments were made on the actual Obama site - and they were both complaints about the post.

You know, that the wingnuts are doing this tells us a lot more about them than it tells the world about us. They are frightened, cornered animals, who are always the most dangerous. I'm sure some of your friends will get e-mails about this alleged anti-Semitic post at My.Barack.Obama. It's our job to set them straight.

Labels: Anti-Semitism, insanity, Republic Party, scumbaggery, wingnuttia

The company he keeps:

Like lawn ornaments in summer, protesters outside the local abortion clinic are fixtures in many places.

Their presence and message have long been so predictable that, without looking or listening, people believe they understand the point. So you might not notice that the protest taking place outside your local clinic has fundamentally changed.

It is no longer about abortion. Saturday, June 7, is the anniversary of Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court decision that granted married people the right to use contraception. To mark the day, anti-abortion groups will take to their normal posts outside clinic entrances not to convince Americans to oppose abortion but rather to stop using contraception.

The national campaign is called "Protest the Pill Day 08'" and it is organized by several leading anti-choice groups including the American Life League and Pharmacists for Life. The groups' Web site is full of unscientific, medically inaccurate information.

Anti-contraception activism has been working its way up the priority list of the anti-choice movement in the U.S. in recent years and Saturday's campaign will be one of the most organized and visible displays of this broadening agenda.

There is not one pro-life organization in the U.S. that supports contraception. In fact, the multi-pronged attack against the right to use contraception is led entirely by anti-abortion groups. Their initiatives include opposing health insurance coverage of contraception; urging pharmacists to deny women's birth control prescriptions; and attempting (with no scientific rationale) to reclassify the birth control pill, and all other hormonal forms of contraception, as abortion methods with the goal of banning them. This represents an important and frightening shift in focus by the anti-abortion movement.

Despite the fact that contraception is the only proven way to prevent unwanted pregnancy and reduce abortion rates, anti-choice groups would forgo these benefits, and even risk dramatically increasing abortion rates, in favor of a larger, more insidious goal: changing Americans' sex lives.

That's the Republican base, folks. That's who McCain is going to have to mollify. And if he has to do it by turning American women into mandated brood mares, he'll do it.

Labels: Christofascist Zombie Brigade, John McCain

Last night I posted my favorite clip from Blazing Saddles, and it's tempting to post it again today, but I'm not going to. Because while it's a lot more fun to ridicule people who keep voting for people who screw them over every time as idiots, this year the stakes are so high that we need to find out WHY they keep doing this, and what we can do to reach them -- because they are bearing the brunt of the deliberate strategy of the Bush Administration's and the petroleum industry cabal of producers and traders to turn this country into a land of the disgustingly rich and the grindingly poor:

Across broad swaths of the South, Southwest and the upper Great Plains, the combination of low incomes, high gas prices and heavy dependence on pickup trucks and vans is putting an even tighter squeeze on family budgets.

Here in the Mississippi Delta, some farm workers are borrowing money from their bosses so they can fill their tanks and get to work. Some are switching jobs for shorter commutes.

People are giving up meat so they can buy fuel. Gasoline theft is rising. And drivers are running out of gas more often, leaving their cars by the side of the road until they can scrape together gas money.

The disparity between rural America and the rest of the country is a matter of simple home economics. Nationwide, Americans are now spending about 4 percent of their take-home income on gasoline. By contrast, in some counties in the Mississippi Delta, that figure has surpassed 13 percent.

As a result, gasoline expenses are rivaling what families spend on food and housing.

“This crisis really impacts those who are at the economic margins of society, mostly in the rural areas and particularly parts of the Southeast,” said Fred Rozell, retail pricing director at the Oil Price Information Service, a fuel analysis firm. “These are people who have to decide between food and transportation.”

A survey by Mr. Rozell’s firm late last month found that the gasoline crisis is taking the highest toll, as a percentage of income, on people in rural areas of the South, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming and North and South Dakota.

With the exception of rural Maine, the Northeast appears least affected by gasoline prices because people there make more money and drive shorter distances, or they take a bus or train to work.

But across Mississippi and the rural South, little public transit is available and people have no choice but to drive to work. Since jobs are scarce, commutes are frequently 20 miles or more. Many of the vehicles on the roads here are old rundown trucks, some getting 10 or fewer miles to the gallon.

The survey showed that of the 13 counties where people spent 13 percent or more of their family income on gasoline, 5 were located in Mississippi, 4 were in Alabama, 3 were in Kentucky and 1 was in West Virginia.

How about that -- the counties where people spend over 10% of their income now on gasoline are located in the most reliable Republican-voting states in the country. You wonder why they keep doing it. And it's the job of the Democratic Party to find out why -- and convince them that while changing the way they've always voted may seem scary, their future under John McCain is going to be far worse than anything they can imagine under Barack Obama.

Labels: 2008 election, oil

So...who am us, anyway?

Are we the people who really do want to see a color-blind society, where any child, black, white, Latino, female -- can dream of running for president? Or do we think the pre-Civil Rights era was just fine and dandy and that treating people differently because of the color of their skin is just fine and dandy? Have we come a long way in terms of living up to the idea that everyone is created equal, or are we as a society still shunning shaking the hands of black people, lest it "rub off"?

Floyd Brown, the creator of the infamous Willie Horton ad of 1988, is betting on the latter:

On a website he calls ExposeObama.com, Floyd G. Brown, the producer of the "Willie Horton" ad that helped defeat Michael Dukakis in 1988, is preparing an encore.

Brown is raising money for a series of ads that he says will show Barack Obama to be out of touch on an issue of fundamental concern to voters: violent crime. One spot already on the Internet attacks the presumptive Democratic nominee for opposing a bill while he was an Illinois legislator that would have extended the death penalty to gang-related murders.

"When the time came to get tough, Obama chose to be weak. . . . Can a man so weak in the war on gangs be trusted in the war on terror?" the video asks.

Though crime has taken a back seat in the presidential race to the war in Iraq and the economy, some Republicans think that Obama is vulnerable on this issue and hope to inject it into the campaign.

Obama and the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain, have some sharply different views on crime, but the job of president has little to do with day-to-day law enforcement.

Brown and GOP strategists say such ads stimulate a debate on crime and punishment and may provide a window into the morality of a candidate.

This focus on "violent crime" seems to be a bit anachronistic in the face of a vanishing job market, $4 gasoline and skyrocketing fuel costs. On the surface, it sounds as if Floyd Brown is frozen in 1988, when people really were afraid of, as Mark Alan Stamaty wrote in a cartoon of that year depicting George H.W. Bush, "killer negroes are coming to get you". But what I fear is that Brown is simply ahead of the curve here.

We've already seen the demonization of Latinos as the job market has diminished, but mostly in that context. The Bush Administration tried the "Al Queda is Recruiting People in Latin America" thing, but that didn't fly. Latino has largely been the new black in terms of job fears, but with radio spots suddenly appearing that advertise locking caps to gas tanks, I think Floyd is betting that it's only a matter of time before desperate people start not just siphoning gas, but breaking into people's houses in search of money and food. When society collapses after people can no longer drive to jobs or heat their homes, and when high fuel costs and shortages mean food doesn't get to market, guess who Republican politicians are going to blame?

Hint: it isn't George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the party that got us into this mess in the first place.

(UPDATE: I just opened my e-mail, and apparently there is an e-mail going around showing photographs of Obama's relatives in Africa and photos of Obama in his childhood. I won't dignify the text by reprinting it here, and it really needs the accompanying images. But it clearly plays to Fears of a Black Planet. What's interesting about it, however, is that the subtext of this e-mail is much ire and huffing and puffing about Obama's alleged support for Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga -- which makes me want to do some more research into Kenyan politics, who's supporting whom, and what interests benefit from the dissemination of this trash, so stay tuned. My guess is that this e-mail was triggered by this June 1 article in the Baltimore Sun about the optimism that Kenyans feel about Obama's presidential prospects. There's clearly more here than I have time to investigate right now, but rest assured, I will. If you receive this e-mail, you'll know what we're up against.)

Labels: fearmongering, Republicans, scumbaggery

Here's the man the disgruntled Hillary feminists plan to vote for to show solidarity with their feminist heroine:

McCain likes to illustrate his moral fibre by referring to his five years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his commitment to family values, the 71-year-old former US Navy pilot pays warm tribute to his beautiful blonde wife, Cindy, with whom he has four children.

But there is another Mrs McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator’s presidential campaign. She is seldom seen and rarely written about, despite being mother to McCain’s three eldest children.

And yet, had events turned out differently, it would be she, rather than Cindy, who would be vying to be First Lady. She is McCain’s first wife, Carol, who was a famous beauty and a successful swimwear model when they married in 1965.

She was the woman McCain dreamed of during his long incarceration and torture in Vietnam’s infamous ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison and the woman who faithfully stayed at home looking after the children and waiting anxiously for news.

But when McCain returned to America in 1973 to a fanfare of publicity and a handshake from Richard Nixon, he discovered his wife had been disfigured in a terrible car crash three years earlier. Her car had skidded on icy roads into a telegraph pole on Christmas Eve, 1969. Her pelvis and one arm were shattered by the impact and she suffered massive internal injuries.

When Carol was discharged from hospital after six months of life-saving surgery, the prognosis was bleak. In order to save her legs, surgeons

had been forced to cut away huge sections of shattered bone, taking with it her tall, willowy figure. She was confined to a wheelchair and was forced to use a catheter.

Through sheer hard work, Carol learned to walk again. But when John McCain came home from Vietnam, she had gained a lot of weight and bore little resemblance to her old self.

Today, she stands at just 5ft4in and still walks awkwardly, with a pronounced limp. Her body is held together by screws and metal plates and, at 70, her face is worn by wrinkles that speak of decades of silent suffering.

For nearly 30 years, Carol has maintained a dignified silence about the accident, McCain and their divorce. But last week at the bungalow where she now lives at Virginia Beach, a faded seaside resort 200 miles south of Washington, she told The Mail on Sunday how McCain divorced her in 1980 and married Cindy, 18 years his junior and the heir to an Arizona brewing fortune, just one month later.

Go. Read. It's truly Dee-Lish.

Yes, my feminist friends, you're planning to vote for a guy who dumped his wife because she had the temerity to be disfigured in an automobile accident and gained weight. You know, when you look at Cindy McCain these days, she doesn't look happy, does she? Maybe it's the 4 tons of Botox she has injected into her face in a vain attempt to still be the 25-year-old her husband fell for in the first place. Or maybe it's that a man who dumped a wife because she didn't look the same anymore, and who called the woman for whom he dumped her a "cunt" and a "trollop" in public, probably berates her in private because SHE didn't stay 25 forever either.

Labels: John McCain, scumbaggery