Is "Hussein" the "Emily", "Jordan", "Jacob", "Amanda", or "Ashley" of 2008?

Emily Nordling has never met a Muslim, at least not to her knowledge. But this spring, Ms. Nordling, a 19-year-old student from Fort Thomas, Ky., gave herself a new middle name on Facebook.com, mimicking her boyfriend and shocking her father.

“Emily Hussein Nordling,” her entry now reads.

With her decision, she joined a growing band of supporters of Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who are expressing solidarity with him by informally adopting his middle name.

The result is a group of unlikely-sounding Husseins: Jewish and Catholic, Hispanic and Asian and Italian-American, from Jaime Hussein Alvarez of Washington, D.C., to Kelly Hussein Crowley of Norman, Okla., to Sarah Beth Hussein Frumkin of Chicago.

Jeff Strabone of Brooklyn now signs credit card receipts with his newly assumed middle name, while Dan O’Maley of Washington, D.C., jiggered his e-mail account so his name would appear as “D. Hussein O’Maley.” Alex Enderle made the switch online along with several other Obama volunteers from Columbus, Ohio, and now friends greet him that way in person, too.

Mr. Obama is a Christian, not a Muslim. Hussein is a family name inherited from a Kenyan father he barely knew, who was born a Muslim and died an atheist. But the name has become a political liability. Some critics on cable television talk shows dwell on it, while others, on blogs or in e-mail messages, use it to falsely assert that Mr. Obama is a Muslim or, more fantastically, a terrorist.

“I am sick of Republicans pronouncing Barack Obama’s name like it was some sort of cuss word,” Mr. Strabone wrote in a manifesto titled “We Are All Hussein” that he posted on his own blog and on dailykos.com.

So like the residents of Billings, Mont., who reacted to a series of anti-Semitic incidents in 1993 with a townwide display of menorahs in their front windows, these supporters are brandishing the name themselves.

Labels: Barack Obama

If you can't manage to pay your fucking property taxes, why should we trust you with the budget of an entire nation?

When you're poor, it can be hard to pay the bills. When you're rich, it's hard to keep track of all the bills that need paying. It's a lesson Cindy McCain learned the hard way when NEWSWEEK raised questions about an overdue property-tax bill on a La Jolla, Calif., property owned by a trust that she oversees. Mrs. McCain is a beer heiress with an estimated $100 million fortune and, along with her husband, she owns at least seven properties, including condos in California and Arizona.

San Diego County officials, it turns out, have been sending out tax notices on the La Jolla property, an oceanfront condo, for four years without receiving a response. County records show the bills, which were mailed to a Phoenix address associated with Mrs. McCain's trust, were returned by the post office. According to a McCain campaign aide, who requested anonymity when discussing a private matter, an elderly aunt of Mrs. McCain's lives in the condo, and the bank that manages the trust has not been receiving tax bills on the property. Shortly after NEWSWEEK inquired about the matter, the McCain aide e-mailed a receipt dated Friday, June 27, confirming payment by the trust to San Diego County in the amount of $6,744.42. County officials say the trust still owes an additional $1,742 for this year, an amount that is overdue and will go into default July 1. Told of the outstanding $1,742, the aide said: "The trust has paid all bills shown owing as of today and will pay all other bills due."

So AFTER the story breaks the McCains pay the taxes? How difficult is it to call the tax assessor and give him/her the correct address to which to send the bills?

If the McCains can't handle owning eight houses, perhaps they ought to consider being more like the common people they're trying to pass as and sell a few of them.

Labels: hypocrisy, John McCain

Dumbass of the Day. Chickenshit Little Weasel of the Weekend. Moron of the Month.

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present T. Boone Pickens:

T. Boone Pickens is not giving up his million dollars.

T. Boone Pickens (Photo: Fred Prouser/Reuters)That’s how much he had offered to pay anyone who could disprove any of the accusations the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth made against Senator John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election – attacks Mr. Pickens, the billionaire Texas oilman, helped finance.

A group of Swift boat veterans sympathetic to Mr. Kerry sent Mr. Pickens a letter last week taking him up on the challenge. In 12 pages, plus a 42-page attachment of military records and other documents, they identified not just one but ten lies in the group’s campaign against Mr. Kerry. They offered to meet with him to provide Mr. Kerry’s journals and videotapes from Vietnam and a copy of his full military record certified by the Navy – a key demand of Mr. Pickens and veterans who believe Mr. Kerry lied about his service to win his military decorations.

Mr. Pickens replied with a one-page letter, thanking the veterans for their research and their service, but politely saying there had been a misunderstanding. “Key aspects of my offer of $1 million have not been accurately reported,” he wrote.

I guess Pickens is saving his money so he can offer it to whomever can prove that Barack Obama is not a Muslim terrorist.

Labels: assholes, liars, right-wing hatemongers

Not that I was, but you have to title it something.

Joe Cocker. With subtitles. After 40 years, we now know what the fuck he was talking about:



Next up: The Joe Cocker Bible Translation Project.

(via Hoffmania)

Labels: comedy, music

Pot, meet kettle:

Zimbabwe came under threat of further sanctions on Saturday as President Bush said the U.S. was working on new ways to punish longtime leader Robert Mugabe and his allies following the widely denounced presidential runoff election.

Earlier Saturday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the U.S. plans to introduce a U.N. resolution as early as next week seeking tough measures against Zimbabwe.

"We will press for strong action by the United Nations, including an arms embargo on Zimbabwe and travel ban on regime officials," Bush said in a statement issued while he spent the weekend at Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland.

Too bad no one thought to do that here after December 12, 2000.

Labels: George W. Bush, hypocrisy, icepick meet forehead

I wish it were going to be daily, just as I wish we could do the Daily Maron. But we can't. Deal with it.

But if you're feeling cynical today, let Unka George speak from you from the Great Beyond, where he and Molly Ivins and Richard Pryor are sitting down with Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and James Thurber knocking back a few (because there's no such thing as addiction in heaven) and laughing their asses off because we're still here in this God-forsaken level of reality dealing with this shit:



(h/t: Drifty the Great and Powerful)

Labels: comedy

It looks already like Florida is going to be an electoral mess again.

In 2000, Palm Beach County was the home of the infamous butterfly ballot which the Palm Beach Post concluded cost Al Gore the election in 2000.

With just over four months till the 2008 election, Palm Beach is having election problems again:

The votes for three precincts weren't counted on election night after Tuesday's special city commission election, prompting the candidates to ponder the reliability of the new optical-scan system as the county heads toward a busy election season culminating with the presidential vote in November.

Nearly 700 votes from three precincts - 14 percent of the total cast - were added into the final results released by the supervisor of elections office after the standard post-election audit Wednesday and Thursday.

The uncounted votes included those from Ibis Golf & Country Club and Riverwalk, two gated communities that produced the highest vote totals in the race. The third precinct was Ironhorse, another gated community.

Under the new totals, Kimberly Mitchell, who served as District 3 commissioner through March, remained the winner. But retired technology company executive Gregg Weiss vaulted into second place, and real estate attorney Rebecca Young finished third.

"The fact that they could not get this right in this small election gives me really grave concern about what's going to happen in a very important national election," Mitchell said. "That's a lot of votes to have not counted the first time."

The county primary election is Aug. 26, and the general election is Nov. 4.

Weiss said he is considering asking for a public inspection of all 4,792 ballots but will first try to talk with Supervisor of Elections Arthur Anderson about the issue. As of Friday evening, he hadn't received a return phone call, he said.

"Woo-hoo. I'm going to have to go out and celebrate tonight, I guess," he said, referring to his new second-place finish. "Are they sure they got them all?"

During the audit in the two days after the election, three cartridges containing vote totals were labeled "suspended," meaning their votes hadn't been counted on election night when all the cartridges were brought to a tabulation center to be "read" by vote-counting machines, said elections office spokeswoman Kathy Adams.

After the audit, they were read and the votes were added to the totals. The cartridges were secure and accounted for at all times, Adams said.

In the end, the system worked the way it was supposed to, she said. The results posted on the elections office Web site and on the county's cable TV channel are unofficial until after the audit, she noted.

"That's why it's marked unofficial, because when they do the audit, they find out if anything was not included," Adams said.

She said the office didn't know why the cartridges weren't read properly the first time. She said it was possible that one reader wasn't working properly and that all three cartridges were read by that reader.

"That's one of the things that they're researching now," she said. "That was the fortunate part of being able to have an election like this, before the primary."

The other fortunate thing is that it allows partisan election officials to come up with ways to change the counts in the post-election audit to produce the desired result.

Labels: 2008 election, electronic voting machines

Funny how we'd all but forgotten about the anthrax envelopes that were received by various politicians and media figures in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. George W. Bush recently made a show of once again having interest in the apprehension of Osama Bin Laden as a means of salvaging his legacy, but frankly, I think that was just cover for the moment at the end of October when Bush lets Bin Laden out of his apartment in the White House basement. But the anthrax attacks are still an unsolved mystery -- or so goes the conventional wisdom.

Yesterday the Justice Department announced that it would pay Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, who at one point was named as a "person of interest" in the case, $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit Hatfill had filed:

Dr. Hatfill, who worked at the Army’s laboratory at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., in the late 1990s, was the subject of a flood of news media coverage beginning in mid-2002, after television cameras showed Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in biohazard suits searching his apartment near the Army base. He was later named a “person of interest” in the case by then Attorney General John Ashcroft, speaking on national television.

In a news conference in August 2002, Dr. Hatfill tearfully denied that he had anything to do with the anthrax letters and said irresponsible news media coverage based on government leaks had destroyed his reputation.

Dr. Hatfill’s lawsuit, filed in 2003, accused F.B.I. agents and Justice Department officials involved in the criminal investigation of the anthrax mailings of leaking information about him to the news media in violation of the Privacy Act. In order to prove their case, his lawyers took depositions from key F.B.I. investigators, senior officials and a number of reporters who had covered the investigation.

[snip]

The settlement called new attention to the fact that nearly seven years after the toxic letters were mailed, killing five people and sickening at least 17 others, the case has not been solved.

A Justice Department spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse, said in a statement that the government admitted no liability but decided settlement was “in the best interest of the United States.”

“The government remains resolute in its investigation into the anthrax attacks, which killed five individuals and sickened others after lethal anthrax powder was sent through the United States mail,” Mr. Roehrkasse said.

An F.B.I. spokesman, Jason Pack, said the anthrax investigation “is one of the largest and most complex investigations ever conducted by law enforcement” and is currently being pursued by more than 20 agents of the F.B.I. and the Postal Inspection Service.

“Solving this case is a top priority for the F.B.I. and for the family members of the victims who were killed,” Mr. Pack said.

But Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat whose district was the site of a postal box believed to have been used in the attacks, said he would press Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I., for more answers about the status of the case.

“As today’s settlement announcement confirms, this case was botched from the very beginning,” Mr. Holt said. “The F.B.I. did a poor job of collecting evidence, and then inappropriately focused on one individual as a suspect for too long, developing an erroneous theory of the case that has led to this very expensive dead end.”

A top priority, eh? After nearly seven years? I don't think so.

You don't have to fashion a fedora out of Reynolds Wrap to believe that this so-called "investigation" stinks to high heaven. Especially when we look back now at seven years of the Bush Administration doing what it can to jettison those who would dare look at what it is doing -- firing U.S. prosecutors, outing CIA non-official cover operatives, putting pressure on news outlets to squelch stories -- it becomes clear that Dr. Hatfill was simply a red herring to draw attention away from something else.

If we look at who received the letters, you'd have to be an idiot to not ask any questions and to still believe that there is some Tim McVeigh-type out there that the government has not yet apprehended. After all, while there have been scares dince then, there have been no further large-scale anthrax mailings since that one episode following 9/11. But once again, here are the recipients of the anthrax letters in 2001:

1. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Daschle's letter was opened by an aide.
   
2. Democratic Senator and head of the Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy. Leahy's letter had been misdirected to the State Department and had been opened by a postal worker.
   
3. Robert Stevens, photo editor at the National Enquirer. A mailroom clerk named Ernesto Blanco was also sickened. The anthrax envelope was addressed to "Photo Editor", and was received in October 2001 after the Enquirer had run an article and this photograph of a falling-down-drunk Jenna Bush the previous August..
   
4. The offices of The New York Post, which would seem to be an unlikely target, were it not for these headline stories about the Bush twins that had appeared during 2001:
   
   

   
   BOOZING BUSH TWIN NEARLY IN THE CLEAR
   Deborah Orin; New York Post; Sep 7, 2001; pg. 015
   
   BUSH TWINS' BOOZE SERVER OFF THE HOOK
   AP; New York Post; Jun 24, 2001; pg. 012
   
   BUSTED BUSH BABES MAKE DIFFERENT BOOZE PLEAS
   MARILYN RAUBER Post Correspondent; New York Post; Jun 9, 2001; pg. 002
   
   REIN IN THESE BUSH LEAGUERS
   LINDA STASI; New York Post; Jun 3, 2001; pg. 002
   
   DOUBLE SHOT: BUSH TWINS BOTH NAILED
   Jordan Smith in Austin, Texas and Deborah Orin in Washington; New York Post; Jun 1, 2001; pg. 005
   
   JENNA COMES 'CLEAN': BEER-BUST BUSH KID FACES GARBAGE DUTY
   Clemente Lisi; New York Post; May 17, 2001; pg. 003
   
   DELAY IN JENNA'S BREW-HAHA
   Post Wire Services; New York Post; May 3, 2001; pg. 026
   
   W'S FATHERLY ADVICE: DON'T YOU DARE MISTREAT MY DAUGHTERS
   Deborah Orin Bureau Chief; New York Post; Jan 19, 2001; pg. 008W.'S
   Abstract: [Bush]'s warning came a day after The Post revealed that Comedy Central is doing a hasty retreat from plans to paint the Bush twins as "hot and sexy" and maybe lesbians in a new sitcom satirizing the first family.
   

   
   
5. NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw. Brokaw's letter was opened by Erin O'Connor, an assistant to Brokaw. O'Connor developed cutaneous anthrax.
   
6. Individuals who were at ABC and CBS headquarters also developed cutaneous anthrax.
   

The so-called USA PATRIOT Act, which was the first step towards the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, was signed into law by George W. Bush on October 26, 2001.

When the many conspiracy theories related to the 9/11 attacks are brought up, someone always invokes Occam's Razor -- that the simplest answer is the best.

In the case of the anthrax attacks, the U.S. government has spent seven years chasing blind alleys and dead ends, trying to find someone who can be said to have access to weapons-grade anthrax and still be an Islamic terrorist. In the case of the anthrax attacks, the simplest answer points to an intimidation job by the Bush Administration. We've seen for seven years how intimidation works. It's silenced the media and everyone else who knows anything about the chicanery of the gang of thugs and thieves who hijacked our government on December 12, 2000. Sending the military-grade equivalent of a dead fish to those who would, or have already, crossed the Bush Administration is perfectly in character.

Labels: Bush Administration, domestic terrorism

I know it's fashionable for younger people to blame the baby boomers for everything and to think that we're going to somehow be the beneficiaries of huge amounts of cash upon "retirement" after spending our adult lives buying SUVs and McMansions (never mind the reality that in my neighborhood, the boomers are driving Hyundai Accents and Civics and Corollas, while the younger people with little kids are still steaming around in ocean liners on wheels). But for most of us, that's not the reality.

I'm not going to say I did everything right. I moved out of my parents' house a year after graduating college instead of staying home and socking away what little was left after my meager retail management training program salary. Then I insisted on working in glamour industries, toiling as essentially a secretary in an ad agency and a major publishing company before deciding to "sell out" and going to work at Standard & Poor's in 1983. It really wasn't until I was well into my 30's that I was able to put away any kind of significant money for retirement. Today I put away over 10% of my pay and I receive a preposterously generous employer match. My account contains a good balance of stocks and bonds, along with a fixed income component. And almost every penny of both that I have put in this year has disappeared into the disaster that is the United States financial markets.

I know about investing for the long-term, but when you look at long-term fundamentals for this country, they look so bleak that it's hard to blame people for wondering why they should bother investing for future gain when it seems so unlikely that there will be any gain. My long-term timeframe suddenly isn't so long anymore, and it's hard to have any kind of optimism that this mess the Republicans (with the help of spineless, capitulating, corporate whore Democrats) have put us into is going to end in time for my money to not have gone down an empty hole.

Steven Pearlstein, in today's Washington Post:

This thing's going down, fast and hard. Corporate bankruptcies, bond defaults, bank failures, hedge fund meltdowns and 6 percent unemployment. We're caught in one of those vicious, downward spirals that, once it gets going, is very hard to pull out of.

Only this will be a different kind of recession -- a recession with an overlay of inflation. That combo puts the Federal Reserve in a Catch-22 -- whatever it does to solve one problem only makes the other worse. Emerging from a two-day meeting this week, Fed officials signaled that further recession-fighting rate cuts are unlikely and that their next move will be to raise rates to contain inflationary expectations.

Since last June, we've seen a fairly consistent pattern to the economic mood swings. Every three months or so, there's a round of bad news about housing, followed by warnings of more bank write-offs and then a string of disappointing corporate earnings reports. Eventually, things stabilize and there are hints that the worst may be behind us. Stocks regain some of their lost ground, bonds fall and then -- bam -- the whole cycle starts again.

It was only in November that the Dow had recovered from the panicked summer sell-off and hit a record, just above 14,000. By March, it had fallen below 12,000. By May, it climbed above 13,000. Now it's heading for a new floor at 11,000. Officially, that's bear market territory. We'll be lucky if that's the floor.

In explaining why that second-half rebound never occurred, the Fed and the Treasury and the Wall Street machers will say that nobody could have foreseen $140 a barrel oil. As excuses go, blaming it on an oil shock is a hardy perennial. That's what Jimmy Carter and Fed Chairman Arthur Burns did in the late '70s, and what George H.W. Bush and Alan Greenspan did in the early '90s. Don't believe it.

More here.

The real estate crash has hardly even started. Diana Olick at CNBC reports that realtors are telling her that fully a third of sales are distressed properties -- short sales and bank-owned properties.

Here in Bergen County, over a quarter of recent foreclosures have higher judgments than the average purchase price, which means that a good portion of the hammering and nailing and contractor signs and gourmet kitchens with granite countertops that was going on in my vicinity during the last five years and the multiple SUVs in the newly-expanded paver stone driveways was paid for with equity loans taken at the time homes were purchased -- betting on huge price increases in perpetuity.

Houses in my neighborhood are selling once they reach the right price, but so far it looks like many sellers are still not ready to admit that they missed the boat. Not far from where I live, on a main road, is a house very similar to mine, except that it appears NOTHING has EVER been done to it. It started out at peak 2005 price about six months ago, and it's still sitting at a price that's been reduced by over $50,000 -- and is still probably around $30,000 overpriced. One spec house -- a McMansion, of course -- has been on the market for almost a year, and the photos taken by the realtor the builder is now using show a house with bare sheetrock -- not even a coat of primer on the walls. It's listed at close to a million and a half -- still at the original listing price. It has no landscaping and no driveway and it's being sold as having custom landscaping and granite countertops in the kitchen.

And this is an area that hasn't been hard hit yet. But nationwide, a second round of option ARMs is resetting early next year, and then, my friends (as John McCain would say), we are really going to see the feces hit the fan.

It's hard to feel sorry for the very people who would have looked down their noses at me for my cabinet reface job and my refusal to take out a loan to get the "dream" kitchen I would have really wanted -- and are going to find themselves underwater in six months if they aren't already. The problem is that their folly is going to hit everyone around them. It hits in neighborhoods where houses that look as if they were nicely maintained before the bank took them are now boarded up -- affecting the neighborhoods around them. It hits in yesterday's 300-plus-point drop in the Dow, because people are either overextended or afraid that no matter how careful they've been, it's all going to come crashing down around their heads.

Which brings us back to disappearing retirement savings. It's one thing to face that you no longer live in a house worth almost a half million dollars. More than once I've sat in my kitchen with the half-finished reface job and the harvest gold wall oven and the ugly 1970's yellow geometric sheet vinyl floor and said, "No way is this a half-million dollar house." But when we've heard for years from politicians and citizens saying that people who haven't saved enough have no one but themselves to blame, at the same time as we ARE doing what we're supposed to -- foregoing short-term gratification for long-term security -- and seeing the money we're trying to put away for the future disappear as if we were lighting a match to it, it's difficult to judge others who have wanted to at least see trinkets as tangible evidence that they once had cash.

Labels: economic death watch

I hate to rag on George Bush too much about the successful negotiations with North Korea about that country's nuclear program, because it's probably the only thing in his entire misbegotten administration that he's gotten right. But where at one time I would have been obliged, however grudgingly, to congratulate the administration on a job well done, Bush's appalling comments about appeasement just a few weeks ago mean that we have to point out his hypocrisy and that of his entire administration.

Or we could just let Keith Olbermann do it:



Note in particular the condescension with which Bush points out the strengths of negotiation -- as if he'd just discovered something previously unknown to anyone.

Labels: Keith Olbermann, North Korea

I've deliberately stayed away from the petty bullshit foofarah over what Republicans say is the Obama campaign's "illegal" use of the "presidential seal" in a campaign logo, mostly because I haven't wanted to give this particular wingnut snit any more daylight than it already has, especially when it has an undertone of "Who does that boy (sic) think he is?"

As the great Skippy found at Mark Nickolas' blog, the Republicans are not above using the official seal to rake in some bucks.

But more than that, Skippy decided to take the racist suckers of the phallus of John McCain to task for their jumping on the "arrogant" meme that only seems like arrogance when it's done by a black Democrat with the temerity to think he can join the Ultimate Old White Guys' Club.

He has more intestinal fortitude than I do.

Labels: hack journalism, racism

Gilda Radner and Madeline Kahn....together. Sheer perfection.

Labels: comedy

Well, our good friend and resident troll Barry is a happy man tonight, because today the Supreme Court overturned 230 years of precedent and decided that the entire U.S. ought to be just like the Wild, Wild Old West -- where everyone's packing heat, and everyone can just shoot whomever and whatever they want.

But the Bush Administration isn't going to be satisfied with just the overturning of Washington, DC's handgun ban. No, the pencil-dicks in the Bush Administration want everyone to be packing heat in the country's National Parks, so that everyone can hunt for bears -- or stray tourists:

The Bush Administration proposed a repeal of the current law governing firearms in national parks in favor of new regulations that would allow for people to carry loaded, concealed weapons into the parks. This move would increase poaching in the parks, according to the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

PEER released a statement Thursday arguing against the proposed change for its failure to consider environmental concerns. The organization blamed the proposal on the influence of the National Rifle Association (NRA).

"The Bush administration proposed the rules in response to a National Rifle Association campaign that threatened congressional repeal of the park service rules," it said. "The NRA has made no secret of its desire to increase hunting within national parks."

The right sure does love its guns. Funny how the Second Amendment is the only one they really care about. Funny how they have they don't care about the government sweeping up all phone calls and internet activity, but take away a big stick that shoots with power and they get their....panties....in a twist.

Labels: Bush Administration, gun nuts, insanity, phallus worship

You'd think that when it came to an issue as important as the right to control your own body -- whether it's carrying a fetus to term or even preventing an unwanted pregnancy, women would pay more attention not even to the personal views of candidates, but to the policies they hope to enact and the people they plan to hire to enact them.

So it's astonishing that so many women have fallen for the "maverick" meme when it comes to John McCain, who has always been a staunch doctrinaire conservative, including on women's issues. In the past, McCain was able to get away with it simply by virtue of not sounding utterly batshit crazy in thrall to the Christofascist Zombie Brigade, but even that has fallen by the wayside this year.

Sorry, ladies, but it makes us women look like idiots when you're this ill-informed about something this important to your life. As the NARAL study referenced in this Amy Sullivan column notes, we've got our work cut out for us:

The NARAL survey found that when pro-choice women are told that McCain believes the Roe v. Wade decision should be overturned, their support for him drops substantially. Among pro-choice independent women, who are already more inclined to back Obama, information about the two candidates' abortion positions improves Obama's edge from 53-35 to 66-26, for a net gain of 22 percentage points. Even pro-choice Republican women shift their support after hearing about McCain's opposition to Roe: 76% initially say they will vote for McCain in November, but that number drops to 63%.


The problem for Democrats is that most voters don't sit through phone calls with pollsters walking them through the respective positions of the two nominees. That sets up a messaging battle, and it's one Republicans enter from a position of strength. In the 35 years since the Roe v. Wade decision was handed down, abortion has reigned as the single most controversial issue in American politics. Nevertheless, GOP presidential candidates have demonstrated a remarkable ability to strike a politically successful balance, quietly reassuring their conservative base of their anti-abortion commitment while publicly hewing to language that appeals to the pro-choice majority.


While every Republican party platform since 1976 has called for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion in all cases, the men who have run on those platforms have been careful to use more measured language. George W. Bush's frequent references to "the culture of life" fit that mold, borrowing a phrase made famous by Pope John Paul II that resonated with social conservatives but sounded innocuous to most pro-choice voters. When pressed in presidential debates, Bush even refused to say whether he wanted to see Roe overturned, choosing instead to talk about the importance of "changing hearts" about abortion.


On that score, McCain has gone further than Bush. Although McCain has a solid record of supporting abortion restrictions in the Senate, he has felt pressure to articulate that position - and prove his conservative bona fides - because of his strained relationship with religious conservatives. Under questioning from ABC's George Stephanopoulos, McCain said that he supported a constitutional amendment to ban abortion and that he believed Roe should be overturned, a position he opposed in 2000 when he came under attack from pro-life activists during the GOP primaries. And not long after he clinched the nomination in the spring of 2008, McCain gave a speech on judicial philosophy that was meant to put to rest doubts on the right about whether he would appoint pro-life judges.


But McCain's more traditional abortion rhetoric is leavened by his carefully maintained political brand as a "maverick" politician. Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL, believes that has led many voters to make incorrect assumptions about McCain's views on abortion and is one reason he is now courting pro-choice women, particularly Hillary Clinton's supporters. "People think that he's a maverick and that must mean that he's a moderate," Keenan says. "And they come to the conclusion that if you're a moderate, you must be pro-choice."

So here at B@B, we're going to do our part to expose John McCain's record on women's right to decide whether to carry a pregnancy to term:

1. Voted YES on barring HHS grants to organizations that perform abortions. (Oct 2007)
   
2. Voted YES on criminal penalty for harming unborn fetus during other crime. (Mar 2004)
   
3. Voted YES on banning partial birth abortions (sic) except for maternal life. (Mar 2003) (I guess that not condemning women to die constitutes a pro-choice record to some people)
   
4. Voted YES on maintaining ban on Military Base Abortions. (Jun 2000) (I guess denying women who serve their country basic medical care is considered pro-choice to some people.)
   
5. Voted YES on banning partial birth (sic) abortions. (Oct 1999) (I guess having politicians overruling women and their doctors is considered pro-choice to some people.)
   

Here's John McCain promising to appoint Supreme Court Justices that WILL overturn Roe v. Wade, thus ensuring that women in the Bible Belt, regardless of their personal religious beliefs, will be subject to the James Dobson/John Hagee view of abortion as part of their health care options:



The only area in which McCain parts company from the Christofascist Zombie Brigade is in the area of embryonic stem-cell research -- which means that he not only thinks the government has the right to control women's bodies on the grounds that a fetus is a human being,but he's also a fucking hypocrite about it.

His record on contraception is no better. In 2005, he voted NO on $100M to reduce teen pregnancy by education & contraceptives, and this is his embarrassing exchange with a reporter in March 2007 about the use of condoms to stop HIV transmission, in which he invokes the lunatic Tom Coburn as his go-to guy on such issues:

Q: “What about grants for sex education in the United States? Should they include instructions about using contraceptives? Or should it be Bush’s policy, which is just abstinence?”

Mr. McCain: (Long pause) “Ahhh. I think I support the president’s policy.”

Q: “So no contraception, no counseling on contraception. Just abstinence. Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?”

Mr. McCain: (Long pause) “You’ve stumped me.”

Q: “I mean, I think you’d probably agree it probably does help stop it?”

Mr. McCain: (Laughs) “Are we on the Straight Talk express? I’m not informed enough on it. Let me find out. You know, I’m sure I’ve taken a position on it on the past. I have to find out what my position was. Brian, would you find out what my position is on contraception – I’m sure I’m opposed to government spending on it, I’m sure I support the president’s policies on it.”

Q: “But you would agree that condoms do stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Would you say: ‘No, we’re not going to distribute them,’ knowing that?”
Mr. McCain: (Twelve-second pause) “Get me Coburn’s thing, ask Weaver to get me Coburn’s paper that he just gave me in the last couple of days. I’ve never gotten into these issues before.”

He should be embarrassed -- and ashamed of himself.

In 2004, McCain voted NO on legislation to improve the availability of contraceptives for women and to require insurance coverage of prescription birth control. Most insurance plans already cover Viagra, so I'm not sure who all these men are supposed to be fucking, unless it's about spreading their seed far and wide and knocking up as many women as possible.

McCain has dog-whistled to the right even on Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court decision that declared that banning the use of contraception by married couples was unconstitutional and which is the next target of the Christofascists.

Annie Newman at RH Reality Check notes:

According to Medical News Today, McCain, assuaging the conservative crowd in attendance said that he would appoint conservative justices to the bench and "criticized justices for using the words ‘penumbras' and ‘emanations'." Those just happen to be two words used in the famous Griswold decision to reason that marriage fell within a zone of privacy (specifically that marriage fell under a "penumbra" of privacy and therefore married couples decision to use contraception was a private matter, not to be regulated by the government).

McCain's coded language around reproductive rights needs to be called out. With the anti-choice advocacy community renewing their focus on contraception as murder and state ballot campaigns that seek to define a fertilized human egg as a person, birth control is under very real attack.

And just for good measure, he's an asshole on pay equity as well. In April he skipped the vote on the Ledbetter Fair Pay act, saying that the problem with pay inequity is simply that women need more "education and training."

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know what McCain's voting record is; it's all right out there for anyone to see. So perhaps those women still deluding themselves that John McCain is a moderate ought to stop listening to talking heads on TV invoking "Maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick maverick" over and over and over again and look at whom they're supporting.

Labels: idiocy, John McCain, rant, reproductive rights

Just as DINO Joe Lieberman (D-CT,) is clearly not gonna support his party's candidate for President; neither will he be supporting democratic congressional candidate, Jim Himes, to replace Congressman Chris Shays (R-CT.)

Best buddies, Shays and Lieberman, have visited Iraq together some 20 times, and held tight to their shared rosy, pro-war stance until just before the '06 elections, when they both began to waffle and turn, only to change back once they assured themselves that their positions were safe...if only temporarily. They are sharing chairmanship of McCain's presidential campaign's CT "leadership team," and from the way that the two of them have been acting, they expect positions in the McCain cabinet. Its too bad that CT voters were so short sighted, misled, and plain old terrified of the unknown, to vote these guys out. Its too bad also that the two of these crony's can hold hands while saluting their leader, in the name of bipartisanship, which is really just shared neocon vision by any other name. They are sure of the fact that we will be "victorious" in Iraq (which means...what?) and don't care how long it takes or how many die. Lip service paid to bringing troops home is just that; lip service. But what is going on is more insidious than just one turncoat and his brown-nose buddy; its about the movement to actually take over the country while we all slumber in our denial. Scared of the "terra," and worried of "losing" or this idea of "cut and run," I doubt that most people could explain what any of that means in real terms or what we are doing there int eh first place. They can, however, explain how hard day to day life has become in this country and most of what people talk about having changed can be attributed directly to this administration and this war.

The Stamford Advocate, my local paper, today had a great letter about Christopher Shays and his praise of the new big oil deals, by one Scott Kimmitch. What struck me was not the facts about Shays and how dirty he is, because its clear or not to the individuals in this state who likely like Shays because of his manner or his smooth lies, but his clear definition of fascism, which is something that every person in this country needs to understand:

Handing out no-bid contracts to big oil companies headquartered in the two countries whose leaders conspired to mislead their peoples into a criminal war sends the wrong message to the world, particularly if you understand the word "fascist." Fascism is the seamless merger of corporations with national leadership, producing a belligerent nationalism accompanied by suppression of citizens' rights.

Fascism happens when the corporations call the shots and the government connives to let them do it. Why not let oil companies around the world submit bids to Maliki's government and let it work the way private enterprise is supposed to work? Why let our government put pressure on Iraq in the name of corporate favorites?

I actually read this at the local firehouse while a bunch of the guys were taking a CPR refresher exam, and I managed to find a highlighter and highlight it, leaving it on the desk so that they would find and read it. Alot of them are not going to vote because they feel so burned by the system, and lied to by their party. I can only quote facts, because the emotional part is tied up in some of their own service in Viet Nam, and having to face what that war was for...and really, the facts are what you need if you're anyone who cares about the lives of soldiers and the future of the young people of this country.

So this is what its come to. Even if much of this were only partly true, it would be worth taking a good hard look at. You can say that we don't have a Hitler leading that march, and maybe Bush is in his lame term, but that doesn't mean that a Hitler doesn't appear out of this...a deranged and mentally damaged man who's got a clearer and better plan for the victory of the country...someone like McCain, if he weren't so bat-shit crazy...or, maybe somebody pulling a McCain's puppet strings as if he were say, a George W. with a Cheney behind him...
I-m not saying that McCain has a chance, because I don't think that he does, but if it all works out, we will have spent 8 years as close as any of us should ever be to fascist rule. This is what I call a close call...and if the republicans were somehow able to pull a reasonable candidate out of their asses we would be in shit trouble, because Americans are uneducated and complacent.



To reiterate: American big oil corporations being able to take back Iraq (...help them with their oil problem, perhaps?) is not what we went there for. We were gonna help them run the oil for the people and then the rebuilding and the war would pay for itself...remember? For the American Government to allow our big oil corporations in there no-bid, without a parliamentary decision on how they want to structure this deal is to go back to the days before Saddam Hussein kicked out the western players and nationalized the country's oil. For the US to put in place the exact same players from the deal before the nationalization has a damning sort of scent to it...like, we went in there to spread democracy? Capitalism? And now they want us to believe that the Iraqis "need" western modernization and expertise in order to make money on their oil? (Like they need sustained electricity still, and buildings without failing plumbing systems, because our private corporations are so, so, great at building infrastructure!) They couldn't ask anyone else who is maybe less conflicted in their interest? Forget those other countries who were shut out of the bidding...This is OUR corporate oil...maybe we'll get a little trickle down from it...in theory, we could; but in truth we won't...And don't expect the Iraqi people to benefit from this either.

So, this is the face of fascism, and it really makes me sick. I'm sure that the Rovian machine can drum up enough outrage and anger to make half of all Americans believe that our corporations deserve this because we've done so much "work" over there, but lets not forget that we broke it...we bought it...and its ours to fix, not gut of its natural resources. And with such an unstable leadership there, I can imagine that the contracts will be long...
So, did we go there for oil? Yeah...we did.
And Chris Shays, my Congressman, is PROUD of the American oil companies that will put themselves in danger's way (but, oh, is it lucrative!...yes it is...)
It will take another strongman dictator to nationalize the oil again...till then, I wonder how much of that profit is gonna go to rebuilding the country? How much of it is gonna go to huge bonuses for CEO's and other players? And will the price of oil drop substantially again? Why should it?
Mission accomplished!

c/p RIPCoco

Labels: chris shays, corporatism, fascism, greed, Iraq, Joe Lieberman, oil

He's also a psychotic nutcase:

On June 20, 1996, Senator John McCain allegedly assaulted a family member of a Vietnam War prisoner of war (POW) who was missing in action (MIA), as a group of about 15 family members of POW/MIAs watched in astonishment. Within about one month, five ethics complaints had been filed with the Senate Ethics Committee by five eyewitnesses. But the Senate Ethics Committee refused to investigate the matter.

According to eyewitness Carol Hrdlicka, wife of Vietnam War POW/MIA air force pilot Col. David Hrdlicka, the group had been waiting in the hall of the Russell Office Building in Washington, D.C. for McCain to come out of an office in order to hand deliver letters asking him to forego an amendment to the Missing Service Personnel Act (MSPA) of 2005. The MSPA had been signed into law in February 1996 as part of the Defense Authorization Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-106). This law, which updated a 1942 law, had been a major victory for the families of POW/MIAs who worked tirelessly to get it through Congress.

The MSPA required the Pentagon to beef up its resources to find and rescue missing service personnel in a timely manner. For instance, it required the filing of reports on missing persons within 48 hours. Among other substantive provisions, it also criminalized withholding information from the families of POWs by broadly stipulating that "any person who knowingly and willfully withholds from the personnel file of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person shall be fined as provided in title 18 or imprisoned not more than one year, or both." McCain's amendment eviscerated these new changes. For instance, it increased the reporting time to 10 days, and it deleted entirely the stated provision penalizing the withholding of information.

These family members of POW/MIAs had come to speak with McCain to try to convince him to leave the law alone. Mrs. Hrdlicka gives the following description of what happened:

When he [McCain] realized who we were, his face turned red and he became enraged. He would not accept the letters we had brought, he burst through our group assaulting the niece of Jane Duke Gaylor, mother of a MIA. I followed Senator McCain down the hall asking that he leave the legislation alone and all the while he is denying that he knew anything about the Missing Personnel Act. ...As we reached the elevator he said to me that I didn't know what he had been through ... I then stated I understood what he had been through and David Hrdlicka was still going through it. I had the capture picture of my husband and tried to show the picture to him but he would not look at it. ...The elevator arrived and Senator McCain quickly jumped in -- that ended our conversation. After this incident we went to the Capitol Police and filed a report. We also sent complaints to the ethics committee on the Senator's behavior.

"He went from a smiling, congenial, happy face to a beet red, totally enraged face in an instant," she said. "I have never seen a senator act in this way. We were all dumbfounded how this happened. He threw his arm up, and she goes flying and Jane [who was in a wheelchair] gets pushed aside as he brushes by her. All I see is people flying and I'm behind him [McCain]... This was assault."

This is the man the media wants to see in the White House. This is the one they're calling an "independent" and a "maverick." The press has been bought off by some kind words and barbecued ribs, and in return they're going to do whatever is necessary to put an even more dangerous man than George W. Bush into the White House.

Sleep well, everyone.

Labels: insanity, John McCain, media whores

You are Howard Beale. We are all Howard Beale. We’re mad as hell and, well, we’re not going to take it… for much longer.

Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, does it?

The death of George Carlin and my own eulogy for him brought to mind the counterculture selling out to corporations and being further atrophied to this day by not getting infused and energized by an equally apathetic-to-nonexistent anti-war movement.

It made me think today of Network’s Howard Beale, one of the most tragic characters ever in the history of the big screen. At first exhilarated then deluded by the limits of his power and influence, Beale only touches back down to earth after his talk with his network’s boss, Arthur Jensen.

Jensen, among his many cruel but prescient truisms, informs “the mad prophet of the airwaves” that, far from powerless to stop his rants, the network that Beale exhorts his viewers to turn off encourages him. Why? The reasons are simple.

Beale is allowed to continue spreading his verbal samizdat because he fattens their bottom line. The higher Beale’s ratings, the more the network can charge for ad time. The higher the price, the greater the likelihood it’ll get scarfed up only by corporations that can afford it. That would be corporations like Exxon, IBM, Union Carbide, the elite corporate ruling class Jensen tells us and Beale that really owns and runs the world.

This corporate ownership elite get their propaganda out to the masses when Beale draws breath every seven minutes and everybody’s happy or thinks they are. So the network really doesn’t care what Beale says or how he does it. He could go out there every night Monday through Friday jerking off to the strains of Igor Stravinsky and cumming on the poncho section in the front row. As long as it kept ratings and the cost of air time up, who gives a fuck?

So, when Jensen tells him that there are no nations, certainly no America and no democracy left to defend, Beale goes back out and tells his audience that they’re a bunch of worthless couch potatoes and they suddenly got offended when it was their turn to swim into Beale’s crosshairs.

Then, as with every zeitgeist, Beale’s message gets old and stale. His undiluted facts become as passe as those “Wasuuuuup?” idiots in those beer commercials. Even the God’s unflyblown truth, whether or not imparted from God’s lips to Beale’s ears, becomes a mere fad. Beale’s supporting cast begins to acquire satellite audiences. The truth is out of favor and the public reverts back to its waking coma for which Beale had just called them out.

Then, the network that had allowed Beale to rant finally pulls the plug on his show by having network-contracted mercs plug him on the air for having low ratings.

The other reason to let Howard have his day? On his gravestone, it could’ve said, “Here lies Howard Beale. Newsman. He got people to impotently yell out of their windows for a few minutes one night.” Beale never really mobilized the masses, the one and only thing that corporate types and elected officials fear more than anything else, the Only Solution.

Honey, where’s the remote?

Well, our lives aren’t in danger as was Howard Beale (Thank God we don’t get bumped off for our hit count dropping to Hadean levels) but we’re just as beholden to corporations. As I’d said in my Carlin eulogy, no matter how you express yourself, whether it be on television, radio, in a book, a magazine, even on a little-read blog, you will almost surely have to go through some corporate entity. Ranting on a soapbox holding up a cardboard sign that says, “The End is Near”? Check the soapbox, too: It may have been made by Johnson and Johnson, the cardboard sign by Georgia Pacific, the message scrawled on it by a Sharpie made by Rubbermaid.

That is, if most of us were hardy and hale enough of spirit to even do that. Unfortunately, we're as much of a roaming pack of electronically-anesthetized airheads as the fickle viewership of Howard Beale. Once again, we’ve let the corporately-mandated principles of Arthur Jensen fool us into thinking that we actually have a choice in the upcoming elections. Oh, sure, we rejected their dictates that Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani were the Anointed Standard Bearers but look at with whom we’d replaced them:

Mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers in Appalachia and in other red blobs on a national map are going ga-ga over John McCain, a doddering, incipiently senile psychopath in his own right who just six months ago was declared as more dead in the water than when he was captured in 1967 by the North Vietnamese near Hanoi. But, hey, let’s just forget that McCain won the nomination purely by default rather than on his own merits because he had the good sense of timing to run for president in a year when the Republicans could only field loathsome scumbags even more demented and detestable than himself.

Forget the fact that he's now promising to bring back this Monster Mash in the form of Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Karl Rove and Lord only knows who else.

Forget the fact that, like some hellish Energizer Bunny that was buried in the back yard eight years ago and has marched its way out of the soil, this creepy old man keeps coming and coming and coming back, beating his little toy war drum while we clap to it.

Now, McCain’s suddenly the greatest thing since sliced bread. Now, he’s so in the groove, it doesn’t matter what idiocy dribbles from his mouth. When he says that he can win in January, they raucously applaud. When he says we have 25,000 less troops in Iraq than we do, they raucously applaud. When he says that we should ship bottles of hot water to dehydrated babies, they raucously applaud. When he insists that he’s in New Orleans when he’s actually in Kenner, they raucously applaud. When he insists time and again that Iran is funding al Qaeda and that Mamoud Ahmedinejad actually runs Iran, they raucously applaud.

Not once do you see in any of these videotaped idiocies any two people looking at each other as if to ask, “What the fuck?” The devotion is unconditional, the discipline ironclad.

It wouldn’t matter at this point if McCain shuffled out gripping a walker like grim death, tapioca running out of one corner of his mouth, wearing two different pairs of shoes and socks with no pants on and declaring that it was 1955 again and promising computers that will one day weigh less than 2 ½ tons.

It wouldn’t matter if he showed up in Minnesota in September with Dick Cheney, the most despised man in America, at his side, Cheney not bothering anymore to file down the horns on his forehead and letting his forked tail swing back and forth, the barb at the end cutting the heads off babies.

And if Jesus showed up at the convention to say, “Hello, time out here? I was never a Republican. I was always a liberal. It’s not fair of these maniacs to co-opt me like this!”, I guaran-fucking-tee you at least a few of those mushroom-brained dead-enders will immediately go searching for the nearest pair of beams and box of nails.

We need another Republican in the White House at all costs, since the GOP has been so good to Middle America and all. So, Senator McCain, we’ll keep those votes coming in and please keep those caskets streaming in from Dover, Delaware.

Forget the fact that McCain has more lobbyists infesting his campaign than K Street and the Federal Bureau of Prisons combined, that he admits he doesn’t know shit about economics, that he’s willing to cut two trillion dollars a year out of an annual 3.1 trillion dollar budget for the next decade. All that’s inconvenient.

Forget the fact that McCain promises no change from what we’ve been subjected to these past 7 years and five months at the hands of that murderous Musharraf, that knee-high Noreiga, that pint-sized Pinochet, all tyrants about whom it could at least be said actually served their nation’s militaries, unlike some people we could mention.

But what else can you say about an electorate that still stubbornly labors under the delusion that we’d actually inaugurated a 43rd president? In 2000, for the first time in American history, we’d “elected” a president based almost solely on the question of who would you rather have a beer with. Even that would’ve been an impossibility, even if Bush wasn’t such an elitist asswipe: Long before 2000, he’d been on the wagon.

And don’t think for a minute that I’m voting for Barack Obama and letting him off the hook. The more this man talks, the less I like him.

How can we be so rapturized by a man who promises change without really offering much hope for it? His health care plan is, if anything, an even bigger joke than Hillary’s and doesn’t hold out any hope of the single-payer health care plan that every major economic analyst and health care expert says we need.

Despite proudly eschewing lobbyist money and volunteered time, Obama of late has been sucking up to the right wing Likud zealots that largely make up AIPAC, one of the largest and most dangerous lobbying groups out there.

And when Obama tells us that Social Security is in a state of crisis, we raucously applaud. When Obama flip flops and tells us that we should give the telecoms retroactive immunity instead of working within the existing legal framework of the current FISA laws, we raucously applaud after calling the likes of Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi traitors for saying the same thing.

But we need that "liberal Democrat" in the White House at all costs since the Democratic party has been so good to Middle America and all.

Between McCain’s saber-rattling at Tehran now Obama’s, it may very well come down to the same dismal choice we had in 2004: Electing the guy whom we think will hold off WW III the longest.

The decisions have already been made for us: Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul are no fucking good for you. Hillary and Rudy Obama and McCain are. No, no, don’t look to the edge of the screen, look in the middle of your screen, the middle, you fucking zombies, where we put the big money candidates. There ya go.

I believe it was Emma Goldman who’d famously said, “If voting could really change things it would be illegal.” I can think of several tens of thousands of African American voters who were told it would’ve been illegal for them to vote in Florida in 2000, thousands more in Cleveland who weren’t allowed to vote in 2004.

The sad part is that in the real world Howard Beale never existed and likely never will. The mobs screaming in blood-curdling rage that we see every now and then in other countries is also something we’ll likely never see. Jesus fucking Christ tap dancing with a rubber crutch, the only solution, as someone once said, is to break everything and storm the gates, break through the ramparts, speak as one with one voice in one language, the only language that corporations and elected officials understand and can hear.

But the bread has made us fat and the circuses are so entertaining. Therefore, the people of every democracy deserve whom it elects.

Shorter John McCain: "You'll still be paying four bucks a gallon, but you'll FEEL better about it -- and I'll get to be president!"

Watch:

Labels: delusion, idocy, John McCain

Skippy posted yesterday about the blatant blowjob given to John McCain by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post:

yes, you read it right. mcsame is a much better candidate because...well, because something about he was a pow 40 years ago, and that's something everybody knows...so, he's gotta be a good guy, because he wouldn't get repatrioted in viet nam, so he's obviously a much better man to be president, and obama's flip flops are worse than mclame's on the exact same subject, because we don't know if obama would fold under pressure because he was never a prisoner of war...or something.

got that?

we, probably much like you, were incredulous as we attempted to interpret what cohen was saying.

mcsame has more character? the headline of the piece itself was "mccain's core advantage," obviously a reference to mclame's "core," his ethics, his values.

that's right. the man whose second marriage was to the woman with whom he was cheating on his first wife.

The larger question here is the general free pass given to McCain -- a free pass that Obama will never, ever, ever get, no matter how many barbecued ribs he served journalists (and it's not his nature to do so).

I don't know what we can do in order to get around this love affair that the press has with McCain. It comes from so many places. There's the aspect of entitlement becuase he was a POW -- that we can't touch him because he endured a horrific experience. We see in this suffering meme the kind of hackery perpetrated by Newsweek this week that I wrote about yesterday, in which they try to turn Cindy McCain, heiress to a beer fortune as some kind of long-suffering martyr to a Difficult Life™.

I know it's a third rail, but I think it's important to address this "free pass" thing and the notion in the press that McCain's experience as a POW doesn't mean he should be even MORE scrutinized because he's so clearly damaged by the experience, but that all the faults we see and all the dangerous signs should be swept under the rug because a soldier had a tough time. That these same pundits don't think that a kid growing up in a slum, dodging bullets just to get to school, deserves a similar free pass just shows that while the "reward for adversity" concept is part of the media love for McCain, it isn't all of it. It's Vietnam guilt and father-worship all rolled up into one nauseating package.

I'm not playing the "He signed up for it" card, but when that's the excuse given for the horrific treatment that this government is giving today's soldiers -- treatment McCain excuses and supports, why shouldn't it at least apply to the guy who's going to carry the nuclear suitcase?

We already know how Republicans are given a free pass for marital behavior that would end a Democrat's career. It's clear that probably because the boys in the press are fucking around as much as the politicians are, Republicans get a free pass for adultery. McCain's first wife has, for whatever reason, chosen to be fairly silent -- and this is regarded as consent. And again -- it's because he was a POW. Being a POW excuses everything -- unless it's an ex-POW who lives on the street and panhandles to get food money. If THAT ex-POW should get murdered while sleeping in a doorway, well, he's just another vagrant. But if an ex-POW marries a pretty 25-year-old who's worth a cool hundred mill and builds a political career on her money, well, then he's entitled to anything he wants -- including the ability to blow up the entire fucking world if that's what it takes to make the nightmares go away.

McCain has assiduously courted the press for a long time. The article I cite in the above-linked piece talks about this. This is something I think we need to hammer as hard as we can -- and create a loud drumbeat. This is what pisses me off more than anything else about the alpha dogs who blog creating their fucking Kool Kidz Klub -- They may be deep but they aren't wide, and if you have EVERYONE talking about something, it just MIGHT gain some critical mass. This needs to be a coordinated effort, however loosely, to somehow SHAME the media into paying the fuck attention.

I just flipped on the TV for THIRTY FUCKING SECONDS, and there was Mike Brzezinski reading from MoDo's surprisingly lucid column today and Scarborough dutifully repeating the Lindsey Graham meme that "Obama broke his promise to the American people."

How the fuck do we fight this? Most Americans are idiots. They don't read us; they watch the news, and they STILL thnk that if they see it delivered by a guy in a suit on TV, it's the truth. Even last night on Olbermann, there's Howard Fineman repeating the memes about Obama being elitist to show what bullshit they are, but simply by putting them out there, he's giving them credence.

That closet case Lindsey Graham breaks into crocodile tears on Press the Meat about Obama's "fall":



-- and no one says a word, despite the fact that this is the worst acting we've seen this year outside of The Love Guru.

But this is what most Americans hear. And when the press has its framing of McCain into Mr. Straight Talk, despite the fact that McCain's record is consistently one of doing favors for people who give him money, that's what people believe.

And now, as MoDo notes today, Karl Rove talks about Barack Obama as some kind of country club guy, despite the fact that there are still country clubs where Obama still wouldn't even be allowed to play, and there are actually people who don't find that idea ridiculous.

I wish Americans would stop treating the words that come out of that damn electronic box in the living room as Treatises from God and recognize that what they're seeing is a function of the baggage carried by those delivering the news. When you see someone like Chris Matthews or Karl Rove talking about how Barack Obama is "elitist", you know that what's talking is not the adult you see, but the awkward fat teenage boy with the man-tits, the one stuck in right field because he can't run and can't hit, the one jerking off with a copy of Penthouse in his parents' bathroom while the Bill Clintons and the Barack Obamas get the girls because they are, in the case of Clinton, charming and gregarious; and in the case of Obama, because he's the coolest guy in the room.

Labels: hack journalism

I'm not a big science enthusiast; I tend to be one of those arts 'n' history types. Mr. Brilliant is our science geek; he can sit and watch the Science channel for an entire afternoon, enthralled. Astronomy in particular is a problem for me, because it forces us to deal with vastness so incomprehensible that we wonder why insignificant beings like us have the hubris to think ANYTHING we do matters. But this is pretty cool:

Planet hunters say it's just a matter of time before they lasso Earth's twin, which almost surely is hiding somewhere in our star-studded galaxy.
Momentum is building: Just last week, astronomers announced they had discovered three super-Earths — worlds more massive than ours but small enough to most likely be rocky — orbiting a single star. And dozens of other worlds suspected of having masses in that same range were found around other stars.

Labels: Science

I'm really thinking it's time to look at the blogroll again. No, I'm not going to do some kind of blogroll amnesty day, but there are some blogs on the list that look to be abandoned, whose authors appear to have gone on to live meaningful lives not spent in front of the computer, and good for them. So if you find over the next couple of weeks that you used to be on the blogroll and no longer are, e-mail me and let me know you're still alive.

Meanwhile, I've added some new blogs today. I added some Bergen County blogs in the New Jersey section, because New Jersey politics and such are so colorful and so utterly rotten that those who chronicle the absurdity of life in the Garden State deserve more exposure. I also moved Blanton & Ashton's to the main blogroll because DBK apparently wanted so badly to vote for Al Franken that he packed up Mrs. DBK and moved to Minnesota.

Also on the main blogroll are PoliTits, whom I could have sworn I added before but apparently didn't, and Fran I Am, whom I would guess came over here from Dcap's place or Batocchio's hideaway. Fran writes a lot about religion -- that thing that George Carlin called "the biggest bullshit story ever told" and "the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims." I'm not by definition opposed to religion; I guess I figure that whatever you need to get yourself through this God-forsaken level of reality is OK, as long as you recognize that it's yours. But Fran is different, because anyone who gives her posts labels like "Jesus I'm Sick Of These People" and "Catholischa mishagas" deserves to be blogrolled.

Labels: bloggers

I'm sure that when Regnery publishes its hit job on Barack Obama this summer, every smear, every lie, will be covered exhaustively by the mainstream media as "an alternative view". Meanwhile, the media's love affair with All Things McCain continues -- at least here in the U.S. Here, as if to squelch any notion that that uppity Michelle Obama is "the new Jackie", Newsweek puts Cindy McCain, airbrushed so that she almost looks like the 25-year-old her husband no doubt wishes she still was, in a Jackie-esque pink suit on its cover and inside pens a story of a brave, noble woman who's had a Really Tough Life™. In the press' world, Cindy McCain is someone who's been like a single mother, with her husband off in Washington. The Washington wives were mean to her, treating her like a trophy wife. I'm not sure why this would be seen as inaccurate, given that McCain made a beeline for the 25-year-old beer heiress while he was still married to his first wife (whom he had already in his mind dumped because she'd had the temerity to age five years, get into a disfiguring car accident, and gain weight as a result). The stealing drugs from her own charity is barely touched, and the involvement with a married man is equally brushed aside, under the IOKIYAR rule.

But it's Cindy McCain's likening of herself to a single mother that got my goat. I keep thinking of the 21-year-old from Bergen County with a new baby who's being shipped off to Iraq. Her life can't be all that easy here, and now she's being sent to a combat zone because she joined the National Guard to try to go to college. NO ONE joins the Guard thinking s/he's going to see combat in a war zone, because historically that isn't what the National Guard does -- unless the President wants to fight a war and refuses to take the political heat of a draft. THAT is a single mother; not a beer heiress worth $100 million who could hire all the help she wanted, who doesn't have to lie awake at night wondering how she'll have enough money to feed the kids for the rest of the month and whose husband "borrowed" $169,000 from her trust fund to run for Congress.

It's even more difficult to feel sorry for a woman with her own charitable foundation who runs the family beer distributorship whose husband calls her a "trollop" and a "cunt" in public, because she, unlike many women married to shitty men, has the resources to leave if she wants to. So don't play me any Songs of Sorrow for Cindy McCain.

But why shouldn't the press build an elaborate mythology around this woman -- another deer-in-the-headlights zombie who'll be seen and not heard any more than absolutely necessary (as opposed to that awful Obama woman™, who dares to think she's entitled to have an opinion of her own). They've already built one around her husband. The War Hero. The Maverick. The Man Who Marches to His Own Drummer. And at one time, all of those might have been true, but they aren't any longer. The problem is that if you only get your news from the likes of Newsweek, Time, newspapers, and cable and network news, you'd never know.

Cliff Schecter has tried to get the other side of John McCain out there in his new book, but you'll notice that Schecter hasn't exactly been invited onto the Today show and Hardball and The Situation Room (though you can bet that the author of the Obama smear book will be). On the other side of the Atlantic, however, Paul Harris in the Guardian writes for a population that can't vote in this election:

Welcome to the John McCain show 2008. It's powerful stuff, portraying McCain as the decent patriot of the middle ground and a steady hand for difficult times. For a lot of Americans - including many Democrats - it is a beguiling vision. They see a war hero whose courage was forged in a North Vietnamese POW camp. They see a maverick who spoke against the tortures of Abu Ghraib. They see a reformer who acts against lobbyists and political favours. They see a politician who has spent a lifetime serving his country and won a place in the hearts of the nation.

Now McCain is also trying to win the White House. He has taken his campaign to places far from the projected Republican road map to victory. He has spoken in the 'black belt' of rural Alabama. He has toured Appalachian coal country to talk about poverty. He has gone to the hippy enclave of Oregon to lecture on global warming. In short, he is a Republican that even liberals can love. And many do. McCain's appeal to America's vital middle ground could easily propel him to the Oval Office.

But there is another, very different side to John McCain. Away from the headlines and the stirring speeches, a less familiar figure lurks. It is a McCain who plans to fight on in Iraq for years to come and who might launch military action against Iran. This is the McCain whose campaign and career has been riddled with lobbyists and special interests. It is a McCain who has sided with religious and political extremists who believe Islam is evil and gays are immoral. It is a McCain who wants to appoint extreme conservatives to the Supreme Court and see abortion banned. This McCain has a notoriously volatile temper that has scared some senior members of his own party. If McCain becomes the most powerful man in the world it would be wise to know what lies behind his public mask, to look at the dark side of John McCain.

[snip]

McCain's campaign bus - dubbed the Straight Talk Express, just as it was in 2000 - is filled with journalists who travel at the back with McCain, relaxing on a U-shaped couch. McCain recently hosted a barbecue for journalists at his Arizona ranch. As TV anchors and newspaper reporters sipped beer and cocktails under a desert sun, McCain stood at the grill and literally served up their daily nourishment. He is someone you could have a beer with, in stark contrast to Barack Obama, who keeps his press entourage firmly at arm's length. Yet McCain's riskier strategy has worked like a dream. Reporters often overlook McCain's errors and flaps - especially in national security - clinging instead to the narrative of an unconventional patriot. 'The media love him, especially his war record. He is the GI Joe doll they played with as kids,' says Professor Shawn Bowler, a political scientist at the University of California at Riverside.

There is also a little-reported back-up plan for reporters who do not toe the line: sheer aggression. A recent Washington Post piece on a land deal by one of McCain's allies prompted a brutal response from the McCain campaign. Without disproving facts, they labelled the story 'shameful' and a 'smear job'. When Newsweek ran a story on the Obama camp's perception of McCain's weak spots, McCain's team struck again. This time the story was 'offensive' and 'scurrilous'. The campaign is willing to strike out abroad, recently persuading one European newspaper editor to scrap a review of Schecter's book. For the fact is, McCain's benevolent public image is no accident. It has been carefully crafted and is forcefully policed. 'This has gone on for years. This is an image he has worked very hard to maintain,' says Professor Seth Masket of the University of Denver.

(More here.)

And of course that's exactly what it is -- an image. Even Jack Kemp has said that McCain is too unstable to be president. You would think that having had one gargoyle in the office disguised by an affable exterior would have taught us. But with McCain running within six points in some recent polls, despite his gaffes, his many lobbyists, his willingness to sacrifice however many young Americans it takes in order for him to resolve HIS issues with his father, and his chief adviser opining that another terrorist attack on the U.S. would be great for his campaign (nothing like the corpses of a few thousand Americans to create political benefit, eh, Mr. Black?); it's all too clear that the image is all most Americans see. And that's exactly how the press wants it. Because they sure do love them barbecue ribs.

Labels: John McCain, media whores

Because we need it.

Truly surreal shit from Ernie Kovacs:



Drolly weird shit from Stan Freberg:



Some more surreal shit from, of all people, Allan Sherman:



Surreal shit featuring George Carlin looking like a refugee from the Kingston Trio and the Smothers Brothers, from 1969:



And finally, shit, piss and corruption as told by the last heir to smart, sardonic, bitter, shit-detecting humor that doesn't suffer fools gladly:

Labels: comedy

Today's honoree: Mustang Bobby, for having the intestinal fortitude to take on William Kristol's sputteringly preposterous op-ed piece in today's New York Times.

Money quote:

William Kristol, who has never had a problem heating up the war rhetoric to get someone else to go fight a war for some neo-con vision, never chose to serve either; growing up the only person he ever saw in uniform was the doorman at the Waldorf Astoria. He glorifies the service of others as if he was re-enacting some G.I. Joe Saturday-morning cartoon fantasy, doing the bidding of the nation's leaders. He serves as the chief cheerleader of sending others, including the sons and daughters of the keepers of BlueStarChronicles.com, to fight his wars, but never thought of doing it himself, and when he was faced with it during the time he was eligible for the draft, he found a way to avoid it. Someone else served instead of him. And he has the nerve to chastise MoveOn for pointing out that there are some people who don't want their child to go to war.

Labels: hypocrisy, warmongering, William Kristol, wingnuttia

That's what just came out of my mouth upon reading just now that George Carlin has died:

George Carlin, the Grammy-Award winning standup comedian and actor who was hailed for his irreverent social commentary, poignant observations of the absurdities of everyday life and language, and groundbreaking routines like “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” died in Santa Monica, Calif., on Sunday, according to his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He was 71.

The cause of death was heart failure. Mr. Carlin, who had a history of heart problems, went into the hospital on Sunday afternoon after complaining of heart trouble. The comedian had worked last weekend at The Orleans in Las Vegas.

Recently, Mr. Carlin was named the recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. He was to receive the award at the Kennedy Center in November. “In his lengthy career as a comedian, writer, and actor, George Carlin has not only made us laugh, but he makes us think,” said Stephen A. Schwarzman, the Kennedy Center chairman. “His influence on the next generation of comics has been far-reaching.”

In recent years, Carlin just hadn't been as funny as he used to be. I suppose one can't have as finely honed a shit detector as he had, and use it so expertly for so many years, and have much of it left after the last eight years of the Bush Administration. But no one cut through the bullshit of modern life the way Carlin did.

There's so much of Carlin's work that's embedded itself into my brain. Just last week I was talking to a co-worker about Carlin's famous "football vs. baseball" musings:



And I can't tell you how many times I've looked for an audio of the "Heaven, Hell, Purgatory and Limbo" sketch from Class Clown, in which a kid tries to come up with the most outlandish scenario under which not receiving Communion wouldn't be a sin as being emblematic of the pretzels into which Republicans like David Vitter and other sex perverts of the conservative variety twist themselves to justify their behavior, using their religion to do so.

Carlin's job was to expose the hypocrisy, the venality, the complete and utter horseshit of modern life. And he did so fearlessly. Here he takes on western religion, and skewers it to death:



There's so much more -- so much that if I embed it all here, you'll be able to go out for a gourmet meal waiting for the site to load. So just go here and pick a sketch...any sketch.

And now, here we are, living in a world in which David Broder says it doesn't matter how much of a fucking hypocrite and liar John McCain is, because he's established a reputation as a man who says what he believes -- even though much of what he says today flies in the face of what he's said in the past. We're living in a world in which a GOP candidate who dumped his injured wife to marry a blonde heiress and has eight houses is a common man of the people and the guy who was raised by a single mom and went to college on scholarships is an elitist. We're living in a world in which John Bolton goes on Faux Noise and says that the Israelis will do our bidding and attack Iran between the election and the inauguration and "Arab states will be delighted" that Iran's nuclear capability will be destroyed. We're living in a world in which idiots believe e-mails they receive claiming that the black guy is a secret Muslim and don't even try to reconcile it with their own fear of the Scary Black Guy™ who used to be in the pulpit of his CHURCH. A world where a major news anchor whines because it's so UNFAIR that the Democratic candidate can raise enough money that he doesn't have to take federal matching funds. A world where George Carlin used to be to remind us of why our leaders are so bad:



We're living in a world of hypocrites, idiots, thieves, and morons -- and now we don't even have George Carlin to poke fun at them any more. We don't have Richard Pryor around to provide much-needed commentary on the race issues in this year's election. And while he's alive and well and living in Los Angeles, we don't even really have Marc Maron around anymore if you live east of the Grand Canyon and can't fly to the west coast to go to comedy clubs.

And somehow I think that George Carlin, whom I would argue had a lot more cultural impact than Tim Russert did, will merit about thirty seconds on the evening newscast.

Maybe it just isn't funny anymore.

More from:

Batocchio
Hubris Sonic, who says it all in seven words.
Louis C.K.
Mustang Bobby
The General is running an endless loop of Carlin bits today.
Richard Blair
Derek
Gotta Cry
Skippy's Big List o'Links

And because I can't resist:

Labels: Comedians

The only person associated with Tim Russert who didn't make a complete ass of him/herself on national television during last week's Orgy O'Grief (aside from Maureen Orth, who even if she'd wanted to appear wouldn't have been able to get a word in edgewise) is Russert's son, Luke, whose very poise and self-assuredness in the face of all the masturbatory hue and cry and rending of garments on the part of his old man's co-workers makes his very existence more of a tribute to and reflection on his father than all the blathering of the nattering classes.

This interview was three freakin' days after he lost his father:



As my mother would say, a NICE boy.

Labels: media, Tim Russert