Give Us This Day Our Daily Dread

Happy Birthday, Daddy-O.

2011-07-14T16:44:00.001-07:00

There are two types of people in the world: Those who turn up volume knobs and those who turn them down. This song by Steel Panther, "Asian Hooker", is definitely not for those who turn them down. So, in honor of my whoremongering old man's 71st birthday, I'm giving him the chance to relive the first year of his marriage and fatherhood in Okinawa. Don't let it be said that I never did anything for you, Pops.

...And Justice For Gaul

2011-07-02T10:20:00.000-07:00

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

“Our concern is that the Manhattan district attorney is too afraid to try this case.” - Kenneth P. Thompson, counsel for the plaintiff

As has been noted many times before, fortunes and misfortunes in the political arena in the age of digital media and 24/7 news cycles occur with frightening rapidity. The potential for success or failure, for scandal or redemption, whether deserved or not, has never been higher since former president-elect Al Gore invented the internets. And we've perhaps never seen a more vivid delineation in how rapidly one can be snatched from the jaws of destruction and placed back on their pedestal than in the circus surrounding former IMF chief and accused rapist Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

This case contains more drama and twists and turns than John Grisham could fit into a legal thriller. We have an accusation of rape against a presumptive future head of state, we have a discredited witness, we have a suddenly embarrassed District Attorney whose political ambitions are now shakier than that of the defendant's, we have Strauss-Khan's native France's full support, we even have an inflatable Statue of Liberty and early 4th of July independence wishes. This sad, sorry clown show makes the OJ Simpson murder trial of 1995 look like a dignified model of jurisprudence by conspicuous relief. And it hasn't even gone to trial, yet. And, by the looks of the tails tucked between Manhattan prosecutors' legs, it never will.

There seems to be little to no doubt that the star witness, the maid who insists she was raped by Strauss-Khan on the 28th floor of the Sofitel New York hotel, has repeatedly lied in other matters or been inconsistent at best with her account of being sexually assaulted. Anyone who's ever watched an episode of Perry Mason knows that in the world of jurisprudence, so much depends upon the credibility of witnesses and plaintiffs.

And while destroying the credibility of a witness or plaintiff is the fastest way to win a case, in many cases it becomes a witch hunt with your more aggressive attorneys who know they cannot prove their clients to be not guilty. The rules of the legal game always has within it an enormous potential for abuse and the innocent get destroyed in court five days a week, 52 weeks a year while the guilty (such as Simpson) walk out of the courthouses with broad smiles on their faces.

What passed over the heads of the three NY Times reporters who contributed a pair of page one, above the fold stories in today's edition was why this woman had to lie about certain things. In a word, it's survival.

She had to lie about being gang-raped in her native Guinea to get into and stay in this country. She had to lie about having another dependent in order to get a slightly bigger tax refund. She had to allow her bank account to be used as a little money-laundering operation for her jailbird fiance and his friends, all drug dealers.

If Cyrus Vance Jr's office were to ignore these revelations, he'd likely be impeached or perhaps even disbarred and his political career would be deader than his father's. I think we all get it.

But this maid accusing Strauss-Khan of rape (and some of the forensic evidence could lead one to believe something non-consensual could've taken place) and Strauss-Khan himself is an unexplored case study in opposites, one that delineates better than any story currently serving as fodder for the MSM in the difference in how we treat the wealthy and powerful and the poor and powerless.

Strauss-Khan is now a free man who can travel anywhere in the United States without notifying the prosecutors, his bail greatly reduced, his posh and cushy house arrest in lower Manhattan now lifted, his ankle bracelet removed and if he wanted to launch a presidential campaign against French President Sarkozy, he'd once again stand a good chance of winning (and don't think for a minute that Strauss-Khan wouldn't play up the martyr angle and set himself up as the 21st century's answer to Joan of Arc).

Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr., on the other hand, has, because of the wealth and power of the defendant, is on the verge of joining Anthony Weiner on the unemployment line, his own political career virtually in tatters. Considering the prosecution did not protest the reduced bail, it's obvious at this point that Vance is, unlike Strauss-Khan in that hotel room, looking for a dignified exit. It's a foregone conclusion this case will never go to trial.

The plaintiff-turned-defendant, the victim, will surely, if she hasn't already, lose her job and possibly face jail time for lying about her taxes and immigration status and will very likely get deported along with 800,000 others in the Glorious Age of Obama, her hopes and dreams of making it in the United States completely destroyed.

It's the classic case of the boy who cried wolf except in this case it's a girl, one who's been living a borderline criminal life in the interests of survival and the wolf just happens to be the presumptive next President of France and former head of the IMF. But while people are sending him balloons shaped like the Statue of Liberty (an inflatable shark with a fish in its mouth was turned away at the townhouse) and bemoaning how he was victimized by having to give up his IMF post, hardly anyone save for the woman's attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson, seem to care about the potential and likely fallout that'll be suffered by the complainant. Suddenly, we're not hearing so much about the compelling forensic evidence, about Strauss-Khan's extremely suspicious behavior (he left the hotel in such a hurry after the rape, he left his cell phone behind).

Once a liar, always a liar, is what we're hearing from the MSM. "If she lied about her immigration status and on her tax returns, then she must be lying about this" is the unspoken consensus. Yet, while it's true that she sought to profit from this (as per the transcript of a recorded conversation she'd had with her self-serving fiance in prison, who put the idea in her head), it's notable that the prison visit reveals the rape to be a matter of fact and not some hoax or conspiracy to extort a vast sum of money from a powerful, wealthy and innocent man.

Here's the difference in a nutshell: If one is poor and has a verifiable history of telling lies, one is doomed. If one is powerful and wealthy and has a verifiable history of telling lies, they get elected, re-elected, literary agents and huge book and TV deals.

It All Started at Stonewall

2011-06-25T09:59:00.001-07:00

My guess would be even the most idealistic activists who'd taken part in the Stonewall Inn riot of 1969 would never have thought that gay marriage would one day be a reality in New York within 42 year's time. Of course, the primary impetus for Stonewall was not a demand for gay marriage or even civil unions but one for the simple, abstract right to not be singled out and persecuted (and prosecuted) for their sexual orientation.

When NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the gay marriage bill into law last night, thereby allowing same sex couples in New York to legally marry in 30 days, it was a watershed moment in not only New York but national politics, with the full weight of historical import felt both in Albany and on the streets of the West Village. Passing 33-29 in a deathly quiet chamber, the outcome hanging in the balance and not known until the final votes were tallied, four New York Republicans joined with all but one Democrat to give the New York LGBT community the rights given to their brothers and sisters in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, Iowa and, briefly, Maine and California.

It was still a hard line party vote but it bears repeating that four Republicans did vote for it while being threatened by Tea Baggers outside the state house. Said GOP state Senator Grisanti from Buffalo:

I apologize for those who feel offended. I cannot deny a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, the people of my district and across this state, the State of New York, and those people who make this the great state that it is the same rights that I have with my wife.

That's not political grandstanding. That's a courageous statement coming from the heart that gets immediately to the heart of the matter, a heart that's been beating in the chest of every liberal since time immemorial: That if you're a gainfully employed taxpayer, a voter, an American citizen and a human being, you, too, ought to be accorded the same constitutional protections, civil liberties and human rights granted those in the straight community.

Anything less is, at best, cowardice and political expediency, at worst, hateful bigotry.

Last night was indeed a great night to be gay and bisexual in New York state, one of the most momentous acts of legislation in recent New York history.

But there was a summer night like this in Sacramento, California not too long ago, three years ago, to be exact. Within six months, gay marriage was taken from the state in a dirty, overfunded and extra-legal dirty trick called Proposition 8. And to this day, even though retired Judge Vaughn Walker struck down Prop 8's constitutionality, his judgment has been stayed and had been until a week and a half ago challenged by die-hard wingnuts who claim that the openly-gay Walker's ruling was a conflict of interest (Oh, the irony!).

Walker's ruling is expected to be tried before the right wing Supreme Court. So let's not forget California and Maine, which lost legal same sex marriage before it had even become law. As Jefferson famously said, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

Acoustic Tuesday

2011-06-22T15:38:00.001-07:00

Recently, I began reaching out to long-neglected family on Facebook. I've already chatted for three hours on the phone with one of my cousins in Port St. Lucie, Florida and found out some things I could've lived without knowing while coming across some things that make me proud. My cousin Corey is one of them.

This is a fan-made video of my first cousin Corey Balsamo's "September", a track that was recorded when he was still in high school. Corey's one of the products of my Aunt Janet's marriage to Billy Balsamo, who used to be a Mets prospect in late 70's/early 80's. When I was this kid's age, I only dreamed of being a writing prodigy. This kid became one, proving that sometimes the apple falls farther away from the family tree than we think.

He also seems to be one of the 11 or 12 people who haven't yet deleted their Myspace pages. You can buy and download his songs on iTunes at his Myspace page. He's also all over Youtube. They say his influences are John Mayer and Dave Matthews and his acoustic stylings seem to bear that out.

You go, cuz!

Top 10 Changes Since Anthony Weiner Decided to Resign

2011-06-16T10:33:00.001-07:00

Today it was confirmed that Rep. Anthony Weiner (NY-9) will resign as a US congressman after it was revealed three weeks ago that he'd sent lewd pictures of himself to several women on Twitter. Many Democrats, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and even President Barack Obama, had called for Rep. Weiner's resignation. Already, things are changing on Capitol Hill in the wake of WeinerGate. What are some of the biggest changes?

10) Americans can now immediately resume trusting Democratic and Republican politicians again after both parties proved their moral purity and superiority at Weiner's expense.

9) Weiner resignation now allows lawmakers and the POTUS to focus on less important issues such as the imminent immolation of the world's largest economy.

8) Now that Alan Grayson and Weiner are gone, Blue Dog Democrats no longer hamstrung and put on the spot by funny and passionate but embarrassing Jewish liberal congressmen.

7) Faith in pogroms and witch hunts restored by having the will of Weiner's constituency subverted.

6) Andrew Breitbart one step closer to looking like a responsible, crusading journalist and one step removed from looking like a racist, spittle-flecked douchebag.

5) Sen David Vitter reportedly wearing Huggies again because of nonstop paroxysm of laughter.

4) Rep. Weiner's final post on his official congressional page is picture of fully erect penis with the caption, "Suck on this, Democrats."

3) Democrats no longer crippled with paralyzing fear that Letterman, Leno, Conan and Craig Ferguson will take down their party with penis jokes on late night TV.

2) Dozens of Republicans reported buying digital cameras and starting up Twitter, Yahoo Instant Messenger and Facebook accounts.

1) Dozens of Democrats reported selling their digital cameras and deleting Twitter, Yahoo Instant Messenger and Facebook accounts.

Sunday Cat Blogging

2011-06-12T15:48:00.000-07:00

You'd be amazed how often this furry little fuck just stretches out on my notebook even as I'm trying to write a chapter from one of my novels. I'm convinced he's a sworn passive-aggressive enemy of literacy.

Of course, he has his charming moments (or perhaps when he's too hot to try to forcibly remove my face without provocation), such as this moment.

Most of the time, however, he's like this.

Even though I wait on him hand and foot, including shedding undercoat maintenance...

...and letting him hog the fan even during heat waves.

The Scarlet Letters

2011-06-11T17:23:00.000-07:00

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

Is anyone else suspicious about the Sarah Palin Chronicles that just happened to be released when media frenzy about her possible run for the presidency is at its height, and when "Rolling Thunder" and her "One Nation" bus tour hit the east coast?

You know the ones I mean. The 24,000 pages of letters from her state email and private email accounts up until her rather hasty resignation when TrooperGate began rearing its ugly head? The Yahoo emails given the "lamestream media" by Palin herself, the ones that "paint a picture of an image-conscious, driven leader, closely involved with the day-to-day duties of running the state and riding herd on the signature issues of her administration"? The ones that also purport to show "a woman striving to balance work and home, fiercely protective of her family and highly sensitive to media coverage. She expressed a sometimes mothering side with aides but also was quick to demand answers or accountability"?

You know, those emails.

The word "paints" is an unintentionally revealing one because "to paint" implies some intelligent design and an attempt to convey some sort of personal vision or to imply, project or even impose some sort of subjective reality. And the timing of this uncharacteristic "disclosure" has about as much spontaneity to it as, well, a presidential photo op.

One of the greatest ongoing comedies and tragedies of the mainstream media is the self-serving yet ultimately vapid and self-destructive relationship between it and Sarah Palin.

In true Republican fashion, Palin has never shied away from blasting the mainstream media that, with a middle school child's love for cheap and obvious puns, she never tires of calling the "lamestream media". However, her diplomacy with the MSM always miraculously comes to the fore whenever she appears before some network or another to pimp yet another ghost-written pack of lies and other name-calling or some TV show or another with the Palin brand name on it.

And the MSM keep going back for more with the viciously comic recidivism of a recovering sex addict going to Amsterdam's Red Light District. As stated earlier, this unhealthy obsession with Palin that afflicts the MSM is a tragedy to those of us who care about the truth and the issues and a farce to those of us who simply no longer give a flying fuck and have long ago written off the MSM as irredeemably imbecilic and corrupt.

The marvel of this obviously carefully cultivated and choreographed "disclosure" isn't that there are no "Gotcha!" moments but that Palin and the MSM each think we're stupid enough to fall for this and be completely insensible to the dead giveaway of the timing, that we'd all suddenly slap our foreheads and say when this burnished and pretentiously presidential image of a nonexistent Palin came out, "Duh! we were all so wrong about the poor woman!"

But to those of us in the reality-based community, the whole thing smells as much as the also suspiciously-timed Branchflower report that found Palin innocent of any wrongdoing the day before the Presidential election.

The press either doesn't know or doesn't care that Palin is political junk food that simply is no damn good for either them or those who consume the pap they trowel out that ludicrously passes for news, that in a country of American, Swiss and cheddar, Palin is Velveeta or Cheese Whiz straight out of the can.

That would be the Palin who tried to fire an Alaskan State trooper and fired Walt Monegan, the Commissioner of Public Safety who refused to fire Trooper Wooten over him being simply a former brother in law. There's no hint in these letters of the facts that were unearthed by the toothless yet still-entertaining Branchflower Report, nothing to even suggest "a shadow office" manned by Todd Palin that was literally an enclave within Palin's office within her line of sight, a shadow office that was dedicated to one thing and one thing only: Firing Trooper Wooten for having the colossal bad luck of being Sarah Palin's former brother in law.

There's nary a breath of the elsewhere underdeveloped scandal involving the corruption behind the building of the Wasilla Sports Center or Palin's flipflopping about Don Young's Bridge to Nowhere and her rejecting the nearly quarter billion in earmark money for the bridges after accepting it but then keeping the money for the road that led to those bridges.

If nothing else, the Branchflower report does something this cherry-picked cache of Palin letters purposefully fails to do: "Paint a picture" of an amateurish administration of grifters and thugs who, instead of running a state, was largely concerned with petty, personal vendettas.

Instead, what we're getting treated to is a Republican Party platter filled with Velveeta, a cultivated portrait of Palin that looks suspiciously identical to the image we were presented three years ago and again today, that of a "dedicated" and conscientious "leader" who expected "accountability" from all those around her and ran Alaska like a mother hen but one that always meant well.

Sort of the image we were given of pre-Katrina Bush months after Katrina struck.

"Dear Chairman Rinsed Penis..."

2011-06-08T09:02:00.000-07:00

(This is an actual response to a mass email sent out today by GOP Chairman and Boston Terrier hybrid Reince Priebus in which he thought mentioning Weiner's wiener was a corking good opportunity to beg voters for money while cleverly tying in Democrat flashers retaining incumbency with the jobs problem.)

Dear Chairman Rinsed Penis or however you spell your name:

William Jefferson was caught with $90,000 in his freezer, not $80,000. Please don't make our corruption more picayune than it really is. Of course, we still have a ways to go before we can catch up with the truly Olympic-class corruption and graft of the Republican Party (I'm thinking of admirable examples such as Duke "Whoremeister" Cunningham, and fellow convicted felon Hot Tub Tom DeLay). But I have every faith that our liberal, Communist elected officials will soon be vacuuming up equally large legalized bribes in the form of corporate campaign contributions.

It's interesting that you would bring up Weiner's wiener as an opportunity to beg for campaign contributions while cleverly segueing into the jobs problem. Indeed, what better reason to vote a Republican into Weiner's seat than because Weiner showed his wiener on Twitter? Indeed, lambasting Democrat congressmen for trying to save their own jobs and the jobs of their own is the closest the Republican Party has come to addressing the jobs problem since they were inexplicably given control of the House last January.

"Vote for me because Anthony Weiner showed his distended underwear on Twitter" is certainly an election-year catchphrase that's as destined for greatness as "Tippecanoe and Tyler, too" and "I paid for this microphone!"

Ordinarily, I'd say, "Put me down for $100, Mr. Chairman Prius!" but since I myself haven't worked because your employers on Wall Street and the US Chamber of Commerce outsourced my job two years ago and since I haven't been able to rejoin this glorious economic recovery retroactively effected by "President" Bush, I have to instead send my best wishes through the ethers.

Jurassicpork

Balls to the Wall

2011-06-07T08:30:00.001-07:00

Guys, I know you're all sick and tired of me and my constant problems and who the fuck can blame you? Keeping a roof over our heads, our bills paid and food in our stomachs is my job. But since I lost my unemployment last March, even these modest goals are impossible when we have nothing but Barb's $135 in UI benefits to cover even some of our bills.

But the luck I've had since 2009 is something even Job would envy. I've shelled out $1300 in car repair bills in the last year now I have a $100-150 muffler job to look forward to. I need to renew my auto policy before the end of the month. I need to renew and convert Barb's license a couple of weeks later and AAA will want a renewal the month after that. That's another $250+.

My Dell shit the bed again last night hours after I got it out of the shop at a cost of $80. The other laptop is in the same shop and will cost us another $100. So we have no computer and we're reduced to spending even more money we don't have to use the local cafe's computer.

And that's not even the worst of it. My card got declined this morning even though yesterday I had about $100 over what I needed to cover our $650 rent check. So I raced to the nearest computer and discovered that the Massachusetts Department of Revenue grabbed over $728 out of my checking account for money they claim I owe them. Then they helped themselves to another $20 for a "fee" and that's where we stand now: A minus balance of $20.

The ironic thing is the DOR owes me something like 20 grand for taking money out of my pocket without a valid court order for nearly 8 1/2 years and when I write them to tell them this, they completely ignore me. But that's not going to get resolved until I can somehow hire a lawyer.

I still don't know if the last rent check cleared but whether or not it did, we're looking at a massive overdraft with no way of covering it. Without a computer and with gas at $4 a gallon, this skein of bad luck puts a severe crimp on our job search.

All this time I've somehow managed to keep our heads above water but this time we're looking at the very real prospect of eviction sometime this month. My landlord lost his own job and the company folded so he desperately needs all his rent or he'll lose this house along with us. Please, Please, PLEASE help in any way you can. I swear to God, I am not making any of this up. I really am this unlucky.

Top 10 Ways Evangelicals Will Prepare for the Rapture II

2011-06-02T13:01:00.001-07:00

Harry Camping's very believable and credible threat that the world would begin to end and the Rapture would occur on May 21st didn't materialize, to the surprise and even disappointment of millions of evangelicals. Bewildered and eager to save face, the Family Radio Network's Camping and his $18,400,000 in donations last year disappeared and reemerged days later to say that he'd, once again, made a miscalculation. Now Camping is saying that May 21st was the day God completed his list of who's naughty or nice and the world will indeed end on October 21st. So how are evangelicals preparing for the second Rapture of the year?

10) If second Rapture fails, to nervously laugh to ex-bosses, psychiatrists and creditors that they were in on the hoax all along and were satirizing Camping.

9) Giving Camping perhaps only half of life savings and kids' college funds as an initial down payment next time around.

8) Job creators will no longer tell employees they will be on their own so they can have sex orgies in the break room.

7) To maybe not boast next time to their HMO, "Go fuck yourselves. I got a better health care plan!"

6) To keep tending their gardens and yards because dandelions get so out of control so quickly.

5) Vetting Camping by actually reading the Bible this time and noting there's no mention of a fucking Rapture in the Revelations of St. John the Divine.

4) Change the litter box. Seriously. Just trust us on this one.

3) Getting a second opinion from other senile non-ministers or theological amateurs who've already lived 15 years past the average life expectancy.

2) Investing in anti-gravity boots to help speed things along.

1) As a backup plan, donating campaign contributions with last of savings to the Republican Party to finish the job in case Camping's wrong about Armageddon again.

"Take Me Out to the Ballgame... in Style"

2011-06-01T15:06:00.000-07:00

"Just another five feet to the limo, Governor." "(Puff, wheeeeeeeze.) I don't think I can (huff) make it, Cory!"

I've been waiting for Jill Hussein, New Jersey blogger extraordinaire, to mention the latest antics of her noxious blimp of a Governor Chris Christie. But, as she's gotten my back on countless occasions, I guess I'll have to return the favor.

As is usual with stories of Republican fuckuppery and hypoChristie, it starts out outrageous then by paragraph two it just gets worse.

New Jersey governor Chris Christie--who has made government reform a major talking point of his administration--is coming under fire for his decision to travel in a state-owned helicopter to his son's high school baseball game Monday.

Then the money shot:

According to the Newark Star-Ledger, Christie landed in the state's $12.5 million helicopter just before the game began, buzzing over the trees in left field and distracting spectators. The GOP governor then got into a black sedan with tinted windows, which drove him about 100 yards to the baseball diamond.

You read that right. The fat fuck couldn't be bothered to waddle the 100 yards between the illicitly-appropriated chopper and the ball field.

Then, they stayed for just five innings, drove back to the chopper and somehow, the poor machine achieved takeoff and stayed aloft long enough to get Christie's fat ass back to the state house.

They're making lot of hay over this in the Jersey press but what every one seems to ignore is that there were two vehicles involved because where ever the helicopter went, the sedan had to follow. All told, with gas at $4 a gallon and helicopter fuel (for turbine engines, that translates to "very clean kerosene") going for more than that... Well, let's break it down:

A five seat turbine helicopter, according to this expert, burns about "25 to 30 gallons an hour."

According to this website, the price of clean kerosene in New York statewide reached 434.6 per gallon as of April, which is actually $4.34, or more than gasoline. We don't know where Christie came from because his Reichstagg won't reveal that but say he flew the 70 miles from Princeton each way, that's 140 miles. At a modest speed of, say, 70 mph (or about as fast as a military transport helicopter can carry Christie's bulk), that means the state chopper burned 50-60 gallons of kerosene jet fuel. At, say, $4.34 a gallon, that means it cost the New Jersey taxpayer about $217-260.40, not including the cost of a full-size sedan to follow that same helicopter both ways, just to haul Christie's fat ass a grand total of 200 yards.

I'll leave it you to calculate the cost of gasoline for that limo.

I guess when Christie was in high school and college, he was dreaming about tap-dancing Twinkies singing, "Eat me, eat me!" during math and economics classes. And only a Republican criminal oligarch would call for sacrifices to be made by working-class people when this corrupt piece of shit is pretending that he's the president taking Marine One chopper rides that cost hundreds in taxpayer funds just to catch a few innings of a high school baseball game.

Personal security? Please. Show me the last New Jersey governor who ever got assassinated while in office. This was privileged laziness, nothing more.

Waiting for G'Duh.

2011-05-31T09:03:00.001-07:00

If any more Republicans join the 2012 presidential race in this upcoming political Special Olympics, they may just put the Onion out of business. Birther king Donald Trump reminded us why we loathe him so much for the double comb-overed, pussy-mouthed misanthrope he is and before his candidacy was even announced, it crashed and burned like a Hindenburg still tied to its mooring lines.

Mike Huckabee is so boring he's not even good for laughs but he announced he wasn't interested in the presidency after being told it was mutual among the electorate.

Then there's Newt, good ole Newt, who before and after his candidacy was announced hoarsely screamed about a mosque at Ground Zero, claimed that his love for America made him fall into vaginas that weren't between his wife's legs and called the president an anticolonial Kenyan. Newly anointed as the most allegedly credible GOP candidate, Newt just couldn't live up to that elevated status and before long his spokesman came out with some of the worst poetry this side of The Stuffed Owl and tried to defend then sweep under the rug an old $250,000-$500,000 no-interest Tiffany's loan. The former Speaker then tried to claim he was a Washington outsider. The only commonsensical thing that's come out of his mouth was when he called Paul Ryan's Medicare "plan" "right wing social engineering."

Now even the Republican Party, starting with el Rushbo, hates his guts and it's obvious the Great Apostate lost all GOP support now and forever.

But what we're seeing with the unfolding Sarah Palin soap opera is unprecedented in American history. Never have I ever seen a failed Vice Presidential contender continue to be the focal point of so much blind, misguided and even sick and obsessive interest. At times, even the former Alaska governor seems to be taken aback and even scared by it, jealously guarding her privacy. And who could blame the lady?

But over the last 33 months since John McCain inexplicably named her to be his running mate, anyone even remotely connected in the most tangential way has been chased by literary agents and had multimillion dollar book contracts and TV appearances and whole series catapulted at them. Bristol Palin herself made more than $200,000 last year alone and the Palin family's yearly income from just reality TV was $3,000,000 last year. Even Levi Johnston, a 21 year-old unwed hockey dad, is making 6 figures and is coming out with his own memoirs.

Now, taking a cue from McCain, Sarah Palin has begun a whirlwind east coast tour on a bus unimaginatively dubbed, "Rolling Thunder."

Call her and her entourage Jerry Farcia and the Grateful Deadheads but Sarah Palin, whether or not she intended to, is sending Tea Baggers and others with too much spare time scrambling for Civil War battlefields like Gettysburg merely on the strength of a quote she'd used from the Gettysburg Address.

Granted, for a so-called publicity-seeking bus tour, Palin's itinerary is strangely private but if that's the way she wants it, that's the way she ought to get it. If Mrs. Palin wishes to attend a historical site without being followed by the common rabble and the "lamestream" media, then she ought to be allowed to so do.

But flocking to Civil War battlefields out of morbid and idle curiosity is something we used to do during the Civil War. We've all heard stories of the landed gentry literally having picnics on the outskirts of Civil War battlefields during the actual engagements. There's something about watching catastrophe unfolding that's irresistible to humans and perhaps the deer-on-the-headlights phenomena isn't peculiar only to ruminants. Perhaps this accounts for Palin's so-called appeal.

So now those of us in the reality-based community have to play witness to another sad chapter in American History as written by Samuel Beckett, "Waiting for G'Duh", in which Vladimir and Estragon (the American people) wait and hunt in vain for their savior. The problem is, unlike Beckett's Godot, Palin will eventually make an appearance because that is what she does for a living and nothing more.

The Rupture

2011-05-22T10:29:00.001-07:00

Maybe I was sitting on the toilet when the Rapture occurred last night. Maybe it bypassed me because Mrs. JP and I were watching the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Maybe it came and went while we were listening to the Red Sox get blown out by the Cubs in their milkmen uniforms last night.

Or maybe I haven't been sufficiently religious enough during my life. But apparently, the baby Jebus either didn't think I was as pious as the 200,000,000 pre-chosen or... Or maybe it didn't happen at all.

Anyway, consider this an open thread to tell me what you did to prepare for the Rapture (Gotta admit, it was awfully convenient for that 89 year-old crackpot to choose a Saturday for the grand Skyline moment).

Posting Will be Sporadic

2011-05-19T10:17:00.000-07:00

My Dell shit the bed... again. So we're back down to one laptop. I don't have the money to fix it right now nor do I have the money to buy even a used one. Keeping a roof over our heads, food in our stomachs and the utilities on is more important. Plus it's going to be a brutal summer because renewing./converting Barb's license to Massachusetts this July, renewing our auto insurance (June 24th, 20% down again) and renewing AAA in August will cost upwards of $450 or more.

So whatever help you could give us in even the smallest measure would be immensely appreciated and would certainly make a difference (Paypal link is at the bottom of this page).

Common Nonsense

2011-05-17T14:34:00.001-07:00

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari Goldstein.)

"(Y)our music is very positive. And you're known as the conscious rapper. How important is that to you, and how important do you think that is to our kids?" - Fox "News" reporter Jason Robinson to rapper/poet Common, October 2010.

"Oh lovely, White House." - Sarah Palin on Twitter

I'm thinking of Robert Lowell. Specifically, I'm thinking of Robert Lowell in 1965. I'm also thinking of Plato's The Republic and how the right wing seems to have misinterpreted one of his and Socrates' dictums.

LBJ had an inferiority complex regarding the Kennedys and for good reason. While JFK and Jackie held lavish parties honoring Nobel laureates and other men and women of distinction in the sciences and humanities, Johnson was letting loose with war whoops in the Taj Mahal and picking up dogs by their ears.

So it came as no surprise to those in LBJ's inner circle as he sought to show they were just as cultured as their predecessors when Lady Bird Johnson organized the Festival of the Arts for the middle of June, 1965. But when Lowell was invited to participate in the Festival, he knew who'd actually tendered the invitation. Like any other American, Lowell at first accepted then thought better of it.

On May 30th, 1965, he sent Johnson a letter which was published in the NY Times the following June 3rd. Declining the invitation, it read,

Dear President Johnson:

When I was telephoned last week and asked to read at the White House Festival of the Arts on June fourteenth, I am afraid I accepted somewhat rapidly and greedily. I thought of such an occasion as a purely artistic flourish, even though every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public celebration without making subtle public commitments. But, after a week's wondering, I am conscience-bound to refuse your courteous invitation. I do so now in a public letter because my acceptance has been announced in the newspapers and because of the strangeness of the Administration's recent actions.

Although I am very enthusiastic about most of your domestic legislation and intentions, I nevertheless can only follow our present foreign policy with the greatest dismay and distrust. We are in danger of imperceptibly becoming an explosive and suddenly chauvinistic nation, and we may even be drifting on our way to the last nuclear ruin.

I know it is hard for the responsible man to act; it is also painful for the private and irresolute man to dare criticism. At this anguished, delicate and perhaps determining moment, I feel I am serving you and our country best by not taking part in the White House Festival of the Arts.

It was said the roar from the Oval Office could be heard all over the White House. Just as the 1964 general election was to be a referendum on how much LBJ was loved by the post-Kennedy electorate, so the 1965 Festival of the Arts was supposed to be a referendum on how cultured the Johnsons were. Then along came that troublesome poet Robert Lowell. As with virtually everything save his successful domestic legislation, Vietnam emerged and defined even something as non-political as Johnson had hoped the Festival would be.

Lowell was pragmatic enough to know that anything of this nature was all window dressing that would be forgotten in a day. He would write to a contemporary about how poets would be feted one day at the White House then in the next he'd read in the paper about the administration sending more troops to Vietnam. At least as far as politics went, Lowell was much more pragmatic and realistic than the Republican Robert Frost, who was so desperate for public honors in the last years of his life that he shamelessly sucked up to the liberal Kennedy administration.

Yet for all our 235 year history, there is no single, annual event that honors distinguished people of the sciences and humanities, at least nothing at the same time of the year and under one name. We have the Easter Egg roll in the spring, the pardoning of the national turkey in November and the lighting of the White House Xmas tree in December.

The Bush administration made one abortive effort to prove its cultural bona fides until they got wind of some left wing poets protesting the event and canceled it by taking Plato's and Socrates' theo-fascist take on banishing poets from the Republic a little too literally.

Then a week ago, Fox showed its true color (I'll give you three guesses which one that would be and the first two don't count) by posting a blurb with the headline, Michelle Obama Hosting Vile Rapper at White House?

Vile, huh? See epigraph above.

As usual, the message was quickly organized and strictly enforced at ~~The Reichstagg~~ Fox News HQ and the usual suspects were quick to jump on the rapper it had once deemed "responsible" and a "positive" influence on kids. Along with Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity was already chomping at the bit when news of this window dressing at the White House was put up front and center as if this was the biggest news story they could find. And even though no one in the MSM has come out and said it, it's essentially the same old meme that Fox was peddling in 2007, 2008 and even up to the present day: Warning white people about Angry Black Man Syndrome.

Common, you see, had in the past defended Assata Shakur, a woman convicted of killing a New Jersey cop in 1973. Exhibit A is the song, "A Song for Assata." Common, to those of us who aren't motivated and guided by racism, was merely questioning whether or not Shakur got a fair trial.

Hannity dutifully trotted out two African American right wingers to prove there was no racial bias whatsoever, although it's tough to see how the pair of panelists could be construed as experts on or even having any sensibility for rap music or modern day poetry.

Eventually, even Sarah Palin, another white person and one who's no friend to the Alaskan State Police, chimed in from her little Twitter balcony.

How soon Fox forgot and how completely bereft of irony they were in condemning a man today for a song he wrote and sang years ago since they sang his own praises just last October. How how fast they forgot about how they embraced and defended Ted Nugent's more legitimate white rage at then Senator Obama by telling him to suck on his machine gun and how he's "a piece of shit." (For good measure, the aging rocker also spewed misogynistic diatribes against future Secretary of the State Senator Hillary Clinton and future Speaker of the House Representative Nancy Pelosi.)

But we all know that Fox "News" and its Republican Party ventriloquist dummies are insensible to irony and even the most universally acknowledged and abstract truths.

Lowell, in his own unintentionally loud way, criticized the establishment for the "strangeness of (its) recent actions." He had taken a brave stand by banishing himself from one day in the Republic without any of the Republic's help. Common's only mistake seems to have been defending someone whom he thought had not received a fair trial regardless of the heinousness of the crime.

Fox's mistake was in lauding the usually noncontroversial Common then turning on him when an administration led by a black man decided to invite him for a fluffy poetry reading before the president went back to killing innocent Afghans, Iraqis and Pakistanis. Suddenly, it was, Angry Black Man Goes to White House to Read for Other Cop-Killing-Condoning Black People.

It stands to reason that if Bono or Bruce Springstein or Bob Dylan or any other white person had written "A Song for Assata" this issue would've been a non-starter.

But the folks at Fox "News" seem to have taken Plato's and Socrates' theocratic-based fascism to heart (although it's tough at best to imagine anyone in Rupert Murdoch's circle having even read Plato's The Republic) when they called for the banishment of poets from the state.

The draconian call for the banishment of poets was based in part on Plato's and Socrates' belief that all poets not divinely inspired be expelled from the polis on the grounds they would eventually delude and mislead the public (Socrates, ironically, was executed exactly for the same charges). While not touching what exactly constituted "divine" inspiration in the polytheistic world of ancient Greece, their intentions were morally pure in calling for a stringent set of guidelines for all poets past, present and future: Thou Shalt be Honest, Truthful and Work for the Public Good.

Like Jon Stewart, I can't speak for Common or any other poet but one must assume he felt his song had at least hugged the baseline of truth in questioning if Shakur's conviction was a just one.

Plato's greatest inspiration was his mentor Socrates, a man who never put pen to paper because he was illiterate. It's ironic that Fox's contributors are also functionally illiterate when they, too, start chasing phantoms out of their vision of the Republic based on words they truly cannot read.

Top 10 Reasons Why Donald Trump Bowed Out of the Presidential Race

2011-05-16T10:49:00.000-07:00

Last night on NBC, billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump announced that he will not be seeking the Republican nomination for president next year. While maintaining he could easily win the nomination and the general election, Mr. Trump stated he was not ready to leave the private sector. But his statement provided other reasons for not running. What were they?

10) Said his hair wasn't in it.

9) Fears Russian spy satellites will discover secret to patented combover.

8) The Apprentice was renewed by NBC and Trump heard rumors he would be replaced as host by fellow billionaire George Soros.

7) Speaker of the House John Boehner privately informed him Washington DC wasn't big enough for two orange men and that he couldn't carry the Oompa Loompa demographic.

6) Presidential run would distract him from planned hostile takeover of Hair Club For Men.

5) The president showing his birth certificate and killing Osama bin Laden within days deprived him of vital "I am a querulous, racist douchebag" political platform.

4) The multibillionaire was skeptical he'd have the cash flow all but guaranteed to Obama's reelection campaign.

3) Was recently told proposed running mate Daddy Warbucks didn't actually exist.

2) He couldn't guarantee he'd still be a Republican by the end of the election.

1) Ex-wife Ivana would've proved Trump's combover actually started as a prop in 1980 during their socialite/gigolo role-playing sex game.

Just to Play Devil's Advocate...

2011-05-16T09:13:00.000-07:00

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

It's been said many times before that media saturation in the 20th and 21st centuries puts a politician or political candidate's personal life under a microscope. With television in the mid-20th century and the rise of the internet these past 20 years, a public figure's personal life now is grist for the mill of public opinion, a grist mill that historical political figures perhaps wouldn't have survived.

For instance, suppose television and the internet had been around in the 19th century. Suppose these twin juggernauts had given us a presidential candidate who'd never been to college, was reputed to have suffered from depression and had bankrupted a business. That plus his ungainly appearance and high, squeaky voice would've all but guaranteed that Abraham Lincoln never would've been elected as our 16th president. Yet all historical scholars agree that Lincoln was perhaps the only man who could've kept the nation together during and after the Civil War. If anyone else had been elected president in 1860, the United States would be a radically different country (or two).

It's also been said that public opinion is almost always in the wrong. And media saturation and manipulation makes public opinion even more susceptible of being misled than ever before. While effecting the illusion that an intrusive 24/7 news cycle makes us closer and chummier as a nation, it also insulates us from politicians and candidates who are essentially chosen and rejected despite our wishes and whose carefully-chosen words are spoon-fed to us in what are known as "sound bites."

Opinions and the right to express them regardless of political ideology is a cherished American right granted to us by the First Amendment but in the present day and age where we're no longer restricted to three networks, the endless opinions of endless talking heads can. understandably, bewilder an already bewildered and apathetic electorate. A political platform during an election year is instead a microscope slide, with the microscope being the electronic media. We the people take turns looking through the eyepiece and see different things.

So the question becomes an increasingly relevant one: Should a presidential candidate's life pass a public litmus test in order to be suited for the highest elected office in the land?

The jury is still out on President Bill Clinton's ultimate place in history. Yet, if you were to ask 100 conservatives and 100 liberals as to whether his own moral turpitude should've gotten him thrown out of office 13 years ago, your answers will likely be along party lines. The same proportions would no doubt be reiterated were you to ask those same 100 conservatives and liberals whether or not the 42nd president should've been impeached for lying to a grand jury.

But one ought to also keep in mind the hypocrisy of the right wing in spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars in assembling a grand jury and investigating a presidency over what amounts to a blow job. And one also ought to keep in mind the chief force behind that impeachment, Newt Gingrich, the soon-to-be-disgraced Speaker of the House who was secretly conducting his own extra-marital affair with a staffer who was even younger than Monica Lewinsky. Plus, at the time of President Clinton's infidelity, First Lady Hillary Clinton wasn't in a hospital bed recuperating from cancer surgery.

Yet how much should our moral belief system be allowed to inform and make our decisions regarding the fitness of certain presidential candidates and incumbents? We on the left and many in the center who decry the government legislating morality from the wells of the House and Senate as well as from the Oval Office hypocritically have no problem whatsoever in using that same morality rubric when deciding who our next president will be.

Otherwise, if we do not allow our moral belief systems and religious mores to inform us during an election, then we must look beyond the candidate's personal life and look to his/her prior statements and review their positions, which is also a slippery slope to 55-60% of an electorate that chooses to stay home every election day.

Outwardly, if we're to use a superficial rubric such as family and the stability it promises, George W. Bush would've been a far more appealing candidate than William Jefferson Clinton were the two men to run against each other. Clinton came from a broken home and spent much of his childhood hovering right around the poverty line. His estranged father was a used car salesman. He also dodged the draft. Hardly what one would call a presidential upbringing, if there is any such a thing.

George W. Bush, on the other hand, was the scion of a powerful political family, with a Senator for a grandfather, a former CIA Director, vice president and president for a father, a sober and religious man blessed with a beautiful family consisting of an educated wife and lovely twin daughters, a successful businessman, a military veteran and, like Clinton, a state governor. And, best of all, not a hint of marital infidelity.

At least that's what the media insisted on showing us. When Dan Rather tried to puncture the military palimpsest that had been wallpapered over Bush's real Texas Air National Guard past, he was forced out of the business. When John Kerry, a real war hero, ran against the sober, God-fearing military man from Texas, the media gave Kerry's detractors much, much time and got just enough of us to believe that perhaps Bush was the real deal and Kerry was the fraud. It was the political version of OJ Simpson all over again.

Otherwise, if we the people had allowed our own native moral belief systems to make a more informed choice in both 2000 and 2004, the world and our nation would be radically different today.

So what place should our own mores have on who ought to be President or not? Should it have a place in the electorate's decision-making process or not? Should we let Christian virtues color our perception of a candidate or should our focus be on more secular matters? And is it even possible for any of us to make such a distinction?

Only one answer is for sure: Men like Dominique Strauss-Kahn rarely make it easy for us to decide whether or not he's fit for the highest office in the land but Strauss-Kahn proves that we need to set some moral parameters. If we had, perhaps we wouldn't be too mired in two unwinnable wars with the incumbent afraid to pull out and look weak against terrorism, an incumbent who gratefully accepted the neofascist infrastructure left to him by his sober, God-fearing predecessor.

Are You Smarter Than a 10th Grader?

2011-05-14T09:54:00.000-07:00

(This is a challenge purportedly written by Amy Meyers of Cherry Hill, New Jersey to Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (MN-6).)

Dear Representative Bachmann,

My name is Amy Myers. I am a Cherry Hill, New Jersey sophomore attending Cherry Hill High School East. As a typical high school student, I have found quite a few of your statements regarding The Constitution of the United States, the quality of public school education and general U.S. civics matters to be factually incorrect, inaccurately applied or grossly distorted. The frequency and scope of these comments prompted me to write this letter.

Though I am not in your home district, or even your home state, you are a United States Representative of some prominence who is subject to national media coverage. News outlets and websites across this country profile your causes and viewpoints on a regular basis. As one of a handful of women in Congress, you hold a distinct privilege and responsibility to better represent your gender nationally. The statements you make help to serve an injustice to not only the position of Congresswoman, but women everywhere. Though politically expedient, incorrect comments cast a shadow on your person and by unfortunate proxy, both your supporters and detractors alike often generalize this shadow to women as a whole.

Rep. Bachmann, the frequent inability you have shown to accurately and factually present even the most basic information about the United States led me to submit the follow challenge, pitting my public education against your advanced legal education:

I, Amy Myers, do hereby challenge Representative Michele Bachmann to a Public Forum Debate and/or Fact Test on The Constitution of the United States, United States History and United States Civics.

Hopefully, we will be able to meet for such an event, as it would prove to be enlightening.

Sincerely yours,
Amy Myers

This will likely be the end result of any debate between Bachmann and anyone else:

My money's on the kid.

The Decade of the Locust

2011-05-13T11:02:00.001-07:00

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

In a saga that could've been entitled Fievel Goes to Wall Street as scripted by Oliver Stone or Nathaniel West and featuring a cast of bipedaled rats, Galleon Securities’ Raj Rajaratnam was convicted yesterday in federal court of all 14 counts of securities fraud and conspiracy. Out of the 26 people named in the indictments, 21 of them would plead guilty and testify against their former benefactor. In another delicious irony, the hedge fund titan was taken down by Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara, an Indian native.

It featured a sociopathic Wall Street hedge fund manager and corporate raider who's a real-life Gordon Gecko, an aging cock tease beauty queen, a down-on-his-heels middle manager and a young man named, appropriately, Adam Smith.

When midlevel Intel manager Rajiv Goel decided to crawl into bed with future convicted felon Raj Rajaratnam, he was suffering from a rat infestation in his home. Little did he realize that by doing so, he'd be letting another rat into his homestead, the biggest one of all.

Out of a cast that could've been scripted by Oliver Stone for another Wall Street sequel, Goel is undeniably the most pathetic. Called the "Sad Sack" by the NY Times' Dealbook blog, the other Raj was a hard luck cog in Intel's vast machinery who looked up to the hedge fund superman like evangelicals look up to Jesus, with this one twist: It wasn't the resurrection of his idol that drove Goel's devotion but his own. His post as a middle manager enabled him to share with his old chum insider information such as Intel's earnings statements.

Rajaratnam, a real-life Gordon Gecko in every sense of the word, typified American high finance while remaining well below the radar outside Wall Street's competitive hedge fund community. He flattered and rewarded those who'd helped him amass an ill-gotten fortune worth an estimated $1.3 billion and a portfolio worth as much as $7 billion. But when the ever-pathetic Goel wanted Rajaratnam to take notice of an award he'd gotten at Intel, the latter yawned, prompting the underling to ask, “Does it always have to benefit you?”

But among those in Rajaratnam's vast army of corporate spies, Goel's starry-eyed devotion was not unique. In the small but steadily-growing hedge fund community on Wall Street, the Sri Lankan was revered as some kind of financial Oracle of Delphi, always making the best acquisitions and deals at the best time. And never once did anyone seem to question nor care whether Rajaratnam's fabulous and invariable success could be attributed to insider trading or, in layman's parlance, cheating.

The bin Laden of Wall Street

In an eerie and almost darkly comic way, Rajaratnam and his economic terrorism that was largely made possible through the deregulation orgy of the last two decades ran roughshod over our nation's economy over roughly the same period that Osama bin Laden was enjoying his greatest influence over that same economy. The only difference is, we were looking for bin Laden since before 9/11. The federal government's investigation into Rajaratnam didn't start until 2008, when they finally got court orders to do wiretaps on Rajaratnam's office phone.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow nailed it when she reminded us (using bin Laden's own words) that the terrorist kingpin's major interest regarding the United States was our financial downfall. Using the same exact tactics used by Ronald "Star Wars" Reagan to accelerate the downfall of the USSR, bin Laden also used our own fear, paranoia and the opportunistic instincts of the military industrial complex to bring about our own eventual downfall. The year after 9/11, the Bush administration authorized a defense budget of just over $400 billion. By the time Obama took over, we were already up to well over $700 billion, not counting another discretionary budget earmarked to fight terrorism.

Meanwhile on the home front, Rajaratnam was engaging in more than a little economic terrorism of his own. Whereas bin Laden's plane bombs were merely means to an end that all but guaranteed financial ruin, the Sri Lankan was busy collecting insider information and taking over weak companies with the intention of liquidating its assets.

In Oliver Stone's Wall Street, Charlie Sheen's stockbroker character Bud Fox, desperate to get into bed with Gordon Gecko, gave him a tip involving the failing airline for which his own father worked. Fox's real-life counterpart Smith had a similar airline moment:

In 2005 (Smith) traveled to Laguna Beach, Calif., for the bank’s annual technology industry conference. There an old colleague told him about Integrated Device Technology’s planned acquisition of Integrated Circuit Systems.

He e-mailed Mr. Rajaratnam about the tip with the subject line “the two eyes” — code for the two companies. When the companies announced the deal in June 2005 — bringing Mr. Rajaratnam nearly $3 million in profit, according to prosecutors — Mr. Smith said he felt a tinge of regret.

“I remember after the announcement having a sinking feeling in my stomach that this might be a problem,” Mr. Smith testified.

Most people, I'd like to think, would be more sensitive to conflicts of interest and breaking the rules to get ahead of more honest Wall Street speculators and would feel more than "a tinge of regret." But tweaks of the conscience will get no one anywhere on Wall Street where the business of business is business. In fact, there's a whole book devoted to the Wall Street personality. It's entitled, "Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work."

Party Like it's 1999.

So why did it take the better part of a decade or more to get this other foreign-born terrorist who plied his trade not in Afghanistan's caves or Pakistan's remote suburbs but openly in our midst, on our soil and using our own financial system for personal gain?

As stated earlier, deregulation during both Democratic and Republican administrations when both parties controlled Congress certainly provides a healthy introduction as to why. It would be a stretch to say that the dismantling of the 1932 Glass-Steagall Act 12 years ago made hedge funds entirely possible. Yet, taking Glass-Steagall off the books certainly did nothing to hinder the creation and monstrous growth of hedge funds since 1999.

US Attorney Preet Bharara and his crackdown on Wall Street aside, it would be easy to use Rajaratnam's crooked exploits in gaming the system as a better argument for immigration reform than the one right wingers have been using for decades. Indeed, it's hard to see how minimum wage-earning Chipotle employees or underpaid, brutalized migrant workers toiling in Florida's tomato fields or North Carolina's tobacco fields (.pdf file) are a greater threat to our economy or national security than a Sri Lankan who stole perhaps billions through insider trading gotten through corporate and even sexual intrigue.

These last ten years on Wall Street have been the Decade of the Locust, with little accountability and even enormous help on several fronts from our government of the people, by the people and for the people. But rather than acting in good faith on behalf of the people who elect and re-elect that government, the only people they're primarily interested in helping are the corporations that are masquerading as people.

Because for every Rajaratnam and Madoff that we put behind bars, there are literally thousands of other people on Wall Street that are doing exactly the same thing with no or little fear of meeting the same fate. Because everyone on Wall Street, and the southern New York US Attorney's office, knows that our economic and financial system is predicated completely on fraud, dirty tricks and deception. They also know if the DOJ were to go after everyone on Wall Street, our nation's economy would collapse within weeks if not days.

It's not that Wall Street crooks are too big to fail. It's the sheer fact that there are too many of them to fail.

Pottersville in Pictures

2011-05-09T15:35:00.000-07:00

The weekly Hasidic newspaper Di Tzeitung covers Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's address to the League of Women Voters.

If the hunt for Osama bin Laden proved anything, it's that you can foil the largest, best-funded and most technologically superior intelligence-gathering apparatus in human history for over a decade as long you don't have a cell phone, landline or ISP.

Professional asshole Dick Cheney (R) tells Fox's Chris Wallace (L) that while he credits Obama for getting bin Laden, it would be a mistake to take torture "off the table."

Among Maria Shriver's reasons for terminating her marriage with Arnold Schwarzenegger was his womanizing, which included an obsession with a woman named Sarah Connor.

In a press release yesterday, God apologized for the flooding in Memphis, Tennessee. "I meant to flood the Nile and get rid of the ruins of the original Memphis during spring cleaning," the Lord said, adding, "But, you have to admit, the stupid fake pyramid didn't help matters any."

Internationally renowned fashion designers Zita Csabai and Zsofia Farkas were arrested this week for trafficking in LSD but not, unfortunately, before their latest show.

Rex, a working dog with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, jumps from a Chinook helicopter during training. Rex later said the jump was successful but added, "You try pulling that fucking ripcord without an opposable thumb and see how you like it."

Right wing garbage mill HarperCollins is publishing Arizona Governor Jan Brewer's memoirs this fall. The working title is, "The Accidental Governor: My Fight For Arizona to Protect Its Own Border While Hypocritically Accepting $185,000,000 in Federal Stimulus Funds." Brewer's literary agent is Lucifer.

Top 10 Inaccuracies Re Osama bin Laden's Death

2011-05-09T12:31:00.000-07:00

In the excitement over the news that Navy SEALs and the CIA killed Osama bin Laden, many inaccuracies were unfortunately reported as fact. The most disingenuous claim seemed to be whether the terrorist mastermind was armed in the final moments of his life. Yet, there were other claims that had been made that weren't reported as widely. What were they?

10) Among the treasure trove of intelligence gathered by Navy SEALs was a kick-ass recipe from Bill O'Reilly for falafel sticks.

9) Moments before his death, bin Laden was about to beat his own high score on CALL TO DUTY 4.

8) That bin Laden pushed his wife to a SEAL operator, screaming, "Take my wife, please!"

7) There was a Post-It note on the refrigerator that read, "Don't worry about Obama. He's a one-termer and he'll never find you. Let's do lunch. Pervez."

6) Pornography stacked in the bathroom for casual reading such as Jihad & Jism.

5) The last entry in bin Laden's secret diary read, "Will let it be leaked out to the CIA that I'm still living in a cave receiving dialysis three times a week. Always good for a laugh."

4) Was wearing a cock ring and holding a goat tether, screaming, "This isn't Florida! I can do whatever I want!"

3) The CIA tracked him down only because he got an iPhone last Ramadan.

2) Last text message to al Zawahiri read, "Black choppers in back yard. Must I tell CIA again I will not come out of retirement?"

1) That George W. Bush should claim even an iota of credit whatsoever for this after slithering out of office nearly 2 1/2 years ago.

A Study in Priorities

2011-05-09T08:45:00.000-07:00

Last week, the Florida legislature just passed a law that would ban bestiality. Even with the ratification of this law (blocked twice by Republicans), bestiality is still legal in 15 other states.

Meanwhile, gay marriage is still banned in 45 states.

Bin Laden Was a Liberal

2011-05-08T10:19:00.001-07:00

.oO By the beard of the Prophet, 110 channels and there's nothing on! Oo.
From this morning's New York Times:

In October, when American intelligence was close on the trail of the courier and spy satellites were taking detailed photographs of the house, Bin Laden issued two audio statements urging help for victims of floods in Pakistan. “We are in need of a big change in the method of relief work because the number of victims is great due to climate changes in modern times,” he said.

In 2007, he complained that Democratic control of Congress had not ended the war in Iraq, a fact he attributed to the pernicious influence of “big corporations.” In other messages he commented on the writings of Noam Chomsky, the leftist professor at M.I.T., and praised former President Jimmy Carter’s book supporting Palestinian rights.

I can only imagine what Breitbart and Malkin and their odious ilk are going to make of this the minute they can find someone to read those paragraphs to them. But their predictable response is not what I'm here to talk about.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: The raid on the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad was a sloppy clusterfuck from the beginning, something out of a Charlie Sheen parody as written by Woody Allen. The air was too thin for the helicopter to get over the wall and they had to drop the chopper on the other side. The air, to their apparent surprise, was still too thin after the raid for it to take off and they then had to destroy a (possibly experimental) multimillion dollar aircraft so it wouldn't fall into al Qaeda's hands.

40 Navy SEALs and CIA operators then burst into the compound with different rules of engagement. Despite piously claiming they would take bin Laden alive unless he resisted, they apparently thought that his wife rushing them and having to shoot her in the leg constituted resistance and they blew his head off despite him being unarmed and within arm's reach of no weapons.

Then the operators let Pakistani officials, the very same people we didn't trust enough to warn ahead of time about the raid, into the compound so they could take pictures of bin Laden and the bodies of the other four people killed in the raid. Then the Obama administration, which was totally responsible for creating and implementing the policy of the raid and its aftermath, the same Obama administration that was watching this whole thing unfold live on CCTV, is now struggling to justify suppressing the photographs they let Pakistani officials take. Horses, barn doors and all that.

To make matters worse, the Obama administration, which has officially declared waterboarding and other forms of enhanced interrogation as torture, is quietly and eerily OK with us using those very same methods to extract the HUMINT (human intelligence) used to track down and kill bin Laden, a man who, like so many of our fathers, fled to the 'burbs and instead of helping with the chores, spent hours in front of a TV with a remote in his hand.

Then, to make this seem even (no pun intended) fishier, hours after the raid, the new day begins like an episode of the fucking Sopranos or a scene out of The Godfather, with bin Laden's body getting dumped in the drink.

So, really, despite the chutzpah of the right wing that's now suddenly demanding forensic proof after not seemingly needing any in the run-up to war with Iraq, I can't blame my brothers and sisters on the other side of the Great Ideological Divide for being a wee bit cynical about bin Laden's assassination and for calling us on our own hypocrisy.

We liberals who fail to see the violations of international law and the sloppiness of this raid are hypocrites if we claim moral superiority because this happened on a Democratic president's watch. We seem to be perfectly at ease over the fact that torture was used to extract this information, that we violated a sovereign nation (and a still-official ally on the war on terror) and God knows how many international laws to do something that the Bush administration could've and should've done nearly a decade ago (and, to be fair, something the Clinton administration also failed to do 15 years ago).

Should we give George W. Bush credit for bin Laden's assassination? Fuck no, not a single bit, no matter how much he whines about being left out of Obama's and America's victory lap at Ground Zero. But we're giving far too much credit to the Navy SEALs and the CIA for killing a lonely, unarmed, middle-aged man reduced to channel surfing in a dirty blanket and who had a skeleton crew of guards that were outnumbered 8-1.

It comes off looking like a mob hit or an urban drug raid gone bad, with the Obama administration telling us to "Trust us" despite the narrative changing practically by the hour. The SEALs fucked up, the CIA fucked up, the Obama administration fucked up and liberals are fucking up by signing off on this extrajudicial assassination that could easily happen in America's streets since JSOC is exempt from posse comitatus (thank you, Bill Clinton, for PDD-25).

And, uh, by the way, Barry, al Qaeda is still promising revenge on America whether or not the pictures come out.

And when we killed al Zarqawi for the second and final time in Iraq, the Bush administration had no problem publishing several different photos of his cadaver.

When Marines killed two of Saddam's sons, the Bush administration had no problem publishing several pictures of their bodies.

Was the Bush administration full of gangsters and war criminals? Fucking duh. Invading Iraq and, to a point, Afghanistan, merely gave bin Laden credibility and new breath to an already resurgent al Qaeda network. But in the superficial public eye, the Bush administration comes off as looking like it has much bigger cajones than the Obama administration because they at least showed the world the proof of what was done with our tax dollars and in our good name.

If the Bush administration was a criminal syndicate, at least they were in your face about it. The Obama administration, by conspicuous relief, comes off looking like a bunch of wimps, little boys who throw rocks through windows and leaving flaming bags of dog shit on stoops before running away, unable and unwilling to face the consequences of its actions.

I was initially skeptical about bin Laden's death. But al Qaeda all but confirmed it by vowing vengeance on America. One of bin Laden's three wives sealed it for me when she identified his body. I believe bin Laden's fish food not because Barack Obama is saying it's so but because a terrorist network and its sympathizers are saying it's so.

And that's what I deplore most of all: That I have to go to al Qaeda to get the truth because I cannot trust my own government.

"Hey, What About Me?"

2011-05-05T07:04:00.001-07:00

Does it really surprise you to hear that Bush would come out with something like this in the wake of bin Laden's assassination at the hands of Navy SEALs?

George W. Bush won't be at Ground Zero with President Obama Thursday in part because he feels his team is getting short shrift in the decade-long manhunt for Osama Bin Laden.

Yep, you read that right. Bush is trying to claim credit for Obama taking out the head of al Qaeda whose own brother Salem was largely responsible for turning around his personal fortunes as well as that of his family. Fucking A, why not give him credit? And while we're at it, let's also credit Herbert Hoover for pulling us out of the Great Depression.

That would be the same Bush who'd said just six months after September 11th, "I really just don't spend that much time on him."

That would be the same guy who also just didn't spend that much time listening to what the outgoing Clinton administration and holdover Richard Clarke tried to tell him about the al Qaeda network.

That would be the same guy who let him get airlifted out of Tora Bora.

That would be the same guy who told French special forces who had bin Laden in their sights to stand down.

Now this putz is acting like he should be allowed to run the victory lap instead of, you know, the Kenyan Muslim who actually did get him. Despite the fact that the president is going out of his way to not brag about it.

No matter how old Bush gets he will always have the puerile mentality of an eight year-old, stamping his feet when he doesn't get his way and pettily trying to claim credit for something that's a benefit to all humanity.

And Bush snubbing Obama for his own perceived snub shows that this prima donna will always be the immature little Caesar living in Daddy's own short, slender shadow.

A Comedy of Terrors

2011-05-04T10:33:00.001-07:00

In the United States, bullshit can almost be considered the Fifth Element, with Donald Trump being The Last Hairbender. And indeed, the actions of this administration of late seem to be less autonomous actions as they're reactions to the Donald's assertions and charges.

Just as Trump was building what in right wing circles was a noteworthy and sturdy campaign platform ("Show us the birth certificate!"), out came the long form birth certificate. Then, to make room for the President's announcement of bin Laden's death, Trump's program, Celebrity Apprentice, was preempted. Sandwiched in between this was Obama's standup act at the White House Correspondent's dinner that was half devoted to roasting Trump without his prior knowledge.

But Donald Trump is easy fun fodder for people who don't have to worry about black helicopters and JSOC legally bypassing posse comitatus. As easy as it is to make jokes about Trump and the Republicans who were unwilling or unable to get bin Laden for the last 10 years, we seem to have forgotten how to recognize the failings and to make fun of an administration simply because it's controlled by the Democratic Party and is led by a man with a reputation for intelligence and glibness.

For instance, consider all the things that went wrong in Abbottabad, Pakistan the night we supposedly killed bin Laden: Misjudging the altitude and air density at the compound, a Navy SEAL chopper was grounded at the foot of the compound's outer wall. This prevented the chopper's takeoff after the op, requiring the vehicle's demolition. In a way, this will remind some of us older folks about the abortive rescue operation in Iran in 1980. It was probably the one single biggest fuckup that resulted in Jimmy Carter getting ousted out of office by Ronald Reagan.

Even though Pakistan's government shared with us intelligence about the compound, we decided to go in with guns blazing without first notifying the Pakistani government. Which, considering how notoriously corrupt Pakistani governments always seem to be and how close they've been to al Qaeda, may not have been such a bad idea, after all.

Then there was the supposedly open-ended ROE or Rules of Engagement: Capture bin Laden except if he resists. First we were told bin Laden traded fire with Navy SEAL and CIA operators. Then that was downgraded to, "Well, he may not have gotten off a shot, after all." By today, we were told by Jay Carney that he wasn't, in fact, armed at all, leading one to wonder what he could have done that could be construed as "resisting" and terminal force with extreme prejudice was deemed necessary.

And now NBC is telling us that bin Laden was captured alive then killed.

In fact, virtually everything we were told by the president and John Brennan, Obama's #1 counter-terrorism advisor, was a complete fabrication. Therefore, if we're to retain any sort of intellectual honesty, we have to wonder about what else went down in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

For those of you whose own memories don't stretch that far back, it may be worth it for me to remind you all that Brennan was Obama's first pick to head up the CIA. Then Brennan had to withdraw his name from consideration because of his prior statements that glorified torture, extraordinary rendition and other war crimes that we've been unsuccessfully denying for years.

Before becoming Obama's top counter-terrorism chief, Brennan headed up a company called Analysis Corp, a security company whose parent company's (Global Strategies) mercenaries have been criticized by human rights groups for human rights abuses.

So not only is Brennan a torture and extraordinary rendition-loving type of guy, he's also a fuckup and a liar who'd embarrassed the administration yet will still keep his job.

This is the first picture authorized by Brennan to be released of bin Laden's body.

Now, it ought to behoove us to remind ourselves of bin Laden's own murky and troubling history with our government and especially the CIA itself, an involvement that certainly did not end with bin Laden's and his mujahedeen's battle with the Soviets during the 80's. In fact, it's a matter of public record that bin Laden was still working with our government and his terrorist training camps in Afghanistan were enjoying protection paid for by the US taxpayer as recently as two years before 9/11.

In fact, the al Qaeda-supported KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) was supported by not only bin Laden and his people but also by Germany and Uncle Sam. But don't believe me: This is coming from a former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania. The KLA, you might remember, has long since been declared a terrorist organization by the US State Department.

Yet somehow, bin Laden's involvement with the CIA hardly ever makes it into the official narrative, especially any that's even tangentially devoted to September 11th. For instance, if you were to go straight to the index of Bin Laden, the Man Who Declared War on America by Yossef Bodansky, who's a former senior consultant to the Pentagon and U.S. State Dept., you'll note two pages of entries for bin Laden but only four mentions of the Central Intelligence Agency. That's hardly what I'd call an innocent oversight.

Compare that to Taliban, by Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid. His own index lists eight entries on bin Laden and no less than 11 about the CIA.

Speaking of intrepid journalists working abroad safely beyond the confines of the American corporate mainstream media, it may be worth it to look at a series of interviews that Greg Palast did for the BBC in the months before 9/11. Pay particular attention to what Michael Springman, a longtime veteran of that same State Department, says about how deep and incestuous was our involvement with al Qaeda. In fact, Springman said at the beginning of the first sound bite that he was ordered to issue visas to al Qaeda terrorists.

This was, of course, during the time when former CIA chief George HW Bush was still clinging to Reagan's coat tails in the White House.

I'm just dabbing at the many, many disturbing connections between bin Laden and the United States government. We know about the financing and training in Afghanistan and all that. What we may not know so much about was Dubya's inexplicable decision to pull back two attack subs near Afghanistan that had been in place for two years and were certainly in a position to take out the training camps if they'd been gotten the order (Clinton gave the order twice to do so but those were struck down by then CIA Director George Tenet).

Considering to what extraordinary lengths the Obama administration has gone to protect the war criminals of the Bush administration, is it really beyond the pale to speculate that perhaps the current administration was, in killing bin Laden, protecting not the United States but previous administrations?

Perhaps the whole idea was take bin Laden out before he could get to the trial phase. And, if anyone had a lot of secrets about our government, secrets that never should get out, that person was Osama bin Laden.

The Latest From Alan Grayson

2011-05-03T13:19:00.001-07:00

(I belong to Alan Grayson's mailing list. This is Congressman Grayson's newest letter on the assassination of Osama bin Laden. My unitalicized comments will follow below.)

About a year after 9/11, I was sitting in an airport terminal, waiting for a flight, when nature called. I turned to the young lady sitting next to me, and asked her if she would watch my carry-on baggage while I went to the restroom.

She looked at me, she hesitated, and then she asked, “How do I know that you’re not a terrorist?”

She wasn’t kidding. She looked a little scared.

I thought about delivering some snappy retort, like “I used to be a suicide bomber, but I quit, because I didn’t like the pension benefits.” I could see, though, that she was actually feeling some fear, so I looked her in the eye and said, “I’m not a terrorist.” She thought for a moment, and then she said, “OK, I’ll watch your bags.”

And off I went.

After that conversation, I realized that 9/11 had not only radically altered our national security priorities, but also the way that many people thought about others. And the weird possibility grew in many people’s minds that any stranger could be a killer.

Now that Osama Bin Laden is dead, I hope that that feeling also is dead. The feeling that we live in fear. Judging by all the spontaneous celebrations, maybe that feeling is dead.

We have often heard the phrase, “if xxxxxxx, then the terrorists have won.” Martha Stewart once told her employees that if not enough of them attended her company Christmas parties, then “the terrorists have certainly succeeded.”

Here is one formulation of that formula that we didn’t hear: “If the terrorists make you feel terror, if they make you fear them, then the terrorists have won.”

I hope that that’s over, now.

We spend roughly $3000 for every American each year on the U.S. military. There is a theory that the reason for this is that the military-industrial complex controls our foreign policy, in much the same way that the medical-industrial complex controls our health policy, and Wall Street’s money-industrial complex controls our economic policy. That public opinion is simply irrelevant.

Maybe. But public opinion since 9/11 has been skewed by the real fear that many Americans have felt. Urged on, of course, by certain parasites in the body politic who want us to believe that they are the only ones who can save us from the threat.

In George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four, the fundamental basis for the totalitarian state that he portrays is the fear and hatred of the foreign enemy, Oceania. A siege mentality, brought about by endless war.

I hope that the death of Osama Bin Laden will mean the death of the siege mentality. The end of the perceived need for foreign occupations, and the end of foreign occupations.

I hope for peace.

Some things need to be said here, things that, once again, the yellow-legged, yellow journalists who are trying to piss and shit red, white and blue will, as usual, never tell you.

First off, this was an assassination, plain and simple. As with the nearly 3000 who were killed at Ground Zero, the evidence was carted away with no real forensic analysis and no peer-reviewed findings presented to the public. Osama bin Laden's body, we're told, was buried at sea and a DNA analysis was supposedly done within hours of his extra-judicial killing. A full DNA analysis, especially when mitochondrial DNA is involved, takes days.

Secondly, among the first stories we heard after the shooting was the ROE or rules of engagement. No Navy Seal worth his weight in MREs is going to go into a tactical situation without first learning what exactly the ROE are. That's not to say they don't change during the op but no operator is going to engage an enemy without knowing what they can or can't do.

The ROE we were told was that bin Laden was to be taken alive unless he resisted. First we heard that bin Laden engaged the erroneously-named SEAL Team 6 then was shot in the left eye. Then we heard that bin Laden may not have gotten off a shot. By today, we were hearing that bin Laden may not have even had a gun but that he nonetheless resisted.

OK, question: How do you resist a SEAL team without a gun? How did he resist? By using harsh language? Giving them the finger?

This was an assassination, an extra-judicial killing that the Obama administration OK'd way back in 2009. We criticized him when we found out he'd ordered a hit on an American citizen who'd become a radical Muslim. But when bin Laden is concerned, we're suddenly OK with this because he wasn't an American.

I can't imagone what actually went on in Abbotabad, Pakistan that night but considering that five terrorists were allegedly killed without even so much as an American injury, one must conclude that the Navy SEAL and CIA operators had the situation fully under control from the beginning. In fact, it seemed they exerted so much control, they could've taken bin Laden alive to be interrogated.

One could make the argument that al Qaeda's longtime leader wouldn't have given them actionable intelligence. But then again, we could make that argument with any terrorist and use that as a rationale for extrajudicial assassinations. God knows we've done that before.

Our country shouldn't go around killing high value criminals such as bin Laden on the assumption we would never get actionable intelligence. We took Saddam Hussein into custody, got no information from him then executed him. We could've done that with bin Laden. But we'll never know what we could've gotten from him because bin Laden is fish food.

Congressman Grayson hopes, naively, that the end of bin Laden will mark the end of the era of fear that has warped this nation's sensibilities and priorities since 9/11. But what I'm hearing, starting with the top, is the exact opposite. All US military installations were ordered by the president to a higher state of readiness. Security has been beefed up in state and federal buildings, airports. The death of bin Laden, ironically, has had opposite the desired effect. Rather than putting us at ease, we're being told by our highest elected officials that our vigilance must not waver and that reprisals may be in the offing. Years ago we were told that we should be very, very afraid when bin Laden was alive. Today, we're being told we should be very, very afraid now that he's dead. When will it end?

Sorry, Congressman Grayson. The fear will never end. In fact, I can perfectly see the Department of Defense, still under pressure to feed the bottomless meat grinders in Iraq and Afghanistan, to note the young people in New York and Washington and to cynically use this as a recruiting tool.

The boy pictured above is Kevin Van Orden, who is shown in full military uniform near Ground Zero the night bin Laden was killed, even though he's not in the military. His brother is in the Army and it gives me chills to think that recruiting will once again see an upsurge as a result of the false patriotism that bin Laden's death is bringing about. It keeps me up at night thinking that bin Laden's extrajudicial killing could be cynically used as a selling point by a Department of Defense that's still fighting and feeding two wars that never should've been started in the first place. It keeps me awake at night thinking that kids like Van Orden, perhaps intent on following their older siblings into military service, may be fooled into enlisting, thinking perhaps that the world really is safer without bin Laden in it, fooled into believing in our nation's invincibility, an invincibility that was forever ended on 9/11.

Goldstein is Dead, Long Live Oceania

2011-05-02T10:34:00.000-07:00

(By American Zen’s Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

The death of Bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat Al Qaeda. But his death does not mark the end of our effort. - President Barack Obama, May 1, 2011

I can just hear it all now.

Republicans, who freebase war like crack addicts, will express skepticism at bin Laden’s death because, well, a black man can’t succeed where his white Republican predecessor did his damnedest to fail for eight years.

Democrats, equally bought and sold by the military-industrial complex, will rally around the president as if he was the one who’d personally shot Osama bin Laden in the left eye and turn this into a mantra as to why we should re-elect their man. But we must stay the course in Afghanistan because the fight is not yet over, comrades.

Conservative bloggers will sneer that it took Obama all this time to kill OBL without once mentioning that Bush could’ve taken him out many years ago when French snipers had bin Laden in their sights not once but twice and that Bush told them to back off or that we hustled dozens of members of the bin Laden family out the US two days after 9/11 despite the FAA’s moratorium and not allowing the FBI to interview a single one of them.

Teabaggers, who are even more woefully deficient in international affairs than they are on domestic issues, will simply mutter or say nothing.

Islamic radicals, terrorists and wouldbe terrorists will jockey for position in the alleged power vacuum and renew the fight against imperialist American forces and their sympathizers in an attempt to turn bin Laden into a martyr.

Rank and file Americans who still feel it their duty to accept as gospel everything the government tells them will have OBL Day in Times Square, sailors kissing nurses and chanting “Fuck yeah, USA!” at Ground Zero.

And liberals, progressives and other free-thinkers will express skepticism that not only was bin Laden’s body conveniently buried at sea and that not one photograph exists of his bullet-riddled corpse, but that this brazenly disingenuous administration that has done nothing but lie to us and flipflop practically from Day One is essentially telling us, once again, to Trust us.

My personal thoughts on the subject? I do not know if al Qaida’s leader is dead nor do I care because it simply doesn’t matter. It goes without saying that the world is a better place without Osama bin Laden but that would be to also suggest that the world would be an even better place without a United States that creates monsters the rest of the world has to slay. Osama bin Laden, as stated here earlier, is the ultimate blowback, a perennially unlearned object lesson delineating what happens when we rashly choose, train and finance allies based not on common, noble interests but simply on having common enemies.

As a figurehead and proxy that took on the Soviets in Afghanistan, bin Laden and his mujahedin served their purpose. It was still and always will be Charlie Wilson’s War but even those of who’d seen the Tom Hanks movie still give the Afghan freedom fighters and the rich scion of a Saudi construction empire who’d led them credit for kicking out the hated Communists. As it was, it’s a miracle we didn’t try to make bin Laden another TE Lawrence, Lawrence of Afghanistan, firing Stinger missiles at our common enemy so we couldn’t be officially accused of reckless adventurism abroad.

And now we’re supposed to be relieved and overjoyed at our President grimly telling us last night that Osama bin Laden, the scourge of American imperialist and corporate interests, is dead. We’re supposed to do our duty and assume that, just because the American government and our president tell us something, it must be so. And we’re not supposed to be mindful of the irony that bin Laden, once our excuse for covert involvement in Afghanistan, is still and will continue to be our excuse for our overt involvement in Afghanistan.

Just remember how truthful and sincere Colin Powell sounded during his presentation as to why we should go to war with Iraq before the UN Security Council in February 2003. Just remember how very truthful and sincere Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz and all those other very serious and powerful people seemed when they gravely intoned veiled and not-so-veiled threats about smoking guns and mushroom clouds as they stole our civil liberties from us by the handful.

They’re civil liberties that still have not been given back to us nor should we persist in believing that disingenuousness and fear-mongering are purely Republican traits. The only difference between the Bush administration and the Obama administration is that the latter finally got around to making bin Laden irrelevant, ergo expendable.

Goldstein’s usefulness to Big Brother was most invaluable as a symbol, a fabrication designed to stir up not only Oceanic patriotism but to stoke fear in the proletariat and party members by more than tickling our innate and inherent anti-Semitic fears and prejudices. Orwell’s naïveté was in assuming that Big Brother and the government of Oceania would never need another symbol like Goldstein.

But the United States has proven very adept at creating not only enemies but symbols who are killed and rekilled and yet live to fight another day. The most common chestnut is, of course, Hitler, whose death was also supposed to be taken on faith despite there having been absolutely no photographic or forensic evidence whatsoever to quantify his death and giving rise to decades of outlandish conspiracy theories and hopes through Nazi and neo-Nazi circles that Der Fuhrer still lived in one way or another.

The biggest mistake the Obama administration ever made in this matter was in not taking pictures and shooting videos that would’ve conclusively proved that bin Laden is dead. The rationale for this is clear and betrays more cowardice on the part of the Obama administration, the same cowardice that led Obama to turn tail and not release the torture photos and videos: It would incur the wrath of al Qaida, a terrorist network we’re hardly closer to closing down than we were when they supposedly brought down the twin towers nearly a decade ago.

And, as stated, it doesn’t matter if bin Laden is dead or not. There will be other bin Ladens, other Goldsteins, other Hitlers we can manufacture to rally the masses around the next guy who’s momentarily put in charge by the military-industrial complex, the petroleum cartels and the Bilderberg Group. Hell, in 1988 Noriega practically ran on the same ticket as HW Bush.

Because whatever political party’s in charge, there will be other blowbacks, other figureheads, other symbols that we can use to one advantage or another for one purpose or another in a neverending dance of death and destruction in which bad guys are the good guys then are unmasked as bad guys and only the victims, the poor and powerless, remain the same

And whether or not you want to believe that Osama bin Laden’s dead, don’t be too overjoyed or rather, be overjoyed. Eat, drink and be merry and enjoy the euphoria while it lasts. Because if you think this means we’ll be getting our troops out of Afghanistan anytime soon, think again. Afghanistan is the new Vietnam, the new South Korea, a slog of a war having nothing to do with al Qaida, one that has long since lost that new war smell and has been tucked away in the backs of our minds as a dim hum.

Because out of all the factions listed above, the only one whose opinions matter, the ones that will continue shaping policies is the faction that says, “But we must stay the course in Afghanistan because the fight is not yet over, comrades.”

Death by Misadventurism

2011-04-20T08:06:00.000-07:00

(By American Zen’s Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

"It's important that I don't get too knowledgeable about the past." - Wallace Booth, on becoming president of United Brands in 1975

At first, the title will make one think that I’ve taken a dog-eared page out of Sarah Palin’s version of Hooked on Phonics. But I decided to coin a new word because “misadventurism” is essentially the only word that distills the perennial lunacy that ensues no matter which party controls the White House.

American foreign policy, whether guided by the White House, the State Department, the Council on Foreign Relations, US corporations or a hybrid of all, has always had a bifurcated, Jekyll and Hyde quality to it. The nation that gave the world the post-war Marshall Plan and Japan with an all-inclusive yet unique constitution courtesy of Gen. Douglas MacArthur has also given it the Bush Doctrine and Cheney’s scorched earth 1% Doctrine. The nation that has come to the aid of literally dozens of countries in their direst hours of need has also ignored the crippling poverty of nations such as Haiti, Afghanistan and others in the 3rd world while invading others for disingenuous or transparently pro-corporate purposes. For every Camp David Accord that brought peace to Israel and Egypt, there have surely been dozens of Bay of Pigs and Gulf of Tonkin resolutions.

Until now, the Reagan years were regarded by pacifists and liberals as the heyday of American adventurism. While shaking a rusty saber at Communists both real and imagined, Reagan got us involved where we didn’t belong, namely in Lebanon, El Salvador, Grenada and other nations including some that haven’t even made the official record. During his eight years in office, the Great Communicator snuggled up to more tyrants than gaudy sashes, one of the most notorious being the right wing dictator Augusto Pinochet who was aided on another September 11th by the Kissinger-hatched plot to overthrow the democratically-elected Salvador Allende.

And, to prove what a pathetically hopeless product he was of his own generation, when Islamic Jihad terrorists killed 242 Marines (and 57 French) in two suicide truck bombings, Reagan cut and ran. He was great at shaking his wrinkled, liver-spotted fist at Communists real or imagined but when it came to the more relevant and unconventional threat of Islamic terrorism, he was utterly clueless and worthless.

Reagan merely continued a long, proud tradition of making tacit alliances and enemies of onetime allies while helping to create monsters that we later couldn’t control. It’s a ruinous policy of imperial American adventurism that immediately turns into misadventurism and the only ones who benefit, it seems, are the corporations that invariably wait in the wings for the US military to finish mopping up for their grand but silent entrance.

And if Barack Obama is sincere about restoring America’s integrity and credibility in the Muslim world in the wake of the arrogant, unilateral and lawless Bush years, he couldn’t have chosen a worse way to do it.

After a hiatus of several months, Wikileaks, through its new mouthpiece, the Washington Post, tells us that the Obama administration has continued a Bush-era propaganda scheme of using the State Department to funnel millions into the funding of an anti-government TV station run by Syrian dissidents. Its signal is beamed into Damascus and beyond by satellite and, as with Bush and Rice State Department, this propaganda program is continuing with Obama and the Clinton State Department.

This cynical piggy-backing of popular sentiment in order to legitimize and make nobler our adventurism is something you’d expect from warhawk Republicans intent on regime change in nations whose own domestic policy isn’t in line with American corporate interests. Many of the 72,000,000 who’d voted for Obama two and a half years ago (if they cared enough about it to learn of this latest disclosure) wouldn’t have expected it of a man who’d promised us “hope and change” when all he’s done is continue one failed Bush policy after another while dreaming up new ones of his own.

Blowback to the Future

Most, if not all, blowbacks are unintentional. For instance, when one remembers Charlie Wilson’s war, you rarely hear anyone include a footnote that a large part of the hundreds of millions he got in funding and training for the Afghan mujahedin to fight the occupying Soviets also gave rise to the terrorist network that would become an American household word after 9/11. Osama bin Laden, as we all know, used to be the good guy, a simple freedom fighter who shared with us a common enemy of the Reagan administration: The Soviet Union.

And, to be fair to those in power back then, the Soviets at the start of their own crusade into Afghanistan still looked pretty formidable and capable of taking on the United States and quite a few of its allies. Little did we know the USSR would only have about twelve years left before beginning a half-hearted slouch toward a pseudo-democracy.

But partly because of our blindly pro-Israel policies bin Laden had already been grinding an axe against his temporary benefactors and became the ultimate blowback. This was brought about by a persistent naïvete and ignorance of the Muslim world that persisted in 2003 when Bush didn't know soon-to-be-invaded Iraq was largely divided along Sunni and Shia lines, when Deputy Undersecretary of State Paul Wolfowitz insisted that all Muslims in Iraq were secular and when Cheney insisted we’d all be greeted as liberators.

And this willful ignorance and naïvete regarding Muslim matters continues throughout the administration of a man whom the far right wing has demonized as a Muslim himself. This errant stupidity is vividly delineated by Obama extra-Congressionally getting US forces involved in aiding Libyan insurgents who’d previously enjoyed an insurgent status in Iraq by attacking and killing American troops. (In light of the Obama administration’s risible insistence that we’re not at war with Libya, it’ll be interesting to say the least how the White House will spin it when the first US ground troops from Libya start arriving horizontally on the transports at Dover AFB.)

The problem with (mis)adventurism abroad is we wind up alienating more hearts and minds than we win. It’s a long-since proven truism that home invasions, wanton slaughter of civilians and cowardly, unmanned drone air strikes controlled by joystick jockeys on military bases in Nevada wind up radicalizing and nationalizing a civilian population that previously was more concerned with simple day to day survival. Yet right wingers, especially, still audaciously say time and again on Fox “News” that the indigenous peoples whose nations we’ve invaded and occupied, the people whom we’ve detained, beaten, tortured, impoverished, raped and maimed ought to show some gratitude!

To cite just Afghanistan, the American military has done more to destroy homes, families and entire villages than the regional terrorist network known as the Taliban. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Afghanistan, nearly a decade after the US invasion of 2001, is still allowing the opium crops to flourish at the insistence of our puppet Hamid Karzai and his drug-dealing brother while ignoring Afghanistan’s eternal poverty (as of 2006, they were still the 6th-poorest country in the world, according to the CIA Factbook.). Under American involvement, women’s rights have taken a large step or two backward as the Taliban has taken back key cities and provinces.

The ironic thing is that Afghanistan is, in theory, one of the richest nations on earth in terms of undeveloped oil and natural gas fields. Their undeveloped mineral resources are alone valued at roughly a trillion dollars.

But Afghanistan will never have the leisure of developing its natural resources and assuming its rightful place in the global economy as long as there’s a state of perpetual war any more than Iraq will achieve a stable, democratic government and free and fair elections as long as they’re in a state of perpetual war. If Afghanis are beginning to view our unending involvement and propping up of an obviously corrupt regime with circumspection, can anyone really blame them? On a rare quiet night in Kabul, an Afghani farmer will be able to hear Halliburton and Bechtel licking their chops and rubbing their cloven hooves.

Whose Bottom Line is it, Anyway?

Our entry into World War II forever ended America’s policy of isolationism. From the time of Truman on down, every single US president without exception has funded or otherwise gotten involved with civil wars, revolutions, coups, vest pocket wars and every class of incursion. But in Latin America and the Middle East during the early 50’s, we saw a disturbing element in the mix: The protection and enrichment of Anglo-American corporate interests. In Latin America it was United Fruit (eventually renamed Chiquita Brand). In Iran, it was BP.

From time to time it’s convenient and even incumbent on the incumbent President or Secretary of State to denounce certain tyrants for human rights abuses and while technically these denunciations are often unassailably true, what you’ll never hear is any American administration making similar denunciations of human rights abuses at the hands of American corporations. Whether it be Chiquita or Coca Cola or Halliburton or Chevron, there has never been a single recorded instance of the United States government stepping in to end, curb or even criticize a corporation that hires mercenary thugs to kill the indigenous people for simply protesting their collective rape.

We all know the reason for this. It’s the most open secret in the world. After his homeowner relief bill was defeated, Sen. Dick Durbin alluded to it when he said of the banksters, “they frankly own the place.” Corporations have bankrolled candidates for countless decades and the minute a candidate grows a spine and opposes his contributors’ agenda is the second their grip on incumbency begins to slip. As freelance journalist Michael Collins says time and again, there’s no Republican or Democratic party but one: The Money Party.

But corporations began bankrolling candidates then entering political activism decades before Citizen’s United vs the FEC was ruled on by the SCOTUS January last year. And while the Supreme Court insisted on using the false and dangerous argument that corporations are people, too, they seemingly forgot to invest ordinary biological entities with the same rights they gave to corporations: Namely the power to contribute unlimited sums of money to candidates without disclosing how much and, in doing so, even keeping their name from being publicly mentioned.

If you think corporations are twisting and subverting American foreign policy now, just wait and see what they do to this planet of ours when Citizen’s United gets fully entrenched in the electoral process if it hasn’t already. We’ve already proved time and again we’ll go to war and overturn democracies over oil and fruit and to keep the military industrial complex well-fed. What will it be tomorrow? Will we go to war with Canada at the behest of Johnson & Johnson over prescription drugs? Will Google send us into Red China so they can take over the last great frontier of internet access? Don’t stay tuned. Coming up next, another thrilling episode of American Idol.

And reckless, deadly pro-corporate adventurism and diplomatic hugger mugger only helps to create contradictory, tacit alliances that fall apart the moment these entities realize they no longer need American financing, training and political and diplomatic support.

One has to wonder what opportunistic Osama bin Laden of the future currently receiving US aid is waiting in the wings, what other monsters with which we’ll have to contend when they seize the moment to come screaming out of the closet and into America on a bright, sunny Tuesday morning. And what monsters will we have to create or cultivate in order to combat them?

And one is also permitted to wonder when we’ll at last return to the isolationism that served us well between the beginning of the 20th century and World War I.

Thumbtack observations

2011-04-19T10:20:00.000-07:00

Since losing my internet access at home a week ago, I just don't have the time or the resources to do the necessary research that a typical post requires. Still, I'd like to keep my hand in and not totally disappear into that not-so-good night.

What follows is mainly commentary off the top of my head, moreso of an opinion piece than usual.

Firstly, it bothers me that Obama is cynically jumping on this pro-democracy bandwagon that's caught fire and sent barreling toward presidential palaces all over the Middle East and Northern Africa. What's especially galling is that the Obama administration has found another way to continue the Bush administration's ruinous foreign policy by continuing to fund, according to Wikileaks, through the State Department anti-government propaganda in Syria.

On the face of it, opposing the autocratic rule of a tyrant such as Bashar al-Assad, whose thugs have killed scores of Syrian protesters, may look like a valiant, proper and moral position. But let's remember that the right wing of our government has always had a throbbing, oozing hardon for al-Assad ever since the Iraq War began. The GOP's erection for regime change just got harder when the false meme started circulating that Saddam's phantom menace of WMD were never found because they'd been spirited away to Syria.

And let's not forget how berserk the Republican White House went when Nancy Pelosi went with a bipartisan delegation in 2007 to talk to Bashar al-Assad (despite the GOP meeting with the same man at around the same time.).

Obama secretly supporting this, until now, underreported pro-democracy movement in Syria is infinitely more dangerous because now our latest round of rash adventurism is brilliantly masqueraded by popular consensus and makes the US look like the democracy-givers that the Bush administration could never be.

So why the continuance of secret financing? And doesn't the current junta in the White House reads its history? If they did, they'll know that, our own history aside, it's always better to let the indigenous people bring about their own regime change without cynical ulterior motives by larger, more powerful countries meddling in their affairs.

Besides, financing TV stations to disseminate propaganda is one of the many things the Bush administration did in both Iraq and here at home and continued by the Obama administration.

This propaganda continues regarding our so-called success in Afghanistan and alleged non-involvement in Libya even as we're openly bombing their country and supporting anti-government forces that just happen to be largely made up of Libyan insurgents who had engaged and killed our troops in Iraq four years ago.

It seems to me that one of the biggest failings today of the MSM not to mention the liberal movement (such as it is) is the unwillingness and/or the inability to clearly and forcefully articulate a return to our isolationist policy of a century ago.

Bay of Pigs II

2011-04-17T08:49:00.000-07:00

Today is the 50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion that was the first major setback of the Kennedy administration. The actual bombing of the airfields and diversionary sorties had actually started on April 15th but the ground invasion itself began on April 17th.

At least in the popular mind, the Bay of Pigs was the brainchild of a brash and immature President Kennedy, who had just been installed in office less than three months prior. What escapes perhaps all but astute historians is that the Bay of Pigs invasion was actually hatched by the outgoing Eisenhower administration with the help of the likes of E. Howard Hunt, CIA Chief John Foster Dulles and, after Eisenhower suffered medical setbacks, even Vice President Richard Nixon. The understanding is that Nixon would ride Eisenhower's coattails into the White House and the invasion would go off as planned.

But Kennedy won the presidency by the narrowest of margins. However, under pressure from warhawk Republicans and the still-powerful anti-Communist sentiment in America, Kennedy was forced to go with an invasion of Cuba that served as a prescient example that sometimes invading a country and engaging in conventional warfare against Communist forces was not a good idea. After all, the Domino Theory regarding Southeast Asia had fallen apart the minute we withdrew our forces from Saigon in late April 1975. Communism did not sweep across SE Asia any more than it metastasized across the water from Cuba to Miami in the wake of the failure of the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion. Not only that, it perhaps served as a reminder to President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year of the folly of hurling the country headlong into an even more dangerous gambit with Communist forces.

You don't have to be a geopolitical savant to know that we now live in a much different world but as the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Dirty tricks and politics will always go hand in grubby hand, false flag operations are always on the table. The major difference is that neither Kennedy nor the press had to be overly concerned about domestic issues more pressing than the bait and switch scumbaggery pulled off by the steel industry.

Obviously, that much is different. Kennedy had inherited an economically stable United States thanks to the steady and pragmatic stewardship of his predecessor. There was no talk, none that has survived posterity, anyway, of defunding then privatizing Social Security. Unemployment hit an uncomfortable 6.6% the month before Kennedy's inauguration. But that's still a far cry from the 9.5-10% rates we're seeing today.

OsborneInk summed it up with elegant simplicity when s/he said Republicans "would spend the 21st Century undoing the 20th Century." Indeed, on top of supporting reckless military adventurism (except when waged by a black guy), Republicans have also embraced birther conspiracy theories (while denouncing 9/11 conspiracy theories), smashing public and private unions, repealing child labor laws, waged an all-out assault on any government regulation on corporations, have shown as much contempt for the planet earth as the non-millionaires living on it and have more than hinted they'd love nothing more than to repeal "ObamaCare" as well as the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights Acts.

In short, any regressive measure, whether it be one that strips rights from workers and even working children, anything that pollutes and destroys the earth, anything that widens the gulf between rich and poor, you can be sure the Republican Party will champion to their last raspy breath.

It's hard to believe any of this would've happened or taken a toehold if JFK was running the country today. Kennedy knew when to work and compromise with Republicans but he also knew how to pick his battles, unlike the current steward. Obama has rarely stood his ground with Republicans, war-crazed generals in the Pentagon and certainly against corporations. Kennedy would've been smarter than to go out of his way to alienate his base by snapping at them for exercising their first amendment rights while giving one free pass after another to Bircher Tea Baggers openly calling for his assassination.

The Bay of Pigs we're seeing today is a domestic one. Indeed, the pigs have taken over Animal Farm and Obama and the American public at large is just as powerless to stop the occupation as Farmer Jones and friends. We're at war and while our egotistical Chief Executive is posing next to busts of Lincoln and jogging to his memorial to show the government is still open, he ought to be taking cues from a more contemporary example, a more courageous president, one who wasn't cowed by and didn't capitulate to Republicans and corporations.

Good News and Bad News

2011-04-16T10:09:00.001-07:00

First, I'll give you the potential good news:

For those of you weren't told directly by me, I'd given up on literary agents and had begun to send proposals for my new novel, The Toy Cop, directly to publishing executives and senior editors. Within hours, I got three nibbles. Jason Kaufman of Doubleday agreed to look at the sample chapters I'd sent and Bob Loomis, VP at Random House, said it wasn't his cup of tea but consented to pass it along to an acquisitions editor at RH's imprint, Ballantine.

The biggest nibble came from Judith Curr, Senior VP and Publisher at Atria Books (she's the founder), a major imprint of Simon and Schuster. Understanding, as with Jason Kaufman, how frustrating it can be to find an agent, she'd requested the entire manuscript, Apparently liking what she'd read, she tried to hook me up with a literary agent (who'd, unfortunately for her, rejected it with a form rejection letter just nine days prior to this.). Since then, she's passed the book along to Nick Simonds, an acquisitions editor on her staff. As Ms. Curr reminded me, she's not an editor and while she may have autonomous acquisition power with the editorial board, the journey from manuscript to finished book would be a lot less rocky if she had some consensus on the board. I do not know why she'd invest the precious time of a staff editor unless she thought it was worth the time to read all 470 pages.

I've been chewing my fingernails up to the elbow in virtual silence for the last 5 weeks because every time I tell you guys about some promising development, it's as if I jinx myself and it falls apart like a piece of cheesecloth in a thresher.

Now for the potential bad news: First, last Tuesday night/Wednesday morning we lost the free internet access that we'd been using at home since Nov. and since I lost my unemployment benefits last month. We're now living solely on my fiancee's weekly $135 in unemployment insurance, we won't be able to use the local cafe's internet wifi (they generally get cranky when you don't buy something). In fact, I'm here now using their wifi but as the coffee shop closes at 6, this will be it for now.

Since we're now reduced to living on $135 a week, it's only a matter of time before we get evicted either next month or June. Obviously, we cannot afford to get internet access of our own since feeding ourselves is our direst and most immediate challenge. The state Department of Transitional Assistance won't help us since we're neither handicapped nor elderly and the application for SNAP food assistance (aka Food Stamps) I'd requested two days ago takes a month to process (although maybe I can get a hardship dispensation and get my claim processed in a week.).

I have a job interview in a little over 48 hours so perhaps that'll bear fruit but I've been disrespected and disappointed by companies too many times to get my hopes up.

Failing anything positive, Mrs. JP's seriously considering us moving to Texas or Florida on the vague promise of her securing employment. And, having lived in both states, I so incredibly do not want to leave New England, leave the place I fought so hard to get and keep since the Troubles of two years ago. Going back to where she came from would be an admission to her family of my failure, my inability to take care of my own fiancee. Plus, the prohibitive cost of highway gas for a car and a rental truck, plus tolls, would make moving too expensive.

I hate inflicting these constant personal financial troubles on you guys as I realize this kind of embarrassing disclosure borders on the irritating and perhaps even on the intrusive. But I have more than just myself to worry about. I also have a fiancee and a cat to keep fed and sheltered.

I'm sorry if this proves to be an inconvenience or an irritation for any of you but I suspect this is what John Lennon meant when he talked about life getting in the way when you're making other plans. We're slowly going under in spite of my most valiant attempts to keep our heads above water. I was hoping and praying that an advance from Atria would come to rescue us in time but that looks less and less likely. A job interview, let alone an actual paying job, is an utter impossibility. I was lucky to get the one I secured yesterday. I miss the America I knew.

If any of you could help out again or for the first time ever, not only would we appreciate it but if I get the book deal that I believe I'll get from Simon & Schuster, you can consider it a loan and every one of you will be repaid. As it is, we have less than zero chance of paying our $650 a month rent on May Day, much less stay fed, pay the $45+ gas bill that just came in, electric, car insurance, cell phone minutes and everything else that pops up.

Our backs are against the wall like never before, thanks in large part to getting clobbered with $1000 in car repair bills since last winter. There's no other place to go but up and anyone who can help us can consider any Paypal donation a loan they'll eventually get back.

P.S. I just found out I owe the IRS $438 because I couldn't afford to have federal withholding taken out when I was on UI last year.

Pictures That Make JP Want to Puke Up Everything You've Eaten Since 1959

2011-04-12T10:20:00.000-07:00

(Update: OK, JP stepped on his dick again. Point made. It's a shame that Crooks and Liars arbitrarily linked to this post because it makes me and them look like we're slipshod in our research, which we're not.

The photo may either be outdated or faked or both but the gist of what I said is still just as true. We don't need Karl Rove to prove how much in bed Obama is with the GOP and Wall Street. Few if any of us will ever be able to completely and fully articulate why the president makes any of the decisions he does. But that's not as important as the end results.

And the end result, for liberals and progressives, is that we were sold out almost from the start.

But let me take this opportunity to apologize for letting myself get punked by this photo. I promise to do better research in the future. I haven't been posting much lately because I lost my unemployment last month, have virtually no income and am redoubling my efforts to find a job. So what little I've been posting has been rushed because I just don't have the time for blogging and research that I used to.)

Don't ask me what the fuck Karl Rove was doing in the White House recently, at any time, for any reason. This is a guy who bugged his own office in an attempt to sabotage the reelection campaign of the Texas Governor. This is the rat who outed Valerie Plame and this is the blubbery-lipped fuck who got fired by W's daddy. This is the guy who disappeared over a million emails and this is the guy who thumbed his nose at Congress when ordered to testify about the firing of nine US attorneys who refused to play ball with the Bush junta.

It's like spending years cleaning your computer of malware that shitcanned your hard drive only to go back to the same porn site that gave it to you in the first place.

But if this picture doesn't delineate everything that is wrong with this country at this point, nothing does. It encapsulates why Obama started from a compromise of a compromise on the health care bill, why he's allowed the GOP, even when they were in the minority in both houses of Congress, to have their spending cuts, it explains why Obama decided to ignore recent history and didn't call the GOP on their bluff to shut down the government even though they control just the lower chamber.

Because if Obama can make friends with a Republican traitor and war criminal like Karl Rove, then well, by God, he can get along with just about anybody. This picture ought to be disseminated far and wide everywhere to all four corners of the nation and the internet when Obama begins his re-election campaign in earnest. It ought to be as infamous as the one of John McCain cutting a birthday cake with Bush the day Katrina made landfall and the one of him hugging Bush despite what Rove did to him in South Carolina and the one of Joe Lieberman getting a smack on the kisser from, once again, Bush. It ought to be turned into a giant three dimensional paper mache statue and put on tour in all 50 states.

But it won't. You know why it won't?

Because all too many of us, many on Daily Kos, insist on saying, "Well, it could've been worse. We could've gotten McCain and Palin."

Guess what? We still have them. McCain singlehandedly kept moving the goalposts back and stalling DADT's repeal. Sarah Palin's balcony pronouncements from Facebook and Twitter are still shaping policy. Remember the death panels? Trig? Weeks later, the Obama administration pressured Congress into striking out funding for end of life counseling mainly because of Sarah Palin.

Remember "Drill, baby, drill?" Obama took up her oil-powered torch and said basically the same thing and opened up more of the Gulf Coast to offshore drilling just weeks before the Deepwater Horizon exploded on Earth Day almost a year ago.

It's as if they were elected, after all. So how much better off are we under this man than we were four years ago or even two years ago?

Look at that lead picture again. Then tell me if you still want to reelect a guy who insists on playing footsie and Hide the Sausage with the GOP that will never stop until he's run out of town on a rail no matter how many knob-noshings he gives them in public?

Do you want a guy who persists on loading his staff and his Cabinet that loads the government with even more corporate types to run this country for another four years even though we still don't have a workable health care policy, still have not come close to getting a handle on runaway debt, a runaway deficit, caves on tax cuts for billionaires, a monthly unemployment rate of 9-10%, had undermined unions, employs corporate tycoons who are largely the reason why there are no jobs while gas is now almost $4 a gallon for no earthly good reason, is targeting US citizens for assassination without due process, had kept Gitmo open and refuses to divulge torture photos and breaking his campaign promises to do so, bailed out Wall St. for the second time, is not only pumping trillions of dollars into two unwinnable wars but getting us involved in a third one without the consent of Congress and keeps telling us to STFU, things will get better sometime, somehow, some way, despite a GOP that opposes him no matter what he does?

And that's just some what we already know. God only knows what we'll find out in the future what he did behind our backs. "Thank God McCain and Palin didn't get elected"?! Take a look at that short list of failures, capitulations and about-faces above and you tell me how they could've done worse. Whether it's 2000 or 3000 degrees, fire still burns and destroys almost everything it touches.

That lead picture is emblematic of the rottenness and corruption of this administration that never met a corporation or a Republican it didn't love. That picture is why you should vote in the Democratic primaries for a real progressive, a real liberal, a real Democrat that isn't bought and sold by Goldman Sachs, the tax-dodging GE, the Bilderberg Group and most of Wall Street.

Why Kathy Nickolaus's Story Doesn't Hold Water

2011-04-08T11:44:00.001-07:00

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

"I have not made my decision. This isn't that big of a deal. It isn't worth an argument. This is ridiculous." - Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus to County supervisors when pressed to implement security measures already used all over Wisconsin

If nothing else, Republican activists like Kathy Nickolaus have a twisted view of what can be defined as "ridiculous." What's truly ridiculous is that she could proffer a transparently disingenuous story like "finding" well over 14,000 votes that she forgot to count and doing so with a straight face. Meanwhile, a Nov. 2009 poll showed 52% all self-identified Republicans still believe that ACORN stole the election for Obama while a fifth (21%) don't know whether ACORN did or didn't. That's ridiculous.

The already polarized election for Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice was from the start turned into a referendum on the popularity or lack thereof of Gov. Scott Walker's, the state GOP's and, by extension, the Koch Brothers' ceaseless crusade against public unions. But in light of last night's "revelation" by Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus that almost 7600 votes for Prosser mysteriously appeared from a private computer to which she had sole access, the election has become a referendum on the electoral integrity of not just Waukesha County, not just of Wisconsin but of the entire nation as Election Day 2012 draws near.

One of Nickolaus's cover stories from last night was that voter turnout was high on Tuesday night but Christian Schneider of the National Review hastens to add,

On election night, AP results showed a turnout of 110,000 voters in Waukesha County — well short of the 180,000 voters that turned out last November, and 42 percent of the county’s total turnout. By comparison, nearly 90 percent of Dane County voters who cast a ballot in November turned out to vote for Kloppenburg.

That says a mouthful right there. 180,000 county residents came out to vote in a midterm year and 42%, or less than two thirds, came out last Tuesday night.

It's hard to tell where the state's Republican machine is trying to assign blame. Nickolaus seemed to place to blame both on her shoulders and on the outdated software she insists on using to tabulate the votes. In the title of his National Review article, the syympathetic Schneider generously calls the SNAFU a "computer error." And if you're to read the semi-hysterical bloviations of the right wingers who dwell in the basement of the comments section of the right wing NR, you'll hear the usual suspects being named: Al Franken to ACORN to Democrats and liberals in the abstract and even Barack Obama (news flash: Franken was elected to the Senate after 10,000 votes were found like a body in the trunk of a mob car. Forget the fact that Franken won by only 225 votes).

What also brings the stench of the 2000 presidential election wafting into the pristine air of Wisconsin is the fact that another well-placed female Republican operative with obvious ties to the Republican candidate, one in a position to hide electoral data and manipulate votes, suddenly makes it possible for the Republican to win after the Democratic challenger had already been named the victor.

But Tom DeLay can save beaucoup bucks on air fare for his protester goons because this election, if the "results" hold, will involve no recount. The 7500 votes that were found like buried pirate treasure in the ancient sands of Nickolaus's outdated computer gives Justice Prosser, the conservative incumbent and the swing vote on any Supreme Court ruling on Walker's antiunion bill, just enough of a lead to avoid the potentially embarrassing (and incriminating) scrutiny of a recount.

Adding to the sweet smell of corruption is the fact that Nickolaus is a woman who inexplicably remains in a position of power and influence over elections in her county despite already having been found guilty of hiding electoral data on her personal computer then just as inexplicably given immunity from prosecution.

This is also a woman who openly "smirked" when pressed by county supervisors to join the rest of Wisconsin in the 21st century by updating security measures then refused to implement those measures. If she had, then she would've been prevented from hoarding electoral data for 29 hours, then disseminating the "newly-found" votes to right wing bloggers and radio talk show sympathizers before the MSM for consensus.

Nickolaus also blamed the outdated Microsoft system that should've been long-redundant in any county let alone her own. Basically, it was the Dog Ate My Homework story and she blamed Microsoft Access for not having autosave. But a quick-witted blogger familiar with MS Access from New Jersey saved the day by telling us:

There's just one problem: When you are entering data into an Access database, it is saved when you move to the next row. You don't have to "press 'save'" Now, when you write (an) application in Access (which consists of a user interface in front of an auto-saving Access database with some Visual Basic code behind it to handle navigation, saving, and calculations, you can turn autosave off and put a save button on the screen. But it's hard to imagine an actual Access application where each record is a single screen AND has autosave overridden AND allows you to just navigate to the next record without doing something, such as pressing another button called something like "Next Screen". Of course if you wrote an app like that, and there was unsaved data, you would probably display a pop-up window alerting the user that there is unsaved data. And even if it was an application that was sloppily written (which is quite possible, after all, Access is part of Microsoft Office and any monkey with rudimentary programming knowledge can write an application with it. And even if this application DID display one precinct at a time, and even if it did have a save button, it's hard to imagine that she would "forget to press the save button" for EVERY SINGLE RECORD.

So much for that argument.

So, while more polite and fair-minded souls are "questioning" the validity of her multifaceted reasons for how this could have happened, I am saying outright that there is Republican fraud going on in Wisconsin and all over the country. Despite the debacle after the 2000 election, we've had two more presidential and three more midterm elections with little if any reform of the electoral process.

So, while Republicans hoarsely scream about dark people like Ignacio Lopez being given the right to vote for non-Republicans and the un-indicted, un-prosecuted ACORN, Republican moles and cronies of Republican candidates in important elections are still subverting the will of the people.

We shouldn't have to be worrying in this day and age in the bastion of freedom and democracy about our elections getting stolen in yet another decade when all it does is distract us from union rights being stolen with more dirty Republican tricks.

Hijack: Nickolaus

2011-04-08T08:38:00.001-07:00

Welcome to the Waukesha County Clerk's Office, where 7500 votes magically appear hours after an election that would've been a disaster for Scott Walker's and the Wisconsin GOP's attempts to thoroughly roger the state's public unions.

The unstuffed ballot box, by the way, gives Justice Prosser just enough of a lead to prevent a mandated state-funded recount. Isn't that convenient? Imagine the hue and cry of "Foul!" that would've arisen from the Far Wrong if this had happened, say, in Cook County during the presidential election of 2008. As it is, this is reminiscent of 2000, except in that election, Al Gore had votes taken away from him and the Bush camp made sure it stayed that way.

Here's the problem: Nickolaus has already been fingered in an ethics probe that found that she had secreted away election data from state computers and servers and had stuffed in a personal computer. Her's, to be more specific.

Here's another problem: Nickolaus used to work for Prosser as a staffer back when the judge was the Assembly Speaker.

Here's yet another problem: After claiming that she suddenly forgot to count any of the votes in the county's second-largest city, she then sat on this revelation for nearly 30 hours before first confessing not to the mainstream media but right wing bloggers and other Republican sympathizers.

This necessarily invites the obvious question: Whether this was an honest, innocent oversight (Yeah, right) or an actual continuation of her sleazy Republican electoral fraud, why is this woman still employed in her present capacity by the county?

I'll be weighing in on this later. Stay tuned. In the meantime, read how Jill at Brilliant @ Breakfast effortlessly deconstructs Nickolaus' lame excuse as to how 7500-14,000 votes could, presto, change-O, magically materialize.

Tea Party Jesus Says...

2011-04-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

Love of Labor

2011-04-04T08:21:00.000-07:00

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

You are demanding that this city will respect the dignity of labor. So often we overlook the work and the significance of those who are not in professional jobs, of those who are not in the so-called big jobs. But let me say to you tonight that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity and it has worth. - The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Memphis, TN, April 3, 1968

Less than 24 hours after uttering these words to an over-packed hall in Memphis 43 years ago, Dr. King was shot dead by an assassin's bullet.

Dr. King was actually more of a Renaissance man than people thought he was. If one mentions Dr. King's name, you'll likely think of civil rights marches, Dr. King's arms linked with those of his aides and supporters. Yet Dr. King didn't merely advocate on behalf of other African Americans but widened his compassionate scope to all Americans and even all people. He was also a vocal and eloquent critic of the Vietnam War.

And, as in the case of Memphis, he was also a vocal and impassioned supporter of the labor movement.

By early April, Dr. King was tired and weary. He didn't want to go to Memphis to speak on behalf of the city sanitation workers who'd been on strike. After all, he had several other projects going on, was flying back and forth the US between speaking engagements and meetings. Plus, he'd been in Memphis just the month before on behalf of sanitation workers who wanted to be recognized by AFSCME. A demonstration less than a week prior to King's return had turned violent when protesters used their signs to break windows of businesses. Looting ensued, 60 were injured, many arrested and one demonstrator was even killed. However, realizing that his voice was needed, the civil rights leader went, anyway, and stepped into tragic destiny.

Specifically, King was there to argue on behalf of the workers' right to collectively bargain. Here's Archives.gov's brief backstory of how this speech was precipitated:

During a heavy rainstorm in Memphis on February 1, 1968, two black sanitation workers had been crushed to death when the compactor mechanism of the trash truck was accidentally triggered. On the same day in a separate incident also related to the inclement weather, 22 black sewer workers had been sent home without pay while their white supervisors were retained for the day with pay. About two weeks later, on February 12, more than 1,100 of a possible 1,300 black sanitation workers began a strike for job safety, better wages and benefits, and union recognition. Mayor Henry Loeb, unsympathetic to most of the workers' demands, was especially opposed to the union. Black and white civic groups in Memphis tried to resolve the conflict, but the mayor held fast to his position.

The shabby treatment of city union workers and the complete nonchalance of worker safety was as much predicated on Jim Crow racism as on basic anti-union sentiment. Loeb came from a business background and was a staunch conservative, exactly the kind of person who would be utterly unsympathetic to the rights and safety of workers.

Loeb was as obstinate as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and refused help from other unions to mediate and even from President Lyndon B. Johnson. He stubbornly insisted the strike was illegal, operating on the sleazy Catch 22 argument that a city sanitation worker had no right to go on strike because they weren't allowed to join the AFSCME union. He tried to hire scabs and used the Memphis police to brutalize the 1100 striking workers.

It took King's tragic and shockingly sudden assassination to force a temporary resolution to the standoff but to his own dying day, Loeb was proud of not standing down to what he insisted was an illegal strike and never seemed to acknowledge that he was the mayor of the city in which America's greatest 20th century civil rights leader was murdered. Essentially, if Loeb wasn't so inflexible, Dr. King wouldn't have had to go to Memphis and he could probably still be alive today.

And if he was, Dr. King would be appalled to see all the hard work that brought about the change with which we'd all grown up. King would be rubbing his eyes, scarcely believing that other white right wingers are nakedly trying to catapult us back into the 19th century by smashing public unions, stripping them of collective bargaining rights, forcing them to contribute more heavily to their own benefits, raiding their pension funds then sending out layoff notices to those who didn't knuckle under.

He'd be stunned beyond belief that white conservatives are actually trying to undermine or outright eradicate even child labor laws especially during a time when the labor pool is 500 times larger than the job market.

Dr. King would also be appalled at this latest round of adventurism in Libya and backwards slide of the civil rights movement that had reared its ugly head in 2000 when, in typical white Republican fashion, Secretary of State and Bush campaign co-chair Katherine Harris hired a data-mining company called ChoicePoint based in Dr. King's home state of Georgia to draw up a list of nearly 100,000 names of mostly African Americans. This list formed the basis of these people being denied the right to vote on Election Day 2000. Had these reliable Democratic voters been allowed to vote, the election's result never would've been in any doubt, the SCOTUS never would've been able to get involved, our country, and the world, would be much different today.

But Jena, Louisiana and the virulent, post-Jim Crow Tea Bagger racism we've seen since Barack Obama got elected President would've informed Dr. King that it's as if his legacy and life, all his hard work, never happened. It's almost as if Dr. King never existed, an anachronism that offered an all too brief and temporary stay against the mindless hatred, cruelty and racism that roils beneath the red, white and blue of Old Glory like a festering cancer never quite in remission.

Paddle Faster...

2011-04-03T06:05:00.000-07:00

That's right, my little Ned Beattys. When you start hearing banjos in the distance, it means only one thing: Republicans are forming exploratory committees to see just how unelectable they are in the upcoming presidential race.

And it's pretty telling that the names we're hearing most often from Baggerville are Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann, proving at the very least that there's no way Obama can lose except if they dig up Reagan, attach cables to his limbs and make him a roadside attraction.

But others, some hardcore lunatics who have long since proven their Republican bona fides and others just trying, for some unfathomable reason, to attach themselves to the Republican brand. So let's look at the top ten Republican presidential hopefuls in a thumbtack Assclowns of the Week, shall we?

10) Donald Trump

The most interesting thing about Donald Trump is when his elaborate combover will finally give way and how many junior executive hangers on will be killed in the avalanche. Trump recently made the news by resurrecting the long-discredited birther conspiracy regarding the President's birthplace. This, obviously, is all the Republicans have to offer beside homophobia, Islamophobia, and a loathing for the Civil Rights Act, unions and child labor laws.

In a prime example of carrying coals to Newcastle (or bullshit to RNC HQ), Trump was paid money and given national exposure he didn't need by NBC for a nasty show called The Apprentice, sort of a Lord of the Flies/Animal Farm hybrid with styling gel and gabardine. Once good at building skyscrapers and naming them after himself, he's now reduced to rehabbing birther conspiracies in the air. And when Glenn Beck laughs at you, you know you haven't got a Giants fan's chances in LA.

9) Newt Gingrich

The former House Speaker had somehow achieved the miraculous in the last month: A way to support our invasion and bombing of Libya while somehow blaming the black guy for it all. Once almost handed his ASWF Entrepreneur of the Year Award to a DVD porn superstore until discovering that Burst Media was stimulating more than just the economy. No stranger to passion, Gingrich is so patriotic that he blamed Uncle Sam for falling into vaginas not belonging to his wife.

A recipient himself of the Franklin Graham Islamophobic Asshole of the Year award for two years running, this hypocritical serial adulterer made national headlines by screaming about Sharia law in the US and the erecting of the Cordoba Center two blocks from Ground Zero. The anti-Nostradamus, Gingrich has been wrong about everything yet still vacuums up enough money from mindless, racist minions every year to form exploratory committees that invariably tell him he's unelectable.

8) Herman Cain

Another Georgia lunatic? What's in the peaches down there? Seriously, who the fuck is this guy? Herman Cain at this point serves two purposes in Wingnuttia: A token to whom the Tea Baggers can point to as proof they're not really racist and the only Republican in America who's even more obscure than RNC Chairman ~~Prince Remus~~ ~~Rice Prius~~ Rinsed Penis.

In true conservative fashion, Cain was the CEO of a pizza joint named in honor of Carl Paladino. Through his work for Burger King and Godfather's pizza, has single-handedly contributed to American obesity more than transfat and sugar combined. For good measure, he also sabotaged the Clinton Health Care Plan 18 years ago out of fear it would induce Americans to eat less burgers and pizza. Dismissed by Jonah "Loadpants" Goldberg of the Weekly Standard by writing, "(I)t’s hard to imagine him amounting to more than an exciting also-ran." Another Islamophobe, he became a Tea Bagger darling a la Mitt Romney by saying he would never appoint any Muslims in his Cabinet. Currently slightly more popular among mainstream Republican voters than month-old anchovies.

7) Mitt Romney

If Caucasian blandness had an IPO or hedge fund, Mitt Romney would be richer than Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined. In '08, was one of many Republican presidential hopefuls, then Republican vice presidential hopefuls, then Republicans hopeful of retaining some iota of relevance to come out swinging against Muslims. His grounds were that Muslims don't represent more than 2% of the US population, even though this was coming from a guy belonging to an overrated cult centered around a Golden Bible no one's ever seen and believes in Good (or White) Jesus and Bad (or Black) Jesus.

The political Max Headroom, Romney triangulates more than a GPS with ADHD, sucking up to evangelicals, gun nuts, racists and other right wing fringe loonies. In the end, they decided on the crazy woman from Alaska who was even more glassy-eyed and devoted to killing animals than Romney while praying for the quick death of President McCain.

6) Mike Huckabee

An evangelical windbag who's so bland even this ordained minister and bona fide fundie can't lock up the evangelical vote. His biggest asset is being the Republican who's hardest to loathe. Even when he talks about a "state's right" to fly the Confederate flag or any of 100 other lunacies, you look at that "Aw shucks" Gomer face and cut him slack in a way akin to making allowances and proffering support to a failed Special Olympian.

May have a chance at winning an Iowa straw poll next year if he promises to make his cool Stratocaster bass guitar his running mate.

5) Haley Barbour

If former Attorney General John Ashcroft had a stupider, fatter, older brother sculpted out of hog lard, you'd get Haley Barbour. Just looking at the governor of Mississippi makes even ascetic Yankees crave biscuits and gravy. A former lobbyist now posing as a lobbyist posing as a governor, Barbour once shot a tourism ad exhorting people to swim in the Mississippi Gulf waters in spite of Deepwater Horizon tar balls washing up just out of camera range.

More recently, Barbour stated he didn't recall an offshoot of the KKK as being all that bad, certainly not racist but more like pro-white. Meanwhile, all over the neo-Confederacy, Tea Baggers and other bigots grabbed their loving cup ears and began doing hillbilly jigs. Most recently, Barbour's ex press secretary resigned when it came out he thought the trio of disasters in Japan was funny.

4) Tim Pawlenty

The only Republican in America who makes Mitt Romney look and sound more exciting than Dick Vitale on an acid trip during March Madness, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty once wrote a book called Courage to Stand. It proved to be an unintentional aid to the Obama health care bill by forcing Lunesta maker Sepracor into bankruptcy.

Pawlenty became a flavor of the day favorite to the Andrew Breitbart/James O'Keefe wing of the GOP by uniting with Bobby Jindal to cut state aid to ACORN, despite the fact that ACORN received no aid from Minnesota. So boring both personally and politically, his political rallies wind up looking like mini Jonestowns.

3) Jim DeMint

South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint is so conservative and tight-assed you couldn't pull a pubic hair out of his ass with a tractor. Thinks as long as it snows in winter, global warming is a hoax and Al Gore is a fraud. Late last year, DeMint said that gays and unmarried, pregnant women should not be allowed to teach in public schools.

Claimed on Fox that Obama's job-creating stimulus bill was "an attack on people of faith" after begging for tens of millions in ~~earmarks~~ stimulus funds for South Carolina. So conservative he makes fellow redneck bigot George Wallace look like Woody Harrelson by conspicuous relief.

2) Michele Bachmann

Joining Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell as aging stars of political porn, Michele Bachmann somehow continues to get reelected in Minnesota's 6th congressional district without any noticeable chapping of her lips. Indeed, this most notorious example of the Land of a Million Flakes will one day serve as required reading in political science classes in the future: The ability of the mentally handicapped to obtain and retain political power.

Once called for Obama and all liberals to be investigated for "unAmerican" activities despite HUAC and Joe McCarthy being dead for decades. Thinks the American Revolution began in New Hampshire instead of Massachusetts. Thinks John Quincy Adams was a Founding Father and that our slave-owning forebears were committed to abolishing slavery. Oh, yes, please, let's all help put her finger on the Big Red Button.

Bachmann once exhorted her Tea Bagger followers in Colorado to commit suicide if Obama's health care initiative were to become law. Then the Sylvia Plath of politics threatened suicide in Colorado again. One suspects that Bachmann's ability to attract huge Tea Bagger crowds is connected to the truism that if you promise the people what they want, they'll come out for it.

1) Sarah Palin

Yes, Sarah dearest, there are lots of dogs in this Special Olympics Iditarod and you're not even the lead dog, anymore.

Once the hottest Republican on the planet earth, Sarah Palin's approval ratings among even Republicans had dropped faster than a bar of soap at a Greenwich Village bathhouse. Ah, where to begin with Sarah's unfittitude for the presidency? She does to the English language what Catholic priests do to 12 year-old altar boys, she's a hypocrite in her brief but happy political life, in her ghost-written books for which she was paid millions, on her reality show and everywhere else.

Like Newt Gingrich and all other Republicans, tells lies from her Mooselini cyberbalconies of her Facebook and Twitter pages that then become de facto truth and wisdom. Has turned the once-contemptible, sneering Valley girl head cheerleader stereotype into an actual debating style, snipes at the "lamestream media" until she has to pimp a new ghostwritten shredder fodder or TV show. Shamelessly uses her children as props and human shields like another politician we can think of.

Let's Burn a Bible For Ramadan

2011-04-02T07:40:00.000-07:00

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

"The thing that awoke me to the fact was when I saw the president and the Pentagon and all these world leaders coming out against Terry Jones' [plan] to burn the Koran. I realized that all these murders of Christians go on a daily basis and you don't hear an international outcry. But one guy in Florida — a nobody — says he's going to burn a Koran... and I thought, 'Something is really wrong with that scenario.' To me, it was the biggest, eye-opening thing to see the whole world has sided, apparently, with the enemies of America." - JoBeth Gerrard, unemployed Marietta, GA accountant

We're the most regressive country since Kenya and its anti-gay laws that execute gay people. We're destroying unions, trying to undermine child labor laws, stuffing oligarchs with more money while further impoverishing the poor. Now we're burning books. Welcome back to the early 20th century.

So, in the spirit of book burning and intolerance, here's an idea: Let's burn a Bible for every day of Ramadan that starts for a month on August 1st. And let's make sure that at least one of them is duct-taped to the gnarled hands of Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center, an ambitiously-named organization that caters to a few dozen Bible-humping zealots in Gainesville, Florida.

You may remember Jones from late summer last year when he vowed to burn 200 Qurans on September 11th before backing down. Somehow, this pastor of a little dogshit ministry in north Florida became a focal point and a poster child for every inbred, post-literate, Muslim-hating lunatic. President Obama and the Pentagon lowered themselves to get directly involved, pleading with Jones to stop his madness. His bigotry had spread to Great Britain, where a 15 year-old girl was arrested for burning a Koran and posting it on her Facebook page. Earlier last year, several British men were arrested for doing the same thing. And, just a few days after the 9th anniversary of 9/11, a burned Quran was found in a mosque in San Francisco.

Well, last Match 20th (I refuse to link to or show any of the videos on Youtube of the "trial" or burning, for obvious reasons), Jones just couldn't resist the call of the wild-eyed Islamophobia and held a kangaroo court to judge whether or not the Quran could be found guilty of rape, murder, torture, etc. The "trial" was held in the Dove World Outreach church, with Jones channeling Flip Wilson and playing "Here Comes the Judge" while wearing a black judge robe. He sat on a high platform with an open iron pit positioned on the floor to the right of his judge's throne. Yeah, the outcome wasn't predetermined at all any more than are American military tribunals (that is, if we actually held American military tribunals).

The "defense" was supposedly presided over by Sheik Imam Mohammed elHassan, supposedly president of an Islamic center in "Texas, USA". Mr. elHassan was described by JoBeth Gerrard, who blogged about the event on Dove Outreach's blog, as " a devout Muslim" who ran for President of Sudan last year. There was indeed a man named Muhammed elHassan who ran for the presidency of Sudan last year but there doesn't seem to be any mention of him on the internet as the head of an Islamic Center in "Texas, USA" or anywhere else outside of this "trial." Photos of him in English judicial regalia on the International Judge a Koran Day Facebook page and this video shot by the Imam last year show a superficial resemblance until you look at biometeric differences (pay particular attention to the height of the ears and you'll observe some inconsistency). But whether this "defense attorney" was an imposter or not, one thing remains:

This mock trial resulted in Afghan rebels invading a UN compound and killing 12 aid workers and guards in revenge for what Jones and his inbred lunatics had done a week and a half ago. Now, in spite of JoBeth Gerrard's assertion that the slaying in Afghanistan and the Quran burning were not connected, Pastor Jones seems to think there is a correlation and is calling for retribution, according the New York Times.

In other words, an escalation in hostilities, since the aid workers and four Nepalese guards who were killed were such close friends of Pastor Jones and all.

As I said, I will not link to the video but you can find it easily enough on Youtube and elsewhere. Toward the end of the 8+ minute-long video, you can hear a teenage boy say, "We should tell her to put some marshmallows and hamburgers on it", referring to the burning Quran in the fake courtroom that conjures up memories of that other fake courtroom in Pennsylvania last November.

Now they're shocked, shocked, that some Muslims would take offense at having their holy book burned after a joke of a trial. Without showing any evidence, some church members claimed they'd received "a stack of death threats" and have taken to carrying guns. Here's a direct quote from a parishioner in the NY Times article:

“We have a huge stack of death threats,” Ms. Ingram said. “We take precautions. I have a handgun. A lot of us have concealed weapons permits. We’re a small church, and we don’t have money to hire security.”

This is a typical reaction from evangelical, knuckle-dragging, post-apocalyptic yahoos who have delusions of speaking for all Christianity (the Youtube video of the Quran's burning earned a whopping 1500 views and the attitude of other parishes in Florida was to ignore it).

But we can't afford to ignore or laugh off the End of Days dickheads on account of one thing: The mainstream media.

The MSM had, starting with Sean Hannity and Fox "News", and continuing with the NY Times, the LA Times and a whole host of major media outlets, turned this smalltime asshole whose congregation makes Fred Phelps' at Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas look like the Roman Catholic Church in comparison, into a rock star for every mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging Islamophobe in Sarah Palin's "Real America."

The actual trial and "execution" of the Quran may have been largely ignored by the other parishes in north Florida but it was quickly picked up on by the MSM that is ever ready to sow the seeds of post-911 bigotry as long as post-911 bigotry is a sexy lead story.

We should've relegated this lunatic to the dustbin of history and denied him even his 15 minutes. After all, this congregation that can be counted in the dozens does not speak for all Christianity any more than Sunnis, Shi'ites or Sufis speak for all Muslims.

This man is the hideous side of the Butterfly effect, someone who burns a single Quran as an empty, symbolic gesture and eventually got a dozen people, UN air workers, killed half a world away.

So when the month-long Ramadan fast begins on August 1st of this year, let's burn a Bible every day in August. If the nine major Crusades proved anything, the Bible and adherents like Jones are even more responsible for the slaughter of countless millions of innocents. For good measure, let's throw in all of Sean Hannity's or Anne Coulter's NY Times bestsellers.

And let's make sure Jones is holding one of those Bibles as we burn it.

Happy April Fool's Day

2011-04-01T07:55:00.001-07:00

Jersey Shore's Snooki is getting paid $32,000 by Rutgers University for a speaking engagement... $2,000 more than Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison.

Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, not once but twice turned down the chance to make a dying child happy through the Make A Wish Foundation before relenting and offering her services. The family told her to sautee in Hell.

Teabagger Republicans like Mike Lee and David Burns and Jane Cunningham and self-confessed candy thief Paul LaPage and Virginia AG Ken Cuccinelli are actually trying to repeal and/or undermine child labor laws.

Paul LaPage can't distinguish between the Maine Labor Bureau and the Maine Chamber of Commerce.

The United States is defending the interests of Libyan radicals who had engaged and killed our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007.

Republican Rep. Judy Biggert was all for talking about jobs before she was against it.

A 14 year-old rape and assault victim in Bangladesh was convicted of adultery, sentenced to 101 lashes and whipped to death. The initial autopsy report ruled her death a suicide.

It's now April and central Massachusetts has 9 inches of snow 48 hours after a 54 degree day.

And none of these, folks, sadly enough, are April Fool's jokes.

Ken Kratz's Advice For Violent Crime Victims

2011-03-29T05:50:00.001-07:00

Now that he's resigned as Calumet County District Attorney for sending dirty text messages and, thanks to fellow Wisconsin Republican scumbag AG J.B. Van Hollen, will not go to jail for it, Ken Kratz has plenty of free time to pursue his new career as a legal advice columnist.

"Dear Mr. Kratz: My boyfriend recently beat me and tried to kill me. What can I do to ensure that he never does this to me or other women ever again?"

"Dear tall, young, hot nymph: Are you the kind of girl that likes secret contact with an older married elected DA ... the riskier the better?"

"Dear Mr. Kratz: I was raped repeatedly by my husband recently and I don't know if I should take him to court for fear of reprisal. What do I do?"

"Dear tall, young, hot nymph: I'm the atty. I have the $350,000 house. I have the 6-figure career. You may be the tall, young, hot nymph but I am the prize!"

"Dear Mr. Kratz: My boyfriend tried to strangle, rape and kill me but I'm afraid when I get on the witness stand, I'll freeze and not be able to speak out against my attacker. What advice can you give me?"

"Hey … Miss Communication, what’s the sticking point? Your low self-esteem and you fear you can’t play in my big sandbox? Or???"

"Dear Mr. District Attorney Kratz: I was beaten so badly by my attacker that I fear I've lost all my self-esteem and that I may not speak out against any man who assaults me in the future. What do I do?"

"Dear tall, young, hot nymph: I would not expect you to be the other woman. I would want you to be so hot and treat me so well that you’d be THE woman! R U that good?"

Ken Kratz is the former sexually harassing District Attorney of Calumet County, Wisconsin. His legal advice column is syndicated in over 850 newspapers.

Libya's Blood For Oil: The Vampire War

2011-03-28T12:21:00.001-07:00

By Susan Lindauer, former U.S. Asset who covered Libya at the United Nations from 1995 to 2003

(Editor's note: Susan Lindauer herself wanted me to post this on Pottersville to remind everyone what's really going on in Libya. Plus, it ought to be worth knowing that, while we're paying well over three and a half dollars for a gallon of gas and the petroleum cartels are using the uprising near the oil fields and refineries as an excuse to gouge us at the pumps, Libya in reality produces only 8% of the world's petroleum and isn't even on the list of the top 15 oil exporters to the United States.)

Who are we kidding? The United States, Britain and NATO don't care about bombing civilians to contain rebellion. Their militaries bomb civilians every day without mercy. They have destroyed most of the community infrastructure of Iraq and Afghanistan before turning their sights on Libya. So what's really going on here?

According to the CIA, the following never happened…

Last October, US oil giants— Chevron and Occidental Petroleum— made a surprising decision to pull out of Libya, while China, Germany and Italy stayed on, signing major contracts with Gadhaffi's government. As the U.S. Asset who started negotiations for the Lockerbie Trial with Libyan diplomats, I had close ties to Libya's U.N. Mission from 1995 to 2003. Given my long involvement in the Lockerbie saga, I have continued to enjoy special access to high level intelligence gossip on Libya.

Last summer that gossip got juicy!

About July, I started hearing that Gadhaffi was exerting heavy pressure on U.S. and British oil companies to cough up special fees and kick backs to cover the costs of Libya's reimbursement to the families of Pan Am 103. Payment of damages for the Lockerbie bombing had been one of the chief conditions for ending U.N. sanctions on Libya that ran from 1992 until 2003. And of course the United Nations forced Gadhaffi to hand over two Libyan men for a special trial at The Hague, though everybody credible was fully conscious of Libya's innocence in the Lockerbie affair. (Only ignorant politicians trying to score publicity points say otherwise.)

Knowing Gadhaffi as well as I do, I was convinced that he'd done it. He'd bided his time until he could extort compensation from U.S. oil companies. He's a crafty bastard, extremely intelligent and canny. That's exactly how he operates. And now he was taking his revenge. As expected, the U.S. was hopping mad about it. Gadhaffi wasn't playing the game the way the Oil Bloodsuckers wanted. The Vampire of our age—the Oil Industry—roams the earth, sucking the life out of every nation to feed its thirst for profits. Only when they got to Libya, Gadhaffi took on the role of a modern-day Robin Hood, who insisted on replenishing his people for the costs they'd suffered under U.N. sanctions.

Backing up a year earlier, in August 2009 the lone Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people, Abdelbasset Megrahi, won a compassionate release from Scottish prison. Ostensibly, the British government and Scottish Courts granted Megrahi's request to die at home with dignity from advance stage cancer—in exchange for dropping a legal appeal packed with embarrassments for the European Courts. The decision to free Megrahi followed shocking revelations of corruption at the special Court of The Hague that handled the Lockerbie Trial. Prosecution witnesses confessed to receiving payments of $4 million each from the United States, in exchange for testimony against Megrahi, a mind-blowing allegation of judicial corruption.

The Lockerbie conviction was full of holes to begin with. Anybody who knows anything about terrorism in the 1980s knows the CIA got mixed up in heroin trafficking out of the Bekaa Valley during the hostage crisis in Lebanon. The Lockerbie conspiracy had been a false flag operation to kill off a joint CIA and Defense Intelligence investigation into kick backs from Islamic Jihad, in exchange for protecting the heroin transit network.

According to my own CIA handler, Dr. Richard Fuisz, who'd been stationed in Lebanon and Syria at the time, the CIA had established a protected drug route from Lebanon to Europe and on to the United States. His statements support other sources that "Operation Corea" allowed Syrian drug dealers led by Monzer al-Kassar (also linked to Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scandal) to ship heroin to the U.S. ON Pan Am flights, in exchange for intelligence on the hostages' whereabouts in Lebanon. The CIA allegedly made sure that suitcases carrying heroin were not searched at customs. Nicknamed the "Godfather of Terror," Al Kassar is now serving a prison sentence for conspiring with Colombian drug cartels to assassinate U.S. nationals.

Building up to Lockerbie, the Defense Intelligence team in Beirut, led by Maj. Charles Dennis McKee and Matthew Gannon, suspected that CIA infiltration of the heroin network might be prolonging the hostage crisis. If so, the consequence was severe. AP Reporter Terry Anderson got chained in a basement for 7 years, while 96 other high profile western hostages suffered beatings, mock executions and overall trauma. McKee's team raised the alarms in Washington that a CIA double agent profiting from the narco-dollars might be warning the hostage takers whenever their dragnet closed in. Washington sent a fact-finding team to Lebanon to gather evidence.

On the day it was blown out of the sky, Pan Am 103 was carrying that team of CIA and FBI investigators, the CIA's Deputy Chief assigned to Beirut, and three Defense Intelligence officers, including McKee and Gannon, on their way to Washington to deliver a report on the CIA's role in heroin trafficking, and the impact on terrorist financing and the hostage crisis. In short, everyone with direct knowledge of CIA kickbacks from heroin trafficking died on Pan Am 103. A suitcase packed with $500,000 worth of heroin was found in the wreckage. It belonged to investigators, as proof of the corruption.

The punch line was that the U.S. State Department issued an internal travel advisory, warning that government officials should get off that specific flight on that specific day, because Pan Am 103 was expected to get bombed. That's right, folks! The U.S. had prior knowledge of the attack.

Unforgivably, nobody told Charles McKee or Matthew Gannon. But other military officials and diplomats got pulled off the flight—making room for a group of students from Syracuse University traveling stand by for the Christmas holidays

It was a monstrous act! But condemning Megrahi to cover up the CIA's role in heroin trafficking has struck many Lockerbie afficiandos as grossly unjust. Add the corruption of purchased testimony-- $4 million a pop— and Megrahi's life sentence struck a nerve of obscenity.

It struck Gadhaffi as grievously offensive, as well—The United Nations had forced Libya to fork over $2.7 billion in damages to the Lockerbie families, a rate of $10 million for every death. Once it became clear the U.S. paid two key witnesses $4 million each to commit perjury, spook gossip throughout the summer was rife that Gadhaffi had taken bold action to demand compensation from U.S. (and probably British) oil corporations operating in Libya. More than likely, Libya's demands for kick backs and compensation extended to other European oil conglomerates as well—particularly France and Italy—who are now spearheading attacks on Libya.

I knew last summer there would be trouble. Payback would be a b—tch on both sides. You don't lock an innocent man in prison for 10 years on bogus charges of terrorism, and expect forgiveness. The United States and Britain had behaved with remarkable selfishness. You've got to admit that Gadhaffi's attempt to balance the scales of justice demonstrated a flair of righteous nationalism.

Alas, Gadhaffi was playing with fire, no matter how justified his complaint. You don't strike a tyrant without expecting a tyrant to strike back.

And that's exactly what's happening today.

Don't kid yourself. This is an oil war, and it smacks of imperialist double standards. Two articles by Prof. Chossudovsky at the Global Research Centre are must reading: "Operation Libya and the Battle for Oil: Redrawing the Map of Africa" and "Insurrection and Military Intervention: The US-NATO Attempted Coup d'Etat in Libya?"

There is simply no justification for U.S. or NATO action against Libya. The U.N. charter acknowledges the rights of sovereign nations to put down rebellions against their own governments. Moreover, many observers have commented that plans for military intervention appear to have been much more advanced than U.S. and European leaders want to admit.

For myself, I know in my gut that war planning started months before the democratization movement kicked off throughout the Arab world—a lucky cover for U.S. and European oil policy. Perhaps too lucky.

As Chossudovsky writes, "Hundreds of US, British and French military advisers arrived in Cyrenaica, Libya's eastern breakaway province" on February 23 and 24— seven (7) days after the start of Gadhaffi's domestic rebellion. "The advisers, including intelligence officers, were dropped from warships and missile boats at the coastal towns of Benghazi and Tobruk." (DEBKAfile, US military advisers in Cyrenaica, Feb. 25, 2011) Special forces on the ground in Eastern Libya provided covert support to the rebels." Eight British Special Forces commandos were arrested in the Benghazi region, while acting as military advisers to opposition forces, according to the Times of London.

We're supposed to believe the United States, Britain and Europe planned, coordinated and executed a full military intervention in 7 short days— from the start of the Libyan rebellion in mid-February until military advisers appeared on the ground in Libya on February 23-24!

That's strategically impossible.

Nothing can persuade me that Gadhaffi's fate wasn't decided months ago, when Chevron and Occidental Petroleum took their whining to Capitol Hill, complaining that Gadhaffi's nationalism interfered with their oil profiteering. From that moment, military intervention was on the drawing board as surely as the Patriot Act got stuck in a drawer waiting for 9/11.

The message is simple: Challenge the oil corporations and your government and your people will pay the ultimate price: Give us your oil as cheaply as possible. Or die.

Don't kid yourself. Nobody gives a damn about suffering in Libya or Iraq. You don't bomb a village to save it. The U.S., Britain and NATO are the bullies of the neighborhood. The enforcers for Big Oil.

Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan have something in common. They have vast and extraordinary oil and mineral riches. As such, they are all victims of what I call the Vampire Wars. The Arab Princes get paid off, while the bloodsuckers pull the life blood out of the people. They're scarcely able to survive in their own wealthy societies. The people and the domestic economy are kept alive to uphold the social order, but they are depleted of the nourishment of their own national wealth.

The democratization movements are sending a warning that I don't think Big Oil, or their protectors in the U.S. and British governments understand or have figured out how to control. The Arab people are finished with this cycle of victimization. They've got their stakes out, and they're starting to figure out how to strike into the heart of these Vampires, sucking the life blood out of their nations.

And woe to the wicked when they do!

This article may be reprinted in full or part with attribution to the author.
Former U.S. Intelligence Asset, Susan Lindauer covered Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria/Hezbollah from 1993 to 2003. She is the author of "Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq."

April is the Cruelest Month

2011-03-27T19:04:00.001-07:00

Burial of the Living

I write this on the second anniversary of the Great Purge of 2009 when I was forcibly evicted from my home and family of 15+ years, having devoted virtually every dram of my energies for the betterment of that ungrateful family and pumped virtually every penny of the $200,000+ I ever earned during those 15+ wasted years into that house.

A month later to the day, I lost my job and therein begins a mere anecdote, a simple little overlooked footnote of the real tale of the Real America, the one Sarah Palin will never tell you about, the Real America that has begun the slow process of burying the living, Corporate America clutching that golden shovel to begun the ground breaking ceremony of the interment of Working America.

We have come not to praise Jurassicpork but to bury him and those he holds dear so the world can get on with its getting and spending and not have to listen to his endless tirades about poverty both personal and collective. God, won't he shut the fuck up?! the world seems to say every time I put fingers to keyboard or raise my embittered voice in agony.

It is now exactly 23 months since I have last held a job, O Lord, and after 31 years in the workforce I am now officially an unemployable dinosaur because I am now suddenly not experienced enough, educated enough, because my teeth aren't white enough, my credit rating not high enough, or maybe because I break water when I try to walk upon it or break wind when I make water. Whatever...

Whatever the reason, O Lord, thou hast forsaken me. And however righteously one may rail against the banks, the corporations, the government or whomever is responsible for my state of redundancy, at some point one is supposed to grab their bootstraps whether or not they exist and to PULL like Horatio Alger on crystal meth until one hath pulled themselves out of the muck and mire.

Even the most pitiable of us get tiresome which is why God really gave Job a break. In the movie The Beach, the man screaming in agony from a shark bite in the leg was eventually excommunicated by the others with a single caretaker because, O Lord, he was harshing their buzz with his screams of agony. At a wake for a cancer victim there are at least several who are relieved not so much at the end of the suffering of the departed but an end to their suffering.

But April Fool's Day will come soon with the attendant bills and that is not a joke and no laughing matter so I beseech thee for a break whether it come in the form of manna from heaven delivered by a really hot chick on a clamshell a la Botticelli or in Paypal donations or a job or, best of all, a book contract.

Hear me, O Lord, for I am at the end of my rope and it is looking more and more like a noose.

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

2011-03-26T16:42:00.001-07:00

(Note: If you could help out JP and the Missus, it would be surely appreciated. Hopefully, in a week or so, he'll be imparting some mind-fucking news. The Paypal link is both below the title of this post and at the bottom of the index page. Thank you in advance. - MF)

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

Failure and tragedy, like water, seek the path of least resistance. And it’s perhaps no coincidence that the words “trailer” and “failure” are almost perfect rhymes. In the American mind, the two are perfectly synonymous. That’s because we tend not to look beyond end results and aftermaths. We see trailer parks, tent cities, people living under bridges and think not “refugees” or “victims” but “failure.” Assumptions are dangerous but those of us who are more fortunate can live with that kind of danger. - Opening paragraph of my memoir, American Zen

To cite just one example, the relationship between Barack Obama and GE Chairman, CEO and Artful Tax Dodger Jeffrey Immelt is so close, it's a miracle Michelle Obama hasn't filed for divorce on the grounds of adultery. Indeed, when Obama turns over in bed at night, one can imagine his elbow hitting Immelt in the face.

Indeed, naming Immelt to head the president's commission on job creation seems like a sarcastic jibe or slap in the face: Immelt's GE has done more to ship US jobs overseas than almost any other corporation. This is necessary to a tax-dodging corporation that has to set up dummy and shell companies and incorporating overseas (such as Halliburton moving to Dubai), taking US jobs with it. Yet no one has ever dared suggest to Immelt that the first thing he should do as Job Czar is to bring GE jobs back to American shores.

And don't even think about criticizing either Immelt or GE for that paradox or you'll get publicly bitchslapped by Obama's circus Carney.

This is but one example of how thoroughly Corporate America has infiltrated the highest echelons of our government. If you need another to see this trend, look at Obama's new Chief of Staff, former JP Morgan Chase goon William Daley, a guy who made almost $9 million last year working for a mega bank that has done more than its fair share of throwing people out of their homes.

And if you need more examples of just how deeply Goldman Sachs, to name just one other mega bank, has both infiltrated and exfiltrated our government in some darkly comical musical jobs game, check out this CBS investigation that aired almost a year ago.

Our economy, to quickly and neatly unpack it and lay it on the bed, is based on fraud and corruption. There is hardly even the appearance of corporate accountability let alone any real accountability. Corporations with its greasy, grasping paws found in the cookie jar have but to pay up to 9 figure "fines" to the federal government and that money doesn't even come out of their pockets. It's often paid for by the shareholders and taxpayers they remorselessly ream on an hourly basis. Daley's old company, JP Morgan, also used that sleazy trick when they got hit with a $700,000,000 fine when Daley was working for them.

A survey released just last September found the gap between rich and poor in the US is the greatest than at any time in American history. And things aren't any better in China, where 130 billionaires live in what you would think is the last Communist stronghold on earth.

To paraphrase Lord Acton, Wealth corrupts and absolute wealth corrupts absolutely, regardless of nationality, political or economic ideology, whether you're a capitalist or Communist, human nature is easily corrupted by money and the impunity and insularity it all but guarantees.

But anyone raising the specter of class warfare is automatically letting themselves in for a right wing shouting-down of fomenting rumors of class warfare. Which isn't so much a rumor as a fallacy: In order to have a war, there has to be some parity. Otherwise you're not talking about a war but a brutal invasion and occupation.

Who knows where, how and when it started but between the time I was a young man and now, our national economy became one based on good and services to one based on debt. Lobbyists were always a problem in government until they ceased becoming a problem and became an accepted part of the legislative process. Suddenly, President Kennedy standing up to Big Steel seems like a fairy tale out of Camelot because one cannot imagine a chief executive today standing up to any corporation, especially one that had contributed heavily to his campaign.

Now, it's accepted that corporations such as GE not only should be allowed to essentially write self-dealing policies but that they pay not a single penny in taxes (in fact, Uncle Sam owes GE some $3.2 billion in tax breaks and deferments).

Now, it's accepted that internet providers get to essentially write policy and to cripple a compliant FCC and have its own self-dealing policies upheld by federal courts.

Now, it's accepted that bills such as the "Consumer Protection and Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention Act of 2005" are written not by Congress but by other self-dealing corporations such as credit card companies, banks and other lenders.

Now. it's accepted that some banks and corporations are too big to fail and ought to be bailed out to the tune of trillions with neither oversight, enforceable conditions nor accountability after almost literally tearing down not only America's but the world's financial market.

And it's accepted that public union workers, the elderly and the indigent will have to continue giving and giving in the community spirit of shared sacrifice while billionaires and multibillion dollar corporations continue to not pay a penny in taxes, that Social Security, Medicare and collective bargaining will have to be the first things to go.

Meanwhile, to show how much they care about us, the wealthy will continue snuggling up to the poor literally side by side almost as if to rub their grimy faces in it for not being rapacious, greedy or sociopathic enough to share in their good fortunes.

It's an infinitely complicated mess but the fallout isn't nearly as hard to see. The rich are simply getting richer while the poor are simply getting poorer. While John McCain, who married a $100,000,000 beer fortune with 110 pounds of flesh attached to it, can't remember how many houses he owns (10), low income and middle class families are getting kicked out by Sheriff's Departments for foreclosing on their one mortgage on the one house they own in which their children have grown up because usurious banks made them pie-in-the-sky no-money-down, low interest loans that then turned into crushing debts within months of ownership.

And it's accepted that these people with the least amount of money and power are the ones who are to be blamed for bringing down the global financial market and for selling these toxic mortgage-backed securities to megabanks. And it's also accepted that we victimized taxpayers and homeowners not only should reward and encourage bad behavior by bailing out these white collar terrorists against our will but to allow the government to do it all over again.

To quote Dickens, it's the best of times and the worst of times, depending on which side of the wall and guarded gate you live on. It's also the most incredulous of times when one considers what we're willing to believe. And if Lewis Carroll were alive today, he'd realize that our political and corporate structure has made his nonsense fiction look amateurish by comparison.

What Have We Learned in a Century?

2011-03-25T08:09:00.000-07:00

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

That sometimes even history's most hideous lessons are worth forgetting.

Today is the 100th Anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the worst industrial accident in New York history and one that claimed the lives of 146 men, women and children.

In lieu of private unions, this is what the workers at Triangle Shirtwaist had to endure:

Many of the workers made under $2 a day, a day often being 12 hours or longer.

Out of those wages, the employees had to pay the owners for the needles, thread and electricity they needed to do their jobs.

All but one exit was locked to deter theft, the primary reason why almost a third of the employees lost their lives.

Missing even a day of work or being caught talking to the person next to them meant immediate termination. Work weeks were commonly 6 or even 7 days a week.

Workplace injuries were ignored because they were time-consuming and could also result in immediate termination.

And a job at Triangle Shirtwaist was considered a plum job a century ago, which ought to give you an idea of how much more brutal the other sweatshops in New York City were.

By 1911, shirtwaists, or women's blouses, were beginning to go out of vogue. Adding to Triangle's problems, literally thousands of other smaller sweatshops in the garment district were making the same product for retailers. The only way for Triangle to remain competitive was to produce in massive volumes. That required draconian policies in the workplace and to put greater pressure on the workers, many of them as young as 13, to produce and meet quotas. It was a precursor of the sweatshops we saw until a few years ago on the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

Triangle was located at the 8th, 9th and 10th floors of the Asch Building in what is now Greenwich Village not too far from the Stonewall Inn. Toward the end of the working day, a fire started in a clothing bin on the 8th floor. Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, Triangle's owners, had blocked all but one door to the exits and stairwells. In an eerie prescience of September 11th and the World Trade Center, this forced dozens of the panicking workers to jump for their lives from the 8th, 9th and 10th floors to avoid the fire and smoke.

The funerals for the workers were, to say the least, heavily attended, drawing tens of thousands of mourners and pro-labor activists. The disaster forever changed building codes, building inspections, workplace safety and was the major impetus behind the forming of private unions such as the International Lady Garment Workers Union.

Or were they changed forever? To prove what a career criminal he was, two years later Max Blanck was again found locking his doors during business hours and was fined a mere $20.

The owners got off scot free and even made a pile of money off the dead workers. During the criminal trial, their ambulance chasing lawyer used chicanery to discredit one of the prosecution's key witnesses and had her testimony dismissed on the grounds the city's DA had coached her. They were acquitted and even though they were found to be responsible during the civil trial in 1913 in which they were forced to pay a paltry $75 for each fatality, the insurance company paid out $60,000 over the size of the settlement, meaning they made $400 for every dead worker.

This could almost be construed as a precursor to the "Dead Peasants" insurance enjoyed for years by many leading corporations today.

A century later, Blanck's and Harris's legacy lives on in the sweatshop owners all over the world, in the lobbyists who continually bribe lawmakers and officials regarding the relaxation of workplace safety and in the Koch brothers and the Republicans they bribe and employ to remove from the latter day workplace landscape the last vestige of unions both public and private.

Such people would lay the blame for the fire squarely on the anonymous worker who'd carelessly tossed a match or lit cigarette into the bin rather than the owners who'd caused the deaths of nearly 150 innocent human beings by locking the doors because they suspected all their underpaid wage slaves to be thieves. The owners, they'd tell you, were the real victims in spite of making a profit of $325 per corpse.

Newly christened Republican Governors Scott Walker (WI), Rick Scott (F), John Kasich (OH), Rick Snyder (MI), Chris Christie (NJ) and others would tell you that it isn't the grasping, rapacious corporations that are at fault but public unions, relegating public union workers who often put their very lives on the line on our behalf to the status of welfare queens for wanting and getting affordable health care and an actual pension.

Many of these freshman Republican Governors were backed by a criminally clueless Tea Party that plainly didn't know what it was backing. Scott Walker, for instance, never, ever campaigned on a platform for stripping collective bargaining rights for Wisconsin public workers (save for the police and firefighters who'd supported him). Considering several of these candidates were bankrolled in part by the Koch brothers and that some of them (such as Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and Indiana's two-term Governor Mitch Daniels) come from a corporate background, it's hard to see where else their administrations would've gone if not against the public unions.

This suspiciously coordinated attack on unions has a manifold purpose: To strip power from public workers, to outsource to private and costly corporations the duties and functions no longer budgeted for and to strip labor of its money and political power (In short: Defeat the black guy in 2012.).

It doesn't matter that stripping such rights away from public unions already willing to negotiate in some misplaced good faith with Republican policy-makers would not impact on any state budget such as Wisconsin's. This is now a national movement that has gained much more traction than that for recall elections for Republicans who are bound and determined to catapult us back in the days of the robber barons who never gave a thought to their workers' safety and even profited handsomely from their gruesome deaths.

Across Greenwich Village near Christopher Street sits the Stonewall Inn, another place of invaluable historical importance. 42 years ago this July, a riot erupted between gay patrons and straight activists and the NYPD, providing the gay rights movement with its first crucial pillar that led to the legalization of gay marriage in what is now five states.

But as with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire a century ago today, there are factions that are hell-bent to take away those hardwon rights that are just as zealously determined to take America back to the 19th century when gay men and women could be murdered, beaten and persecuted with impunity.

Religious and ideological conservatism and corporate greed and callousness are sicknesses of the human spirit and no lesson, no matter how hideously instructive, retains its force against such cancers of the human soul.

To the Shores of Baghdad Tripoli

2011-03-23T07:06:00.000-07:00

On the 6th of this month, I warned that the president was fucking up big time and not being proactive enough against the world's dictators. But it seems as if he's swung to the other extreme and had never once considered diplomacy in the Protean transition from impartial onlooker to primary military aggressor.

I know, I know. Gadhaffi's nuttier than a squirrel turd but you have to at least make the diplomatic effort so you can legitimately reach further toward the center of the table and use military might.

Still, one doesn't have to squint to see the disturbing similarities between Iraq and Libya: A clearly insane strongman of an oil-rich nation who'd been in power for decades who nonetheless was no longer a threat to us and being bombed by a "coalition" that just happens to be led by US fighter jets, the bombing starting on March 19, of all days, with the British playing a hyped cameo role but a cameo role nonetheless.

The only thing that's missing is support from the president's opposing party and outrage from the so-called leftists who are bound and determined to support Obama no matter what he does just as surely as Republicans will condemn him no matter what.

So far, we haven't lost anyone, although a fighter jet recently went down with little fanfare.

I'll leave the infinitely complex geopolitical ramifications to the wonks like Juan Cole and Nick Kristoff. My "job" is to give a citizen's worm's eye view of what's going on around us and this stinks to high heaven, plain and simple. As Jon Stewart pointed out, we already have two wars on our plates and this isn't like paying attention to the baby war because the older ones can take care of themselves.

One could make a case, as Michael Moore recently had, that revolutions are supposed to be won by the indigenous people, without outside interference. Yet as noble a narrative as that is, Moore seems to forget that that's not exactly how we'd achieved our own independence from the British.

The one question no one seems to be asking is, "Why Libya?"

Libya was a relative newcomer to the unrest in the Arab world, suffering serious fallout from the violent regime change in Tunisia and Egypt. In fact, not one regime in the Middle East has been toppled while every Arab country in northern Africa with an unpopular leader has been unceremoniously thrown through the palace gates.

Save for Gadhaffi. Ah, Daffy, the Michael Jackson of dictators, a guy whom we'd all but forgotten if not forgiven for his past acts of terrorism against Americans. Now suddenly, removing Gadhaffi is the most important thing on our agenda. Not balancing the budget, not creating jobs, not getting us the fuck out of Afghanistan and Iraq, not helping the Japanese with their even graver crisis, not pressuring the terrorist Israelis for their criminally under-reported bombing of the Gaza Strip...

It's removing an old potato-faced madman well past his prime and dresses in clothes that look as if they were ransacked from the Three Stooges' wardrobe.

Here's another question no one is asking: Did anyone ask the Libyans what they thought of our interference, especially the ones that killed our troops in Iraq before scuttling back to Libya?

And, as always, no matter who's sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, you can always count on some frustrated poet at the Pentagon to dream up stupid titles such as "Operation Odyssey Dawn."

It's Time for a Koch Block

2011-03-22T10:12:00.000-07:00

(Note: If you could help out JP and the Missus, it would be surely appreciated. Hopefully, in a week or two, he'll be imparting mind blowing news. The Paypal link is at the bottom of the index page. Thank you in advance. - MF)

or, Scott Not So Free.

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

"Your support during the election, it meant a ton. It made a difference and I can certainly use it again." - MA Senator Scott Brown to David Koch, March 4, 2011

The multibillionaire Koch brothers, people who have pumped more money into Republican and pro-corporate causes than most nations spend on defense combined, must like right wing politicians named Scott. We know they'd propped up Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's campaign to the tune of $43,000, now my junior senator Scott Brown was recently seen sucking up for a donation from David Koch. Last month, they'd chipped in $5,000 to Brown's campaign, according to their disclosure filings, and when Brown was running for office a little over a year ago, the Koch brothers were even more generous, dumping over $50,000 into his runoff campaign (that includes $20,000 in PAC money to the Republican Party Senate Campaign Committee.).

Not coincidentally, this Brown donation was just before the Supreme Court's now-infamous Citizen's United vs the FEC ruling.

The video above shows Brown, at MIT not during a fundraiser but at the dedication of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, begging for campaign contributions like a $25 hooker crashing someone's birthday party on rent day. That same day, in a fawning NY Times interview, Koch half-jokingly expressed the fear that Ian Murphy's prank on Scott Brown would hinder access to the politicians that he bribes.

This should have caused more of a stir than Koch whining about how he's been made the bad guy because he and his brother have contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to not just conservative causes but anti liberal causes such as affordable health care and workplace and environmental safety to name just three. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that the primary movers, shakers and financiers of the Tea Party movement that targeted Democratic lawmakers with harassment are white collar terrorists. But try convincing David or Charles Koch of that. And try convincing the "liberal" NY Times of that, as well. In the second paragraph, the dutifully prostrate Michael Cooper described Koch as merely "a billionaire who is perhaps best known for his family’s contributions to conservative causes."

Calling the Koch Brothers people who are "perhaps best known for (their) family’s contributions to conservative causes" is like calling Sauron a jewelry aficionado. And it's thanks to pseudo-liberal rags like the NY Times that the Koch brothers are best known for their largesse to conservative causes. Because if we had a real, non-corporately subsidized mainstream media, the Koch brothers would be called out as right wing, white collar terrorists that pollute the environment only slightly less than BP and are dedicated to smashing public unions and had financed smear campaigns against school teachers even in states in which they don't live.

And the reason why that Koch joke didn't get more play in the media and called out for what it is is because in today's day and age, a billionaire who'd pumped tens of thousands of petrodollars into an anti-progressive, anti-union candidate's campaign is supposed to get immediate access to their employees, don't you know.

To play Devil's advocate for a moment, the NY Times hasn't been entirely supine as last October they published an article exposing the Koch brothers' secret agenda not to mention past beneficiaries of their "generosity", including Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, two major movers behind the Citizen's United ruling 14 months ago.

So the obvious liberal kneejerk answer is to hit them where they're most sensitive: In their wallets. But that's easier said than done. The Koch brothers own many corporations and produce many products while polluting the environment (they're among the top ten polluters in the US, according to a Political Economy Research Institute study a year ago.). They own Georgia Pacific, a major paper producer as well as polluter. To boycott the Koch brothers' products would almost involve walking around with a dirty rectum, using sponges to wipe your countertops and printing documents on brown butcher's paper.

The Koch brothers will tell you, as David Koch said to Michael Cooper of the Times, that political activism is a mere hobby involving a mere bag o' shells and that they donate far more money to philanthropic causes. That may be true, as whole wings of natural science museums and entire cancer research facilities have the Koch brand name plastered all over them.

But being philanthropists and seeming to give back to the community is the tactic used by other billionaire criminals like Pablo Escobar, who built schools and hospitals where his drugs were respectively sold and treated in its aftermath.

The Koch brothers' financial "folderol" in the political sector is a matter of public record, but much of that money was given before Citizen's United was ruled on 14 months ago. Imagine how much more damage the Koch brothers can do in a new environment in which campaign finance "reform" is now officially a laughingstock and where they can pump untold billions into "conservative causes" and without having to file campaign finance disclosure forms.

The Koch brothers have all but declared war on the environment, education, worker safety, affordable health care, unions and who knows how many other causes and organizations that are necessary for a healthy democracy. We can start by boycotting their products but their very tentacular reach all but guarantees that wouldn't put a dent in their personal finances. We know we cannot trust the mainstream media to get and keep the word out about these white collar terrorists. If you but connect the dots, you will eventually draw a gigantic dollar sign crushing a stick figure.

As always when the system breaks down, it will come down to the citizenry so it will be up to us to execute this Koch block that is so necessary for the survival of our nation.

Super Troll to the White Man's Rescue

2011-03-20T14:51:00.001-07:00

Something tells me this clown is white. I don't know. But while reading his profanity- and sexist-laden screed to Pam Spaulding for a post she wrote yesterday about Sarah Palin (claiming she would've won three years ago if she'd been at the top of the ticket), one can practically smell the golf club wax and mayonnaise.

Well, I can't resist jumping in on a good flame war uninvited regardless of what either party thinks. We liberals can't just let such idiocy go unchallenged. In fact, it is the intellectual imperative and moral responsibility of the intelligent and erudite to lampoon the factually challenged and willfully ignorant without quarter or mercy.

So, this one goes out to you, Bill Carpenter, Sr. of Auburn, CA.

First, in the interests of context, here's what seems to be his screed in full and before you read that, it might behoove you to read Pam's original post on Palin yesterday:

I want you to know EXACTLY who sent you this mail, I have guts similar to Sarah Palin and I dare you to challenge me concerning my view of you and your posting.

Bill Carpenter Sr
Auburn, California
XXX-XXX-XXXX
bill@billcarpentersr.com

I watched the entire interview ( LIVE ) so don't try to spread your bullshit around. Sarah Palin said no such thing. Only you liberal jerks would believe anything written on your pages. Look in the mirror BITCH, if you don't faint first you will see a serious lier. You wouldn't admit the truth if it was to your benefit.. Since I believe you are so stooooopid, the string end goes in last.

( HEY BITCH, HE IS A COMMUNITY ORGANIZER NOT A PRESIDENT)

I don't know why she couldn't use his proper title, ( BECAUSE SHE DIDN'T WANT TO SAY ASS HOLE IN FRONT OF ALL THOSE PEOPLE ) but Palin seems in many ways stuck back in 2008, constantly re-litigating her grievances and sure that if she just tells us that "candidate Obama" is inexperienced, we will believe her. It's as if she doesn't quite grasp that while she was doing reality TV shows, he's been in the White House. ( PLAYING GOLF, FIGURING OUT BRACKETS, WRONG I MIGHT ADD, ENTERTAINING MUSLIMS, BLACKS AND UNION LEADERS. ARE YOU TOO STOOOOPID TO SEE THAT.)

OK, Bill? You have tragically mistaken for a hero and someone with guts Sarah Palin, a vacuum-skulled mental anorexic who quit midway through her first and only term as Alaska's governor when the scandals got too numerous and when the call of the wild (crooned by opportunistic literary agents, right wing publishers and TV producers) was too strong to resist.

Perhaps it's because of Reagan's budget cuts to California's public education all those decades ago or maybe you were home-schooled and your Momma was busy singing Hosannas with you while she should've been teaching you real profiles in courage like FDR, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy and virtually any other liberal in American history.

Whichever the case, it had obviously eroded your reading comprehension (and spelling) skills. Sarah Palin did, too, claim that she would've won the presidency if she'd been at the top of the ticket. Indeed, this is the sole moment of clarity that Palin has had since John McCain threw a dart at a US map in August 2008 and hit Wasilla. For the flannel-tongued Palin, this is pretty unambiguous. I would think you would be smart enough to see that.

But no. You had to go on a profanity- and misogynistic rant and defend a woman you likely have never met nor would likely ever meet (her security would plant you six feet under head-first were you to get within 10 feet of her, I'm sure), a woman who is as blissfully unaware of your pathetic, semen-flecked existence as she is of foreign policy.

Let me tell you one thing, Billy boy, and hopefully it'll rattle around in your head long enough to form some rudimentary neural groove: Your chosen heroine is a fraud. The only thing that is authentic about her is her ignorance and errant stupidity, ignorance and stupidity that is only reinforced by Teabagging assclowns like you. It's because of the support of racist, Pearl Beer-swilling shit stains like you and your ilk that Palin's head has swelled larger than James Sensenbrenner's ass. It is people like you who encourage her.

But you're not totally to blame, Billy boy, because you're just an anonymous foot soldier in the war on intelligence, job security and education. The real culprits are the spittle-flecked, predatory cocksuckers at Threshhold Publishing, the Discovery Channel, ambulance chaser-cum-literary-agent Robert Barnett and Fox "News" who saw fit to further bloat her unjustified ego, turning trash by a racist ghostwriter named Lynn Vincent into an instant bestseller (thanks largely to right wing organizations buying them up in bulk thanks to unconscionable buyers so they can then give them away at Republican functions.).

That is, they were piling money at her feet of Pla-Doh when they weren't mocking her behind her back under a cowardly veil of anonymity (thank God Nobel laureate Saul Bellow isn't alive to see his son Adam do to the family's literary legacy what 300 pound lifers do to newbies in prison showers).

She's hysterically hypocritical about the "lamestream media". She sneers at them with her trademark, spurned-head-cheerleader venom except when she's got another reality show or ghostwritten piece of tripe to sell, picks fights with late night talk show comedians, makes up words on Twitter and insults our President while he's on foreign soil (such as when he was in Hong Kong).

And, speaking of our president, he used to be a community organizer, a pretty damned noble cause, if you ask me, but now, thanks to 72,000,000 of us, he is the President of the United States whether or not your reptilian, racist pulp of a brain wishes to acknowledge that (By the way, his brackets were 80% correct out of 5 chosen).

It's notable that white supremacist groups, gun sales and militia group enrollment skyrocketed after the black guy took over. In light of these inconvenient facts, it is a cause of neverending mirth to see you people turn red and quiver your jowls with right proper white outrage at being labeled as gun-clutching racists. How come Tea Bagger rallies rarely feature faces that aren't white or sunburned? How come gun sales went through the roof when the black guy got elected, despite him having no agenda in the slightest to take away your guns?

How come the black guy is now at fault for a high unemployment rate, a spiraling deficit, two unwinnable wars? All these things and much, much more began when your dimbulb poster boy Dubya was illegally and illegitimately squatting in the White House like a noxious tick beneath the nation's dermis. But suddenly they're issues when a man darker than John Boehner is in the Oval Office.

Which brings us back to Sarah Half Term, a woman followed by scandal and rightful ridicule like stoners following the Grateful Dead. Yeah, she energized McCain's campaign for about 15 minutes (every idiot gets their 15 minutes and Palin's has been long overdue to end for over 2 1/2 years). And that's because she brought out every racist, gun-clutching, 1st cousin-fucking, right wing, nimrod nutjob in the land. In other words, people like you, Bill.

Then the inexplicable happened: Even Republican voters suddenly woke up and came to the conclusion that between McCain and Palin, they didn't know enough about the salient issues to challenge a 3rd grader. Palin did a Hindenburg in front of Katie Couric (then blamed Couric time and again for asking specific, blunt questions) and the McCain campaign was forced to turn her into Osama bin Laden and make her unavailable to the media.

She's spread lies about death panels, doesn't know what the Vice President's job would've consisted of, doesn't read newspapers, doesn't know the basic rudiments of intelligible English, is a fraud as an "author", is a fraud on her reality TV show and is a political fraud who never served a full term in any political capacity except as mayor of a one-moose town named Wasilla.

And yet, somehow, you've turned this woman into the next Joan of Arc so she can lead the poor oppressed white man to the Promised Land where white people are white, black people are black and that's the way it'll stay, where public unions have no power, no money and no way to protect their workers while people who can buy and sell your first born child 100,000,000 times over get one enormous tax break after another, in which the environment is shat on, consumer protections are gutted and in which Social Security and Medicare will be privatized and put on the craps table better known as Wall Street.

The greatest coup the Republican Party ever pulled off was during the Southern Strategy in which they convinced you mouth-breathing bigots that voting against your own basic interests by voting Republican decade after decade was the way to go. This mode of thinking, far from burning out or losing traction, had hideously bloomed to the point where you hold up as your right wing icon a hillbilly grifter presiding over a collection of adulterers, underachievers and future porn stars, someone who would sneer at you and have you publicly humiliated if you said you didn't plunk down $30 for her books or watch her fraudulent TV shows.

It is people like you, Bill, who are gleefully turning us into the third world country and banana republic we are, because you lack the inherent ability to more carefully choose your heroes and protect your, and our, mutual self interests.

May God have mercy on your soul, you pathetic waste of trace elements.

A Peck of Hatred and Stupidity

2011-03-19T08:12:00.000-07:00

Maybe Kansas state Rep. Virgil Peck's problem is he's watching too much Sarah Palin's Alaska or Arnold Schwarzenegger's The Running Man. But at a state assembly in Kansas recently, Virgil Peck seriously proposed "Looks like to me, if shooting these immigrating feral hogs works, maybe we have found a (solution) to our illegal immigration problem."

"Immigrating feral hogs." Not human beings but "immigrating feral hogs." Shot from helicopters.

Uh huh.

Yeah, I can see how, like Iowa's Steve King, Virgil Peck, a guy who also lives in a landlocked, midwestern state, would be so fearful of "immigrating feral hogs." And, believe it or not, this wasn't even the most heartless suggestion proposed of late for dealing with the so-called immigration problem.

Last June, some bald-headed mick bigot out of New Mexico by the name of Tom Mullins seriously proposed using land mines at the border.

Only slightly more humanitarian was King's fellow Iowan Dr. Pat Bertroche's suggestion that we implant microchips in immigrants. Both of the last two suggestions may have been midterm election sops thrown to the racist Teabaggers, maybe not.

But Peck obviously won re-election in southeast Kansas. And King, still inexplicably a United States Congressman, four and a half years ago seriously suggested using electrified fences along a border he doesn't live anywhere near, likening the immigrants to cattle.

If you think this isn't racist, consider, #1 that all this anti-immigrant rhetoric is coming from white Republicans and, #2, there doesn't seem to be any concern about the US-Canadian border, just the southern border with Mexico (although the Minnesota state house seems to be keeping a wary eye on them there Canucks, too, just in case they're thinking of giving up their evil, Socialized health care system for our bloated, expensive and corrupt one and 9+% unemployment rate). They're just careful enough not to specify the southwestern border.

But we all know what and to whom they're really referring in their thinly-veiled dog whistle language.

There is something extremely sinister going on in this country and when one sees how truly evil and venal the Republican Party has gotten in the last two years, thanks in large part to Republican and Independent voters, one sees a trend that too readily lends itself to an apocalyptic mindset.

Undocumented workers are evil. Unionized public employees are evil. Gay people are evil.

But Wall Street and the upholstered ticks that make up the top-earning 2% in the country? Hey, they're job producers. Let's give them another tax break.

These people used to be laughed at because until a couple of years ago, before the black guy got elected president, they were on the fringes of mainstream society, the kind of lunatics who sold mimeographed books at White Supremacy rallies dealing with post-apocalyptic survival and evil Jewish bankers.

Now they're elected officials, some of them at the federal level. A lot of them are chucking their mimeographed books and getting book contracts from an increasingly conservative publishing industry. They're now getting serious air time on TV and radio.

Meanwhile, much saner and humane progressive voices are still waiting for their version of Fox News, for their people to get serious air time on TV and radio while white Republicans advocate the mass murder of brown human beings just looking for a better life.

Here's an idea: How about we hunt Republicans from helicopters? Even without a spotter, I'd be glad to come out of retirement for that. Let's start with peckerheads like Peck. Then, after we've vaporized into pink arterial spray every Republican with Barrett 50 calibers, let's put every illegal alien we can find on welfare, SSI and unemployment. Let's give 'em all free, Congressional-class health care, HUD-subsidized housing in white Republican neighborhoods starting with Lou Dobbs' and make all their kids and relatives back home automatic citizens just to detonate the heads of whatever Republicans escaped our sniper scopes.

After all, if you want to preach audacious hatefulness, I say we fight fire with fire. I'm serious. Let's kill all the Republicans because, after all, the illegal immigrants just want jobs. The white Republicans are the ones advocating murder and they ought to be put down like the feral pigs we all know they are.

Fuck the Working Man

2011-03-18T07:00:00.000-07:00

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am.
I guess that's why they call me,
They call me the working man.
- Rush

What does this say about Haim Levine after he tried to use his words to judge and attempt to degrade me? I gracefully ignored this folly for 177 shows. I fire back once and this contaminated little maggot can't handle my power and can't handle the truth. I wish him nothing but pain in his silly travels especially if they wind up in my octagon. Clearly I have defeated this earthworm with my words -- imagine what I would have done with my fire-breathing fists. I urge all my beautiful and loyal fans who embraced this show for almost a decade to walk with me side-by-side as we march up the steps of justice to right this unconscionable wrong. - Charlie Sheen

What does this say? That in no country at no time in the Industrial Age has the working man, on whom everything depends, has ever been the hero. What else does it say when the only unemployed people who become more popular and become more in demand than ever are celebrities and politicians who don't even want to show up for work?

Generally, I leave the Charlie Sheen/Michael Jackson/Lindsey Lohan blogging to nasty little fucks like Perez Hilton, another example of a marginally-employed wasteoid who's somehow been turned into a latter day folk icon who can sell ad space on his marginally pornographic blog for $50,000+ a pop. But the news that Charlie Sheen, a man who makes the likes of Martin Lawrence, James Woods, Mel Gibson and Wynona Ryder look like capstans of sanity by conspicuous relief, is a more desirable candidate for president than both Obama and Sarah Palin had stirred something inside me.

Consider the case of Charlie Sheen, who jumped the shark and Oprah's sofa like a spittle-flecked, anti-Semitic lunatic on Alex Jones' show, of all places, and pissing and moaning about losing his job on Two and a Half Men. Essentially, as I'm sure we all know whether we like it or not, Sheen got fired for badmouthing his boss (never a good idea, no matter how big you are), making borderline anti-Semitic slurs in the process because he was coddled a little bit less than usual for not showing up for work.

In the real world, you get fired for that and when you try to complain about your unfair treatment, people tell you to shut the fuck up and start reading the classifieds. They don't go on whirlwind international tours called "The Terrible Torpedo of Truth", collect over a million followers on Twitter and get hailed as a folk hero of the working man.

In the real world, you don't get one enormous book deal thrown at you after another, get hired by the highest-rated cable news network in the galaxy, have the Discovery Channel build a show around you while blatant evidence of fraud dogs you like a Doppleganger and you don't make millions for not doing what you're paid to do. Your Twitter and Facebook accounts wouldn't be shaping policy at the highest levels of government.

In the real world, if you get fired, you don't get unemployment and you certainly don't get signed to a lucrative tour that'll make you enough millions to continue living a bloated, coddled lifestyle.

Fortunately, we don't live in the real world.

In this Bizarro version, these peoples' names are bandied about as polling fun fodder for deadly serious issues such as who'll be running this country after next year while the real working people who've been put out of work are actually ignored by those few companies who are actually hiring.

Sarah Palin and Charlie Sheen and how their celebrity and fortunes have bloomed since they quit and got shitcanned from their respective jobs are not what's wrong with this country but it sure as hell is symptomatic. Sheen's anti-Semitic tirade put 200 crew members out of a job in an industry where job security is measured weekly in Neilsen ratings and is considered solid if you're employed for more than 22 episodes.

Yet when they're revealed as bigots, antisemites, thieves, alcoholics, and sex and drug addicts who've done more than their part to tear down the most sacred institutions in the human experience, we idolize them moreso than Joe Lunchpail who gets up at dawn every morning or work in the dead of night for less and less money to make sure civilization continues functioning.

These are the people who educate our children, who inspect airplane parts to make sure hatches don't blow at 35,000 feet, who keep our streets safe from crime, who run into burning buildings without a thought of their own safety to save our loved ones, who care for us and our loved ones during medical crises, who keep our neighborhoods clear of our garbage and who do literally tens of thousands of unsexy jobs that'll never be put on posters in teenagers' rooms but are infinitely more important than someone whose own is to entertain for 22 minutes a week for 22 weeks out of 52.

You want Charlie Sheen for President because you think it'll be like when his Dad starred in The West Wing, Democrats, Republicans and Independents? You think who will lead our nation after 2012 is a laughing matter by getting people to say that a bigoted lunatic enjoying momentary notoriety is preferable to the incumbent President?

Be careful what you wish for, America, because you might put ideas in Charlie's addled head and you just might get it.

A Joke For St. Patrick's Day

2011-03-17T09:18:00.001-07:00

We all have a favorite joke and this one happens to be mine. So what better day to share it than on St. Patrick's Day?

A conservative Irish judge went pub crawling after a hard Friday at court. He was known as a law and order judge and had an image to maintain but after such a hard day, his Irish thirst was raging.

After he crawled out of his 6th pub, he vomited all over his brand new suit and racked his reeling brain for what to tell his teetotaling wife Brigit. Then he got a brilliant idea.

He poured himself through the front door and said in an outraged voice,

"Ah, Brigit, you'll never guess what happened to me this very night. I was walking home from the courthouse and this drunken yobbo staggers up to me and threw up all over me brand new suit. Well, I had him arrested and when I see him in court on Monday, I'll be givin' him 30 days in gaol, I will. Now, be a dear, Brigit, and clean me suit, will you? There's a lass."

"Very good, your honor," said Brigit and she set about cleaning his suit.

The weekend passed and Monday morning arrived. The conservative judge, dressed in his newly-cleaned suit, thought it prudent to reinforce his lie one more time. At breakfast he said to his wife,

"When I see that suit-soiler in court today, I'll be givin' him 30 days, I will!"

"Well, your honor," began Brigit, "you'd better be giving him 60 days because he shit in your pants, too."

悪魔は細部にある。

2011-03-16T06:33:00.000-07:00

or The Devil is in the Details.

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

There's no reason why, technologically, we can't employ nuclear energy in a safe and effective way. Japan does it and France does it, and it doesn't have greenhouse gas emissions, so it would be stupid for us not to do that in a much more effective way. - President Barack Obama, October 2009

It's Japan's curse, perhaps a fated one, to be dogged every once in a while by radiation. First Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then Godzilla, now the earthquake and tsunami that's caused havoc in the northeast side of Japan. President Obama's own curse? Sitcom timing regarding his inevitably ruinous energy policies.

The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, built by General Electric in the early 70's, has been verging near catastrophe. 50 to 100 Japanese power plant workers, or what makes up a skeleton crew at the plant on a slow day, are valiantly battling the intermittently exposed core trying to prevent a full-blown meltdown as we saw at Chernobyl almost exactly 25 years ago. Uniting them is a solidarity and brotherhood only understood by other reactor workers and seen among policemen, firefighters and soldiers. Typically, neither the Japanese government nor the Tokyo Electric Power Company that owns the nuclear plant hardly even acknowledge the life-endangering toil of these brave workers on which Japan's well-being rests.

We saw much the same callous disregard for human life in the Ukraine. The Soviet government refused to even admit that Reactor 4 at Chernobyl had melted down and was spewing radioactive dust all over that part of the world. It wasn't corporate profits that were at stake but the upcoming May Day celebrations and Soviet pride and prestige that were on the line.

While much of eastern Europe and Scandinavia (and, yes, eventually Japan) were getting poisoned by radioactive fallout, the government of Mikhail Gorbachev silently but frantically sent hundreds of local and surrounding firefighters into the burning inferno without adequate briefings of the danger nor personal protective equipment (PPE) and the casualties began to mount immediately. Those who had rushed into the reactor and, later, the Russian helicopter pilots who'd built the sarcophagus that still more or less encases Reactor 4 to this day, soon died.

600,000 "liquidators", as they were called, were soon rushed to the scene to purge the Ukraine and surrounding areas of radioactive contamination. This included merely burying farm equipment, euthanized livestock as well as shooting dogs and cats (so they wouldn't escape the 40 km Zone of Exclusion). Even on the periphery of the epicenter, many of these liquidators fell ill because of radiation sickness. Their children were born with genetic defects now common in Chernobyl, Pripyat and the surrounding area such as thyroid cancer and atrial septal defects (a hole in the heart).

There was a stunning lack of concern for human life, even given the Soviet Union's historically hideous human rights track record, and it was the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. Within 5 1/2 years, the Politburo voted to shut down the USSR and start a new government.

"Chill the fuck out. I've got this."

Fast forward 25 years later. A new Russia, a new American President. Yet the only constants from the bad old days are the 40 year-old reactors in Japan and the insistence that nuclear power is still safe despite glaring evidence to the contrary from the Land of the Rising Sun. As with the Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 workers and subsequent oil spill almost a year ago, President Barack Obama is telling us there's nothing to worry about, nothing to see here, let's continue conducting business as usual. After a brief moratorium on offshore oil drilling, the Interior Department's MMS continued handing out leases with minimal to no safety standards being met.

To make his point, Obama, while defending his plan to aggressively expand our nuclear power plant footprint, even had the obligatory Japanese person in the background as window dressing to remind us that there was nothing to worry about, because there's nothing at all synonymous with Japan and nuclear catastrophe.

Somewhat in his defense, this president has been dogged with horrendous timing. Mere weeks before the Deepwater Horizon exploded (on Earth Day, at that) and spilled tens of millions of gallons of crude oil onto the Gulf Coast, the president embraced the Republican/Palinesque mantra of "Drill, baby, drill!" and announced we were opening even more of the Gulf Coast to offshore oil drilling.

Then, right in the middle of the president's plan to revamp our energy policy, a 9.0 earthquake off the eastern coast of Japan resulted in a 23 foot tsunami that pushed four of Japan's reactors into crisis mode, setting several on fire and risking a meltdown that could theoretically be 10 times worse than Chernobyl. Now, once again uniting with racist Republicans that are bound and determined to see him fall next year no matter what he does to appease them, Obama is telling us to "Calm down. I've got this. Nothing to see here, folks."

Jacqueline Marcus of Buzzflash also reminds us (emphasis mine),

European leaders stand as a direct contrast to President Obama's sense of confidence. Germany, Switzerland, Britain and others have decided to suspend nuclear power plans and they're also considering shutting down current plants for safety examinations, especially older plants that were built in the 1970s.

Another problem: The 45 year-old idiocy of planning to build nuclear reactors in an earthquake-prone area such as the Pacific Rim is, unfortunately, not restricted to Japan.

As Marcus reminds us, the Diablo nuclear power plant in California was built, with an idiocy rivaled only by the Japanese, not only directly on the San Andreas Fault but near three others. To give you an idea of the sheer level of stupidity that went behind Diablo, it took a newbie engineer aged 25 to discover that the plant's seismic blueprints had been reversed, thereby compromising overall integrity of the vulnerable twin towers.

During storms, water intake from both its primary and secondary cooling systems are scaled back by 80% to prevent kelp from clogging the intake valves. Cutting back on the cooling system is what brought us the Chernobyl disaster in the first place and lack of water through failed pumps is what's exposing Japan's reactor cores to this day.

As the Watergate-era maxim goes, "Follow the money" and if you follow this money trail long enough, it's not hard to see where Obama's real allegiance is. The CEO of General Electric, which designed and built the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, remained on Obama's Economic Recovery team, even after it was revealed early in the administration's history that GE had pulled an Enron and used sleazy accounting tricks to mislead its shareholders and investors by inflating its profits. Jeffrey Immelt, a so-called tree-hugger, is no longer on that council because he got promoted last January as the head of Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

That's why one has to laugh when, days after the president's inauguration, Immelt wrote to the shareholders to whom he was lying about company profits, "The interaction between government and business will change forever. In a reset economy, the government will be a regulator; and also an industry policy champion, a financier, and a key partner."

Obama has hardly been a regulator of any industry or individual company, especially GE. What Obama wants, GE wants. What Obama says, GE says. Or maybe it's the other way around. Either way, we're not getting a single indication that Obama is interested in being a regulator as much as "an industry policy champion", especially if that policy benefits Obama's closest corporate chums. In fact, GE was Obama's 18th most generous contributor to his presidential campaign (Goldman Sachs, if you're curious, was #2 at almost a million bucks and Citigroup was #6.)

The Devil, or el Diablo as it were, is in the details and one need not be a detective/journalist on a par with Greg Palast, who's forced to ply his trade with the less cajone-endowed American MSM, to see where Obama's true allegiances lie.

As Marcus says while flinging her gauntlet to the ground,

Given the fact that there have been major earthquakes around the world, I'd like to see President Obama stand in front of the Diablo Nuclear Power Plant when an earthquake hits and announce: "I'm confident everyone! I'm confident!"

But the president will never do that, perhaps because he's aware of his own rotten timing regarding energy policy. And it would be fitting, if not inevitable, for such a press conference to host a major earthquake along the San Andreas Fault to show America the true face of el Diablo and Hell.

Goodbye to All That

2011-03-13T08:38:00.000-07:00

While I never actually admitted it, when I'd do my erstwhile long column on Sunday morning/afternoon, I'd poach from Frank Rich's column for ideas on where to go. Actually, "poach" perhaps is a too-larcenous word: Perhaps I should say I took cues from Rich's weekly Op-Ed and zig-zag off on my own lonely tangent ("The road less traveled"? I usually need a machete to go where I'm going.). And today, I'm about to do it again.

I was a relatively late newcomer to Frank Rich's genius. I didn't begin to read the Op-Eds until I became a political blogger over six years ago (rivaling Rich's 17 year-long tenure at the Times in blogger years). Later, when that venerable institution made the colossal blunder of trying to put their Op-Ed columnists behind the velvet rope of Times Select, thereby making them available only to paying subscribers, my interest in the Op-Ed, and Rich's canon, really took off. Back then we bloggers would vie to see who could poach Rich's byline first and get the coveted link (and maybe, Oh God, the Big Headline) on Buzzflash when it was still Buzzflash.

Rich didn't have the brutal elegance or write the perfumed poison pen belles letters of a James Wolcott nor did he turn into some tiresome nickname-slinging insider like Maureen Dowd. Somehow, over the course of nearly 20 years, he'd avoided espousing controversial, and bigoted, opinions that would end his career. It's to his enduring legacy that he never suffered the same fate as Helen Thomas.

Any newspaper is bigger than the sum of its parts but that hasn't been the case of the NY Times. They are no bigger than the sum of its parts, especially since Frank Rich has now passed into its hallowed Halls of Posterity. Rich, as one could expect, made a graceful exit, taking only one potshot at his former employer when he wrote in his swan song Op-Ed, "Neither it nor any other institution is infallible, as was illustrated most recently during the run-up to the Iraq invasion."

Indeed, not only had the NY Times dropped the ball on that, as it had during Vietnam, but also on 9/11, Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina (.pdf of the original article, not the silently-amended one in the Times' archives), etc. Judith Miller, in fact, was so embedded with the weapons inspectors and the Screaming Eagles that she was practically writing policy and was squarely in the middle of the Valerie Plame outing. And who that follows the Times can forget the fake articles of Jason Blair?

Not only that, to this day they're still censoring the late Molly Ivins because of a PG-13 joke about "chicken pluckers," hardly the grudge that one would expect for a newspaper branded for decades by conservative mouth breathers as being a bastion of liberal propaganda. Like Rich, Ivins, the ultimate liberal pundit, felt the Times was too claustrophobic and creatively stifling.

For 17 years virtually every Sunday, Rich produced hundreds of articles skewering Bush, the right wing and outrages that helplessly swam into his eagle-eyed ken. Making relevant connections between seemingly unrelated news items, Rich forced us to expand our outlook and to acknowledge the deeper connective tissue that drives our country and its policies. Rich was often at his best when he'd briefly slip into theater/movie critic mode and make some spot-on cultural reference such as the article almost exactly a year ago about Wall St. crooks running roughshod on Main Street and the late Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Four and a half years ago, when Obama still hadn't served out his third year in the US Senate, Rich had warned us that the junior senator from Illinois was "not a miracle elixir." Obama's two plus years in the White House has proven Rich to be a prophet in a par with Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce.

With Rich's departure after today's column, the NY Times has gotten a lot poorer. Maureen Dowd's never been the same since winning a Pulitzer for helping to almost take down the Clinton administration over a blow job. Bob Herbert's just tiresome. Paul Krugman's good for economic viewpoints but his acumen has been noticeably absent since the start of the Obama administration. And not too many of us are sufficiently intrigued with Middle Eastern/Asian affairs to much care what Nick Kristoff says about anything.

As the Times' Opinion Editorialist-at-Large, Rich spanned this great nation, its policies, its prejudices, its triumphs and its stupidities with sartorical humor and always controlled outrage. With a last tongue-in-cheek observation, Rich wrote, "That’s one reason America is so thrilling to write about." In other words, as the Chinese say, "May you live in interesting times."

The problem is, The Times isn't nearly as interesting now that Frank Rich has fled to New York Magazine.

Dog Walker

2011-03-11T18:39:00.000-08:00

...and keep dogging that cross-eyed cunt before he does any more damage. If California can recall a guy like Gray Davis and replace him with a flabby, egotistical, gap-toothed baboon like Arnold Schwarzenegger, then Wisconsin can 86 this clown.

What seems to be elided over by the always reliable mainstream media < /snark > is this little-known provision of the union-busting bill that was rammed through the state assembly with all the industry and gusto of a 12" dildo at a lesbian orgy:

SECTION 2704. 174.13 (2) of the statutes is amended to read:

174.13 (2) Any officer or pound which has custody of an unclaimed dog may release the dog to the University of Wisconsin System, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Medical College of Wisconsin, Inc., or to any other educational institution of higher learning chartered under the laws of the state and accredited to the University of Wisconsin System or University of Wisconsin–Madison, upon requisition by the institution. The requisition shall be in writing, shall bear the signature of an authorized agent, and shall state that the dog is requisitioned for scientific or educational purposes. If a requisition is made for a greater number of dogs than is available at a given time, the officer or pound may supply those immediately available and may withhold from other disposition all unclaimed dogs coming into the officer’s or pound’s custody until the requisition is fully discharged, excluding impounded dogs as to which ownership is established within a reasonable period. A dog left by its owner for disposition is not considered an unclaimed dog under this section. If operated by a county, city, village or town, the officer or pound is entitled to the payment of $1 for each dog requisitioned. An institution making a requisition shall provide for the transportation of the dog.”

No, this is not from The Onion or Andy Borowitz. This is how evil the Republican Party truly is. They want to use your puppies for scientific experimentation to benefit corporate R&D. The "scientific or educational purposes"? That's vivisection, or performing surgery on a live subject. So if you let little Spot get loose in Appleton or Madison and the Animal Control Officer gets his hands on him, he could easily be sold to scientific research for a $1.

There must be a shitload of stray dogs in Wisconsin if this is seen as a source of much-needed revenue.

So, all the jokes we've been making about Republicans torturing puppies and kittens? They're literally coming true. And I don't know if it's some zombie virus in the air that affects only Republicans but we've seen more screaming assholes from that party coming out of the woodwork in the last year than at any time in human history. This is the Rumsfeldian worst of the worst, the bigots, the homophobes, the Islamophobes, the antiUnionists, the pro-corporate tools. Only they're now calling the shots. These lunatics are in the mainstream. Way to go, poor and middle class Republican voters. Be careful what you wish for because...

And speaking of pro-corporate tools, if you didn't catch Maddow the other night, she mentioned that Republicans, just seconds after their blitzkrieg tactic of dividing the bill and conquering those evil, bloated public unions (without even grazing any of the state budget issues), literally ran to a Republican fundraiser in Washington, DC that was held by a scumbag corporate lobbying firm named BGR that also buys votes for other scumbag consortiums made up of home lenders and companies seeking health care "reform." (Fun factoid: BGR was cofounded exactly 20 years ago by racist shitbag Haley Barbour, another Republican Governor and one who's still to this day drawing a steady income from BGR through a blind trust valued at almost $3.5 million.)

That's not to be confused with the $2500-a-plate fundraiser they had back in January the night before they took the House. God only knows why they're seeking ~~bribes~~ ~~graft~~, ~~kickbacks~~, ~~payola~~ campaign contributions since there's already a massive Act Blue campaign to recall these Kochsuckers like so many defective Toyotas.

As Maddow says, this power play that's greased by corporate and lobbyist payola has nothing to do with balancing Wisconsin's or any state's budget. If Walker was really sincere about that, he wouldn't have split the bill in half and passed the half that doesn't even address the budgetary shortfall. The state GOP gave massive amounts of cash to the wealthy in the form of tax rebates and cuts and now they have to put the money back.

It's redistribution of wealth, plain and simple.

Redistribution of wealth?

Remember when Republicans, Libertarians and their indentured online porch monkeys were screaming about redistribution of wealth when the black Socialist was running for president?

Apparently, wealth redistribution is Socialist only when it goes from rich to poor. It's only a good idea that's immune to criticism when it flows from poor to rich, which is what we're seeing in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey and every other state that's being run into the ground by a ~~right wing corporate dildo~~ governor.

Jesus Christ, you have to give the Republican Party credit for one thing: Just when you think these demented, vicious pricks have hit the bottom of the barrel in terms of human moral turpitude, they then grab a pickaxe, bust through the bottom and tunnel all the way to China. With the latter-day, post-Democracy Republican Party, there's always room to sink lower.

They're now literally, literally running away from the people they supposedly represent to GOP campaign fundraisers held by corporate lobbyists just moments after putting the shaft to working class people.

Now they're after our fucking puppies and are selling them to be torn apart alive for a buck.

And they're not even trying to hide it, anymore, because they found a way to shit on the people with impunity. Public opinion, in theory, no longer matters.

They have finally completed the transition from mere scum to actual, living, breathing caricatures.

"Nyuk, Nyuk, Nyuk!"

2011-03-10T14:56:00.000-08:00

This was exactly my reaction when Mrs. JP was trolling on the HuffPo earlier tonight and told me the result of the Fed's "investigation" of lenders fraudulently foreclosing on 3,000,000 homeowners last year. Here's the incredible finding (emphasis mine):

During a public meeting attended by Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and other regulators, consumer advocates on the panel criticized federal bank regulators for narrowly defining what constitutes a "wrongful foreclosure." At least one member of the panel voiced concerns that the public would not take the Fed's findings of improper practices seriously, since the wide-ranging review did not find a single homeowner who was wrongfully foreclosed upon.

I guess that would include those homeowners who'd been foreclosed on despite not having a mortgage, and owning their homes lock, stock and barrel, seizing the wrong homes. That would also include those who were told they were in default in excess of what they actually owed or even those who never missed a payment.

Here's the best part, in case you're wondering how Big Ben's Fed was able to investigate all 3,000,000 cases of foreclosure: They only did a sample of 500 cases. Using a sampling plan when dealing with large numbers of widgets works in a quality control lab but not when you're dealing with real people who've been thrown out of real homes. One has to wonder if these 500 case files were really drawn at random or subject to some pre-screening process to guarantee a 100% "See No Evil" verdict.

So, tell me how ethical it is for the Federal Reserve, an entity that bailed out these same lenders to the tune of billions, to investigate these same lenders for foreclosure fraud, especially when it involves a simple narrowing of the definition of "wrongful foreclosure"?

The Bushies got away with torture because ass monkeys like Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo simply narrowed the definition of torture to mean simply something that results in organ failure without once taking into account the psychological effects of a person's dehumanization.

And, in the bait and switch scam of the year, Republicans in Wisconsin just yesterday passed the union-busting bill without the necessary quorum of 20 people by resorting to sleazy, pseudo-legal parliamentary tricks that cannot possibly be legal and will surely fall once it's up for judicial review.

Forget the fact that stripping collective bargaining rights for public workers in Wisconsin will not do jack shit for "repairing" the state budget that was partly made all but irreparable because of tax cuts for the super wealthy. And let's just forget that with a simple narrowing of the definition of the phrase "wrongful foreclosure" not one person was illegally tossed from their home last year.

The crooks are now running the asylum and they're not even making an effort at plausible deniability.

Voting For the D...

2011-03-08T08:34:00.000-08:00

...not the ARRRRR!

It seems we here in Massachusetts officially have a Pirate Party. I swear, this is no joke, even though there's a James O'Keefe quoted. This Pirate Party movement is bigger than you might think, stretching as far as the recently rebooted government of Tunisia.

So if you're a Bay Stater, register as a pirate, me hearties (You still have to pay taxes on your booty, though)!

You're Blowing it, Mr. President.

2011-03-06T05:25:00.000-08:00

I'm still waiting for someone to say to Barack Obama, "If you want to earn your Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. President, now's the time."

Indeed, President Obama could be taking advantage of once-in-a-lifetime opportunities handed to him both domestically and abroad by the always dysfunctional Republican Party and the rioters in the Middle East and northern Africa. Yet it seems the Constitutional Law Professor President's grasp of history is as rusty as his equally dysfunctional grasp of the US Constitution.

Let's look at the Republican Party's recent attempts to shut down the government until a stopgap bill was passed by the Republican House. The Republican "Young Guns", apparently led by an already fractious Tea Party caucus, were setting up a showdown on Main Street, USA, the bait and switch of this generation, in claiming, "We really don't want to shut down government but we will if we have to to teach them evil lib'rals Dutch Uncle lessons in fiscal responsibility."

As Frank Rich said in his last article for the New York Times, Republicans weren't so much blind to history as taking a jaundiced squint at their other failed revolution of 1995, when they actually had shut down government with major political fallout, and tried to engineer it as a tail to be pinned on the Democrat donkey if it ever did come to pass.

After the stopgap bill passed, it worked to some degree: The MSM were eager to declare the averting of a crippling government shutdown as "a stunning victory" for the Republican Party with the Democrats portrayed as losers gasping in the dust of Republican fiscal brilliance and heroism.

But nothing could've been further from the truth. The Republicans still have not even begun drawing up a plan to create jobs (the unemployment rate being lowered from 9.6 to 9% last month was merely incidental and, as always, misleading), still have not come up with a plan to reduce runaway spending that's adding to our nightmarish deficit and national debt, still have no workable alternative to the Obama health care overhaul and still have not addressed the root causes of our budgetary shortfalls (***coughtaxcutsfortherichcough*** ***cough gaspIraqAfghanistancoughahem***).

Obama could be taking full advantage of this just as Slick Willie had done in the wake of the Republican shutdown of government over 15 years ago. Then House Speaker Newt Gingrich proved to be a foil worthy of Clinton just as Tip O'Neill was to Ronald Reagan a decade before that and President Clinton, a masterful political infighter if ever there was one, climbed through the ropes with alacrity.

Yet it seems the president's reserve of special venom is reserved for liberals and those of "the professional left" who criticize him and his dysfunctional, pro Wall Street policies far less effectively and viciously than Republicans and Tea Baggers who keep screaming for the birth certificate and tell one outright lie after another about him.

If Obama was worth his weight in Koolaid powder, he'd call out these Republican hustlers and grifters and ask them for solutions to our budget woes other than cutting funding for Planned Parenthood, PBS and Medicare. Then again, the president preemptively cut himself off at the knees last year when he once again caved to still-minority House Republican demands to extend the crippling tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% for another two years. Obama hardly even addressed the fact that the GOP was shamelessly holding a critical unemployment extension hostage to these reckless and greedy demands.

Another issue, this one foreign policy-based, is one on which our Nobel Peace Prize president has no authority. After saturninely clucking his tongue and serenely observing the carnage in Iran in the summer of 2009, Obama is now calling for Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi's resignation and publicly deploring the violence in Libya and directly insinuating his way into pro-democracy Arab unrest for the first time since the riots in Tunis.

But then again, if whiteboarded history is any guide, perhaps Obama is hoping that he'll be retroactively hailed as a law-giver by future generations for merely stepping in only after the spoils have been seized and the dead buried. Such a useful fiction worked for Reagan and the inevitable fall of Communism and still does.

But hanging back in the wings and waiting to address Libya almost exclusively is not stemming the tide of human blood that ran down the streets of Cairo, Tunis, Bahrain, Jordan and Yemen and certainly not to this day in Libya. And you'd think the Libyan strongman ought to make this a nobrainer. If his bizarre umbrella speech and conspiracy rhetoric of the unrest being plotted by Osama bin Laden and hallucination pills didn't reveal Gaddafi to be the Michael Jackson of dictators, nothing will. The only thing Gaddafi knows how to do effectively these days is to kill his own people.

Obama could be seizing the unrest and thirst for democracy in the Arab/Muslim world as a mandate for the end of dictatorial and/or monarchical tyrannies, to have his State Department lead the way toward diplomatic rather than military solutions like Carter did with Begin and Sadat at Camp David.

But Obama is living up to Maureen Dowd's caricature of him as statecraft's answer to Mr. Spock and seems loathe to take on even unworthy straw men like the Republican Party and clearly insane and clueless dictators who have clung to power for far too many decades. And Obama, aside from the soaring but empty rhetoric that inexplicably earned him a Nobel Prize nomination a week and a half in office, has shown himself to be an even less forceful and effectual leader than Jimmy Carter and that's saying something.

Obama has proven to be a miserable failure on every front. He is a disgrace in the ring, overhyped, and over powered by inferior opponents, the political version of the 1990 Mike Tyson versus the GOP's Buster Douglas, a man who only snarls and counterpunches against his own backers in his corner.

Fox News At Its Finest, Part XI: It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Madison World edition

2011-03-02T06:07:00.000-08:00

Oh. Yeah. Bet on it, Madison.

Ignorant rednecks protesting ObamaCare on corporately-sponsored Freedom Works' tit: Good.
Wisconsin union workers protesting loss of collective bargaining: Bad, bad, bad.

"Republicans and Tea Baggers: Can America afford them?"

"Everybody's gone serfiiiiing, serfing USA!"

"Teacher, teacher, Bud's playing hooky!"

Brian Kilmeade on the welfare state of public unions, who are not to be confused with right proper taxpayers that Republicans fight tooth and nail against becoming.

As is only natural for a half wit, Steve the Douche is half right. The Wisconsin protests are similar to the Egyptian protests but not the way he's projecting it.

Actually, it was a tap. Plus, Fox reporters are the ones doing the assaulting.

Forget Comrade Walker and his idiotic bumper sticker. Look at the chyron that says, "The enemy in Afghanistan is losing." Too bad the NY Times and the federal government disagree.

How about that? Two thirds of the country don't support the unions. Too bad the results were inverted.

Looks like Fox can't quite get the hang of polls.

Why not? The Wisconsin state government's already been privatized by Koch Industries.

"Oh, our Greta Van Susteren debunked it? Fuck it, run with it, anyway."

Way to stay "in focus", Rupert.

Not if Diebold is unionized.

And no doubt France looks at us like we’re American Dad.

Just to remind you crackers that we’re still looking out for you.

Finally, the funniest lie of all:

Really? I didn't know Barbizon was a school of journalism.

My Own Private Wisconsin

2011-03-01T07:08:00.000-08:00

or Why Glenn Beck Ought to be Anally Raped With Edward R. Murrow's Microphone.

Yesterday on his bile delivery system, Glenn Beck called the protesting teachers "useful idiots" and accused the police of having "thrown in with the Socialists."

Wisconsin was spared from this lunacy on WTDY. But setting aside the fact that this is obviously a lot of axe grinding against Wisconsin for dropping Beck for insulting Wisconsin and his shameless plugs for Fox "News", let's concentrate on the phrase "useful idiot."

Everyone who works at Fox "News" is a useful idiot of some sort at some time. For years, Alan Colmes, the token "liberal" on Hannity and Colmes was a mere foil a la Charlie McCarthy. Five nights a week, Hannity's lips moved while conservative America drank the Koolaid as Colmes sat on his lap. Megyn Kelly and the other bubble-headed bleach blonde bimbos in Rupert Murdoch's stable of libertarian lovelies is there merely to fill the horny conservative male 25-55 demographic.

But Glenn Beck's time has come and gone. He's been jettisoned from four states, including Madison, Wisconsin because he's just getting too, well, "out there" even for him. In short, he's been living in his own private Wisconsin.

Now, Glenn Beck makes $33,000,000 a year as a picked scab of the McCarthy era. Like Ann Coulter and that ilk, his job is to stoke fear and panic in people over Obama's Socialism and the impending economic crash, over George Soros, over the Tide Foundation, over the ACLU, over anything more viable than a wet firecracker that can possibly be yeasted up into a conspiracy that will unravel the fabric of this great Republic.

Here's Beck's take on his own private Wisconsin:

We talked today about the police in Seattle. We haven’t talked yet about the police in Wisconsin who are now throwing in with the socialists and the teachers. I mean some of the people who are there are just useful idiots. They don’t know what’s really going on. They don’t know that this is a coordinated effort, and the police, unfortunately in Wisconsin have now thrown in with the protesters in the capitol, and they are not forcing them to leave, which they have to leave. They’re calling this now social justice. No, that is the problem. It is justice for all. Equal justice for all, not special justice. If the Tea Parties were there and they were camped out in the rotunda, they should leave if they’re supposed to, and I’d be the first to say it, obey the law, period, but now the police aren’t forcing them out.

Now, there's about a whole jumbo jet hangar full of bullshit in that one paragraph but what sticks out the most to me is Beck claiming in a way that would make Winston Smith proud that smashing collective bargaining for public unions is "justice for all" seems even more beyond the pale than we're used to from Beck.

Apparently, to Beck and his odious ilk, "justice for all" means justice for the Tea Baggers whose presence was merely theoretical, justice for the Koch Brothers, justice for the Republican Party who wants to butt-fuck public unions and the entire middle class back into the days of Stonehenge.

No, Glenn, if the Tea Baggers were there, they wouldn't have left until they realized they were outgunned. If there was a Democratic Governor in office and he wanted to raise the pay of union workers and actually strengthen collective bargaining rights for the unions, they would've been throwing bricks through his window, they would've been holding up their own misspelled, badly Photoshopped Nazi signs and they would've been screaming like a horde of zombies on fire at the end of a George Romero movie.

We got more than a taste of that in the summer '09 during the health care town halls. What Beck seems to miss is the fact that if the Madison teacher's union and the other protesters acted like typical Tea Baggers, the police wouldn't be siding with them and would've had no choice but to eject them regardless of their private sympathies. But police and civilians are literally lying side by side in the state house every night.

Beck is obviously the useful idiot here. There's a great need for social justice in Wisconsin, as well as in Indiana, Ohio and other states now in the clutches of radical right wing Governors who are engaged, with the Koch Brothers, in their own "coordinated effort" to undermine unions and union support for Democrats in 2012. If there's any "special justice" being screamed for, it's that for union workers, not the right wing industrialists and politicians who want to strip them of their half century-long rights.

Billionaires, Tea Party-backed union busters like Scott Walker and actual useful idiots like Glenn Beck don't need justice. They thrive in the absence of justice with every union they bust, every lie they tell and every time they pollute the air, sea, sky and airwaves.

Now, I say we all march into Beck's office, bend him over his desk and shove Edward R. Murrow's microphone up his blubbery, pasty ass and ram home an unlubed message from Eddie from beyond the grave. Because Murrow wouldn't have had any patience with this fear-stoking, fat fascist any more than have, to date, four radio stations and over 300 of Beck's sponsors.

Scott Walker Walks into a Restaurant...

2011-02-27T07:48:00.001-08:00

...in Madison last Friday and asks the hostess, "Do you serve assholes?" And the hostess says, "No, now get the fuck out."

This isn't a joke but an allegedly true story. Naomi at Mind Stain insists it's true while right wing turd blogs such as Politisite and Badger Blogger insist the restaurant lied about the incident to drum up pro-union business.

Yep. You've probably heard by now that Koch Industries Governor Scott Walker got tossed from a restaurant last Friday night in Madison for "being a nuisance." The eatery is called The Merchant (I know Crooks and Liars took down the name of the restaurant because of all the right wing threats they started getting from goons but, c'mon people, it's the internet. Shit gets cached and nothing disappears forever once you hit that "publish" button.") and they were well within their legal right to not serve a patron. And it wasn't just management but the other patrons who were booing and hissing at him.

Both Laffy at the Political Carnival and Digby, following her lead, are suspicious this ever happened. I have every reason to believe it had.

The phone call that the Badger Blogger made to the Merchant is held up as proof that they manufactured the whole thing when in fact they were being noncommittal either way and when the call was accidentally put on speaker, the exchange is virtually unintelligible. But my right wing colleague heard them going on the internet and assumed they wanted to take down their blog post. But they were probably just reading someone else's blog post for the first time.

Plus, the idea that Patrick Sweeney, the restaurant's owner, would willingly lie about kicking out the Governor and opening himself and his establishment up to criticism, bad PR and (typically, in the case of Walker's right wing lunatic supporters) threats just to drum up pro-union business smacks of irresponsibility that I wouldn't readily ascribe to a small business owner in a highly polarized state.

Did Scott Walker get kicked out of a Madison restaurant last Friday night? Between the lies, innuendos and echoed misinformation on both sides, we may never know. Do I believe it happened?

Hell yes, partly because Naomi at Mind Stain brings up some interesting points that leads me to believe that, with all due respect to John Amato, Laffy, Digby and Co., this may have actually happened. Scott Walker is, for many, many reasons, the most despised Governor since Sarah Palin and if any of our nation's 50 governors would get kicked out of an eatery this month, it would be Scott Walker.

You know, the union-busting piece of shit who, like Mubarak, lost the support of the constabulary. That would be the constabulary that isn't actually affected by the anti-collective bargaining bill. That would be a constabulary led by a man who's now openly questioning Walker about his "troubling" statements in that phone call when he all but proved his true allegiance: the Koch Brothers. The same constabulary that, instead of kicking out the protesters at 4:00 like the right wing legislature ordered them to, has actually joined them and slept beside them in the state house.

Like the Rude Pundit simply said, it's never a good idea to fuck with unions. I'd amend that to say that the first union you shouldn't fuck with is the fraternal order of the police. Politics is one thing and I'm sure not every single protesting public union member isn't some dirty, hippie, Commie libr'al and that there are likely quite a few right wingers in that crowd (I wish someone would do a survey), perhaps some who even voted for Walker, who gave no hint during his campaign that he would go after unions' half century-old collective bargaining rights.

But when you fiddle fuck around with a person's ability to empower themself, when you say, "Fuck you to your proposed concessions and willingness to collectively and reasonably bargain with my administration", then you're going to make a lot of political enemies out of your own people, let alone the Democrats. In a way, it's like the radicalizing of the Iraqi military after we'd smashed and disbanded them and turned their country into a rubble-strewn wasteland.

Because that's what the Republican Party on both the federal and the state levels want to do to the middle class of any and every political stripe. And, while the MSM stubbornly ignore the public union uprising for the 3rd Sunday in a row (save for Scott Walker's appearance today on Press the Meat), this is not going to go away.

And like the shaggy dog story epilogue goes, if that asymmetrical, cross-eyed, corporate tool of a cunt Scott Walker never got kicked out of a restaurant, he ought to be and likely will.

Republican Scumbaggery In Action

2011-02-26T13:29:00.001-08:00

Try to see if you can spot the exact moment this slimy union-busting bill was passed in the Wisconsin legislature at 1:05 AM. If you blink, you'll literally miss it because the Republican blitzkrieg came and went faster than a 12 year-old boy's first orgasm.

This is the only way these douchebags can get shit done and actually move their fat, pasty asses: Through trickery, chicanery, threats, parliamentary shell games and tyranny of the majority, especially in the interests of shafting the working people.

Remember the first 100 hours of the 110th Congress when Pelosi led the way to the House passing a massive raft of progressive legislation by locking out the Republicans? Remember how they squealed like a couple of hundred butt-fucked Ned Beattys about how they were locked out of the legislative process? That was Pelosi's object lesson in how effective one party rule can be when the other party brings nothing but stall tactics and "No!" to the table. If only the Democrats had continued doing that throughout the entire 110th and 111th Congresses.

Now the only thing standing between the Republicans and assfucking most Wisconsin public unions with a microplane nutmeg grater sans lube are the Wisconsin Senate Democrats who did the same exact thing their counterparts in the lower assembly had: They're holing up in Chicago and calling for lawyers, guns and money.

If you're from Wisconsin and reading this, don't forget: the cross-eyed cunt spearheading this party-line union busting bullshit is a Marquette University dropout who was asked to get the fuck out for cheating and was found guilty of dirty tricks when running for college class president (he lost). (Bonus trivia fact: Scott Walker had a 2.3 GPA, even with cheating.) Your public unions are being dismantled by a man who looks as if he ought to wear a football helmet 16 hours a day and wear boxing gloves to keep from fist fucking during that time.

He also takes phone calls in his office from guys he thinks are David Koch, looks forward to spending time at a California retreat with that billionaire scumbag and his brother and seriously thought about planting rabble rousers among the protesters (in other words, professional union busters straight out of the 20's and 30's.) What's next? African mercenaries?

We already went through this on a national level for 8 years with his spiritual Godfather, fellow college fuck-up George W. Bush. And you see well that turned out.

He's also a fucking hypocrite when it comes to state pensions.

What About the Little Swimmers?

2011-02-25T06:26:00.000-08:00

Dear Congressman Bobby Franklin:

As a post-zygote American, I am heartened to hear that you have done your part to cover Georgia with more glory than Congressman Broun already has this past week by trying to make miscarriages a punishable and investigatable offense until proven otherwise. Since you're my parents' state congressman out of Marietta, I have to say I have a personal stake in the matter and am glad that Dad didn't use a condom or Mom a shook-up bottle of Coke during a certain beer-drenched night in the back seat of a Ford Fairlane behind the Bowl-A-Drome in Astoria, Queens in mid April, 1958. Obviously, you have my full-throated support. Boo yah and pass the see-gars!

Another post-zygote American, Jill Filipovic, has offered a crackling good suggestion on how to get a handle on this by offering her used tampons for investigation by the Georgia State Police, whose renowned crime lab can no doubt determine if any foul play was involved in the aborted fertilization of her 12 eggs a year. Indeed, any woman who does not conceive and birth monthly ought to be treated as a subversive to the white race.

However your proposed bill in the Georgia state house has overlooked a crucial component of baby-making and that is our little swimmers.

Hardly a Sunday goes by when I don't walk down the street and see used condoms on my very street after a night of reckless revelry the previous Saturday night.

Now, the medical zeitgeist claims that there are, on average, approximately 111,000,000-115,000,000 sperm cells expelled per ejaculation. That's over a third of the national population per spent wad, all of them dying like trout in a dried creek bed in a single Trojan body bag.

Plainly, this is mass murder. Women generally can only make one egg a month but men are constantly churning out hundreds of millions of viable little swimmers on a daily basis and every one that doesn't break through the ramparts and divide the prize by initiating mitosis is a scofflaw, a goldbrick and perhaps a homicide.

Therefore, Representative Franklin, I propose collecting all used condoms (or body bags, if you will) in Georgia so they can all have thorough body counts. With the aid of the best electron microscopes, that shouldn't take more than a few weeks per condom. The autopsies and DNA typing, on the other hand, might take a bit more time, patience and ingenuity. I don't know if they make scalpels and rib spreaders that tiny.

In the interests of forensic analysis, the best part about this idea is that unless the user was also wearing latex gloves, there ought to be fingerprints on them to identify these various mass murderers who are too cowardly to face up to fatherhood or to live dangerously. I mean, safe sex! Since when was sex ever safe?

Also, since every penis is different, my theory is that, like fingerprints and retinas, every penis makes its own unique imprint on the interior of the rubber, making identification easier through cross-referencing (In the event they were used for anal sex, I'd suggest wearing gloves when handling these used condoms).

I thoroughly hope this bill passes and that miscarriages, and cavalierly dismissed ejaculate, will finally get the attention from law enforcement and the Georgia Attorney General's Office they so richly deserve.

Your humble and obedient servant, sans latex,
Jurassicpork

Addendum: Obviously, either liberals or Karl Rove is controlling the email at the Georgia State House because this is the auto reply I got: "Due to the unreliability of the General Assembly’s technical support team, it is unlikely that I will receive your email. Please call my office at 404-656-0152."

Republicans: Putting the "Mad" in Madison

2011-02-24T08:30:00.001-08:00

Somehow, against all odds and despite Republican assclownery at its most full-blown, the mainstream media have been able to keep a straight face even when the NY Times publishes a story telling us how WI Gov. Scott Walker was tricked by a Buffalo Beast blogger into thinking he was talking to his boss David Koch over the phone. Among the admissions this inexplicably incumbent dunce made to an ad-libbing Ian Murphy: Tricking renegade Democrats into coming back to Madison so the Republicans can claim to have a quorum and Walker likening himself to Ronald Reagan and PATCO in 1981. So, forget about his "mandate" and mantra of fiscal responsibility: It's all about his legacy or repeating history by latching onto Reagan's tattered coattails.

Yeah, you heard that right. The Murphy/Walker interview that's made an even bigger stir than Sarah Palin getting punked in 2008 by someone claiming to be French President Nicholas Sarkozy helped exposed the meanness, venality, underheanded treachery and Reagan worship that, perhaps more than anything else, has kept this country from truly moving forward in over three decades.

The prank call also revealed that Republicans from coast to coast and everywhere in between can't get shit done except through illegitimate means such as stealth legislation, trickery and chicanery, fake mandates and, in the case of now-former Indiana Deputy Attorney General Jeff Cox, violence and threats of death a la Libya, Tunisia and Egypt (Sidebar: Don't forget, this is coming from the same JCCentCom who, while ridiculing anyone drawing parallels between Cairo and Madison, espoused treating the peaceful strikers like the Mubarak and Qaddafi regimes treated their protesters.). Right wing violence to opposition is something that of late used to be the specialty of the Tea Baggers. Now Republican terrorism is virtually mainstream.

Am I taking this man's words out of context, seeing something into a mere Twitter tweet that really isn't there? Uh, no. He meant every word. He really wants to kill public union members.

Wisconsin is getting the lion's share of the pro-labor/anti-labor coverage not because the demonstrations surrounding the State House are the biggest or that's it's become the epicenter of the American labor struggle but because its Governor, Scott Walker, has been fully exposed as an intractable tool of far right oligarchs like the Koch Brothers who have turned union busting into a lucrative industry.

Walker not only received $43,000 in campaign donations from the Koch Brothers but has also signaled he will not negotiate with public unions that have already shown a willingness to accept compromises, which was Big Labor's first mistake when dealing with Republican politicians and corporate tycoons. But they were willing to compromise and that isn't good enough.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, at first as stubborn an asshole as Walker and Chris Christie combined, had since backpedaled and decided not to support an anti-collective bargaining provision in the state budget when he saw what he was up against. Ohio decided to give back collective bargaining rights to their public workers (but only after throwing in a poison pill amendment that stripped from them the right to strike, which is the ultimate power of a union).

If the stakes weren't so high in this ongoing labor struggle, the spectacle would be comical. Democratic state lawmakers from two states have fled to Chicago like Prohibition-era bootleggers or bank robbers and frustrated Republican governors accusing them of drawing pay while shutting down the government and all the while screaming for the repeal of union rights and budget woes while just as stubbornly refusing to rescind tax cuts for the rich. But there's nothing funny in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana or anywhere else where there's labor unrest.

Republicans are always eager to bring back the good old lawless days when tycoons, magnates and other oligarchs determined how many hours a week their workers should work, what they should earn and how safe their workplaces were.

Leaving such decisions to those self-dealing entities naturally resulted in unions. Now, with maniacs like Jeff Cox advocating death, he's pushed the United States that much closer to the 20's and 30's, when people fought, and died, in the streets of America during the labor riots. Yes, Jeff Cox is now out of a job and good riddance. But just by posting those messages on Twitter as an appointed official, the damage has been done.

He got it out there and, however much we may ignore it, it is now on the table.

I Was Told There'd be Pizza

2011-02-22T11:43:00.000-08:00

I was wondering why Jill Hussein at Brilliant at Breakfast began chattering about New Jersey pizzerias when there are so many other Much More Serious Things to blog about. Then I got an email from my friend D at the New Jersey State Treasurer's office and she mentioned in passing that the people of Cairo were sending pizzas to the protesters in Madison, Wisconsin.

The link Jill provided takes you to an article by the SF Chronicle that provides a link (as does Jill) to Ian's Pizza on State, which is right around the corner from the epicenter of the public union protests that have drawn up to 68,000 people, making Madison a city within a city.

To make a long story short, someone called up Ian's a little while back and asked if they could donate their leftover, after-hours pizzas and they said Sure. Then they began getting phone calls from people who'd heard about their kindness and before they knew it, they'd shut down their regular business to provide pizzas to the Madison protesters.

By their own admission, they've gotten calls from as far away as Canada and even Denmark. Now, it seems, the brave and passionate people in Cairo, Egypt (as I'd said over a week ago) recognize that our people are protesting their local and state governments for essentially the same reason they were. In worker solidarity, they've also bought pizzas for the protesters in Wisconsin. At last count, they'd served about 430 to the State Capital but I'm sure that's gone way up. But even 430 pizzas divided eight ways won't come close to feeding the tens of thousands who've massed to protest the bill that would strip most public unions of collective bargaining power.

Times are very tough for Mrs. JP and me but I called up Ian's a few minutes ago and bought $20 worth of pizzas (the minimum they'll deliver for) for the hungry folks massed outside the Wisconsin State House. You don't have to be employed to feel solidarity for workers the world over. So if someone in northern Africa or Scandinavia can call halfway around the world to send a pizza or two, so can we in the US.

So if you have a few bucks to spare, call Ian's by clicking on their Facebook link or order online and send a pizza to a protester. I'm sure they'll appreciate it.

They Were All Over a Blowjob...

2011-02-21T08:31:00.000-08:00

...Vince Foster, the Clinton health care bill, Hillary's presidential campaign.

Yet, suddenly, this doesn't merit a single mention in the permanently supine corporate mainstream media.

To those of you who've been closely following the war in Iraq, you couldn't have helped hearing the name of Ray McGovern at least a couple of times a year. McGovern was a senior intelligence analyst who'd worked at Langley for 27 years and has been protesting our foreign policy for close to two decades.

Six days ago, McGovern attended a speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at George Washington University. Like a bodyguard, McGovern silently stood with his back to Secretary Clinton wearing a "Veterans For Peace" tee shirt with a dove on it while she excoriated the governments of Bahrain, Egypt, Iran and Libya for brutally quashing dissent. Then the real thing pounced on McGovern. A large man in plainclothes jumped the 71 year-old McGovern and a cop soon joined the fray. They then dragged McGovern somewhere and beat him where no one could see it.

Yes, this was right after Clinton serenely watched the incident without comment and then piously condemned the brutal suppression of dissent. The ultimate in irony, it was the Obama administration's "Don't Tase me, Bro!" moment.

So how come it's up to minor leaguers like Amy Goodman, Alex Jones, Tom Degan and yours truly to bring attention to this latest example of police brutality? Yet if you were to do a Google News search using the keywords "Ray McGovern, beaten", you'll find not a single mention about it by the MSM. Alex Jones, for instance, posted a 22+ minute-long video of the incident and used CNN footage to start the segment. Yet CNN, as with the rest of the warmongering MSM, chose not to report on it.

That gives rise to yet another irony: The sign on the podium before Clinton said, "Internet Freedom", which can be extended to mean the internet is free to report on McGovern's beating since the mainstream media suddenly found Hillary Clinton to be very unsexy.

Just as the Obama Justice Department has put together a shadow judicial system designed solely to protect war criminals of all political stripes, the mainstream media are just as complicit as the federal courts in shielding the American public from any meaningful dissent against whichever administration is momentarily in power. And, in McGovern's case, the beatings all too often take place offcamera.

So Hillary Clinton is now at last one of the Untouchables while peaceful protesters like McGovern, who was not throwing rocks, loudly demanding Clinton's resignation, setting fire to anything, looting from anyone, gets roughed up and charged with "turning his back on the Secretary of State."

Is turning your back on a Cabinet official a crime all of a sudden? Is wearing a certain tee shirt now enough to get you ejected from a building, arrested and charged with non crimes? Since the Bush administration, that's been abundantly proven.