Another worthy Netroots Nation scholarship candidate

Blue Girl, Red State is only three recommendations away from being in the top eight candidates for a Netroots Nation scholarship. If you're so inclined, you could click over and give her a shout-out to put her into contention.

Onward Christian Soldiers: The Bush Christian Crusade in the Middle East

In December 2006, Chris Hedges wrote of the infiltration of the U.S. military by Christian right groups. At the time he wrote, half of military chaplains were of the Christofascist Zombie persuasion:

The politicization of the military, the fostering of the belief that violence must be used to further a peculiar ideology rather than defend a democracy, was on display recently when Air Force and Army generals and colonels, filmed in uniform at the Pentagon, appeared in a promotional video distributed by the Christian Embassy, a radical Washington-based organization dedicated to building a “Christian America.”

The video, first written about by Jeff Sharlet in the December issue of Harper’s Magazine and filmed shortly after 9/11, has led the Military Religious Freedom Foundation to raise a legal protest against the Christian Embassy’s proselytizing within the Department of Defense. The video was hastily pulled from the Christian Embassy website and was removed from YouTube a few days ago under threats of copyright enforcement.

Dan Cooper, an undersecretary of veterans affairs, says in the video that his weekly prayer sessions are “more important than doing the job.” Maj. Gen. Jack Catton says that his being an adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff is a “wonderful opportunity” to evangelize men and women setting defense policy. “My first priority is my faith,” he says. “I think it’s a huge impact.... You have many men and women who are seeking God’s counsel and wisdom as they advise the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs] and the secretary of defense.”

Col. Ralph Benson, a Pentagon chaplain, says in the video: “Christian Embassy is a blessing to the Washington area, a blessing to our capital; it’s a blessing to our country. They are interceding on behalf of people all over the United States, talking to ambassadors, talking to people in the Congress, in the Senate, talking to people in the Pentagon, and being able to share the message of Jesus Christ in a very, very important time in our world is winning a worldwide war on terrorism. What more do we need than Christian people leading us and guiding us, so, they’re needed in this hour.”

Now it seems that there are some boots on the ground in the U.S. military who have gotten the message loud and clear that yes, Virginia, this IS a religious crusade against Islam:

The U.S. military suspended a Marine on Thursday for distributing coins quoting the Gospel to Sunni Muslims, an incident that has enraged Iraqis who view it as the latest example of American disrespect for Islam.

The Marine, stationed in the western city of Fallujah, handed out silver-colored coins this week that said in Arabic: "Where will you spend eternity? (John 3:36)." The other side read: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16)."

"We are sorry for this behavior," said Mike Isho, a U.S. military spokesman in Anbar province, which includes Fallujah. He said the Marine, whom he did not identify, distributed only a few of the coins and that the episode was under investigation.

"This incident doesn't represent the morals of the Marines," he said.

Mohammed Amin Abdel-Hadi, the head of the Sunni Endowment in Fallujah, an institution responsible for overseeing the sect's mosques, criticized U.S. troops, whom many in the city view as occupiers, for acting like Christian missionaries. He said the coins were part of a pattern of insensitivity toward Muslims, citing the outcry this month over a U.S. sniper in Baghdad who used a Koran, Islam's holiest book, as a target for practice.

"We demand the Americans leave us alone and stop creating religious controversies," Hadi said. "First, they shot the Koran, and now they come to proselytize inside Fallujah."

Mohammed Jassim al-Dulaimi, 43, said a Marine forced one of the coins into his hand Tuesday morning as he passed through a checkpoint at the western entrance to Fallujah. He said he was shocked when he read it.

"The claims that the occupation is a Crusader War make sense now," Dulaimi said.

I dispute that this Crusader for Christ is some kind of renegade and that the U.S. military takes seriously the idea that it's not there to convert the heathen to the One True Faith. First of all, are we supposed to believe that NO ONE KNEW this guy was doing this? None of his fellow Marines? Are we supposed to believe that he's the only one who had these coins? Second of all, the suspension didn't occur until AFTER McClatchy newspapers broke the story, and the story refers to multiple Marines, not just one. And third, this follows on the heels of the story of a U.S. sniper who was using the Quran for target practice.

Look at what's happened in this country in the aftermath of nineteen guys with box cutters. What do you think would happen here if an Islamic country sent its army here en masse to occupy this country and used the Bible for target practice? As it is, we have Dunkin' Donuts caving into lunatics like Michelle Malkin because Rachael Ray wore a scarf in a TV commercial. So why on earth is it so difficult to understand why proseletyzing is unacceptable behavior in an Islamic country? Perhaps it's because the military's own commander-in-chief and his mouthpieces have been framing this war by dogwhistling to the Christofascist Zombies every step of the way.

Friday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

Today's honoree: Bobbo, for recognizing that the so-called "boomer revolution" wasn't the beginning of one, but the end of one.

There are worse things that could happen than being a next-generation Pete Seeger, you know. (From where I'm sitting, having to sit through 2-1/2 more hours of the narcissistic self-indulgence and conspicuous consumption of "Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha" is one of them.)

=Rimshot!=

Shall we start a Mark Kitchell Fan Club?

For more comedy, go here..

UPDATE: John Cole has more, but reminds us that as much as we may laugh now, it is going to be a long, ugly slog towards November. Because desperate people do desperate things, and Republicans are really fucking desperate.

Just wonderin', is all

I wonder why, in all the hoopla about how poor Hillary Clinton is being pushed out of the race because she's a poor defenseless fragile flower of a woman, there isn't a big feminist outcry about the Blogad for the finale of The Tudors that's running on all the big name blogs (you can see it at Digby's blog, for one). Because if there were ever a poster child for domestic violence, it's Henry VIII. Maybe it's just me, but this poster bothers me. It's the same "hot" image that's been running in ads the entire season, but the bodice-ripper-style photo of Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry with his hand firmly on Natalie Dormer's throat, taken in conjunction with what we know happens to Anne Boleyn in this Sunday's season finale, seems kind of like B&D porn to me. Is this an image that progressive blogs ought to be carrying?

Discuss.

Help Jeff Gardner get to Netroots Nation

The powers that be at Netroots Nation may have put the kibosh on our two proposed panels, but they are offering scholarships to a few worthy individuals to attend the conference.

I met Jeff Gardner in 2004 when he ran a Meetup in Paramus, NJ for the Dean campaign. He was welcoming and enthusiastic, and made me feel right at home. He's a terrific grassroots organizer with impeccable progressive cred, and he deserves to get one of these scholarships.

If you'd like to help, just go here and voice your support. No purchase necessary, void where prohibited by law.

Send this to all your friends who are getting "those" e-mails

Awesome:

And then she'll take it to the Supreme Court if she has to

If you thought that Hillary Clinton was going to settle for anything less than the nomination; if you thought that this was going to be settled after this weekend's Rules Committee meeting; if you thought this was going to be over after the June 3rd primaries, guess again. Wesley Clark last night said that Clinton will settle for nothing less than giving Hillary Clinton all the delegates from Florida and Michigan:

As usual, Jon Swift puts it all into perspective.

The important issue no one is talking about

I'm not a science person. Mr. Brilliant loves watching the Science Channel, but my interest in black holes is limited to that episode of The Simpsons in which Homer falls into one. Perhaps it stems from my utter inability to learn to use a slide rule (yes, I went to high school in the pre-calculator age), or the time I seriously cut my finger trying to put a glass tube into a rubber stopper in high school chemistry class. But while I have little aptitude or even interest in the nuts-and-bolts of science, I realize how important it is to not just life in today's world, but how vital it is to solving the many problems that face us today.

Because I work in the area of clinical trials and studies, government commitment to scientific and medical research is not just an abstract concept, it's my bread and butter. But when you have a government run by people who are flat-earthers, or who embrace flat earthers like John Hagee, you have a government that lacks that commitment:

Speaking at a science summit that opens this week's first World Science Festival, the expert panel of scientists, and audience members, agreed that the United States is losing stature because of a perceived high-level disdain for science. They cited U.S. officials and others questioning scientific evidence of climate change, the reluctance to federally fund stem cell research, and some U.S. officials casting doubt on evolution as examples that have damaged America's international standing.

"I think there's a loss of American power and prestige that came about as a result of our anti-science policies," said David Baltimore, a biologist and Nobel laureate and board chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Raising questions about the science of evolution, he said, "leads to a certain disdain for American intelligence." He added, "What we need is leadership that respects science."

The panelists also expressed concern that science funding has not been a major issue for any of the presidential candidates. "The campaign so far has given too little attention to what science means for our own economy and our status in the world," said Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate and president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

The fish rots from the head. The anti-science posture of the Bush Administration, Congressional Republicans, and the wingnut echo chamber are a significant part of the problem, but also at fault are schools that can't can't attract teachers with scientific knowledge and parents who place sports at a higher level of importance than knowledge.

We didn't get to where we were when I grew up by being incurious religious nuts who think a Great White Alpha Male in the Sky made the earth in six days and sculpted us out of clay. But we're sure as hell going to go back to the Middle Ages if we don't stop letting these people dictate policy.

Now I KNOW something terrible is about to happen

Because here we go again.

UPDATE: I guess this is the something terrible:

The George W Bush administration plans to launch an air strike against Iran within the next two months, an informed source tells Asia Times Online, echoing other reports that have surfaced in the media in the United States recently.

Two key US senators briefed on the attack planned to go public with their opposition to the move, according to the source, but their projected New York Times op-ed piece has yet to appear.

The source, a retired US career diplomat and former assistant secretary of state still active in the foreign affairs community, speaking anonymously, said last week that the US plans an air strike against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The air strike would target the headquarters of the IRGC's elite Quds force. With an estimated strength of up to 90,000 fighters, the Quds' stated mission is to spread Iran's revolution of 1979 throughout the region.

Targets could include IRGC garrisons in southern and southwestern Iran, near the border with Iraq. US officials have repeatedly claimed Iran is aiding Iraqi insurgents. In January 2007, US forces raided the Iranian consulate general in Erbil, Iraq, arresting five staff members, including two Iranian diplomats it held until November. Last September, the US Senate approved a resolution by a vote of 76-22 urging President George W Bush to declare the IRGC a terrorist organization. Following this non-binding "sense of the senate" resolution, the White House declared sanctions against the Quds Force as a terrorist group in October.

And THAT, Senator Clinton, is why your vote for Kyl/Lieberman matters.

(h/t: the Jill with the cookies)

Blogrolling in our time

I've been reading Paul Levinson for a while now, so I decided it's time to add him to the blogroll. He writes about politics, Lost, The Tudors, Dexter, and other important things. What's not to like?

Wouldn't this just be, well, just so very METS?

Some of you outside the Noo Yawk area may not be aware of the new stadium being built for the New York Mets to replace the aging but somehow charming dump that is Shea Stadium. The new stadium, like the new Yankee Stadium on the other side of town, takes elements from parks that preceded it; from both Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds.

This computer-generated flyby shows you what it's going to look like:

I guess they're going to have to go back to this version of the theme song, since the one currently used for Mets radio broadcasts mentions Shea Stadium, though there's something kind of sad about a theme song that talks about how the Mets are really socking the ball when Carlos Beltran is trying to bunt for a base hit and scrap-heap pickup Fernando Tatis is looking like Ted Williams by comparison to the rest of this sorry-ass team.

It would have been nice if the Wilpons had been willing to name the new stadium after Jackie Robinson, though they did deign to create the "Jackie Robinson Rotunda", wherein you can think about the man who sucked up the hate of white baseball fans to pave the way for Barry Bonds, and as far as I'm concerned, gave his health for baseball. But the lure of easy naming dollars was too strong, and Citigroup won the bid. And so the new park is going to be called Citi Field.

As if it weren't bad enough, and yet strangely fitting, that the Mets are going to be playing in a multimillion dollar, state of the art ballpark that is an unwitting South Park joke, now it looks like Citi Field may yet, before it's all over, be the second coming of Enron Field:

In the latest campaign to save its ailing self, Citi plans on ditching more than $400 billion of so-called legacy assets over the next few years, eventually cutting up to $500 billion off its books. Investors are still in the dark about what specific assets will be tossed, but Citi hinted most of the slimming will take place in the consumer banking and securities divisions, as well as running off real estate assets, which the banking industry has become particularly conscious of lately.

[snip]

One question yet to be answered is who on earth it plans on selling these assets to. While the two-to-three-year timeframe gives Citigroup room to let the market ease its nerves, the thought of selling nearly half a trillion dollars of assets in today's market at anything less than fire-sale prices is laughable at best.

At any rate, Citigroup will shrink, banks will continue their uphill battle, and the troubled real estate market will give the banking industry more than enough trouble to chew on in the coming years. The saga continues.

So given how the Mets are playing and the recent front office drama involving Willie Randolph, perhaps a giant megacorporation being sold off piecemeal really IS a more fitting testament to this team than is a man of courage, guts, and class -- despite last nights bench-player win.

Scott McClellan's Lee Atwater Moment

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan is trying to get himself some Lee Atwater-style absolution without having to die a horrible death from a brain tumor to do it.

Keith Olbermann reported last night on how McClellan throws his former boss under the bus:

It was always clear that Scotty was really uncomfortable with the kind of utter horseshit he was required to spew as part of his job, but the fact remains that he did it -- and in the process, helped to bamboozle an incurious nation. And even in this horrifying expose of what many of us have always known, or at least suspected, about the Bush Administration, he still falls under the spell of the towel-snapping frat boy:

I still like and admire President Bush,” McClellan writes. “But he and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war. … In this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security.”

So what are we to take from that? Those of us who have known all along that George W. Bush was NOT the second coming of Churchill, Reagan, or whatever other major figure into whose boots the media tried to cram this intellectual lightweight and chronic, lifelong fuckup, have vascillated between thinking that he's either completely evil or Dick Cheney's useful idiot -- the affable guy the Republicans turned to to be their own grinning, charming rogue after eight years of another one. That their grinning, charming rogue was a moron was immaterial. If McClellan is truthful, and not trying to salvage his sorry ass in the face of the famously vindictive Bush family, then we have to come down on the "idiot" side of the fence, although Bush's faux-religiousity and refusal to ever acknowledge any fallibility played right into their hands as well.

Either way, I suppose we could be grateful for McClellan for pulling the curtain away on the bloodstain on this nation's history that is the last eight years. It just would have been more useful if he hadn't waited until it was nearly over, until after over 4000 families had lost their sons and daughters and tens of thousands of American young people had lost their limbs, parts of their brains, and in many cases, their ability to cope.

But perhaps the most telling part of what's been reported about the book is, as Olbermann and Rachel Maddow discussed at the end of the clip last night, how it may very well implicate Dick Cheney and Karl Rove in a criminal conspiracy. Of course, to actually DO anything about these revelations would require a Congress and a Democratic Party that cares more about doing what's right than about what Tim Russert might say -- and we don't have that. So when the door closes on the Bush Administration; when he turns the keys over to whomever is going to succeed him, leaving an American economy in ruins, Iraq in a quagmire, and in all likelihood, a wider conflagration in the Middle East after his bombing of Iran, he can walk off into the sunset hand in hand with Dick Cheney, each grinning from ear to ear, with visions of millions of dollars in speaking and lobbying fees dancing in their heads, knowing that there's no one in Washington who has the fucking balls to use the laws they're pledged to uphold to hold these criminals accountable for the atrocities they have committed against this country and against humanity.

As for Scott McClellan, I'm sure he thinks this book will allow him to sleep at night. But I for one hope that the images of the dead in Iraq haunt him forever.

Bits and Pieces from a Scattered Week....

Reasons to be Cheerful:

This week, Wednesday the 28th through Friday the 30th, Marc Maron once again takes the microphone at Air America Radio, in the American Afternoon slot from 3PM to 6PM. Stream it live from the Air America page, or get the podcast there...or spring for Replay A/V
and go crazy saving all kinds of stuff that you always miss and wish you could grab for your MP3! NO matter what you do, drop a note to pcollin@airamerica.com and let him know what you think about the programming and who should be on the station that was at one point arguably, the voice of the liberal movement in America.

Don't forget the Seder V. Maron VoD-cast, which happens live most Tuesdays at 11AM EST, and is available on demand here. It's an evolving, technologically glitchy, hilarious romp through the minds of two of the most brilliant political and comic minds out there.

Whats up with Seder and his jack-of-all trades tenuous perch at AAR? Who knows? Its hard to believe that pcollin at air america dot com would let slip such a multi talented and reliable guy, not to mention a great broadcaster, but I've seen them do worse...much worse, so....I just don't feel anything anymore except sadness for the end of something that was great at one time and the real inability of any number of new management characters to do even a couple of right things. I guess we'll see.

In interesting news:

Scott McClellan is the latest rat to jump ship, with a book that basically throws the Bush White House under the bus. So, when does the criminal investigation start? Is Rove even gonna answer his subpoena in that other matter? Its nice sometimes to see how predictable rats are when a ship is going down. It adds back a little of that lost universal order.

Meanwhile:

Our beloved hero, Brad, of Bradblog, posted a little funny here
from The Satirical Political Report, which claims that the Supreme Court has blocked reruns of HBO's Recount (which has Emmy buzz)...He really had me going for a second there as I was thanking God that I DVRed the thing because of the constant interruptions around here....But, honestly, the real reason to be cheerful is that Brad is out there traveling round and reporting back the most incredible information on what is happening on the ground across the country regarding our voting rights, our voting machines, and if our votes are really being counted. This is some of the most important work going on in the country right now, and this guy should have a mandatory viewing, prime time TV show, right in between Merv Griffin's Crosswords and Are you Smarter Than a Fifth Grader, just to make sure that Americans are getting this...it could be like one of those Most Wanted shows and maybe at one point the villagers would pick up their torches and it could become the best reality show ever!

In news of another of the most important jobs out there right now, the one person who has gotten a book on the shelves that dares to pull the curtain back on old man McCain, author, blogger, pundit, Cliff Schecter, is appearing Friday, may 30th, from 6-8PM, in Washington, DC at a book discussion of the fantastic and revealing, The Real McCain (available on the RIPCoco front page Amazon widget or the front page Brilliant Amazon Widget, meaning that we endorse it and suggest it!) The discussion is being held at the AFL-CIO headquarters, on 815 16th St., NW (RSVP: John Goltz at 202-508-6938.)
if I were able to get there, I would SO be ensconced at the George Hotel and eating one of those Chinese salads from the downstairs food court at the station, then wandering round the hollow mall on the hard mud field wondering what the fuck went wrong, before running over to the AFL-CIO for what promises to be a revealing look at a complex guy amongst the denizens of DC, where the air is permeated with politics in this most interesting political season ever...(and maybe somewhere out there someone might find that key for Maron.)
My suggestion meantime: Buy this book! Read this book! Give it as a gift! Many gifts! Your favorite republicans/independents/undecideds/Hillary Clinton supporters need this book! Check for it at your local bookstores and make sure its right up front on the current events table!

Look, just because McCain has the faded aura of hero doesn't mean that he doesn't have problems and skeletons...and it doesn't mean that he is qualified to run this country, considering what he's saying, what his record is, and the whitewash job on his health. Just because he lived through some of the worst tragedies that come from war, doesn't mean that we shouldn't do the necessary research before half the country considers handing him the football...right? You'd think that they would want to do this research themselves, but they don't seem to want to know.

Worried about things? Have trouble believing anything at all? Lost your religion? Here ya go:

Fuck it: The Ultimate Spiritual Way check it! and then sign up to receive a regular Fuck It thought in your email!

John C. Parkin argues that saying Fuck It is a spiritual act:
That it is the perfect western expression of the eastern ideas of letting go, giving up and finding real freedom by realizing that things don’t matter so much (if at all).

This is The Fuck It Way

...And finally, 19 days and counting till the launch of No Ignoring!, Mike Boettcher's ground-breaking Iraq/Afghanistan project that will span 15 months and show us, up close and on the ground, in our soldier's own words, and as a fly on the wall in the major war zones that we are responsible for, what is happening. Lets bring awareness and personal sacrifice back to the concept of war, and see if some sort of ownership doesn't give us some pause when it comes to escalation of any sort. Lets see how the soldiers really feel about what is going on over there. This is going to be an interesting unfolding project with many arms, and I will be following it closely as it kicks off and heads out to war for a tour of duty exactly the length of the actual soldiers. Be careful guys! Keep your heads down!



And, speaking of war...The old man just keeps talking:
"By the way, I will never surrender in Iraq, my friends....and we are winning!" That was John McCain today in a speech in Denver on nuclear non-proliferation, in which he tried to frame himself as the more JFK-like candidate, (he was interrupted by anti-war protesters 3 times!)
Speak for yourself Bozo! You can never surrender all you want, wandering round the 8 mansions talking to the portraits of dead beer scions and their patrician wives, you can rail on and on to your lobby buddies before nodding off in your own drool, or tell it to you oncologist, but don't include anymore of our American troops in your plans, you befuddled old man.

Joementum Lieberman is gonna HOST that Hagee Rapture ready Throw down, July 22nd!! What a sick fuck Joey is. First he moved back to Stamford (my town,) where all his own friends and supporters hate him for lying (I'm talking about a 180 on the war, just 2 weeks before the election, and then another 180 back right after!) and then he embraces a guy that is so putrid, so horrible, as to be unbearable...talk about self-hating! This is the pinnacle of craziness. Earth to Joe: they only want you to lure the coming rapture...then they will dump you! Are YOU ready for the rapture?
Christians United for Israel, indeed! Kish mir en toches!



Which leaves me speechless...what else could anyone say ever again?



c/p RIP Coco

Monday Big Blue Smurf Blogging -- What They Said

Today's honoree: Arianna Huffington (of all people) for pointing out how silly, self-defeating, and just plain dumbass it would be for progressive women angry that Hillary Clinton isn't nominated to show their anger for voting for John McCain.

Money quote:

The only way John McCain can win is if his reactionary views on choice and women's health issues remain obscured by his faux maverick reputation and the blinding disappointment of Clinton die-hards.

Exactly. And why would women believe John McCain is pro-choice? Because Chris Matthews told them that John McCain is a maverick? There's about as much excuse for not knowing that John McCain is as much a reactionary neanderthal wingnut as the guy he's hoping to replace as there is to, well, not know that there are no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, nor is there an active nuclear program, in Iraq.

So if you're a Hillary supporter, or you know any, who are thinking that voting for John McCain is somehow going to be a way to get revenge on those mean old Obama supporters, well, you and they are going to have to live with yourselves. Or you could click on over and read about McCain's real record and decide if cutting off your nose to spite your face is such a good idea.

Driftglass Explains it All....

Thank the Gods for Drifty, who rose up from his hiding place in that toddling town, and once again nailed it on the head so exactly, so precisely, that not only is he talking about our...ahem...party problem, but about the bigger problem here; magical thinking that is really actually mental illness permeating the power hungry human psyche these days. Call it unrestrained id, if you must... until common sense is completely replaced with illogic, and smiling Terry McAulliffe is all that's left; nodding, smiling, nodding, smiling.....

Click the Guardian of Forever portal below, brought to you by Drifty's fantastic art department, to visit his world, where things start to connect and make sense... unfortunately, we are still lost, but at least we know why....


...and away we go:

The terrible moment when you are looked straight in the eye and lied to, and you realize that what makes the moment terrible isn't the lie, but that she damn well knows its a lie, damn well knows that you know, and just doesn't give a shit anymore.

snip...

Inventing absurd and/or wildly improbably scenarios in which your indefensible behavior is somehow vindicated. Even noble.

snip...

Not from the FoxNews transcript:

McAuliffe: Now that we have access to the “Guardian of Forever”, this thing is not over. In fact, it hasn’t even started yet!

Wallace: Meaning what…?

McAuliffe: Meaning that we’re Inevitable again! We’re gonna travel back in time to before Iowa, and dump 20 million dollars into that fucking state. If that doesn’t work, we’ll go back further and rewrite the party rules about caucuses and proportional representation.

Wallace: But that’s insane.

McAuliffe: You mean insanely…brilliant. We’ll stop ourselves from ever signing that stupid pledge about Florida and Michigan. If we have to, we’ll ring the god damned Bosnia airport with snipers ourselves! We’ll go back and suffocate that floozy Lewinski in her cradle!

Wallace: But that will destroy everything.

McAuliffe: Says who?

Wallace: Every physicist ever. Real and fictional. What you’re proposing would create an unsupportable temporal paradox that would collapse the time/space continuum and obliterate the Universe.

McAuliffe: Well, we feel that it would be worth it to insure that Every Vote Counts.

Wallace: Did you even hear what I just said?

McAuliffe: Well what do you expect from a bunch of elitist, woman-hating “scientists” who live only to thwart Our Gal's rightful destiny as the apotheosis of feminism!

And there it is...replace any part with any part and it still comes out the same...
its all magic unless you erase the numbers and start again...or, as Hillary says, something awful should happen.

c/p RIPCoco

Is the New York Times growing these people on a tree?

And the names "Nagourney", "Kantor", "Bumiller", and "Rudoren" or "Wilgoren" (take your pick) appear nowhere in this article.

How much painting of Barack Obama as both an effete wuss and Scary Negro™ (sic) can you cram into one article? Here's how much:

Mr. Love now knows that when it comes to food, Senator Obama “eats pretty much anything, from chicken wings and barbecue and ribs to grilled fish and steamed broccoli.” But when he is campaigning in a small town with limited options, a cheeseburger is always a good bet. (“Cheddar is the cheese of choice,” Mr. Love added.)

Good old fashioned Kraft Singles aren't good enough for this "uppity" guy, the article seems to say...he wants CHEDDAR. Ready for more?

He knows that “the boss,” as he calls Mr. Obama, likes MET-Rx chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew — Black Forest Berry Honest Tea. He keeps a supply of both on hand.

Ooh...hoity toity. Protein bars and organic tea? Ah...the candidate of dirty fucking hippies and Volvo-driving, latte-drinking elitists, when everyone knows that Real Good Old Hard Working WHITE American Men drink Chock Full O'Nuts and Lipton.

Mr. Love, 26, is Mr. Obama’s body man, the personal aide who shadows the senator and anticipates everything he needs — and everything he does not need. He is not a bodyguard (security is provided by the Secret Service), but rather the ultimate assistant, rarely more than a body length away from the candidate.

Young, eager campaign aides are stock characters in movies and on television, but few have quite the élan of Mr. Love, who, at 6-foot-5, is about three inches taller than the tall candidate, fitter than the fit candidate (he can bench press more than 350 pounds) and cooler than the cool candidate.

And never let it be said that the Scary Negro™ can't be compatible with the painting of male Democratic candidates who aren't looking to bomb the fuck out of any country that looks at us crosswise (and even some who are) as gay:

What a body man does depends on the politician. Senator John Kerry’s aide for his presidential race in 2004 was dubbed “part butler, part buddy.” Bill Clinton’s aide when he was president said their relationship sometimes felt more like that of an old married couple. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has a body woman, the efficient and glamorous Huma Abedin.

You almost have to admire the utter hackery of a paragraph like that, especially how Ashley Parker, the author of this piece, manages to paint Bill Clinton's relationship with HIS "body man" as somehow homoerotic in his likening it to that of a married couple. And let's not forget the rumors that wingnuttia has circulated for the last year about Hillary's relationship with Huma Abedin.

And to top it off, Parker managed to get Mr. Love to provide a list of Sen. Obama's favorite things, just so the Tucker Carlsons and the Pat Buchanans and the Fox News-bots who can get away with saying on national television that they hope someone will take a shot at Obama can parse it and compare and contrast these items with the stuff Real Americans™ eat -- the good old fashioned Frankenfoods put on shelves by megacorporations.

As Senator Barack Obama’s body man, Reggie Love makes sure the candidate has plenty of the things he likes — and makes note of those things he would rather avoid.
Here is a partial list, provided by Mr. Love.
¶ Planters Trail Mix: Nuts, Seeds & Raisins
¶ Roasted almonds
¶ Pistachios
¶ Water
¶ Dentyne Ice
¶ Nicorette
¶ MET-Rx chocolate roasted peanut protein bars
¶ Vegetables, especially broccoli and spinach
¶ Handmade milk chocolates from Fran’s Chocolates in Seattle

¶ Mayonnaise
¶ Salt and vinegar potato chips
¶ Asparagus (“if no other vegetables are available, he’ll eat it”)
¶ Soft drinks (he prefers water)

Trail mix, almonds and pistachios, when Real American Men™ eat beer nuts? Water when Real American Men™ drink Budweiser? Dentyne Ice when Real American Men&trade chew Wrigley's? PROTEIN BARS? Broccoli and spinach, when Real American Men™ know that FRENCH FRIES are the vegetable of choice; maybe coleslaw. But broccoli and spinach? And he doesn't like mayonnaise or good old American Coca-Cola?

Gasoline is now $4/gallon in 11 states. The IAEA is giving the Bush Administration more fuel for its lust to invade Iran. And this is the information the New York Times is giving readers. This is what the media think is important.

R.I.P. Sydney Pollack

I was watching Anne of the Thousand Days on Saturday -- a film based on a Maxwell Anderson play. As I do so often when watching movies from that period of the 1960's just before Bonnie and Clyde came along and changed American cinema, I was noting how stagy and actorish it seemed, even in a film like this that because of its subject matter has held up better than most films of the age. It really wasn't until the 1970's that characters in movies really started sounding like real people and actors weren't, as Jon Lovitz used to say, "AC-ting!" That's not to say that there were no good movies prior to 1970, but there is a marked difference in style between what came before and the immediacy that characterized the films of the late Vietnam era.

For all that Scorsese and Coppola are the 800-pound gorillas of 1970's cinema, you can't talk about that decade in movies without talking about Sydney Pollack, and few directors made the transition more seamlessly: Jeremiah Johnson. Three Days of the Condor. Bobby Deerfield. Out of Africa. Havana. The Firm. Not all of them great films, but in their own way characteristic of their time. But for my money, Pollack's best film was Tootsie. And my dirty little secret is that I always liked Pollack's work in FRONT of the camera better than his work behind it. This is one of my favorite scenes from Tootsie:

Masters of the Non-Apology Apology

Bitch:

I'm really getting tired of this "I apologize if you were offended" crap. That's not an apology, it's an accusation. The way you apologize is "I'm really sorry I was such an asshole." This is not about hypersensitivity, it's about the fact that Liz Trotta said on national television that she wishes someone would do harm to a presidential candidate. Such a remark may or may not be forgivable, but it sure as hell isn't forgivable when the apology is more of an accusation than a sincere expression of regret.

Not just a number

Brad Friedman has all the names of all those killed in George Bush's war.

Today is in memory of their lives, and thanks for their service.

And our promise that we'll do everything we can to make sure that future presidents only commit troops to war when it's absolutely necessary.

Whaddya asking me, if anyone in the room will verify that the schvartze is a mensch?

Barack Obama went into the lions' den last week when Florida Rep. Robert Wexler took him to shul:

And the next day, Randi Rhodes, happy to be out of the Air America swamp (though what her beef is with Sam Seder, I have no idea), reminded us of how funny she is when she isn't utterly miserable:

No, You Can’t Leave and Better Yourself

There was a time not too long ago when I thought John McCain’s version of the new GI Bill was a cold, heartless piece of work that was all too typical of the cold, heartless pricks that make up the Republican party.

But what George W. Bush has done just defies rational explanation and offers a new definition of the phrase cold, heartless prick.

When the Senate passed its GI Education bill last Thursday, this was the Bush administration’s kneejerk answer, according to Alternet’s Paul Rieckhoff:

The Administration has also expressed objections to the GI Bill based on concerns about retention -- basically, they believe that if a GI Bill benefit is too good, it'll reward veterans too richly for their service and draw them away from re-enlisting.

This isn’t exactly new. We’ve known about this for a solid month. Yet, just to remind those who’ve been living under a rock since last Thursday, 25 Senate Republicans broke ranks with the anchor chain of the Republican White House of George W. Bush and sided with Democrats for a change to give tuition assistance to our nation’s veterans. I wouldn’t get all choked up about it and start singing the GOP‘s praises just yet: Many of the Republicans who’d voted for this bill have a jaundiced eye on their reelections this year and are afraid of alienating the vet vote. Also, as happens so often on Capitol Hill, legislators are often for a bill before they’re against it and, in this case, vice versa. All 25 Republicans changed their vote when they realized that their true positions were going to get an ass-whupping. So their response to visual stimuli and seeing the light is more an act of political expediency and cowardice than an actual progressive stance.

Still, in the past Congressional Republicans sided with Bush before even when their Nazi-class devotion and ideology was plainly self-destructive and would hurt their reelection chances.

However, since this is Memorial Day, I’ll give these cold, heartless pricks a pass for now to concentrate on George W. Bush’s attitude problem regarding retention problems that offering our veterans the best education their government can give them for putting on hold their lives (Not to mention for risking their lives.).

Let’s keep in mind, instead, that this stubborn opposition to a humane bill that at part repays our returning veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a childishly stubborn opposition that flies in the face of a vote that’s 15 Ayes more than the Senate needs for a veto override, is coming from a scion of a family whose biggest military retention problem was in explaining unconvincingly why George W. Bush never retained his commission in the Texas Air National Guard. I don’t suppose that Georgie dropped out just before a physical that would’ve turned up evidence of cocaine usage so he could continue his paternal-based Affirmative Action, Legacy-subsidized studies at Harvard Business School, now would it?

And was John McCain, along with Burr and Graham, really ballsy enough to try to superimpose his palimpsest of a bill that would’ve put unfair conditions on veterans who’d put their lives on hold to fight over a pack of lies in the most dangerous nations on earth? That alone stands, in my mind, as more courageous than anything John McCain ever did considering his Daddy and Granddaddy got him into the Naval Academy so he could graduate 894th out of 899 in another form of paternal-based Affirmative Action.

This Memorial Day, which will feature for the last time (Saints Be Praised) the spectacle of a draft-dodging scion of a wealthy Republican family of crooks, alcoholics and drug addicts and sexual degenerates waxing pious about how we ought to honor and remember our veterans from all wars.

Putting the Cart Before the Jackass

Because going unvoiced in the frame of debate will be the reasons why there’s a retention problem in the military, particularly in our all volunteer professional army and these retention problems began years ago, long, long before there was even a draft of a new GI Bill. Soldiers and officers began dropping out and kids stopped enlisting when it was becoming obvious to the more perspicacious that their government had lied them into a war that has only bloated private industry, strengthened Iran and al Qaeda and muddied the flag they’d sworn to defend against all enemies foreign and domestic.

Little did they realize at their swearing in ceremonies that one of the domestic enemies would prove to be a Republican party that time and again uses them to fight illegal wars against manufactured little Hitlers then denies them VA assistance, disability and death benefits, education and even the chance to have their bodies flown home as something more dignified than freight.

The "retention problems" per se were actually the homophobic Pentagon kicking out gay and lesbian soldiers, less recruiting goals met despite being lowered and these factors resulting in 15 month-long tours of duty and injured and even suicidal soldiers being sent back into harm's way.

It is a domestic enemy headed up by a man who proposed cutting pay for the troops even while he was first sending them into harm’s way in Iraq and then balked at a 0.5% increase when Congress last year wanted to raise their meager pay to 3.5%. It’s represented by a man who enjoys playing shell games with the public over the VA’s budget, crowing about how much more the VA’s gotten under him than the last president.

Yet the Veteran’s Administration have had key budgets slashed to the point where they’ve had to turn away tens of thousands of shell-shocked veterans on the verge of suicide because they’ve only enough money to treat a mere fraction of those returning with PTSD.

It is a domestic enemy of metaphorical elephants that had trampled over their right to free speech, has branded them dissidents and turncoats for criticizing the war when they rightly bring up the chronic lack of armor and manpower to carry out their hopeless task of pacifying a nation in the first throes of a grand mal political and social seizure, their poisoning at the hands of Halliburton and KBR. They are fighting George W. Hannibal and his herd of elephants but they will lose this one.

Yet, to George W. Bush, a man who learned nothing about war while buzzing tumbleweeds with his F-102 on the Texas/Arkansas border except how to start them and leave for future chief executives to finish, this poseur is trying to pretend the retention problem is only imminent and contingent on whether or not we give these veterans the financial wherewithal to continue their lives and the education that they’d voluntarily interrupted or postponed to serve that same man.

But Republicans are so out of touch with not only average civilian Americans but the troops they have pretensions of honoring. They are people, for want of a better word, who honestly don't think that these acts of legislative sodomy committed on them, the pay and budget cuts, the lack of armor plus the Walter Reed scandal, is somehow going to be lost on them and is going to result in "retention problems."

So when your favorite Republican relative piously puts their hands over their hearts today to the strains of a martial ditty by John Philip Sousa, remind them of their own hypocrisy, hypocrisy such as George W. Bush getting a leather vest from Rolling Thunder even as he's bending them over. I'll be here to meet their criticism.

Somehow I don't think this is the company Hillary wants to keep

...though who knows, with her embrace of Rupert Murdoch and Richard Mellon Scaife. But if you want to know why talking about the termination of a presidential candidate is Extremely Bad Form on the campaign trail, this is why:

Uh, Secret Service? Given that students have received visits from your representatives for far less than this, don't you think that a threat being made against a presidential candidate warrants your attention? Are you going to pay a visit to Liz Trotta, given that she admitted on national television that it'd be a good thing if some nut decided to do something to Barack Obama?

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere: Short Oh to be Young and Fearless and Free Edition

Jen Clark of Little Country Lost and now of Where are Joe and Jen checked in the other day, and if you, like me, are spending entirely too much time trying to figure out what to do for vacation this year and feeling more than a little resistance at paying $1300 a head for the vacation that cost you $900 just a year ago, and more than a little resentful at having to cut 2-3 days off that trip just to keep it at least year's price, you can save your money, stay home, and just follow them around the world instead.

I never was the sort of 25-year-old who could just decide to take off and bum around Europe for a summer, or a year, or whatever. Some of it was the need to earn a living, but much of it was just plain fear of the unknown. So kudos to these two for getting up and actually doing it.

Meanwhile, here at Brilliant Central, we're still trying to decide among a few options, all of which sound less appealing than they would have if it weren't for skyrocketing fuel costs. It's one thing to walk or bike to the A&P instead of taking the car, or talk to one's boss about working flex time 2 days a week to carpool with Mr. Brilliant, or combine errands until one is exhausted and Saturday is completely shot. It's quite another to bite the bullet on it costing $600 just to get where you want to be....which is why joining the ranks of Cruising Americans out of New York (where the ship we might take, the Norwegian Spirit, decided to play Titanic and hit the pier this morning) is sounding more appealing, even if the ports aren't all that we might have wanted. Because when you start getting north of 50, vacation hassles are no longer charming, they're just a pain in the ass.

Sunday Morning Nightmares...

Wait a minute...was that just unofficial, buddy-chum, adviser-but-not-really, in a friendly way, you understand, to John McCain, always-subpoenaed-but-never-interrogated criminal, Karl Rove, on my Tee Vee with George Snuffleupagus just now decrying the bad treatment of his man McCain after 50 years of service to this country?...was that real?

Who else in the world gets subpoenaed by the United States government and is immediately given a platform on national TV with which to stump for his own candidate...who was the very architect of the earlier smears against same candidate in this groundhog day-esque, stranger than fiction, circus, that is playing out slo-mo, while tornadoes rip the entire heart of the country out.

The only thing for sure here is that the catch-me-if-you-can Rovian above-the-law tour will likely continue today and on into this week...
Memorial Day...yeah...

c/p RIPCoco

Who is More Over the Top? Keith Olbermann or Hillary Clinton herself?

It is the season of Over the Top, and from moment to moment the most adept speakers edge each other out in the ad lib and the prepared statements of the moment...With the off the cuff, exhausted remark being the most revealing, its clear who is planning what.
Personally, I think the Over the Top Award goes hands down to Hillary.
In a world where people openly talk about being afraid for Obama's health should he get the nomination, wouldn't it have been wiser for Hillary to apologize to both the Kennedy's and the Obama's and then say that in her exhaustion she merely mentioned something that comes up all the time. The American public would get it. Its not something to be spoken of by the inexplicably ongoing opposition within the party, who has taken to bending the truth and numbers, to the point that it seems like maybe she IS just waiting around for the slot to open because Obama will surely be vacating it one way or another...
I dunno what to think about any of whats going on...it smacks of someone telling us that they know what is better for the American people than the American people themselves.
Its the "look! Shiny, shiny!" of Joe Lieberman politics that changes only to get into office and then goes on about its business...I don't like it.
Here, Keith Olbermann again, because YouTube seems to be pulling these videos as quickly as they can be put up. Within this clip is Hillary's clip and transcript.



I think that he is spot on...exasperated...and I agree with him completely.
This is where Hillary supporters say, "Well, you have to forgive her because she is A) tired as hell, and B) wants whats best for the country and truly believes that she knows better than we do, and C) she probably DOES know something more than we do, being in such a powerful position and all....so it follows that D) she knows that Obama will be taken out because she is on some security committee, so we'd better hold onto the devil we have...she really cares about us and will be the Hillary that we know she is, under the tough-girl act, again once she is in office...
and daddy wont hit me anymore because he says he's sorry....you know the drill.
This is the definition of insanity!!
Look for Hillary next to try to break all laws to make a Hillary for Hillary party and run independent...I'll bet she's looked into it!

Oh no she di'int!

Oh, yes she did:

You know, I never put any stock in all the stories about Clinton Body Counts and stuff like that. I remember the whole shooting-watermelons-in-the-yard thing and all the raving about how the Clintons were responsible for everything from the crucifixion of Jesus to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby to the fixing of the 1919 World Series to Steve Bartman catching that home run ball in game six of the 2003 NLCS. But holy moly, when she pulls shit like this you almost have to wonder.

She "clarified" later on...

...but note how she ONLY apologizes to the Kennedy family, not for the obvious reference that if the presumptive nominee has someone, say, someone who attended an NRA conference at which Mike Huckabee joked about it, take a shot at him, then she'd be the logical choice.

As always, you can rely on Rachel Maddow to strip away the bullshit and get right to the point:

There's something about the idea of Barack Obama in the White House, constantly watching his back while Bill and Hillary conspire in the hallway, that makes me think about Papa Boleyn and son George talking about how if Henry VIII dies from his jousting wounds and Elizabeth becomes the heir apparent, then Papa Boleyn gets to run the country until she comes of age. And remarks like this don't help. Either Hillary is mind-bogglingly tone-deaf, or she knew damn well what she was saying.

I'm not ascribing any murderous intentions to her, but this sure doesn't look like what you want to say if you're hoping to be picked for the Vice President slot. At BEST it's another example of the kind of sloppy, off-the-cuff remark that brought us news of her plan to "obliterate" Iran.

And no, this isn't about smacking her around for saying this because she's a woman. It's smacking her around for saying this because she's smart enough to know better.

UPDATE: I should have figured that some of those reading this would latch onto my mention of the wingnut Clinton Derangement Syndrome that characterized the years 1992 through 2000 and musing on perhaps this kind of remark is why they escalated these people into Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett. I don't believe for one minute that Hillary Clinton is going to assassinate or hire someone to assassinate Barack Obama. She may be ruthless and utterly convinced that she deserves this nomination, but she's not a monster. But as Keith Olbermann just mentioned in his special comment tonight (which was both accurate AND over-the-top), there are other examples of a campaign going on into June without invoking assassination that she could have used in a year when a black candidate is the, or a, front-runner for the nomination, one who had Secret Service protection early on because of death threats, one whose candidacy has had people telling pollsters to hang him from a tree.

We're finishing up eight years of someone who doesn't think before speaking, who says "Bring it on" and shoots (if you'll pardon the expression) first and deals with the press later. Throughout this campaign, Hillary Clinton has shown the same alarming tendency, along with an ominous inability to admit to mistakes. Whether it's the Iraq War vote, or her Bosnia tales, or drawing this unfortunate analogy, she refuses to admit to being wrong. She could have defused this with a public statement acknowledging how awful it sounded and how she didn't mean it to sound the way it did. She should have called the Obama campaign and apologized not "if they were offended", but for how it sounded. But instead she did what she always does -- dug in her heels, apologized for something completely different from what the problem was, and so the story goes on.

People say unthinkingly thoughtless things sometimes. I recently went on a rant about parents who don't discipline their kids and then wonder why their kids are using drugs in their teens in front of someone who lost her child to drugs. After I realized how it must have sounded, I called her and apologized, saying I hadn't been impugning her parenting and acknowledging that it must have sounded terrible to her, that it was thoughtless and I was sorry. It's hard to do, but not that hard -- and it's mandatory in a presidential candidate. I'm sure that being reminded of that day in 1968 is painful to the Kennedy family, especially now. But being reminded that a man who's a father of two young children has to deal with the reality that there are people who would rather see him dead than president is painful too. And Barack Obama deserved an apology too -- not "if he was offended", but for the remarks made. Because if Hillary Clinton can't acknowledge a mistake, she's no different from what we have now.

This Digital Ad Worker Goes to "11"

Emily Steel starts out her Wall Street Journal article, "More Digital Ads are Produced Offshore", with this eye-opening statement:

Outsourcing has hit Madison Avenue.

I don't think that's exactly late-breaking news, but if that's what the WSJ implies, than in a sense, it is late-breaking news.

The article continues:

Until recently, Web ads were produced mostly by creative types in downtown lofts in places like New York City or San Francisco. But big marketers are now increasingly shipping off that work to little-known businesses in places like Costa Rica and Bulgaria.

One company reaping the rewards is avVenta Worldwide, which has 415 employees in San Jose, Costa Rica; Kiev, Ukraine; and London, as well as Charleston, S.C. Since avVenta launched in 2005, it has built a business out of doing behind-the-scenes production work on Web ads for the agencies that work with some of the world's biggest marketers, including General Motors, Microsoft and Bank of America, at rates about 20% to 50% lower than what agencies pay for similar work in the U.S., ad executives say.

The article then goes on to talk about exactly which processes are being outsourced, and how American advertising agencies view outsourcing as necessary for survival.

Of course, it isn't always about lower costs. Emily Steel nicely says that "The campaigns are labor-intensive to produce -- and most ad agencies can't find enough talent in the U.S. to fill their needs." The article then talks about a Charleston-based company that expanded into Costa Rica "...because its time zones are compatible with those in the U.S., and it has a high concentration of English speakers and a work force with experience in design and development."

I didn't realize that Costa Rican schools were producing such prodigious quantities of ready-made digital design workers. Sigh! I guess we'll just have to lengthen the school day by one more hour so our children will learn yet another skill in order to become competitive in the global economy.

This guy wasn't as nice as Emily Steel in talking about American workers: "

There are a lot of talented people in this country, but there is just a different work ethic that comes with working with people from another country," said Dan LaCivita, senior VP-executive director of Firstborn, a 40-person digital agency headquartered in New York. Referring to a one-to-ten scale system, he said that in the U.S. you can hire "100 'sevens' or 'eights', but you can't hire 100 '11s'. And I want there to be 40 '11s' here."

LaCivita's quote was taken from AdAge.com (login ID required, but the article was copied into one of Rob Sanchez' Job Destruction Newsletters).

I decided to visit the Firstborn Multimedia website. Was it designed by one of their "seven's" or one of their "11's"? Is it my eyesight? Do I not have some sort of essential flash media installed on my PC? Or is it most of it almost (besides the pretty pictures) totally unreadable? I immediately found out why they can't find qualified American workers. It must be some sort of "If you can't read this, you're not good enough to work for us."

I was curious how a foreign-born "11" working in the United States is paid compared to a Costa Rican working in his or her own country. I have no way of knowing how much Costa Ricans earned, but I could find out a little bit about the H-1B's working for Firstborn through the Department of Labor's Foreign Labor Certification Data Center website. According to the Labor Condition Applications (LCA's) filed for fiscal years 2006 and 2007, a Senior Designer makes $65,000 per year, Flash Developers make between $50,000 and $70,000 per year, and a Senior Producer makes $80,000 per year. I doubt if the Costa Ricans are making that much money.

I also can't help but notice that Emily Steel doesn't seems to think the necessary talent exists in the U.S., while LaCivita says, yes, we have the talent, we're just not very good.

Food for thought. If we start producing a bunch of American-born "11's", would the ad agencies start bringing the outsourced jobs back into the U.S., or start replacing the H-1B's with Americans? Shouldn't we start demanding that our nation's executives and politicians also be "11's"?

(Note: John McCain, in a recent Silicon Valley fundraiser, was very sympathetic to donors complaining about the low H-1B limits, and the fact that foreign students "must return" back to their own countries after graduation rather than seek employment in the United States. Do you think McCain is an "11"?)

Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.

Veepstakes

This weekend, John McCain has invited some prospective running mates to one of his eight homes, presumably for barbecue. Specifically, those being interviewed are the closeted governor of Florida, a card-carrying member of the Christofascist Zombie brigade who thinks joking about bombing Iran and about assassinating a black presidential nominee constitute humor, and Paulie Walnuts.

The Obama running mate hunt is just beginning, despite the Clinton campaign's attempt to rewrite history and spin the Florida/Michigan situation as being (pick one) Zimbabwe, Florida 2000, or Jim Crow, even though it was HER VERY OWN PEOPLE who helped put together, and voted for, the rules that put us into this mess.

I haven't got a freaking clue who Obama should pick, but I'm emphatically opposed to the so-called "dream ticket." It's clear that Barack Obama can't trust Hillary Clinton one bit, and there's something Shakespearean about the idea of a young president with the wife of a former president as his #2, with said former president lurking around the hallways. Obama's dilemma is in finding someone who can represent change along with him, but who can fill in some of the experience gaps. I'm kind of leaning towards Jim Webb on that front, for all that Webb isn't exactly a progressive dream candidate. But I could also live with this guy:

More of this speech here, here, and here.

UPDATE: Joltin' Joe smacks down Holy Joe and his Republican friends in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal today.

This isn't even a surprise anymore

What does still surprise me is there are still people who think we shouldn't spend money on universal health care, education, or food for poor families, but don't seem to care about this:

A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the United States Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federalThe audit also found a sometimes stunning lack of accountability in the way the United States military spent some $1.8 billion in seized or frozen Iraqi assets, which in the early phases of the conflict were often doled out in stacks or pallets of cash. The audit was released Thursday in tandem with a Congressional hearing on the payments.

In one case, according to documents displayed by Pentagon auditors at the hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, a cash payment of $320.8 million in Iraqi money was authorized on the basis of a single signature and the words “Iraqi Salary Payment” on an invoice. In another, $11.1 million of taxpayer money was paid to IAP, an American contractor, on the basis of a voucher with no indication of what was delivered.

Mary L. Ugone, the Pentagon’s deputy inspector general for auditing, told members of the committee that the absence of anything beyond a voucher meant that “we were giving or providing a payment without any basis for the payment.”

“We don’t know what we got,” Ms. Ugone said in response to questions by the committee chairman, Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California.

The new report is especially significant because while other federal auditors have severely criticized the way the United States has handled payments to contractors in Iraq, this is the first time that the Pentagon itself has acknowledged the mismanagement on anything resembling this scale.

John McCain says that the G.I. Bill which passed the Senate yesterday is too expensive. Let's see what he has to say about this. Somehow I'm not expecting him to say much about it. After all, it's the Memorial Day weekend, and he's too busy very quietly releasing his medical records as part of the Friday news dump and hoping nobody notices.

Hazelnut Bundt Cake

My mother loves hazelnuts, so a hazelnut bundt cake seemed like a perfect birthday treat. I cobbled a few recipes together, splitting the cake in half and sandwiching it back together with cream. Over the top I poured over a thick chocolate icing which was then sprinkled with more hazelnuts for extra crunch.This is quite a dense cake that is more filling than it looks. All those hazelnuts must be

Today's entry from the "Holy Shit!" file

This one comes to us via Earth-Bound Misfit:

What was the mysterious program that had so alarmed Comey? Political blogs buzzed for weeks with speculation. Though Comey testified that the program was subsequently readjusted to satisfy his concerns, one can't help wondering whether the unspecified alteration would satisfy constitutional experts, or even average citizens. Faced with push-back from his bosses at the White House, did he simply relent and accept a token concession? Two months after Comey's testimony to Congress, the New York Times reported a tantalizing detail: The program that prompted him "to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases." The larger mystery remained intact, however. "It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate," the article conceded.

[snip]

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

See also: Oil panics, food riots, chances a Democrat could be elected, etc.

See you in the camp. I'll save you a bunk.

Note to American Jews: Stop Being Stupid

Before you get all into a lather and call me an anti-Semite, let me be quite clear: I am a member of the tribe, so I get to write this.

Would you people please stop this idiocy about worrying about whether Barack Obama is "good for Israel"? You're making us all look like morons:

At the Aberdeen Golf and Country Club on Sunday, the fountains were burbling, the man-made lakes were shining, and Shirley Weitz and Ruth Grossman were debating why Jews in this gated neighborhood of airy retirement homes feel so much trepidation about Senator Barack Obama.

[snip]

“The people here, liberal people, will not vote for Obama because of his attitude towards Israel,” Ms. Weitz, 83, said, lingering over brunch.

“They’re going to vote for McCain,” she said.

Ms. Grossman, 80, agreed with her friend’s conclusion, but not her reasoning.

“They’ll pick on the minister thing, they’ll pick on the wife, but the major issue is color,” she said, quietly fingering a coffee cup. Ms. Grossman said she was thinking of voting for Mr. Obama, who is leading in the delegate count for the nomination, as was Ms. Weitz.

But Ms. Grossman does not tell the neighbors. “I keep my mouth shut,” she said.

On Thursday, Mr. Obama will court Jewish voters with an appearance at a synagogue in Boca Raton, Fla. A longtime Democratic constituency with a consistently high turnout rate, Jews are important to his general election hopes, particularly in New York, which he expects to win; in California and New Jersey, which he must keep out of Republican hands; and, most crucially, here in Florida, where Jews make up around 5 percent of voters.

This is the most haunted state on the electoral college map for Democrats, the one they lost by hundreds of votes and a Supreme Court decision in 2000, and again in 2004.

“The fate of the world for the next four years,” mused Rabbi Ruvi New as his Sunday morning Kabbalah & Coffee class dispersed in East Boca Raton.

“It’s all going to boil down to a few old Jews in Century Village,” he added, referring to a nearby retirement community.

[snip]

Because Mr. Obama is relatively new on the national stage, his résumé of Senate votes in support of Israel is short, as is his list of high-profile visits to synagogues and delis. So far, his overtures to Jews have been limited; aside from a few speeches and interviews, he has left most of it to surrogates.

American Jews hold two competing views of Mr. Obama, said Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington. First, there is Obama the scholar, the social justice advocate, the defender of Israel with a close feel for Jewish concerns garnered through decades of intimate friendships. In this version, Mr. Obama’s race is an asset, Rabbi Saperstein said.

The second version is defined by the controversy over his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., worries about Mr. Obama’s past associations and questions about his support for Israel and his patriotism.

“It’s too early to know how they will play out,” Rabbi Saperstein said.

Alan M. Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School, said he had been deluged with questions from Jews about the race, especially about what to think of Mr. Obama. “I have gotten hundreds of e-mails asking me, ‘Who should we vote for?’ ” he said. Mr. Dershowitz, who supports Mrs. Clinton, says he tells voters that Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton and Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, are all pro-Israel and to reject false personal attacks on Mr. Obama.

Because of a dispute over moving the date of the state’s primary, Mr. Obama and the other Democratic candidates did not campaign in Florida. In his absence, novel and exotic rumors about Mr. Obama have flourished. Among many older Jews, and some younger ones, as well, he has become a conduit for Jewish anxiety about Israel, Iran, anti-Semitism and race.

Mr. Obama is Arab, Jack Stern’s friends told him in Aventura. (He’s not.)

He is a part of Chicago’s large Palestinian community, suspects Mindy Chotiner of Delray. (Wrong again.)

Mr. Wright is the godfather of Mr. Obama’s children, asserted Violet Darling in Boca Raton. (No, he’s not.)

Al Qaeda is backing him, said Helena Lefkowicz of Fort Lauderdale (Incorrect.)

Michelle Obama has proven so hostile and argumentative that the campaign is keeping her silent, said Joyce Rozen of Pompano Beach. (Mrs. Obama campaigns frequently, drawing crowds in her own right.)

Mr. Obama might fill his administration with followers of Louis Farrakhan, worried Sherry Ziegler. (Extremely unlikely, given his denunciation of Mr. Farrakhan.)

South Florida is “the most concentrated area in the country in terms of misinformation” about Mr. Obama, said Representative Robert Wexler, Democrat of Florida, the co-chairman of the Obama campaign in the state. His surrogates can put these fears to rest, Mr. Wexler said, by simply repeating the facts about Mr. Obama — his correct biography, his support for Israel, his positions on other important issues.

But the resistance toward Mr. Obama appears to be rooted in something more than factual misperception; even those with an accurate understanding of Mr. Obama share the hesitations. In dozens of interviews, South Florida Jews questioned his commitment to Israel — even some who knew he earns high marks from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which lobbies the United States government on behalf of Israel.

I can't even begin to tell you how angry this makes me. It's one thing when people who don't have a lot of education and who don't have access to sources of news other than Fox News refuse to consult any part of their brain other than the reptilian one. But I know who these "few old Jews in Century Village" are. My grandmother was an old Jew in Century Village and I spent four days with her in the early 1980's. These are not stupid people. These are not people who don't know where to get information. This is willful fucking ignorance.

My mother isn't an old Jew in Century Village, but she's an old Jew in North Carolina. She's been to Israel, she loves Israel, and she voted for Barack Obama. So don't tell me that these people don't have access to the same information she does.

So who are these people going to vote for? John McCain, who's "proud" of his endorsement from a so-called "pastor" who thinks God Himself sent Hitler to move the Jews to Israel?

Come on, people! The deal has always been that we may not be athletic, but we're smart. Don't take that away from us.

If Hillary Clinton has lost Rachel Maddow, she's lost the nomination

Rachel speak, you listen:

(h/t: JedReport)

Stupid and paranoid Americans are NOT too smart to fall for this

ZOMG....he has an unusual name....his middle name sounds MUSLIM....his SKIN is DARK!!! That's so SCARY!!

For weeks we've heard about "white working class voters" -- the voters in states like Kentucky and West Virginia who utterly refuse to vote for Barack Obama under any circumstances. They'd rather see their sons drafted, their jobs sent overseas, their Social Security and Medicare gutted, than take the chance on someone who might work to make their lives better, but who flies in the face of their lifelong fear and loathing of anything different.

I will forevermore have ringing in my words of my friend, a 60-plus-year-old grandmother who asked me, in all seriousness, if I really think Barack Obama is "loyal enough to our country" to be president. She hates what the Bush Administration has done, she hates John McCain and everything HE promises, but this fall she will either stay home or vote for McCain, because friends who send her e-mails have led her to believe, or at least to fear, that Barack Obama is somehow dangerous.

And she's not alone:

Prefacing a question about the challenges of winning over white, blue-collar voters, the reporter offered this observation: "They think you are un-American," he said.

Such questions, asked by reporters and plainly on the minds of voters in Appalachia and elsewhere, are the fruits of an unprecedented, subterranean e-mail campaign.

What began as a demonstrably false attempt to cast Obama as a Muslim has now metastasized into something far more threatening to the likely Democratic nominee. The spurious claims about his faith have spiraled into a broader assault that questions his patriotism and citizenship and generally portrays him as a threat to mainstream, white America.

[snip]

The anti-Obama e-mails now bouncing around the Internet have multiplied and are difficult to track, though the website Snopes.com has catalogued and debunked many of them. But the themes are similar: Elements of his biography make him too exotic, or unknown, to be president.

One features a made-up quote in which Obama "explains" why he purportedly doesn�t place his hand over his heart during the national anthem.

"There are a lot of people in the world to whom the American flag is a symbol of oppression," the e-mail quotes Obama as saying. "And the anthem itself conveys a war-like message."

Obama has never said such a thing.

Another makes the false claim that Obama was sworn into the Senate on the Quran.

He took the oath on the Bible.

Then there is perhaps the least subtle e-mail, "The Genealogy of Barack Hussein Obama in Pictures," which includes numerous pictures of the candidate's dark-complexioned relatives on his father's side in native African garb.

The e-mailers aren't troubled by the dissonance between two lines of attack -- the assertion that he's a Muslim and the claim that he belongs to a radical black Christian church -- though one goes as far as to try to reconcile the apparent conflict by arguing that Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ is covertly Muslim, something that would come as a surprise to its parishioners.

These e-mails are racist, they are libelous, and they are lies. But they work.

Democrats have made the mistake year after year of insisting that "The American people are too smart to fall for this." Republicans, on the other hand, understand the power of fear and loathing. They know it works. They know that since they can't win people to their side with the doctrine of Stuff More Cash Into the Pockets Of The Wealthy, they'll win it through fear -- fear of Scary Negroes™ (sic). Fear of Scary Middle Eastern Men™. Fear of Scary Women Who Want To Cut Off Your Penis&trade. Funny how it's never about fear of Scary Corporate Executives Who Want To Send Your Job Overseas While Raking In a Nine-Figure Salary And Poisoning Your Water Supply™.

Lower Manhattanite also understands:

Rugged in its raw form, and rougher still through what has been done to it by man and moguls, this is a place where large corporations make mega-fortunes on ripping the very heart out of the earth and cleaving off its scalp. The coal mining industry, while not employing the huge numbers it once did, is still a major economic force in the area. With upwards of 600 open and active mines in the region, pulling out close to 300 million tons of coal every year, pitting and scarring the land as the dark manna is hauled out on the cheap, the region's workers average a paltry $25,000 per year in pay for this back-breaking hollowing out of the earth beneath them. You add in the mills that have taken up the slack, where every fiber-filled, right-to-work breath steals a little bit of a person every day, and then stir in the “legacy” economy that pays to keep alive the people who gave of their bodies for decades—pensions and stratospheric late-in-life health care costs, and you have a population dangling by its economic short and curlies. And the moguls who own and ioperate these cash-cow companies have a vested interest in keeping the area's population ill-educated (which lessens the opportunity to gain work beyond home), financially on eggshells and “American Dream”-starved. Were these folks to in large numbers move beyond the necessity to work in these life-stealing industiries, where-oh-where would the cheap labor come from? There simply isn't enough of an incentive for “illegals” to descend upon the mountains and snatch these jobs up. For that low level of pay (and it'd be lowered still for brown-skinned folks) and body-busting work, there would have to be more of a secondary, benign payoff than Appalachia-as-it-stands can provide. Things that many take for granted, like ease of inexpensive travel and access to the culturally familiar would work against a replacement, outsider workforce. So you have in effect, a group almost permanently chained to the corporations that call the shots in the area. That is what is called “a captive workforce”.

This is the main reason why the young leave there in droves—the limited opportunities for success compared to the rest of America. Sadly, Appalachia is not a place you think of when thoughts of making the most of the “American Dream” come to mind. And that's the way the region's controlling interests want it. Born poor, keep them poor, and said poverty keeps enough there to be used as fuel for the money machine. It's also why the voting populace skews so heavily older. These are the folks tied to home—be it by duty to family who needs them, or an inability to escape. They will be born there, live there, work there, and yes—die there.

Now, this is not to say that they are terminally morose, or constantly unhappy...or dare I say it—bitter. They most certainly are those things when times are at their hardest, as would anyone who feel the weight of clouds limiting their sight of prosperity's sky. But they get by. It doesn't consume them. They live their lives as fully as things allow. And they no doubt know that the country outside of where they are experiences life differently—maybe with the odds stacked in a less-high pile against them. It's only human for there to be some envy, and even some antagonism.

Here's where race creeps into the picture. When you take into account the relative scarcity of Black folk in the region, racism's spectre seems odd in that it would appear hard to hate people who aren't there to be hated. Racism though, is a chameleon, changing pattern and texture depending on environment and situational catalysts. It manifests itself in Appalachia as an outgrowth in large part from socio-economic pressures and good, old self-esteem issues. This is also in the interests of the “bosses” whose businesses so dominate the region, and further, the local politicians in their pockets. As a distracting straw man, they unsubtly perpetuate the dusky, but actualy unseen “other” as a factor in their doing so poorly. And since time immemorial, no group wants to be regarded as the low man on the totem pole (The irony of using a Native American metaphor should give us all pause.), and in America, regardless of social station, African Americans can never truly escape that position.

You may be bad off. You may be under-educated, or ill-housed...but as long as you ARE NOT a n*gg*r, you ARE NOT at the bottom.
For some people—for a LOT of people, that's more than enough to make them feel a little bit better about themselves. And anything that enables that is hunky dory when you're effectively parked in what America deems its sweaty regional armpit.

It should be easy to combat this; it really should. It shouldn't be so difficult to point out how Republican Parties serve to eliminate any dreams these people have for themselves, their neighbors, and their children. Barack Obama's name and skin pigmentation are just the latest manifestation of the Democrats' failure to reach these people for nearly four decades.

The war in Vietnam gave patriotism a bad name. Conservatives who supported the war changed the definition of patriotism from love of country to blind obedience to that country's leaders -- a definition that persists to this day and was exacerbated by tha 9/11 attacks. Of course the media help perpetuate this notion that patriotism = unquestioning jinjoism and boosterism, but we liberals have been astoundingly ineffective as framing what "love of country" means. Perhaps it's because our country has this bloody history of kicking indigenous people off their land, using slave labor to grow crops, and exploiting workers for the benefit of the filthy rich. It's hard to pull a patriotic message out of that. But we have to find a way to get out of the grievance politics that make us feel we have to self-flagellate in perpetuity for the heinous acts of those who built this country and create the compassionate nation of opportunity and welcome that can benefit all of us -- including the descendants of those who were the victims of these parts of our history.

If Barack Obama were a Republican, he could beat the drums of war and wave the flag and spout the standard right-wing horseshit, and maybe (like Alan Keyes) he might occasionally be granted the title of Honorary White Person when it behooves Republicans to do so. But the irony is that more than any presidential candidate in my lifetime, Obama most fully represents the true meaning of the country for which we're supposed to wave the flag -- E Pluribus Unum -- "out of many, one".