The Adventures of Big Daddy Pimpstick and Alternate History Boy.

It must totally suck having to serve two diametrically-opposed masters. On the one hand, John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison from Hispanic-laden states such as Texas have to tread carefully and carry a small axe handle lest they incur a blowback from both their Latino voters.

On the other hand, they also have to be careful not to alienate Big Daddy Pimpstick Rush Limbaugh and his sidekick Alternate History Boy Newt Gingrich. It's an amusing linguistic balancing act, watching the GOP try to craft language with the care and deliberation of so many Alzheimer's-afflicted Doctors of Divinity: They're trying to tone down their own racism and misogynism yet just can't seem to distance themselves too far from the Talking, 300 lb. Sweat Stain from Missouri nor from the man with the biggest unused cranium in the Deep South.

What makes this partnership of common hatred between Limbaugh and Gingrich comical is just last March this dyspeptic duo was publicly trading potshots over Rush's gut-wrenchingly despicable desire to see Obama fail. But in Bizarro World, partisan harmony is only possible when at least two have a common enemy like Sonia Sotomayor.

So now we're watching the political Lilliputians of the GOP trying to tie down Gulliver yet again despite not having enough thumb-sized warriors or thread to hold down Gulliver. This has every bit to do with grudges as new animosities. Republicans who weren't even within hailing distance of Capitol Hill way back when are still grinding axes over the rejection of Robert Bork and the downfall of Richard Nixon and perhaps even the serious grilling that Clarence Thomas got from committee Democrats during his own confirmation hearing. What's the harm in a little sexual harassment and pornography?

Of course, completely lost on the irony-deficient Republicans of today is their seeming obliviousness of Sam Alito's former Princeton affiliation with CAP or Concerned Citizens of Princeton, a racist, misogynistic organization that was dedicated to the proposition that women and minorities ought to be banned from that Ivy League campus. Alito was so proud of his association with these David Duke wannabes and so eager to suckle at the withered teat of Ronald Reagan that Sammy had put his CAP membership on an application for deputy assistant Attorney General.

But in Republican World, that's a lot less egregious, a youthful indiscretion at most, when compared to Sonia Sotomayor's opinion that her racial background may make her a little more sensitive and insightful regarding discrimination than a white male judge and former CAP alumnus like Alito. We ought to be reminded here that if Sotomayor tried matriculating at Princeton in 1973 as an 18 year old, the year after CAP was founded, Alito's former running buddies would've been doubly inspired to keep her off campus.

I'd love to see committee Democrats bring that up the minute Newt or Rush's surrogates bring up the racism angle, however delicately. But we all know the timorous Democrats won't because we're all one big happy family, a family in which irony is politically incorrect and way too partisan.

How predictable they are

There is now a suspect in custody in connection with the murder of Dr. George Tiller. And he's everything one would expect him to be. From Hunter over at the Great Orange Satan:

Several news sources are now reporting the name of the suspect in the murder of Dr. George Tiller. According to KWCH-TV:

Deputy Chief Tom Stolz w/ Wichita Police Dept. says Dr. Tiller died of a single gunshot wound. The Associated Press says the man detained in the Kansas City area is 51-year-old Scott Roeder of Merriam, Kansas, according to Law Enforcement authorities in the area. Roeder has not been formally charged with the killing at this time. Police say he was arrested without incident after a traffic stop.

Via diarist FreeStateDem, Militia Watchdog previously reported of Roeder:

July 7, [1997], Kansas: Scott Roeder is sentenced to sixteen months in state prison for parole violations following a 1996 conviction for having bomb components in his car trunk. Roeder, a sovereign citizen and tax protester, violated his parole by not filing tax returns or providing his social security number to his employer.

He was also an active member of Operation Rescue; in 2007 a "Scott Roeder" posted this on the Operation Rescue website (which has been down throughout the day, probably more as a result of increased traffic than any sense of collective shame):

[May 19th, 2007 at 4:34 pm] Bleass everyone for attending and praying in May to bring justice to Tiller and the closing of his death camp. Sometime soon, would it be feasible to organize as many people as possible to attend Tillers church (inside, not just outside) to have much more of a presence and possibly ask questions of the Pastor, Deacons, Elders and members while there? Doesn’t seem like it would hurt anything but bring more attention to Tiller.

The Lawrence Journal-World and News relays that Kansas City station KMBC reported a post-it note with a phone number for Operation Rescue in his car at the time of his arrest.

So a bombmaker, tax protester, member of the "sovereignity" movement, anti-abortion zealot and Operation Rescue member: the arrested suspect manages to fit every stereotype of right-wing militia teabagger.

And more on this pendejo here.

And every qualification to be a good right-wing Republican. Ladies and Gentlemen, Scott Roeder is the new face of the new right-wing Republican Party. Hey, Republicans, this is you. Do you like what you see? If not, then take your fucking party back. Because it is no longer just a party of psychopaths and torturers. It is now a party of cold-blooded murderers.

Terrorist attack in Kansas today

No, it wasn't escapees from Guantanamo Bay. It wasn't swarthy men from the Middle East. It wasn't so-called anti-Christian secularists. No, this attack took place in a church in Wichita just before Sunday worship. The victim of this attack was named George Tiller, and he was an ob-gyn who performed abortions:

George Tiller, the Wichita doctor who became a national lightning rod in the debate over abortion, was shot to death this morning as he walked into church services.

Tiller, 67, was shot just after 10 a.m. at Reformation Lutheran Church at 7601 E. 13th, where he was a member of the congregation. Witnesses and a police source confirmed Tiller was the victim.

No information has been released about whether a suspect is in custody.

Homicide detectives and Sedgwick County District Attorney Nola Foulston have arrived at the church.

Members of the congregation who were inside the sanctuary at the time of the shooting were being kept inside the church by police, and those arriving were being ushered into the parking lot. Witnesses are being transported downtown for interviews and other members of the congregation are slowly being released from inside the sanctuary.

Tiller has long been a focal point of protest by abortion opponents because his clinic, Women's Health Care Services at 5701 E. Kellogg, is one of the few in the country where late-term abortions are performed.

This is the American Taliban at work right here in this country, folks, and they are more dangerous to American freedom than anyone else on earth. Because their sick, twisted version of what they call "Christianity" allows for no live and let live. Like the Taliban we revile in Afghanistan and Pakistan, this Taliban believes in killing the infidel. I wonder when we are going to consider ourselves as a nation at war with them the same as we are with any other terrorists?

I've long said that it's the people who are least likely to be struck by Islamist terrorists who are the ones still crouching under the bed with a roll of plastic sheeting in one hand and one of duct tape in the other. They are the ones who are willing to sacrifice their freedom to Dick Cheney in the name of being "safe" while those of us who live near large cities don't have the luxury of fear. But there are people in this country who put their lives at risk every day so that women can obtain LEGAL medical care. And today one of them was killed by a home-grown, American terrorist.

More:

What John A. said.
An intrepid Kossack takes a walk through Freeperville.
John Amato notes that Skeezix has made Tiller a target many times.
Cara at Feministe via Ann at Feministing. Yeah. Oh my fucking god just about says it.
Ann Althouse has the stupidest fucking commenters on the planet. My favorite is the guy who says that you should have your rape baby because who knows, he (sic) might turn out to be a cool person.
What DakotaWomen said.
Dusty too.
Amanda too.
The situation is being twittered.

Richard Clarke smacks down Cheney, et. al.

Richard Clarke has had quite enough of Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, and the rest of the Bush Administration's war criminals' claim that "they kept us safe after 9/11", thank you very much. He reminds us that when the warnings were there, these murderous criminals ignored them. I believe it was that they wanted an excuse to go into Iraq, but Clarke seems to learn more towards simple incompetence:

Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense.

"Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans," Condoleezza Rice said last month as she admonished a Stanford University student who questioned the Bush-era interrogation program. And in his May 21 speech on national security, Dick Cheney called the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a "defining" experience that "caused everyone to take a serious second look" at the threats to America. Critics of the administration have become more intense as memories of the attacks have faded, he argued. "Part of our responsibility, as we saw it," Cheney said, "was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America."

I remember that morning, too. Shortly after the second World Trade Center tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president's national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice president's office and remember glimpsing horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter, Cheney assembled his team while the crisis managers on the National Security Council staff coordinated the government response by video conference from the Situation Room. Many of us thought that we might not leave the White House alive. I remember the next day, too, when smoke still rose from the Pentagon as I sat in my office in the White House compound, a gas mask on my desk. The streets of Washington were empty, except for the armored vehicles, and the skies were clear, except for the F-15s on patrol. Every scene from those days is seared into my memory. I understand how it was a defining moment for Cheney, as it was for so many Americans.

Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."

I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.

Go read the whole thing. Clarke has tried mightily to be diplomatic in the years since the 9/11 Whitewash the Bush Administration Commission, but after Dick Cheney's reprehensible behavior of the last two weeks, he's finally decided to point out what many of us have known ever since that day in 2001: That when it counted, these people were AT BEST asleep at the switch. If you want to paint yourselves as competent, you don't claim credit for closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.

To the extent that we live in a more dangerous world today, it's BECAUSE of the mistakes of the Bush Administration. Frank Rich enumerates them today:

On Sept. 6, 2002, Landay and Strobel reported that there was no known new intelligence indicating that “the Iraqis have made significant advances in their nuclear, biological or chemical weapons programs.” It was two days later that The Times ran its now notorious front-page account of Saddam Hussein’s “quest for thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes.” In the months that followed, as the Bush White House kept beating the drum for Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds to little challenge from most news organizations, Landay and Strobel reported on the “lack of hard evidence” of Iraqi weapons and the infighting among intelligence agencies. Their scoops were largely ignored by the big papers and networks as America hurtled toward fiasco.

Another reporter who was ahead of the pack in unmasking Bush-Cheney propaganda is the author Ron Suskind. In his 2006 book on the American intelligence matrix, “The One Percent Doctrine,” Suskind wrote about a fully operational and potentially catastrophic post-9/11 Qaeda assault on America that actually was aborted in the Bush years: a hydrogen cyanide attack planned for the New York City subways. It was halted 45 days before zero hour — but not because we stopped it. Al-Zawahri had called it off.

When Bush and Cheney learned of the cancellation later on from conventional intelligence, they were baffled as to why. The answer: Al-Zawahri had decided that a rush-hour New York subway attack was not enough of an encore to top 9/11. Al Qaeda’s “special event” strategy, Suskind wrote, requires the creation of “an upward arc of rising and terrible expectation” that is “multiplied by time passing.” The event that fits that bill after 9/11 must involve some kind of nuclear weapon.

“What are the lessons of this period?” Suskind asked when we spoke last week. “If you draw the wrong lessons, you end up embracing the wrong answers.” They are certainly not the lessons cited by Cheney. Waterboarding hasn’t and isn’t going to save us from anything. The ticking time-bomb debate rekindled by Cheney’s speech may be entertaining on “24” or cable-news food fights, but is a detour from the actual perils before the country. “What we’re dealing with is a patient foe who thinks in decades while we tend to think more in news cycles,” Suskind said. “We have to try to wrestle this fear-based debate into something resembling a reality-based discussion.”

The reality is that while the Bush administration was bogged down in Iraq and being played by Pervez Musharraf, the likelihood of Qaeda gaining access to nuclear weapons in a Taliban-saturated Pakistan was increasing by the day. We know that in the month before 9/11, bin Laden and al-Zawahri met with the Pakistani nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood. That was the real link between 9/11 and nuclear terror that the Bush administration let metastasize while it squandered American resources on a fictional link between 9/11 and a “nuclear” Saddam.

And where are we now? On the eve of Obama’s inauguration, David Sanger reported in The Times that military and nuclear experts agree that if “a real-life crisis” breaks out in Pakistan “it is unlikely that anyone would be able to assure an American president, with confidence, that he knew where all of Pakistan’s weapons were — or that none were in the hands of Islamic extremists.”

Pakistan is the time bomb. But with a push from Cheney, abetted by too many Democrats and too many compliant journalists, we have been distracted into drawing the wrong lessons, embracing the wrong answers. We are even wasting time worrying that detainees might escape from tomb-sized concrete cells in Colorado.

What we need to be doing instead, as Suskind put it, is to “build the thing we don’t have — human intelligence. We need people who are cooperating with us, who step up and help, and who won’t turn away when they see things happening. Hearts and minds — which we’ve botched — must be corrected and corrected quickly. That’s what wins the battle, not going medieval.

After all the lies, after all the botching of this nation's anticipation of terrorism, handling of terrorism, and policy in the Middle East, why on earth, other than craven attempts at getting ratings, is ANYONE even listening to anything Dick Cheney says? And why is anyone giving him any credit at all for knowing what he's talking about? The news media were in thrall to these people for eight years, and they're in thrall to them still. Perhaps they feel fear gets ratings. Perhaps they long for the kind of punitive Big Daddy that Cheney represents instead of the one who'll get on the swingset with you like Obama. Perhaps they think that global thermonuclear war will be a cool thing to cover. But you can get that if a Democrat had botched eight years in office the way the Cheneybush Administration did, David Gregory and the rest of the media whores wouldn't be fellating him on national television.

Scary Sotomayor and the World of the Tweety! ...or Media's Inability to Move Forward...

I try not to watch this crap anymore. The cable company here has done me a strangely backwards favor by taking away my ability to stream MSNBC or much of anything to my desktop besides dreaded network TV. So its odd these days that I'm catching Tweety when he's on as opposed to on YouTube or DVR when he's done something idiotic that is worth a couple of minutes of my time. This morning, in the here and now, I am reminded how much of a hack Tweety is, and I'm wondering how the panel manages to sit there, controlled by the "stories" of the week, as prescribed by the M$M talking points, and following the mundane surface doings of the new President, without screaming a la Howard Beale. Its all so predictable and boring, and maybe Tweety needs to consider that if he really wants those ratings that he needs, he might try to talk about the real stories and what they mean, if he's even capable of that.

So, if Obama is going to travel to Normandy to mark D-day, then we have to go over the foibles of other presidents who fell down stairs and offended one person or another; Bill Clinton looking through binoculars with the lens caps on, or worse, smoking a cigar in public after the Lewinsky scandal...wink, wink...And how will Obama fit into the meme that they are busily preparing for him? Its all so exciting that I can hardly wait! Of course, Obama spoils the fun time and again because he is so too slick.



Look, I know that even these political head brainy shows are a microcosm of the American psyche, and that there was never a NASCAR or Grand Prix fan who wasn't on the edge of their seat waiting for the crash. I know that we look for someone to trip and fall or, more recently, embarrass our country diplomatically, but I was sort of hoping that we were going to send President Obama out into the world to smooth over the impression of the ugly, stupid American that Bush spent eight years honing. It used to be that we waited for the hockey fight or Abbot and Costello to get lost in the haunted mansion as a way to get our ya-ya's out, but somewhere between Gerald Ford falling down the stairs of a plane, eliciting fond ribbing and Clinton's cigars, a huge helping of leader hatred was thrown in, and it has somehow become a sport to expect something any minute that is gonna stamp a presidency with a meme that will follow it into forever. So far the Obamas have avoided this, causing some strange sorta anger and shot in the dark labeling attempts; socialist, liar, not doing what he promised in the campaign...whatever...the reality is that things are so much better than they would have been with McCain, and though we should expect the best, lets not throw out the baby with the bathwater...or something like that.

The important question to ask yourself is what are these main stream talking points turning us away from; What are we missing here? I keep hearing that President Obama is not following his campaign promises exactly to the letter, but I'm not so sure that we want someone in that office who isn't able to adapt on the fly. I'm as worried as the next person, and I'm willing to fight for the more important issues, like Afghanistan and gay marriage, but I'm also acutely aware that in the big picture we need to look at who he has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the supreme court! Look at what is happening that is really going to shape trends in humanity in the next 100 or 200 years? What will our world be like with 2 or 3 new judges on our highest court that resemble the actual reality of the make up of America? This is huge! This is the kind of long term decision that along the way might grant the wishes of people who are so focused on a single issue that they are ready to jump ship immediately. Sheesh...Americans have no patience for sure, but this is ridiculous, and self destructive.



To spend so much time on one piece of a speech from eight years ago, indicates to me that they have nothing! Further, what Judge Sotomayor said is true! Is Limbaugh or Tweety or anyone else going to say with a straight face that Alito's rulings don't have something to do with his conservative, Italian, white upbringing? Isn't the point that a judges follow the rule of law, regardless of their backgrounds, but also bringing their background into their decisions that one interfere with the law? All indications are that she is a judge with a record of such decisions, and if this is all they can pull out, then we had better get ready for a different looking Supreme Court.... yay!...and in turn, we will see the kinds of changes that the people of this country want; not what special interests can conjure with swift boating and hysteria.

This is less an issue of what we Americans want, than a shaping of the story in a pathetic, grasping way by the disgruntled minority. Its unbelievable to me that the usual suspects still are giving a free platform to the usual suspects to say the same old crap. I know that the news guys miss Bush as much as the comedians do because there was so much to work with there, but maybe we'll have to get back to our favorite TV shows, America's Got Talent or whatever it is that allows us to make fun of each other, and extend again some respect where respect is due. Maybe along that way we can demand some focus on the fucking war(s) and how we are going to go forward!

If every public servant can be swift boated in this way (did I mention that this is extrapolated from one passage in a speech from eight years ago?) and if the story can be twisted and fed back to us as something that we somehow want to obsess about, then the inmates still have control of the asylum and maybe its time for a change of management at these networks, or at least some reregulation of media content in general.

Lets discuss Afghanistan and the torture issue. Lets discuss indictment of the criminals and what that would mean to us going forward. It occurs to me that the fear of Judge Sotomayor is more about the fact that she does have respect for the rule of law (for the people as opposed to bending and changing it in favor of large corporations.) The grasping by the right, and the insane racial comments tell me that they protesteth too much and that this may be someone who will fairly represent us regardless of who they're duck hunting with on the weekends.

If you want to contact the folks at NBC about their inane programming choices click here.

c/p RIP Coco

The Self-Killing Fields

In the first 131 days of the Obama administration, we’ve played witness to an impressively ambitious and manifold agenda that has spanned gender equality in the workplace, an economic stimulus plan, the banning of torture, the closing of Guantanamo Bay, a phased troop reduction in Iraq, the passage of an extended childrens’ health care bill. And this is just the beginning. It isn’t so much a liberal/socialist agenda as the sneering jocks of the GOP are saying but merely a more law-abiding, humane one that our government ought to always pursue. At this point, the Obama administration is still, and will continue to be, in damage control mode. Yet the first signs from Mr. Obama are relatively auspicious.

However, there are still issues on which the president could speak out yet has not. There’s the problem of contractor abuse and outright fraud in Iraq and where’s there’s contractor corruption in Iraq, then surely it exists in Afghanistan (although in the nearly seven years of that conflict, we haven’t heard a word of any such thing going on). The president should also continue his campaign mantra of not letting lobbyists influence government to the degree that they have. There are vulture funds, which the president, as per his Constitutional prerogative, can eliminate with the stroke of a pen. He could also ban the Clinton-era Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which has been responsible for more suicides among closeted gay servicepeople than we’ll likely ever know.

And that is something on which the president could be taking a more proactive stance yet has not: The problem of the rising suicide rate in our armed forces is getting so serious that even Republicans are getting concerned. Last February 4th, Rep. Zach Wamp (R-TN) said during a House Appropriations subcommittee on military construction and veterans affairs hearing, “This suicide rate issue is the canary in the mine, in a sense.”

Predictably, the problem isn’t restricted to the Army- the Navy and Marine Corps have also seen a rise in their suicide rate last year. The smaller, elite Marine Corps alone suffered 41 suicides in 2008. The much larger US Navy also saw an increase to 39, a figure that brings that of their sister branch in the Corps into conspicuous relief. The US Air Force lost 38 airmen to suicide in ‘08.

What is especially tragic is that the disturbingly high Army suicide rate also includes National Guardsmen who’d originally signed up for two weekends a month and never thought they’d be deployed for two, three or four ever-lengthening tours of duty that would separate them from their families, see them lose their civilian jobs and face foreclosure as a result.

While it’s true that only two thirds of last year’s Army/National Guard suicides deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan, 85 or 86 of the ones who did deploy and kill themselves is still an unacceptable figure. The problem got so bad in Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, the home of the Screaming Eagles 101st Airborne, that they had to shut down normal operations for three days earlier this month after two soldiers committed suicide in the same week. As alarming as the 128 confirmed suicides from last year are, the Army has already lost exactly half that many to self-extinction and we’re still nowhere near the end of June.

So why is the suicide rate climbing even though a full one third never deployed to either war? Part of the theory as to why is the stress of selling homes, moving to a new city and the toll it takes on families. Yet, speaking as a former Air Force brat who had to pull up stakes every 2-3 years, I can tell you that’s part and parcel of being a military family.

The root of the problem, aside from the stress of deploying and redeploying into two quagmires overseas, is the General George S. Patton mentality that’s still endemic in the armed forces. Base commanders such as Brigadier General Stephen Townsend of Ft. Campbell and Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullins have appeared to make serious and sincere inroads toward tackling the problem.

Yet somewhere in the middle, from the highest levels of command down to the boots on the ground, there’s still a prejudice against those who openly ask for help. The reluctance to do so only exacerbates their pre-existing condition of suicidal ideations. And speaking of pre-existing conditions, word almost surely has spread of the perversion of the Chapter 5-13 clause: More and more military doctors examining shell-shocked and wounded soldiers are diagnosing their wartime injuries as pre-existing. The DoD does this primarily for one reason: to save money on disability payouts and VA assistance (which isn’t even part of the Pentagon’s annual defense budget).

And the subtraction of funding for veterans with PTSD has resulted in longer waits for treatment, if it comes at all, and after being made to pay a Bush-era $230 registration fee. As far back as 2006, nearly 100,000 veterans appealed to the Veteran’s Administration for help with their post traumatic stress syndrome even though the VA had been funded by the Bush administration and Congress for perhaps a quarter of that number.

So, for many disturbed and suicidal soldiers, it’s just easier to say nothing. While military suicide rates have historically climbed during wartime, it would be all too easy to blame the current spike on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, while no one person has tied it all together, I think it would plausible to say that the steadily climbing suicide rate in our armed forces is synechdochal of much else that plagues our nation: Home foreclosures, joblessness, a high divorce rate, etc.

While a civilian suicide of any number is just as tragic, when we’re talking about a military number that officially reaches 246 a year, it’s especially tragic and begins to impinge on our military’s ability to vouchsafe our national security.

Outreach programs within the military are a good start but it ought not be restricted to the beleaguered boots on the ground. Sensitivity classes, behind the door asskickings, whatever works, also need to be implanted between the ground troops and the command level until this tragic problem is seriously addressed and the prejudice against those in serious need of psychological treatment is eradicated once and for all.

The Obama administration has not mentioned the rising suicide rate in our military since it was the Obama campaign when then-Senator Obama one year ago last Friday mentioned a report on military suicides. It’s a pretty sad day in the neighborhood when Congressional Republicans who waffled, made excuses and even blamed the troops for the Water Reed Hospital scandal are more vocal about this suicide problem than the seemingly oblivious administration.

Therefore, I think it would be a good idea to contact several veterans’ advocacy groups and to petition them to petition the president and Secretary of Defense Dr. Robert Gates to address this deadly serious problem from the highest levels of our government. We cannot help these tortured souls unless we can gain their trust.

You can start by going to Vote Vets.org, John Soltz’s organization. Then, there’s the National Gulf War Research Center, which specializes in helping veterans and active duty servicepeople alike in dealing with the problems that arise from the present war in the Gulf. Capveterans.com is also another good place to start as they target PTSD in the military.

Meet the Old Boss, Same as the Older Boss

About the only difference between George W. Bush and Bill Clinton during their mutual hand job in Toronto last night was the color of their suits and ties. In a way, it resembled that final climactic scene in Animal Farm in which the pigs and humans morphed into one another and became indistinguishable.

It had appeared that in the first major appearance Bush would make since slithering out of the White House would be to come out swinging against President Barack Obama for reversing his executive orders or for officially condemning torture or for closing Gitmo or beginning a multiphase troop withdrawal from Iraq according to a strict 16 month timetable.

Instead, Bush made his first major public appearance since January 20th a public circle jerk involving the 42nd president and moderator Frank McKenna. If the crowd of 6000 expected a post-presidential debate involving Arkansas razorback pig shit and shoes, they were deluded.

I'm not one who's much for partisan bickering for its own sake. It needlessly throws sand in the engine of the omnibus of the democratic process. Yet one would think that after all the Republican monkey feces that for eight years had been flung at Slick Willie during their own Clinton Derangement Syndrome, after all the lies told about his wife during her presidential campaign, a level of persecution that went far and beyond the pale of political gamesmanship, that Bill Clinton wouldn't have been as gracious as he was. Of course, both men could afford to be gracious: Bush and Clinton split a $300,000 honorarium for their live sex show.



Perhaps, like two Dutch Uncles, they were trying to teach Barack Obama a lesson in bipartisanship that he doesn't really need. Yet the differences between the style and results of each man leading this nation are so stark and obvious, it boggles the mind at how they could have bitten their tongues for as long as they did.

Instead, it merely gave the appearance to the 6000 in attendance who paid anywhere from $200-$2500 to listen to this bilge and for those many tens of millions more reading about it this morning that there truly is no difference between the two parties except for two capital letters, rhetoric and strategy. This was not two former American presidents putting country above all else and showing bipartisan unity as much as it was a lesson in the indistinguishable nature of the two rotten wings of our two party system.

There were differences of opinion, sure, such as Clinton insisting that more attention should have been paid to Afghanistan and that we shouldn't have let ourselves get diverted by Iraq, that the UN weapons inspectors should have been given more time. And Bush, predictably, said, "Not so, neener neener. We didn't get diverted from the war on terra."

And it was all said with perfectly molded smiles and casually dismissed as if they were two fair weather baseball fans disagreeing on who stands the best chance of winning the World Series. Who cares if the shocking difference between competence and incompetence was several millions of deaths, maimings, personal economic ruin and displacements, that our top military commanders in Iraq are still saying we could be there for another decade and that we still haven't any solid assurances that this recession has touched bottom and that it still couldn't turn into a worldwide depression?

For $300,000, they sure could pretend the countless hundreds of millions of lives largely ruined through the actions, misactions and inactions by the Bush administration weren't even worth bringing up (Although McKenna didn't mind asking Clinton about the hundreds of thousands who died through his own inaction and indecisiveness regarding the Rwanda genocide. No such questions were asked of Bush about either Iraq or New Orleans. At least Clinton took the blame for Rwanda and offered no lies or excuses.).



Meanwhile, Canadians both inside and out were seething and there weren't nearly as many Bill Clinton protest signs as there were those of Bush, including several of him in effigy wearing an orange jump suit. Sure, Junior was the most Republican president since Ronald Reagan and it's been said by Michael Moore that Bill Clinton was the most Republican Democratic president we've ever had, so there was already a lot of room for common ground.

Like Bush and Cheney, Clinton and Gore tried sounding the alarm and telling us that Iraq had WMD that we all know were fictitious. We're now saddled with the Defense of Marriage Act that had long since been signed into law by the most notorious two-timer since Jack Kennedy and we're also afflicted with Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Like Bush, Clinton had cozied up to murderous tyrants such as Suharto and corporations of dubious reputation. Who among us outside of Arkansas had even heard of Bill Clinton 18 years ago until he began circle-jerking with the Powers That Be at the Bilderberg Group? And let's not forget under whose watch and with whose blessing the CIA launched their extraordinary rendition program. And, regarding the global economy/New World Order midwifed in part by Clinton, I have five letters for you: N-A-F-T-A, a poverty-inducing travesty even his own wife will no longer support.

Gore Vidal once said that were no longer any political parties and that there was just the Corporate Party with Republican and Democratic wings. You want to know how thoroughly corporatized the parties have become even in retirement? The picture above of Clinton and Bush was released by TD Bank. The circle jerk's moderator, former Canadian ambassador to the US Frank McKenna is also TD Bank's vice chairman, the corporate entity that had underwritten the event.

Why is MSNBC even giving Tom Tancredo a forum?

I realize that the ravings of a lunatic make good television. But I don't see David Shuster dragging into the studio some homeless guy ranting about how aliens are beaming death rays directly into his brain. So why on earth is Tom Tancredo, best known for being a failed long-shot presidential candidate and having a rabid hatred of immigrant Latinos, being given air time on the public airwaves that you and I own, to spew hatred and inaccurate bullshit? Tancredo makes it very clear here that what he's afraid of is that his world of white male privilege is changing, and there is nothing he can do about it, other than what is the subtext of the kind of vitriol he and Rush Limbaugh and the rest of their ilk -- the very same people who practically fellated in public the mediocrity that is Clarence Thomas -- lose their minds at the prospect of a highly accomplished Latina being appointed to the Supreme Court.

But this is what Republicans have done for decades now -- project their own hatred and their own bigotry onto others. It used to be that guys like Tom Tancredo would put on hoods and were regarded as fringe extremists. Now they are the mainstream of the Republican Party. One can only wonder the extent to which they are willing to go in order to preserve their white power world.

Happy 100th Birthday, Benny Goodman

WKCR, the radio station of Columbia University in New York, has been celebrating the Benny Goodman centennial for two weeks, playing the man's entire discography. As I said in a comment to DCap in response to his inexplicable inclusion of some of the Worst Songs Ever Recorded in a video sampler designed to prove the superiority of anything recorded in the 1960's to anything being made today, he's starting to sound like my late father-in-law, who thought that Glenn Miller was the greatest musician who ever lived and that Big Band swing was the only good music ever made.

Under the "You Always Hate What Your Parents Listen To" rule, this meant that Mr. Brilliant has always hated big band swing. I have been free of this burden (though I was probably 40 before I could bear to listen to anything written before 1800 because MY parents were classical music buffs), and so I am able to say that while Glenn Miller is too schmaltzy for my taste, I think he was on to something where Benny Goodman was concerned. Goodman's Wikipedia entry is a good, comprehensive account of just how important Goodman was to the development of American popular music from the 1920's and 30's and beyond.

Here's Goodman and his band performing one of my favorites from the Goodman oeuvre, "King Porter Stomp" at Wolf Trap in 1977, with John Bunch On piano, Cal Collins on guitar, Buddy Tate and Al Klink On sax, Warren Vache On trumpet, amd Mickey Mcgieve On trombone.

...and a short version of "Sing Sing Sing" from Hollywood Hotel (1937), showcasing the genius of Gene Krupa on drums:

I'm thinking that bad economic times warrant another swing revival. How about you?

Danny Roberts

Beautiful artist.

So inspiring!


http://igorandandre.blogspot.com

new styles up soon!

buy these summer styles soon on our website!

valley girl Vlada

Love her, a lot. Numero Tokyo. Im jealous she gets a custom necklace!

The 2000-Post-Old Man

Happy Postiversary, Driftglass! It would be easy to pat myself on the back because I have more self-housed posts than he does, except that Drifty had a brilliant career over at the late and still sadly lamented News Blog long before he stopped sleeping on Gilliard's online sofa and got his own digs. And as we know, number of posts, or even comments, doesn't mean shit. It's about the writing, as we used to say over at the equally defunct Cinemarati when evaluating new critics for membership. (And look where that got us.)

Drifty's 2000th post comes just days before the Blogtopia(™ Skippy)-Wide Day of Remembrance for the great Mr. Gilliard, who inspired so many of us, even those of us who never had the privilege of meeting the man (though I did get a cherished link once). Now that I have a job where I actually have work to do, instead of waiting around to be deemed worthy of a project that requires use of the gray matter in my head, it's often difficult to skim a few sites, come up with something to write, and then write it coherently after not enough sleep and the ever-present deadlines that hang over me. I wouldn't trade this job for the one I had before, for all the slack I had then that I don't have now. It's nice to be respected for your abilities at work, even if it does mean 12-hour days and the sacrifice of almost everything else in life. It's also nice to not have the ever-present threat of layoff hanging over my head. This isn't to say that my current employer couldn't hit bad times, but for now it's pretty secure. But given that the company is self-insured, I am an overweight 50-year-old, and they want to give us "lifestyle" coaches so we can live a healthier life (presumably by cutting out fast food, which I don't eat anyway; cutting down on sweets, which I've done anyway; and getting more exercise, which is hard to do when one is putting in 12-hour days and doesn't think a life of nothing but work and working out is terribly appealing), somehow I suspect that if times got tough, my job performance would matter not a whit when weighed (heh) against my body-mass index.

But with newspapers now having top-secret conclaves to decide whether to collude in charging for online content, and most people having little time to read the paper versions, one wonders just how long rantbloggers who go off to corporate America are going to be able to survive without staffs of full-time investigative journalists of their own -- or if HuffPo, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo are going to inherit the earth.

But for now, please join me in sending postiversary wishes to one of the Four Horsemen of Blogging Curmudgeonliness. (For the record, these are the other three).

Freebie Friday: Win tickets to see Gordon Ramsay at the Good Food & Wine Show, Sydney

It's a Happy Friday to you because Grab Your Fork has another competition giveaway!Thanks to Johanna from Stellar* Concepts, Grab Your Fork has a swag of prizes for the upcoming Good Food & Wine Show in Sydney. This ever-popular event runs over three glorious days, enticing visitors to eat, drink, taste and purchase a huge range of food, drink, wine, cooking and entertainment products.Good Food &

Scary Latina Tough from the Bronx Wants To Take Your Weapon

Castration anxiety much from the right about the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court? I myself love the sound of wealthy white male talking heads in the media mewling about the oppression of white males in the morning.

Last night I responded to a comment from our resident troll Barry (who's been awfully quiet lately since his party went completely off the deep end), whose concern about the Constitution is limited solely to gun rights, had expressed his concern about the Sotomayor nomination to the Supreme Court.

I think even if Barack Obama had nominated Robert Bork to the Court, I think the wingnuts would have similarly gone bonkers, because it's all about this stealth Muslim terrorist radical Negro (sic) having the opportunity to make such decisions. I'm no legal expert, but from what I'm reading, Sotomayor is not the judicial equivalent of William Ayers; she's actually a fairly centrist judge who relies heavily on precedent when deciding cases. In fact, as the New York Times reports, Sotomayor isn't always favorable to the idea that a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy is absolute, as today's New York Times points out:

In a 2007 case, she strongly criticized colleagues on the court who said that only women, and not their husbands, could seek asylum based on China’s abortion policy. “The termination of a wanted pregnancy under a coercive population control program can only be devastating to any couple, akin, no doubt, to the killing of a child,” she wrote, also taking note of “the unique biological nature of pregnancy and special reverence every civilization has accorded to child-rearing and parenthood in marriage.”

nd in a 2008 case, she wrote an opinion vacating a deportation order for a woman who had worked in an abortion clinic in China. Although Judge Sotomayor’s decision turned on a technicality, her opinion described in detail the woman’s account of how she would be persecuted in China because she had once permitted the escape of a woman who was seven months pregnant and scheduled for a forced abortion. In China, to allow such an escape was a crime, the woman said.

In a 2004 case, she largely sided with some anti-abortion protesters who wanted to sue some police officers for allegedly violating their constitutional rights by using excessive force to break up demonstrations at an abortion clinic. Judge Sotomayor said the protesters deserved a day in court.

Judge Sotomayor has also ruled on several immigration cases involving people fighting deportation orders to China on the grounds that its population-control policy of forcible abortions and birth control constituted persecution.

Now these cases don't deal specifically with Roe, but the case which has Barry (and presumably others whose concern with the Bill of Rights begins and ends with the right to bear shoulder-fired missile launchers to hunt deer) up in arms (heh) is Maloney v. Cuomo, in which Sotomayor ruled with the majority that a New York State law against possession of nunchaku did not violate the Second Amendment:

The Supreme Court recently held that this confers an individual right on citizens to keep and bear arms. See District of Columbia v. Heller, 128 S. Ct. 2783, 2799 (2008). It is settled law, however, that the Second Amendment applies only to limitations the federal government seeks to impose on this right. See, e.g., Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252, 265 (1886) (stating that the Second Amendment “is a limitation only upon the power of congress and the national government, and not upon that of the state”); Bach v. Pataki, 408 F.3d 75, 84, 86 (2d Cir. 2005) (holding “that the Second Amendment’s ‘right to keep and bear arms’ imposes a limitation on only federal, not state, legislative efforts” and noting that this outcome was compelled by Presser), cert. denied, 546 U.S. 1174 (2006). Heller, a case involving a challenge to the District of Columbia’s general prohibition on handguns, does not invalidate this longstanding principle. See Heller, 128 S. Ct. at 2813 n.23 (noting that the case did not present the question of whether the Second Amendment applies to the states). And to the extent that Heller might be read to question the continuing validity of this principle, we “must follow Presser” because “[w]here, as here, a Supreme Court precedent ‘has direct application in a case, yet appears to rest on reasons rejected in some other line of decisions, the Court of Appeals should follow the case which directly controls, leaving to the Supreme Court the prerogative of overruling its own decisions.’”

If anything, this decision should hearten the fetophiles, because it gives an indication that Sotomayor might be favorable to throwing the matter back to the states.

Jill Filipovic of Feministe is relatively unconcerned about the nomination even in the face of Sotomayor's vote in Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc. v. Agency for International Development:

The First Amendment claim was dismissed because the issue had already been decided in the Planned Parenthood case. The Due Process claim was dismissed for lack of prudential standing, because CRLP's complaint did not fall within the "zone of interests" protected by the Due Process Clause - it was a third party (the foreign NGOs), not CRLP, whose rights are constitutionally unclear because of the Gag Rule. The Equal Protection claim was dismissed because the Gag Rule's privileging of anti-abortion views did not infringe upon a fundamental Constitutional right or target a suspect class (legalese for a classification of groups which have historically been subject to discrimination, and therefore receive increased scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause); further, Sotomayor pointed out that "the Supreme Court has made clear that the government is free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position, and can do so with public funds."

The Center for Reproductive Law and Policy lost the case, and the Global Gag Rule continued to compromise women's health around the globe until Barack Obama took office.

That outcome disheartened feminists, liberals and reproductive justice advocates, and I wish it had been decided differently. But the decision wasn't necessarily a bad one - and it absolutely should not stop progressive women's rights activists from supporting her nomination.

If anything, CRLP v. Bush highlights precisely why Sotomayor should, in a sane world, be an easy confirmation: She sticks to the rule of law, respects precedent and writes thoughtful and reasoned opinions. She was nominated to the federal district court by George H.W. Bush. Her decisions are left-leaning insofar as she generally seeks to protect Constitutional rights by supporting religious freedom and free speech, and she often sides with the plaintiffs in discrimination cases - hardly "activist" material. But she's not a liberal dream by any stretch. She has some bad First Amendment cases to her name (Doninger v. Niehoff, where she sided with a school that disqualified a student from running for senior class secretary after the student posted a vulgar school-related message on her blog), and some bad Fourth Amendment ones (United States v. Howard, where she held it was constitutional for state troopers to entice suspects away from their cars in order to allow other troopers to search the vehicles for drugs). Those cases, though, are the exceptions rather than the rule; generally, Sotomayor follows a fairly consistent Constitutional philosophy, and errs on the side of maintaining rather than limiting rights.

Given her history, it's hard to grasp why conservatives brand her "a liberal activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important than the law as written," as Wendy E. Long, counsel to the right-wing Judicial Confirmation Network, put it. Sotomayor has clearly and consistently deferred to "the law as written" -- she's considerably less activist and dogmatic than Bush's two Supreme Court appointees, John Roberts and Samual Alito. Unfortunately for conservatives, the law as written does affirm the rights to speak without governmental intervention, to practice your religion freely, to be free from state-sponsored religious exercises, to maintain your privacy, and to retain certain protections even if you are a suspected criminal or a criminal defendant.

We were never going to get a progressive dream nominee from this president, just as we weren't going to get a progressive dream agenda from this president. Anyone who painted his or her own agenda onto the face of Barack Obama during the campaign because he was inspiring just wasn't paying attention to this guy's record. This is a thoughtful, careful man who has spent his entire life straddling two different worlds, and there was no reason to believe he'd be any different as president. This is precisely the kind of attempt at a consensus nominee (albeit with the added benefit of being a woman and having the potential to shut the door between Republicans and Latino voters for good) I would expect him to make. If the wingnuts would crawl out of the deep end of the insanity pool for five minutes they might see that.

But then they wouldn't be nearly as much fun to watch.

Love makes the world go round and round and round

Sasha!
She's been my favorite model for about 3 years
and this shoot only reconfirms
HOW much I love her.
Shot by Bruce Weber for
Vogue Paris
Summer.
I'm crying it's so good.