This Is What The Face Of Fascism Looks Like

The NRA. & it is also how fascism works, you step out of line & the man come & take you away.

The NRA keeps pounding the drums for assault rifles, while wildlife habitat dwindles, while public access dwindles. We really need to take these fools on face to face. They spend millions to destroy good honest people, while they do nothing for the average hunter. They ought to be, but are not, ashamed. They are happy at what they did to Jim Zumbo. I wouldn't want the NRA backing me up, it goes without saying.

Judy, Judy, Judy

Booman Tribune has this good post.

It's a cruel irony for Judy that all the thanks she gets for obstructing this investigation for over a year is to be destroyed by the people she set out to protect. I love it.

Let this be a lesson to anyone that does business with the Bush administration. I don't care if you are Karzai, Maliki, Lieberman, or Judy Miller...there is no profit in it. They will destroy your reputation quicker than you can say Colin Powell or George Tenet.

Just More Bullshit

Since Bu$hCo can no longer fool the voters, he, being The Decider, decided to circumvent the Congress once more time. The Decider, The Dictator.

President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy.

So much for democracy. Oh, & feeling safer yet?

Thanks Supreme Court

Via Booman Tribune. Dick "dick" Cheney shows what his five deferments during Viet Nam taught him.

Wolffe: Bob Woodward reported that President Ford thought you had justified the war wrongly, and that Ford agreed with Colin Powell that you developed a fever about Saddam Hussein, about terrorism. Did you feel that was accurate?

Cheney: I've never heard that from anybody but Bob Woodward.

Wolffe: And other comments—criticism from [Brent] Scowcroft about not knowing you anymore. People have gotten quite personal, people you worked with before. You wouldn't be human if you didn't have some reaction.

Cheney: Well, I'm vice president and they're not.

Asshole

Justice was a drowning victim in Bu$Co v. Gore. & Scalia is wrong. & what else is wrong is how the audience at Iona College laughed along with Scalia. What is wrong with these people. They must enjoy all the dead in Iraq, the loss of our civil liberties at home, & the dead & unreconstructed in New Orleans.

Jumping Toads Almighty

Is there anyone in America more deserving of the adjective fucktard than Joe Lieberman? No one, not one single person. Here's a bit from his "questioning" of Gen. Petraeus, apparently the new savior of Bu$hCo's Iraq.

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) asked Army Lt. Gen. David H . Petraeus during his confirmation hearing yesterday if Senate resolutions condemning White House Iraq policy "would give the enemy some comfort."

Petraeus agreed they would, saying, "That's correct, sir."

Well, I'm a traitor, but I'm in good company, 60 plus % of Americans are traitors, according to Joe. Fucktard might be putting to fine a face on the moron from CT.

24

Interesting facts about the star of this torture teevee drama.

It's especially unfortunate to see Kiefer Sutherland play the world's most popular torturer -- because his father, Donald Sutherland, has been a prominent antiwar activist since Vietnam days and starred in some great films critiquing fascist politics, including MASH and Bertolucci's 1900 -- and also because Kiefer's grandfather, Tommy Douglas, was Canada's first socialist premier, and was recently voted "the greatest Canadian of all time" -- because he introduced universal public health care to Canada.

My emphasis. & a hat tip to RLK for The Tyee referral.

Slow Day

Today started with some jointing of white pine boards over at The SideKick's. Had some coffee & conversation at the coffee shop whose name shall not be repeated here, since the demented, but hot, owner refuses to provide WiFi for the patrons. I then drove home & used a new clamp/tool guide to cut to size the tops of the drop-leaf tables I'm making. While Mrs. coldH2O probably won't read this, I am going to confess, nonetheless, to using the kitchen counter as my workbench. I will report that the clamp/tool guide worked well, as did the finish cut blade that I bought for my circular saw. The circular saw has no relation to the circular arguments Bu$hCo uses to justify everything. On the way home, I heard the news today, oh boy, another Bu$hCo shill, Tony Blow, er, Tony Snow, says that the insurgents in Iraq killed a bunch of people because the media reports news. I guess no media, no war, no HIV/AIDS, no racism, no nothing. Oh, & some old guy gets visited by the Secret Service for writing a letter to the editor. This happened in America. Feeling safer yet? That's my day, we'll see how the evening unfolds, or folds, as the case may be.

Feeling Safer Yet?

Bu$hCo learned nothing from the November 2006 elections. & yet, 30% of the American population continues to support this fascist. With the swearing in today of the new Congress, the Democrats need to resurrect American liberty. & they need to do it quickly.

President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant, the Daily News has learned.

The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open people's mail under emergency conditions.

That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.

Bush's move came during the winter congressional recess and a year after his secret domestic electronic eavesdropping program was first revealed. It caught Capitol Hill by surprise.

So much for the new bipartisan approach the lying liar Bu$hCo claimed he was interested in. Emphasis added.

More On Evil

Enough Said


She knows a robust economy won't bring back the dead.

President Michele Bachelet, herself a torture victim during the Pinochet rule, did not attend the ceremony.

One Less Evil Bastard

On earth. Henry Kissinger will probably attend the funeral of his dear friend. Fascists, both. But the world is a slightly better place without Pinochet.

FORMER DICTATOR PINOCHET 'ruled with iron fist, died a pariah.'

Sham

It's probably too fine a touch for this. I feel so much safer.

No Tears

For this son-of-a-bitch.

Sheesh

Well, this is just great. Welcome to the beacon of liberty, the land of the free, apparently, it's all bullshit.

Values

Via The General.

Fat Of The Land

From Mr. Greenwald.

These two coddled authoritarian cultists are giggling about people who have been put into cages for the last five years on an island, away from their lives and their families, with little hope of ever being released. Many of them have attempted suicide. Actual terrorists ought to be detained and sentenced to life in prison or, reasonable people can believe, executed, provided they are found guilty in a fair proceeding. But large numbers of these detainees have been imprisoned without ever being charged with, let alone convicted of anything. And it is beyond dispute -- even the Bush administration admits -- that many of those we have detained in Guantanamo have been guilty of absolutely nothing.

To sit around chortling about how great these detainees have it and how grateful they should be requires a sociopathic derangement that is nothing short of grotesque. And to believe that people on a one-day controlled visit get an accurate or complete picture of what goes on there requires a blind faith in the Government so absolute that it is explains most of what one needs to know about the authoritarian Bush movement. On the day our country legalized tortured techniques and vested the definitively un-American power of indefinite detention in the President, Hugh Hewitt and Mark Steyn take off their masks and reveal the hideous and frivolous face of the Bush follower.

Fat bastards.

Nothing, Part Deux

Via Atrios.

TPM Muckraker.

So in exchange for political contributions, Mehlman made sure the Choctaw got their $16 million contract. I believe that's called a quid pro quo.

It's by no means the only example of Mehlman's favors.

In 2001, he made sure a State Department official wasn't re-nominated for his post -- the official, Allen Stayman was a long-time foe of Abramoff's.

And according to a report from the Justice Department's Inspector General, Mehlman ordered one of his suboordinates at the White House to keep Abramoff updated on issues related to Guam; Abramoff was keen to see the U.S. Attorney there replaced.

In March, Mehlman told Vanity Fair, "Abramoff is someone who we don't know a lot about. We know what we read in the paper."

But, of course, it means nothing, as well.

Nothing

This means nothing.

This means nothing.

This means nothing.

This means nothing.

We no longer live in a decent, honorable country. We are now officially a country that can torture with the best of them. Proud? Feeling safer yet?

Bizzare Bush

Froomkin has the right idea. Good read it all. Please.

And yet Sanger is being too gentle, because this is perhaps the ultimate Bush straw-man argument, this one so absurd is almost defies description.

No one is suggesting that the invasion of Iraq was responsible for terrorist act that predate that invasion! The argument is that invading Iraq has made the threat of terrorism since then worse than it otherwise would have been. Reciting past terrorist acts is almost laughably nonresponsive. And yet it's a staple of Bush's argument.
....
What's even more astonishing than the fact that the president makes a mockery of legitimate criticism rather than confront it is the fact that the press corps routinely lets him get away with it. Aside from a few paragraphs here and there, like those from the Sanger story above, most reporters quoted Bush's statements without putting them in the appropriate context.

Worst. President. Ever.

Frank Rich

Via Raw Story, we get this exerpt from today's Frank Rich's column. It's about Bu$hCo's LIES.

The untruths are flying so fast that untangling them can be a full-time job. Maybe that's why I am beginning to find Dick Cheney almost refreshing. As we saw on "Meet the Press" last Sunday, these days he helpfully signals when he's about to lie. One dead giveaway is the word "context," as in "the context in which I made that statement last year." The vice president invoked "context" to try to explain away both his bogus predictions: that Americans would be greeted as liberators in Iraq and that the insurgency (some 15 months ago) was in its "last throes."

The other instant tip-off to a Cheney lie is any variation on the phrase "I haven't read the story." He told Tim Russert he hadn't read The Washington Post's front-page report that the bin Laden trail had gone "stone cold" or the new Senate Intelligence Committee report contradicting the White House's prewar hype about nonexistent links between al-Qaida and Saddam. Nor had he read a New York Times front-page article about his declining clout. Or the finding by Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency just before the war that there was "no evidence of resumed nuclear activities" in Iraq. "I haven't looked at it; I'd have to go back and look at it again," he said, however nonsensically.

Rather than tune this bluster out, as the country now does, let's try a thought experiment. Let's pretend everything Bush said is actually true and then hold him to his word. If the safety of America really depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad, then our safety is in grave peril because we are losing that battle...