What A Moron

I believe an IED just exploded in my head. That is all.

Today at a press conference, President Bush dismissed these concerns out of hand. Bush said, “You know, I hear people say, Well, civil war this, civil war that. The Iraqi people decided against civil war when they went to the ballot box.”

Brilliant

Just brilliant.

Having grown up on welfare, Rochelle Riordan had vowed never to ask for a government handout. That was before her hard-drinking husband kicked her and their young daughter out of their house near Lewiston, Maine, leaving her with a $300 bank account, a bad job market and a 15-year-old car held together in spots with duct tape.

Maine's welfare agency, she heard, was offering help for poor parents to go to college full time. With the state paying for day care and $513 a month in living expenses, Riordan, 37, has been on the dean's list every semester at the University of Southern Maine, expecting to graduate and start a social work career next spring. But this summer, her plans -- and Maine's Parents as Scholars program -- suddenly are on shaky ground; under new federal rules, studying for a bachelor's degree no longer counts by itself as an acceptable way for people on welfare to spend their time.

His Family

My ass.

U.S. Rep. Bob Ney, under scrutiny in a corruption scandal involving convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, announced Monday that he was abandoning his re-election campaign.

Oil Policy? What Oil Policy?

This can't be good. I don't think things are going to be very happy in Bu$hCo land.

In a sudden blow to the nation's oil supply, half the production on Alaska's North Slope was being shut down Sunday after BP Exploration Alaska, Inc. discovered severe corrosion in a Prudhoe Bay oil transit line...

Once the field is shut down, in a process expected to take days, BP said oil production will be reduced by 400,000 barrels a day. That's close to 8 percent of U.S. oil production as of May 2006 or about 2.6 percent of U.S. supply including imports, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration...

Piano, Anyone? Shoes?

I can't agree more.

Anyone else watching Condi on Meet the Press right now? It’s hands-down one of the craziest performances I’ve ever seen on an American news show, even nuttier than Newt’s “World War III” crack-up a few weeks ago. Her basic point today is that increasing violence in the Middle East is proof that the president’s policies are working. I mean, my God.

Tune in next week, when Bush declares victory in the war on terror after Baghdad explodes.

It's like beating the crap out of your dog & then the next time she see you she lies down, exposing her tummy & you say, "Look, I taught her to lie down." Bu$hCo is a mental patient, from a mental patient family.

Most chillingly, George H.W. and Bar didn't tell Dubya that his sister Robin had leukemia. They just took Robin to various East Coast hospitals, where Bar stayed to care for her daughter, leaving the seven year old George Jr back in Texas. He was only told not to play with his sister on the occasions when she was home. And the Bushes didn't even have a funeral for Robin:

Robin died in New York in October 1953; her parents spent the next day golfing in Rye, attending a small memorial service the following day before flying back to Texas. George learned of his sister's illness only after her death, when his family returned to Texas, where the family remained while the child's body was buried in a Connecticut family plot. There was no funeral.

Golfing? WTF?

Global Influence

I'm happy to see that America's new path is being copied.

Pro-Beijing lawmakers approved legislation here today giving broad authority to the police to conduct covert surveillance, including wiretapping phones, bugging homes and offices and monitoring e-mail.

Susan Butcher, R.I.P.

Too bad.

Private?

A cop shoots a bullet through a hotel room wall into the next room & the Woodbury Police Chief William Hering in treating the name of the cop as a private matter. WTF? Cops are different than the rest of us.

Oh Yeah, Send Him Up The River

After all, this is way more serious than lying to the 9/11 Commission. What we need in this country is a sense of priorities, people. Itasca County, MN, ought to be spending its resources on that criminal Bu$hCo & his minions. States rights, anybody?

Such An Excellent Post

I'm going to steal it all.
The week in priorities

Wolcott

Here.

*What idiotic moral yardstick is this? Lebanese civilians weren't responsible for 9/11, neither was Hezbollah, so why draw the analogy? Is 3000 dead the Roger Simon cut-off point for how many civilians it's acceptable for Israel to kill?

One View

From Israel. Via TPM.

Witnessing the near-perfect symmetry of Israeli and American policy has been one of the more noteworthy aspects of the latest Lebanon war. A true friend in the White House. No deescalate and stabilize, honest-broker, diplomatic jaw-jaw from this president. Great. Except that Israel was actually in need of an early exit strategy, had its diplomatic options narrowed by American weakness and marginalization in the region, and found itself ratcheting up aerial and ground operations in ways that largely worked to Hezbollah's advantage, the Qana tragedy included. The American ladder had gone AWOL.
....
As hostilities intensified, the phrase "proxy war" gained resonance.
....
The key neocon protagonists, their think tanks and publications may be unfamiliar to many Israelis, but they are redefining the region we live in. This tight-knit group of "defense intellectuals" - centered around Bill Kristol, Michael Ledeen, Elliott Abrams, Perle, Feith and others - were considered somewhat off-beat until they teamed up with hawkish well-connected Republicans like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Newt Gingrich, and with the emerging powerhouse of the Christian right. Their agenda was an aggressive unilateralist U.S. global supremacy, a radical vision of transformative regime-change democratization, with a fixation on the Middle East, an obsession with Iraq and an affinity to "old Likud" politics in Israel. Their extended moment in the sun arrived after 9/11.
....
Finding themselves somewhat bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire, the neoconservatives are reveling in the latest crisis, displaying their customary hubris in re-seizing the initiative. The U.S. press and blogosphere is awash with neocon-inspired calls for indefinite shooting, no talking and extension of hostilities to Syria and Iran, with Gingrich calling this a third world war to "defend civilization."

Disentangling Israeli interests from the rubble of neocon "creative destruction" in the Middle East has become an urgent challenge for Israeli policy-makers. An America that seeks to reshape the region through an unsophisticated mixture of bombs and ballots, devoid of local contextual understanding, alliance-building or redressing of grievances, ultimately undermines both itself and Israel. The sight this week of Secretary of State Rice homeward bound, unable to touch down in any Arab capital, should have a sobering effect in Washington and Jerusalem.

Afghanistan is yet to be secured, Iraq is an exporter of instability and perhaps terror, too, Iranian hard-liners have been strengthened and encouraged, while the public throughout the region is ever-more radicalized, and in the yet-to-be "transformed" regimes of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, is certainly more hostile to Israel and America than its leaders. Neither listening nor talking to important, if problematic, actors in the region has only impoverished policy-making capacity.

Beyond that, Israel and its friends in the United States should seriously reconsider their alliances not only with the neocons, but also with the Christian Right. The largest "pro-Israel" lobby day during this crisis was mobilized by Pastor John Hagee and his Christians United For Israel, a believer in Armageddon with all its implications for a rather particular end to the Jewish story. This is just asking to become the mother of all dumb, self-defeating and morally abhorrent alliances.

Emphasis added.

For those of you not familiar with John Hagee, you ought to watch him sometime. He's on the satellite teevee, down with the other religious channels. Although, they are employing a new stragtegy & sort of sprinkling themselves throughout the station roster. As a semi-aside, what's always pissed me off is the fundie religious stations on the radio clustering around the dial where public radio exists, down on the left end of the tuner. Back to Hagee. He's something to watch, something to understand that he has control of people who, I'll bet, really need a dose of progressive leadership in the country in terms of their lives, their families, & their jobs. He's based in San Antonio, TX. There is no joy in that church. All this is reflecting the awful, fascistic, brutal sci-fi imaginings, rather than the blurry, everyone wears the same dress & loves, well, everybody sci-fi. We really are giving in to our worst tendencies as a species, & there are few leaders trying to lead us to free love, rather than retail hate.

Gore Vidal

He's in the August issue of The Progressive.

Q: You’re a veteran of World War II, the so-called good war. Would you recommend to a young person a career in the armed forces in the United States?

Vidal: No, but I would suggest Canada or New Zealand as a possible place to go until we are rid of our warmongers. We’ve never had a government like this. The United States has done wicked things in the past to other countries but never on such a scale and never in such an existentialist way. It’s as though we are evil. We strike first. We’ll destroy you. This is an eternal war against terrorism. It’s like a war against dandruff. There’s no such thing as a war against terrorism. It’s idiotic. These are slogans. These are lies. It’s advertising, which is the only art form we ever invented and developed.

But our media has collapsed. They’ve questioned no one. One of the reasons Bush and Cheney are so daring is that they know there’s nobody to stop them. Nobody is going to write a story that says this is not a war, only Congress can declare war. And you can only have a war with another country. You can’t have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids. Nothing makes any sense, and the people are getting very confused. The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed.

Q: You’ve called the country “The United States of Amnesia.” Is this something in our genes?

Vidal: No, it’s something in our rulers. They don’t want us to know anything. When you’ve got a press like we have, you no longer have an informed citizenry.

I was involved somewhat with Congressman Con-yers(sic) on what happened in Ohio during the last Presidential election.

Conyers is the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and he went up there with a bunch of researchers. They went from district to district, and they found out how the election was stolen. He wrote a report that was published by a small press in Chicago. To help out, I said I’d write a preface for him on how the election was stolen. We were thinking that might help. But The New York Times and The Washington Post were not going to review the book about how we had a second Presidential election stolen. They weren’t going to admit it.

A huge number of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. You have a people that don’t know anything about the rest of the world, and you have leaders who lie to them, lie to them, and lie to them.

It’s so stupid, everything that they say. And the media take on it is just as stupid as theirs, sometimes worse. They at least have motives. They are making money out of the republic or what’s left of it. It’s the stupidity that will really drive me away from this country.

Q: When were the media better?

Vidal: They’ve never been much good. They belong to the people who own them. But they were better, the level was higher. There used to be foreign correspondents in other countries. There’s nobody abroad now. The New York Times gave up being anything except a kind of shadow of The Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post is the court circular. What has the emperor done today? And who will be the under-assistant of the secretary of agriculture? As though these things mattered.

Q: What do you think of the public advertising of one’s faith among political leaders? They make a show of going to church and participating in ceremonies.

Vidal: Personally I find it sickening, and very much against what our Founders had in mind. Remember that the country was mostly founded by Brits, and England’s always gotten credit for having invented hypocrisy. So we are reflecting our British heritage when we hypocritically talk about how religious we are.
....
Q: Do you see any developments on the horizon that might suggest an alternative?

Vidal: Newton’s Third Law. I hope that law is still working. American laws don’t work, but at least the laws of physics might work. And the Third Law is: There is no action without reaction. There should be a great deal of reaction to the total incompetence of this Administration. It’s going to take two or three generations to recover what we had as of twenty years ago.

We're Winning

I guess.

Tens of thousands of followers of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr rallied in support of the Lebanese militia Hezbollah on Friday, denouncing Israel and the United States for igniting violence throughout the Middle East.

The protest, the largest of several demonstrations in Iraq since the Israeli-Lebanese conflict began more than three weeks ago, filled 20 blocks of a wide, squalid boulevard and dozens of side streets in the Shiite-dominated Sadr City section of the capital.

All but a handful of the demonstrators were men, mostly young, wearing white cloth to symbolize funeral shrouds. Some carried guns. Waving Lebanese flags and posters of Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, they shook their fists and shouted in unison against what they described as the enemies of all Muslims.

That Darn Cat

Jeez, who knew.