The Mississippifarian

Thought I’d be gone by now, but since I’m still around, here’s the winning Minnesota infrastructure demolition team members. They’ll be moving on to the next round in St. Paul on September 2 for the championship round in the Who Can Destroy America? contest.

Putting Marty “fuck the Democrats” Seifert and Steaming Turd Blossom on the bottom line together was a stroke of genius, imho.

“We need to respect those 48 states that did not violate the rules.”

Howard Dean, at today’s DNC Rules Cmte. meeting

 

Obama at the Xcel Center Tuesday night!

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The evil fucks who rule our country have launched countermeasures to make it harder for Obama to restore the rule of law after he’s elected.

Democracy, American Style: Republicans are elected to do whatever they like, Democrats are elected so they can negotiate with Republicans to arrive at mutually satisfactory compromises. 

It’ll never happen, but I wouldn’t mind seeing Obama declare martial law and then so several well chosen summary executions. If Hillary put that into her platform, I might reconsider….

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Bernie Kerik, who you may remember as Bernie fucking Kerik, the bag man/police chief/Baghdad Security Chief, says that Scotty McClellan is “disloyal, sickening and despicable disloyal, sickening and despicable.”

Glad to see Bernie’s been working on his drinking problem.

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Digby reminds us that Scotty’s revelations have all already been made by others (and ignored by the media). And Glenn Greenwald has more on the bum’s rush Phil Donohue got from MSNBC.

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Heds that sell the story: 

Bob Dole: King of erectile dysfunction hits McClellan for selling out

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But there’s no conspiracy in play to stifle Scotty, nosirree!

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More on that shortage of Iowa workers that forced the Postville meat packing plant to hire all those Mexicans.

If this administration doesn’t arrest one single packing plant manager before this is all done, Obama should launch a massive investigation of this matter with an eye towards criminal charges for all the INS and Ag Dept. creeps responsible.

When it comes to labor matters, we always arrest the rape victim, and never charge the rapists.

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One more thing. The article’s mostly about the labor shortage in Iowa. When the Republicans ran that state, Iowa exported workers by the tens of thousands. Now they don’t have enough bodies for all the jobs the Democratic governor and legislature have created.

Think about that for a while.

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[A]nimal husbandry has been turned into animal abuse. Manure — traditionally a source of fertilizer — has been turned into toxic waste that fouls the air and adjacent water bodies. Crowding creates health problems, resulting in the chronic overuse of antibiotics.

And, because the modest profits in confinement operations require the lowest possible labor costs, including automated feeding, watering and manure-handling systems, these operations have helped empty and impoverish rural America.

NY Times editorial

Never again. President Obama needs to roll back corporate farming all the way. Let them have a few test plots and experimental feedlots, but confinement operations must end.

I’m not an animal lover. Ask anyone who knows me who had an ailing pet whether I volunteered to put their critter down for them. I most likely did. I consider veterinarians who extend the lives of pets to be inhumane. Animals don’t understand or benefit from suffering, and at a certain point it’s kinder to let them go.

So, having put down more than my share of kittens and puppies, let me say that I find confinement livestock operations to be obscenely barbaric, and, on an ethical basis, unholy. 

Yes, banishing this practice would drive up the cost of meat, but it would radically lower problems with unwholesome food. If you are what you eat, and you’re an American meat eater, you have more in common with concentration camp victims than you realize.

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North Oaks, the exclusive community where former VP Mondale lives, has asked Google to remove their street images out of their map finder pages.

I’m OK with privacy, but only when it’s privacy for all, and not just some. In this case, I think North Oaks could use a little sunshine.

North Oaks’ unique situation, in which the roads are privately owned by the residents and the city enforces a trespassing ordinance, may have made it the first city in the country to request that the online search engine remove images from Google Maps.

“It’s not the hoity-toity folks trying to figure out how to keep the world away,” said Mayor Thomas Watson. “They really didn’t have any authorization to go on private property.”

Strib

This sort of thing has always grated on me. Private streets? Seems to me like they don’t even meet the definition of a municipality. North Oaks is a private residence development, and should not be recognized as a city at all. The word “city” should be reserved for public places, not private enclaves.

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As a test of airport security, a customs officer planted marijuana in the side pocket of a random suitcase at Narita International Airport in Tokyo, the BBC reports.

The test failed when the sniffer dogs were unable to detect the pot. But the officer could not remember which bag he had used.

Using an actual passenger’s suitcase is against regulations, and the airport’s customs service has apologized.

Meanwhile, the marijuana is still out there. “Anyone finding the package has been asked to contact customs officials,” according to the BBC. So far, nobody has spoken up.

NYTimes

 

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How long does it take for you to learn your lesson? How stubborn would you have to be to need fifteen years to get past your mistakes?

The WaPost talks to a middle aged crack offender who spent all of his twenties and half of his thirties in prison to find out how he (and society) benefited from his taxpayer paid vacation from the real world.

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Meanwhile, in another front of the Republican jihad against Americans, even mainstream newspapers are stopping and taking note of the insanely stupid Michelle Malkin attack on Racheal Ray and Dunkin’ Donuts.

Link.

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That’s probably it for today. Helping a buddy move and since the heat and humidity are expected to climb, that should about do me in.

It’s Friday, here’s what’s in this week’s download:

From the spiritual to bluesy to a bit of funk and then yet another cover of Tezeta, which I’m coming to suspect translates from Amharic as Louie, Louie.

Click here, then scroll down and click FREE, wait on the timer and then download the entire 70MB set with just one more click.

The Verres Militares (War Pigs), btw, is from an entire album of Black Sabbath covers as performed by a medieval ensemble. It works, and I’m not surprised. Most gospel and heavy metal use the same tunes, just different arrangements.

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Oh, and courtesy of a heads-up email from Corey Anderson over at MinnPost, here’s some relevant excerpts from Al Franken’s Playboy article, “Words and concepts that people running for office can never, ever use.”

Just to make things easier for you, here’s the “list”:

• pornography
• erotica
• pornographer
• masturbating
• bestiality
• Titology
• ass
• breasts
• bodacious breasts
• Virtu-Screw
• erect nipples
• blow job
• sex
• cock
• shot my wad
• rubbing my crotch
• Sexbot
• threesome
• horny
• came several times

No f-bombs or c-words, but yes, it’s a fairly smutty piece and runs in a predictably juvenile vein. I was writing similar stuff when I was in high school, as, I’m sure, Al Franken was.

I’m not sure this is enough to knock off Franken by next weekend’s DFL convention. For that Ciresi will need one of the following:

• a similar article with a homosexual theme
• a similar article about dead girls, live boys and/or gerbils
• proof that Al Franken’s father used to solicit the hookers in the parking lot at Savoy Pizza
• nude pictures of Al (aka political goatse)

Imho, the real damage will come the day after the primary when the Coleman surrogates start running bleep-studded ads of Al’s potty mouth in high gear. That’s when we get fucked and Coleman starts picking up the independent voters.

Tales from our brave, new Bushian world, part LXVII.

As a teen I had a fantasy that was quite similar to this story. 

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You think you understand just how nasty it’s gotten out there, then you read something else that makes you realize that the lying corporate fucks have stolen everything from us, and that it’s time to audit the silverware.

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Digby on the latest edition of lying liars and the lies they told.

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Republican office holders do what Al Franken can only fantasize about.

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Charlie does a separated-at-birth with a real rimshot ring to it.

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When’s the last time gasoline cost more per gallon than a retail pack of smokes?

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For what it would take to feed a Burmese family of four for a week, you can try a Minnesota Martini.

Actually, the martini sounds like it would taste pretty good. Right there that’s reason enough not to name it after Minnesota, home of lime jello, hot dishes, and a culinary reputation that would do Old Country Buffet proud. 

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Thanks to buddy Don, my G4 is now sporting a Flying Spaghetti Monster chrome logo right above the CD drawer. It’s covering up the speaker, actually, but since the computer uses auxiliary speakers (and a subwoofer!), the little built-in speaker doesn’t get used. 

Times have been hard for us Pastafarians but a better day is coming. As a first-gen cyber citizen, I think my descendants will be proud to learn that their great-great-great uncle was godless before godless became kewl.

The Strib is ginning up as much controversy as they can over Al Franken’s Playboy article from eight years ago. This would be the same daily newspaper that gave The Clit Diaries a headline and review when that show came to town. But that was pre-Avista, and this is post-fuck the Democrats, we need a better climate for big bidness Avista.

But the names in the story are telling. The biggest squawkers? Jim Oberstar and Betty McCollum. I’m not sure about Jim, but Betty endorsed Ciresi, so when she says “As a woman, a mother, a former teacher, and an elected official, I find this material completely unacceptable,” I think it’s safe to assume she’d like to see the DFL withhold its endorsement.

A little below the belt, but I can’t argue with anything that would stop the DFL from it’s biannual hara-kiri ritual. That and, seriously, pornography isn’t the same as over-the-top comedy routines. Porn is porn, and that’s a word you can’t let come near a political campaign. Franken would do better to admit to having knocked up a teenaged girl and then getting her an illegal abortion. (It didn’t stop W from becoming president!)

It has to be assumed that the Republicans will, a la the Starr Report, flood the airwaves with Frankenporn this fall. After all, Karl “Turdblossom” Rove is keynoting the state Republican convention this weekend.

I can’t find it at playboy.com, so if you have a copy of this article, get it to me and I’ll publish it here so people can actually read it for themselves. Even if I have to type it up myself.

Oh, and yeah, this is pretty much EXACTLY the kind of shit a lot of us were worried about, and are still worried about. This is coming half a year out from the election. You just know the ‘pugs are holding onto shit way better than this.

Had Al simply put together a video montage of his foulest moments and showed them to DFLers as he traveled around introducing himself to the state, I suspect this wouldn’t be such a big deal.

Porn never is, unless you try to hide it.

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Meanwhile, not that anyone cares what Republican humorists do, Lileks’ opus this week is about Pepsi-spurting erections.

No, I’m not kidding.

(Obviously, owning a Mac doesn’t all by itself make you a photoshop wizard…as I continue to prove with each artistic effort. But I think you get the idea.)

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Harvey Korman, R.I.P.

Maybe not the coolest show on TV, but the old Carol Burnett Show with Harvey Korman and Tim Conway was one of my family’s favorite shows when I was growing up. And Korman’s work with Mel Brooks was nothing short of brilliant. 

A funny, funny man.

Here’s an eyewitness update to the rice “shortage” situation here in the Twin Cities. Walking through an Asian food warehouse just now, I saw three quarter-block long aisles packed with pallets, each stacked ten feet high with bags of rice. 

Shortages are created by hysterical reporters and exacerbated by lying cameras. There is NO shortage of rice in Minnesota, and fuck any halfwit who says otherwise.

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Lilibet Hagel, Sen. Chuck Hagel’s wife, is donating money to Obama.

Draw your own conclusions, but mostly I think she’s a gender traitor cruisin’ for a bruisin’ from Hillary’s enforcers.

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How bad is the one-handed typing from wingnut bloggers over Obama’s technical error regarding which death camp his uncle liberated? Sadly, No! has the most loathsome comment thread this side of Free Republic.

Otoh, who better to judge nuances of evil than the assclowns who’ve had George Bush’s dick parked up their asses these last several years?

John Cole has more.

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For Winston, an Allofmp3 update.

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Colbert does the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins.

“Why,” he asks Perkins, “do these judges keep seeing gay things in the Constitution?”

“They’re afforded the same rights and privileges as you and I are,” Perkins responded. “They don’t have a right to marry just as you and I don’t have the right to marry anybody we want to. We don’t have a right to marry our first cousin…”

“No, no, no,” Colbert countered. “I’m from South Carolina.”

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More on Howie the Whore’s stunning ethical lapse.

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Via Techno, the Masters of War are confronted with a mountain of quotes from before and during the war. My faves:

“Now that the combat phase of the war in Iraq is officially over, what begins is a debate throughout the entire U.S. government over America’s unrivaled power and how best to use it.” (CBS reporter Joie Chen, 5/4/03)

“We had controversial wars that divided the country. This war united the country and brought the military back.” (Newsweek’s Howard Fineman–MSNBC, 5/7/03)

“We’re all neo-cons now.” (MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)

“Now that the war in Iraq is all but over, should the people in Hollywood who opposed the president admit they were wrong?” (Fox News Channel’s Alan Colmes, 4/25/03) 

“This has been a tough war for commentators on the American left. To hope for defeat meant cheering for Saddam Hussein. To hope for victory meant cheering for President Bush. The toppling of Mr. Hussein, or at least a statue of him, has made their arguments even harder to defend. Liberal writers for ideologically driven magazines like The Nation and for less overtly political ones like The New Yorker did not predict a defeat, but the terrible consequences many warned of have not happened. Now liberal commentators must address the victory at hand and confront an ascendant conservative juggernaut that asserts United States might can set the world right.” (New York Times reporter David Carr, 4/16/03) [Note: David Carr has a lot of media friends here in the Cities, and it was quite clear they were very annoyed by the rude treatment Carr got in the blogs. For some reason certain local reporters seem to think that "good guys" who get it wrong deserve more of a break. Fuck that shit.]

Media whores, each and every one of them.

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Right on cue:

GRETCHEN CARLSON: Scott McClellan better not have any skeletons in his closet. I hope he didn’t do anything that he doesn’t want the world to know about because we all have, and all of his secrets are going to be coming out. 

“Coming out” — no, that’s not at all suggestive. And Carlson’s secret? She’s Barbara Walters’ identical twin brother, only with a better plastic surgeon.

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The Baltimore Examiner is going with City Pages old blogging contract:

“You understand that you will not initially receive any other compensation for performance of the Services. However, if the Web Page obtains traffic levels and/or other performance metrics determined by Examiner.com from time to time, you may be eligible for a performance-based incentive.”

Except that City Pages never got around to implementing this plan, probably because they never committed themselves to promoting the part of their online presence that took them from a 30,000 to a 5,000 Alexa ranking in just three months.

Without local promotion and marketing, all you get is a readership scattered from all over the world, and that’s not the target market for a local drug store chain. 

Newspapers need to work with web content providers to create an appropriate synergy advertisers will find attractive.

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A court has ruled that it’s legal for people who buy software to resell that software. 

This could be the end of the brutally obscene business model that made Bill Gates into a multi-multi-billionaire. The notion that you should pay hundreds of dollars for software that was designed to be obsolete in a year or two was always bad enough. The conceit that you were only licensing the right to use that software never made sense, or was in any way a desirable distribution model.

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From Denny in CR, this is actually a very handy page to have bookmarked. Still, just googling up the address isn’t very hard, unless you’re spelling impaired.

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More from Black on Hatch.

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Had my arm twisted to come to Drinking Liberally tonight, but instead I’ll be hanging out with buddy Don while he kills time between work and symphony practice. And then it’s intertubes radio time for San Antonio at L.A. (the Lakers are looking to close out Tim Duncan and his thuggish pals).

Too funny. [more funny]

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Another explanation of this would be that young viewers are Obama supporters, and were repulsed by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopolous’s craptacular debate performance.

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Curmudgeon has gone singular, and I’m doing the beast of burden thing on Saturday to help out. There’s also a rumor I’m serving the papers, partly because I have a rep as an advocate for not getting fucking married in the first place.

It’s like buying a home direct from the previous owner. Cut out the realtor, or in Curmudgeon’s case the lawyer, and you save a lot of money.

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Everybody’s writing about Hmong food all of a sudden. Now University of Minnesota Press is putting out a cookbook. What they call “meat salad,” btw, is actually called laab, or larb, and it’s possibly the tastiest entree you’ll get in a Thai restaurant.

Kathie Jenkins bitches about rice surcharges at restaurants. She’s absolutely right to do so. Restaurants in this area are currently paying $35 for a 50 lb. bag, tops. One cup of uncooked rice equals four cups of cooked rice. There are 100 cups of rice in a 50 lb. bag, good for at least 200 servings. Do your own math from here on out, but I think the bump in rice prices will be absorbed by most restaurants.

Foodies can also shell out $38 for the Taste of Minnesota fundraiser next Tuesday at the Chambers Hotel. 

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Speaking of which, here’s today’s list:

• Thai eggplant
• fresh prikki-nu peppers
• tapioca sheet
• sticky rice (still only $29 a bag!)

And I’ve already got 36 white plastic hangers stashed in the car. 

Little Scotty sure pissed off his friends, all of whom took time from their busy schedules yesterday to go on the air to trash McClellan. So far, everything I’ve read rings true.

The cult of the lying liars is beginning to unravel. Most interesting was Dan Bartlett’s comment that Scotty was giving voice to “an outrageous accusation that mostly was coming from the left wing of the Democratic Party.”

That’s an embarrassingly truthful revelation: only the Left has the guts to call Bush out for what he is. The fact that a member of his inner circle has done so means that McClellan must be destroyed.

The Left? They’ll put us into camps later….

[more from Atrios]

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Glenn Greenwald:

Jessica Yellin — currently a CNN correspondent who covered the White House for ABC News in 2002 and 2003 — was on with Anderson Cooper last night discussing Scott McClellan’s book, and made one of the most significant admissions heard on television in quite some time:

    JESSICA YELLIN, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I think the press corps dropped the ball at the beginning. When the lead-up to the war began, the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings.

    And my own experience at the White House was that, the higher the president’s approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives — and I was not at this network at the time — but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president.

    I think, over time…

    (CROSSTALK)

    COOPER: You had pressure from news executives to put on positive stories about the president?

    YELLIN: Not in that exact — they wouldn’t say it in that way, but they would edit my pieces. They would push me in different directions. They would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive, yes. That was my experience.

Click the link because this Greenwald post just gets better and better. It’s finally out in the open, and any discussion from this point forward only benefits us. Fuck Little Scotty — this is about crushing the media whores who’ve destroyed our democracy. 

More from Greenwald here.

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Can the corporate media be reined in? Or will we have to smash their cartels to pieces? In These Times looks at the latest media crap and what Robert McChesney’s Free Press is doing about it.

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The U.S., Russia and China, together again.

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David Brauer has new info on the flap over Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy charter school, which has turned into a KARE vs. KSTP fight.

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YES!!! There’s a new program for Firefox users that replaces website ads with “curated art images.”

I’ll let you know how that works for me.

UPDATE: Shit, it doesn’t work with Firefox 3.0 yet.

I’m watching the Stanley Cup game between Detroit and Pittsburgh on NBC while listening to the Bullets-Celtics game on the intertubes. The same intertubes currently fetching me parts 3 and 4 of the National Geographic’s “The Mafia.” Likewise Ninja Tunes’ ZEN TV, and some fan’s scans of all the early Action comics. Ditto a 3.8GB collection of ‘art’ scans. Ferus Mustafov has stalled, however, and I don’t think either the Kraftwerk or Madwoman of Chaillot will ever get going but that’s OK because I’m way behind on torrents to be downloaded.

Oh, and I’m ripping a copy of Walk Hard The Dewey Cox Story so I can quick get the disk back to Netflix before I blow the delivery by Saturday window.

If I were the recording and movie industries, I’d be thinking really, really hard about my business model.

You can’t change what is. Customers are always right, and it’s past time someone renegotiated their relationship with the people who give them money.