Our president, in his own words as faithfully transcribed by one of his most trusted and loyal generals.
≥≤
Mia Farrow’s nephew dies in Iraq. Her brother has this to say:
Whatever the cause, Patrick Farrow feels he knows what really killed his nephew: “Because of the arrogant, corrupt lies of George W. Bush and his neo-con handlers my nephew is dead, and I am mad as hell…Jason Dene was not killed by enemy fire nor friendly fire but by Bush’s brutal and cynical stop-loss program.”
“Because of Bush’s abusive stop-loss policy, Jason had been sent into an unwanted third tour of duty. He was a father of three and could not afford to lose his pension. Some ‘volunteer Army’.
“During his three 15-month tours in Iraq, exposure to roadside bombs and other job-related injuries caused Jason to be hospitalized several times for concussion and internal bleeding and other injuries. Recently, Jason’s condition was such that the Department of Defense flew him from Iraq to Dover Air Force Base for surgery. He was released from the hospital into the loving arms of the government who sent him directly back into Iraq. He was put on active duty while he was still on a liquid diet, unable to eat solid food because of a throat hemorrhage due to a botched surgery at a military hospital.
“After his second tour Jason returned home with severe mental and physical issues. He was certainly in no condition to be pressed into a third tour. He wanted out of the army. But Jason was a victim of the liar’s back-door draft…
“Because of George Bush, the arrogant, the corrupt, the liar, the war criminal, my nephew is dead and my sister and the rest of my family are devastated.”
Isn’t it funny how E&P, a media watchdog, is just about the only media we’ve got that reliably brings us this news?
≤≥
Scott Horton slips out of blogging retirement just long enough to post more on Karl Rove, the father of all lies and the first person to be arrested by the House of Representatives in decades. Assuming, of course, that Speaker Pelosi allows things to move forward, and doesn’t keep everything impeachment related on the back burner, along with economic justice, social progress, Gitmo, and all of George Bush’s other high crimes, treason and misdemeanors.
≥≤
Clinton’s national campaign co-chair admits the obvious:
Tom Vilsack, the former Iowa governor and a national co-chairman of Clinton’s campaign, said Sunday: “It does appear to be pretty clear that Senator Obama is going to be the nominee. After Tuesday’s contests, she needs to acknowledge that he’s going to be the nominee and quickly get behind him.”
The father of potty-mouthed blogging has bent over backwards not to take sides in this one (no Great Orange Satan he). Is there anyone left who can talk without spitting who supports Clinton?
Al Giordano says staff are being recalled and told that it’s over.
You have the right to run as long as you like, so long as you don’t trash the putative frontrunner. 2012? I’ll be voting to re-elect President Obama while HRC will be 65 and her voting record will suck every bit as much as it does now.
≤≥
It was a year ago today that part of the heart of the internet went away.
He was important to many of us, even if he didn’t do the talk shows (anti-war, therefore pundit-ineligible).
≥≤
Maha gets to the bottom of the notorious Michelle Obama “whitey” video that gets talked about, but that no one seems to have seen. Well, now some bloggers think they’ve found the smoking pun.
When they make shit up, that’s a sign this fall is going to go our way, big time.
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My chain of thought just got interrupted by Merchant Circle robodialing me. I’ve never signed up for Merchant Circle, but they’ve posted a page about my all but non-existent business and the only way I can take it down is to sign up.
So get used to me inserting mini-items that say little more than FUCK MERCHANT CIRCLE, A PROFOUNDLY DISHONEST BULLSHIT BUSINESS NETWORKING GROUP THAT’S NEVER MADE ANYONE A DIME, BUT WHICH HAS IRRITATED A NATION. SIGNING UP FOR MERCHANT CIRCLE WILL GIVE YOUR BUSINESS CRABS! BUSINESSES THAT ROBODIAL AS PART OF THEIR BUSINESS MODEL SHOULD BE BEATEN SEVERELY BY TRAINING EXPERTS FROM SINGAPORE.
≥≤
Maybe the wingnuts should hold a garage sale, sell all their flag pins, and then use the money to keep our troops in Iraq from losing their homes here in the good ol’ U.S. of A.
And if they really want to make a difference, maybe they should try selling off some of their excessive firepower.
≤≥
The Cities are pretty much the home of tall bikes, but Sunday at Grand Old Days they broke out the tall unicycles.
When the Ford Bell campaign did the May Day march we were joined by some young kids on six-foot unicycles. Shit, at their age I could barely ride a bicycle….
Thoroughly pollinated, utterly polluted
May 15, 2008
Yes, I was a little cranky last night. Even going to a friend’s place to watch Cleveland-Boston didn’t do much to cheer me up (that was while all you busy beavers were leaving messages last night). This morning, after semi-successfully hacking the pollengelatinous gunk and chunks out of my throat, I ran around delivering checks to vendors because nothing spells success like being too busy to pay your bills. And just now I got an eyeful of sun courtesy of the back window of a car driving by and am typing with a big purple spot the size of an NFL hematoma blurring my vision.
Just so you know it’s not all Hillary.
~*~
It’s more than a little amazing how much you can slow down criminal investigations when you control the DOJ. The open and shut voter suppression case from the New Hampshire GOTV phone jamming case is still dragging on.
They hauled Allen Raymond in front of Congress yesterday.
Rep. Paul Hodes, a New Hampshire Democrat, urged his colleagues to focus on key “unanswered questions” about whether the White House played a role in the plot and whether the Justice Department dragged its feet on the case for political reasons.
“We need to know whether others were involved in the election interference, whether they attempted to cover up the involvement of other political operatives, and whether there was a concerted effort to delay prosecution,” Hodes said.
Hodes said the public deserves to know whether political interference delayed prosecution of the case until after the 2004 elections and Bush’s re-election.
Republicans fumed at the charges. Rep. Chris Cannon, a Republican from Utah, suggested Democrats were recycling a 6-year-old case to score political points against the GOP in an election year.
“These cases are old news,” Cannon said.
The phone-jamming scandal has led to at least three criminal prosecutions and a lawsuit that was settled with Republicans paying the Democrats $135,000.
More than 800 hang-up calls jammed get-out-the-vote phone lines set up by the state Democratic Party and the Manchester firefighters union for more than an hour on Election Day, when Republican John Sununu won a Senate race against then-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat. Because Sununu won by nearly 20,000 votes, the more than 800 jammed phone calls probably had little effect on the outcome of the race.
Charles McGee, former executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party, pleaded guilty and served seven months in prison for his role in the scheme.
Former RNC regional director James Tobin of Maine was convicted by a jury in 2005 of helping arrange the phone-jamming calls. He was acquitted this year on appeal; federal prosecutors are appealing.
Phone records from Tobin’s trial show he made two dozen calls to the White House political office right about Election Day 2002, as the phone-jamming operation was finalized, carried out and abruptly shut down.
The White House political office, recipient of most of the calls, was run in 2002 by Ken Mehlman. He has denied any calls were related to the jamming, contending the discussions focused only on the close election won by Sununu.
In 2009, the new Congress needs to immediately pass legislation removing the statute of limitations for all crimes buried by Bush’s DOJ. Re-election doesn’t mean all your crimes are absolved, and there are clearly more unindicted felons associated with this case than felons who’ve served time.
~*~
Sara Robinson writes on ten theories about change. My take isn’t that the problem is with change, so much as the subversion of change by the rich and powerful. Look at Microsoft. By now I would hope that most people are computer friendly enough to recognize that personal computing has been moving forward with the handbrake on thanks to Microsoft’s buggy and virulently unsafe platforms.
Barack Obama could increase national safety and decrease long-term administrative costs simply by switching the government over to Macintosh computers. Stronger regulatory functions could stop greedy CEOs from underpaying workers who contribute most to productivity (hint: that would be no one in accounting or upper management). Patent and copyright reform could put an end to corporate exploitation of others’ creativity, while opening the door to further innovation and technological advances.
The time is right for a big thinker, and that’s Barack Obama. Does even the most die-hard HRC supporter think that she would ever do anything to loosen the death grip the wealthy have on how things are done in this country?
The future belongs to the young, and right now most of the young have zero incentive to educate and better themselves, having seen how that worked out for their parents, most of whom have worked themselves half to death without getting ahead, and who are facing retirement without any assurances of home ownership or proper medical care.
Change is mandatory, but this time it needs to be real change, not Bush league bullshit.
~*~
CBS is buying CNET for $1.8 billion. The old media is truly more clueless than anyone imagined. Then again, in real, pre-Bush dollars, that’s way less than a billion.
I feel sorry for anyone whose pension money is invested in a fund that holds a lot of CBS stock. (And I feel worse for dollar hoarders in general.)
More proof that the wealthy are putting their dollars into tangible assets as fast as they can.
This painting selling for $86.3 million is all the proof I need that the dollar isn’t worth much anymore. Think of what you could buy with $86 million, then look at this painting again. One hundred years from now there will be hundreds of Bacon’s contemporaries whose work will be more highly prized. This is the work of desperate people who have all the money, but know the value of nothing. To say that this painting is worth more than a nice house is stretching it. To say it’s worth more than 500 homes is, on the face of it, absurd.
~*~
The Republican National Committee yesterday attacked Barack Obama for promising to stop federal raids against clinics that dispense medical marijuana in states where it has been legalized. (I reported his promise yesterday.) Danny Diaz, the R.N.C. communications director, released this statement:
“Barack Obama’s pledge to stop Executive agencies from implementing laws passed by Congress raises serious doubts about his understanding of what the job of the President of the United States actually is. His refusal to enforce the law reveals that Barack Obama doesn’t have the experience necessary to do the job of President, or that he fundamentally lacks the judgment to carry out the most basic functions of the Executive Branch. What other laws would Barack Obama direct federal agents not to enforce?”
Bruce Mirken, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project, which supports legalizing medical marijuana, said the R.N.C. statement “ignores a few salient points, such as the fact that last year 15 Republicans voted last year for the Hinchey-Rohrabacher amendment to cut off funding for Justice Department medical marijuana raids, including such flaming liberals as Tom Tancredo of Colorado and Dana Rohrabacher of California, a former Reagan staffer.”
John McCain has echoed the Bush administration’s line that there’s no evidence of marijuana’s efficacy for pain relief, but several recent studies have concluded otherwise.
A little too little too late. Medical marijuana was the compromise. Since the Republicans chose to continue playing hardball, the new position should be legalization, and immediate full pardons for everyone in jail or prison with only marijuana-related offenses on their record.
Bankers who swindled billions from hard working Americans are getting golden parachutes, but we still lock up working people whose only crime was to try to forget about what a shithole country the Republicans have turned America into.
Guam. Obama won despite some cheatin’ goin’ on.
•=•
Also from Eschaton, Avedon Carol links to a one-hour video that won’t really tell you anything you don’t already know: the American middle class is on the verge of collapse. What does that mean? It means they win, and we all lose. (Skip the first minute and a half, the first five minutes if you don’t care who Elizabeth Warren is, if you already know or read the blurb on the right. Pressed for time, let the video load and then jump to the six and a half minute mark. Warren is, more than anything else, describing how women’s “lib” changed everything altho she fails to attribute how those sensible changes were subverted to create the monstrously inhuman times we live in.)
Interesting findings. Where does your money go? Warren says that from the early ’70s to near present, clothing costs went down 32%. Food? 18% less. 52% less on appliances. Cars, down 24%.
So, what went up? Electronics by a bit, liquor up, pet food up. The real bumps? Housing up 76% (for mortgages). Why? Because houses are bigger and cost more. Housing is no longer targeted towards new buyers, but for consumers “moving up” with the real expense coming when you buy into decent school districts (call that elective apartheid based on money, not race).
Another huge bump? Health insurance up 76%.
Actual car costs (due to multiple car households) have also gone up. Child care has doubled (more hours of it, not higher pay). And taxes have gone up 25% thanks to the end of the progressive tax system. Yes, all those tax cuts really did go to the rich.
Another finding is that while families make more money, our fixed costs are much higher now, amounting to 3/4s of the average families expenditures. Once you crunch all the numbers, modern families have to have two incomes just to stay afloat. Fifty-two paychecks a year isn’t enough, now we need 104 paychecks to avoid eviction or bankruptcy.
Yes, you’re working harder, yes, you make more money (slightly), but no, you’re not getting ahead, not really. Lots of charts and graphs, and all spell out the same thing: the middle class is fucked. And I think we all know who fucked us over.
Dumping the ‘pugs doesn’t fix this if we just go with another pro-corporate Democrat. We need Obama to remember his roots and transcend his early training, especially the nurturing he got from the University of Chicago. Warren’s number crunching serves a purpose. In 1970, you could enter the middle class with a high school education. Today? You know what it takes today, and a four-year degree is no guarantee.
Let’s not even talk about bankruptcy (save this one fascinating stat: more children in the US live in a household going through bankruptcy than divorce).
Things have to change. Not for all our sakes. No, obviously there are winners in this rigged game. No, things have to change or the vast majority of us are fucked. That has to change, and it has to change soon or we’ll break the middle class and what comes after that won’t be good for anyone.
=•=
Meanwhile, Ben Stein ramps up the argument that evolution led to the death camps — because serious people have more serious things to think about than the middle class.
=•=
Mick goes ballistic after reading CEO MacDougal’s WaPost screed. Not going for bragging rights or anything, but I went ballistic yesterday, still, to Mick’s credit he actually put some time into his rant and brings up several additional salient points.
=•=
The Times continues to front for the pro-war liars.
=•=
Digby on still more dead horses.
=•=
John McCain’s only hope for winning is to ensure a…disappearance of the issues which Americans continuously say are most important to them — namely, the disastrous Bush/Cheney economic policies and the need to extricate ourselves from the Iraq War. If the actual concerns of American voters are allowed to determine the election outcome — as they did in 2006 — the GOP has no chance. Thus, the only prospect for a McCain victory is to have the media flood the country with the types of childish, gossipy trash that has predominated thus far — lapel pins and Pledge of Allegiance symbolism and endless fixations on pastor sermons. That is what makes all the dark plagues which our political and media class have enabled — those images of dead Iraqi children and foreclosure signs and crushing collective debt and collapsed American credibility and a truly lawless government — blissfully disappear.
The GOP’s hope that the media will do its part to continue to degrade our political discourse this way is understandable. It is, after all, Matt Drudge who rules their world. A lowly, Rush-Limbaugh-created, right-wing gossip-monger is the Walter Cronkite of their era.
The Right knows it can rely on the establishment press to repeat endlessly whatever smears it spits out, knowing that journalists (a) find such chatter irresistible because of how cheap and easy and fun it is to disseminate and (b) have a built-in excuse for doing so: “tiny sideshows are what The Little People care about, and thus we oh-so-reluctantly must cover them.” Thus, the last two months of news cycles have been dominated by precisely such chatter, to the exclusion of one huge political story after the next — torture memos, suspension of the Fourth Amendment, domestic propaganda programs, endless bloodshed in Iraq, more threats towards Iran. And there is no end in sight to this conduct. Indeed, it is only getting worse.
Our lying media and dying middle class — it’s all tied together in obvious ways that might be a bit more obvious to most of us if only we had a media that reported the news, and not just slant.
=•=
NBA doubleheader today, I’m outta here.
