The Mississippifarian

I can give a benediction:

Obama blesses you and keeps you on his lists: Obama smiles at you and wants you to register others: Obama looks up at all of you seated in the rafters, and gives you the peace sign. 

Blessed be the Obama.

[repeat]

[repeat]

[dance like hare krishnas while singing the Obama bama bama bama bam song (to the tune of the crowd's chorus in Hosanna from Jesus Christ Superstar, with beats by Jay-Z)]

If you have to drive, drive safely, and remember that the other guy is probably even drunker than you are.

Or maybe not. It’s not like you enjoy learning that more American troops died in Afghanistan in June than in any month since the 2001 war. 

Defense officials and Afghanistan experts said the toll of 28 U.S. combat deaths recorded last month demonstrates a new resurgence of the Taliban, the black-turbaned extremists who were driven from power by U.S. forces almost seven years ago. Taliban units and other insurgent fighters have reconstituted in the country’s south and east, aided by easy passage from mountain redoubts in neighboring Pakistan’s lawless tribal regions.

The officials and experts said the spike in troop deaths should not be the only measure of the growing conflict in Afghanistan, but they acknowledged that the Taliban’s persistent attacks on military units and civilians have frustrated U.S. and international efforts to help the Afghan government secure the country.

“What it points to is that the opposition is becoming more effective,” said Barnett R. Rubin, an Afghanistan expert at New York University. “It is having a presence in more areas, being better organized, better financed and having a sustainable strategy. In all, their strategic situation has improved.”

Violence in rural areas controlled by the Taliban and in eastern provinces along the border with Pakistan has increased in recent weeks as insurgents have begun using more makeshift bombs, borrowing a tactic honed by insurgents in Iraq. According to top U.S. commanders, the number of violent incidents has risen nearly 40 percent during the first half of 2008 compared with last year.

The grim total surpassed the 27 troop fatalities in Afghanistan in June 2005. But that total included the 16 troops killed on a single day in a helicopter crash. 

Josh White

And no, Barack Obama can’t do anything about this. Nancy Pelosi could. Harry Reid could. But they don’t, because the Democratic party in Congress is a snakepit of AIPAC fucks who — given a choice between America’s best interests and Israel — pick Israel every time.

Neocons, AIPAC, Guatemalan-abusing Lubbavitchers: American Jewry has caved to their hard right just as American politicians have pretended that the extreme Christian right speaks for all Christians. 

Enough of this shit. Liberal Christians are fighting back, and liberal Jews need to do the same. And the best way to fight back? New laws that eat wealth. 

Yes, I’m serious. The vast majority of our problems stem from rightwing billionaires blowing tens of millions on rightwing education and propaganda. We need laws that will ensure that idle wealth is slowly taxed to death. Give rich families three generations tops, and if by then they haven’t earned more wealth, taxes should eat up all of grandpa’s money by the time the grandkids hit middle age.

Inherited wealth has all but ruined this country. We fought the Revolutionary War to rid us of Kings, but thanks to Wall Street we have Hospitality Queens who leave billions of dollars to their fucking dogs. I think that speaks loudly for the contempt the rich have for the rest of us.

Afghanistan was our war. The Israelicans wanted war with Iraq, and that’s the mess we’re in. Liberal Jews need to speak up now, before Obama decides to have a Sistah Souljew moment.

¡¡¡¡¡

I’m skipping all the Clark crap. As of tomorrow, the only people still talking about Clark’s eminently defensible comments will be Fox News whores, and other media cunts.

LANGUAGE NOTE: Sorry, George Carlin’s death helped put this in focus for me. After a lifetime of casually denigrating male genitalia — assholes, pricks, dicks, peckerwoods, dickheads, etc. — I’m going British and I’m going to start using the c-word. 

In part, it’s because I’m a coarse working class guy, but for the most part I have had my fill of being lectured on my language by feminists who’ve never once limited their use of sexist language that disparages men. Until pricks and dickheads have been banished from polite discourse, I’m going to feel free to cunt out when I feel like it.

Because coarse language isn’t being used to subordinate women. It’s being used to fight back against an all too polite establishment that’ll fuck you in the ass if you say fuck on the air, but who haven’t an unkind word to say when a corporation fucks an entire community by shutting down a profitable manufacturing plant.

The right whines about the language of the left, but our language is necessitated by their coarse actions. Toward that end, I’m renewing my commitment to reference Dick Cheney as a cunt, and Condi Rice as a real dick.

¡¡¡¡¡

WALL*E must be even better than I thought: now the wingnuts are trash talking it like it was the Pixar version of Battleship Potemkin. [I'd point out to them that Terry Gilliam's Brazil was that movie:

During the climactic shootout at Information Retrieval, the janitor is killed and her vacuum cleaner rolls down the steps as the storm troopers walk and fire their weapons in a skirmish line formation. This is a reference to Sergei M. Eisenstein's film, Bronenosets Potyomkin (1925), when the Cossacks march down the steps of the Port of Odessa, firing away as a baby carriage rolls by.

Wikipedia

But I'm afraid wingnuts aren't bright enough to pick up on what that movie was really about, the right being stunningly incurious when it comes to totalitarianism.]

¡¡¡¡¡

Complain about what others are doing because it is easier than actually doing … read more something yourself. Parrot what the Dixie Chicks tell you because it is a much simpler message to understand than understanding history and interpreting complex world events. Are we in danger from immediate invasion or even immediate violence? No, but does that mean our freedom is not threatened in today’s world, only a simple mind believes it is not.

Katherine Kersten

OK, here’s a good example of the need for my new language rules because I think you ALL know which word sprang to mind when I read that pomp and twaddlestance.

¡¡¡¡¡

It was twenty years ago today
H.W. Bush shot down Flight 655
Iran Air was on their flight path
But the Vincennes shot them to hell

So may I introduce to you
Dead for all these fucking years
H.W. Bush’s really dead Iranian band!

Sixty-six children, 224 adults, all dead, dead, dead. 

 When asked about the incident soon afterward, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush stated, “I’ll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don’t care what the facts are.”

If Iran had shot down an American airliner, we’d have nuked them. Oops — wait, they did shoot down an American airliner in revenge. What did we do? We blamed Libya.

We really suck at this tough guy shit. And that’s not even talking about the hypocrisy of it all.

¡¡¡¡¡

Balloon Juice on why the hard right can’t stomach lefty blogs (and it’s not our language).

Frankly, I can’t stomach their crap either, but being turned off by lies isn’t exactly the same as not being able to handle the facts. I used to read the wingnuts, then I realized how rarely they linked to news sources, and how most of their links were to other wingnuts. It was as if they never wanted to see the actual source, just someone else’s interpretation of the news.

Even Michael Smerconish has had a belly full.

But still the corporate news establishment carries Bush’s water. 

More than 900 cases alleging that government contractors and drugmakers have defrauded taxpayers out of billions of dollars are languishing in a backlog that has built up over the past decade because the Justice Department cannot keep pace with the surge in charges brought by whistle-blowers, according to lawyers involved in the disputes. 

Shit, another bi-partisan scandal. This one apparently started under Big Dog.

Since 2001, 300 to 400 civil cases have been filed each year by employees charging that their companies defrauded the government. But under the cumbersome process that governs these cases, Justice Department lawyers must review them under seal, and whistle-blowers routinely wait 14 months or longer just to learn whether the department will get involved. The government rejects about three-quarters of the cases it receives, saying that the vast majority have little merit. 

2001? That was seven years ago, not a decade. In little casual ways, the WaPost teaches its writers to fog the glass. If it’s a scandal, everyone does it. If it’s a triumph, it’s all George W. Bush singlehandedly winning the day (yeah, not many of those stories).

It’s really not a bad news story. My only problem with it is that at no time does this article ever lay this at Bush’s doorstep. Not just that, but a quick word search shows that this article doesn’t even mention “Bush” or any form of the word “Republican.”

Who does the WaPost think has been running this country since 2001?

A lot of stuff but first I think I need to clear something up before any more of you think I’m responding to you personally. All my comments about shutting the fuck up and supporting Obama are generic. With the sole exception of 2000, when the DLC’s annointing of Al Gore finally sent me off the deep end into Naderland, I have fanatically closed ranks behind the Democratic nominee every four years going back to my first vote in ‘72 for George McGovern.

Even in ‘80, when I had busted my butt for Ted Kennedy, I voted for and supported Jimmy Carter. If you claim to be a Democrat, that’s your job!

Now if you’re not a Democrat, fine. Say whatever you like. But maybe you should instead try shutting the fuck up during our nominating process since you don’t plan on supporting our eventual nominee anyhow. 

It’s all about winning. Once you’re locked into a candidate, you’re stuck with them. Always tough when it’s not your candidate, and even tougher given that job 1 for Dems after being nominated is to move to the right. But bear in mind what Al Giordano had to say about that:

Among the baggage from the Clinton era of Democratic Party politics is this narrative about a nominee “moving to the center.” I myself have a hard time breaking out of it, even though I know it’s generally bullshit, and here’s why: I have reported the campaigns of hundreds of candidates in the US and elsewhere, and for a number of years in my reckless youth I worked inside of political campaign staffs. And there’s one thing that is evident from that experience: What a candidate says while seeking office has little to no bearing on his or her actions upon obtaining that office.

Too many progressive activists suffer from the illusion that if they leverage a candidate during a campaign that getting him or her to say one thing or another will later translate into policy. Ironically, it was Ralph Nader that pioneered that view of activism and we can all see to where it has naturally led him and some others after the frustration of decades of believing, despite the bad results, in a tactic that did not work. I can find very few examples of that in the campaigns I’ve covered, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. Candidates that clipped to the right turned out to govern quite progressively. Candidates that tacked to the left governed more conservatively, sometimes to authoritarian extremes. A thousand issue organizations and interest groups tell their members to send them money and portray themselves as those who are policing the politicians and leveraging campaign seasons to do it, but their track record producing results from those politicians is abysmal.

Obama will have eight years to educate the electorate, using his bully pulpit to gently bring back the moderates to the genuine center, from which the real left doesn’t look anywhere near as scary.

We’re coming off of eight years of non-stop lies, preceded by eight years of Clinton bullshit, preceded by twelve years of Reagan-Bush lies. If you’re slow on math, that’s 28 years you have to go back in time just to arrive at Jimmy Carter’s administration. I think most of us would say that one didn’t count, and that you have to go back to LBJ’s extremely flawed presidency to find a liberal president. LBJ left office just shy of 40 years ago, but I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that almost all of Obama’s most vociferous critics lived during LBJ’s time in office.

How exactly do these critics expect the majority of Americans — who weren’t alive in the ’60s — to respond to Obama running on a liberal agenda? Especially when, thanks to our cowardly Congress, these under-40s have no clue what it looks like to have a liberal agenda implemented.

All most Americans have known is conservatism, rightwing bullshit, and Clintonian triangulation that always put Wall Street first, and the poor last.

Obama has the opportunity of running just to McCain’s left (or right of center), and sweep the board come this fall thanks to Bob Barr’s Libertarian spoiler campaign. And then, just like Joe fucking Lieberman or Norm I wonder who she’s sleeping with tonight Coleman, Obama will govern as he sees fit, abandoning his electioneering rhetoric. 

Republicans ALWAYS LIE WHEN THEY CAMPAIGN, AND THE MEDIA NEVER CALLS THEM ON IT. 

Democrats would do the same, but too many people on our side loudly call foul, and undermine our nominee. Obama isn’t listening to you anymore. He’s focused on winning votes, not holding them. As his base, his campaign logically assumes we have no place to go. Kerry, stupidly, didn’t move nearly far enough right, instead playing the smear game.

Obama can rise above the rightwing smears, but the lefties can damage him, just like Bill Clinton already has.

So suck it up, and try to cynically weather out this campaign. You can listen to what Obama says now, or you can study his life instead. I’ve followed his career, and this guy is no Bush. He’ll get us what he can, but no, he’s no Kennedy either. 

If you had wanted a Kennedy, well, John Edwards was as close as you could have come this year, and he didn’t play too well. Then again, Obama’s the only candidate who was able to stand up to Hillary, so if you’re really pissed about Edwards not being the nominee, blame Hillary. She stole Edwards platform, and beat his ass with it thanks to rural women who never bothered to check to see if she’d voted the way she was campaigning (answer: NO!).

And then, after she had been mathematically all but eliminated after Super Tuesday, Clinton exercised her right, as Huckabee did, to stay in the race. But unlike Huckabee, Hillary and her surrogates continued to beat up on Obama. That was vile and foul. It took Al Gore years and a Nobel Peace prize before I forgave him. Hillary should expect my scorn for at least that long, and much longer if the Republicans run a lot of Bill Clinton anti-Obama ads.

Obama? We’re stuck with him now. Like him, hate him, whatever, he’s the nominee. DON’T FUCK WITH THE NOMINEE.

Seriously. Al Giordano is absolutely right when he says that elected officials never honor their campaign promises. Obama’s been winning so far, why criticize his style now? Are Democrats that desperate to lose another one?

But if you have to criticize Obama, stick to issues where he can’t be hurt by criticism from the left. Calling him a theocrat doesn’t hurt him. Saying he’s soft on Iraq/Iran is OK. FISA? Not OK. 

Accept that the lying liars have pissed in our drinking water so long we’re all getting indirect single malt/Havana cigar highs. Yes, FISA sucks beyond imagination, but nearly as much as it would suck if McCain got elected and Bush’s ENTIRE FUCKING ADMINISTRATION got a pass on their high crimes and treason. 

Feel free to call me out on this, but unless Mike Ciresi jumps in the MN U.S. Senate race by July 15, you’re not likely to see any more Franken bashing from me. I’m stuck with him (THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH NETROOTS BUSYBODY FUCKHEADS), just like we’re all stuck with Obama.

Learn to live with it. Obama has enough problems without taking shit from his left.

Hectic morning but lots of links to digest and comment on, probably early this afternoon.

This would be a good time to start practicing your googling of “fuck bush.”

So here’s the deal. I’ve just learned that Boeing needs a certain technology for its next generation airplanes, and that X company, a failing hi-tech startup here in the Cities, makes exactly what Boeing needs. All I need is a few million to buy up X company, and I could end up making billions and billions of dollars by ruthlessly enforcing the technological monopoly created by X company software engineers. 

X company’s technology is easily adaptible, so I will jealously guard their secrets, and I’ll get Congress to help establish and protect my monopoly so only me and my heirs will benefit from this techno coup d’etat.

But since some of you might have problems with that, I’ll donate a lot of my “earnings” to charities. Does that make me a saint? Or a ruthless piece of shit holding the future of aviation hostage so I can become the richest man on earth?

Don’t ask me: ask Bill Gates. He’s the fucker who stole DOS from Tim Paterson and Seattle Computer Products. 

Frankly, I’m starting to wonder if any of our superrich can lay claim to having earned their fortunes, or if it’s all about fucking over others to get ahead. [Credit: this item thanks to Anil Dash's clueless post]

_____

The Republican party continues to operate as if the truth were the inner secret workings of DOS, but still the RAND Corporation’s 2003 white paper on Iraq has finally made it to the light of day. More from TPM Muckraker, 

_____

CREW objects to Norman Bertram Coleman’s cozy does-he-pay-rent-or-not relationship with the Larsons. 

Not to worry. Normie’s got a new commercial coming out that alleges that Al Franken lived rent-free from 1951 until 1969 in some sort of ’60s-style communal living arrangement with Joseph, Owen and Phoebe (née Kunst) Franken in a quasi-kibbutz in St. Louis Park. While the ad doesn’t mention it, I understand Brodkorb has proof that Joe Franken was, unsurprisingly, named after “Uncle” Joe Stalin, a name so venerated in the Franken family that Al named his own son Joe in honor of the Soviet dictator.

Oh, and further rightwing scuttlebutt has it that the Franken family cat, Meow tse-Tung, was given a clitorectomy shortly after being adopted by the Frankens.

_____

Disco Stoo has a great video on the joys of voting Republican.

_____

Tis the season for McKnight fellows to cough up some product. More on visual art here, and the performing arts here. [Note: dancer #4 is a friend.]

_____

Tom Elko reports on the online backlash against Obama. Whether you’re pissed over FISA or his backstabbing of Wes Clark, people are pissed about Obama moving to the right in an effort to better position himself for the general election.

I have four words for those people: GROW THE FUCK UP.

Once you have a nominee, you eat shit salad and smile. Once I decided I couldn’t do that again, and I voted for Ralph Nader. I think we all know how that turned out. So I ate heaping helpfuls of John Kerry’s shit as he and his brain trust flubbed the ‘04 election. If you’re a Democrat, that’s what you do.

And, of course, words can’t begin to express the contempt I have for the PUMA crowd, there not being a nickel’s difference between HRC’s and BHO’s voting records. When I pushed Kerry, I was advocating for a man who was well to my right. All a Hillary supporter has to do to work for Obama is ignore Obama’s plumbing (his voting record on women’s rights is at least as good as Clinton’s).

McCain is not an acceptable alternative. Not now, not when we know that you can’t trust a Democratic Congress to stop Republican lawlessness. 

[Note to DFLers: you don't have a nominee, you have an endorsee — not the same thing but thanks to Al having a clear field, I'm laying off him even though he's not the nominee yet, just as I am with Obama. More from Clark.]

Oh hell: just watch this video Al Giordano’s got up.

_____

OK, I should be far enough down the page now. I know how much you love links dumps, so I’m hiding them deeper in the post.

Categorized for your discriminating protection:

REPUBLICANS

Why a woman you’ve never heard of will be McCain’s running mate

TBogg on Ass®ocket’s big paycheck (NOT!)

Mukasey invokes omerta privilege

Republican attack ads go viral

Bill Clinton’s attacks on Obama get recycled [because, as I said at the time, there are lines you don't cross, and the Clintons crossed them repeatedly]

 

BUSH

Documenting the atrocities (2007-present)

 

MORE CRIME NEWS

Chicago area Lao woman kills pregnant woman, takes baby

Agriprocessors denies running new Help Wanteds in Guatemala 

Last week, Iowa Independent reported that an Agriprocessors supervisor who sold used cars and gave favorable treatment to company employees had fled to Israel, according to people who knew him. A federal agent said in a sworn affidavit that there was “probable cause to believe” that the supervisor who sold used cars “aided in the harboring of illegal aliens.”

More on Agriprocessors

Iran Contra (cont.)

Buena Vista Dworkinist arrested for being a perv

British Wal*Mart bathroom policies attract attention

 

DEMOCRATS

DLCers applaud when Kos calls Joe Lieberman an asshole

John Cole defends Clark

Blue Texan contrasts Clark’s remarks and the 2000 Bush campaign’s McCain slurs

Al Giordano’s ongoing blog opera

 

TWIN CITIES/MN

Things fall apart (when the copper wiring gets stolen)

David Schultz: Ventura doesn’t have the money to run [WTF? Jesse on the ballot makes Norm a lock — the 'pugs would auction off their own grandmothers to Saudi slave traders to get money for Ventura to run with.]

In civilized states, they have their convention AFTER their primary (and then actually get things done instead of playing power games)

More on the T. Hussein Missippifarian name change

Pawlenty does yet another national talk show, has yet to be asked about the I-35 bridge collapse

Brauer gets in a shot:

The Strib test story notes that among schools with a majority of low-income kids, the best math-test performer was Tarek Ibn Ziyad Academy. Yes, that’s the Arabic-language charter school Strib columnist Katherine Kersten has crusaded against for allegedly impermissible Muslim practices; 84 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches; 86 percent reached math proficiency.

 

MEDIA

Fox News teams up with Alabama’s elected Republican thugs to terrorize innocent voters

Yet another rave blogger review for WALL*E

Last week’s winners

This week’s movie

 

RELIGION

More on Sally Quinn desecrating Russert’s funeral mass out of idle curiosity

S. Baptists: more blowjobs, less spousal abuse

Global search and replace: too much for the AFA to handle

Gone for the long weekend starting some time on Thursday. Back Monday late. In lieu of Mississippifarian posts, just type FUCK BUSH into Google and click on links at random.

And if you can’t say anything nice about Obama, consider just shutting the fuck up.

Lots of ways of linking to this story, but Digby’s always a safe intro. BMW Direct has been raising money for conservative candidates, but almost all the money raised goes to pay for the fundraising. 

If you understand the costs associated with direct mail, you know this isn’t a scandal so much as an incredibly stupid way to raise money, and that is the scandal: the stupidity, not the ineffective fundraising.

Fine for Republicans. Let them tap out their donors without that money helping to achieve anything other than paying the salaries at a fundraising firm.

What I would like to know is why Al Franken is still raising money this way. One of the ways in which Franken grabbed center stage last fall was with his fundraising numbers, numbers that oddly enough left him with less money in the bank than Norman Bertram Coleman.

Draft Ciresi! is still posting, but given the scarcity of comments over there I’m fairly sure they’re not getting any kind of audience. I think we’ve got about two more weeks before the filing deadline for the September primary, and I’m sorry to say it looks like Franken v Coleman.

My prediction: by next November most Minnesotans will despise both men with a passion that may shock the local punditariat.

ööööö

Scott Horton has six questions for Paul Alexander.

 

Karl Rove springs from what might easily be termed a dysfunctional family. His biological father abandoned his mother, Reba, when he was very young, and she remarried Louis Rove, a geologist, who shocked the family when Karl was 19 by announcing that he was gay, divorcing his wife, and moving away to California where he gained prominence for his devotion to nipple piercing. Yet according to James Moore, Rove maintained a loving, positive relationship with his adoptive father. You write that he had a cold relationship with Reba, who committed suicide and left behind a note to her sons that Rove summarized as “a classic fuck you gesture.” Also, Rove never wanted to have anything to do with his biological father. This background suggests that Rove on a personal level had no problems accepting his homosexual father and maintaining a father-son relationship with him, but on the political side, Rove’s relationship with homosexuality is dark and complex. You link Rove to whispering campaigns that persistently painted his political rivals, and at one point even his business partner, as gay because he knew this would damage them with their socially conservative base, and of course attacks on the civil rights of gays figure as one of his signature social issues. Does this show Rove’s crude Machiavellian instincts at play—his desire to score political points by exploiting the homophobia of target voters—or does all of this point to some unresolved issues from Rove’s childhood? How do you judge it?

From all indications, whatever issues Rove had concerning homosexuality left over from his teenage years—and he must have had some emotional challenges created when the man he thought was his father came out and left his mother when Karl was 19—he had resolved them by the time he was an adult. “I knew Louis Rove both in Los Angeles and when we retired to Palm Springs,” Joe Koons told me. “We were very close friends. He was my strongest friend at the time. We were like brothers…. As for his son Karl, Louis and Karl had a pleasant father-son relationship—very close. I would see Karl coming and going at Louis’s house when he visited him, particularly in Palm Springs. We would chat, Karl and I, often about politics. Karl knew his father was gay, of course. There was a group of us. For the most part, the men were very intelligent, well-to-do people, Louis among them.”

Despite his close relationship with his father, Rove would use homosexuality and gay rights as wedge issues in his career. Famously, he helped fuel a whisper campaign in the 1994 Texas gubernatorial race that implied Ann Richards was a lesbian—or at the very least sympathetic to gay people. At one point the whisper campaign went public when Bill Ratliff, a Rove client who was a state senator, called a press conference in Mount Pleasant and declared his concern about the number of lesbians Richards had working for her. The smear contributed to the defeat of Richards, who had a 60-plus percent approval rating on the day she lost to Bush.

In 2000, as part of the Rove-lead smear against John McCain in the South Carolina primary, McCain was labeled a “fag candidate,” because he had spoken to gay groups and taken essentially a libertarian position on homosexuality and some gay issues. But the 2004 race saw Rove’s most effective use of gay rights as a divisive issue. Rove had Bush propose a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, which led to a number of states adopting ballot initiatives. When conservative voters showed up to cast their vote for those initiatives, they also voted for Bush for president. Many analysts believe that that vote provided Bush with his slim margin of victory in 2004.

Machiavelli believed that the end justifies the means. The gay man’s son who is not homophobic using homosexuality and gay rights as wedge issues to win elections is the very definition of Machiavellian tactics.

 

There are five more questions and answers.

ööööö

Brian Lambert sorts through the latest patriotism flap. More from Steve Benen.

ööööö

A.G. Lori Swanson and ACORN: this doesn’t sound good. [Britt Robson has more.]

ööööö

Why is it that Republicans excel at shit that doesn’t mean a damned thing?

ööööö

When a federal appeals court bench, including one of the circuit’s most conservative jurists, openly mocks the Bush administration, you know the government’s position is pretty weak.

ööööö

I wasn’t that big a Blondie fan, but I know people who are going to feel pretty old when they hear that Debbie Harry turns 63 today. And if that doesn’t make you feel like a geezer, today is also the 29th birthday of the Walkman, the 36th anniversary of the first gay pride parade, the 28th anniversary of German reunification, Jamie “Klinger” Farr is 74, Karen Black is 69, and French waif Genevieve Bujold is 66. Other punks with b’days include Fred Schneider (57), and music fan Diana, Princess of Wales (47). 

Still feeling smug? Sufjan Stevens turned 33 today, Pam Anderson 41, and Liv Tyler 31.

But fuck the living, having hit 55 I’m now more obit-focused. Personal faves who died on this day in history include Juan Peron, Michael Landon (who will always be Little Joe to me — fuck LHOP), Wolfman Jack, Bob Mitchum, Walther Matthau, Herbie Mann and Marlon Brando. 

Countries observing national holidays today include Ghana, Hong Kong, Bulgaria, Surinam and Turkey. It also appears to be a holiday in that oversized national park just north of Minnesota.

ööööö

Demko on Norm Coleman’s curious living arrangement, but still no details on who warms that bed for him.

ööööö

A new Minnesota law takes effect today, allowing teens to sell their blood. Not at full price, of course. They get a special discounted “learner donor” rate that doesn’t go up until they’re homeless on their own, and no longer living with moms at the shelter.

We lost that war. We’re losing this one.

You know you’re reading the PiPress and not the Strib when you see:

A decent article on Tim Walz’s race down in CD1

Fresh reporting on local residential construction

A human interest story I haven’t already seen on local blogs

I’d love to see a j-school class do an audit of both the Strib and PiPress. Count the original stories, weight them, and divide by the number of reporters left on staff.

No special reason, just curious.

≤≤<>≥≥

Shorter Bob Herbert: Yes, it was all about oil.

≤≤<>≥≥

We already know that the Bushies have been treating our wounded like shit. Now we learn that they’ve abandoned our wounded Iraqi allies completely.

Worst scumfucking pieces of shit to ever go to the war. They may not be Nazis, but that’s because Nazis had a code of honor they lived by, however fucked up it was. We just have propagandists who swallow their own rhetoric, then puke up soundbytes for the bought and paid for corporate press.

≤≤<>≥≥

A small town in Missouri solves its drug problem by throwing out all the rules. 

Admittedly, it’s a tough choice: obey the law and watch your town go to hell, or break the law and bust the lawbreakers.

Except, they’re not lawbreakers so much as they are substance abusers, addicted to a cheaply manufactured product not unlike cocaine.

We’re all suffering through life during Bush, and I for one would never fault someone for having given up (having dropped out myself). America needs to be healed, and you do that with doctors and psychologists, not fruitloop security guards pretending to be federal officers.

Drug abuse isn’t the problem, just a symptom of our problems. And Lord only knows this country has a lot of problems thanks to the hard right’s 35-year war on the rest of us.

≤≤<>≥≥

Thomas Schaller says the Old South is stacked against Obama, and that there aren’t enough black votes to overcome the white racist vote.

I’ve never been to the deep South (for much the same reasons as I’d never want to travel back through time to Nazi Germany), but over the years I’ve met plenty of Southerners. I think they’re ready for a change. I think many whites are tired of and more than a little ashamed of their heritage, possibly because they’ve figured out that the same system that keeps blacks downtrodden in the South oppresses many poor whites as well.

Schaller’s one of the best GOTV analysts we’ve got, but I believe this will be the year all the old rules get thrown out the window. Obama isn’t flirting with FISA and stabbing Wes Clark in the back just because. He’s got a strategy and if it works, he will be leading a reUnited States of America.

≤≤<>≥≥

Hmm.

A former CIA operative who says he tried to warn the agency about faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs now contends that CIA officials also ignored evidence that Iran had suspended work on a nuclear bomb. 

The onetime undercover agent, who has been barred by the CIA from using his real name, filed a motion in federal court late Friday asking the government to declassify legal documents describing what he says was a deliberate suppression of findings on Iran that were contrary to agency views at the time.

The former operative alleged in a 2004 lawsuit that the CIA fired him after he repeatedly clashed with senior managers over his attempts to file reports that challenged the conventional wisdom about weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. Key details of his claim have not been made public because they describe events the CIA deems secret. 

Joby Warrick

 

The article says that this unnamed agent was forced to falsify his WMD reporting five separate times. 

So what? Scott Ritter established well beyond the shadow of a doubt that Bush was rushing to war in Iraq even though Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. 

Wait a day, then pop “Joby Warrick” into Google News to see how many other newspapers have picked up on this story. I’m betting the corporate bastards ignore this, like they ignore every story about Bush crimes. Even when the whistleblower is a 22-year CIA veteran who speaks Farsi and has worked undercover in Iran.

Once George Bush has made up his pea brain to do something, facts mean nothing, not to Bush, not to the sold-out government whores who enable him or the rightwing appointees who enforce Bush’s will, regardless of the law or any steenkin’ facts.

≤≤<>≥≥

True story (via Gene from DM who was there and saw it happen):

≤≤<>≥≥

This had to be embarrassing:

(Yes, I finally figured out how to turn an image into a link in WordPress, but I’m still trying to figure out how to make it open in a new window.)

It’s feeling a lot like 1992 right now. It’s also feeling a lot like 1980. But which parallel is closer? Is Barack Obama going to be a Ronald Reagan of the left, a president who fundamentally changes the country’s direction? Or will he be just another Bill Clinton?

Paul Krugman

What. The. Fuck. After listening to Krugman disparage Obama all spring, it’s a little galling to be reminded that the Krugster doesn’t respect Big Dog either. 

I wish he would stick to economics, because Krugman really doesn’t get how politics work.

…..

No link as I’m sure you’re just as sick and tired of her one-trick who-do-I-hate-today schtick as I am. 

…..

They won’t admit to it, but the real reason the Republicans are holding their convention here in the Twin Cities is because the Republican widow ladies all want to “touch” the legendary “big cannon” of St. Paul.

OK, that description of this picture is a joke. This is actually a picture of the Xcel smokestack being imploded. For some world-class erectile dysfunction video, go here.

…..

More video, this one of John McCain caught going pottymouthed on video!

And yes, that’s obviously spliced together, and I would expect all my readers to recognize BillO’s legendary video eruption as providing the lower half of McCain’s face.

…..

Tim F. at Balloon Juice pulls a nugget out of the news that the Army has rethought how to approach a major occupation. 

Rummy was so sure of instant victory, that his entire game plan was to install Chalabi and that was supposed to have been that.

Only a Republican (or a Democratic U.S. Senator) would assume that an oppressed people would just roll over and accept their new dictator. 

…..

Bob Barr isn’t just running for president, he’s trash talking the party that brung him to the Clinton impeachment hearings. Former House Impeachment Manager Barr now believes that whatever Big Dog did, George Bush has committed far worse crimes and is a better candidate for impeachment.

…..

Quote of the Day:

“Ann Coulter has more patriotic blood in one of her used tampons then you have in your whole body.”

As quoted by Romenesko

…..

Seymour Hersh is saying that Cheney’s gone all out to manufacture a war with Iran, ramping up covert action and misappropriating $400 million to get some shit started in country.

The dude’s got medical issues, use that as cover for forcing his retirement. Not to press Bush would be criminal, and any serious provocations by Cheney must be immediately defunded, with formal diplomatic apologies tendered.

Until Iran develops a missile that can hit the Atlantic Ocean (let alone our side of the big puddle), the only thing we have to fear is Dick Cheney himself. Enough of this childish make believe that we are endangered by countries that lack the technology to deliver a nuclear payload. Ahmadinejad could swipe every nuclear warhead in Russia, but without their ICBMs, he can’t get those warheads from Iran to the U.S. unless he FedExes them.

…..

Digby takes note of the severe confusion on the right as Sean Hannity does cranial 360°s while talking to John “I got my dick sucked at Plato’s Retreat” Bolton. (See also dday on the ‘pugs and North Korea.)

And then, for equal time’s sake, Digby disembowels the so-called liberal hostess with the mostest in the Beltway, WaPost pseudo-religious editor Sally Quinn. Be warned: this story includes tales of transubstantiation and probably shouldn’t be read by impressionable young’uns.

If you had time for that, you’re primed for another religious bit from Digby. This one features Bill Moyers and a lefty mantra that’s treated like a shibboleth despite being the most accurate summary of Bush foreign policy ever: no blood for oil. 

…..

On Dec. 5, 1962, comedian Lenny Bruce was arrested in a Chicago nightclub — not for fighting or flinging beer bottles but for obscenity. His comedy routine, which typically used lots of four-letter words, was too raw for police to tolerate.

But he wasn’t the only one hauled in by the cops. So were two people in the audience, one of them, the Chicago Tribune reported, “George Carlin, 25, of 20 E. Delaware Pl” — the same Carlin who died this week at age 71.

Chicago Tribune editorial

Yes, more George Carlin appreciations:

Dennis Hartley  with 7 movies you can’t see on TV

And Couch Pundit has Carlin’s first closeup

…..

Another movie post, this one claiming that WALL*E is the best thing on screen since, well, anyhow, it’s a classic.

Pixar is to animation what Apple is to computers.

…..

High school buddy Dan D. sent this insanely inspired video about found drumming opportunities, and that reminded me of the Norwegian video of a band playing major appliances.

It’s Monday, lighten up — the day will drag you down fast enough.

Read Jon Tevlin’s excellent in-depth article, There’s something bad in this town.

 

Rabbi Allen of Beth Jacob Congregation knew about Agriprocessors’ problems a long time before the raid. He knew the most recent CEO, Sholom Rubashkin, who for a time lived in St. Paul’s Highland Park before moving to Postville. After reading an article critical of the company, Allen led a delegation of Twin Cities rabbis to Postville in 2006.

Workers told story after story of long hours, unsafe conditions and wages as low as $5 an hour. They told him many of the same things now in court documents.

“They appeared to me to do everything possible to maximize the bottom line at the expense of human dignity,” Allen said of the plant owners.

The Minnesota rabbis tried to work with the Rubashkins. “I think if they had followed our advice, this may never have happened,” he said.

Allen is now leading a national movement to create a certification program called Hekhsher Tzedek, much like fair trade agreements, which would ensure not only that kosher meat is prepared properly, but also that workers are treated fairly.

 

Jews in the Midwest weren’t blindsided by this scandal, and tried to get the Lubavitchers to obey the law. It was never a secret what the Rubashkins were up to. From day one word got out all over northern Iowa about the bigoted Jews who’d moved to Postville. Initially, this transplanted community rejected all welcoming efforts and determinedly kept to themselves, refusing to even engage in small talk with locals. And the locals, understandably, took deep offense. So much so that Agriprocessors launched a PR effort to improve community relations (without having to mingle with the locals anymore than was absolutely necessary).

But what I don’t understand is why the locals turned a blind eye to the Guatemalans. Only an idiot would think that our government had granted work visas to that many Central Americans. 

This is one of the last chapters in a long and sordid story about Iowa labor. When I was active in that movement in the ’70s, meatpacking unions across the state were under constant fire. It’s a vicious industry, and men who own plants that profit from selling meat, blood and guts aren’t squeamish about breaking unions. But the men who worked in packing plants were hard cases as well, and most of the packers ended up shutting down their plants rather than continue to pay union wages (living wages earned through demanding physical labor). 

This was but a part of the great labor realignment Reagan brought with him. In Reagan’s first term, Iowa lost over ten percent of their work force. Tens and tens of thousands of Iowans were forced to leave the state to find employment.

Came the ’80s and Terry Branstead became governor. Branstead opened the doors to Iowa Beef Packers, and they swooped into Iowa with a vengeance, buying up old packing plants for pennies on the dollar and then bringing in Mexican laborers because even out-of-work Iowans wouldn’t do packing house work for the low wages offered by IBP.

It got so bad that state Attorney General Tom Miller sent letters out to every conceivable Hispanic organization warning them that IBP’s wages and working conditions did not offer decent job opportunities. The fact was that the Mexican workers ended up living in crowded apartments because they didn’t make enough money to pay rent. Despite having dangerous jobs, they had no health insurance, and IBP quickly developed a record of lying about workplace injuries. The workers were mostly men living apart from their families, locked into low wage jobs that didn’t permit them to bring their families to Iowa.

Agriprocessors simply moved into an existing bad situation, then proceeded to make it worse.

Read Tevlin’s article. It is only because of the lawless nature of the Bush administration that Agriprocessors’ owners are not facing trial. And God help them if they ever are put on trial. Kosher meat is a monopoly, and Agriprocessors could have raised their prices at any time, allowing them to easily pay living wages to legal employees. They chose not to. They chose to break labor laws, they chose to dehumanize their workers, they chose to reject the embrace of the local community and to instead develop an insular community.

It’s that last bit that’s the most telling. The Lubavitchers moved from Brooklyn to rural Iowa, and then sealed themselves off so their children wouldn’t be contaminated by the locals. To them, there was no difference between the gangs of Brooklyn and the church softball leagues of northeastern Iowa. They could have paid high wages without significantly impacting their sales (it’s good to have a monopoly on a product that’s endorsed by your religion).

I think the Jewish community need to recognize that within their faith, they harbor bigots every bit as vile as the worst Aryan Nation villains. And no, I don’t think I’m telling them anything new. I’m just encouraging Jews to be more open in their rejection of extremist beliefs. Postville was never in danger of becoming the Jewish Waco, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a strong element of Branch Davidian nuttiness permeating the Lubavitcher movement, a religious sect as fucked up as anything Sun Myung Moon or Jim Jones ever concocted. Seriously, on a theological level, the Mormon faith makes more sense than the bastardized Judaism practiced by Lubatvitchers, a personality-centered cult that should have disbanded when Rebbe Schneerson died.

Chabad Hasidim believe that there is no successor to Schneerson and all the suggested successors declined the mantle of leadership in the days after his death. Chabad Hasidim believe that he is still their leader, guiding them from beyond the grave through prayer and signs. Some Chabad Hasidim believe that he will return as the Messiah; this view has led to controversy with other Orthodox groups and within Chabad itself. Some, quoting Talmudic passages and statements that Schneerson himself made, refuse to put the typical honorifics that Jews normally use for the dead after his name. Schneerson’s messianism or divinity is not advocated in any of Chabad’s official literature, but such literature is published and distributed by people who hold that belief. Chabad-Lubavitch leaders have repeatedly condemned the Meshichists (messianists) in the strongest possible terms.

Wikipedia

Kudos to the Twin Cities Jewish community for recognizing the problems being created by these transplanted Lubavitchers early on, and for trying to help fix a situation that predictably blew up in everyone’s faces.

And congratulations to Jon Tevlin for capturing so many different aspects of this complex story. Read the whole thing — each online page documents still more atrocities as the anti-labor beliefs of Ronald Reagan accumulated in one vile misogynist management experiment that all but destroyed a once prosperous Iowa community.

(This is just a picture of how they mistreated the animals. What they did to their workers was worse.)