Book of the Month "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!": A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959 by Erik Schaefer |
You are a New Left Hipster, also known as a MoveOn.org liberal, Netroots activist, or Daily Show fanatic. You believe that if we really want to defend American values, conservative hatriots must be exposed and mocked for every fanatical, puritanical, soulless, paranoid, fact-free, obstructionist ideal for which they stand.
Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com
Regular readers of this blog know that I am leaving tomorrow on the Air America Cruise to the so-called "Mexican Riviera". As a result, I am going dark for a while.
Thank you for reading, and I look forward to coming back to you in ten days or so.
And, for all of you who are going to be on the cruise with us, here are graphic representations of the ID badges that I and She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed will be wearing. If you see us, please come up and introduce yourselves.
One of the popular Religious Right arguments against the separation of church and state goes something like this: The Founding Fathers were all Christians, so therefore the United States was founded on Christian principles.
This is a classic error, a logical fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc ("after this, therefore because of this"). But those morons are good at that. They can point to the 1960s-era Supreme Court decisions about prayer in school, claiming (erroneously) that the court kicked god out of the classroom, and that following those decisions, American society went to hell in a handbasket. You can pick out any supreme court ruling and say that the country immediately went to hell because of it. Try Brown vs. Board of Education, for example, which, as everyone knows, was a 9-0 decision on school desegregation. Unless you're a Strom Thurmond cheerleader like Trent Lott, no one rational person tries to make the case that school integration caused, say, the US intervention in SE Asia and its consequent rending of the fabric of society.
The genius of the framers of the Constitution is that they were able to construct a completely secular document in spite of their religious beliefs, not because of them.
But good luck on convincing any of those mouthbreathing knuckledraggers over on the Fundo-Xian end of the scale. By definition they are not rational people.
I've posted before on the various attempts by historical revisionists to reframe the Vietnam War into something we could have "won" if it weren't for those goddam [insert favorite scapegoat here: the media, the war protesters, the "civilians" in charge of the military, the "doves" in Congress, etc etc etc] back in the good ole USA who "lost" the war for us.
Now I see there's yet another new book out playing that same tired old song. I won't identify it here because I don't want to give the fucker any additional web traffic or book sales out of my website, but I will refer you to an excellent piece by H.D.S. Greenway entitled Revisionist Approach to Vietnam, wherein he takes on the author of the book and, more importantly, the conclusions the author came to:
Today there is a school of thought that says Tet was a terrible defeat for the Communist Vietnamese, that it should never have caused us to flinch, that the war was basically won by 1972, and that if we had only stayed the course we would have won it. Henry Kissinger has said as much, whole generations of soldiers were told that, and, it seems, that many around President Bush believe it as well.Go read the whole thing. Greenway says the same thing as me, as thousands of other Vietnam veterans, all of whom were there and saw it for our own eyes, that the Vietnam War was never "winnable" in any real military sense.
When Iraq became the quagmire it is, I used to wonder how we could make the same mistake again so soon. But then I realized that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were in the Oval office with President Ford when Saigon fell. Perhaps they, and the worshipers of American power, felt that, this time, we would get it right.
Over at Talk to Action (a site with which I am so impressed that it now appears in my links list), Bruce Wilson has reprinted a fable about a young man in Germany who starts out attending a school with the Ten Commandments hanging on the wall.
Johan Lehrer, the "hero" of the story, lives a life wherein he always strives to do the right thing. However, in the course of that life, he also ends up violating each and every one of the Big Ten. Read his sad tale, and then tell me if you want this fable being taught in your public school "Bible class".
This is brilliant satire; as one of the commenters on that page noted, it is right up there with Voltaire's Candide, with its incisive bite into the soft underbelly of "religious" society.
It's well worth the read, even if Bruce Wilson still seems to be a little taken aback by it.
Just in case anyone thinks that the only people crabbing about the Iraq War Illegal Occupation are us old and bitter veterans of Vietnam, plus a bunch of crabby old ladies and other assorted left-wing types, here's a story out of Texas, Fort Hood soldiers breaking the silence in war in Iraq.
Excerpts:
...some vets feel it's their duty to let the American public know the truth.And that's from the mouths of people who really know what's being done in Iraq in the name of the American people. In fact, if you change just the time period, they are saying the same things as a lot of soldiers home from Vietnam said way back when.
"The honest truth is that if the American people knew what was going on over there everyday, they would be raising their voices too. They would be saying, 'Hey, bring those guys home," Sgt. Selena Coppa said.
Coppa blames lawmakers in Washington for filtering the facts on the war in Iraq. She said there's no real end in sight.
"There is a cost to this war. This war is being paid in American blood, in my soldier's blood. And that is not okay".... . ."We lost really good friends, really good leaders who died in Iraq. From my perspective, it didn't make any sense, we didn't accomplish anything, and I talked to a lot of other soldiers who feel the same way," Fort Hood soldier Casey Porter said.
I swear you can't make this shit up. A library in Loudon, Virginia, has removed from the children's library section a children's book called And Tango Makes Three.
Because the book is about -- gasp! -- two male penguins who hatch an egg and parent a chick.
Never mind that this is something that actually happens in the wild, that those precious little innocent eyes can see on, say, the Nature Channel, Animal Planet or National Geographic.
Never mind that this is based on the story of two real-life penguins at New York's Central Park Zoo.
Never mind that this is a heart-warming story about love and family and making it together in the cold world.
No, exactly one snippy parent complained, and suddenly the book was taken off the shelves. All because it promotes that terrible "homosexual agenda" -- whatever the fuck that is. The gay people that I know have pretty much the same agenda as me: Food, clothing, shelter, friends, family, happiness. You know, all that stuff that "real men" or "real women" apparently eschew in their rush to be oh-so-NOT-gay.
Give me a break. Give me a fucking break.
Over at the Carpetbagger Report, Steve Benen has a deliciously insightful deconstruction of that White House "Official Myth vs. Fact" sheet on exactly why it's such a freakin' national disaster that Congress refused to pass that FISA bill.
Excerpts:
MYTH: If any new surveillance needs to begin, the FISA court can approve a request within minutes. In the case of an emergency, surveillance can begin immediately and FISA approval can be obtained later.Or how about this one:
FACT: Reverting to the outdated FISA statute risks our national security. FISA's outdated provisions created dangerous intelligence gaps, which is why Congress passed the Protect America Act in the first place.
STEVE: Um, guys? In this case, the "fact" does not disprove the "myth." In fact, it's a non sequitur. The White House presented a "myth," apparently in the hopes of disproving it, and then didn't point to any evidence that actually undermined the veracity of the original claim, which, inconveniently, happens to be accurate.
MYTH: The future security of our country does not depend on whether Congress provides liability protection for companies being sued for billions of dollars only because they are believed to have assisted the Government in defending America after the 9/11 attacks.I guess this is just another example of how fucking stupid the BFEE really thinks we are. And I guess by and large we are -- we just keep letting them get away with it since to do otherwise would "embolden" the terrorists. Remember the BFEE motto: You're either with us or you're with the terrorists.
FACT: Without the retroactive liability protection provided in the bipartisan Senate bill, we may not be able to secure the private sector's cooperation with current and future intelligence efforts critical to our national security.
STEVE: That may sound nice, but this "fact" is plainly false. This administration, or any future administration, can secure the private sector's cooperation with a court order.
The latest media storm surrounding the election concern charges from someone in the Clinton camp that Barack Obama stole from speeches of Mass. Gov Deval Patrick. Accusations are flying faster than donuts at a police convention, but what is the truth? Is it plagiarism or not?
Those who are quick to level the charges seem to be trying to equate a political stump speech with a research paper. But they are not equivalent forms of communication. A research paper, by its very nature, has to be original, and any "borrowings" that are not footnoted with the source acknowledged are considered, with good cause, in all of Academia to be plagiarism, and god help anyone, from freshman to doctoral candidate, who gets nailed for doing it. I've spent enough time, both as a student and as a college instructor, in the Groves of Academe to know what I'm talking about.
A political stump speech, to my way of thinking, is less like a research paper and more like a symphony. If you listen to both of them, you'll see they contain the same kind of movements and pacing: adagio, allegro, allegro non tropo, etc. Neither a political stump speech nor a symphony is intended to inform; they are both intended to work at the emotional level.
The inclusion of bits and pieces from other orchestral works has a long and varied history in classical music, to the point where it even has its own name: "Musical quotation". (See also From ancient Greece to John Williams: music has always been the same.)
And that, I submit, is why Obama's use of something said in another political stump speech by his friend Deval Patrick is the political equivalent of musical quotation; it is not "plagiarism".
My good friend BAC over at Yikes! got this from our mutual friend D-Cup at Politits. According to D-Cup, "It appears that the rules by which Technorati, Google and other important social websites and search engines rank blogs do not take blogrolls into consideration but do count links within posts". I don't know if this is true, but just in case, here's a repeat of my blogroll to fake out those search engines:
It has now been 1360 days since Jenna and Not-Jenna Bush, the slacker offspring of Preznit Numnutz, graduated from college and they are still not in the uniform of the US armed services.
Why? Because they have other priorities. They are too busy partying down in Georgetown, Argentina and god-knows-where-else to show their support for the war by enlisting their chickenhawk-child selves into the military service, that's why.
Grandpa McCain said so a while back -- "the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation", but immediately had to backpedal a bit to say we are "a nation founded on Judeo-Christian principles".
And that's a corner that you can back a lot of Fundo Xians into when they start spouting that "Christian Nation" bullshit, but they tend to stop there, dig in their heels and insist that the United States was founded on "Christian principles" (ironically, as we shall see, they tend not to give the Jews a lot of credit in these things).
Usually when the subject comes up, it's within the Fundo-Xian snake-handling bible-thumping tradition that, for example, excoriates those liberal-atheistic-commie-pinko activist judges in the Federal courts for telling Judge Roy Moore that he couldn't display on public property that giant carved rock containing the Ten Commandments, or some such similar nonsense. And note that it's almost always some kind of rabid frothing at the mouth over the "suppression" of the Ten Commandments -- other bibilical topics get pretty short shrift with these people.
Okay, so maybe they have a point: Maybe the United States was founded on the Ten Commandments. I think an examination of the appropriate part of the so-called Holy Bible is in order. So here, complete and unexpurgated, is the section of Exodus wherein can be found the Big Ten:
Exodus 20And there you go. Now let's take a look at the US Constitution and see how many of these holy-writ directions from god ended up there.
1 And God spake all these words, saying,
2 I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;
6 And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
7 Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
9 Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:
10 But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:
11 For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
12 Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.
13 Thou shalt not kill.
14 Thou shalt not commit adultery.
15 Thou shalt not steal.
16 Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
17 Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.
As with most things that have to do with this issue, most people think that they know everything, but since a lot of them have diametrically opposed ideas, they can't all be right.
The Freedom from Religion Foundation has created a fun little online quiz, so you can see how your knowledge of this important issue stacks up against reality. Go ahead and take it, see where you fall on this critical area of knowledge.
Naturally I'm not the only one to question the motives behind wingnut radio slinging mud at the man who has the lock on the Rethug nomination.
In Reading the Tea Leaves of Today's Biggest Broadcast Idiot, P M Carpenter rings in on what he calls "the biggest, fattest, most conservative broadcast idiot of them all" (Rush Dope-Addict Limp-Dick Limbaugh, in case you didn't already guess it):
I write, of course, of Rush Limbaugh, he of 13.5-million weekly listeners who, it would seem, wouldn't know serious political philosophy from botany. If you've ever been gripped by sufficient masochism to tune in, you know what I mean. There they are, the fawning, sycophantic dupes of dittodom, queued up on the switchboard, hankering to get at Rush so they can regurgitate his wretched unenlightenment from the Dark Ages.I am a devotee of so-called "Old Time Radio", so I have some recordings of the infamous Father Coughlin, and yes, I can see that there are some striking similarities between the fascist-apologizing freedom-hating Coughlin and the bloviating Missouri gasbag. In their respective times, they each were the biggest non-elected (and unelectable) demagogues in the nation.. . .Rush may in fact represent less of an actual, loosely organized mass movement than merely a massive intellectual bowel movement.. . .When it's all over, I'm venturing, this most reactionary of broadcast idiots will be found to have held only a negligible sway over his presumed legions of lapdogs -- and he may even soon go the way of his equally offensive and finally beyond-the-pale broadcasting forebear, Father Coughlin...
McCain, however, may wish that Limbaugh's voice grows even louder. Because returning again to the era of Father Coughlin, Rush represents what Franklin Roosevelt denounced as "government by organized money" -- "the old enemies of peace, business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism [and] war profiteering" who were aligned in rabid opposition to the New Deal. But rather than accommodating them, rather than seeking peace with them, rather than staging powwows of compromise, Roosevelt announced: "I welcome their hatred." He then cleaned their clocks in the '36 election.Like I said before, this whole thing seems just a little too calculated, a little too neatly wrapped, for it to be what some of us out here in Left Blogistan would like to see, which is nothing short of an implosion in the Rethug Party. Keep watching.
If McCain is shrewd -- and I think he is -- he will return the same fire against the on-air reactionaries and extremists of today, and thereby gain the allegiance of moderates and independents who otherwise would quake at the thought of a presidential candidate in bed with the malignant likes of a Rush Limbaugh.
In short, as Rush himself has suggested, his alienation from McCain may be the best thing that could have happened to McCain. The extreme right is shrinking, and Rush's intimation would seem to verify that he even he knows that. It's out of whack with the times, an aging and dying ideological dinosaur whose cranky intrusion into this race could cause any candidate more injury than benefit.
Snuggly is one of my favorite cartoon characters, created by the exceptionally talented and hilariously funny Mark Fiore.
In the current episode, Spies Who Love You, Snuggly says that the terrorists want to undermine our constitution and our way of life, so we have to do it before they do.
Remember: "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." -- Der Monkey Fuehrer, Aug 5, 2004.
Total American dead in the Iraq Illegal Occupation: 2500 2513 2532 2540 2546 2558 2571 2585 2597 2605 2619 2641 2710 2737 2758 2788 2809 2826 2865 2888 2906 2959 3006 3018 3025 3067 3087 3118 3132 3151 3166 3189 3210 3233 3245 3266 3299 3316 3337 3358 3387 3409 3444 3504 3519 3546 3577 3592 3611 3631 3683 3705 3725 3738 3760 3780 3795 3823 3830 3838 3845 3866 3875 3881 3886 3891 3896 3908 3921 3932 3943 3952 3960
Total coalition forces dead: 307
Total Iraqi Dead: 700,000+
Number of days since Baby Doc said he'd get Osama Bin Laden "dead or alive": 2347
Number of days since the illegal occupation of Iraq began: 1808
Number of days since "Mission Accomplished": 1750
Number of days between Pearl Harbor and the end of WWII: Only 1347
Number of days that the the Vice President has NOT shot a man in the face: 736
Number of days that the Bush Twins are still not pregnant with baste-'em-or-waste-'em Snowflake babies: 575.
It is still 337 days until the end of the BFEE Maladministration.
Wanna know why Barack Obama had that unforeseen and unprecedented series of lopsided victories this month?
Easy. February is Black History Month!
Way back when (before I really got a good look at him), I had a lot of respect for John McCain. Yeah, I know, it was naive of me, and I'd actually been flirting with that whole "Rethug with a human face" thing. In August of 2005 I even posted an entry about Bill Orally lecturing McCain (of all people) about torture:
O'Reilly: "Cheney doesn't want any restrictions on the detainee interrogations. OK? And he's adamant about it."And later that year, McCain led a drive to put anti-torture language into a military spending bill. In 2006 McCain sponsored the Detainee Treatment Act which included a ban on waterboarding, which Der Monkey Fuehrer essentially invalidated by one of those nifty little "signing statements" arrogating to himself the authority to just ignore any law that he doesn't agree with.
. . .
McCain: "Don't think that you get anything out of torture, Bill, because you don't. And I know that for a fact." [Emphasis added]
Okay, students. Put on your thinking caps and tell me which prominent US politician said this:
However, on religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly.So who do you think? Ted Kennedy? Hillary Clinton? Barack Obama? Barney Frank? Former Chief Justice Earl Warren? Former Justice William Douglas?
The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C," and "D" Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?
And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism."
Way back in August of last year, at one of those "Ask Mittens Anything" forums in Iowa, back when he still had delusions that he could actually get the nomination, Mitt Romney was asked why his sons have not served in the military. His answer was as stupid as it was arrogant:
My sons are adults. They've chosen not to serve in the military in active duty and I respect their decision in that regard. … And one of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping me get elected because they think I'd be a great president.He also said that "the way his sons are showing support for the military of our nation is to buy a Winnebago and tour across Iowa and help him get elected."
It is an odd formula, but I guess that it's worked so well in the past that they keep going back to the same well.
This morning Der Monkey Fuehrer was issuing one of his most dire warnings ever (cue scary music): The goal of terrorists using telephones is to "bring destruction to our shores that will make September 11 pale by comparison". Jesus, he all but invoked that "smoking gun-mushroom cloud" meme again.
Coincidentally, almost at the same time he was trying to scare the shit out of us, a story came out of New York about the NYPD setting up a fake company that bought 300 pounds of liquid chlorine and had it delivered to an address in Brooklyn, without hassle, and even without much human intervention.
Now maybe it's just me, but you'd think that an administration that was hell-bent on protecting us from terrorists would have, by now, over six years after 9-11, have thought this through and put some kind of limits on who, how and where anyone could buy that much chlorine.
Chlorine gas, just in case you didn't know, is a deadly poison that was used by insurgents in Iraq as far back as February 2007 to kill not only other Iraqis but also American troops.
More scared does not equal more safe. That's just the way THEY want you to see it.
[HT to Rachel Maddow for this piece of news -- if it hadn't been for her mentioning it on her show today, I wouldn't have seen it, since a Google News search for "NYPD chlorine" returns exactly two -- and only two -- Associated Press stories...]
I don't mean to go all tinfoil hat here, but I have a sneaking suspicion that all this storm in the wingnuttery, how they hate McCain, mAnn Coulter would rather vote for Hillary, etc etc, is all thunder and no lightning. I think it's an elaborate scam to convince more liberal or centrist voters to take a chance on McCain.
After all, if Limpdick Limbaugh, Slanthead Hannity and the Wicked Witch of the Airwaves all hate him, then there must be something about him to like. You know, it's the whole "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing.
Bullshit.
It's all a bunch of smoke and mirrors, designed by the Rovian puppetmasters in the Rethug party, to make McCain seem more "human" to the centrists, the sunshine liberals, and those who say they will never vote for Hillary.
Again, bullshit.
That's what Farnsworth says…
Apparently I'm not the only one who is hearing some distant echoes from 1968. Stephen Pizzo over at OpEdNews.com has his own analysis of the oddly echoing parallels between 1968 and this year.
Check out Chicago 1968 - Denver 2008:
· In 1968 support for the Vietnam war had hit new lows.Adding to this strange brew is the odd coincidence that both conventions will start almost exactly on the same date (Aug 26 in 1968, Aug 25 in 2008) forty years apart.
· In 2008 support for the war in Iraq has reached new lows.
· In 1968 the Democratic Party insider candidate, Humphrey, had supported the war and, while public option was increasingly for withdrawal, he preached against a mandated withdrawal from Vietnam, deeming such a withdrawal as reckless and potentially dangerous to US security.
· In 2008 the Democratic Party insider candidate, Hillary Clinton, who was for the war until she was against it, now argues against a rapid withdrawal or setting a hard timeline for withdrawal.
· In 1968 an unconventional, anti-war candidate -- Senator Gene McCarthy, captured the imagination and rekindled the hopes of a new generation of voters, even bridging racial divides garnering support from civil rights groups including the Black Panthers.
· In 2008 an unconventional, anti-war candidate -- Senator Barack Obama, has captured the imagination and rekindled the hopes of a new generation of voters, again bridging historical racial divides.
It has now been 1353 days since Jenna and Not-Jenna Bush, the slacker offspring of Preznit Numnutz, graduated from college and they are still not in the uniform of the US armed services.
Why? Because they have other priorities. They are too busy partying down in Georgetown, Argentina and god-knows-where-else to show their support for the war by enlisting their chickenhawk-child selves into the military service, that's why.
And it's not just The Twins: ONLY ONE member of the extended Bush family has seen fit to volunteer for military service. Check out the Buzzflash analysis of the chickenshit Bush/Cheney extended family and see for yourself. There's even a photo taken in 2000 of the extended Bush family, complete with a whole lot of young fresh faces who seem to be of an age now to be eligible to enlist.
Little Georgie Bush, the son of Jebbie, has enlisted in the Naval Reserve. He's going into the Officer Training Program, preparing to be ... an intelligence officer. Okay, the obvious jokes aside, what are the chances he's ever going to see Iraq? Especially since he apparently hasn't actually even put on the uniform yet, even though he "enlisted" way last year.
And I see in the news that little Jenna has set a date to marry her boyfriend, one Henry Hager. Wanna bet that he won't be wearing a uniform anytime soon? Like ever? Unlike the husbands of the daughters of Lyndon Johnson, both of whom went into the service and were sent to Vietnam.
Bush and Cheney were cowards during Vietnam who sent other men off to die in their place. Now the next generation is doing its part, sending their own peers off to die instead of them.
Why can't the Twins be more like their royal counterparts in the UK? The British Royal Family, unlike the Bush Crime Family, has a centuries-long tradition of honorable military service. Prince Andrew was a combat helicopter pilot in La Guerra de las Malvinas (aka the Falklands War) and Prince Harry, until the decision was made not to send him, was on his way to Iraq as a cavalry lieutenant. But even though he's not on his way to The Sandbox, he's still in uniform.
Will the Bush Twins follow his example?
No, they will not. They are fucking cowards like their father and their Uncle Dick(less) Cheney.
Be sure to check out The Yellow Elephant blog, which asks the question "It's their war; why aren't they fighting it?"
BTW, the twins are also still not pregnant with their own Snowflake Babies. If they can't join the service, the least they could do would be to get themselves impregnated with a couple of blastocytes that would otherwise go into the garbage.
Remember what Farnsworth always says: Baste 'em, don't waste 'em.
Article II, Section 1, of the United States Constitution prescribes the following oath or affirmation, required to be uttered by each and every president upon taking office:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.So wouldn't it be a good idea for a presidential candidate to actually know what's in it?
I intend to nominate judges who have proven themselves worthy of our trust that they take as their sole responsibility the enforcement of laws made by the people's elected representatives. Judges -- judges of the character and quality of Justices Roberts and Alito, justices who can be relied upon to respect the values of the people whose rights, laws and property they are sworn to defend.Jeez, there is just so much wrong with that statement, but I'll just latch onto the inconvenient fact that the Judicial Branch does not have the duty or responsbility to enforce laws. That's the job of the Department of Justice, which is part of the Executive Branch.
In Washington State, where I live (out here on the Left Coast), the Democratic Party chooses its delegates using the caucus method, where Democrats in the various voting precincts statewide meet and decide the direction that the party should take.
Delegates to the county conventions are chosen at these caucuses, and from those county conventions delegates are chosen to the various congressional districts, and from there to the national convention.
So the precinct is the most basic element of Democratic Party politics, and I am proud to say that I was an active participant in democracy at its most grassroots level.
I was at my local precinct caucus from about 11:30 (I showed up early to volunteer to help) until just about an hour ago. Talk about pandemonium!
Our facility was a retired Junior High that is now being used as the school district HQ. By 12:45 we had a full auditorium and a line snaking out the door, down the hall and around the parking lot. At one point one of the other volunteers came in and said the crowd was getting unruly, so I went out and talked to them. Although I felt like I needed a whip and a chair, I did manage to calm them down -- among other things, I used my favorite Will Rogers quote on them: "I don't belong to an organized political party; I'm a Democrat". Once you get people to laugh, it's pretty hard for them to go back to being angry.
I would guess that there were well over 1,000 people there, spread (rather unevenly) over six precincts (which was a far cry from the off-year caucus two years ago, when the same six precincts had a total of about 13 people).
Finally we split up into our respective precincts and mine (Olympia 48) in the first round was something like 32 Obama, 4 Clinton, 3 Undecided, 1 Kucinich, and 1 Richardson.
After a lobbying effort, two of the Undecideds switched over to Clinton and the Richardson came over to Obama, with the end result that out of our seven delagates to the county convention, Obama got six (of which I am one) and Clinton got one.
I was on my feet all that time, since I was simultaneously lobbying for Obama, helping people find their precinct sign-in sheet, running around putting out fires, etc., so right now I am experiencing a very weird combination of exhaustion and elation.
But it is democracy at its most basic -- and its finest -- level and it was worth every single minute of it.
Total American dead in the Iraq Illegal Occupation: 2500 2513 2532 2540 2546 2558 2571 2585 2597 2605 2619 2641 2710 2737 2758 2788 2809 2826 2865 2888 2906 2959 3006 3018 3025 3067 3087 3118 3132 3151 3166 3189 3210 3233 3245 3266 3299 3316 3337 3358 3387 3409 3444 3504 3519 3546 3577 3592 3611 3631 3683 3705 3725 3738 3760 3780 3795 3823 3830 3838 3845 3866 3875 3881 3886 3891 3896 3908 3921 3932 3943 3952
Total coalition forces dead: 307
Total Iraqi Dead: 700,000+
Number of days since Baby Doc said he'd get Osama Bin Laden "dead or alive": 2340
Number of days since the illegal occupation of Iraq began: 1801
Number of days since "Mission Accomplished": 1743
Number of days between Pearl Harbor and the end of WWII: Only 1347
Number of days that the the Vice President has NOT shot a man in the face: 729
Number of days that the Bush Twins are still not pregnant with baste-'em-or-waste-'em Snowflake babies: 568.
It is still 344 days until the end of the BFEE Maladministration.
UPDATE: I heard today that Shooter Cheney is spending the weekend back at the scene of the crime, that tame-dove "sport shooting" game ranch down in Texas. I guess the poor old man who got shot in the face isn't going this time. "Unavoidable conflict" in his scheduling. Oh, well, we can always hope that he's going to take someone like Scalia with him, Scalia who didn't have any problems going fishing with Cheney at the same time a court case involving Cheney was coming in front of the Supremes.
No, really. I know there exists a peculiar mindset among veterans that predisposes them to vote for McCain because "he's one of us", he knows the trials and tribulations that veterans have gone through, etc etc ad inifinitum ad nauseum.
Bullshit.
Just take a look at former Army sergeant Michael Bailey's compilation of the voting records of the top three existing candidates, McCain, Clinton and Obama, at What Veterans Should Know in Order to Vote.
Check out these statistics, all of them based on their respective 2006 voting records in the Senate:
· McCain supported the interests of the Disabled American Veterans 20 percent.These are not minor issues. These are issues of utmost importance to veterans. And you can see that both Democratic candidates outpaced McCain by a long shot in nearly every category.
· Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America gave McCain a grade of D.
· McCain sponsored or co-sponsored 18 percent of the legislation favored by the The Retired Enlisted Association.
· Clinton supported the interests of the Disabled American Veterans 80 percent.
· Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America gave Clinton a grade of A-.
· Clinton sponsored or co-sponsored 41 percent of the legislation favored by the The Retired Enlisted Association in 2006.
· Obama supported the interests of the Disabled American Veterans 80 percent.
· Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America gave Obama a grade of B+.
· Obama sponsored or co-sponsored 12 percent of the legislation favored by the The Retired Enlisted Association.
It's kind of a neat little set of bookends. Rotten Rudy G (sounds like a rap artist, doesn't it?) thought he was the front runner, but as the campaign went on and people got to know him, his numbers trailed off to the point where they vanished. He ended up dropping out before Super Tuesday.
Jeez, who could've seen that coming...
Obama is just the opposite. The more people get to know him, the more support he gets. It's not a coincidence that he won big yesterday in the states where he actually showed up in person. As the campaign progresses and more people get to know who he is, the more those numbers will climb.
The media has gone out of its way to call various states as supporting either Obama or Clinton, but given the way that delegates are proportionally allocated based on the relative percentages of the votes -- as opposed to the Rethug "winner take all" rules -- it's pretty much a meaningless distinction. It doesn't matter who won a given state, but who won the most delegates. That's what Nevada proved: Clinton won "the state", but Obama won more delegates.
Right now Obama and Hillary C (another rap artist?) are in a virtual dead heat in committed delegates, with a number of votes left to count, but those so-called "Super Delegates" are still problematical. Mostly they are party insiders whom the Clintons have been cultivating for years. They are under no obligation to support anyone, but one could profitably wager that they will come down solidly in the Clinton camp.
If Hillary gets the nomination at the convention based solely on the Super Delegate count, or solely on the seating of the controversial Michigan and Florida delegations, then I foresee the Democratic party entering another self-destruct mode (which BTW we are really good at) that will make the 1968 convention look like a Sunday school picnic.
Or whatever big number you want to utter. The fact is that apparently NONE of these pricks can keep it in their pants.
The latest is Daniel Thompson, a Salt Lake City pervert who was the founder or manager or something like that (it's not clear exactly what position of authority he held) of an outfit called Clean Flix, has been arrested for having sex with underage girls.
Clean Flix, you may recall, was responsible for Bowdlerizing movies to remove all the "smutty" parts. It did this, of course, without the authorization of the studios or the copyright holders, and in fact lost a lawsuit because of it.
So it appears that Thompson cut out all the dirty parts, but kept them for himself:
...the "booking documents state Thompson told the 14-year-olds that his film sanitizing business was a cover for a pornography studio." Police found a "large quantity" of porno movies inside the business, "along with a keg of beer, painkillers and two cameras hooked up to a television." Thompson has been released after posting $30,000 bail.If you ask me, there ought to have been an additional bail for being a goddam rightwing hypocrite. But I guess that isn't against the law. If it were, the jails would be bursting at the seams.
Today someone left a comment on my very first Bush Twins in Uniform post from way back in June 2005 -- which also was my very first post on this blog.
Someone hiding under the name "bunbun8464" says:
you didn't mention Amy Carter or Chelsea Clinton in your jabs at the GOP---let's be fair kids. And did any of the Kennedy's kids serve? Any of Gore's?Okay, it's a fair question. Sort of. But as usual, those from the wingnut wing of semi-reality just don't get it. They miss the point so much that it has to be intentional. But that's a common tactic among those people: Pick out some minor point and elevate it to the point where it exceeds and surpasses the original thesis. A case in point: The so-called Rathergate controversy, wherein the authenticity of the memos themselves was called into question, instead of the actual content of the memos. And that campaign, as you know, was completely successful. The question as to whether the memos could have been typed with proportional spacing in 1972 (short answer: Yes, the IBM Selectric was widely available -- and in use in the military -- by the mid-1960s) completely overtook and submerged the actual story, that of Baby Doc's questionable National Guard service.
Be fair!
kb
It has now been 1346 days since Jenna and Not-Jenna Bush, the slacker offspring of Preznit Numnutz, graduated from college and they are still not in the uniform of the US armed services.
Why? Because they have other priorities. They are too busy partying down in Georgetown, Argentina and god-knows-where-else to show their support for the war by enlisting their chickenhawk-child selves into the military service, that's why.
It has become something of an article of faith among the apologists for the BFEE illegal Iraq invasion that Saddam Hussein refused to say whether he still had those weapons of mass destruction, and that he kicked the UN weapons inspectors out of his country.
The myth goes something like this: Saddam kept mum about the weapons in order to instigate a war with the United States. For what reason I can't possibly imagine, but there it is. And in order to hide the fact that he didn't have the weapons, he kicked out the inspectors. I know, that was a Scooby-Doo "hyunh?!" moment for me, too.
I don't how these things get started -- well, in this case, yes I do: They were lies told by the Baby Doc Maladminstration mouthpieces to the Moron-Americans watching such drivel as the State of the Union address, etc., in order to gin up support for a war that we had no business fighting.
So what was the truth? Well, let's turn it over to a couple of experts. Here's an excerpt from a Dan Rather CBS 60-Minutes interview with Saddam in February 2003:
Just when you don't think it can get any weirder, here's Moron-American crossdresser mAnn Coulter saying she'll vote for Shrillary before she'll vote for McCain!
Excerpt:
We know the far right is upset with McCain as nominee but this is really going too far: Ann Coulter asserting on Fox News that if he gets the nomination she would not only "vote for" Hillary, she would "campaign for her if it's McCain." She told Sean Hannity last night that Clinton "is more conservative than he is" and added that in that scenario "she will be our girl." As president, Hillary would be "stronger in the war on terrorism" and would not pull the troops out of Iraq -- she jumped to her feet at the State of Union speech when Bush said the surge was working. Hannity countered: "McCain did support the war." She pointedout: "So did Hillary."Jesus, I know politics can make strange bedfellows, but ... no, wait. I don't need that image in my mind's eye.
Total American dead in the Iraq Illegal Occupation: 2500 2513 2532 2540 2546 2558 2571 2585 2597 2605 2619 2641 2710 2737 2758 2788 2809 2826 2865 2888 2906 2959 3006 3018 3025 3067 3087 3118 3132 3151 3166 3189 3210 3233 3245 3266 3299 3316 3337 3358 3387 3409 3444 3504 3519 3546 3577 3592 3611 3631 3683 3705 3725 3738 3760 3780 3795 3823 3830 3838 3845 3866 3875 3881 3886 3891 3896 3908 3921 3932 3943
Total coalition forces dead: 307
Total Iraqi Dead: 700,000+
Number of days since Baby Doc said he'd get Osama Bin Laden "dead or alive": 2333
Number of days since the illegal occupation of Iraq began: 1794
Number of days since "Mission Accomplished": 1736
Number of days between Pearl Harbor and the end of WWII: Only 1347
Number of days that the the Vice President has NOT shot a man in the face: 721
Number of days that the Bush Twins are still not pregnant with baste-'em-or-waste-'em Snowflake babies: 561.
It is still 351 days until the end of the BFEE Maladministration.
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