Give it UP for the Political Oracle!

Samuel Alito? Fucking A can I call 'em or what?

So give it up. If you're vague on what 'it' refers to, I'd accept cash, hallucinogenics, consensual sex or anything which might persuade bush et al to exile themselves to the further reaches of the Yukon territory.

Maybe it's just me

God am I glad I won't have to hear any more bullshit debate about Miers. Am I the only one that never bought for a second all the republican 'backlash'? Let's be real, people. She was another party approved lackey who was every bit as 'conservative' as Bush & Co. TOLD her to be. So where was the revolt coming from?

I'll tell you. It was nothing more than a set up. Miers was designed to fall. Now Bush will nominate the person the GOP wanted all along, and the democrats, being gullible retards who thought they got a win on Miers, will put up a half assed fight. And when they do, the GOP will scream foul, claiming that the Dems are just being partisan. The GOP, they will argue, proved they were willing to be fair by not accepting Miers.

Don't believe me? Think this is all some conspiracy crap? Then explain the logical basis behind the conflict within the GOP. Go read what the Rude Pundit has to say; it sums it up nicely. We all know no one gets nominated by Bush but that Bush, Cheney and Rove have worked them over with a cat o' nine tails. There was nothing Miers was that wasn't 100% party line with what is already an absurdly consolidated and loyalist Republican party, so why the revolt? How could they be so opposed to someone who for certain was never going to do any less than what the GOP leadership told her to do? The answer is simple: it's a set up, and it stinks to high heaven. How else, WHY else would Republicans object so loudly to the nomination who is nothing more, nothing less than a dyed in the wool GOP leadership tool?

Open mouth, insert holy war

Iran's New President Says Israel 'Must Be Wiped Off the Map'

And we thought our president said stupid things...

George Will: 1, Administration: 0

Well, I guess it was only a matter of time. This from the NY Times...

Miers Failed to Win Support of Key Senators and Conservatives
Mr. Bush issued a statement in which he accepted Ms. Miers's decision with regret, praised her "extraordinarily legal experience" and her character and said he agreed that senators were intent on gaining access to internal White House documents about her service. Surrendering such paperwork would undercut any president's ability to get frank and unfettered advice from key aides, Mr. Bush said.

"Harriet Miers's decision demonstrates her deep respect for this essential aspect of the Constitutional separation of powers - and confirms my deep respect and admiration for her," the president said. Mr. Bush said he would announce a new nominee "in a timely manner."

Our president then paused, blinked 27 times and said, "After much thoughtful consideration, I have chosen a new nominee who has an exceptional legal mind and a good heart... Judge Judy." He was then tackled by Secret Service.

Women. You can't live with 'em & you can't use them as a scape goat for a prison scandal

From Democracy Now!

Col. Janis Karpinski, the Former Head of Abu Ghraib, Admits She Broke the Geneva Conventions But Says the Blame "Goes All the Way to The Top”
Karpinski, the highest-ranking officer demoted in connection with the torture scandal, speaks out about what happened at the Abu Ghraib prison. She discusses:

• How the military hid "ghost detainees" from the International Red Cross in violation of international law
• Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller calling for the Gitmoization of Abu Ghraib and for prisoners to be "treated like dogs"
• Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's secret memos on interrogation policies that hung on the prison’s walls

Secret interrogation memos hung on the walls? And we're still having trouble making a case?

Miscommunication

If there were anything which illustrates the prevailing attitude of the U.S. as a whole, it's the manner in which we're approaching the recent conflict regarding control of internet domain names. As you may not know, the U.S. essentially controls the establishment and oversight of doman names on the internet. Though the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is supposedly controlled by an international advisory board, the U.S. Government retains total, and I mean, total veto authority on any and all decisions.

Other nations have begun to express an increasingly vocal disapproval of this system. They feel that domain oversight should rely on a truly internation body, perhaps a U.N. comittee or some such. The argument that the U.S. provides to counter this argument is that such a system would become politicized and bureaucratic, thus hindering the development and innovation online.

This is the same government which, in response to a flood of letters from conservative Christain americans, is attempting now to block the institution of a .xxx domain block for pornographic and adult sex websites.

I mean, jesus fucking christ, people, how dishonest, greedy and psychotic does a government have to BE? We have here one of the clearest examples you could dredge from the annals of human history of a politically motivated and irrational bureaucracy hindering innovation that you could want. How can any sane person sit and tolerate the level of lying the U.S. government perpetrates at this point?

There is an alternative solution, of course, the one that we'll almost certainly see. Nations, given a tool for communication and unification, will instead be forced to either pander to the U.S. as a monopoly or choose to seperate entirely from our control, taking control of their own national domains. And suddenly, the Internet, a tool for communication and information distribution, gets slammed down to just another tool to foster out of date nationalism and political boundaries. And that is exactly what the current government, the current people of the U.S. want. Another boarder to tax, another enemy to hate, more division, more control, more conflict. And that's the mindset of the modern U.S.A. It's truly become a nation of people to loathe, greedy, dishonest, violent people who are incapable of even envisioning cooperation much less accepting it.

Et tu, Bill Buckley?

Bad news for our president from the National Review... an editorial urging for the withdrawal of Harriet Mier's nomination.

Here's a taste...

There is no good reason to keep going down this road other than the sheer stupid force of inertia.

And we thought Alec Baldwin was tough.

A question for the GOP

Special celebrity guest post on Arianna Huffington's blog by special celebrity guest, Alec Baldwin. It is thoughtful and well-written, proving either [a] it was ghost-written; or [b] all other Baldwins are pale immitations, and Kim Basinger is a fool.

Here's a snippit...

My question for today is: Why are contemporary Republicans so full of shit? And a follow-up...How did the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and General Eisenhower get taken over by such lying, thieving, self-serving scoundrels?

Damn! The Republicans got served by a Baldwin.

Just so we're clear, I mean that in the "street" sense, not in the "Here's your drink, sir." way in which the other Baldwins are forced to make their living.

Dems' 08 strategy: Beef up your assets

From today's New York Observer... Hillary's Chest Gets Bigger As '08 Gets Closer .

That's one way to win back those red states. Seriously though, if that were really the way to get the nomination Ted Kennedy would be a shoe-in.

He's a politician, he's supposed to lie

From NY Daily News... turns out our president did know about the leak. Hmmm...

Bush whacked Rove on CIA leak
WASHINGTON - An angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair, sources told the Daily News.

...

"Bush did not feel misled so much by Karl and others as believing that they handled it in a ham-handed and bush-league way," the source said.

Bush-league... they just write themselves.

She's a lawyer, they're supposed to lie

From Reuters...

Miers backed abortion ban in 1989: Senate papers
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, as a Dallas City Council candidate in 1989, backed amending the U.S. Constitution to ban abortion except to save a mother's life, papers given to the Senate on Tuesday showed.

The disclosure was the first indication from Miers she opposes abortion. On Monday, Miers, the White House counsel, told a Democratic lawmaker no one knew how she would rule if the issue came before the high court.

Come on, folks. That was a long time ago... and we all know that our president has a strict what happened in the 80s stays in the 80s policy.

I am an Arrogant Man, But...

It’s not uncommon that I will hear, in the course of a conversation, some halfwit attempt to increase their own credibility by trying to reduce some master of the field. I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve witnessed some entirely unqualified college sophomore strive to inflate his intellectual reputation among his peers by dismissing Shakespeare as rustic or common. Or how about the wild debates over the abilities of various famous musicians held by a group of people who, between the lot of them might manage to muster out Stairway to Heaven on a guitar. Of course, my personal favorite is listening to the bold young conservative’s latest endeavor to fake evidence of rightwing intelligence; scoring off of Noam Chomsky.

I desperately don’t want to be that that person. I am critical and I am arrogant, yes, but I also recognize that my superiors in both experience and ability have paved the way for me. My ideas are hastily cobbled together patchworks drawn from the writings of Richard Bach and Immanuel Kant, from the actions and beliefs of Aristotle or Ben Franklin and fostered by the efforts of people like Thomas Edison or Rogue Ales up in Oregon. In the end, I’m a common man with what I’d like to think are a few good ideas that could help the real movers and shakers that lead our species forward out a bit. Which is why, no matter how harsh what I’m about to say sounds, I want to make it clear under no circumstances am I trying to suggest that Walter Cronkite is an idiot, nor am I attempting to send the message that I could single handedly lead the Democrat Party to victory in 2006 and 2008 if the stupid fuckers would just listen to me.

That being said, I would like to state for the record that Walter Cronkite is an idiot and if the stupid fuckers running the DNC would just listen to me, I could single handedly lead the Democrats to victory in 2006 and 2008.

I would like to quote from a recent letter of Walter’s to the editor of the New York Times:

”The key to a Democratic success in next year's Congressional election is clearly in the party leadership's coming up with a campaign that does not concentrate on the Bush administration's failures but offers alternative programs to fix what it believes is wrong with the Republican agenda.”

(Sound of single pair of hands clapping slowly, expressing sarcasm.) That’s great, Walter, let’s just keep being pussies because, hey, it’s worked so goddamned well so far. Wait, what’s the number one complaint among those skeptical of continuing to support the DNC? Oh, right, it’s that they’re useless cowards who won’t do their job and help rid us of these psychotic scum controlling every branch of the federal government. But Mr. More-of-the-Goddamned-Same Cronkite here says, “Stay the Course, Fellahs!” If it doesn’t work, why fix it? It’s the same message as always, “Lets not be all negative.” Well,fuckers here’s a new idea for you. Maybe a negative situation calls for someone to address it negatively.

The economy is down, way down, and the Bush administration’s only solution is to keep giving middle class tax dollars to the wealthy. We’re stuck in a virtual quagmire in Iraq where we’ve already killed thousands based on an invasion theory that’s been exposed as just plain lies. The value of the dollar continues to drop while the price of gas skyrockets for reasons that seem most likely to involve corporate conspiracy, not supply and demand. We just got our asses handed to us as a nation by a hurricane, an ass handing that might have been reduced to, at worst, an ass kicking if our federal government hadn’t cut its own balls off in the disaster response arena. And perhaps worst, a terrible terrorist attack has allowed the federal government to pass a series of draconian laws severally curbing personal freedom, but having done so they are now using their new powers, not to thwart terrorism, but mostly to attack U.S. citizens who own pornography.

Mr. Conkrite, the situation is negative. The situation is as negative as its been since I inhaled my first breath of genuine air, and those in the realm of politics, who strive for positions of social leadership, unwilling to point this out are nothing short of liars. The DNC needs leaders who can point a steady, unwavering finger to the right and say, “hey, we had things running just fine until these dipshits fucked it all up.”

We don’t need some referendum on ‘alternative programs’ to ‘fix’ what the Republicans are doing wrong, because all of the Republican errors can pretty much be summed up in one line, “They undid all the programs we had in place.” From FEMA to the New Deal to the goddamned Bill of Rights, we have, or had, a series of excellent working laws and programs which got things done, and the GOP has put its back into clearing away all of that. The ‘fix’ to the vast host of tragedies perpetuated by the GOP is nothing more complex than ‘go back to the way we were doing things under Clinton.”

You want to take back the White House, you stupid shits? It’s real fucking simple. Point out, loudly and clearly and with just enough facts to get Joe Mows the Lawn’s attention without confusing him, the host of national backslides suffered under the GOP. Be fucking negative. These are negative people perpetuating a really negative reality. That’s NEGATIVE, asswipes. It needs to be portrayed as such. Show simply, effectively, how much better we had it under Clinton, so much better we seem like a fucking second world nation, now. Show how we had more jobs, more financial security, better international perception, less crime, less violent crime, less police crime, more personal freedom, and we traded it all away for a segregationist social policy which pretty much devotes itself to attacking everyone who isn’t a right wing Christian and a tax policy that cuts out the middleman and simply hands all of our money over to the wealthy.

Mr. Cronkite, it’s not that I don’t respect you. You’re just caught in the past. You’re used to playing the peace and love liberal, but like most old people, you’ve become mildly conservative and can’t grasp when your ideals are harmful rather than helpful. Being a mild mannered liberal in the current environment is, as I said, tantamount to lying. Stop that shit, get out there and say what needs to be said. Firm honesty is the pathway to success, for both the Democratic Party and the nation as a whole.

In defense of Harriet Miers... she's like totally cool!!!

OMG!!!

I inadvertently stumbled across the following this morning on the smoking gun... a copy of a belated birthday card sent from Miers to our "cool" president released as personal correspondence exchanged between Bush and Miers from 1995-2000, when she served as the Texas State Lottery Commissioner.

And they said she didn't have a paper trail.

While the Rove's away, the mice will develop a spine

Democrats See Dream of '06 Victory Taking Form

Democrats Chant "Shame" in Congress After Bills Pass Benefiting Big Businesses

Look... the Dems are getting their groove back. Isn't it cute?

If you're guilty and you know it blink your eyes

Ok, you saw or heard about this already, but...

For President Under Duress, Body Language Speaks Volumes
"Does it worry you," NBC's Matt Lauer is asking him at a construction-site interview in Louisiana, that prosecutors "seem to have such an interest in Mr. Rove?"

Bush blinks twice. He touches his tongue to his lips. He blinks twice more. He starts to answer, but he stops himself.

"I'm not going to talk about the case," Bush finally says after a three-second pause that, in television time, feels like a commercial break.

...

As Lauer went through his introduction, the presidential eyes zoomed left, then right, then left and right again, then center, down and up at the interviewer. The presidential fidgeting spiked when Lauer mentioned the Democratic accusation that Bush was performing a "photo op." Bush pushed out his lower front lip, then licked the right corner of his mouth. Lauer's query about whether conservatives "are feeling let down by you" appeared to provoke furious jiggling of the right leg.

Our president later curled his imaginary mustache with his fingers and then tied Katie Couric to the railroad tracks. The man's a friggin' cartoon villain.

This just in... Jesus loves Harriet Miers

Richard Cohen's column today, "Decoding Miers," is an interesting read... who knows what about Miers and why. The real question is how is it possible that Focus on the Family Grand Wizard, James C. Dobson, has greater insight into Miers' abortion views than our president.

Here's a quote from Dobson...

"When you know some of the things that I know -- that I probably shouldn't know -- you will understand why I have said, with fear and trepidation, that Harriet Miers will be a good justice," he told his radio listeners. Then, referring to aborted fetuses, he added, "If I have made a mistake here, I will never forget the blood of those babies that will die will be on my hands to some degree."

If he only knew what we know he probably shouldn't know he knows. Anyway, this just goes to show that conservative talk show hosts love fetuses... well, the white ones anyway.

Hello, pot, this is kettle calling

Bush warns war on terror will require more sacrifice
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Struggling to rebuild American support for the Iraq war, President George W. Bush said on Thursday the struggle would require more sacrifice and accused Islamic militants of trying control Iraq as a step toward a radical Islamic empire.

Yeah, how dare those religious fanatics try to occupy our Iraq. We were there first! Oh, wait...

And Iran, Iran so far away

From the Guardian...

Blair links Iran to Iraq blasts

Begun, the cloned war has.

The agony of dissent

Choice for Head of Wildlife Agency Provokes Dissent... this somewhat overblown headline from the WashPost this morning about the inevitable Senate confirmation of Dale Hall as the head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service...

Hall, a 27-year Fish and Wildlife Service veteran, has infuriated wildlife activists, not to mention some of his staff, by not pushing more aggressively to protect threatened and endangered species in the Southwest. In May, he told agency biologists they should rely on the genetic science available at the time of a species' listing when deciding whether to recommend new safeguards for an imperiled plant or animal, even if that science dated back to the 1970s.

"He consistently tries to get the staff to change the science," said retired agency biologist Sally Stefferud, who worked under Hall during part of her 20-year tenure at Fish and Wildlife. She predicted "substantially less protection for the species" under Hall's leadership.

But Senate Democrats and the Bush administration do not see it that way. Diane Derby, a spokeswoman for the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.), said there has been little opposition to Hall's nomination and she expects "a quick and easy vote."

Sigh. It's pretty sad when you can't even get the environmentalist fired up anymore.

Campaign Promises

So speaking of Supreme Court nominees, hear tell Roberts’ was put to work on his first real hearing this week (sniff, they grow up so fast.) It’s all about Oregon’s assisted suicide law, which apparently the Republican controlled White House, and therefore Roberts, is afraid might undermine the Controlled Substances Act.

Run that through your head. Within minutes of the case opening, in fact before Oregon Senior Assistant Attorney General Robert Atkinson could even get out a full sentence in the law’s defense, Roberts is all over his ass about how this law might undermine the Feds’ already entirely absurd war on drugs, because, hey, you know, the recently dead are one of the high risk categories for addiction and abuse.

The Drug War, the republican trump card, the bullshit propaganda tool they can apparently use to attack any enemy, from terrorism to hemp clothing to assisted suicide. A majority of Americans already recognize the goddamned thing for the costly failure in social policy it is, and yet it is time and again the foil used to prevent all sorts of other freedoms. The Drug War has to go.

It’s 2005. It’s about time for me, I guess, to form a campaign strategy, to help build a platform for the party, maybe kiss a few babies, shake a few hands, make a few promises. Well, here’s my first promise to you, Fun Party supporters now and future. If elected president, a national referendum will be held, a ballot in every voting district, to eliminate or maintain the War on Drugs. And those communities which elect to continue to persecute drug users and everyone else by proxy will be hosed down with mustard gas. I’m not kidding, the National Guard will use crop dusters to saturate these lands with the stuff, killing each and every fucking citizen for miles.

Now, I know how most of you react to campaign promises. Even now, you’re probably saying to yourself, “Sure, he says that now, but when the time comes he’ll probably cop out and use cyanide gas or something.” NO! When I make a promise, I keep it right down to the letter and I promise you, the American people, that any psychotic or traitor in your midst that continues to support wars on their fellow citizens will be lethally gassed in one of the most horrible manners mankind has yet engineered. It will be a fairly slow, painful death, marked by the loss of their eyes and the bleeding of their lungs. The new utopia, my friends, will be paved with the blistered, crumpled corpses of America’s lowest denominator, and lackeys like Roberts will not be spared.

Will delivers an editorial bitch slap

I love it when George Will gets all indignant.

Can This Nomination Be Justified?

It's worth the read, but in case you don't Will's reaction to the Miers nomination was "oh no he di'int!" Here's a tasty morsel...

It is important that Miers not be confirmed unless, in her 61st year, she suddenly and unexpectedly is found to have hitherto undisclosed interests and talents pertinent to the court's role. Otherwise the sound principle of substantial deference to a president's choice of judicial nominees will dissolve into a rationalization for senatorial abdication of the duty to hold presidents to some standards of seriousness that will prevent them from reducing the Supreme Court to a private plaything useful for fulfilling whims on behalf of friends.

I really hope someone translates the article for our president.

He's got the whole judiciary in His hands...

A NY Times "news" article about our president's nominee to replace Sandra Day O'Connor.

In Midcareer, a Turn to Faith to Fill a Void
"She decided that she wanted faith to be a bigger part of her life," Justice Hecht, who now serves on the Texas Supreme Court, said in an interview. "One evening she called me to her office and said she was ready to make a commitment" to accept Jesus Christ as her savior and be born again, he said. He walked down the hallway from his office to hers, and there amid the legal briefs and court papers, Ms. Miers and Justice Hecht "prayed and talked," he said.

...

In an interview Tuesday on the televangelist Pat Robertson's "700 Club," Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the Christian conservative American Center for Law and Justice, said Ms. Miers would be the first evangelical Protestant on the court since the 1930's. "So this is a big opportunity for those of us who have a conviction, that share an evangelical faith in Christianity, to see someone with our positions put on the court," Mr. Sekulow said.

Well, that's a relief...

Hurt People the Safe and Easy Way

Getting coverage but not, in my opinion, nearly ENOUGH coverage is the manner in which prisoners in New Orleans were treated during the crisis, which is to say they were abandoned, without food or water, still locked in their cells, to drown.

This may seem only marginally related, at first, but I would like to draw attention to this article about a new Florida gun law.

Most notable, I think, is this line, “Critics say the current law allows gun owners to shoot if they engage in a simple argument. Supporters say that criminals will think twice when they try to attack someone in public.”

To me, what this illustrates is the notion of a ‘citizen’ vs. a ‘criminal’. If you have two people in an altercation, and one, feeling threatened, shoots the other then who, exactly, was threatening who? What makes this scenario more favorable than the other person getting in the first shot. What benefit to social order or ethical standards was maintained? None, unless you have constructed in your mind the notion of a ‘criminal’ being something other than another human being.

And that’s exactly what has happened, in relation to prisons, in relation to Florida gun law. Most U.S. citizens, regardless of their supposed political or social leanings, view the ‘criminal’ not as a human being or a fellow citizen, but literally as some abstract boogums which threatens their lives, property and ideals. If the prevailing attitude towards how to treat prisoners seems horrific or inhumane, it’s because people literally do not consider prisoners humans.

Quoted recently in my life both on both Slacktivist and the box office nightmare Con Air, are these insightful words of Dostoevsky.

"A society should be judged not be how it treats its outstanding citizens, but by how it treats its criminals." -- Fyodor Dostoevsky

Rather like a man who beats his spouse, having come to envision her as the symbol of all his aggravations, so does the modern ‘civilized’ person tend to strive to punish ‘criminals,’ without thinking for a second as to the nature of the crime they committed, the possibility of their innocence or the social benefits or repercussions of stripping away their humanity or the associated rights. It’s not merely lazy thinking, it’s honestly a form of irrational violence, no different in its motive than physically attacking minorities or beating your wife, excepting that it’s ‘legal’, so people can ‘get away with it’. The eagerness with which so many seek to inflict misery and harm upon others they know nothing about, based on only the most meager media data regarding some possible crime or another (if that,) illustrates Dostoevsky’s point beautifully. Socially, we’re backpedaling rapidly, with our understanding and appreciation of human rights and freedoms collapsing back into irrational and personalized applications of instinct and emotion.

To say that the staff of the Parish prison or the Parish Sheriff or the Sheriff's department should be 'held accountable' is woefully inadequete. What they did was most certainly a crime against humanity, almost certainly far worse in its moral, ethical and social evils than anything done by anyone they had imprisioned. Each and every one of them should be tried for nothing less than counts of attempted murder for every single prisoner in their custody and premeditated murder for each and every inmate either unaccounted for or whose body makes its way downstream to some waiting cleanup crew. And when they are rightfully and justly found guilty of their obvious and horrific crimes, each and every one of them should pray like a madman to whatever shallow deity they so contemptiously pretend to worship that they end up in the hands of some bleeding heart liberal like myself, who, despite my fury and loathing of them and their behavior, still seeks to help them reform, still thinks of them as humans with emotions and lives rights and potential, as opposed to more scum like themselves who will just beat them into submission and then abandon them to die.