Fratricide

Fucking Democrats, doing the Republican's work for them.

1. DiFi throws a hissy because Obama didn't check with her first before appointing someone, though for the last eight fucking years she always seemed all too keen to slurp the cock of whatever wild-eyed wingnut neocon loser the GOP submitted for a dog-and-pony show of approval. Now she decides to show a little independence. The FISA vote would have been a much better time to grow a spine, bee-yotch.


2. Harry Reid, in a predictable show of spinelessness, folds at the mere threat of a GOP filibuster (as per usual) over seating Al Franken. Which is OK, in one sense, because...


3. ...Harry Reid, in a predictable show of misapplied vigilance, was so keen on scoring a couple of cheap tough-guy points to butch up his well-oiled Über-wimp image to all those dumb jocks in the GOP that he very publicly painted himself into a corner by piling onto the "Lynch-Blagojevich" Bandwagon with the expectation that Blagojevich would simply fold (for some reason) under the frowning but basically unthreatening glare of widespread Democratic mucky-muck disapproval. Well, it seems Reid forgot The Chicago Way. He and most of the rest of the Dems brought a (rubber) knife to a (live-ammo) gun fight. The Windy City crook with the bad haircut proved some mad skillz by appointing the one guy in the whole state who was both eligible and completely unobjectionable in any form by anyone of any color, race, creed, religion or political persuasion and then daring the Dems to put-up or shut-up about how ba-a-a-a-d they were gonna fu-u-u-u-uck him u-u-u-up, yo. Dude, Reid and the whole slithery lot of them got punk'd. What's more, they deserved to.
   

Now, ladies and germs, we are treated to the sight of a national party with a freshly-minted president (dashing, smart & handsome) with an actual popular mandate backed up by the largest margins in Congress since before Word War 2 opposed by an increasingly minor regional party in the midst of a disorganized intra-party feeding frenzy and weighed down by a crushingly unpopular outgoing president folding -- FOLDING! -- when they should be standing up to Republican bullying and then -- THEN! -- shivving one of their own, like they're trying to establish street cred on their first day in prison. I have thought for a long time (OK, since the initial excitement over the 2006 election gave way to resignation at Democratic wimpiness) that the D's suffered from some political form of battered-wife syndrome. Until they actually stand-up and fight on our behalf as we have hired them to do by, you know, electing them, instead of depending on us out here in the Land of Average Voters to deliver unto them some magical, insurmountable margin of victory, I don't think they can do anything but talk tough. Remember Nancy "New Sheriff In Town" Pelosi's first few days as speaker?

With Democrats like these, actual card-carrying Republicans seem rather, well, redundant.

I want a new party.

Comment cross-posting

From the comment thread of this post, my very good friend Broadway Carl wrote the following:

Hey Joe,

What you doin' with that gun in your hand? (Sorry I couldn't resist.) I understand the frustration with the Warren crap, but ultimately will it matter? He chose Warren to give an invocation, not to become his new Senior Policy Advisor. I know it seems like a slap in the face to us now, but who's really gonna give a shit a month from now? That's how I'm looking at it. Obama is not all of a sudden going to become pro-life.

This is why I disagree with the Greenwald quote in your post - because his decision to include Warren in his inauguration for a 3 minute prayer (something that shouldn't be a part of the ceremony to begin with, IMHO) isn't going to change his mind on pro-choice, or closing Gitmo, or troop withdrawal from Iraq, or suddenly make him think conservative judges are what we need in the Supreme Court.

Sure, I'm disappointed that he chose Warren for all the same reasons everyone else is, but I don't find the invocation so important that I believe it's the beginning of the end for the Obama administration. Unemployment, health care, getting out of the Middle East, vets care, the economy - these are the things that are important to me, not who says what prayer when.

Which is why I don't agree with Hitchens either. Yes, Obama can be inclusive - that's what he campaigned on - but not on Inauguration day. Either Obama is going to believe what he says every day, or he's going to be politically manuevering every day. I hope it's the former, but it has to be every day.

And look at it another way. Warren's acceptance of the invitation is not sitting well with his base. I would say the evangelical right is freaking out about Warren's attendance more than the liberal left is. So, although I doubt this is the reason, Warren's power and influence is possibly being compromised on Obama's first day in office. That can only be a good thing.

And finally, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."? Seriously?

To which I replied:

New boss? Well, yeah.

New Boss Obama is triangulating his little heart out with all the mighty force of Old Boss Clinton. Up to now, it has been part of some master plan and I was (and still am) willing to sign on because, as you say, in the long run we trust that we will still get what we want on choice, Gitmo, Iraq, environmental policy, etc... Note that I said "trust." Signs are good, sure, but I realize that Washington politics is like making sausage and I'm not going to like a lot of what comes out of the Obama Administration over the next four years. That not-liking starts today.

The Warren choice smacks of wishful thinking to me. Why waste such a valuable moral commodity as the invocation at one's own historic inauguration? Such a bully pulpit for declaring and demonstrating a new direction, wasted on a bigot with a top-shelf PR team.

If Obama understands just how odious Warren (a liar & a bigot) is and thinks throwing these ravenous wolves a bone will quiet them, I point to Bill Clinton's impeachment as counter-evidence. If he understands how odious Warren is and doesn't care, then he needs to be made to show respect to this portion of his coalition. If he understands how odious Warren is and actually agrees with him, god help us, then he isn't the person we've supported all this time and should be called out loudly and often.

I don't think saying to such an important component of the Obama coalition "get over it" is really honest or fair, since that's what the whole political left in this country has heard since BushCo. stole the election in 2000. Warren equates homosexuality with incest and bestiality and loudly and publicly declares that Jews are going to hell. Lending him the weight of the Office of the President legitimizes his bigotry and spits in the face of the people who put him there. It fails to honor their blood, sweat, toil and tears.

The last paragraph of my response, ultimately, gets to the heart of how I read Carl's critique of my post, and his take on the whole Warren thing altogether, which is to say: "get over it," which misses the point. Warren is free to spew his hate all he wants. Sure, he's not quite the hellfire-and-brimstone Old Time Religion bigot that Fallwell was and Robertson still is, with his Hawaiian shirts and Van Dyke beard, but he still thinks homosexuality equates to incest, child rape and bestiality. He still thinks Jews are going to hell. And while to hold and express out loud those beliefs is still perfectly legal in an America where free speech is supposedly allowed, that still doesn't mean that it is altogether fitting and proper that Obama should give such a person a platform on the day of his inauguration.

On the other hand, it is Obama's Big Day and he can invite whoever the fuck he wants. I can have an opinion about it, though, and I think it is an insult.

More about Warren (UPDATED)

So, I hadn't realized this, but via a Steve Benen at Washington Monthly, I learn that we've spent most of our history without an invocation nor a benediction. FDR added both at his inauguration in 1933 and, sadly, they've been part of the program ever since.

This factoid makes me even angrier than I was before.

While I grant that Obama is elected to be the president of all the people, not just the people who voted for him - something the current occupant just never got through his thick skull - I still say Rick Warren is quite simply a bridge too far. I have read a lot in the last few days about this issue, both pro and con, and I still come down where I was before: Rick Warren is the wrong choice, a walking, talking insult to the spirit of inclusion Obama has spent so much time and energy creating.

I hate quoting myself, but I must raise a question I asked back in September in the wake of the McCain campaign's mud-slinging: why are we always the ones who must suck it up?

Why am I and my fellow progressives, liberals & Democrats expected to take the high road every single time? Why is the onus on us to make nice and maintain civility while the other side gets to wreck and rob the place with impunity, spewing hate and flinging poo like a monkey? Why are we supposed to just sit there and take it? It is almost as though they know these people are over-grown children and, like children, we grown-ups are required to be patient and tolerant while they go through some adult version of the terrible twos, except sustained and culture-wide.

So, once again, The Left is expected to sit down, shut up and take one for the team, to just be grateful for the fucking-over not being worse than it otherwise would have been. The emotional retards on the other end of the spectrum once again have to be pandered-to, because they will otherwise get their widdle feelers hurt and take their toys home to pout. I just don't recall seeing a reciprocal show of respect when the other side stole the last two elections. I just remember a lot of crowing and chest-thumping about "mandates."

I find the inclusion of Rick Warren to be sickening because the most favorable spin I can put on it is to think that maybe he wants to insure the largest possible audience for the launching of his bold new direction in government and putting Warren at the beginning of the program is the least odious way to get and keep the eyes and ears of a large group of people who would otherwise range from the curiously skeptical to the overtly hostile. Warren, with his genial demeanor and Hawaiian shirts, projects an approachable warmth (however manufactured and shallow it may be) that his predecessors Robertson and Falwell lack and maybe that is a factor for Obama as well, though I must say that even with all of that in mind I still don't think this is what we who worked his campaign and gave him money had in mind.

The intolerant learn nothing when tolerated; for them it just means the suckers on the other side didn't have the guts to let their hate win the day.

Because I think the thing all the Obama defenders lose sight of amid this whole brouhaha is that we've been here before. Democrats have been sucking up to the Reich-Wing since Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun slithered into Washington on a tide of racial fear-mongering and cultural resentment. It has never, ever, provided any long-term benefit for the Democrats except to encourage the poo-flinging monkeys to fling even more poo. "Triangulating Bill" Clinton tried and tried and tried to accomodate a burgeoning and ascendant Political Right, in fact he was the finest Republican president we ever had, and all he ever got was impeached for his efforts.

I think some of this has to do with the old saw about a liberal being someone who won't take his own side in an argument. As liberals, we think surely some common ground can be found on any issue since we generally try to see other sides of arguments. Righties think god is on their side and the devil is in any opposition. In such a formulation, how can we ever find the middle? We can't because there isn't one. As Glenn Greenwald wrote yesterday:

Ultimately, the reason politics is unavoidably "divisive" is because people have really divergent and irreconcilable views on passion-provoking controversies. That's what politics is. It's what it always has been. At some point, Obama either will or won't repeal DOMA and don't-ask-don't-tell; he either will or won't rescind Bush's anti-abortion regulations and appoint new Supreme Court Justices likely to re-affirm Roe; he either will or won't close Gitmo; he either will or won't withdraw from Iraq; he either will or won't investigate Bush war crimes; he either will or won't deliver on his promises to unions, etc. People feel very strongly -- and very differently -- about those issues.

And besides, at the end of the day, being an unapologetic atheist, I have to agree with (...a-hem...) Christopher Hitchens when he writes:

As Barack Obama is gradually learning, his job is to be the president of all Americans at all times. If he likes, he can oppose the idea of marriage for Americans who are homosexual. That's a policy question on which people may and will disagree. However, the man he has chosen to deliver his inaugural invocation is a relentless clerical businessman who raises money on the proposition that certain Americans—non-Christians, the wrong kind of Christians, homosexuals, nonbelievers—are of less worth and littler virtue than his own lovely flock of redeemed and salvaged and paid-up donors.

This quite simply cannot stand.

[...]

A president may by all means use his office to gain re-election, to shore up his existing base, or to attract a new one. But the day of his inauguration is not one of the days on which he should be doing that. It is an event that belongs principally to the voters and to their descendants, who are called to see that a long tradition of peaceful transition is cheerfully upheld, even in those years when the outcome is disputed.

So, Obama promises us a new politics. With the Rick Warren selection, Obama reveals himself as an epic genius with a secret plan so grand no mere mortal can guess it, or else he is either more of a cynical operator than we thought or more gullible and stupid than he seems.

I'm not sure I like any of those options. I know, I know, he's still the far better option and he's going to give us what we want on Iraq, Gitmo, minority rights, energy policy, environmental policy, labor policy, and he projects competence and tolerance while single-handedly changing the image America projects to the world, blah-blah-blah, but right now, I'm angry and I choose to stay that way until he gives me a reason not to be.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

UPDATE:
From the marvelously poisonous pen of Jillian over at Sadly, No:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been completely nauseated by the Sensible Liberal. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Left’s greatest stumbling block is not the Republican party or the Freepers of the world, but the moderate Democrat, who is more devoted to “winning” than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension, often called “inclusion” or “getting along”, to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who says “I agree with the goal you seek, but I also understand the point of view of people who think you are little more than crazed pedophiles”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s full citizenship; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the fag to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Change? Where?

So, Obama is trying to gain some street cred with The Village poobahs the way all the Dems have always done since the early days of "Triangulating Bill" Clinton - by kicking the dirty fucking hippies in the nuts. Bigot, liar and all-around general hater Rick Warren will be giving the invocation at The Inauguration, and will do so at Obama's invitation.

I know he's trying to be a new kind of politician and all that shit, but... but...

Aw, hell, I think Ezra said it best:

This might be a wise political calculation on Obama's part. But it is a cruel thing to ask of his coalition. There's a time to pander to intolerance, and it is called the election. The election is over. January 20th is the inauguration. Pro-choice women and gays were a significant part of Obama's coalition, and they're being forced to accept that the candidate they worked for will use the election they won to elevate a powerful religious leader who works often and publicly against their interests. For them, the day will be darkened.

So many liberal Christians out there, to say nothing of other faiths (I'm certain no rabbis, imams or maharajahs will speak on January 20th), instead of giving yet another high-profile platform to someone already famous, couldn't Obama use the awesome weight and power and global visibility of that day to raise the profile of some non-bigoted, non-lying, non-hating Christian? We all already know who these evangelical fucktards are and what they stand for and using that day to suck up to the Christo-paths is, I think, a misuse of the power of his office and a violation of the trust he asked of the people who worked so hard to get him elected.

So, I say fuck you, Mr. Obama.

This Man Is A War Criminal

He should be arrested, tried and convicted of war crimes, then sent to prison for the rest of his unholy life. He dared the incoming administration to do just that a couple of days ago. I don't think anything will come of it and he will live happily ever after.

Because Dems are wimps.

LIE-berdouche is safe

It's been hard to compose a post these last few days. My guy wins and, well, the outrage that has driven my blogging these last three years or so has started to abate.

However, I have no doubt that the outrage will return. In fact, it has already begun.

The Quisling from Connecticut, the sniveling piece of opportunistic dog shit that barely resembles a human being (much less a senator) who once occupied a place on the Democratic ticket only because he had no qualms about doing the dirty work of the opposition party by publicly scolding the leader of his own party -- a risk/reward object lesson he hasn't forgotten in an era of GOP ascendancy and which has ever since only driven him to ever higher levels of party disloyalty under the guise of "bipartisanship" wrapped in a flaky veneer of "principle" -- a lying, sanctimonious toad who was rejected by the people of his own state party, has been given a reprieve by his fellow Senators. He gets to keep his seniority and gavel at Homeland Security.

Which is why the Rethugli-goons and the other members of the Reich-wing all think Dems are a bunch of pussies. I'm all full of the milk of human kindness and bleeding-heart fuzzy-headed magnaminity, but how bad how bad do you have to fuck up to be punished in any meaningful way by the larger membership of the Democratic congress? The GOP would never have stood for something even remotely hinting at disloyalty, much less something akin to that first time he spoke out on the floor of the Senate against Bill Clinton a decade ago. He would have been shunned, stripped of any position of power and driven from the caucus. The Repukes may defend the multiple marriage womanizers and closeted homosexuals and drug addicts and child-molesters in their midst to the bitter end, but one whisper of disloyalty and you're out.

And don't bother me with platitudes about reconciliation or us being made of better stuff or "change" or some other kum-ba-ya horse hockey, this is why the other side doesn't respect us. Why would we expect something better or something more? Why should we?

May they all rot in hell.

That Didn't Take Long

Though I enthusiastically supported Obama's candidacy and am moved beyond words by what his ascension to the presidency says about who we have become and are becoming as a nation, I have said since he became the nominee and his victory began to look inevitable that he will likely piss me off more than make me proud for the majority of time he's in office. He's a centrist, I'm not and in a world where a post-Nixon-Reagan-Bush1&2 GOP has pulled the center WA-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-AY to the right over the last forty some-odd years, being in the center is still sitting way too far to the right for me. I'm thinking of O's FISA vote, just to name one example.

And now comes Number 2.

He's told the Democrats in the Senate to leave LIE-berdouche alone.

The Quisling from Connecticut gets rejected by his own state party, actively curries favor with the opposition party, campaigned against the head of his own purported party and said some pretty nasty things along the way in so doing and he gets to keep his seniority and his committee assignments.

Way to go, O. I know you're all about reconcilliation and all of that kum-ba-ya shit, but this guy fucked you over loudly and in public and he is now going to suffer no reprimand whatsoever. What are you afraid he would do, say something mean about you on Tee-Vee? He's going to do that anyway and now, if the D's get really close to 60 votes in the Senate, we'll need him again (dammit) to put us over the top and all the bobblehead shows will naturally court him like a rockstar because he'll hold the balance of the Senate in his greasy little hands.

I would say he doesn't get it, but then he went to Harvard and is the President-Elect of the United States and I'm just a bitter partisan. I'll shut up about it.

For now.

(Found the picture above at this guy's facebook page)

Unicorn Farts

izzy o'rainey asks a very good question in response to my post about walkable cities:

What's your timetable for the Star Trek world where I don't have to work for money and can live in a dense-but-totally-biodegradable neighborhood with recycled-cardboard streetcars that run on rainbows and unicorn farts?

(keep in mind that part of my job is pulling your leg)

Well, it seems to me when I think about Star Trek that whatever else may be said about the lack of conflict in the storylines or the relative androgyny of their creepily-sterile world, my biggest complaint would be that their world seems to take a staggeringly vast amount of energy to run. Which is why the geeks who dream up the technology for the show had to invent a virtually bottomless type of fantasy energy called dilithium to run all the warp drives and "Shh" doors and tri-corders and such. That world isn't running on black gold, that's for sure. And soon enough, neither will ours.

As I look into my crystal ball, I see oil only getting more extravagantly expensive in the coming years. I don't just mean gasoline for our cars. Expensive, depleting oil will drive up the cost of everything since petroleum is used to make, process, transport, heat, cool and otherwise store pretty much everything we see, hear, taste, touch and smell throughout our days. Since so much of our national infrastructure is invested in an oil-based economy, from shopping malls to corner gas stations, our cities will shrink by necessity and what remains on the perimeter (the current-day suburbs) will remain a fairly rich source of partially processed materials to be scavenged for the retooling of the older center cities for decades into the next phase of human history - the post-petroleum future we once thought would look like 2001 (until we actually got there, when it started to look more like Road Warrior).

My guess, and this is only a guess, is that in ten years the scope of the catastrophe will be obvious to even the most obtuse, pro-Reagan, Limbaugh-loving nitwit - who will naturally blame it on Al Gore and the dirty fucking hippies anyway and who will also naturally deny ever having thought Global Warming and Peak Oil were hoaxes - but none of that will change the fact that only the wealthy will continue to own and operate motor vehicles and the very wealthy will actually be able to fly anywhere.

The very wealthy, that is, and the United States military - who will likely use up the very last drops of oil on earth to drive a tank into a ramshackle village somewhere in Iowa to put down a rebellion on behalf of the wealthy overlords who will be nervous about the threat of food riots by the serfs on their land. Although I think that scenario is several decades away, we are nevetheless in Iraq to secure an oil supply for the Pentagon, not for the average American car owner. Fighter jets gotta fly and tanks gotta make tracks and neither can run on re-used french fry grease or unicorn farts.

So, what I was saying in my earlier post was, more or less, that we will have these changes forced upon us. Some places are better positioned to weather the changes than others. If a place was fairly prosperous in the pre-car era, chances are that it may have enough legacy architecture and infrastructure to re-tool and adapt. 19th-Century cities have "good bones" upon which oil-free prosperity can be built. If not, then not. Phoenix, for example, will be unlivable in the post-petroleum future because they can't grow enough food locally to feed themselves, nor have enough electricity without oil to run the air-conditioners and water-pumps needed to keep the place habitable.

In other words, I don't think we're going to find a better, more eco-friendly way to run the world we live in now. Why would we want to? This world needs to change and we had a chance to get ahead of the curve three decades ago, but it was more profitable for the plutocratic class to double-down and stick future generations with the bill and it was more fun for the trogs to make fun of Jimmy Carter to the sound of a revving big-bore engine than to, you know, pitch-in and make a better future by conserving. Conserving is for suckers, nerds and wimps and who wants to be one of those?

Maybe if we'd invested in research when we had a chance, by now we'd have those recycled-cardboard streetcars that run on rainbows and unicorn farts.

Or maybe dilithium.

Seeing Will Be Believing

So, I see that the cretinous bastards who run the Democratic Party in Washington have started to wake up to the fact that Joe LIE-berman is a Quisling P.O.S.. The best part is the word "may" : Democrats May Kick Out Joe Lieberman If He Addresses The Republican National Convention

Ahh, well, Mr. Reid - better late than never. If it happens at all. I will believe that you have a pair when you actually kick the SOB out of your caucaus and strip him of his committee assignments, which you should have done two years ago when the hard-working people on the ground for your Party in Connecticut did not see fit to return him to Washington. I guess they were just too stupid or naive or unsophisticated to understand that Joe-nertia deserved to be there, even if the mechanisms of democracy failed to do so in a real-world exercise. I guess we should have been more grateful to our ruling class for protecting the natural order of things.

Which brings us to the heart of the mattter when it comes to right-wing versus left-wing politics. Left-wing politics is always difficult and an awkward fit with the trappings of power precisely because The Left - what makes it "Left-wing" and not "Right-wing" or anything else - is the opposition to entrenched power. When left-wingers lose their way, they become "Limousine Liberals" or corrupt union bosses or, in our current political climate, the bloated, Renfield-esque capitulators of the current Democratic establishment in Washington.

Because right-wing politics is a natural fit with the trappings of power precisely because what makes right-wing "Right-Wing" is the impulse to protect and extend privilege and power. In a democracy, by itself a radical notion (the horror! the riff-raff having a say in how I spend my money? Never!), such a point of view is hard to market beyond its natural adherents, so they have to gussy it up in guns, flags, country music and - when necessary - racial politics in order to build large enough coalitions to win elections. Although, in all fairness, once they win (or act like they won) a sufficient number of elections, they can simply obliterate the legal mechanisms that impede their urge to gut that pesky democratic process and finally stop acting like the opinions of the masses actually matter.

This is the late-stage republic we find ourselves in now. When Rome was in a similar spot a few years back, some cat named Julius something-or-other rolled into town and clarified that whole "will-of-the-people" thing. Get ready for a similar naked power-grab in the wake of some as-of-yet unseen crisis. They used the last one (tall buildings + airplanes) to maneuver into place all the legal materiel needed to obliterate all those annoying limitations on power so that next time they will be able to completely sweep away this creaky, rotted ediface we like to call "American democracy."

And if you ever had any doubt about where the Democratic Party, the supposed "Party of the People," stands on this whole thing, that should have been clear in the wake of the 2006 realignment election. The Connecticut Democratic Party said to the national party in Washington "We don't really care anymore for the fellow who has represented us up to now, so we're going to try to send someone new" to which the national party said "OK, but we really like the guy you've been sending us up to now" and we saw a really clear break within the party over the status of Joe LIE-berman. Some senators came out publicly in support of the state party's choice to submit a different name for consideration, but most others came out in defense of Holy Joe's claim to the seat and, in the ensuing confusion with a lot of help from Rethuglican friends, he was able to rally and return to Washington - this time with a chip on his shoulder and not only with an axe to grind, but the will and unique position (in an evenly divided senate) to do it. And to do it good and hard.

Of course, Harry Reid cried poverty over and over again when the left-wing of his party - the base of power in his party BTW - cried foul. "We need the votes" he'd say, or "He votes with us 99% of the time." How's that workin' out, Harry? It seems to me that the passing of the new FISA legislation should put to rest any notion that the Democrats in Washington learned anything from the 2006 election. They are so locked into the Bi-Party mentality that they think a rejection of the opposing party is automatically a victory for their Party qua Party, and not for what their party represents as an opposition party - in this case the rule of law, free and fair elections, freedom from the burgeoning police state and rampant militarism - in other words, anti-fascism. Instead, the bloated capitulators in Washington took the 2006 landslide election as a validation of their claim to the reigns of power, this time helpfully enhanced and value-added by a power-mad GOP, with a special mention for the corpulent visage of a leering Darth Cheney. I'm pessimistic about the lessons they'll learn should Obama survive the march to the White House.

Because what I find most irksome about this news about the idea that some Democrats are upset about Pal Joey perhaps speaking at the GOP convention is that - once again - we who were right all along and were continually dismissed with any number of smirking tsk-tsk condescending pats on the head don't get credit for being right. We are instead hated for it. Surely, we should get some props for being right about George W. Bush way back in 1999 or the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003. Every bad thing we said was going to happen did happen and yet, and yet...

So, here we sit, watching the Dems yet again tying themselves in knots over whether or not "Rape Gurney" Joe should be kicked to the curb when the GOP has never had to worry about such things because their internal party discipline precludes ever having to ask the question. He should have been kicked out long, long ago. Maybe this time, they actually do something.

Or maybe they'll just issue another even more sternly worded letter.

Rearranging Deck Chairs

This is the America we live in now. America 2.0, if you will. Secret prisons where "Enemies of America" get locked up. Evidently we're reaching back to the practices of the British Empire to get our way in the world. Hell, the sun didn't set on the British Empire for two hundred years, so they must have been doing something worth studying. The Royal Navy used ships as floating prisons, and it seems, now, we do too. As the guy in the video says, if you can't bring them to the prison, bring the prison to them. And in international waters, to boot, so no laws to worry about.

Go Navy!



Which is why it should surprise no one that Obama is choosing to avoid Muslims. America is corroding into a decrepit and sinister police state (see: "FISA Bill", "House of Representatives" "2008") while huge swaths of our body politic see that transformation as a comforting elevation in their personal security - they don't break any laws, so what do they have to worry about?

When the puppet masters decide to demonize the brown people for electoral gain, they tap the lizard brain fear-response of these crispy white people living in blissful racial isolation by pointing to the dark-skinned scary people who talk funny or speak furrin' in them-there coastal cities and over there in furrin' countries-n-shit. Someone like Obama, dark-skinned and all - with a funny-sounding name, to boot - probably thinks that appearing in any way whatsoever within hailing distance of a mosque or someone wearing a headscarf will be the kind of image the PR-spin-meisters at FOX Noise will run with ad nauseum, possibly causing him to lose some votes. Of course, anyone who would believe anything they see or hear on FOX wouldn't vote for Obama anyway, but that's beside the point because you can't present yourself as an agent of change if you actually aren't.

John Cole is pissed about it over at Balloon Juice. And frankly, it pisses me off, too. He's flat wrong. Middle name "Hussein" or not, Barack Obama needs to change policy on this one no matter how much hay the other side might make out of some insinuating juxtoposition of images, or it's just one more example of a Democrat asking a portion of his constituency to quietly bide their time for just a little bit longer while they do Real Work that we, the common people, couldn't possibly understand (see: "FISA Bill", "House of Representatives" "2008"). I won't defend the Obama campaign on this one.

Because, well, can he really be THAT afraid of a pinhead like Bill Orally? I really enjoyed this takedown of Mr. Loofah:

Strength versus Capitulation

I haven't posted in a while - starting a new show can really soak up all your free time - but I have to post the following, moved as I am to the act of contributing money not once but twice today.

Contribution Number One:
I threw a few bucks to the Obama campaign here - because of this:



Barack Obama is remaking American politics, truly, deeply and (hopefully) for all time. He isn't taking public money for the general election, because he can quickly raise piles of money in small amounts from a huge swath of the American public - which is why he can make the map look like this:



Contribution Number Two:
I threw a few bucks to the ACTBlue campaign here - because of this (from Glenn Greenwald):

It's bad enough watching the likes of Steny Hoyer, Rahm Emanuel and a disturbingly disoriented Nancy Pelosi eviscerate the Fourth Amendment, exempt their largest corporate contributors from the rule of law, and endorse the most radical aspects of the Bush lawbreaking regime. But it's downright pathetic to see them try to depict their behavior as some sort of bipartisan "compromise" whereby they won meaningful concessions:

"When they saw that we were unified in sending that bill rather than falling for their scare tactics, I think it sent them a message," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). "So our leverage was increased because of our Democratic unity in both cases.

Not even the media establishment and the GOP can refrain from mocking this pretense they're trying to peddle. What's amazing is that they're actually as devoid of dignity as they are integrity.

As I noted yesterday, the GOP couldn't even wait for the ink to dry on this "compromise" before publicly -- and accurately -- boasting that they not only got everything they want, but got even more than they dreamed they would get. To The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau, GOP House Whip Roy Blunt derided the telecom amnesty provision as nothing more than a "formality" which would inevitably lead to the immediate and automatic dismissal of all lawsuits against the telecoms, while Sen. Kit Bond taunted the Democrats for giving away even more than they had to in order to get a deal: "I think the White House got a better deal than they even had hoped to get."

Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi's lap dog, has worked hard these last few weeks to try and pass this bill. I called my representative's office in Washington, Charlie Rangel, last night and urged him to vote against this bill. Happily, he did. To check and see how your representative voted, go to this link.

It pisses me off that it has passed today, 293-129. Thanks, Nancy "Off-The-Table" Pelosi. And Steny, too. Who both voted for it. Despite their spin to the contrary, this is not a compromise, it is a capitulation that gives the president everything he wants. I just don't understand why the Dems have been so eager to bend over and take this one up the ass from a record-settingly unpopular president. Every few months or so, they'd keep putting this bill out there and we (until today) kept defeating it. This time, they got it through with a convoluted set of procedural rules. Again, thanks, Nancy "New-Sheriff-In-Town" Pelosi.

Their eagerness, I suppose, on the one hand comes from the same impulse that has kept them from impeaching George and Barbara's idiot son despite his manifest crimes against the Constitution and common human decency. Somehow, that urge also makes them want to give him whatever he wants in a Quisling-Renfield sort of way. I call it Democratic Battered Wife Syndrome, their fear of an out-of-control Rethugli-bot Party makes them collaborators in their own degradation. That, and I'm sure not a few of them are complicit in the crimes of the telecoms and they hope that this immunity will either put off the retribution for their wrong-doing until they can get out of office or thwart it altogether. Either way, they need to be out of work, up to and including Pelosi and Hoyer.

THE 4th AMENDMENT:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.




I got the picture from Bob Cesca: