Hecate has her own blog, but she hangs most often at Atrios’ joint. There she often—not so much lately as she used to, but sometimes—leaves for the evening with a Blessing. This is the one for Oct. 11 2007, a night at which she had a meeting [...]
Hecate has her own blog, but she hangs most often at Atrios’ joint. There she often—not so much lately as she used to, but sometimes—leaves for the evening with a Blessing. This is the one for Oct. 11 2007, a night at which she had a meeting [...]
Well, the first song is for Graeme. The second song is for every girl I fell in love with on a Friday night…
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[...]“We Want To Die”. “Mission Accomplished” indeed.
[...]That’s all Internet traffic, foreign and domestic, data and voice. And the decision to do this was taken, not because of 9/11, but as soon as Bush took office. So much for the idea that the extremely benevolent and trustworthy Bush administration just wants “surgical” surveillance* to keep us [...]
On Gore’s Nobel award:
Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean
said in a statement, “No other person has worked harder or done more to draw much needed attention to the crisis of global climate change, one of the most critical issues facing our planet. Future generations will thank [...]
First Blackwater attacks Air Force Officers. Next, they lie about “returning fire” in Iraq. Then, they lie about what kind of money they’re making undermining the US Military abroad. From a Dkos Diary on Prince’s testimony, Tennessee Congressman John Duncan reveals the escalation in costs of Blackwater’s [...]
Many of you recall, no doubt, that two years and two months ago, a hurricane hit the Gulf Coast. The devastation remains largely unrepaired (well, except for casinos and maybe Trent Lott’s porch). One family in NOLa’s 9th ward lost all progress on restoring their home when it burned [...]
But I really don’t think he’s gonna run.
Indeed, I’d bet on it.
Surely not this time.
Mebbe next time, after the dust from the forthcoming ’failed’ presidency settles.
Why?
The next ’president’ cannot win, anything, at all, ever, period. None of the problems we face are in any way [...]
Al Gore deserves a lot of credit, more than a Nobel Peace Prize. Hardening himself to the peanut gallery of the White House goon squad - a place he had earned and would have ennobled - he has forged a recognition of the threat this planet faces almost singlehandedly.
The [...]
The Draft Gore movement is trying to get the reluctant candidate onto ballots across the country.
[Vist draftgore.com and find local “meetup” groups by entering your zipcode here.]
Al, to quote the writer of your one-time campaign song, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you. We’re [...]
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[...]
This time, Nancy Pelosi:
“We have to make responsible decisions in the Congress that are not driven by the dissatisfaction of anybody who wants the war to end tomorrow,” Pelosi told the gathering at the Sofitel, arranged by the Christian Science Monitor. Though crediting activists for [...]
Seems that Hillary’s got a business model a lot like Microsoft’s: She lets others (in this case, John Edwards) do the innovating, and then releases her own version when user acceptance reaches critical mass. Of course, Microsoft has been very successful with this strategy, and if what Hillary is [...]
Or at least to drastically curtail it.
Which is why the Commander-n-Chimp exhausted so much of his already scant and diminishing political capital to try to stop the Congressional resolution condemning Turkey for the Armenian genocide almost a century ago. (The Turks figger, with some justice, that in the interim they [...]
If Christians don’t bug the hell out of Jews, who will? And don’t say “Muslims” because that’s cheating!
What follows is from the musical comedy “Torah, Torah, Torah” set to open at the Starlight Lounge in Mecca this coming Ramadan…
In this scene, the coltish, horsey, equine, studly, whinnying, nostrils-flared, [...]
and when he talks to us about war and the military/industrial/congressional complex, and the costs, and the price, he does so as someone with direct, intimate, and immediate knowledge, it behooves us—and in particular those who do not have any direct knowledge of or experience with war and its [...]
As I just shared with the Rockefeller staffer (numbers here), after mentioning I’d be very happy to write a check to a primary challenger, this retoractive immunity thing sounds like a sweet deal. ’Cause I’ve got some stuff I’d like retroactive immunity for—but I don’t want to tell anybody [...]
The order given to the State of Texas by its former governor, now Cretin-1 in the White House, hasn’t gone down easily, if at all. As I mentioned in an earlier post about the attempts to exceed his constitutional powers, the occupier of the White House has chosen to [...]
On Tuesday, Barack Obama announced his support for President Bush’s bid to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement to Peru.
Yup - Obama is once again helping pass one of President Bush’s top priorities - even as Bush blocks the entire Democratic agenda and daily rains rhetorical [...]
I have a terrible confession to make: I am not a multitasker. I am not, in this important way, a 21st century man.
I can and do juggle lots of projects. But I can only do one thing at a given moment.
Among other things, my neo-disability means that when I’m [...]
WaPo:
In the late 1970s and ’80s, Mukasey and Giuliani were among a group of high-powered former prosecutors who revitalized the litigation practice at the law firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler. Mukasey is now on the Tooliain campaign’s judicial advisory board, and his son works for Giuliani’s law [...]
Congress is taking another swing at amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. A proposed bill by the Democrats in Congress, H.R. 3773 entitled “Responsible Electronic Surveillance That is Overseen, and Effective Act of 2007” or the “RESTORE Act of 2007” (how witty) passed both the House Intelligence and Judiciary [...]
Hate on Microsoft all you want, but do read this cogent Q&A with Bill Gates about the foundation he and his wife Melinda run.
Really good questions (from Newsweek readers) about [...]
Sometimes, things are simply to obvious to see. Except for the dirtiest of the DFHs
. Quoting in its entirety:
Misprision
I suppose it’ll take a dirty fucking hippie blogger to point out [...]
Okay, so I go out to get the morning paper, only there is no morning paper because I only get the paper delivered Thursday through Sunday. So that just sucks for two obvious reasons: I don’t know what day it is and even if I did there would still be [...]
Just the other day, Israel apparently signalled the Palestinians that they—the Israelis—might make concessions on Jerusalem, ahead of the forthcoming “MIddle East Summit” now in the planning stages, and set for next month.
Today—well, yesterday—the Israeli high command has ordered the IDF to assume control of as much Palestinian land [...]
Anyone who got the opportunity to watch proceedings on the floor of the House of Representatives yesterday got a treat. Rep. Abercrombie’s House Resolution 400 was up for debate. The GoPervs opposed it.
H. Res. 400 establishes a fine of $1 MN, or twice the amount in ill-gotten gains the [...]
Dems (Cont’d): “Don’t kill us. Here, we’ll cut off one of our fucking legs and bleed in the street, if you just won’t kill us, please, oh please!”
Pukes: “Okay. You talked us into it. We won’t kill you, now, if you cut off BOTH your legs, and bleed in the [...]
Back in the day, back when we had a government instead of rulers, back when we at least imagined we had a Constitution, back before the wingers started pissing all over themselves, and us, executive lawbreaking was considered a Big Deal. Why, when Clinton lied about a a blowjob, the [...]
Back in the day, back when we had a government instead of rulers, back when we at least imagined we had a Constitution, back before the wingers started pissing all over themselves, and us, executive lawbreaking was considered a Big Deal. Why, when Clinton lied about a a blowjob, the [...]
If you have any Banquet—or any brand for that matter, including generic or store brand—chicken or turkey pot pies lying around, purge them puppies, promptly.
They’re all made, it turns out, by
ConAgra Foods Inc. — the same company involved in a recall of peanut butter made in South Georgia [...]
If you have any Banquet—or any brand for that matter, including generic or store brand—chicken or turkey pot pies lying around, purge them puppies, promptly.
They’re all made, it turns out, by
ConAgra Foods Inc. — the same company involved in a recall of peanut butter made in South Georgia [...]
Or, rather, speaking of an enormous, mendacious, disembodied anus: The existential predicament shared by the “assholes” in the Conservative “movement,” the assholes who’d attack [...]
AP:
A top Democratic leader [sic] opened the door Tuesday to granting U.S. telecommunications companies retroactive legal immunity for helping the government conduct electronic surveillance without court orders, but said the Bush administration must first detail what those companies did.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said providing the immunity will [...]
Democrats asked 12-year-old Graeme Frost, an SCHIP beneficiary, to speak on the radio. “Graeme, a seventh-grader at the Park School, has a message for the president.
“If I could speak to him, I would say, ’You have to sign this bill,’” he told reporters yesterday during his first visit to the [...]
Chevron is one of the biggest corporate supporters of the Burmese dictatorship. This site is encouraging people worldwide to call and fax them today between 4:00 and 6:00 pm ET (their headquarters are in California) to tell them to change their relationship with the junta. Go there [...]
Here’s a little detail tucked way, w-a-a-y down at the bottom of the AP story on how a torture abductee can’t sue the administration because of a “state secrets” privilege:
The state secrets privilege arose from a 1953 Supreme Court ruling that allowed the executive branch to keep secret, even [...]
I talked to Representative Barbara Lee’s office, because she’s chair of the Progressive Caucus, who took such a strong, principled, effective stand for Constitutional government, as opposed to Steny Hoyer’s never-introduced abomination, permanently gutting FISA and the Fourth Amendment.
What Lee’s staffer said was that they had taken no official [...]
Who has some good awards of the Darwin variety for Flat Earth Sexuality Comprehension. Water Tiger gave out the Golden Hoo Ha already this a.m. Do I hear an Iron Hide Your Head In The Sand, anyone?
In Dallas, we are going to have the convention of psychologists selling their treatment [...]
Shades of Theodorus Nitz and “the serious, baffling problem of being conspicuous.”** From WaPo:
Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.
“I heard someone say, ’Oh my god, look at those,’ ” the college senior from New York recalled. “I look up and [...]
Elvis Costello is playing at a 60th birthday party.
And not just anybody’s birthday: it’s this year’s girl, the prospective queen of America, who seeks to command our armed forces.
Get happy, punsters! What’ve you got to help us try to be amused?
[...]I’ve had enough of the lies, the phony heroes, the cheaters. These guys showed the way.
They’re still doing it.
“During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone,” said George Frenkel, 87, of Kensington. “We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I’m proud [...]
See: Digby who has Paul Waldman’s piece about the Chickenhawk’s “Phony Soldier” Shriek up at her blog.
At least I’d still have a small chance to REALLY hurt one of ’em. I’m a little over 60, a little overweight, a little short of breath. I think I could take ol’ [...]
Read this book now:
The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care and Retirement and How You Can Fight Back
By Jacob Hacker
Company pensions impede company profits, just like other quaint benefits such as employee insurance and living wages.
FDR’s “New Deal” had put non-stock-speculator Americans on a sounder footing [...]
MSNBC has this story up now, from WaPo:
Top Iraqis pull back from key U.S. goal
Reconciliation seen as unattainable amid power struggle
By Joshua Partlow
Updated: 11:20 p.m. MT Oct 7, 2007
BAGHDAD - For much of this year, the U.S. military strategy in Iraq has sought to reduce [...]
Die, Tiny Tim, Die!
Mitt Romney has a rule
And sticks to it like glue
If you have no appetite
Too fucking bad for you
Stay away from me, Mitt. Stay far, far away.
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[...]Truthout’s Jason Leopold, reports: “The Defense Department (DOD) allegedly provided two fundamentalist Christian organizations exclusive access to several military bases around the country. This access became official [...]
The faculty has joined with officials of the Methodist Church in fighting the nasty deposit of a load of disinformation from the Cretin in Chief.
An editorial in the Dallas Morning News this morning joined the opposition to having presidential papers sequestered at SMU, and away from the public.
Whisper sweetly, whisper soft
In the night with stars aloft
The moon is shining in the sky
So I sing a lullaby
Go to sleep, my little one
Father will return again
Far away and yet so close
He misses holding you the most
Dream of him this very night
Wings he’ll [...]
Barack Obama: “I just want all of you to pray that I can be an instrument of God….”
Justice David Souter: “Government should not prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion.”
Barack Obama: “I think it’s important particularly for those of us in the Democratic party to not [...]
As Field Negro says:
To the extent that there is a heaven, of course.
I remember the first article I ever read on reggae, back in the day. The beat was described as “gummy.” For example:
Then again: Precision, concision, passion, power, beauty: Surely the Wailers were, at their peak, absolutely the [...]
Then put your foot on the mangled remains and beat your chest, roaring. I thought that California Electoral Vote Theft project collapsed with remarkable speed. It did. Turns out that was no kind of an accident but one of the most gratifying endeavors I have heard about recently. And oh [...]
Via Jack and Jill politics, the following timeline:
• 1793 Upper Canada, by Act Against Slavery
• 1799 New York State introduces gradual emancipation
• 1802 Danish abolish slave trade in Danish colonies
• 1802 Slavery re-introduced in France[1]
• 1803 Lower Canada abolishes slavery
• 1804 Haiti abolishes slavery[2]
[...]
Because today was the first mass ascent of the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. Dogs seem to take special exception to the floating, occasionally roaring, shapes drifting across the sky. But dogs are basically conservative
; they don’t do ‘strange’ [...]
By this time you’ve racked your wine several times from one carboy to another. The airlock is quiet as fermentation has stopped. You notice that after the last racking, there has been no more sediment deposited on the bottom of the carboy, and using a wine thief, a specially formed [...]
Irrational exuberance is not the primary danger, sorry Mr. Greenspan. Working my way through Sunday’s specials at the WaPo, I am getting a real feeling of hope that it’s Atrocity Fatigue (A.F.). The liberal DFH[...]
Paul Waldman at TAPPED:
Conservatives are huge fans of symbolic patriotism — flag lapel pins, flags on cars, full-throated singing of “God Bless the U.S.A.” (aka “Proud to Be an American”), and so on — public displays, in which one demonstrates to other people that one loves America.
Progressives, on the [...]
Be afraid. Be very afraid. Writes the Military Religious Freedom Foundation:
Over the course of the last 5 months, our research has accumulated to form a now overwhelming body of evidence substantiating the case that the US military, from the Pentagon on down, has become dominated by a particular, sectarian [...]
Systematic rapes to destroy women in the Congo.
“We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,” said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo’s rape epidemic. “They are done to destroy women.”
Eastern Congo is going through another one of its [...]
The Bush War Department sent 2,600 soldiers from the Minnesota National Guard to Iraq for two years. The survivors came home to learn their orders showed they served one too few days to accrue GI Bill benefits.
Tell me again how anything connected with the GOP[...]
The value of a phrase that fits exactly is displayed by op-ed writer Jim Hoagland this morning, and I want to point it out.
Why has a secretive government addicted to power politics and flexing its military muscles abruptly turned to negotiations and peaceful compromise? And why is [...]
Wal-Mart’s most famous anti-worker case came back a couple of decades ago. The meatcutters in one particular store actually got as far along in the organizing process as to vote to join a union. In response the company closed, not just that meat department but all meat departments at all [...]
Just when I was getting the hang of this atheist thing, the hated Yankees are devoured by a plague of midges.
I just don’t know what not to believe anymore.
[...]
[Welcome, TPM readers]. As we keep saying, authoritarian systems are extremely vulnerable to fraud, because authoritarian followers aren’t capable of providing checks and balances for their leaders, and the leaders are always tempted by the usual suspects: Money, power, and sex. Latest example: Oral Roberts [...]
Just Because.
[...]
(photo by Marianne Mather/STNG)
I love to read mystery novels, for pure escapism and fun. And my special subset of interest is female protagonists, in books written by women. The absence of visible testosterone makes these books more interesting and intellectual, IMO.
One of my favs is [...]
and he takes down Rush Limbaugh’s mouthpiece effectively, calmly, and in a way that makes it clear as can be who is the veteran, who is the adult, who has experienced and survived combat — and who is merely the tool.
General Wesley Clark has a petition to take [...]
“I think the word secret is getting a little too much…. It’s taking on an air of mystery.”
[...]And if the Moderate, Centrist[...]
The announcement that Pajama Pete Domenici was, in fact losing his mind—which fact having been evident for at LEAST the last two years—and therefore would retire before he forgot he was gonna do it, has led to a flurry of speculation on the subject of his replacement, and the subsequent [...]
“You say our feet bumped, I believe they did…”
Larry Craig (Republican Senator, Idaho)
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Dear Larry Craig,
I heard the recording of you talking to that undercover police officer and was so moved I wrote some lyrics which I believe speak, in some small way, to the magic and mystery [...]
Clickit! To Support Mammogram Donations:
A Favor for a Friend: it only takes a minute….
Then, please tell ten 10) friends to tell 10 MORE today!
The Breast Cancer site is having trouble getting enough people to click on their site daily to meet their quota [...]
In case your work hasn’t yet received the recognition it deserves, there is another chance for you, too. The Ig Nobel awards that were given out at Harvard U. today should inspire you onwards. They include the ’Gay Bomb’.
Pioneering research into a “gay bomb” that makes enemy troops [...]
This was on Huffpost this morning:
“When I asked Hersh who wants to bomb Iran, he said, “Ironically there is a lot of pressure coming from Democrats. Hillary Clinton, Obama, and Edwards have all said we cannot have a nuclear-armed Iran. Clearly the pressure from Democrats is a reflection of [...]
Josh thinks the elephant is bending over. I think the image is suggestive of a drunken pachyderm dancing wildy right after having been run over by a Blackwater Humvee.
What do you think?
UPDATE: The GOP[...]
Hey, there Rush Limbaugh: this one’s for you!
Phony Soldiers Rag
I was at the mall about a week ago
kicking it with some friends
a recruiter came up to me
and told me of a cool new trend
he said, sign up boy, and you will find
the army has changed [...]
As the efforts of student, faculty, alums and Methodist Church members to keep the Bush LieBury from being located at SMU fell earlier this year to considerations of the dollars that it would bring from the war criminals - the church is trying again.
I signed a petition as a member [...]
Christ, don’t let Xenophon see this one. Really, this is the sort of thing that makes me want to scream. The best part? It’s been going on for two years, and they are just now realizing it’s “insensitive.” Racism is institutional, fo shizzle:
Over 100 sixth graders at Grover Cleveland [...]
