No More Mr. Nice Guy!

And you thought it was his magnetic personality...

Vestal Vespa discovers where Junior's speeches come from.

Space (between Bush's ears): the Final Frontier

These are the voyages of the starship Bush. Her eight year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations - and take their oil. To boldly go where no wingnut has gone before - so far right, we're in another galaxy.

Captain's log, man-date 2005.628304. Captain George Tiberius Bush reporting. We are drifting in the Jesus Nebula, a vast empty region of space where a dense fog keeps all light and information from penetrating from the outside.

Science Officer Mr. Dick: Captain, sensors indicate unusually low poll readings.

Bush: Orange alert! Deploy Terri Schiavo.

Bill "Bones" Frist: She's dead, George!

Bush: Uh, never mind. Sound the Social Security alert!

Computer voice: Social Security will be bankrupt in... five seconds. Social Security will be bankrupt in... four seconds. Social Security will be bankrupt in... three seconds. Social Security will be bankrupt in... two seconds. Social Security will be bankrupt in... one second.

Dick: Captain, the Social Security alert has caused polls to decrease even further.

Bush: Divert all power to the deflector array!

Dick: Aye aye, Captain. We are broadcasting Fox News on all frequencies at maximum power. However, polls continue to drop.

Bush: Lieutenant Ya-whore-Ya, open a hailing frequency.

Lieutenant Ya-whore-ya: Aye aye husb - I mean Sir.

Bush: Now hear this! We are firm! We are resolute! We're going to stay the course, and we won't stop turning corners until the Federation people are safer! I want you to know that I think about the war on Terra every day - every single day! And I'm going to continue thinking about it every day - every single day!

Scotty: Captain, the polls are critically low! We're running on fumes! The engine canna take it any more - she's gonna blow!

Bush: Boy, this is hard work - it's hard work! Umm... I'll be in my ready room. Hold my calls.

Bush bolts from the bridge. Shortly afterwards, the Captain's shuttle is seen to take off on a course for the planet Alabama...

(And here's something a little off topic, but I found it hilarious.)

GOP will eat itself

With Junior's approval ratings dropping faster than Ann Coulter's knickers, the junta is lashing out in increasingly crazed and demented desperation. Of course, we've long been used to the gutter attacks on Democrats - Karl Rove's recent despicable tirade being the latest in a long tradition of hate-mongering and rabble-rousing - but now the bushites are starting to attack the growing number of Republicans who are belatedly opening their eyes and realizing how totally and royally their glorious leader has cheneyed up in Iraq.

Recently, Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel stated the obvious: the Bush administration "is completely disconnected from reality" and that "we're losing in Iraq." Though Hagel has been one of Junior's staunchest loyalists, speaking the truth is a cardinal sin which cannot be tolerated from anyone. Cheney the Dick lashed back: "Since 9/11, we've had people like Chuck Hagel and other politicians and we've had people in the press corps and commentators who've said we can't do Afghanistan."

A few days ago, the odious and sleazy professional liar Donald Rumsfeld came before a Senate hearing to deny angrily that the US is losing in Iraq. "You have an insurgency with no vision, no base, limited popular support, an elected government committed to Iraq's democratic process," he said. "And you have Iraqi security forces that are fighting and dying for their country every day. Senator, that is not a quagmire." Ooookay... but more recently, Rumsfeld offered a much less rosy picture: the insurgency could last "5 to 12 years." Will Rummy be the next one to be taken to the woodshed?

But many more Republicans are seeing the Bush regime's incompetence in Iraq as electoral poison in next year's mid-term elections, and are seeking to distance themselves from the self-deluding cabal in the White House. Even Walter "Freedom Fries" Jones is calling for the administration to start creating a plan for withdrawal - though Junior petulantly refuses to consider setting any timetable for pulling out.

So desperate are the Bushites that they are sending out their bumbling figurehead to do another "Mission Accomplished" tomorrow night at Fort Bragg. Once again the Chickenhawk-in-Chief will use soldiers as props, and proclaim that everything is going swimmingly, and people who say otherwise just hate America. But something tells me he will not be greeted as a liberator. The troops are no dummies, and even the most gung-ho of them are starting to realize that they are being used as cannon fodder in a reckless and pointless war. Meanwhile, the rethugs are "supporting the troops" by slashing their pay, benefits, health care and so on, while extending their tours of duty indefinitely.

Junior's reign is following the trajectory of almost every tyrant in history. First the seizing of power amid rosy projections of a new order leading to utopia. Then the increasingly blatant arrogance and corruption. Next, the growing megalomania and paranoia, with friends and enemies alike falling victim to hysterical purges. Finally, the inevitable collapse and overthrow.

The Junior junta is by no means in its last throes, but a tipping point is rapidly approaching. Of course we in the reality-based community can't sit back and take it for granted that things will work out. We have to pile on the pressure more than ever, keep hammering away on the Downing Street Memo and the regime's criminality and cluelessness, keep doing whatever we can to turn public opinion against the Iraquagmire and the blundering buffoons who led us into it. Every day we remain in Iraq means more troops and innocent civilians killed for the greater glory of Halliburton's bottom line.

But the signs are hopeful that the GOP will implode under the weight of the neonazi-con's lies and corruption. Who knows, maybe the remaining moderates and grown-ups will reclaim their party from the religious lunatics and corporatist crooks. So we'll be doing them a favor in the long run.

Fly the fiendish skies

Fair play to the Italians for standing up to global bully boy George Bush Junior and his CIA minions who kidnap Italian citizens and "render" them to be tortured in third world hellholes. Germany and Sweden are also starting to take action.

Now if only Bertie Ahern would grow a spine and have the CIA's "torture express" corporate jet impounded the next time it refuels at Shannon Airport, and its occupants arrested for violating international law.

I mean, we all know that air travel is torture nowadays, but this is ridiculous...

The horror! The horror!

David Horrorwitz has finally lost the plot. He has created a massive website which purports to list every "leftist" in creation and the links between them in their fiendish conspiracy against mom, baseball and apple pie.

The site is hysterically funny in an unintentional way. Hours of amusement are guaranteed as you surf through the grab-bag of dyed-in-the-wool Republicans like Richard Clarke, medieval religious fanatics like Osama bin Laden (remember, this is supposedly a list of leftists), and celebrities major and minor. Julia Roberts is there because she supports gun reform, Katie Couric because she considers herself a feminist, and Jayson Blair for no discernible reason whatsoever. And of course what list of American leftists would be complete without - I kid thee not - Saddam Hussein!

Blogger Michael Berube has an entry (Aw! No fair! I want one too!) but Duncan Black (Atrios) and Markos Moulitsas (Kos) are noticeably absent. On the other hand, you'll laugh out loud at Jon Stewart's entry. "Called CNN's Crossfire hosts "hacks" to their faces during an interview." Oh my god! What a fiend! Katie bar the door! "Jonathan Stuart Liebowitz was born in November 1962 in New York City and grew up in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, a suburb of gritty Trenton he later described as 'a magical little fishing village.'" Ha ha ha! What a stoooopid librull!

It's easy to dismiss Whore-owitz as just another extreme-right attack poodle, frothing in demented paranoia about vast left-wing conspiracies, rather like the NRA and its widely mocked hit list. But he can't be underestimated, if only because of the bottomless pockets of the corporatist anti-democracy "foundations" and "think tanks" which fund his drooling dementia. And his anti-intellectual campaign to destroy free speech on university campuses is scarily reminiscent of the Nazis' purge of German universities during the late 1930's.

Hannah Ahrendt wrote of the banality of evil. What we are facing today is the stupidity of evil, but that doesn't make it any less dangerous.

(Hat tip to PZ for bringing this to my attention)

Bush's brain talks out of his ass

The sinister and infinitely despicable Karl Rove continues to plumb new depths of sheer evil and loathsomeness. Here's his take on the difference between liberal and "conservative" responses to 9/11:

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.

[...]

Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.

And here's the reality: New York is an overwhelmingly liberal city. Therefore it stands to reason that most of the victims of 9/11 were liberals. Most of the firefighters rushing into the twin towers as they burned and teetered on the brink of collapse were liberals. Not that anyone stopped to think about political distinctions on that terrible day. 9/11 was an attack on all Americans, and all of humanity.

So what was Junior doing during this attack? He was sitting in a kindergarten classroom, clearly way out of his educational depth, holding the book "My Pet Goat" upside down.

What has he done since? He made a token attempt to find Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, then pulled US troops and resources away when they were on the brink of success, and instead invaded Iraq - a country which had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no threat to US security. He followed an agenda pushed by his big-oil and neonazi-con puppetmasters since long before 9/11. This champagne-unit-deserting little coward has sent over 1,700 US troops to their deaths and killed tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and spawned a massive world-wide wave of revulsion and resentment that guarantees we will have to fight a whole new generation of Bin Ladens and suffer many more and worse 9/11's in the near future.

Junior and his criminal cabal have utterly failed to respond in any positive way to 9/11. They've stripped us of our constitutional rights while putting us in greater danger, instead of making us safer.

With Junior's approval ratings languishing in the toilet alongside the Koran, with violence continually growing out of control in Iraq and the Downing Street documents destroying what's left of the Bush regime's credibility, it's no surprise that the RRR would launch a diversionary attack. Hence the ferocity with which they howled for the blood of Dick Durbin. Hence their renewed efforts to use 9/11 as a cheap wedge tactic. How utterly despicable! And it's clear that Rove isn't just shooting his own mouth off, he speaks for Junior and the rethug leadership; they refuse to condemn his remarks.

Now you know why they call Rove "Turd Blossom". The one silver lining in this affair is that Rove has made a critical mistake by raising his public profile. He likes to operate in the shadows, pulling dirty tricks for his beloved George Bush Junior but never being seen holding the smoking gun. Now the spotlight is shining on this sleazy dung beetle, and there's no dark corner for him to scuttle to. It's way past time for this turd to get flushed down the toilet!

Train-wreck TV

George Bush Junior is such a gibbering demented moron, it's painful to watch him, and downright embarrassing to recall that he is the most powerful man on earth. Did you see the clip form his news conference that the Daily Show played? It was so surreal, so cringe-inducing, that you may have thought it was staged with actors. Alas, it's all too true - it's right there on the White House website for the world to see.

We talked about the Middle East... We talked about Iraq... We talked about Afghanistan... We talked about the broader Middle East. We talked about the need for us to continually support democratic movements... We talked about terrorism. We talked about visas. We talked about the need to continue to share information... We talked about Iran... We talked about our collaborative efforts in Darfur... We talked about our economies... we talked about how we can work together to make sure that the world trades more freely and more fairly for the sake of our -- for the sake of our peoples...

And I was going to say he's a piece of work, but that might not translate too well. Is that all right, if I call you a "piece of work"? (Laughter.)

Adam, I think about Iraq every day -- every single day... And so, you know, I think about this every day, every single day, and will continue thinking about it.

Q Mr. President, many in Europe --

PRESIDENT BUSH: You're offending people here, we got two other --

Aaaaargh!!!! I'm ashamed to be of the same species as this drooling little simpleton. Why doesn't he just stay on his ranch in Crawford, and stop trying to play a president on TV? He's a national embarrassment and disgrace.

Bidin' his time

Joe Biden (D-MBNA) is the first dem to announce that he will be a candidate for prez in 2008. I wonder whose speech he'll plagiarize this time? And do we really need another candidate from the Republican wing of the Democratic party?

Hmm, I feel another poll coming on...

The G-Word

The lunatic extreme right is still getting its collective knickers in a twist over the word "Gulag" being used in reference to its, umm, gulag in Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Camp Guano, as well as an unknown number of CIA torture facilities around the globe. The shrieks of manufactured outrage reveal once again the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the RRR - it's okay for them to torture people (most of whom are innocent, rounded up in mass sweeps) but it's the depths of evil for a Democrat to draw attention to what's going on.

With typical jaw-dropping and stomach-churning hypocrisy, the whited sepulchers of the extreme religious right are accusing Amnesty International and Dick Durbin of trivializing the word "gulag". But of course, IOKIYAR - it's okay if you're a republican. Consider these words by everyone's favorite insane, drooling, judicial-activist black female judge, Janice Rogers Brown:

There are so few true conservatives left in America that we probably should be included on the endangered species list. That would serve two purposes: demonstrating the great compassion of our government and relegating us to some remote wetlands habitat where - out of sight and out of mind - we will cease being a dissonance in collectivist concerto of the liberal body politic. In truth, they need not banish us to the gulag.

And of course there is a never-ending stream of repug imbeciles displaying their moral infantilism by trotting out the Nazi comparison against everyone who stands in the way of their berserk, mouth-foaming agenda of blind greed and rabid religious fanaticism, whether the issue be taxes, stem cell research, the environment, or gun reform.

The RRR are truly the most loathsome, despicable piles of manure ever to spread their stench over the earth. But at least their squeals of self-serving anger show that we are hitting a nerve. Between the Downing Street Documents and the growing uproar over torture as US policy, the lunatic right has good reason to pile on the synthetic and synchronized ire to hide its real emotion: fear. Junior and his Neocons, Theocons and Nazicons have royally screwed the pooch, and there is going to be such a tidal wave of revulsion against repug sleaze and venality in the mid-term elections that not even the rigged Diebold voting machines will save the extreme right's hide.

So in case there are any wingnuts reading this post, allow me to say:

Gulag!

GULAG!

GULAG GULAG GULAG GULAG GULAG GULAG GULAG GULAG
GULAG GULAG GULAG GULAG GULAG GULAG GULAG GULAG
GULAG GULAG GULAG GULAG GULAG GULAG GULAG GULAG
GULAG GULAG GULAG GULAG GULAG GULAG GULAG GULAG

Better get used to that word, you're going to be hearing a lot more of it!

This is your brain on religion

Rumania, the legendary home of Dracula and Vlad the Impaler, is also the home of some seriously sick and twisted people driven insane by religion. Via Pharyngula comes this story that just about turns my stomach.

A Romanian Orthodox priest who ordered the crucifixion of a young nun because she was "possessed by the devil" and now faces murder charges was unrepentant on Saturday as he celebrated a funeral mass for his alleged victim.

[...]

"I don't understand why journalists are making such a fuss about this. Exorcism is a common practise in the heart of the Romanian Orthodox church and my methods are not at all unknown to other priests," he said.

A 34-year-old parishioner who had come to defend Daniel and gave her name as Dora, said Sister Irina "had to be punished, she had an argument with the Father during a Sunday mass and insulted him in front of the congregation".

For all its pious mouthings about loving thy neighbor, this is what religion is all about in practice. It's a framework for demonizing other people (literally, in this case) and dehumanizing them, so that anyone you don't like, anyone who isn't a member of your little tribe, you can kill them in unimaginably cruel ways without the slightest twinge of conscience. And you can even celebrate their funeral and tell yourself what a good, holy person you are.

Religion, the crystal meth of the masses.

Bill Frist's political autopsy released

Autopsy results for Bill Frist's political career have been released. They confirm that Frist has been in a persistent state of hypocrisy for the last several years. The cerebral cortex had degenerated to mush, leaving a vestigial lizard brain. Also, the results confirm that Frist suffered from ideologically-induced blindness and could not respond to facts or reason. In addition, Frist could not breathe on his own, due to having his head up the religious right's ass.

Frist, it will be recalled, collapsed into a state of terminal mendacity on the Senate floor on March 17 this year, when he made a long-distance diagnosis of Terri Schiavo based on looking at an edited amateur videotape supplied by her parents. Concern for Frist's mental health had previously been raised when he refused to disavow false statements made in an "abstinence only" education program, to the effect that HIV can be transmitted through tears and sweat. Frist now denies that he made the Schiavo diagnosis, confirming that the part of his brain that controls ethical behavior is severely atrophied.

Unfortunately, some people are in deep denial about the seriousness of Frist's condition. Having watched him preen and position himself as the religious right's candidate in 2008, they can't accept that his presidential hopes have flatlined.

Medical amateur hour is over for Frist, George Bush Junior, Tom Delay and the other pandering hypocrites who sought to inflame a tragic private situation for partisan political gain. Now they will try to scuttle back into the shadows like the cockroaches they are. And the attack poodles of the reactionary media, who not so long ago were make daily murder accusations against Terri Schiavo's husband, are suddenly mouthing oafishly: "Terri Who?" Most sickening of all, Jeb Bush is abusing his powers as governor and trying to keep the witch hunt against Michael Schiavo going.

Ever since it was hijacked by the lunatic religious right, the GOP has been in a terminal state of mealy-mouthed hypocrisy and brain-dead stupidity. It's time to pull the plug on this rotting vegetable.

Strange fruit and deranged coots

History doesn't always repeat itself as farce; sometimes the second time is tragedy, too. But there was definitely an element of farce in the Senate's long-overdue apology for lynching. Why did Bill Frist insist on a voice vote in an evening session, vetoing a roll-call vote and nixing a debate during regular business hours when there would be media coverage? Obviously because many of his repug colleagues, especially those from the South, didn't want to go on record against lynching since it would be political poison in their home states.

But the prize for mealy-mouthed hypocrisy surely goes to Frist's fellow Tennessean, Lamar Alexander. Alexander is one of 16 senators - all repugs - who refuse to express their support of the measure by co-sponsoring it. (Arizona's Kyl is another.) But Alexander tried to cover his ample derriere by hurriedly introducing a competing resolution called "celebrating Black History Month". The Tennessean newspaper reports: '"There is no resolution of apology that we can pass today that will teach one more child to read, prevent one more case of AIDS, or stop one more violent crime," Alexander said in a statement he inserted into the Congressional Record during the apology debate.' Note the word "inserted"; it means that Alexander wasn't present for the debate! He didn't even care enough to deliver his pompous bloviation in person!

Most sickening of all is the way the extreme lunatic right throws the word "lynching" around in a temper tantrum whenever it doesn't get its way. Can you believe anyone would use the word "lynching" to describe the Senate's hesitation to confirm the rabidly insane, out-of-control John Bolton? And of course when Clarence Thomas's despicable treatment of Anita Hill was revealed, Thomas showed what a moral midget he is by complaining about being the victim of a "high-tech lynching."

Let's remind ourselves what lynching really means. Mahablog quotes an 1893 account of a lynching in Texas:

The negro was placed upon a carnival float in mockery of a king upon his throne, and, followed by an immense crowd, was escorted through the city so that all might see the most inhuman monster known in current history. The line of march was up Main street to the square, around the square down Clarksville street to Church street, thence to the open prairies about 300 yards from the Texas & Pacific depot. Here Smith was placed upon a scaffold, six feet square and ten feet high, securely bound, within the view of all beholders. Here the victim was tortured for fifty minutes by red-hot iron brands thrust against his quivering body. Commencing at the feet the brands were placed against him inch by inch until they were thrust against the face. Then, being apparently dead, kerosene was poured upon him, cottonseed hulls placed beneath him and set on fire.

Read more about lynching here.

Some right-wing bloggers are being typically dishonest and disingenuous, arguing that the Republicans don't need to apologize for lynching, because it was Democrats in the Senate who blocked anti-lynching and civil rights legislation, often using the filibuster. Needless to say, this is just as mealy-mouthed as Lamar Alexander's evasions. The Dixiecrats who supported lynching have since then decamped en masse (except for Zell Miller) to the GOP and taken it over. The brutal bigots who were in favor of lynching then are the same ones who are now refusing to apologize for it.

The mindset that says lynching is no big deal, just a piece of harmless fun, is clearly the same mindset that is operating in Abu Ghraib and Camp Guano. The lunatic right continues to be "outraged by the outrage", huffing and puffing in synchronized synthetic anger, and imagining they can bully everyone else into silence.

How long will it be before Congress is forced to apologize to the victims of the torture that the US is carrying out today? The incredibly vile and loathsome Bush junta has done incalculable and irreparable damage to the USA's standing in the world. Will they ever be held accountable for their crimes against humanity?

Got Jesus Juice?

(No, I'm not going to blog on the Michael Jackson circus, other than noting how sad it is that the greed and stupidity of one victim's mother led to all the victims being denied justice.)

It's a little known fact that, ever since he went tiptoeing through the tulips with manpanion Crown Prince Abdullah, George Bush Junior has been fascinated with Arab culture and traditions, and is determined to add some color to White House protocols with a little Arab flair. So now whenever James Dobson drops into the Oval Office for a visit, Crown Prince Abdullard rushes up and kisses him on both cheeks. Then Dobson pulls up his pants and they both get down to work.

On the top of Dobson's list of demands these days is more stark raving right-wing lunatics on the Supreme Court. Dobson's "Focus on the Family" and related hate groups have already spent millions of dollars on radio and TV ads urging the appointment of the corrupt Priscilla Owen and the mouth-foaming insane Janice Rogers Brown as circuit court judges. That's a lot of Jesus Juice! But they're planning to spend over $20 million on the fight to pack the Supreme Court, waging all-out war against Democrats and "activist judges" while hiding behind bogus astroturf groups with names like "Progress for America" and "The Judicial Confirmation Network". It shows clearly how much value they place on controlling the Supreme Court, and how high the stakes are. (Of course Dobson is all in favor of activist judges as long as they are agitating for his "culture of life".)

Where does all this money come from? In a nutshell, hatred is big business. "Christian" hatemongers like Dobson rile up the useful idiots, who dig deep into their pockets and send tidal waves of dollars rolling in. And of course laws against political lobbying by tax-exempt churches are winked at.

The GOP has sold its soul to Satan, i.e. the endless parade of "spirit-filled" hatemongers whose mission is "to set the world aflame for Christ." Dobson is just one example. There's also the incredibly despicable and vile Fred Phelps, whose latest stunt is disrupting the funerals of US soldiers killed in Iraq. So much for "supporting the troops". And yet the repugs continue to drop trou and bend over, the Jesus juice trickling down their flabby buttocks, confident that with the aid of their treasonous, anti-American hate-mongering friends, they can retain power and not be held accountable. (As this blogger points out, if you want to know what "fundamentalist" means, look up its root, "fundament", in a dictionary.)

Has every repub and every christian drunk the Jesus juice kool-aid? Are there no decent, honorable people left who are disgusted by this obscene hijacking and travesty of their religious and political beliefs? Or is everyone on the right so convulsed with hatred that this bizarre display of berserk drooling dementia seems perfectly normal?

The lunatic religious right's "reign of madness" threatens the very nature of this country. Do we want a constitutional democracy with separation of church and state, or are we going to succumb to the worst, most vindictive and deranged form of theocracy?

Words and weapons

I learned something new today, thanks to my homie Desert Rat Democrat. I knew that a merkin is a pubic wig, but I didn't realize that it derived from the obsolete word "malkin", a lower-class woman. How appropriate!

(To be fair, I think it's juvenile that Atrios and others constantly refer to Michelle Malkin as Michelle Maglalang. Malkin is her married name, she's perfectly entitled to use it.)

Anyway, here's some more interesting stuff about words. The word "fascism" comes from fasces, a bundle of twigs that was a symbol of authority for magistrates in ancient Rome. The word "faggot" comes from the same source. It's commonly believed that "faggot" came to be associated with homosexuals because a bundle of twigs was often used to start a fire, and when women were burned at the stake as witches, sometimes a gay man would be thrown in to get the blaze going. (However, this may be an etymological urban legend.)

Every fascist movement needs a scapegoat, a group of people that can be demonized and dehumanized. For the Nazis, it was of course the Jews. Today, as the US plummets headlong into stark raving fundamentalist christofascism, it's rather curious that the primary scapegoats are not Arabs and Muslims (though they are on the receiving end of a great deal of hatred and racism) but gays. Compare today's anti-gay fulminations with Nazi rhetoric against Jews. Look at how the Bush junta used gay marriage as a wedge issue in the last election, pushing anti-gay-marriage amendments into state constitutions across the country as a way of riling up the neanderthal vote. Pretty soon, we'll have politicians calling for gays to wear distinctive armbands when they go out in public... wait a minute, it's already happening.

The point of this post is that words are weapons. In our increasingly illiterate and dumbed-down society, it's all the more important that we understand the words our lords and masters fling around, and understand how they are being used against us.

It's a sin if you take pleasure in it...

"Marijuana is an un-Christian pleasure, therefore illegal," this guy explains.

So if you're dying and marijuana would help, go to church instead. Find your Mother Teresa for comfort and die.

I sure hope he's writing with tongue in cheek. This being Arizona, you never know.

Just one question...

"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

This was John Kerry's simple but eloquent challenge to Congress when he testified on "Operation Winter Soldier" in 1971. Certainly. the war against Vietnam was a mistake, and a massive one. But Vietnam doesn't have oil so we can give Nixon and "El B.J." the benefit of the doubt and assume their motives were not totally self-interested.

The war against Iraq is not just a horrendous f***-up but an appalling crime against humanity, waged for the basest of motives - deranged drooling greed. As the Downing Street Memo and related documents continue to expose the Chimp-in-Chief's lies and utter venality, as military recruiting plummets, as violence spirals ever upwards and our troops see themselves stuck in a quagmire with no exit in the foreseeable future (even while corporate criminals and parasites like Cheney the Dick's Halliburton make out like bandits), the question now is:

How do you ask a person to be the last one to die for a lie?

Oh gawd, here we go again...

Just as I predicted...

Thinkprogress wonders, "Is Bush's New Nominee A Bigot?" Does the question even need to be asked?

Un-friggin-believable!

It must be the End Times... the Bush scandals are piling up faster than a simple blogger can keep up with. Here are two items that caught my attention, literally in the last five minutes of surfing the net.

Item the first:

Bush aide altered climate reports

Philip Cooney, a White House official who had no scientific training, doctored official warnings on climate change, inserting words to qualify evidence, and deleting paragraphs which he considered to be speculative [...] Mr Cooney not only lacks any scientific training but was a former lobbyist with the oil industry's largest trade group before he entered the White House in 2001. (more...)

Secondly, remember King George the Turd's "read my lips, no new drafts" pledge during last year's election campaign? Read this pair of articles (1, 2) about military recruiters actually kidnapping 17-year-old kids and cutting them off from their families to get them to sign up. Un-friggin-believable!

This once-great country is now in thrall to criminal, corrupt, incompetent, venal, sleazy, stark raving lunatics. WAKE UP, PEOPLE!

Are we feeling safer yet?

On April 25, Gregory Despres arrived at the U.S.-Canadian border crossing at Calais, Maine, carrying a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife, brass knuckles and a chain saw stained with what appeared to be blood. U.S. customs agents confiscated the weapons and fingerprinted Despres.

Then they let him into the United States.

The following day, a gruesome scene was discovered in Despres' hometown of Minto, New Brunswick: The decapitated body of a 74-year-old country musician named Frederick Fulton on Fulton's kitchen floor. His head was in a pillowcase under a kitchen table. His common-law wife was discovered stabbed to death in a bedroom.

Jeezus jumped-up Christ on a hot-dog bun with sauerkraut on top!!!!! I thought the "Patriot" Act, the TSA and all the other bureaucracy put in place after 9/11 was supposed to secure our borders and make us safer. Yet some whacked-out howling-at-the-moon nutcase with a blood-stained chainsaw can just wander across the border without a hitch! Hell, just look at the guy - shouldn't they have arrested him just for looking so scary and freaky?

A US Customs spokesman explained, "Nobody asked us to detain him. Being bizarre is not a reason to keep somebody out of this country or lock them up. . . . We are governed by laws and regulations, and he did not violate any regulations.''

As No More Mrs. Nice Guy eloquently rebutted, BS! They do it every day. They even forced a commercial airliner out of the sky when Cat Stevens was found to be on board.

I guess it's too bad Chainsaw Boy didn't have dark skin and/or a turban. But then, violent heavily-armed white christian psychopaths are perfectly at home in Bush's America.

Catapult the truth

"See, in my line of work, you gotta keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kinda catapult the propaganda." -- George Bush Junior

The Bush-ass-licking "liberal media" is still studiously ignoring and burying the explosive scandal that is the Downing Street Memo. This document is a "smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud" that utterly destroys Bush's credibility on Iraq and exposes his lies, scheming and duplicity. He lied to Congress, he lied to the American people and he committed high crimes that are the clearest grounds yet for impeachment, let alone war crime trials.

Fortunately, there are a couple of lone voices in Congress - John Conyers in the House and Ted Kennedy in the Senate - who are fighting to break through the wall of silence. They need your help! Go and sign their petitions for a congressional inquiry. Call your congresscritters and demand an inquiry - "because I trusted my president. And he lied to me." Write letters to local media, asking them why they aren't covering this incredibly significant story. Talk to your neighbors and workmates about the subject. Stand on a soapbox, run naked down the street with an ostrich feather up your butt, whatever you have to do to get some attention.

The lunatic extreme right has been amazingly successful in generating a wall of noise to saturate the airwaves and the public consciousness with their carefully scripted ranting points. The only way we can take our country back is to start fighting back at least as hard. Hold the bums' feet to the fire! Keep piling the pressure on. It's up to us to catapult the truth!

John Brown's body lies a-spinning in the grave...

The lunatic extreme right has had another one of its barking mad, loony-tunes activist judge nominees approved by the Senate. Janice Rogers Brown, who has an absolutely horrific record on the California state bench, is now free to inflict her ultra-right idiocy and drooling imbecility in the US Circuit Court of Appeals for D.C., the most powerful federal court and a stepping stone to the SCROTUS (Supreme Court - Republican - of the United States).

In a nutshell, Brown believes that human beings have no rights; only corporations have rights. She thinks workers should have to endure racist abuse and discrimination in the workplace, that black women can be barred from a jury solely on the basis of race, that the New Deal was a "socialist revolution", that social security is cannibalism, and so on and on... one can only read so much of Brown's profoundly deluded rantings before one feels oneself slipping away into an alternate reality where black is white, good is evil and the Constitution makes us all slaves of King George the Turd.

But let's be clear that it's not Brown's beliefs alone that make her unfit to be a judge. After all, every judge has some political beliefs, but their job descriptions requires them to put their beliefs aside and decide cases fairly. (Though anyone holding beliefs as stark raving insane as Brown's seems better fitted to a straitjacket than black robes.) What makes Brown unacceptable is her unshakeable religious conviction that she alone - not the Constitution, not decades of Supreme Court rulings, not the plainly expressed will of voters - is the final arbiter of all law, and any law she dislikes, she can "judicially nullify" and ignore. No wonder her own colleagues consider her unqualified as a judge, and a huge list of African-American, legal and public interest groups opposed her nomination.

Of course the GOP, the party of the "southern strategy", the cabal that regularly wraps itself in the confederate flag and panders to the lowest dregs of racism, ignorance, stupidity and superstition, is shocked - shocked! - that Democrats would oppose a black woman. It can't possibly be about substantive issues like what an appalling record Brown has - it must be racist! Barack Obama gave short shrift to this rank hypocrisy: "Just as it would be cynical and offensive that Judge Rogers Brown be vilified simply for being a black conservative, it's equally offensive and cynical to suggest that somehow she should get a pass for her outlandish views simply because she's a black woman."

Alas, she was approved by the Senate along partisan lines, with one quisling Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, voting with the rethugs. Another victory for the RRR in stuffing the courts with their lunatic ultra-extreme-right zealots who will roll back a century of progress.

The most depressing thing is that the RRR seems to have an infinite supply of these deranged fanatics on tap, each more mouth-foamingly insane than the last one. I believe Karl Rove is planning to provoke another filibuster fight, by constantly putting forward totally unacceptable nominees to force the Democrats into filibustering repeatedly until they lose public sympathy. Then the filibuster will be abolished and the transformation of a constitutional democracy into a totalitarian fundamentalist police state will be complete.

These are scary times...

The Repulsive doth protest too much

My local rag, the "Arizona Repulsive" as it's fondly known, continues its proud tradition of shooting the messenger, hitting its own foot in the process. With pathetic predictability, it takes haughty offense at Amnesty International's use of the word "gulag" to describe what anyone with the IQ of a sea cucumber can plainly see is indeed a gulag.

Does anyone else see the irony in applying the term "overkill", not to the brutal regime in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and secret CIA facilities around the globe (to say nothing of the 100,000 civilians killed in Iraq), but to Amnesty International for having the temerity to point this out?

Read a book, enrage a right-winger

Human Events Online, a right-wing site that apparently exists mainly to peddle the demented scribblings of Ann Coulter and her hate-mongering ilk, has drawn up a list of the "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries". No, it isn't the hysterical and scurrilous attack tomes whose ads are plastered all over the site. Instead, it's a list that speaks volumes about the anti-intellectualism, know-nothingism and moral bankruptcy of the extreme lunatic right.

Lumped in with "Mein Kampf" and "The Communist Manifesto" are such seminal works as Dewey's "Democracy and Education" (two concepts that are anathema to the extreme right) and Kinsey's "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male". (Of course, anything that deals realistically with sex is guaranteed to invoke paroxysms of mouth-foaming rage in the ranks of the "moronic majority" and born-yesterday christians.)

Several classics fail to make the top ten, but get honorable mentions, including Darwin's "Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man", plus "Silent Spring", "Unsafe at Any Speed", and even John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty". Scroll down to the bottom of the article, if you can make it that far without tossing your cookies all over your computer screen, and you will see the list of judges in this anti-book kangaroo court. Apart from Phyllis Schlafly, almost all have some affiliation with a (usually Southern) university. So much for universities being hell-holes of liberal brainwashing!

When fascists start drawing up lists of "dangerous books", the next step is always book-burning (and we've already seen how readily the zombie true believers can be orchestrated into Dixie Chicks CD-burning orgies.) And of course, when they start burning books, they always move on to burning people. Of course, to the mega-corporate ruling elite, which can only stay in power by riling up the useful idiots into anti-intellectual frenzies, any book is dangerous. Their ideal is a nation of ignorant, uneducated serfs who can be manipulated with ease into committing economic suicide at the voting booth. Any form of independent thinking, any dissemination of facts that contradict the official mythology, threatens them like sunlight threatens a vampire.

Over to you. Which are the real dangerous books? Introducing the first "No More Mr. Nice Poll"!

Idiots and Nazis

Last week, bloggers had fun with New Jersey repug and conservative idiot Bret Schundler, who is running for governor but apparently can't find any enthusiastic young supporters willing to pose with him, so he had to be photoshopped into a photo of Howard Dean. Now Schundler is blaming his website company for the blunder. Apparently the company had previously done some work for Dean, and a junior staffer "inadvertently [sic] thought he could use the crowd shot." Hmm, I hope someone isn't disassembling here.

This gaffe comes on the heels of a previous Schundler snafu, where he blamed his printer for a mailing which attacked a GOP rival: "Forrester could have used his wealth to do good instead of evil." Ah, the Republicans, the party of personal responsibility...

And if the depths of Schundler's idiocy aren't enough to disqualify him from public office, this is. It seems Schundler is a friend and former business partner of the hatred-spewing, violence-inciting pile of feces, neonazi Hal Turner, who says:

Given his family is rich in German (Aryan) heritage, and based upon conversations we've had on issues important to our way of thinking, I think Bret is truly "our kind of guy."

Let's hope the good people of New Jersey dump Schundler in the political toilet where he belongs.

Throwing your Vote down a Black Hole

Tallahassee, FL: "Are we having fun yet?"

This is the message that appeared in the window of a county optical scan machine, startling Leon County Information Systems Officer Thomas James. Visibly shaken, he immediately turned the machine off.

Diebold's opti-scan (paper ballot) voting system uses a curious memory card design, offering penetration by a lone programmer such that standard canvassing procedures cannot detect election manipulation.

The Diebold optical scan system was used in about 800 jurisdictions in 2004. Among them were several hotbeds of controversy: Volusia County (FL); King County (WA); and the New Hampshire primary election, where machine results differed markedly from hand-counted localities. (Read more)

The 2004 election was largely decided by Diebold black box voting machines in Ohio. (It looks like CEO Walden O'Dell kept his promise to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Junior.) And there will be even more of the damn things in use in the mid-term elections next year. Meanwhile, more and more horror stories are emerging on how trivial it is to hack into the machines and tamper with election results.

As a software professional with over 30 years of programming experience (does anyone else remember APL?), I am horrified by the sloppy and incompetent programming revealed in the article excerpted above. One example is the fact that the number of votes for a candidate will roll over from 65,536 to zero. This indicates that the number of votes is held in an "unsigned short" - 16 bits. Now, 65,536 is not a large number when you consider that the population of Maricopa County, where I live, is over 3 million. Granted, they won't all vote at the same precinct, but 32-bit computing is absolutely standard today, even on the lowest-end handheld, and desktop computers are rapidly moving over to 64 bits. With 32 bits you can store numbers up to about 4 billion without rollover problems, so there is no excuse for not using the piddling amount of extra memory needed. (Not only that, but, as the article explains, a hacker can easily use the rollover behavior to subtract any desired amount from a candidate's total without arousing suspicion.)

Even worse, I recall reading in another article - I don't have the link now - of a case where a candidate's vote total rolled over from 32,768 to minus 32,768! Obviously (at least it's obvious to a geek like me), the programmer used a "signed short", which is totally inappropriate since the vote total is never supposed to be negative. This sort of ignorant, slapdash programming would lead to the greenest summer intern being shown the door at any respectable company.

But what's really disturbing is that the software which controls the machine, and resides on a chip inside the bowels of the machine (presumably a ROM, or read-only memory chip, though that is not stated) actually transfers control to code residing in a RAM (writeable) memory card which is only supposed to be used for storing vote totals! There is zero security over these cards - anyone can remove a card from a machine while voting, and substitute a card with malicious code! Worse still, "[t]hese cards were seen scattered on tables in King County, piled in baskets accessible to the public in Georgia, and jumbled on desktops in Volusia county" according to the above article.

This is not just a monumental security blunder - it raises the strong possibility that the Diebold machines were designed to cheat state certification tests. The machines must pass these tests before going into service, but the state's election inspectors can only test the code that resides in ROM - once a RAM card is inserted, the machine can behave in a completely different way.

Take it from me, there is no legitimate reason for such a wide-open, totally insecure architecture. The only time I've seen this technique used was in space software, where you might need to change an unmanned spacecraft's software while it is in flight. I suppose you would also use this technique for unmanned deep-ocean probes and the like. But in any other sensibly designed embedded system, if you foresee the need to change the code after deploying the system, you will use a dedicated port for this purpose, and you will write some security into the base code so it does some checking of the new code you are trying to upload, rather than accepting code from any Tom, Dick or Harry. (Hmm, should that be Tom, Dick or George?)

This news strengthens my view that Diebold is a corrupt company surviving only because of its political ties. This story is potentially bigger than Enron. After all, Enron destroyed the careers and life savings of thousands of employees, but Diebold has perhaps destroyed our democracy.

When are we going to see Walden O'Dell doing a perp walk? Somehow I won't hold my breath.

The Missing Sock Problem

Preface: Many years ago, as a nerdy grad student with no life to speak of, I wrote this article as a parody of creationist - or cretinist, as I prefer to call them - "arguments" against evolution. It actually got published in a journal which, strange to say, ceased to exist some time after that. Unfortunately the article is just as relevant today. The cretinists haven't come up with any better arguments, but their political power has grown immeasurably in George Bush Junior's theocracy - as witness the "Son of Scopes Monkey Trial" circus currently going on in Kansas.

For several decades, Secular Humanists have been brainwashing public schoolchildren with the godless, atheistic theory of evolution. Meanwhile, the scientific establishment has been engaged in a massive conspiracy to keep the truth about evolution from the public. In recent years, however, a small but dedicated group of scholars has uncovered some startling facts about evolution:

• That it is only a theory;
• That it is unfalsifiable and therefore not a theory but a religion;
• And that it is false (1,2,3)

Recently, my own observations have revealed the existence of a phenomenon which should sound the death knell for evolutionary theory. My result presents even more damning evidence against evolution than the missing link question; it is the problem of missing socks.

Every time I do my laundry, I lose a sock. This seems to be the experience of many other people. Considering the number of families who do their laundry weekly, it is a reasonable estimate that as much as 2 million socks are lost each week. If the earth is 4.6 billion years old as the evolutionists claim, and if the rate of sock disappearance has remained constant, then the sock population at the earth's formation would be 4.6 x 10¹⁷ more than it is now. Estimating the earth's surface as 5 x 10¹⁸ cm², and the area taken up by the average sock as 100 cm², we see that there are enough socks to form a layer 10 socks high completely surrounding the earth. This layer would have blocked out almost all the sun's light, preventing the formation of animo acids in the primordial soup. Thus the evolutionist account of the origin of life is refuted.

Besides, one would expect the disappearing socks to have been fossilized and preserved in the rock strata. But the fossil record is utterly devoid of socks[3] - another embarrassment for evolution.

Furthermore, Darwin's theory predicts that evolution from apes to sock-wearing humans would have proceeded gradually through a continuum of intermediate forms. It is obvious that a partially-evolved sock would be of no use to the wearer, and would in fact be a hindrance until fully developed[1,2]. Therefore, natural selection would have prevented its appearance in the first place.

Note also that the idea that "socks evolved from non-socks" is not only tautological[4], but is also forbidden by the second law of thermodynamics[1,2]. This law predicts, and everyday experience confirms, that holes tend to develop in fully-formed socks and become larger as the sock becomes more disorganized, until eventually the sock becomes completely dissipated. Evolution requires precisely the reverse process.

Finally, how is it possible that the human foot has evolved to fit the sock so perfectly? Evolution offers no mechanism except blind chance to account for this amazing result. But the odds against such a coincidence are so overwhelming as to make it a mathematical impossibility. We must conclude that an infinitely wise Creator, recognizing man's needs for socks, designed the human foot accordingly.

At this point, let us reflect on the signs, foretold so long ago, that Armageddon is close at hand. The disappearance of socks from laundromats is evidence that God is displeased with the sin and evil of this world. The hour is fast approaching when the Armies of the Righteous will triumphantly smite the dark forces of Satan. So don't be caught with your socks down!

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Institute for Science Destructionism, San Granola, California, for its hospitality during the writing of this work.

References

1. Morris, H.M. 1974. The Troubled Waters of Evolution. San Diego: Creation-Life Publishers.
2. Hiebert, H. 1979. Evolution: Its Collapse in View? Alberta: Horizon Books.
3. Gish, D.T. 1979. Evolution? The Fossils Say No! San Diego: Creation-Life Publishers.
4. Bethel, T. 1985. Agnostic Evolutionists: The Taxonomic Cage against Darwin. Harper's 270 (1617), 49-61.

The Vast Pro-Cure Conspiracy

Liberal blogs are buzzing over an article by Jonathan Alter of Newsweek. Alter writes that repug posturing against stem cell research could be their undoing. More and more ordinary Americans are noticing how Junior & co. are so beholden to the extreme religious right that they are putting the brakes on science that could cure the suffering of countless people - our parents, children, friends, neighbors. "Only Bush bitter-enders and the pope are in the perverse position of valuing the life of an ailing human being less than that of a tiny clump of cells no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence."

Alter also writes: "Look for smart Democrats to run ads with relatives of the afflicted ('My sister has Parkinson's,' 'My father has Alzheimer's') pointing out that Congressman X is so extreme, he voted against a bill supported by many Republicans to begin curing these diseases." Alas, Dems are too wimpy and spineless to adopt such a tactic; they consider it "negative" and prefer to play nice in the naive expectation that the Repugs will reciprocate. Then they react with innocent astonishment when the GOP kicks them in the face yet again.

So it's up to us, the broader reality-based community, to spread the meme. We are the Pro-Cure Movement! I must say I'm not 100% happy with that title. It cedes the "pro-life" moniker to the religious nuts, and tacitly capitulates the very questionable assertion that embryonic stem cell research is morally equivalent to abortion. The reality is that nothing is more pro-life in the genuine sense than medical research that could potentially cure or alleviate a vast array of diseases.

But in our sound-bite era, "Pro-Cure" is as good a soundbite as any, and puts the onus on the RRR to explain why they are pro-disease. Let's pile the pressure on! If you have a blog, help yourself to the large icon above or the smaller one below, and put it on your blog. Invite your readers to do the same. I think "Pro-Cure" has the potential to resonate with the public in a way that "Reality-based community" never did.

Let's get the message out there!