No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Memo to the vast anti-Christmas conspiracy

Attention, anti-Christmas warriors! I regret to say that our very secret plan has been exposed. Even worse, Bill O'Felafel is single-handedly going to take us down! Flee! Flee!

As you know, our cunning plan called for our brave soldiers to go forth in the streets and wish people "Happy Holidays." This would mark them out as hate-filled defilers of the Christmas spirit, unlike, say, Ann Cunter, who declares: "Oh, it was so much fun this year, because saying 'Merry Christmas' is like saying 'Fuck you!' I've said it to everyone. You know, cab drivers, passing people on the street, whatever." (Warning: link is to the Clue-Free Republic hate site.)

Naive and innocent liberals that we are, we were so full of high hopes that by saying "Happy Holidays", we would instantly abolish Christmas, make christianity illegal, change the pledge of allegiance into "one nation under Darwin", force cities nationwide to display scenes from the Kama Sutra instead of nativity scenes, and magically cause the words "in god we trust" to vanish off the coins in our pockets.

Alas, the RRR is on to us! Now we are forced to retreat in disarray, ceding victory to the true spirit of Christmas: people trampling each other to buy cheap Chinese-made crap at Walmart.

Oh well, we'd better crawl back into the woodwork and bide our time, waiting for another chance to destroy the holiest and most authentic of christian holidays. Keep watching this space for next year's memo! And remember, Mithra is the reason for the season!

A hot Phoenix welcome for Junior

Phoenix, being one of the most conservative large cities in the US, is a regular stopover in George Bush Junior's Potemkin presidency. For some reason, he always chooses the afternoon rush hour to beam down and grace his benighted subjects with the privilege of his royal presence. The result: massive gridlock as freeways and arterial streets are shut down between Sky Harbor Airport and whichever ultra-exclusive country club is the setting for his $10K-a-plate shindig, so that the Boy King can be whisked to and fro with minimum actual contact with - ugh, horror! - ordinary working people.

But Junior can't claim all the credit for today's traffic disruption. As in royal visits past, yours truly and several hundred of my closest friends - the number grows all the time - spent the evening standing at the corner of 24th and Camelback, waving signs, chanting slogans, and generally exercising our First Amendment freedom to protest the most clueless, incompetent and immoral president in US history.

Junior was in town to stump for Jon Kyl, the colorless apparatchik who has faithfully carried water for him in Congress. All of Arizona's corporate ruling elite turned out to cheer and laugh dutifully at Junior's lame and insipid speech. Personally, it was much more fun being out on the street corner, reading the many inventive signs, seeing the impromptu parades back and forth across the intersections (led by drummers in full costume) and soaking in the almost festive atmosphere, despite the awfulness of the quagmire war we were protesting.

Best of all was the unmistakable feeling that the tide is turning. I've attended several peace protests in Phoenix in the last few years, and the number of protesters is growing steadily, as is the support from passing drivers in the form of honks, smiles, waves and peace signs.

The temperature is rising for Junior and his war whores. Let him shuttle around haplessly from one exclusive enclave to another, like a chimp in a space capsule. We of the sane community are winning back the streets, we are winning the hearts and minds of the majority, and we will take back our country!

Bok-bok-bok-bok-bok

The sky, I mean George Bush Junior's approval rating, is falling! This calls for...

ATTACK OF THE CHICKENHAWKS!!!

The latest twist in cowardgate: Danny Bubp, the Ohio state Representative and Marine reservist who has studiously avoided being deployed outside the continental US or seeing combat, is trying to cut and run from his attacks on John Murtha as a coward. Bubp is such a manly he-man, he hid behind Jean Schmidt's skirts in order to make his disgusting sleaze attack on Murtha, who has more combat experience than the entire Congressional GOP put together.

I guess Bubp is so busy trying to force the Ten Commandments into public places on the taxpayer's dime, he never actually had time to read them, particularly: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor." He's probably also not familiar with this bible verse: "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."

Land of the conscience-free, home of the depraved

According to today's "Arizona Repulsive" (print edition only), 42% of readers think it's okay for the US to torture prisoners of war. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, considering that Sheriff Joe Arpaio is the most popular politician in town. Still, it makes me puke.

Vile, despicable, and infinitely beneath contempt

That's the kindest thing you can see about the rethugs in Congress following yesterday's cheap political stunt. Stung by the words of Congressman John Murtha, a two-war hero with more experience of military service than all the rethugs in Congress and the White House combined, they instantly offered up a strawman resolution that crudely caricatured his substantial and carefully though-out plan, and voted in lockstep to defeat it. Now they're calling for an ethics investigation of Murtha, but not of Jean Schmidt, the corrupt whore from Ohio who called him a coward. (And, ironically, was too much of a coward herself to call Murtha a coward straight out, instead attributing her remarks to some marine colonel.)

In the why-am-I-not-surprised department, the idea for this shameful circus came from J.D. Hayworth, a bloviating buffoon from Arizona and a former sports commentator who has never served a day in his life. Or rather, it was his wife's idea. Hayworth, you remember, is the loyal party man who stands behind the president - so far behind, they won't be seen together in the same photograph. As in, "please, pretty please, don't come to Arizona to campaign for me."

Nancy Pelosi made an inexplicable gaffe when she called for House Dems to vote alongside the rethug chickenhawks to defeat the strawman resolution. She must have known how the rethug sleaze attack machine would spin this craven decision. The obvious thing for the Dems to do was to boycott the vote, and get up and walk out of the chamber en masse to show their disgust at the lunatic right's cheap grandstanding and crawthumping about the most important issue facing the US public today: the fact that we are bogged down in a never-ending quagmire war against the wrong country, and the US is in vastly greater danger from Osama bin Laden as a result.

Everything those slimy rethug sleazeballs touch, turns to crud. After years of Congress mindlessly rubber-stamping the neonazi-cons' imperial adventurism in Iraq, at a cost of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, not to mention the incredible human damage and loss of life, for one brief moment it looked like Congress might finally do its duty and allow a substantive debate on this whole ghastly debacle. Instead, the rethugs reverted to form and wallowed in an orgy of imbecilic showboating, dishonesty, political dirty tricks and smears, and cowardly attacks on people whose piss they are not fit to drink. How unspeakably loathsome these disgusting vermin are.

And yet, yesterday's orgy of feces-flinging did achieve one result, the "moment of clarity and vision" Hayworth pompously orated about - but not for him or his fellow Junior-regime waterboys. Rather, it's a wake-up call for the rapidly growing number of people in the US who are asking overdue questions about this war, and realizing that it was a horrific, festering mistake.

It's becoming increasingly clear that rethug chest-thumping and shrill, manic screaming about "staying the course" is nothing but a wall of noise to cover up the utter bankruptcy of the neonazi-con imperial pipe dream. We are stumbling along blindly in Iraq, with no vision, no purpose, no goals, no objective, no timetable. The Junior regime doesn't even know what would constitute success in Iraq, let alone how to achieve it, so they try to mask this ignorance and cluelessness with stale, empty bromides about spreading democracy. It's incredible - the lowliest high-school-dropout burger flipper at your local McDonald's is subject to a higher standard of oversight and accountability than George Bush Junior!

Meanwhile, the rethugs, having sent US troops to the wrong country in the first place, as cannon fodder in an illegal war based on lies and greed, are extending their tours of duty in a back-door draft, keeping them in harm's way indefinitely, cutting off their health care and benefits, slashing their base pay and denying them combat pay, forcing severely wounded veterans to jump through all sorts of demeaning hoops before receiving help, even serving them spoiled food. This is what rethugs call "supporting the troops".

Of course, the only people the rethugs support are Cheney the Dick's Halliburton, George Bush Senior and Junior's Carlyle Group, Junior's Bechtel and the other sinister mega-corporate members of the US shadow government. These parasites have sucked in hundreds of billions of dollars of our tax money and given nothing in return, thanks to the whole Iraq fiasco. It's been the most massive feeding frenzy of cronyism, corruption and bare-faced looting and plundering the world has ever seen. So from the rethug point of view, the war has been going swimmingly all along. They are genuinely "baffled" that those of us who are not billionaires could see the matter differently.

That's all I can write about the neonazi-con mega-corporate swine who have hijacked our country, without throwing up. The only silver lining I can see to this debauched circus of hypocrisy, lies and bloviating is that ordinary people will realize once again how out of touch, how clueless, how despicable, criminal and corrupt their lords and masters are.

Tomorrow's News, Today: John Murtha special edition

Once again, No More Mr. Nice Guy! brings you news so fresh, it hasn't actually happened yet.

A new advocacy group, Chosin Reservoir Veterans for Truth, Justice and the American Way (www.crvftjataw.org), is running nationwide TV ads denouncing Congressman John Murtha (D-PA) as a traitor who gives aid and comfort to the enemy.

The 37-year Marine, a veteran of both the Korean and Vietnam wars, with more military experience than the entire GOP combined, is being attacked for calling for immediate US withdrawal from Iraq. The group calls him a "traitor" who "agrees 100% with Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al Zarqawi", and demands that he be "put to death".

The group also claims that Murtha faked his war service, massacred children and drank their blood, and sodomizes dead puppies while anally pleasuring himself with George Bush Junior action figures. [Hey, that's an idea - ed.]

Chosin Reservoir Veterans for Truth, Justice and the American Way did not return calls seeking information about its membership or when it was founded. However, reports indicate that it was created recently by a donation of $10 million from reclusive Texas trillionaire N. Ron Hubbard, and that it has close links with an unnamed senior White House official whose initials are K.R.

(OK, so part of it actually has happened, as you'll see if you click on the quotes. That's the trouble with living in a christo-fascist police state run by criminal, corrupt, gibbering lunatics ; it's getting harder and harder to write satire.)

They hate us for our, um, bushiness

George Bush Junior's poll numbers are at their lowest point ever, just about half what Clinton's were when he was impeached - 37% versus 73%. And they're still trending down! (if Newsmax says Junior's popularity is rebounding, that proves it's diving further down into the toilet.)

I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks Junior is becoming more than a little unglued, pathetically lashing back and flashing back, trying to fight John Kerry all over again. Junior's latest tack: he didn't mislead, the Dems misfollowed. "But... but... but... sniff sniff - they had the same phoney intelligence we had!" Total, unmitigated BS. Even Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia had access to intelligence that the White House was withholding from the Democrats, and from Colin Powell for that matter.

Getting back to the polls, one interesting tidbit in the first link above is that 6% of people are willing to say - even in this age of secret torture gulags and the Patriot Act - that they hate Junior. What I find even more astonishing is that the poll asked: "Do you hate the president of the United States?"

Personally, and I know this may come as a shock to regular readers, I don't hate Bush. Hating someone is a futile and self-destructive emotion. It's a waste of time and psychic energy - my hatred would have no effect on Monkeynuts, and accomplish nothing except raising my own blood pressure. What I hate is Boy Wonder's actions, the horrific effect he has had on this country and the world. Hatred of evil is good, especially if it prompts you to fight and overcome the evil.

Thus endeth today's sermon. Back to the schadenfreude! In your face, rethug bitches! 37%! And it will get even lower before we kick Junior's scrawny ass back to Crawford!

That's the way the Oreo cookie crumbles

I've previously written about Doug MacEachern, the tenth-rate, no-talent partisan hack who masquerades as a journalist at the Arizona Repulsive. MacEachern is a spiteful little man, full of piss and vinegar, and seized with a blind, overwhelming hatred of liberals and Democrats. He is intent on misusing his position to bombard his unfortunate readers with lunatic-right screeds, more often than not lifted wholesale for extreme-right hate blogs and with nothing added except the flecks of foam from his mouth.

MacEachern's columns are often unintentionally hilarious. Take this one, where he decides to attack Joe Wilson and belittle his trip to Niger. Lacking anything of substance, MacEachern seizes on a casual remark about Wilson drinking mint tea with officials, and writes a whole column sneering about "tea parties."

Now, anyone who has been to North Africa or the Middle East knows that offering tea to guests is an intrinsic part of the culture. Whether you're visiting a president in his palace, or a nomad in the desert, custom dictates that you have several glasses of mint tea together. It's rude to refuse the tea, or even to start talking business before finishing the second or third cup. MacEachern's cheap gibes about "tea parties" serve only to reveal him as an ignorant boor pandering to other ignorant boors. And when you compare Wilson's original article with MacEachern's account of it, MacEachern's dishonesty and willingness to suppress awkward facts become all too evident.

However, MacEachern has never cared about the facts. If some story shows Democrats in a bad light, then of course it is true - in some platonic sense - even if the facts are the opposite of what is alleged. MacEachern's god, George Bush Junior, doesn't do nuance. MacEachern doesn't do facts!

A perfect example is the bogus Oreo-tossing story which has been around for three years, about African-American Republican Michael Steele supposedly being pelted with Oreo cookies at a debate. MacEachern discovered the story, just as it was coming apart at the seams, and decided to go one better; he claimed, on no basis whatsoever, that "[s]ome people - Democratic officeholders, even - say it's OK to toss Oreo cookies at Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele for being Black and conservative." (He repeated the claim the next day.) Presumably this is a reference to former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the Democratic participant in the debate where the Oreos were allegedly thrown. Needless to say, it's a bald-faced lie. Townsend said nothing of the sort, and neither did any other Democrat.

Not only that, but the incident itself almost certainly never happened. Steele and the Maryland Republicans did not make any complaints until almost a week after the alleged event. Since then they've changed their story numerous times. The Washington Times reporter who pushed the story to national prominence wasn't even there.

At one point, the story had Oreos "raining down" like "locusts". Trouble is, the Baltimore Sun could not find any independent witnesses who were present at the debate and saw any cookie-tossing, nor did it appear in the videotape of the debate. So now Steele has backed away from that version of the story, and merely claims that he happened to look down and saw an Oreo on the floor near his feet. Oh my god, the horror! But even this version doesn't fly - the janitors found no Oreo cookies on the floor afterwards, or anything else out of the ordinary.

Back to MacEachern - is he going to issue a retraction, apologize to Townsend, and resolve to do at least some fact-checking in future? Yeah, right. I'll say it again - MacEachern is a tenth-rate political hack, and an embarrassment to a newspaper that is itself a sorry excuse for journalism.

Capitalist Fool

Life just isn't fair. How can anyone that rich be that stupid?

Steve Forbes dons his ass-hat and ruminates:

• Was Ambassador Joseph Wilson under a nondisclosure contract when sent by the CIA--at the prompting of his wife--to check out if Iraq was trying to obtain yellowcake uranium from Niger to make nuclear weapons? Somebody brought on board to carry out a sensitive mission like that almost always signs a nondisclosure agreement and is given clearance to handle classified information. Yet Wilson felt free to bombastically berate the Bush Administration over this. He actively aided John Kerry's presidential campaign. If Wilson hadn't signed a nondisclosure contract, why not?
• Since Wilson's wife was working for the CIA, why did Wilson pursue such a high-profile campaign against the Bush Administration? Surely this diplomat had to know that such highly charged publicity would attract attention--and reaction.

First of all, pardon my freedom, but WTF do nondisclosure contracts have to do with the price of tea in China? "I'm sorry, Mr. Wilson, you forgot to sign the nondisclosure form. Under Clause 18, Section 3, Subsection A of the contract, that gives us the right to betray your CIA agent wife and endanger her life." Pull the other one.

And for the love of Mike and all the saints, can we drop this demonstrably false and totally irrelevant claim that the trip to Niger was Valerie Plame's idea? As if a trip to one of the poorest countries on earth - mainly at Wilson's own expense - was some kind of junket. It's unbelievably pathetic that the lunatic extreme right tries to distract attention from the criminal and treasonous betrayal of a covert CIA agent - one who was working to protect this country from WMD proliferation - by jumping up and down, waving their arms frenziedly, and screaming: "She sent him! She sent him!"

Finally, notice how Forbes frantically tries to insinuate that Wilson was supporting John Kerry at the time he was working in Niger, or at any rate before his wife was betrayed. This is just jaw-dropping in its ineffable stupidity. Yes, Wilson donated $1,000 to John Kerry's campaign - in 2004. Before his wife was betrayed, Wilson had donated to both Democratic and Republican politicians - including $1,000 to George Bush Junior in 2000. It was after Valerie was betrayed, and her CIA career ended, that Wilson placed himself firmly (and understandably) in the anti-Junior camp.

Sheesh! How can anyone be so stupid as to think he can get away with such a transparent lie? And this guy ran for president? Good grief - where's Dan Quayle when you need him?

Tortured logic

Maha has an interesting article, with some thought-provoking links, on the subject of Cheney the Dick's unseemly eagerness to torture. The bottom line: torture is for losers. Once you start torturing, you've already lost.

Unfortunately, for the lunatic extreme right, rhetoric trumps reality. Glorious Leader declares: "We do not torture." Junior said it, I believe it, and that settles it! Never mind that the Dick is feverishly lobbying senators to allow the CIA to torture. Never mind the news of a vast gulag of "black sites" stretching from Camp Guano to Thailand. And just airbrush those photos from Abu Ghraib out of your memory.

It's a sad day when it has to be spelled out in short words: torture is wrong. We should never torture. First, because it is evil and immoral in itself. Second, because it is ineffective; torture victims will say anything to make the pain stop. Third, because if we torture their guys, they will torture ours. When we torture, we are endangering our own people!

Of course the brain-dead torture boosters will always drag out the "ticking time bomb" argument. But if we become a nation of torturers, maybe we deserve to have the bomb go off?

Something to think about this Veterans' Day. What kind of country did all those veterans fight and die for?

Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer?

I didn't do well on this quiz - I only get 4 out of 10. And most of the time I was guessing randomly - the only face I recognized was Son of Sam. I must be in the wrong profession! I hasten to add I'm a software engineer, not a serial killer. (HT: Vestal Vespa)

Mind you, I've been to a few software conferences where I saw some scruffy, suspicious-looking types whom I at first took for homeless people who had wandered in off the street for the free food, but who turned out to be Perl programmers. They're usually harmless unless you mention the word "Tcl". (Yes, that is a word.)

However, after taking the quiz, I'm always going to feel paranoid and imagine my colleagues eyeing me hungrily after I take the last cookie in the break room...

One flu over the cuckoo's nest

I nearly missed this story - it was buried in the comments in another blog. It seems that Donald "Prince of Dorkness" Rumsfeld stands to make out like a bandit if an avian flu epidemic hits, thanks to his major stake in the company that owns the rights to Tamiflu. Sheesh! (Update: now with corrected link)

Remember how Cheney the Dick's Halliburton snapped up hundreds of millions in no-bid contracts in the wake of Katrina? (And then stiffed its subcontractors, resulting in people who are actually doing the work not getting paid.) There is no disaster, however horrifying, that the neonazi-con cabal cannot profit handsomely from. These people have their brains wired differently from normal human beings. They're all about greed, and their instinctive reaction to suffering is not to alleviate it, but to make money from it.

You know, I'm convinced that the Junior regime - and a great many of the useful idiots who support them - want to see a major world-wide outbreak of bird flu. Junior is itching to impose martial law, and has had the Pentagon practice repeatedly for this scenario, using the code name Granite Shadow. A pandemic would be precisely the excuse he wants. And of course the mouth-foaming freepii and NRA gun fetishists have been praying for Armageddon lo these past decades.

Plus, you have to admit, the collapse of society would be a pretty effective way for the Junior regime to avoid responsibility for their massive cheney-ups. Heck, they wouldn't even need Diebold to rig elections for them!

If the Rapture doesn't come soon (and it's only about 2,000 years late), a global pandemic will have to do...

Torture the messenger

Rethugs are still "outraged by the outrage." News of a vast CIA torture gulag comes to light (again), and with sickening predictability, noted cat torturer Jesus H. Frist and his oh-so-righteous moral majoritarians demand an investigation, not into the black sites themselves, but into who let the cat out of the bag. Been slapped in the face again, eh, Bill? Wanker.

Meanwhile, Cheney the Dick is still lobbying for the CIA to be allowed to torture anyone it wants. And we know how effective torture has been in the past. False information extracted under torture from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Scooter al-Libi, the 5,467th "Al-Qaeda's number three man" to be captured by the US, got us into a quagmire in the wrong country, at a cost of tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Yup, mission accomplished!

But Cheney and Frist are only the ugliest faces of a cabal of sick, twisted fascists. The evil of these scumbags is matched only by their incompetence. They don't torture to find out information; they torture to create confirmation of their prejudices and bolster their preconceived agenda.

Also, these foul, bestial insects undoubtedly derive some unspeakable sexual gratification from torture. Witness Scooty-Poo and his paean to child rape and bestiality, Lynne Cheney's turgid lesbian bodice-ripper, and a never-ending litany of rethug depravity. These are sick, sick people. No words can express how utterly venal, depraved and despicable these craw-thumping "family values" bloviators really are.

How did this happen? How did a country that was once the world's beacon of hope, freedom and justice get taken over by a corrupt, criminal gang of evil fascist swine? How did so many people get fooled by their lies, hypocrisy, and lowest-common-denominator hatemongering and rabble-rousing?

We can only hope that yesterday's election results are the first faint, nascent stirrings of a backlash against this putrescent cabal. That there is still some sanity and decency left in this country. Otherwise we are all in the gulag.

Jesus Christ, Vampire

Brent Rasmussen is steamed that Anne Rice, a mediocre writer of tedious bodice-rippers that happen to feature vampires, has announced with much fanfare that she has been born again, and that henceforth her meretricious lucubrations will be dedicated to the greater glory of JEEZUS! A shrewd marketing move, or a hint that Rice is a few bats short of a belfry? Who cares?

Several years ago I started reading "Interview with the Vampire". After a few chapters, I decided that it was the most sophomoric piece of drivel I had ever subjected myself to, and physically flung it as far away from me as I could. I've since heard that the later books are even worse. Her constant self-aggrandizing publicity stunts (she once staged her own funeral in Lafayette Cemetery in New Orleans) showed that her ego is inversely proportional to her talent. And when I learned about the harassment, by Rice and her employees, of those who showed their appreciation for her by writing fan fiction, my respect for her, already close to zero, hit a new low.

On the other hand, going from writing about vampires to writing about Jesus Christ (in the first person, with typically Rice hubris) is in some ways a logical step. Isn't JHC (at least as perceived by fundies) the most feared vampire the world has ever known? He grabs his victims, sinks his fangs into them, and they become one of the born-again undead. Henceforth they are doomed to wander the earth, shrinking fearfully from the light of reason and science, compelled to spread their sickness to others.

I'd love to see a novel about a fearless vampire slayer who, armed with the symbol of power, a Darwin fish, defeats the forces of darkness and ignorance. (Joss Whedon, I'd be happy to sell you the TV rights.) Unfortunately, the fundies are like the Borg - they assimilate everything.

Oh well, better quit before my pop culture references get too mixed up. And if any non-fundy Christians are reading this, I hope your sense of humor booster shots are up to date.

Two Americas

Remember when Dan Quayle was about to take a trip to Latin America, and he was worried that his schoolboy Latin was a bit rusty? (God, I never thought I'd miss Dan Quayle.) George Bush Junior, needless to say, has no such worries; he never learned Latin in the first place, or very much English for that matter.

And so Junior embarked on his merry and mindless way to South America with his massive imperial entourage of over 2,000 flunkies. But he found a very different America waiting for him - one that refuses to bow down in mindless fawning adulation of the great white father. In fact, his visit to the region was an unmitigated disaster and a miserable failure. A tidal wave of popular opposition and outrage forced him to turn tail and flee like the yellow-bellied craven little coward he is, peevishly muttering: "This is hard work! It's hard work!"

Junior's purpose in beaming down to South America was to push the FTAA, yet another item on the endless wish list of US mega-corporate oligarchs who want the entire world delivered into feudal bondage. In the process, Monkeynuts had the unbelievable gall to lecture other countries about "rolling back democracy". What an insufferable little pipsqueak this boy is!

FTAA is of course the bastard child of NAFTA and CAFTA, which have already caused a massive upsurge of poverty in Mexico, and promise to do the same in the Caribbean. The number of poor people, and the gap between rich and poor, have grown explosively - rather like what's happening here. And of course the chickens are coming home to roost in the form of tens of millions of unskilled, desperately poor illegal immigrants who are placing a crippling burden on US society, especially here in Arizona and in other border states. But of course the mega-corporate ruling elite is happy to have an infinite supply of workers who can be paid sub-minimum wages, and couldn't care less about the vastly greater cost to the country as a whole. After all, only the little people pay taxes, right?

Latin Americans may not speak Latin, but they're much smarter than the dumb gringos who worship the Boy Wonder. They look at Venezuela, where the oil income is finally beginning to be distributed fairly, and the government is taking steps to improve the lives of the poor. Then they look at countries like Bolivia, under the heel of a brutal military dictatorship that constantly scurries to do the bidding of Junior and his mega-corporate puppetmasters, in the process crushing its own people and condemning the vast majority of them to abject poverty. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see which path is better.

King George the Turd is persona non grata everywhere in the world, except in the United States of Ignorance, stupidity and megacorporate-controlled media. But even here, in the land of the bland and the home of the craven, more and more people are waking up and realizing that the chimperor is naked. As the scandals mount up and the indictments keep coming, Junior's approval ratings will continue to drop faster than Ann Coulter's knickers. Pretty soon there'll be no place left for him to hide.

Filibastard

The Harriet Miers debacle, and the growing Scalito fiasco, speak volumes about how discombobulated the White House has become. The Sword of Damocles is hanging over the shiny pate of Bush's Brain, threatening an instant lobotomy of the whole administration. Their repeated missteps, painful tin ear and general air of "where are we going and why are we in this handbasket" illustrate how badly distracted they are by the ongoing Traitorgate investigation.

A perfect example of how the Bush crime gang has lost its mojo is that it withdraws Harriet Miers and nominates Sammy Strip-Search as a craven act of capitulation to its ultra-extreme religious right base, and then fondly imagines it can sneak SSS through as a stealth candidate despite his overt anti-Roe record. Well, they have to - Roe v. Wade is not only settled law, it has the support of the US public by a huge margin. Even 35% of Republicans do not want Alito confirmed if he would overthrow Roe v. Wade.

The Junior White House is weakened, and we can win this one! We don't have to settle for yet another so-far-right-he's-in-another-galaxy extremist troglodyte. We don't have to play nice guy and rubber-stamp a drooling neanderthal who thinks it's fine and dandy for police to strip-search 10-year-old girls, or that "pro life" means a woman has to get a permission slip from her rapist before she can terminate a pregnancy, but it's perfectly okay for convicted felons to own a machine gun. We can fillet the bastard - I mean filibuster. All we need are some Dem senators with balls!

After (in effect) filibustering its own leader's previous candidate, the lunatic extreme right is returning to its pious talking point about every candidate being entitled to an "up or down vote" - as usual, oblivious to its own jaw-dropping hypocrisy. Guess again, bitches! The Gang of 14 is not going to hold, and if the current circumstances don't qualify as "extraordinary", nothing does.

Scalito is a very scary reactionary who wants to turn back the clock forty years. We have to get the word out on how far out of the judicial mainstream he is, and why it is so important to stop him. And we have to give our Dem senators a spine infusion. Let the rethugs bluster and bloviate all they like about the nuclear option - they haven't a leg to stand on. Many R's know it would be a huge gamble to push the nuclear button, and break rules that have held for over 200 years, when the party and its leader are in such a weakened state and getting weaker by the day.

This is no time for the usual Dem tactic of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. I'll say it again - fillet the bastard!

The Fisting of Frist

I used to get angry at the despicable arrogance and stomach-churning hypocrisy of the rethugs. Now I find myself increasingly amused and even encouraged as their manic mouth-frothing takes on more and more of an air of frenzied desperation. They're no ladies, or gentlemen either, but they sure as hell doth protest too much!

During Bill Clinton's presidency, the rethugs repeatedly forced Congress into closed session on the pretext of investigating his penis. Talk about political stunts! But now those self-same zealots of honor and integrity are thrashing around on the floor in a rictus of mouth-foaming apoplexy. Girly-man Bill "Martha" Frist is blubbering that he has been slapped in the face. Wow, it's amazing that a man with such psychic powers, he can diagnose a brain-dead woman as perfectly healthy by watching an edited videotape (let alone predict a drop in the value of his "blind" trust), didn't see that one coming!

The cause of all this wailing and gnashing of teeth? The Senate Dems finally grew something approximating a spine. Perhaps they're taking lessons from Geena Davis. Anyway, you may recall that last summer, the Dems foolishly agreed to a delay in "Phase II" of the hearings on the Junior Junta's misuse of intelligence to stampede the US into its war of lies. An election was coming up, and the Dems didn't want to look partisan - heavens forfend that they should take a stand on anything!

Needless to say, in an election year it's all the more important that the public be aware of administration abuse and cooking of intelligence. But the Dems made their deal with the devil, no doubt naively imagining that they would get something in return other than a kick in the face. (Remember the definition of insanity - doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.) The rethugs, of course, promptly reneged on their promise, and have been lying and stonewalling ever since.

Finally, and several years too late, the Dems mustered up the courage to call BS and say enough is enough. It's great political theater, and it's wonderful to see Dems being something more than spectators in Congress, but is it really a turning point in history? Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. The rethugs have spitefully and grudgingly agreed to set up a committee to investigate the committee that is supposed to be investigating the intelligence cooking and lies about WMD. Like its predecessor, this new committee - which has less than two weeks to report - will no doubt be yet another whitewash.

But as I said at the beginning, rethug huffing and puffing is becoming increasingly frantic. Their synchronized outrage is a transparent attempt to mask their real emotion - fear. With Traitorgate reaching high into the White House, with Katrinagate destroying the regime's delusions of adequacy, and with the 2,000th US military death in the appalling Iraq debacle, even the corrupt Sammy "Strip Search" Alito can't distract public attention from the pervasive stench of venality and chicanery emanating from the regime.

So keep on howling with rage about "political stunts", you rethug neanderthals. It just makes more and more people ask the obvious question: what do you have to hide?

Scalito, finito?

Wow! That was quick... the wheels are already coming off the Alito nomination.

The WaPo reports that Alito issued a ruling in 2002 which reeked of conflict of interest - despite a prior written promise to recuse himself should the situation arise. He had considerable holdings in Vanguard mutual funds, and ruled against a widow from whose husband the company had improperly seized funds. The ruling was later withdrawn by an administrative judge.

Perhaps aware of this about-to-surface dirt, the rethugs were up to their usual tricks earlier yesterday, playing the race card and falsely accusing the Democrats of anti-Italian racism on the basis of - well, nothing whatsoever. (Mind you, Alito does have a fondness for machine guns, not that that's got anything to do with Italian stereotypes.)

It's becoming clear that Alito is just another rich, morally challenged white guy whose lunatic extreme-right opinions are nothing but the usual fig leaf for naked rethug greed. PZ has an outstanding rant about him. Hie thee hither and read it, and be sure to sign the MoveOn.org petition.