No More Mr. Nice Guy!

It's a bitchslap-fest!

Still insanely busy at work so I will let Gary Hart and several former CIA officers do the No More Mr. Nice Guy thang for me tonight.

George Tenet gets told in no uncertain terms by a bunch of former colleagues that he is a dishonest lying weasel. And Gary Hart has a delicious smackdown of Rudy Giuliani at the Huffpost. Here's an excerpt:

Before you qualify to criticize Democrats, Mr. Giuliani, you must account for your preparation of your city for these clearly predicted attacks. Tell us, please, what steps you took to make your city safer.

Until you do, then I strongly suggest you should keep your mouth shut about Democrats and terrorism.

You have not qualified to criticize others, let alone be president of the United States.

P.S. You might ask these same questions of George W. Bush while you are trying to find a better reason to run for president.

Go Gary! And someone please give the same treatment to that comb-licking little goblin, Paul Wolfowitz.

Video Vets

...Speaking for themselves about Iraq, about exploited patriotism, about the lies behind the facile "support the troops" soundbites.

Can video kill the Bushio star? Click here and get another side of the story.

The Fall of the House of Busher

I finally got around to seeing "The Queen" over the weekend. As an Irishman who thinks the English monarchy is a decrepit, clapped-out, irrelevant and parasitic institution that should have been put out to pasture long ago, I wasn't sure if I'd enjoy the movie. But Helen Mirren does a terrific job, Michael Sheen is great as Tony Blair, and Helen McCrory is a hoot as Cherie Blair.

While watching the film, I was struck by the similarity to our hereditary monarch here in the US. The royals were on vacation when Di was killed, and refused to break their vacation and come back to London, oblivious to the growing public resentment about their absence. Shades of Katrina... But by the end of the movie I was feeling some sympathy for Lizzie, mainly because Mirren plays her as such a strong and complex character, but also because you realize that for all her vast wealth, she is essentially a prisoner of her cocoon of privilege and isolation, and of her rigid, emotionless upbringing. She lives in a bubble, but unlike Bush she does feel some sense of obligation to the "commoners". At the climax of the movie, she realizes that the country she thought she knew better than anyone else has changed and left her behind, and she must catch up or become a relic of the past.

I still think the monarchy is a stupid anachronism, but I just can't see Britain carrying on without it - a "Republic of Britain" would be an oxymoron somehow. If the monarchy does go, you will quickly see Scotland declaring itself an independent republic, Wales possibly following suit, Northern Ireland very likely reuniting with the more prosperous Republic of Ireland, and even England itself unlikely to survive as a unified entity - it would probably split between the impoverished post-industrial north and the "fashionable" south. The monarchy, creaking and obsolete as it is, is the only thing papering over the cracks and holding the "United" Kingdom together.

Anyway, back to the Bush dynasty. Can it last much longer? Bush is obviously term-limited, but Jeb has screwed the pooch with his blatant disenfranchisement of black voters in the last two presidential elections, not to mention his kowtowing to the lunatic religious right in the Terri Schiavo debacle, so he is a non-starter. The next generation offers slim pickings; Jenna and not-Jenna are basically a female version of Beavis and Butthead, and even "rock star" George P. Bush admits that there is "Bush fatigue" among a significant segment of the public.

Will Junior decide to suspend the Constitution and cancel elections, declaring himself Decider-in-Chief-For-Life? I wouldn't put anything past him or his criminal treasonous puppet-masters, but I think that's a remote possibility. More likely we will see a replay of the Clinton years (whether Hillary gets elected - Christ forbid - or not), with the 'thugs crawling back into the shadows, waging a never-ending war of obstructionism and sabotage, and continuing to saturate the media with their hatemongering soundbites. Then they'll regain power like a cancer that keeps metastasizing, and the nightmare will begin anew, before we've even recovered from the current one.

Next year's election is the Dems' to lose, but we need to do more than just win it. We need to smack the 'thugs down hard, by dragging out into the open all their sleaze, corruption and criminality, starting right now. There should be no caving over withdrawal from Iraq, no caving over Purge-gate and the culture of corruption at the Justice Department and throughout the federal government. More and more people are growing sick of the Iraqi cluster-cheney; we need to cement in the public mind the fact that rethugs stand for ill-conceived warmongering for private financial gain, with reckless disregard for the lives and safety of the troops they so loudly claim to support. George Bush Junior's religious-right conservatism is a cancer, and we must cut out ever last trace if we want our democracy to survive.

Benjamin Franklin said that we would have a republic, if we could keep it. It's up to us! Can we keep it?

Huh?

From today's Arizona Repulsive (sidebar, print edition only):

"I do not want my sons going to serve in any foreign land not led by a leader that does not understand what it means to send young men and women into combat." --Cindy McCain

Can anyone parse that sentence?

B.S. News and World Report

I've been working insane hours lately, and haven't had much time to eat or sleep, let along blog. So let's just try and clear out some of the backlog with a quick run through some recent headlines.

First of all, a dispatch from Bobo's World, which, it turns out, is located in Alabama. After the recent massacre at Virginia Tech, it was rather disturbing to learn that the Feds had found a gang of hillbillies stockpiling enough weapons to start a bush war. But of course it doesn't count as terrorism when the good ol' boys are doing it - it's much ado about nothing. Anyone remember William Krar, the white supremacist fundy nut who had a huge stash of WMD's in Texas?

Staying in that festering cesspit of inbred cluelessness known as the south, we find John McCain still yucking it up about death and dismemberment. Yeah, those rethugs are such cut-ups. And anyone who doesn't want to be flip and sneering about IED's is told to "lighten up and get a life". Hey, McCain, there are 3,200 US troops and several hundred thousand Iraqi civilians who used to have a life, and now don't, because you were such a cheerleader and cheap whore for your beloved Chimp-in-Chief as he lied us into a quagmire war. So bite me, you old bastard.

Not to be outdone in the stupidity stakes, Rudy Giuliani is once again dusting off the old cracked record that sings: "if you vote for a Democrat, you'll all die screaming in your beds." And of course we'll be in such good hands with a drag queen who appointed an unqualified mobster-tied thug as police commissioner, and who exploited 9/11 for his personal aggrandizement even though his incompetence killed hundreds of firefighters. Giuliani is definitely one type-A-hole personality we can do without.

The thing about McCain and Giuliani is, they are both positioning themselves as the candidate for people who think George Bush Junior should have a third term. In other words, idiots who are deeply deluded and in denial, and make up an increasingly small percentage of the electorate. Sounds like a losing strategy to me.

Speaking of losers, Michelle Malkin (dictionary definition: an untidy woman; slattern; a scarecrow, ragged puppet, or grotesque effigy) has finally collapsed into terminal wingnuttiness and insanity. Her latest rant is a truly bizarre and rather embarrassing meltdown. You won't believe it unless you see it, but be warned; afterwards, you will want to gouge out your eyes and scour the empty sockets with bleach.

In other news: I keep wondering how blatantly biased the "liberal media" can be, and they keep showing me that there is no limit. Consider this headline about the corrupt Arizona congresspig Rick Renzi: Renzi aide's call to U.S. attorney inflames Dems. The press is still furiously pushing the talking point that this is all an overblown personnel matter out of which the Dems are trying to make hay. You know, like when rethugs spent millions of our tax dollars subpoenaing the fan mail of Socks the Cat. Shouldn't the headline be: "Renzi aide's call to U.S. attorney shows his corruption"?

Another story that sickened me: the commander of Camp Crapper in Baghdad abuses his power and forces himself sexually on the daughter of a prisoner, and the headlines blare about aiding the enemy. In my book, a POS like William Steele is the enemy.

Finally, from the well-regulated militia department: Jewell Williams, a Pennsylvania legislator, is getting death threats for proposing gun reform legislation. Another representative, Angel Cruz, was threatened at a gun nut rally, where a large banner called for him to be "hung from the tree of liberty". There's that southern humor again... what a hoot.

That's all I can stomach for now - be seeing you.

Conservatism kills!

Rick Perlstein has a terrific post on E.coli conservatives, those slash-and-burn extremists who, under the mantra of "government in the problem, the enemy, the source of all evil," are gleefully slashing enforcement budgets for food safety inspections. "Surveying the results, what once looked to me like principle now looks to me now like mania. Conservatism has been killing Americans."

It's the same story at the EPA, and of course at FEMA and at every agency that is actually supposed to serve the public rather than delivering billions in cronyist welfare to mega-corporate polluters. George Bush Junior and his corrupt criminal gang are driven by an ideological (and highly self-serving) frenzy to cut government out of existence (except of course for the part that regulates our private sex lives), loot and plunder the treasury, and channel billions of dollars into the coffers of the wealthiest 1%. What used to be "government of the people, by the people, for the people" is now all about, "I've got mine, screw you."

Conservatives love to justify their depredations with facile soundbites about "limited government". Well, liberals believe in limited government too. The difference is, we're smart enough to realize that "limited" does not mean "zero", nor does it mean "crippled and ineffectual". We believe in honest, transparent, accountable government that works to form a more perfect union and promote the general welfare. Sound familiar? Oh, and it's "We the People", not "We the Corporations".

Conservatism - at least the Bush military-industrial-big-oil-religious-right variety - is all about strip-mining and asset-stripping the planet and concentrating all power and wealth in the hands of the already obscenely wealthy. It does this by pandering to the basest instincts of its victims, ordinary hard-working people, by riling them up with stupid wedge issues and promoting racism, bigotry and war-lust. If these guys really were "running a business", as they claim to be doing with our government, they would drive it into bankruptcy on day one, and shoot all the employees in the process.

The world can't afford another two nightmare years of this toxic, cancerous, self-serving ideology. We the People need to take our country back now!

It depends on what the meaning of "I don't recall" is...

From yesterday's Senate hearings:

"Mr. Gonzales, let's begin your testimony. Please state your name for the record."

"Uh... I don't recall it, Senator."

After that stunning and embarrassing combination train wreck and meltdown that was the sworn testimony of the nation's top legal official, today's talking point being frantically pushed by the right-wing media is that Alberto "Torquemada" Gonzales is a little forgetful. Or to be more precise, he is stunningly, godawfully, spectacularly, cosmically incompetent. (Either that or he's on drugs.)

He can't remember key events from the last few weeks. He can't remember what decisions were made, who made them, when, where, or on what basis. He doesn't recall being present at critical meetings when the minutes show he chaired them. Crucial conversations with Bush and key rethug senators, who leaned on him to fire US attorneys who were doing their jobs too well by investigating GOP corruption or refusing to go along with specious witch hunts, have completely slipped his memory.

And yet Speedy can state categorically, with total certainty, that there was nothing improper in the political purge of the nation's top attorneys. And the right-wing corporatist media blithely accepts that statement! See, it's nothing to worry about - just a little case of amnesia. Move on, folks, nothing to see here. Pay no attention to Karl Rove behind the curtain. Yeah, and I've got a bridge in Alaska I'd like to sell you for a billion dollars.

The right-wing media has been forced into the indefensible position that we should gladly accept the idea that Gonzales is the dumbest and most incompetent man on the planet, because they don't want us thinking about the far more likely explanation. Gonzales was asked almost seventy direct questions regarding his involvement in the events of the last few weeks, and he refused to answer a single one of them; he evaded every question with "I don't recall." It's obvious to anyone who has the intelligence of a sea cucumber and hasn't drunk the Jesus juice that Speedy is desperately trying not to perjure himself and to keep the lid on massive criminality and corruption by an out-of-control regime. No wonder Dana Peroxide says Junior is pleased with Know-Nothing Gonzo's beyond-embarrassing performance.

While yesterday's entertainment was political theater of the most jaw-dropping kind, Torquemada's refusal to answer any questions made it not very significant. Fortunately, the Geneva Conventions are now quaint and obsolete, habeus corpus no longer exists, and torture is official US policy. Gonzo has given us the tools we need to jog his memory. Or perhaps Monica Lewinsky Goodling will spill the beans? In any case, let's remember that Gonzales is only the monkey. We need to take out the organ grinder!

Onward to impeachment!

Resign, bitch!

In today's Repulsive, right-wing partisan hack Rethug MacEachern had an attack of political correctness for the first time in his life and complained about the term "bitchslap". He must have seen what was going to happen to his brown friend, Alberto "Torquemada" Gonzales.

Speedy got bitchslapped six ways to Sunday, not by nasty, meanie Democrats, but by his own stunning, Force-10-on-the-cringe-scale incompetence and haplessness. He squirmed, he flailed, he whimpered in that grating little testicles-haven't-dropped-yet voice of his, and he made a total dog's bollocks of himself. It was beyond pathetic, and embarrassing even for the most fervent liberal who longed for this day.

TPM Muckraker has the blow-by-blow for those who want to wallow in schadenfreude.

Let's hope that this meltdown marks the beginning of the end for the terminally corrupt and clueless Junior regime.

Arizona Conservative Idiot of the Week: John McCain

Jesus wept... the Straight Talk Express becomes more of a train wreck every day.

Remember when McCain said before the midterm elections that if Dems took the Senate, he would commit suicide? He's certainly committing political suicide right now. What a sad, pathetic end to a career.

Guns don't kill people, doctors kill people?

Sorry for being "off the air" yesterday - my web hosting was up for renewal, and the company never sent me a reminder beforehand, they just waited until the time ran out and pulled the plug on me. Good job I had backed up all my files. I've signed up for another year but I will be keeping an eye out for a more customer-friendly host.

Anyway, it kills me how the wingnuts who smugly smirk that shooting sprees like that at Virginia Tech are a small price to pay for the sacred right to "pack heat" with no restrictions or accountability are today hailing a SCROTUS (Supreme Court - Republican - Of The United States) decision that fundy-pandering politicians can infringe the hell out of a woman's right to control her own body, overruling doctors in the process and showing reckless disregard for living, breathing human life. I'm referring to the upholding of the federal ban on "partial-birth abortion" - a medically meaningless term, deliberately chosen to be inflammatory, and a horribly vague law that aims to shut down a wide range of procedures that are sometimes necessary to save a woman's life.

Maha has a couple of great posts that clear up the (deliberate) confusion and explain why forcing the complexities of modern medicine into the straitjacket of religious thinking is a recipe for tragedy. See in particular the story linked to here, where religion-based policy led to two fetii being stillborn when one could have been saved.

But then the "pro-life" fetus people are no more pro-life than the gun nuts. It's all about thumping their chests and braying about how morally superior they are to us evil librulls - the only thing that changes is whether they call us baby-eaters or unarmed sheep deserving of slaughter.

By constantly fighting in the most knee-jerk and mouth-foaming manner against any attempt at gun reform, the NRA has more innocent blood on its hands than the IRA. And as for the Compulsory Childbirth Brigade... I couldn't even guess at their toll in both deaths and destroyed lives, but it has to be up there.

Guns don't die, people do

Sometimes it seems to me that there is a certain sickness, a psychopathy, a rottenness at the heart of US society. Today's awful events in Virginia rekindled that feeling in me. Not just the fact that someone would come in to school one fine day and cold-bloodedly start slaughtering people at random, but that as predictably as the sun rising in the east, the gun nuts are seizing on this tragedy to push their agenda of mindless gun proliferation. (Thanks to Maha for linking to the wingnuts so I don't have to.)

"Oh, if everyone at Virginia Tech had been packing heat, this would never have happened," they bleat - just like they bleated after Columbine. As if we don't already have the most insane gun laws in the world, the gun nuts would have everyone armed to the teeth at all times, constantly on hair-trigger alert, ready to blow away anyone who, in their untrained eyes, made a suspicious move.

Of course, anyone with the IQ of a sea cucumber realizes that in such a situation, shooting sprees would not be stopped, they would be happening every other day! Besides, Virginia already has some of the loosest gun laws in the US, and it doesn't seem to have made a difference. How come you never hear in the news about someone who starts a shooting spree and is shot dead by someone else before he can kill more than one or two people? Real life is not like the movies. Personally, I think a bunch of Walter Mittys blasting away would only make things far worse.

I can't tell you how angry it makes me when gun nuts smugly proclaim, "an armed society is a polite society." Firstly, it suggests that if someone is impolite to me, I'm perfectly justified in whipping out a gun and killing them. Secondly, it couldn't be further from the truth. An armed society is one where anti-social individuals feel they can be as impolite, or downright psychopathic, as they like, and get away with it because they are armed. Here in Phoenix, road rage incidents where guns are fired or at least brandished are an everyday occurrence - the media doesn't even report them unless someone is killed.

Another argument that enrages me is when the gun proliferationists say that gun laws can never be completely effective, therefore we should give up and not even try. We can't have 100% success, so let's settle for zero percent! This is doubly dishonest when you consider that the main reason gun laws are ineffective is that the NRA is working night and day to abolish or sabotage them, and open up loopholes that you could drive an 18-wheeler through.

Consider the successful NRA campaign a few years ago to strip cities and local governments of the right to regulate guns in their communities, and have state-wide uniform laws based on the lowest common denominator, i.e. sparsely populated rural areas where everyone hunts and shoots. Consider also how the NRA and other gun nuts are constantly tying the hands of the police in investigating violent crimes, by pushing for secret, untraceable, unaccountable gun ownership with no restrictions whatever on who can own guns, what type, or how many.

Gun nuts live in a cloud-cuckoo land where there are good guys (i.e. the gun nuts themselves) with good guns, and bad guys with bad guns (and guess what skin color the bad guys are). Now, there's nothing we can do to stop bad guys from getting bad guns, because the bad guns just magically fall out of the sky into the hands of the bad guys. So the only thing we can do is arm the good guys to the teeth and let them take their guns anywhere they want - city parks, courtrooms, bars - so that they can blaze into action at a moment's notice. It never occurs to the nuts that every "bad" gun starts its existence as a "good" gun, and the more "good guns" floating around, the more guns available to the criminals. Or that a "good guy" can suddenly snap and go on a shooting spree. NRA theology is just as Manichean and simplistic as fundamentalist christian theology.

I freely admit that it's not enough to change gun laws. There will always be shocking rampages like today's as long as the US remains an immature, rootless and alienated society with a gun fetish. But adding guns to the mix, especially in such out-of-control numbers as we have in the US, is like trying to put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it.

The time to stop letting a lunatic fringe dictate to us is long overdue. Here's the minimum we need to do in order to regain some semblance of sanity:

• All guns should be registered and ballistically fingerprinted, with the records being kept indefinitely. Screw the idiots who rant and rave that registration is just the precursor to gun confiscation, which is the precursor to genocide of gun owners. You register your car, you register your dog or cat - if you want a gun, you register it! Period!
• Guns to be sold only by licensed dealers. If you want to sell a gun as a private party, you sell it on consignment through a licensed dealer. If you sell it illegally, you are responsible for any crimes committed with it - including murder.
• Real, effective background checks when buying a gun - not the placebo paper-shuffling exercise which is all the NRA allows us, with different states and agencies not allowed to share data. And a mandatory waiting period of at least one week, because this not only makes the background checks more effective, it is proven to reduce impulse murders. Also, some minimum level of training to be required for all gun owners.
• Impose two-gun-a-month limits (to put illegal dealers out of business), ban assault weapons, ban heavy-caliber sniper rifles that can bring down a commercial airliner, ban Dirty Harry guns that can send a round through an exterior wall, across the street, into another house, and kill someone lying in bed. There are some weapons that nobody has any legitimate reason to own.
• The crazy patchwork of state gun laws is something we can't afford. Washington DC's efforts to curb gun violence are constantly undercut by guns pouring in from Virginia. Any state with unduly lax gun laws should be denied highway funds or have some other pressure applied until it gets in line. If we can do it for the drinking age, we can certainly do it for the far more important issue of gun laws.

Will this stop all gun violence? No, of course not. But as I alluded to above, just because we can't achieve 100% doesn't mean we should settle for 0%. If we can introduce the notion (alien to many people) that with gun rights come gun responsibilities, if we can give police the tools they need to trace crime guns, then we can make a significant dent in the constant background noise of gun murders even if we can't stop the occasional rampage.

There's a lot more I could write about this country's insane and destructive gun-worship, but right now I just want to say that my heart goes out to the loved ones of today's victims. May they find the strength to carry on with their lives, and may those who think that the solution to guns is more guns, think again.

Update: Since writing the above, I have received several death threats. I have passed all information along to the police including IP addresses etc. Way to go, gun nuts! You've certainly convinced me that I can feel safe with people like you running around heavily armed!

You've got mail

Putting on my computer geek hat, I have to say that the White House's explanation of how it lost 5 million emails just doesn't pass the stink test. The official story is that they somehow lost this vast amount of data while migrating the email system from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook (or "Look out!" as some of us geeks call it). I've overseen a number of similar migration projects and I have a really hard time coming up with a plausible scenario that fits with this story.

First of all, before undertaking any project of this sort, you back up your data. That is basic sysadmin 101! Even more so when there are legal requirements on data retention, like Sarbanes-Oxley for publicly traded companies, or the Presidential Records Act for the White House.

And even if you ignore legal requirements and basic common sense, you don't allow 5 million emails to build up on the live server. It's not even possible, unless you installed gobs of extra memory and never archived old emails. And by the time you got into a position to lose 5 million emails, your system would be so slow as to be virtually unusable.

It's clear that Dana Peroxide, the "White Ho", is lying, and at the very least the White House is guilty of criminal negligence and obstruction of justice. Conventional wisdom in Washington is that it's never the scandal that gets you, it's the attempted cover-up of the scandal, which ends up being more damaging than the scandal itself. But we are not living in conventional times.

As the dam breaks on the infinite sleaze, corruption and criminality of the Junior crime gang, as fresh scandals pour out faster than anyone can keep up, it's becoming clear that they are in fact parts of one huge scandal. This once-great country has been taken over by a gang of corrupt, criminal traitors who are determined to pull off the biggest heist of all time. They've plundered the treasury, looting billions of dollars of our hard-earned money. They've lied us into a ghastly quagmire war in order that their megacorporate cronies could suck at the public teat with no oversight or accountability. They've allowed Enron and other criminal enterprises to write our national energy policy in secret, shoveling billions in subsidies to these polluters and strip-miners and slashing public health, safety and environmental laws for the benefit of their bottom line.

They've shown their contempt for the law, the security of the US, and basic human decency when they betrayed a covert CIA agent in order to punish her husband for exposing their lies. They showed their contempt for all of us when they allowed New Orleans to drown, and the Vacationer-in-Chief was too busy playing air guitar to lift a finger. And they've turned virtually every branch of the federal government into one giant, corrupt political machine to keep their gravy train rolling on in perpetuity by disenfranchising voters, fixing elections and witch-hunting their opponents.

We've still barely scratched the surface of a bottomless cesspit of rethug crime and venality. But if some of the missing emails start coming to light, I've a feeling that all but the most brain-rotted Junior worshippers will be appalled, and start howling for the blood of these treasonous criminals. Interesting times lie ahead!

More thoughts from Thought Theater.

All the president's emails

Thanks to the hard work and expertise of computer forensic specialists, many of the five million missing emails from official White House servers and the emails deleted by Karl Rove from RNC domains have been recovered. Here is a sample:

To:       jim.guckert@jeff-gannon.com
From:     kr@georgewbush.com
Subject:  Go ahead, Jeff ;-)

Dear Jeff,

Ever since you stopped coming to White House press conferences, and
especially since my leather slave escaped, I have been longing for your
probing, manly, um... questions. The moonbats say you lobbed softballs
at Scott McClellan but there was nothing soft about the balls you lobbed
at me!

Love,

Karl


---------------------------------------------


To:       cheney.the.dick@globaldomination.com
From:     junior@gwb43.com
Subject:  I'm gonna be rich!

Dear Uncle Dick,

Some dude in Nigeria - you know, the country where Valerie Plame set
Joe Wilson on a junket - is gonna put $437 million in my bank account.
This is great! I don't have to be preznit no more - I was getting tired
of it anyway. It's hard work being the decider, practising my
love with women - it's hard work! Now if I can just get a war czar to take
my place, I can spend all my time on the ranch clearing brush. Sweet!

Love,

Dubya

Asked to comment on these emails, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel complained that it wasn't clear what the meaning of "missing" is, Monica Goodling invoked the Fifth Amendment and fled to a nunnery so that she wouldn't have to answer questions from a bunch of meanies, and Cheney the Dick invoked the Second Amendment and shot someone in the face.

Developing...

Czar Georgie, the terribly stupid

War isn't fun any more for Chimpy the Bush Chimperoo.

Oh sure, it was funny to lie about Dubya Em Dees, and it was a blast to shock-and-awe Iraq back to the stone age. (Remember how he ordered the bombardment of Baghdad, then pumped his fist and screamed orgiastically, "feels good!"?)

And when Uncle Dick the Dick's Halliburton, Daddy Warbush's Carlyle Group and other thuggish, murderous organized-crime megacorporations started feasting at a trough containing hundreds of billions of our tax dollars, "Happy Days are here again" was playing in an endless loop over the White House PA system.

But now the Dems are back in Congress, Junior's poll numbers are below those of gonorrhea, and he might even - oh, the horrors of war! - have to face accountability, show some progress and agree to a timetable. Suddenly waging war is boring. He'd rather clear brush and pedal his little bicycle up and down.

Hence the sudden urge to outsource the job of Commander-in-Chief to a war czar. As in, someone who has to clean up the Potemkin Village Idiot's mess and take the blame for his infinitely colossal cluster-cheney.

This is typical of Monkeynuts. He's had everything in life handed to him on a silver platter, and has always had his daddy and his rich friends to bail out his bony ass whenever he screwed up. Whether it was getting out of being sent to Vietnam, getting out of his cushy champagne-unit sinecure in the Texas National Guard just ahead of a drug test, getting into Yale, having the Bin Laden family bail him out when he couldn't even find oil in Texas, having the taxpayers of Arlington, TX, hand him a hundred million dollars in pure corporate welfare, and so on right up to getting into the White House (despite losing the election) - Chimpy has never accomplished anything by his own efforts. If he had to get through life with only his own talents and abilities, he would today be bagging groceries at the Piggly Wiggly.

But this time, Junior has FUBAR'ed so badly, so monumentally, that he is beyond all help. Nobody is stupid enough to take on his so-called war czar position. For years, Dumbya has wallowed in the title of Commander-in-Chief, but as the fall-out from his staggering, nay cosmic, incompetence and fucktardery mounts up to the very heavens, a painful fact is slowly penetrating the presidential cranium and trickling into his reptilian lizard brain: with great power comes great responsibility.

Heck, even the lowliest school dropout burger-flipper at your local McGreaseball's is subject to more oversight and accountability than Captain Codpiece was for the six years of rethug rubber-stamp Congress. But now that the grown-ups are back in power, suddenly "it's hard work! Hard work! Heh heh heh."

Tell ya what Junior, why don't you take a long relaxing break in a tropical paradise. You just have to sit through some annoying trial at the Hague, then you can spend the rest of your days in Camp Guano. I'm sure there's plenty of brush to clear!

Bankrupt

"A federal bankruptcy judge Wednesday ordered an external audit of the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego amid accusations church leaders are trying to hide [assets] to avoid payment to sex abuse victims." [Link]

They used to move priests from one parish to another, now they're moving money from one bank account to another to escape responsibility.

The Catholic church is bankrupt. Intellectually, spiritually and morally bankrupt.

Scum

I was wrong to think that the artificial, synchronized outrage and screaming fits of the vapors from the extreme lunatic right over Nancy Pelosi's trip to Syria was just another example of rethug hypocrisy. It's far more sinister than that, and follows a long tradition of the 'thugs actively sabotaging and undermining peace efforts around the globe.

Now the 'thugs are frightened that Pelosi's diplomacy might actually bear fruit, after their boy Chimperor has totally cheneyed up his pet war against Iraq. So they are going all-out to swift-boat her, hiding behind an astroturf group that calls itself the Republican Jewish Committee.

Gotta keep that carnage and chaos going, got to keep wasting thousand of our troops' lives and trillions of dollars. After all, we can't have King Monkeynuts losing face!

These people are scum. Infinitely vile, despicable, loathsome scum. There are no words in any language to express how inconceivably sickening, repulsive and execrable these pieces of excrement are.

The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on

All those annoying little attack poodles who are screaming that Nancy Pelosi is stabbing Israel in the back by going to Syria (because only Jesus is allowed to destroy Israel, don't you know) should shut up and read this column in the Jerusalem Post:

It was a gutsy move by the new Speaker and one that deserves commendation, not criticism from those who are committed to the whole litany of failed policies of recent years. One would think that some of these pundits would look at the sheer carnage they delivered in Iraq - the 3,200 American dead and the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians - and be shamed into shutting up. But no such luck.

It's been obvious for many years that the extreme lunatic right has no shame.

Gone to the great cave in the sky...

Johnny Hart, the BC cartoonist, has died. Frankly, I'm not exactly overcome with grief.

Hart jumped the shark years ago, when he exchanged a booze addiction for a Jeezus addiction, became a no-talent partisan hack, and dedicated his comic strip to shoving his extreme, even loathsome(*) fundamentalist views down his readers' throats - not to mention making bigoted attacks on Jews and Muslims. Only a born-again would get away with that shit, since he had a huge and fanatical contingent of extreme-right supporters who foam at the mouth about anti-christian persecution when any newspaper makes noises about dropping his crappy strip.

Can you imagine Garfield pushing scientology? Or Dilbert lecturing his cube-mates on the power of magic underpants? And how did those cavemen know all about Jesus when he was supposedly thousands of years in the future?

For the last several years, Hart had dropped any pretense of trying to be amusing and had descended into mindless bleating. Every day's strip was just another moronic soundbite delivered with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Hart wouldn't get paid a penny for such worthless product if he wasn't pandering to people's basest ignorance and superstition.

Personally, I think comics ought to be funny, not smug and preachy. I guess fundies are different that way.

(* In April 1999, in an interview with the Washington Post, Hart revealed that he was sad that his mother was in hell because she had died without being saved. But not to worry; when he gets to heaven, God will erase his memory of her so he won't worry about her screaming forever in infinite agony in the lake of fire. I found the above link after a lot of googling, but it may not work anymore.)

Worst. Administration. EVER.

Purge-gate, the firing for political reasons of 8 US attorneys, is only the tip of the iceberg. The real scandal is becoming more and more disturbing every day - the wholesale gutting, not just of political appointees, but of hundreds of career lawyers in the Justice Department.

Legal professionals who have spent decades building up experience and expertise in the public service are being forced out, or passed over for advancement, to make room for loyal, born-again Bushies and incompetent toadies armed with worthless diplomas from Pat Robertson's fundamentalist degree mills. Some of these panjandrums make up for their scanty credentials with enormous hubris and self-importance, knowing the Junior's patronage makes them untouchable - like Rachel Paulose, who threw herself a lavish coronation as US attorney in Minnesota, complete with a professional photographer, a color guard, and a choir. The cost to the taxpayers? $225 - if you can believe Paulose. And of course rethugs never lie.

It's been the same pattern throughout the federal bureaucracy ever since Junior seized power despite losing the 2000 election. Consider his appointment of anal rapist David Hager to a critical position in the FDA with responsibility for women's health. Hager's prescription for PMS? Pray to Jesus. I wish I were making this up. And Junior has appointed over 100 lobbyists for megacorporate polluters, strip miners and other environment-destroying and anti-social industries to regulate their own companies. Good friggin' grief!

I guess it's faith-based regulation - have companies regulated by people who don't believe there should be any regulation, and who have a blatant conflict of interest. And faith-based environmental monitoring: let polluters "self-report" by crossing their fingers and declaring that they don't pollute. And don't even get me started on Junior's war on climate scientists, as always using toadies who lie about their credentials as proxies. Can anyone deny that this despicable little twerp has the worst environmental record of any head of state in world history?

In a way, such a torrent of corruption and cronyism when you have a gang of extremist ideologues who believe that government is the source of all evil, the beast that must be drowned in the bathtub, yada yada yada. "Government doesn't work, so put us in charge and we'll prove it! And enrich ourselves with your money in the process, heh heh heh."

As the Enron presidency lurches into terminal meltdown, it's a race against time to impeach the bastards before they utterly destroy what is left of this country, our democracy, and our future.

Fly the fiendish skies

The Soviet Union controlled its population (and especially its dissidents) very effectively by requiring every citizen over 16 to carry a propiska or internal passport which specified the person's ethnic group and where they were allowed to live.

Is the US no-fly list a form of back-door propiska? Read this before saying it couldn't happen here.

'I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that." I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. "That'll do it," the man said.'

The speaker is not only an ex-marine but one of the foremost legal authorities in the US and an emeritus professor at Princeton. If this can happen to him, it can certainly happen to a lowly software engineer - I've been on many peace marches and have frequently noticed a rather oppressive presence of Phoenix PD cameramen.

(And what do you mean, "we", paleface? "We ban a lot of people from flying" - the TSA or American Airlines? Since when is exercising one's First Amendment right peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, punishable by internal exile?)

Note also that the no-fly list apparently uses an algorithm called Soundex, which is useful in certain contexts but totally inappropriate here - it confuses Osama bin Laden with Johnny Rotten, and for every genuine terrorist on the list, hundreds of innocent people will be wrongly flagged. Not only is this a huge hassle for the victims of false positives, it drives down the signal to noise ratio and overwhelms intelligence analysts to the point where the system is basically useless.

See also this article which gives an inside look at airport screeners. It's clear that the system is dysfunctional, poorly designed, drastically under-resourced, and does nothing to make anyone safer. It's just window-dressing. Why won't Congress fund the system properly? Because all the money is going into the black hole of George Bush Junior's pet war against Iraq, which apart from anything else is creating a whole generation of terrorists and putting us all in infinitely more danger.

This country is so screwed.

Here's your answer, E.J.

Today, the local toilet paper finally got around to publishing squishy liberal E.J. Dionne's "Answers to the atheists" which has already been much discussed in the blogosphere. Dionne is joining in the pile-on against uppity atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris etc. He doesn't actually provide any answers, just a bunch of rhetorical questions, such as: "Are these people [Christians] a threat to reason and even freedom?" and some knee-jerk accusations of dogmatism and intolerance.

There have been many excellent responses from bloggers (for example sociologyman and jcasey at NonSequitur) but the best answer was a story that appeared on the same page of the Repulsive: "Faith, fury mix at Mormon temple." It describes an altercation between born-agains and Mormons outside a Mormon temple in Mesa, Arizona.

It seems a group of fundie born-yesterday idiots have been demonstrating the love of Jesus every Easter for the last few years by mobbing outside Mormon temples and braying through megaphones that the people inside are going to scream forever in infinite agony in the lake of fire. (I don't know if they're connected with this anti-Mormon campaign.) The leader of this charming group is the "burly" 42-year-old Lonnie Pursifull, who lost a fight with a 64-year-old Mormon woman in a wheelchair. Apparently he blocked her way, got a bump on the shins from her wheelchair, and ran off blubbering about being the victim of an unprovoked attack. Once again we see that all bullies are cowards. I think Mormonism is a Mickey Mouse religion, but there's no doubt Pursifull got what he deserved.

You see, E.J., there's the difference between religion and atheism. Religion is nothing but primitive tribalism which sets people at each other's throats when they would otherwise have absolutely no reason to hate each other. It really has nothing to do with morality. It occasionally and accidently aligns with morality, but mostly it is about brainwashing people with "us vs. them" attitudes based on irrational and unquestioning belief. (And don't bother countering with academic discussions about the questioning that goes on at the rarefied strata of theological ivory towers. I'm talking about the unquestioning belief of people like Lonnie Pursifull, or for that matter Anne Carlisle, the woman in the wheelchair.)

The problem with religious moderates like yourself, E.J., is that you provide cover for the lunatic extremists who aim to spread their meme with violence. You lecture us that we must respect their beliefs, however bizarre and even loathsome, simply because they are religious beliefs. Religion gets a free pass, a special immunity from objective scrutiny and criticism that is not available to any other human invention.

The horrific attacks of 9/11 should have convinced everyone of the dangers of letting religious fanaticism fester in the darkness of ignorance. Instead, we are fighting Islamic fundamentalism with Christian fundamentalism, and destroying the world in the process.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: religion is an embarrassing piece of baggage from the infancy of human development, and an increasingly dangerous one. Today our technology gives us more power than the ignorant savages who wrote the world's holy books could ever have dreamed of ascribing to their gods. Will the ability to destroy the planet be unleashed in the service of some ancient tribal hatred? Atheists have something legitimate to say on this matter, and squishy moderates who try to silence and marginalize them are just as culpable as the mouth-foaming fundamentalists.

Don't tear down this wall!

There is a Big Lie which is increasingly gaining ground in the US. The extreme religious right saturates the media 24-7 with this lie, and the media cravenly regurgitates this lies and marginalizes anyone who tries to point out that it is in fact a lie: that the US was founded as an explicitly Christian nation, by devout Christians who were escaping a secular and intolerant Europe so that they could have freedom to worship the Christian god.

A good example of the triumphalist majoritarianism of the "Christian nation" myth-peddlers can be found here. See also this story of a Texas state senator who became enraged when a non-Christian prayer was offered on the senate floor. (But it's encouraging to note that at least some high-school kids see through the lie.)

It's true that many of the original American colonies were hotbeds of religious intolerance and church-state entanglement, founded by zealots who fled Europe not so much to escape religious persecution as to impose their own variety. Some colonies had an established church, and you had to pay taxes to support this church whether you were a member or not. Some colonies banned activities that were considered sinful by the established church but not necessarily by others. In Puritan Massachusetts for example, for many years it was illegal to celebrate Christmas. There really was a war on Christmas back then!

But the founders of the US had a very different idea on the proper relationship between church and state. They were all too familiar with the history of long, bloody religious wars in Europe, and the constant petty squabbling between different denominations in America, which they feared could escalate into open violence.

And so the Founding Fathers stated very clearly in the Constitution that there should be no established religion and no abridgement of religious freedom. In many of the new states, the majority church opposed the first amendment while minority religious groups supported it, fearing that without it, they would be swallowed up by larger churches. One such group was the Danbury Baptists, who sought reassurances from Thomas Jefferson that the Constitution would protect their rights. Jefferson wrote back a famous letter in which he coined the phrase "Wall of separation between church and state." It's a powerful visual metaphor which makes plain how church and state were to relate to each other; each minding its own business and staying out of the other's territory. Good walls make good neighbors!

In recent years, some Christian dominionists such as George Bush Junior associate David Barton have been peddling a bogus version of this letter which has Jefferson calling for a "one-way wall" which allows the church to control the state but not vice versa. Others have claimed that the letter is irrelevant because the words "church-state separation" do not appear in the Constitution. But the Supreme Court ruled as long ago as 1878 (in Reynolds v. United States) that Jefferson's words were the words of a framer of the Constitution explaining its intent, and as such should be given the same weight as if they did in fact appear in the Constitution. And it's clear from Jefferson's other writings, and those of other founding fathers, that they would have been horrified by the idea of an officially Christian United States. (While you're here, take my quiz: match the church-state separation quote with the founding father.)

The very first international treaty signed by the United States was the Treaty of Tripoli, which stated plainly: "The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion." This treaty was passed unanimously by the Senate, and there's no record of any debate or controversy about this unequivocal statement.

In the 1940's, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson wrote: "If there is a fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox politics, nationalism, religion, or any other matters, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."

So we see that there is a consistent pattern from the founding of the Republic down to the present day. The United States is NOT a Christian nation. It is not founded on any religion or sect, nor should it give any religion or sect special privileges. It takes no position on which religion, if any, is the "true" one.

Some religionists are sensible enough to realize that this state of affairs actually benefits religion. Christianity flourishes in the US, with over 3,000 different sects of that religion alone, but without the religious violence and infighting that marks so many other parts of the world. As Barry Goldwater noted, this notable success was achieved only by maintaining the separation of church and state.

The wall of church-state separation protects everyone, whether Christian, minority religion, or no religion. That's why I say: Don't tear down this wall!

What is Cheney doing in the bushes?

It's time for another No More Mr. Nice Poll!

Hey guys, this is not a gay porn site, okay?

...Despite that fact that a lot of people are finding this site while googling for gay porn. And as for other people, I don't think I want to know what they're googling for. Here are some of the search terms that are showing up in my server logs, just for April:

• thumbs asses
• human guy penis
• penis tree
• abortion destroying america missing states
• bollocks of henry the eighth
• dwarf mentally ill relative living nazi germany atrocities
• easter honk satan
• gay parade coming to pensacola christian college
• gays guys pising on each other
• hindu penis
• is it okay for an lds member mormon to go to battlecry
• neverending lesbians torrent
• photo of women with their backs painted
• the first of the fallen the spoiler of virgins the master of ab
• unauthorized reproduction of nude photos federal law

Happy googling!

Taboo or not taboo, that is the question

Some time ago, Jordan Carlos, the actor who played "Stephen Colbert's black friend", sounded off about how the tokenism suggested by that title is closer to home than you might think.

I was reminded of that article when I saw a routine recently on the Daily Show. John Oliver, the annoying Brit with the snot-clogged voice, wanted to interview a New York city councilman who spearheaded a non-binding resolution to ban the N-word. So he dragged along Jon Stewart's black friend, "Senior Black Correspondent" Larry Wilmore, to cover for him by repeatedly saying the word "nigger" on command, like a trained monkey, in front of the unamused councilman.

I thought it was more than a little cowardly and dishonest, and it must have been incredibly degrading for Wilmore, who has an impressive resumé as a writer and producer. Not to mention Councilman Comrie, whom Oliver addressed with glee as Leroy. (Yes, that is his first name, but still.)

Was this racism on the Daily Show's part? I know there are some people who annoyingly cry "racism" every time they stub their toe, but there is a grey area where the word "racism" is too strong, but where people are definitely acting thoughtlessly and insensitively. Jordan Carlos evidently experienced a lot of this during his stint with Colbert. But Oliver's routine went right up to the line and beyond it.

Of course there is a great deal that is stupid and worth mocking about our national obsession with "race", this unscientific and ever-changing concept that has everyone who doesn't want to look like a redneck constantly tip-toeing on eggshells. But if that's what the Daily Show was trying to do, they went about it in a very clumsy and needlessly offensive way.

I realize that there are no magic words; words only have the power to shock and hurt us if we give them that power. What complicates the issue with the N-word is that it's either taboo or acceptable depending on the skin color of the speaker. But I have a hard time with the argument that minority groups can empower themselves by embracing words that are used as slurs against them.

In Britain, "paddy" is an ethnic slur for an Irish person, and equivalent to the N-word in that it conjures up a host of ugly stereotypes about lazy, drunken, brawling Irish and what not. I increasingly often hear Irish people referring to themselves as "paddies" and it bugs the shit out of me, even more so than when ignorant English use the word. I'm not a paddy and will never call myself such; I have too much self-respect! So although (insert ritual obligatory disclaimer) I can never know what it's like to be a black person in the US, I imagine I would be with Councilman Comrie on the issue of black people using the N-word.

Anyway, it's getting late and I don't have a pithy aphorism with which to wrap up my ramblings on this subject. I just think a lot of people, myself included, need to make more of an effort to treat themselves with respect, treat others with respect, and avoid giving or taking needless offense. Easier said than done, I know.

Oh, now someone took away the toy...

Here's another blast from the past: "The Toy" by The Casuals, the same group that had a hit with "Jesamine". Listen to the song and imagine that it's addressed to George Bush Junior, and "she" is Nancy Pelosi, and it's startling how well it fits.

Arizona Conservative Idiot of the Week: Jack Harper

Arizona state senator Jack Harper (R-Surprise, surprise!) has found someone to blame for the problems at the Arizona State Veteran Home. No, it isn't Bill Clinton; it's freshman Democratic Congressman Harry Mitchell, who last November unseated the corrupt and clueless J.D. Hayworth.

Yes, that's right: Mitchell is supposed to responsible for a problem that's been brewing long before he took office. And a problem that isn't even a federal but a state responsibility! Hello, state senator Jack Harper? Anyone home?

Jesus wept - I swear the rethugs don't even care any more how stupid they look. They just say the first dumb shit that comes into their heads, knowing that the Repulsive readers and Fox-suckers will lap it up as gospel truth. What a bunch of dickless dumbasses.

[Update: Tedski has more on Harper.]

Bonus Arizona Idiot: John McCain. Read Montini, he's actually earning his pay today.

"With each new incident of executive incompetence, more and more of us were united in the feeling that something had to be done before some monumental error in judgment led to an even more terrible waste of American blood and treasure. Even it if meant abandoning respect for presidential prerogatives and qualifying American's potent defense of its interests and values out of concern that the incumbent president wasn't up to the task. [...] Even though I regretted my action, I felt that circumstances were so compelling that it was a necessary response to a failed policy that had cost the lives of eighteen good Americans."

--John McCain, 1993

Don't ask, don't yell

Jeezus! This is friggin' unbelievable so I will just link to it without comment.

Maybe they should have booked a flying carpet...

The Flying Imams controversy drags on, much to the delight of hate-o-sphere pundits like Michelle Malkin (dictionary definition: "An untidy woman, slattern; a scarecrow, ragged puppet, or grotesque effigy.")

As you may or may not remember, six Muslim religious leaders who had boarded a plane from Minneapolis to Phoenix were taken off and arrested when other passengers freaked out at the fact that six bearded men had praying in Arabic before boarding, and became convinced that a new 9/11 plot was underway. After lengthy questioning, the men were released without charges, but the airline refused to honor their tickets back to Phoenix.

Subsequently, there were umpteen lurid but unsubstantiated stories about the imams making elaborate preparations to hijack the plane once they boarded. The real story was much simpler; one of the men wanted to swap his seat in first class with a colleague who was blind. But as Mark Twain said, a lie goes halfway around the world before the truth has put on its boots, especially nowadays in the US when Muslims are involved.

Anyway, the six men are now doing something as American as apple pie - suing the airline. And they certainly have a case, considering the humiliation they were subjected to for flying while Muslim. However, it's troubling that the lawsuit also covers the passengers who called the cops.

But while Islamophobes are reaching fresh heights of apoplexy over this development, and even rushing anti-flying-Imam bills through Congress, I view this as another reason to hate lawyers, not Muslims. Besides, I don't think it'll amount to much. Lawyers instinctively go after the deepest pockets, which means the airline, not the poor schmucks who have to fly coach.

However, I would feel better if the Imams (assuming they were aware of this tactic) told their shyster lawyer, "No, we're not going down that road." Apart from being unseemly and grasping, this could indeed have a chilling effect on people reporting genuine threats.

In short, no-one has come out of this smelling of roses. But the affair is mainly a sad commentary on the ignorance and know-nothingism of Merkins who have been brainwashed into thinking that 1.4 billion people are terrorists who are plotting night and day to destroy the US. Hey, Junior and his neonazi-con friends are doing that job already...

Wanker of the day: Duncan Black

Duncan Black (Atrios) writes:

Things Which Make Me Want To Shoot People In The Face:

People who bitch about other peoples' blogrolls who don't even have a blogroll on their main page, but just a link to one.

Well, there is in fact a blogroll, but it's easy to miss because the page design is so horrible, with dark text on a dark background. But Black totally misses the point of the post he links to.

The blogger at Republic of T. is taking an appropriately Buddhist view on the hunger for blog links as a form of attachment to material things. If you start blogging today, unless you're a movie star with a ready-made outlet at the Buffington Ghost, or have the resources of a major PR firm at your beck and call (and the megabucks to pay for it), you are inevitably going to be a C-lister in the blogosphere as a whole. If you aspire to break into the rarified strata of Atrios, Kos & co., you will be disappointed. So you might as well deal with the situation and find other rewards from your blogging.

Like almost everyone else who reads blogs, I skim over Atrios most days, because, well, almost everyone else does. And because you find breaking news stories that the corporatist media won't cover until several days or weeks later, if at all - Purge-gate being a good example. But let's face it, most days Black just phones it in. He has hundreds of people doing the heavy lifting for him, emailing him links, and he just posts the links with a token "Heh-indeedy" or "What Digby said." Don't look to Atrios for any depth of analysis or fresh, thought-provoking perspectives.

Which is fine as far as it goes. But what annoys me about Black is his smug sense of entitlement. He has benefited from first-mover advantage, having started when you could count liberal political blogs on a Simpsons character's hand, and he's never really had to work hard at it. So he gets pissy when it's pointed out to him that A-list status doesn't just fall into anyone else's lap any more.

Do we detect sour grapes, you may reasonably ask. Hell, no! I couldn't survive a link from Atrios - it would blow away my monthly bandwitdh quota in seconds. Besides, I realized long ago that there are far better bloggers than I who are always going to be obscure and known only to a small circle.

My reason for blogging has always been that, living in a backward, reactionary city like Phoenix, I have to vent from time to time in order to preserve my sanity. If anyone else enjoys my writing, that's great. If someone gets their knickers in a knot over it, that's even better. But even if I knew that no-one was ever going to read me again from tomorrow onwards, I think I would still blog. Not only to let off steam but because I do all my own programming and database administration for this blog, and I've learned a lot of technical stuff that I find fascinating in its own right. It's much more interesting applying programming skills to a real project than following along with some "hello world" example from a book. Plus, some of it may even prove useful in my professional life. I've never made a penny from this blog and I don't expect I ever will, but that's beside the point.

As for my own blogroll, granted it's not on the front page, but my contribution to anyone else's traffic is statistically insignificant anyway. But for what it's worth, I don't go with the herd and link to Blog X just because everyone links to it in hopes of crumbs from the table in the form of a return link. I link to people whom I read on a regular basis and who have something original and interesting to say. I do so in no expectation of any quid pro quo.

To sum up, I think this fetish about links from A-listers is silly and childish. There are a lot of whiny-ass titty babies out there - among the A-listers no less than among us peons - and they need to grow up and remember why we blog in the first place. If it isn't because you have something to say and you just have to vent about it, then why even bother?