No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Hot enough for ya?

It's summer in Arizona, and time for another...

Millions and millions

Atheist Hussy links to an excellent video that puts in perspective just how cosmically, ineffably, and utterly wrong young-earth creationists are when they claim on Biblical grounds that the earth is less than ten thousand years old. They're off by a factor of a million!

Doesn't it follow that, instead of the equal time in the science classroom that they are clamoring for, they should get at most one millionth of the time that evolution gets?

"Pro-life" vs. real life

Just read this, and pass it along to any "culture of life" person you know.

Chimpigula

Incuriouser and incuriouser... or should I say scarier and scarier. That's what life is like under the Boy Chimperor as he descends into raving madness and vows to take us all down with him.

Is it 2009 yet? Will we make it?

What a schloz!

And he looks like the obnoxious guy from the British Office, the one who ate Scotch eggs.

Guns in bars... Part Duh

Arizona continues to revel in its status as the wingnuttiest state in the Union. Not long ago a proposal to allow guns in bars was narrowly defeated, but bad ideas never die in this state... they just keep festering in the overheated miasma of the legislature, and come back as even worse ideas.

The current incarnation is a bill which says you must either allow people to carry guns on your property or provide them with a lock box. Well, so much for protecting private property rights... once again the gun fetishists get to drive a bulldozer over everyone else's rights. Why can't they just leave their goddam guns at home? Why do they get to impose a burden on other people just so they can swagger around with their penis substitutes wherever and whenever they want?

For all their whining about "gun grabbers", I'm always astonished by the unique privileged position gun nuts have. It seems laws are only for "unarmed sheep". A few years ago, Arizona - like most states - passed an NRA-written state preemption law abolishing all local gun regulations and stripping communities of the right to pass regulations to protect their citizens. The (incredibly weak) pretext for this law was that a gun owner might unwittingly cross a city line and be in violation of local regulations. Well, tough shit! It's been a basic legal principle for centuries that ignorance of the law is no excuse - you are responsible for knowing what the law is and obeying it. Unless you're a gun nut of course.

But what's scariest of all is the current wave of license to murder laws being rammed through various states by the NRA. You literally can kill anyone you want, for any reason or no reason, as long as you use a gun. This is stark raving fucking lunacy! If the NRA ever succeed in forcing this law onto the books in Arizona, I'm outa here.

And don't get me started on the total lack of safety regulation on the gun industry or its blanket immunity from lawsuits, even as it continues to market increasingly powerful and concealable weapons and saturate the country with them. Truly, the lunatics are running the asylum.

The Norwegian Dream

A new study shows that Norway is the most peaceful country on earth. The study took into account general prosperity, quality of education, militarization, crime and access to guns among many other factors to rank the Scandinavian countries in the top 10. Refuting the US image of Ireland as a hell-hole of religious violence, it came in fourth, with Britain doing very poorly in 49th place.

The US languishes in 96th place, just ahead of Iran and well behind such countries as Syria, Bangladesh, El Salvador and Papua New Guinea. Rounding out the bottom three are Iraq in last place, behind Sudan and Israel.

I wonder where Iraq would have ranked before the US invasion. And I wonder if any neonazi-cons will take this hint why other countries don't want "freedom and democracy" spread to them by dint of overwhelming firepower and violence?

Let the illegals soar

Lost in the brouhaha over the latest illegal immigrant amnesty bill is a little-noticed development - the fees that the government charges legal immigrants for a green card or naturalization are set to double, to over $1000. The excuse is that the increases are needed to "provide better service." What a joke!

I'm an immigrant who came to the US the hard way - legally. I had to spend thousands of dollars in fees and years of my life in a bureaucratic limbo (the INS lost my file four times), and jump through every demeaning hoop imaginable, to come and live with my US citizen wife. I've heard nothing but horror stories from every other legal immigrant I've talked to. Unless you've dealt with the INS as a would-be legal immigrant or H-1B visa applicant, or as a US citizen sponsoring a loved one for a visa, you have no idea how nasty and incompetent those inept jerks can be.

During my years of living in a Kafkaesque nightmare waiting for my green card, I've seen fees rise steadily every year while the quality of service plummeted, the lines outside the INS office at 2am grew longer, and the bureaucrats in the office got more arrogant and unpleasant. The pigeons outside the building know more immigration law than those self-important panjandrums, and I swear they screw up people's lives just for the malicious pleasure of it, by losing your paperwork, giving out incorrect information, and barking and snapping at you like you are cattle.

I don't know why the immigration "service", alone among federal agencies, is expected to pay its way with user fees as its sole source of funds, and why its employees are not held responsible for providing professional, reasonably courteous service regardless of its budgetary situation. Anyway, this is just one way in which the US encourages illegal immigration and discourages the legal variety. We insult, mistreat and turn away the world's brightest and best, and allow an overwhelming flood of the unskilled and uneducated to provide cheap labor for big business, despite the huge net burden to society as a whole.

People often say that if we have a guest worker program without eventual automatic citizenship, we are being racist to Hispanics by saying they are good enough to work here but not good enough to live here. Try telling that to the H-1B workers I worked with for many years in Silicon Valley. These are very bright, hard-working, highly educated people, without whom the US's high-tech economy would go bankrupt overnight. They aren't taking jobs Americans won't do - they're taking jobs most Americans can't do. And yet they can only stay here for three years, six at most - then they must uproot themselves and leave, regardless of how important their work is and how scarce their expertise, regardless of whether they have US-born children, regardless of anything. I guess they're just not good enough to live here, however desperately needed their skills are. (And a lot of them are brown-skinned too, which I just mention because people are always playing the race card in any debate about immigration.)

I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason for the latest (and unusually large) fee hike is to discourage lower-income legal immigrants from naturalizing and voting, since they are more likely to vote Democratic. (Given that the regime disenfranchises African-American troops serving in Iraq, you know there's nothing they won't stoop to.) In any case, it's just one more way in which legal immigrants are slapped in the face and treated far more shoddily than illegal ones.

Every few years Washington declares amnesty for illegal immigrants and then claps itself on the back for enacting "comprehensive immigration reform" and solving the problem once and for all. And a few years later we find ourselves back at square one, with nothing changed except that the illegal population has doubled, school classrooms and emergency rooms are twice as crowded, and low-paying jobs pay half as much. There's no reason to believe that the current bout of legislative activity for activity's sake will be any different.

The problem is that the US has no immigration policy - it just has a dysfunctional self-perpetuating status quo driven by the corporate greed of Republicans and the woolly-minded political correctness of Democrats. I know everyone deserves a chance for a better life, but does the entire population of Latin America have to come and live here permanently? The current situation is not good for anyone except the megacorporate neo-feudalists. A better solution is to improve education and prosperity for the least privileged, both in Latin America and among our own citizens.

Unfortunately, this requires Republicans and Democrats to act on principle rather than out of greed or sentiment respectively. In other words, it will never happen.

Evolution in action

PZ talks about the Museum of Cretinism (as I call it) and longs for the day when Ken Ham's ignorant anti-knowledge brand of fundyism will be as much a historical curiosity as Shakerism. I can only say: me too. Imagine, a $27 million BC cartoon when the US is already at the bottom of the league in science education. As my wife says, people are scary stupid.

However, my main point in this post is to contrast Shakerism and Fundyism. No doubt you've heard of the concept of a meme - "a unit of cultural information which can propagate from one mind to another in a manner analogous to genes", or to put it less delicately, a mind virus.

Just as some biological viruses (and computer viruses) are more virulent than others, some memes are more successful at implanting themselves in the brain and using it to propagate. Considering that two of the main tenets of Shakerism were celibacy and withdrawal from society, we at once see a problem - how are Shakers going to pass on their religion? No wonder they died out. Fundyism, by contrast, is a much more infectious and malignant meme because its top priority is spreading its sickness to others. Victims call this "witnessing."

How often have you been approached by a total stranger, or someone you've only just met, and asked if you have accepted Jesus Christ as your personal lord and saviour? If you live in the Deep South, you know what I'm talking about - it probably happens every day. Here in Phoenix, it occurs often enough to piss me off. Even where I work - a large engineering firm - some employees have turned their cubicles into proselytizing tools, with Christian posters, pamphlets and knick-knacks prominently displayed.

The irony is that for all their frothing at the mouth about the evils of evolution, the fundies themselves are an excellent illustration of the principle. It's survival of the fittest - where "fit" really has nothing to do with the actual teachings of a religion and just boils down to how hard the religion fights to impose itself on others. It's a chain reaction, like Night of the Living Dead. The people the fundies kill (in the sense of killing independent thought) get up and kill! The people they kill get up and kill!

If people subjected Christianity to objective scrutiny, and weighed its claims on their merits or lack thereof, it would have died out long ago - and it is in fact dying out in the civilized world (i.e. Europe and much of the Far East) where its hateful and hideous screeds are deservedly being replaced with a secular humanist consensus. The know-nothing, anti-public-education US is the main breeding ground for this pestilence, where it festers in the darkness of ignorance and irrationality. One nation, undereducated!

The moral for the reality-based community is clear. Evolve, adapt to the environment and take it over - or die!

Thanks for your service, Cindy

My heart goes out to Cindy Sheehan on reading her announcement that she is resigning from the role that was more or less thrust on her, that of the face of the peace movement. I don't necessarily agree with everything she writes, but I can well understand her frustration, bitterness and exhaustion - particularly after the Dems' abject, craven surrender to George Bush Junior and their taking ownership of his disastrous cluster-cheney of a war.

However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the "left" started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of "right or left", but "right and wrong."

I'm surprised and saddened to hear this. I've never been a party loyalist - I've supported the Democratic party because they are marginally less bloodthirsty and warmongering, and actually have one or two principled people in their ranks. At the same time, I've constantly berated them for their cowardice and timidity. Of course it's about right and wrong, not party politics. If, hypothetically, the Republicans announced tomorrow that they were going to end the war, and I had reason to trust their sincerity and their effectiveness, I would switch allegiance in a heartbeat. Not that I'm discounting what Cindy is saying. She has had to bear a burden these last few years that is heavier than a decent society would make anyone bear.

Good-bye America ...you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can't make you be that country unless you want it.

It's up to you now.

Good-bye Cindy, and thank you for your service, your courage, your perseverance and hard work. You well deserve to rest and spend time with the remainder of your family. It is indeed up to us, and I hope we will all examine our consciences and ask ourselves how badly we want this war to end, and those who wage it and gorge themselves on the blood of our children to be held accountable.

Dick heads, dick heads, roly poly dick heads...

Whoa! Let the eagle soar... in more ways than one. That's the horniest eagle I've ever seen.

For the six people who haven't heard (and as usual I am the last person in the blogosphere to write about this), Juan Cole posted about US troops facing food shortages in Iraq (all food has to be trucked in from Kuwait, with Halliburton no doubt charging Uncle Sam $100 per gallon of milk) and the lunatic extreme right erupts in synchronized outrage against... Juan Cole. The leaked memo detailing this situation isn't what they want to hear, so it's obviously fake! As is anything that reflects negatively on Glorious Leader. Only problem: the memo has been confirmed as genuine.

This is so typical of the Junior-worshippers. The slightest hint of a suggestion of a possibility of a scintilla of lèse majesté has them foaming at the mouth and thrashing around on the floor in a frenzy of uncontrollable rage. Like when Harry Reid said the war against Iraq was lost, and the loonies immediately screeched in unison that he was a traitor. Now, since you're reading this blog you presumably have at least one neuron firing, so I ask you: who is the real traitor? The guy who points out that the war is lost, or the guy who keeps sending troops into the meat-grinder of a lost war, and insists that they will stay there as long as he is in the Oval Office?

Where do the priorities of those Bush-zombies lie anyway? In supporting the troops, or in continuing to sacrifice them as cannon fodder to avoid any risk of cognitive dissonance in having to confront the reality of a failed war and a failed warmonger?

Dick heads, dick heads, eat 'em up, yum!

Memorial Day

I remember when the US was a beacon of hope throughout the world.

I remember when we had leaders who are statesmen, who realized that with power comes responsibility. Men like JFK who were profoundly admired and respected by other heads of state, and revered by adoring crowds wherever they went.

I remember when our legal system and our democracy were the envy of millions living under oppression.

I'm not quite old enough to remember when US troops actually were liberators, but I've seen many British and French people go misty-eyed at the memory of WWII GI's.

I remember when the US was overall a force for good in the world, an honest broker for peace.

Today, as we mourn the 3,500 troops whose lives have been squandered in the neonazi-con's pet war, we should mourn all the more the country that betrayed them, and betrayed itself.

Cheney wants to wipe Iran off the map

Oh gawd... things just keep getting worse, more frightening and more nightmarish under the ghastly misadministration of the Junior Junta. Latest news: Darth Cheney. the real power behind the throne, wants to do an end run around the Boy Chimperor and cement his place in history by nuking Iran.

"Cheney's team wants to work with Israel, nudging the country at some key moment to mount a small-scale attack on the suspected site of Iran's nuclear infrastructure, which could lead to an Iranian counter attack on US forces stationed in the Persian Gulf." This would then give Cheney the pretext for a massive retaliatory air strike, most likely nuclear, against Iran.

And the sick thing is that the Dems have paved the way for him, by signing off on Bush's never-ending war against Iraq. Cheney's crazed bellicosity will end up taking us all down with him.

Why don't we just lock Cheney up in a room with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and let them fight to the death? We could put it on pay-per-view and it would pay for itself. Remember half a trillion dollars ago when the war against Iraq was going to pay for itself? (And in fairness to Ahmadinejad, he never called for Israel to be wiped off the map.)

Monica Goodling's love song to George Bush Junior

(To the tune of Johnny Cash's "I walk the line", and inspired by Lindsay's T-shirt:)

I got my law degree in a box of Cracker Jack
I keep a close watch on troops in Iraq
Make sure that they can't vote if they are black
Because you're mine, I cross the line

All I wanted was to serve
But Karl Rove is a little perv
And Gonzo really has a nerve
Because you're mine, I cross the line

Monica Goodling is discovering that being a White House patsy is no picnic. Let's hope Congress continues to grill her until she spills the beans!

Incredibly unintelligent

Good friggin' grief! Everything that has gone arse over teakettle in Iraq, the whole damn cluster-cheney from looting to sectarian murders to a vastly improved position of strength for Iran's theocratic regime, was all spelled out explicitly to George Bush Junior, in words of one syllable, before the invasion - and Chimpy Boy went ahead and invaded anyway. Obviously he blew off the report, just like he blew off the warning "Bin Laden determined to Attack Inside the United States", because he'd rather continue defoliating the entire region of Crawford, Texas, and hold "My Pet Goat" upside down, pretending to read it in a kindergarten class.

When he gets called on his bu**sh**, and asked how he can be considered credible when he selectively leaks two-year-old cherry-picked intelligence reports, Junior gets cranky and snaps, "I'm credible because I read the intelligence." Then the broken record starts up: 9/11, fighting them over there, they'll fight us wherever we are, and your kids will die if you don't put blind, unthinking trust in me.

Un-jeezus-h-christ-believable. This blithering psychopath is the most deranged and incompetent ruler since Caligula.

I think we ought to give a medal to the bird who crapped on Junior today. I mean, when you are faced with such cosmic, ineffable stupidity, thuggishness and evil, words fail you. Taking a dump on the asshole's five-grand suit is the most eloquent statement you can make.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and I'm all out of words - it's been a long week - so I'll leave you with a selection of youtubes for your viewing pleasure or displeasure as the case may be.

• Great moments in speechimifying
• American Idiot
• Could Blair be even stupider? You are the weakest link! Goodbye!
• Endless love
• Okay you guys, get a room! Or take it to a gay bar!

I'm off to bed - wake me up when it's January 2009.

Bird 1, Bush 0

At least the sparrows in the White House Rose Garden have a better grasp of reality, and are less fawning and obsequious, than the White House Press Corpse (sic).

[Link]

Goodling Two-shoes

I'm still steamed over the Dems' craven capitulation to the least popular president in US history over the least popular war in US history, and the Chimperor's feces-flinging fit of gloating today. So let's blog about something more pleasant - the ongoing inquisition of Alberto "Torquemada" Gonzales.

Monica Goodling's testimony under a guarantee of immunity raises the juiciness factor considerably. She of the crying jags - "all I ever wanted to do was - sob! serve at the pleasure of the president" - with her degree from the 700 Club University and her training in how to use a position of public service to punish "sin" - isn't shy about throwing her former boss under the bus to save herself. She also revealed exactly why she invoked the Fifth Amendment - she routinely used a political litmus test for career lawyers, a violation of civil service law. (Except when a rethug does it, it's called "crossing the line" and they didn't really mean it.)

But Gonzo ends up looking even worse than before - not only does he act as a two-bit goon putting the squeeze on a sick old man in a hospital bed, he tampers with witnesses. (I think that's his Indian name: "Tampers with Witnesses".) The question is, on whose orders? Fredo has always been Junior's water boy, and there's strong reason to believe it was Junior himself who dispatched him to Ashcroft's hospital room. Who ordered him to coordinate his story with Goodling's?

The Gonzo death watch continues. How long can he last? How low can he go? Will he get kicked out before his testicles drop?

On a totally unrelated subject, I love how the lunatic religious right is maintaining an embarrassed silence about the birth of Mary Cheney's baby. And I especially enjoyed this description of a pic of the proud grandfather: "Dick Cheney sports an expression somewhere between enigmatic and the look of a man who has just urinated into your cup before serving you a cappuccino."

And on that note, I bid you good night!

Surrendercrats

I can't tell you how disappointed and disgusted I am at the cowardly, craven quisling Dems in Congress. Their capitulation to George Bush Junior has been complete and utterly shameful. They've given him yet another blank check, they've piled even more billions of tax dollars on him than he asked for to continue waging his pet war, they've refused to take even the mildest stand, voice the most timid protest, or demand the slightest shred of accountability. They are licking the boot that kicks them - and all of us - in the face.

Reid, Pelosi & co. have decided that their personal ambition, their cushy Congressional perks are more important than the fate of this country and the tens of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars being poured down the black hole that Junior has turned Iraq into. But, in their typical babes-in-the-wood naivete, what they haven't taken into account is that they are giving cover to the rethugs.

From this day forward, this is the Democrats' war - they have signed off on it, they own it as much as Junior. As the rethug candidates in '08 see which way the wind is blowing, see how much a rapidly-increasing majority hates this war, they are - with some justification - going to hang the war around the donkeys' necks. More and more 'thugs are going to start cynically bleating, "we want to get out of Iraq, it's the Dems who are keeping the war going, keeping our troops in harm's way." Fox Noise will start running whiz-bang graphics: "The Democratic War - Year 5 - America held hostage." Even Junior will be going, "Gee, I'd love to end this war, but the Democrats keep sending me billions to spend on it - they're tying my hands." Despite their stunning corruption and incompetence and their record of abysmal failure, rethug control of the US will be solidified for years.

Mark my words, it will happen - there is no limit to rethug cynicism and opportunism. You don't think voters will fall for it? Then I've got a bridge in Alaska I'd like to sell you for a billion bucks. No-one ever lost a penny underestimating the intelligence of slobus vulgaris americanus.

All I can do is echo the advice of other bloggers. First, call Pelosi, Reid and your congresscritters and let them know in no uncertain terms how angry, disappointed and outraged you are. Then, start supporting genuine Democrats in '08 at all levels, federal to local. Identify candidates who are unequivocal in their opposition to the war, support them with your voice, your energy, your passion as well as your money - and hope to hell they don't also sell out if and when they reach Washington.

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer

"I can handle things! I'm smart! Not like everybody says... like dumb... I'm smart and I want... uh... I don't recall!"



How much longer before Fredo finally sleeps with the fishes?

(Thanks to Bailey for the link)

Let the fundies kill each other off

That's my reaction after reading this story, about a student at "Liberty" University, Jerry Falwell's fundamentalist diploma mill, who was steamed that Phred Felps planned to protest Falwell's funeral, and apparently responded by making some napalm bombs.

But this detail is a little troublesome:

Benson said Uhl [the would-be bomber] was in Liberty's Army ROTC program and was studying to become an Army chaplain. [Sheriff] Gaddy [said] investigators in Fauquier County were interviewing several people who had been in an ROTC program with Uhl, of Amissville, in high school and may have been involved in making the bombs. One is now in the Army, he said.

Falwell graduates being seeded throughout the military, and no doubt fast-tracked by the Bush regime to key positions of power and responsibility - let's hope it isn't so! And what kind of chaplains is Lobotomy University turning out anyway? I though Jesus preached, "turn the other cheek", not "throw Molotov cocktails."

Dems cave, Junior doubles down

Jesus - this is really disappointing. The Dems are caving like a West Virginia coalmine, and are about to send Junior the "clean" bill he has been demanding (as opposed to "dirty" bills that call for some accountability and show of progress for the trillions of dollars and thousands of lives he has dumped down the drain). They've even taken out the so-called "pork" - e.g. funds for Hurricane Katrina relief, veterans' health care etc. - that the 'thugs so loudly and sanctimoniously denounced. (Of course, every bill the 'thugs passed during their six years of monopoly power was bursting at the seams with giveaways for their megacorporate cronies. What a bunch of slimy, hypocritical slugs!)

As for the Boy Chimperor, he is escalating the escalation! More combat troops are being sent to Iraq and the ones already there are having their tours of duty extended, resulting in the number of troops in harm's way doubling by Christmas.

What a slap in the face to the vast majority of Americans who are sick of Junior's pet war and desperately voted for change last November. I know there is political calculus and triangulation involved, but I am really sick of Dems making a token gesture, getting kicked to the curb, and then wringing their hands and bleating, "well, at least we hold the moral high ground." Sorry, but once you leave kindergarten, you no longer get gold stars just for trying.

The problem as I see it is that the Dems have been in the political outer darkness for so long, and have become so used to being the rethugs' whipping boys, that they no longer know how to wield power, and are afraid to do so. Plus they've internalized the constant barrage of noise from the right-wing media calling them evil traitors, extreme-left liberals, Osama-loving Satanists and what not. Being kicked in the face has become a comfortable, familiar routine for them. The Beltway bubble cocoons them just as much as it does Junior, and they are deaf to the cries of ordinary Americans for a new direction.

We've probably lost this battle, and the lunatic extreme right 28-percenters are going to be insufferable for the next few weeks. But we have to keep fighting, keep putting pressure on our Congress critters to do their job. Call 'em up and give 'em hell!

Making the trains run on time in New York

Rudy Giuliani: he may have been mayor of a blue city, but he's just as much of a toady to the rich, and cruel and heartless to the unprivileged, as any a-hole from Texas.

88% say: Impeach Bush!

Add your vote at this poll! (HT Julie in Boise)

He's a goner

From New York to Des Moines, the drumbeat grows louder and more insistent: Gonzales must be impeached. He has done unprecedented and almost irreparable damage to the Justice Department, one of the most vitally important branches of the administration, an agency which must be (and must be seen as) strictly non-partisan. He has to go.

Never mind pussyfooting around with motions of no confidence. Congress has the power to impeach Gonzales, and they must use it! Go to ImpeachGonzales.org and sign the petition. Write letters to you congressperson, the local newspaper, etc. Keep piling the pressure on!

Of course, ousting Gonzo is not the end - it's only the beginning. Fredo is only Junior's water boy and always has been. But he knows where a lot of bodies are buried, and taking him out means chipping away a significant chunk of Fortress Bush. Also, assuming his replacement has an iota of integrity and independence, it's inevitable that the floodgates will open on the vast torrent of sleaze and corruption that defines the Junior Junta.

Today Gonzales, tomorrow Cheney and Rice, then the Chimperor himself!

Carry on my wayward son...

What the f***king hell is the matter with Kansas? I mean, really... where do they find these droolingly insane neanderthals? And send them to the US Senate to represent them?

Kansas, the home of the pedophile wife-beating gay-basher Phred Felps, has the honor of being represented by the most starkly and rabidly insane fundamentalist loon ever to fall off the short school bus and hit his head on the ground: Sam Brownback. Now, when you live in Kansas you have empirical evidence that the earth is flat. But Brownback goes far beyond flat-earthism in his flights of deranged lunacy. His campaign also denies the holocaust, rejects the fundamental scientific fact of evolution, and even - assuming this site is genuine - denies that the earth orbits the sun.

I'm with Callandor - I want Brownback to be the rethug nominee. Because he represents religious-right idiocy taken to its logical extreme. The 28-percenters will flock to him, but the rest of the electorate will be unable to deny the obvious: the Republican Party has been hiacked by a gang of stark raving lunatics who want to stamp out knowledge and education, and impose a type of Christian sharia that would make Osama bin Laden green with envy. Give the Dem candidate a landslide victory, let the GOP spend a few years in the political wilderness alongside Lyndon LaRouche, and maybe - just maybe - the few reasonably sane and decent Republicans left will reclaim their party.

Support the Brownback-Felps ticket!

The burning question: verb or gerund?

This is delicious! John McCain channels Cheney the Dick in a rumble with John "Box Turtle" Cornyn, and Michelle Malkin (dictionary definition: an untidy woman, slattern; a scarecrow, ragged puppet, or grotesque effigy; a mop, esp. one made from a bundle of rags and used to clean out a baker's oven) falls out of love - hard - with George Bush Junior. Nothing like immigration legislation to get the conservative circular firing squad all riled up.

It's likely that the current illegal alien amnesty will repeat the mistakes of Reagan's 1986 amnesty on an even bigger scale, but for now we can at least enjoy a bit of schadenfreude as the 'thugs turn their hatred and vitriol on each other.

Update: I love it! Phred Felps is going to picket the funeral of Jerry "if you gave him an enema you could bury him in a matchbox" Falwell!

Decline and fall of the brutish empire

Details from recent stories show yet again what a bunch of brutal thugs George Bush Junior and his neonazi-con puppetmasters are. There was the sordid story of Andy Card and Torquemada Gonzales skulking into a hospital at dead of night to put the squeeze on a sick old man. There was the jaw-dropping spectacle of Wolfowitz spewing obscenities, sounding more like a two-bit hood than the president of an international body. These are only the two latest examples of imperial nudity on the part of the restorers of honor and integrity to Washington.

Even though there is a strong taboo on former presidents criticizing sitting ones, Jimmy Carter was forced to say what has been obvious to the reality-based community for many years: Junior is the worst president ever.

There's no doubt any longer that those corrupt, criminal, traitorous incompetents have jumped the shark and are on a downward trajectory. Their arrogance, hubris, venality and stunning ineptitude have doomed them to the dustbin of history. They're still very powerful, however, and can do enormous further damage before we can finally kick them out. That's why we need to redouble the pressure. Never slack off, never take victory for granted! Instead, take a leaf out of their book. Kick the bastards when they're down! We don't want them ever coming back again like the metastasizing cancer that they are, destroying our country with their toxic greed and far-right lunacy.

Chimpeach!

The chimp who cried wolf

Only inside the Bush bubble would it make sense to appoint, as head of an international agency whose mandate is to alleviate world poverty, a man who caused untold poverty, death and suffering in Iraq, and whose cronies plan to do the same in Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and who knows where else.

Now the neonazi-cons are singing their usual song: Paul Wolfowitz, the genocidal little troglodyte whose personal ethically-challenged behavior could not survive outside of Junior's protective cocoon, is a victim who was forced out by devious liberal plots. (I only wish liberals had half the moxie the lunatic right ascribes to them.) Wolfowitz was sent to the World Bank to clean up corruption, goes the extreme-right fantasy, just like Bolton went to the UN to clean up corruption there, and those corrupt entrenched liberals stabbed him in the bank before he could accomplish his mission. (Never mind that the World Bank already requires recipient nations to improve governance and root out corruption, or that the real corruption is going on inside the White House and the Pentagon.)

Of course, the Junior Junta has a different definition of "corruption" than everyone else's. Part of the neonazi-cons' strategy in controlling the World Bank is that it loans to poor countries would be contingent on regime change if the regime was one the cons didn't like, i.e. a government that represented the people instead of giving away the farm to the US megacorporations.

The affair of Wolfowitz's mistress getting an astronomical salary for doing nothing was bad enough, and has done enormous damage to the institution's credibility. But what Wolfowitz had planned was far worse - the Iraqization of the entire Third World. Good riddance to him, and I hope Europe will insist that the next president be someone who has no connection with the foul, venomous nest of vipers that spawned him.

Burning down the House

This post on Dailykos, about whiny obstructionist rethugs in Congress, further deepens my disgust at these venal, despicable pieces of filth - and my despair at the cowardly, pusillanimous and hapless Dems who let them get away with it.

The thugs are tying up legislation "to improve troop readiness, strengthen the National Guard, provide much-needed equipment and training, upgrade military health care and give the military a pay raise." Supporting the troops again, huh? In fact the thugs are filibustering every Dem bill without even knowing what it contains, out of deranged, berserk partisanship. A thug aide smugly smirks, "We will bring down the House."

In other words, SOP for the GOP: slimy, infinitely hypocritical and utterly contemptible behavior. But several questions immediately come to mind. Why didn't the Dems use at least some of these tactics to slow down, if not stop, the never-ending avalanche of fascist, anti-consumer and anti-environment legislation the thugs kept ramming through when they controlled Congress? Were the rules different then? Did the thugs violate procedure in order to shut out all Democratic participation? Or were the Dems just too pussy to fight for their constituents, preferring to wring their hands in horror while consoling themselves by bleating, "at least we hold the moral high ground"?

Now that the Dems are the majority in Congress despite their best efforts to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, why aren't they exercising their power? Why are they letting these buffoonish antics go unchecked? Why aren't the airwaves being saturated with angry denunciations of obstructionism and sabotage, like they were when the Dems timidly and hesitantly hinted that they might hold up some of Junior's more mouth-droolingly insane judicial nominations?

I fear that the Dems have spent so long in political Siberia, they have become afraid of power, afraid to use it, inured to being the lunatic right's whipping boys. We are starting to see the first timid, tentative steps to confronting Junior over his cluster-cheney in Iraq, but they have a long way to go and not much time to do it. They'd better get their act together damn fast, before the thugs, in a fit of pique and petulance, destroy what's left of this country.

Uh oh...

My fortune cookie said, "Your most memorable dream will come true."

That means I'll soon sit down to a final exam for a class I never attended, and find myself naked.

Assholes on parade

Jerry Falwell is gone but unfortunately there are many other right-wing rethug luminaries that are still with us.

First, Alberto "Torquemada" Gonzales. It speaks volumes about what a loathsome little turd he is that he manages to make John Ashcroft look sympathetic. Then there's that comb-licking little troll, Paul Wolfowitz, who is just as ugly and corrupt on the inside as he looks.

In other news, the FBI intervenes to get Paris Hilton's transsexual father, Ann Coulter, out of a voter fraud felony case. Well, it's nice to know that the War on Terror is over and the FBI has time to devote to such less than life and death matters.

So many "Christians", so few lions...

Jerry Falwell, R.I.P (Roast in Perdition)

Some liberal and freethinking bloggers are taking the high road with regard to the death of Jerry Falwell. Good! That means I don't have to. Good riddance to the loathsome, hateful old bastard. There are people who make me wish there were a hell, or at least a Jesus to tell them, "Get thee behind me Satan, you whited sepulchers."

GrrlScientist reminds us, in Falwell's own words, what a despicable human being he was. Who can forget his blaming 9/11 on lesbians and the ACLU, or his Christian attitude towards Iraq: "Blow 'em all away in the name of the Lord." (And let God sort 'em out, presumably.)

Falwell was a typical religious right conservative; he toadied to the wealthy and powerful, pandered to the ignorant and reactionary, and preached hatred against the powerless and disenfranchised. He thought that morality begins and ends with (other people's) sex, and was so prurient and obsessed that he seized on a TV show aimed at one-year-olds and used it as an excuse to gay-bash. Okay, so he had entertainment value sometimes.

Still, the world is a better place without him, and it will be better still when he is followed by Pat bin Robert, Ted Haggard and all the other Elmer Gantrys, American Talibanists and Christofascists who represent all that is vile, ignoble and hypocritical about the "people of faith" in the US.

War is over...

The "War on Terror" is already over. Terror won. It won when we shredded the Constitution and declared the Geneva Conventions quaint and obsolete. It won when we decided that the president is above the law and can spy on anyone without due process, declare people "enemy combatants", and disappear them into a torture gulag. It won when those stomach-churning photos from Abu Ghraib flashed around the world, showing Saddam Hussein's rape rooms and torture rooms reopened under American management.

Most of all, when we are afraid to rock the boat, afraid to exercise our sacred right of free speech, then terror has won.

Arizona Conservative Idiot of the Week: Rick Renzi

Rick Renzi is one of the crooked rethugs who had a US attorney purged to derail multiple corruption investigations against him, but nothing can cover up the stench of his sleaze and venality. More here.

The Footsteps: an Atheist Parable

Two men were walking along a beach. One was young and naive, the other, old and wise.

They walked all day until their feet hurt, and finally reached their destination. Then the young man looked back and exclaimed in excitement: "Look! See those places where there is only one set of footprints? That's where Jesus carried us."

The old man replied with a smile, "No, son, you're wrong. Sometimes you got tired and I carried you, sometimes I got tired and you carried me. But there was no Jesus. The only thing that got us through this long journey, the only thing we ever had, was each other."

Onward Christian Soldiers...

A veteran, crippled by excruciating pain from kidney stones and 100% disabled, goes to a VA hospital for a medication refill. The doctor refuses to write a prescription, and tells the veteran: "You're a religious Jew. Why don't you try prayer and meditation?"

I have been hospitalized three times at the Iowa City VA for symptoms of angina, and all three times, while in bed, wired to a heart monitor, I have been visited by Christian Chaplains and handed Christian tracts. Twice the Assembly of God Chaplain insisted on proselytizing me - telling me about how Jesus loves me, how Jesus is the Messiah of the Jews too. And although each time I had informed the staff both verbally and in writing that I did not want to be visited by a Chaplain, they came anyway - carrying their message of love. Each time I objected, as vigorously as I could. But the hospital's answer to my complaint regarding these visits was that I should have objected more strenuously. What am I supposed to do, hang on to my heart monitor and jump up and down?! (Link)

Welcome to today's dominionist armed forces. With the encouragement and support of the George Bush Junior regime, an extreme fundamentalist movement has hijacked the US military from the highest levels down, and is turning it into one giant faith-based tax-supported proselytizing machine, in blatant defiance of the Constitution and everything the military stands for (not to mention the Hippocratic oath, as in the above outrageous story).

This is beyond unacceptable and despicable - it's incredibly scary. The Pentagon has become the Pentacostalgon, and the Christian Taliban and its Crusaders have control of the most lethal military force the world has ever known!

Visit the Military Religious Freedom Foundation website and consider how you can help oppose this unbelievable, appalling and unacceptable assault on our freedoms and our most important institutions.

(Cross-posted at Unscrewing the Inscrutable)

Gott Mitt Uns

Mitt Romney has made hay out of a remark by Al Sharpton indicating that Mormons are not "true believers in God". This, says Romney, is anti-Mormon bigotry. No doubt he's glad of any distraction from his long series of flip-flops and sharp lurches to the extreme right.

I'm not making excuses for Sharpton, but Romney is a hypocrite. He proclaimed not long ago that only a "person of faith" is qualified to lead the US. Isn't this bigotry against atheists and agnostics?

Sick beyond belief

My god - Purge-gate just keeps getting worse and showing new lows of mind-bending sleaze and evil on the part of the Junior Junta. The latest angle concerns the 2001 murder of Assistant US Attorney Thomas Wales and a possible connection to the firing of his boss, Seattle area US Attorney John McKay.

Until now it looked fairly certain that McKay was ousted because he would not play along with partisan witch-hunts against "voter fraud" (defined as rethug candidates losing elections). But now it looks like McKay incurred the wrath of the Chimpocracy because he was dissatisfied with their foot-dragging on the murder investigation. Obviously he had to recuse himself from the investigation because he was personally involved with the victim, but he committed the sin of asking DC for "appropriate" resources to be devoted to the case, which apparently led to his dismissal.

We know that the regime has no problem firing US attorneys for doing their jobs too well and investigating rethug corruption, and it doesn't hesitate to send an innocent woman to jail for purely political reasons. But impeding the investigation of the murder of an assistant US attorney - Jesus H. Christ on a mountain bike! Is there nothing they won't sink to?

One immediately wonders which corrupt rethug criminal Wales was investigating when he was murdered. It turns out he was pursuing a local gun extremist for tax fraud, and since he had been an activist for gun reform (no doubt after seeing first hand the senseless carnage caused by our insanely lax gun laws), his death was cheered by local gun nuts. The theory is that the administration put the brakes on the murder investigation to appease the gun lobby - they wouldn't even send a representative to his funeral, an astonishing snub to a senior Justice official killed in the line of duty.

Fredo Gonzales appeared before Congress again yesterday, and was just as evasive and non-responsive as before, but considerably more smug. Why don't they hold the little puke in contempt of Congress, and jail him until his memory improves? How long are we going to continue taking mountains of shit from there bastards?

The Irish are coming! The Irish are coming!

Remember "Rising Sun" and the trend of wealthy Japanese buying up property in Manhattan? Now it's the turn of the Irish. Buoyed by the weak dollar and one of the world's strongest economies, Irish investors and retirees are snapping up new condos in New York, sight unseen.

There's also a new breed of Irishman roaming around Europe, known as CRISPIES - "cash-rich Irish seeking properties in Europe". Hmm, I guess I need to find some Celtic Tiger millionaire who wants to retire in Phoenix, and offer to swap my house for his Georgian mansion in Killiney.

Unless you lived in Ireland during the 70's and 80's, you can't imagine how weird this sudden affluence is. My timing sure stinks...

What a bunch of Dix!

Aaaargh! Run for your lives! Some paintball players and a pizza delivery guy are gonna kill us all! (Even though they're dumb enough to take their Jihad tape to a local store to get it put on a DVD.)

The regime has been pushing the fear button for all it's worth today, but the Fort Dix Six who have been all over the headlines seem to have been no more of a threat than the Tooting Popular Front, or that bunch of sorry-ass losers arrested in Miami last year.

If anything, we are in greater danger from the NRA (to say nothing of natural disasters). After all, it's the NRA who's fighting for the right of every idiot to run around armed to the teeth, even if they are on a terrorist watch list.

Still, you'd think today's new stories would put to rest the moronic myth that if we fight them over there, we won't have to fight them over here. No such luck. Maha has some of the responses from the usual blithering idiots. (Spoiler: it's Bill Clinton's fault.)

I just wonder how long the Feds kept those six idiots on ice, waiting for the right time to goose Junior's polls. In the long run, it won't make any difference. 28% Boy has nowhere to go but down.

The war on librarians, redux

The most secretive and polluter-friendly administration in US history continues its underhanded shenanigans.

Washington, DC - Despite promises to consult with Congress before proceeding with dismantlement of its library system, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has ordered its libraries to "disperse or dispose of their...contents," according to agency directives released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The move to eliminate physical collections comes as EPA's own enforcement branch warns about the risks of hampering environmental prosecutions.

This move places all EPA libraries under the control of a Bush regime political appointee and even the agency's own specialists will have difficulty accessing information critical for enforcing the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and other key environmental legislation.

I've written before that the regime hates librarians because the free flow of information is to a corrupt dictatorship what sunlight is to a vampire. This is only the latest act confirming that analysis. (Hat tip to High Priestess of Knowledge for the link.)

A royal screw-up

OMFG - the Chimp-in-Chief is physically incapable of opening his mouth without stuffing a manure-laden cowboy boot in it. In today's gaffe at the WShite House (Update: IHT has since fixed the typo), the National Embarrassment (and black sheep of the family, who had to sit at the kiddies' table when Poppy hosted a royal visit in 1991) hinted that the Queen of England was alive in 1776, and "sheepishly" implied that she is his mother. Come to think of it, there is a certain family resemblance. We know that Junior has close blood ties with almost all the royalty in Europe. But could he be the idiot love child of Queen Lizzie? That would explain a lot... including his love of monarchy and hereditary power and privilege, his disdain for constitutions, and especially his inbred cluelessness. I just wonder who the father is... Benny Hill?

One more glorious victory and we're all finished

This isn't prompted by any particular news item (other than the four-year anniversary of Captain Codpiece strutting around under a "Mission Accomplished" banner and declaring that major combat operations in Iraq had ended), it's just something I have to get off my chest.

Junior throws a tantrum at the merest hint that the US should not be occupying Iraq for ever and ever amen, and whines petulantly about "artificial timetables". He's determined to keep our troops bogged down in the meat grinder until he leaves office (if he ever does), so that his successor will have to clean up his mess, and he won't have to lose face by changing course and thus tacitly admitting he screwed up. So we're in the quagmire until January 2009 at least. Um... excuse me... isn't that an artificial timetable? And could there possibly be a more cowardly and dishonest reason for keeping the war going?

And another thing... I am sick to death of hearing that moronic, meaningless soundbite about fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here. Anyone who spouts this garbage is a brainless moron without the intelligence of a sea cucumber. There are so many ways this talking point is stupid, vapid and worthless, it's hard to know where to start.

First of all, "they" - the vast majority of them - are Iraqis. They're fighting us because - DUH! - we have destroyed their country and are continuing to occupy it with great brutality. They just want us out - they're not going to "follow us home" and start setting off IED's in East Jesus, Arkansas! Why the hell would they?

Secondly, the 7% or so of "them" whom we are fighting over there, who are Al-Qaeda members, just love having us over there. They've got us exactly where they want us, bogged down in an exitless war of attrition while our presence inflames the entire Muslim world. We swallowed Osama bin Laden's bait, hook, line, sinker, rod, reel, fisherman and pier.

Anyway, who says "they" have to wait for us to leave before they can "follow us home" - what's to stop them from coming here right now? Certainly not the Bush administration. They have done zilch to safeguard our ports, preferring to dole out corporate welfare to their cronies. Isn't "they'll follow us back home" really an admission that the Bush regime has once again cheneyed up this country's security?

Finally, how can anyone be so totally brain dead as to still bloviate pompously about achieving "victory" in Iraq, and that any alternative is "surrender"? Do they even have the foggiest clue what would constitute "victory"? How the bloody hell can the US win another country's civil war?

It seems to me that the neonazi-cons have regressed to such a state of infantility that "victory" to them means keeping our troops in the meat grinder just so that they can go "nyah nyah nyah" at the Democrats. And they claim they "support the troops". What a despicable, utterly loathsome bunch of spoiled brats.

Monkeynuts and his corrupt, criminal, treasonous puppetmasters are, in their vile, stomach-churning arrogance and hubris, destroying two countries - the US and Iraq - and threatening the entire planet. Victory will begin the day we remove the whole stinking, cancerous cabal from power, and start pulling back from the abyss over which they are dragging us at ever-increasing speed.

Chimpeach the Boy Blunder! Impeach Cheney! Impeach Rice and Gonzales! Impeach ever last one of those goddam criminal traitors!

I've had some dates like this...

Link (Google Video)

The Official Linux of Jesus

I love Linux, and I think it's great that more and more people are discovering it as an alternative to MegaSuck, but this is a bit much: a Christian version of Linux. I guess it's for people who think Macs are Satanic.

Actually, Christian Linux seems to be little more than a standard Linux distribution with the addition of a bible study program and a net nanny - because only Christian parents care about protecting their children from internet smut, don't you know. A disappointed reviewer at a techie website writes:

Another thing that bothered me about Ubuntu Linux Christian Edition is that...well...it didn't feel particularly Christian. There was no Christian ambiance in the wallpaper or graphics. It felt rather bare and lacked the warmth that one might expect from something labeled as being Christian. [...]

[P]erhaps including two separate themes in the distribution might be a good idea? A Catholic desktop theme and a Protestant theme?

Oh, great... Northern Ireland on your desktop! I've heard of religious wars in the world of computing, but usually it's about Python vs. Perl, or C++ vs. Java. Now we can literally have... religious wars!

And what's this about Christian "warmth"? You mean, my screen wallpaper should be a picture of the Lake of Fire in which all except the chosen few will scream forever in infinite agony?

Seriously though, people are entitled to have Christian Linux on their computer if that's what they want, but what is it about some Christians that they have to spend every waking minute loudly trumpeting their Christianity, or wrapping themselves in a Christian cocoon in every facet of their lives? "Look at me, I'm so holy, I only eat Christian cornflakes!"

Okay, whatever. But it's almost enough to make me want to go back to the tool of the beast, Windows...

For more Jesus-related Linux stuff, check out the Gospel according to Linus Torvalds, and see how Tux the Penguin died for your sins. Gotta go now, I have to cast spirits out of my PC...