What The Traffic Will Bear

Sometimes my temperament turns positively ELFin, and now is one of those times.

I was listening to the radio--NPR's national evening show--when I heard the story of a couple in Colorado Springs who were trying to buy a Ford "Alternative" vehicle, an SUV which boasted of being 'green, and of beeing capable of achieving upwards of 35 mpg, on certain occasions, under certain circumstances. (Your mileage may vary...)

They'd gone to a dealership (is there more than one FORD store in the Springs?), and of course there were none of the SUVs on the lot. They'd have to order one. So they sat with the sales-creep (they're ALL creeps, believe me; I know) and worked ot the details of the vehicle they wanted to order. The lackey sales-creep went away to consult with the Uber-Sales-Creep, and when he returned, the buyers were confronted with a non-negotiable, non-reducible, non-transferrable, AUTO-fucking-MATIC $5000 surcharge added by the dealer.

They, understandably, said "Pound sand, Cheese-dick," or something similar and went away without placing their order. They were pissed and disappointed. I shared their ire, which was not in the least assuaged when, in the next sound-byte, the spokes-cheesedick for the Automobile Dealers' Association announced that car dealerships were NOT non-profit agencies.

And, not for the first time, I thought: "Well, if they're not, it's not because the international association of cheese-dicks hasn't invited such treatment."

And, I thought, if I happened to see a couple of shadowy figures skulking around the Cheese-dick's Ford lot in Colorado Springs, I wouldn't say a fuking word. Let the motherfucker burn to the fucking ground.

It's for reasons like these that "Murkin Bidness" wallows in the ethical shadows with Catholic priests and meth-dabbing evangelical pastors.

Eli's Google Obsession

The Well-Armed Lamb occupies the number ONE position among 358,000 pages searched In Italian Google for the phrase "dwarf dick."
Ah the acclaim! International recognition!

The Usual Suspects, The Sequel: Son of Kayzer Sosa

This is a pretty amazing story which, among other things, illustrates far better than anything Robert Samuelson would EVER admit, the amazing synonymies between 'bidness' and 'crime.' As the late Arthur C. Clark said of technology and magic, so too, in any reasonably developed society there is no effective difference between them, either.

This story also exemplifies again why the civic polity NEEDS newspapers--big ones, like the NYTimes/LATimes/CHITrib, and outfits like McClatchy (WHO COULD HAVE EVER ANTICIPATED THAT?), which provide a record of the facts they uncover and report. This kind of journalism really IS what journalism is supposed to do, is at least a good example of that rara avis.

The piece is longish. It involves what appears to be a naked profiteering scam between some really low-lifes with Eastern European connections dba "AEY" and the purchasing arm of the US Army, which paid millions to the scammers for defective, cold-war ammunition scavenged in former soviet-bloc countries, mainly around the Balkans. Oh, yeah, the president of the company supplying the ammo is a 22-yr-old thug with a habit of beating up his girl-friends.

The fotos? The one on the left is David M. Packouz, 25; he was AEY’s vice president. He is a licensed masseur. The douchebag on the right is Ephraim Diveroli, president of AEY. He seems to have escaped prosecution for harassing and abusing a woman 'friend' by claiming he was the only person who could operate his business, protecting freedom and fighting terrorism. Really.

Sometimes, don't you wish they were making this shit up?

It's the Fear, Stupid: How (& Why) McStain Can Win

What the left misunderestimates (my one enduring, favorite Bushism)is how deeply scarred (and scared) Mid-Dull Murka was and still is by the events of IX/XI.

Susan Faludi makes an interesting and important point in her most recent book, “The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America.” It is that ours is a nation literally FOUNDED on fear, and consequent inadequacy rooted in the inability of our fore-fathers to actually do what their history and mythology proclaimed was their PRIMARY responsibility: "Protecting" their women and children from injury, and providing for their sustenance.

Unfortunately, it was damn near impossible to do in colonial America, for about the first 300 years, or so. There arose from this contradiction a huge space for cognitive dissonance. Their mythologies were making promises the realities could not sustain. A LOT of 'em perished, many more were injured, thousands of children and women were captured, 'property' (which of course was one of the problems) was 'wantonly' destroyed, settlements were ravaged. Yet they were the chosen, building their 'cities on the hill.' This was not something the Murkin psyche took very well, and the myth of exceptionalism is probably something of a national psycho-social over-corrective/compensation to the manifest failures the earliest settlers endured, at the hands of "indians" who, if one followed out the logic through time, were very much the first 'insurgents.'

Anyway, Murkins are deeply and inherently (perhaps endemically) fearful folk in consequence. The events and the rhetoric of the last 7 years have ratcheted up this deep, consuming fear/inadequacy thing so that (seemingly) the only things that will appease or assuage it is to seek out new insurgenciess to quell (that is, brown people to murder).

McStain sez yesterday the only person qualified to be Preznit is the person who knows that brown-skinned terrists are hte greatest danger to Murkins, Murkinism, and all those eternal verities that are Murka. He's gonna run on that, and I believe he can--will--win with it.

Woody's "Words To Live By (or not)":

"Winning isn't everything.
Losing is also a thing, as are eggs and bonnets and quilts and, I believe, red trucks."

With credit due to Dirk Voetberg on Tim McSweeney via Jon Schwarx's lapidary ATR blog.

The Face Of Our National Future?

As of today, I'd peg the odds at about 5-2 in favor.
The primary circus in the Dim Partei more or less guarantees the Dims will be more fractured than usual. Hillary's partisans and Obama's partisans have become so acrimonious, so angry, so entitled, that I fear there is precious little chance that the most committed partisans of either candidate will be able to bring themselves to vote for the other one.

Some say McStain has no 'natural' constituency. But this in not true. His "natural" constituency is that whole, writhing, seething, unhappy mass of folks--which I call "Mid-Dull 'Murka"--who 1) crave the security of the status quo, 2) fear the rising of Murka's 'minorities' as a threat to their own precarious, zero-sum based status, 3) still, late at night, quake in angst at the thought of "tur'rists" in head-scarves and wierd names attacking them in their churches and schools, and 4) idolize the military.

I take that number to be about 70 million voters, even without the Puke's normal recourse to vote theft and corruption.

I do not think (and cannot 'hope') there will be sufficient unity in the Dim ranks to overcome that advantage...

Eli (Multi-medium dot Net) Does GOOD Work

His was the first blog I know of to feature the Dickipedia.

For which, let the kudos flow:

In the late 1980’s, McCain became one of the “Keating Five.” Some have noted that this sounds like a band. And to the extent that taking payoffs from corrupt savings and loans officials, passing legislation that deregulated the industry and destroyed thousands of lives, and intervening in the investigation of said corrupt savings and loan officials is like playing music, then, yes, they were a band. A very good one.

(…)

According to one classmate, “being on liberty with John McCain was like being in a train wreck.” It is unclear what being with McCain during his presidency would be like for the nation. Unfortunately, America has no direct experience from which to draw with a president who was a temperamental son of a distinguished military man and who in college was a temperamental fuckup who liked to party. What could possibly be so dangerous about that?

(…)

But in February of 2007, even though he had become the presumptive GOP nominee for president, McCain had still not secured the enthusiastic support of right-wing goons and thugs whose sexual inadequacy has manifested in an extreme love of torture. This group is also sometimes referred to as “The Republican Party.”

Therefore, when an Intelligence Authorization Bill came to the Senate floor that would require the intelligence community to abide by the same standards contained in the Army Field Manual, which bans waterboarding, McCain was faced with a choice: make a principled stand consistent with his avowed opposition to torture, or cowardly choose to abandon his principles and suck-up to the right-wing goons and thugs who sexual inadequacy has manifested in an extreme love of torture. McCain chose the latter.

As many whose views of foreign policy are not influenced by sexual inadequacy have noted, aside from the moral reason to not engage in torture, another is the reasonable conclusion that making practices like waterboarding legal also makes it much more likely that other countries will engage in the same practices on American prisoners of war. McCain’s son Jimmy is, in fact, in the Marine Corps. On February 14th, 2007, Jimmy returned from Iraq, meaning that McCain’s son is now safe from the increased danger of being tortured that McCain’s cowardice has placed other U.S. troops under.

(Interesting timing there, eh?)

The saddest part of the entire [Keating Five] situation, even more sad than the 21,000 mostly elderly people who had their entire life savings completely wiped out, was that it brought the appearance of conflict upon Senator McCain. As McCain said, “The appearance of it was wrong. It’s a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence.”

And what a terrible impression that can be. Almost as terrible as working your ass off your entire life, little by little putting enough money away for retirement, and then right before retirement finding out your life savings has been robbed from you and instead of working to try to get your money back, your own senator is busy trying to quash the investigation.

(…)

Rightly sensing that he had disgraced himself in the Keating Five scandal and that this would hinder his chances to fuck up the country as a hotheaded, dangerously unstable, pandering, angry, very old president, McCain set out to launder his reputation. Since the Keating Five scandal had shown him to be a financially sleazy insider, the way McCain chose to rehabilitate himself was campaign finance.

(…)

The [McCain-Feingold] effort paid off for McCain, and in just a few years the press corps, whose short-term memory falls somewhere between that of a household cat and the Rhesus Macaque monkey (Macaca mulatta), native to Afghanistan, northern India, and southern China, hailed McCain as a good government and campaign finance reformer.

How effective was the act in reducing the influence of money in politics? The answer can be found in a simple experiment that anybody can do. Try it yourself: just say the following phrase out loud: “Hey money, I want you to stop influencing politics!” There, you have now had more influence in diminishing the influence of money in politics than the “Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002…”

(…)

Most Washington journalists have a deeply internalized sense of self-loathing. They see themselves as cowardly, flaccid, ineffectual, impotent wimps. In this, they’re not entirely wrong. They have always secretly admired the asshole jocks who used to push them around in high school. The journalists would console themselves with the soothing affirmation that the assholes were not as smart as they were. They were right, of course, but still, deep down the journalists secretly admired the assholes.

Along comes John McCain — an asshole, but an asshole who is nice to them, an asshole who comes to back of the plane and jokes around with them and doesn’t make them feel unmanly. Why, sometimes, it seemed as if McCain really liked them. A few years of this, and suddenly McCain’s not a temperamental, dangerously unstable asshole, he’s a “maverick.”

(…)

McCain spent the years of the first and second Bush administrations making self-congratulatory shows of “independence” from the Republican party and cultivating the weakling press to keep up his image as a “maverick.” It was in these years that McCain laid the groundwork for what would be the classic McCain pattern: speak out against bad people when it doesn’t matter, cowardly cave in when it does matter.

(…)

McCain considers “national security” to be one his strengths. Given the fact that he has yet to be right about any single fact regarding Iraq when it counted, this should tell you something about his prowess in domestic matters….

…McCain was asked about possible military action against Iran. His response was to sing “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” to the melody of the Beach Boys’ song “Barbara Ann.” Though this was widely criticized at the time, it should be noted, however, that deciding foreign policy based on punning lyrics to Beach Boys songs could not, at least, result in a worse situation than the one the United States finds itself in today.

(…)

The fact that McCain, an unstable, angry old asshole, would find himself coasting to the nomination says much about the rest of the field he was facing. His two main rivals were Mitt Romney, a comically soulless toady whose religion, Mormonism, was once thought to be his weakness but turned out to be the only consistent fact about him, and Rudy Giuliani, who is, according to scientific studies, the most dangerous and insane man ever to run for president.

You can't touch dat!

A Real American Hero: Tomas Young

I hope you watched Bill Moyers' Journal last night, called The Body Of War.

Enter the story of Iraq war veteran Tomas Young who was shot and paralyzed less than a week into his tour of duty. Three years in the making, BODY OF WAR tells the poignant tale of the young man's journey from joining the service after 9/11 to fight in Afghanistan, to living with devastating wounds after being deployed to Iraq instead.

Also fascinating, tho in a different way, were the marginal remarks by Donohue and Spiro, the directors:

Bill Moyers interviews former talk show host Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro on the true cost of war and their documentary, BODY OF WAR, depicting the moving story of one veteran dealing with the aftermath of war.

You can (and should) watch the vid on Moyers' site. You may find many of the tunes included in Young's compilation/soundtrack for The Body of War on my blog, Woody Guthrie's Guitar. Most have also appeared on Neil Young's (no relation, other than human)Living With War Today pages...

Not Just "Not Smart" -- Dumber Than Dog-Poop

Jews for Jesus is not unlike Cows for MickeyD...or Mice for D-Con...

NB: the foregoing shamelessly cribbed from JC Watts' father who, when asked how he felt about his son becoming a GOP Congresscritter, remarked (I heard him) that a black voting GOP ws a lot like the chickens voting for "the Colonel."

As Perhaps Only Someone Of My Generation Can

I despise Richard Nixon. I'd like to piss on his grave, defile it. I shall not die before I do.

But Ronald Reagan is something else all together. I harbor for Raygun such antipathy as to defy description, him and his crew of gunsels and toadiies, and his vapid, empty, stupid, vain, idiotic cunt of a wife.

I really want to shit in his dead mouth.

All in "The Family" ... Is HRC A Stealth Christo-Fascist?

(Just to demonstrate I'm an Equal Opportunity Bastid!)
Barbara Ehrenreich wants to know...But she definitely has her suspicions, and the seem well-founded.
From The Humanist (blog):

Does Hillary Have a Family Secret?
Thursday, March 20th, 2008, 3:59 pm

A shocking article published in The Nation, written by social critic and 1998 Humanist of the Year Barbara Ehrenreich, takes a scathing look at presidential contender Hillary Clinton and her involvement with an ultra-secretive conservative group known as “The Family.”

Also known as “The Fellowship,” members of The Family are Capitol Hill legislators that gather for Bible study and group prayers. Hillary has been an active participant since winning the Senate in 2006, and evidence shows she was involved in The Family’s activities as early as 1993.

Perhaps this is nothing more than a gathering of dedicated religious leaders for private group worship. But Ehrenreich suggests it goes far beyond that, referring to an upcoming book by Jeff Sharlet, who uncovered the following:

The Family’s most visible activity is its blandly innocuous National Prayer Breakfast, held every February in Washington. But almost all its real work goes on behind the scenes–knitting together international networks of right-wing leaders, most of them ostensibly Christian. In the 1940s, The Family reached out to former and not-so-former Nazis, and its fascination with that exemplary leader, Adolf Hitler, has continued, along with ties to a whole bestiary of murderous thugs.

At the heart of The Family’s American branch is a collection of powerful right-wing politicos, who include, or have included, Sam Brownback, Ed Meese, John Ashcroft, James Inhofe and Rick Santorum. They get to use The Family’s spacious estate on the Potomac, The Cedars, which is maintained by young men in Family group homes and where meals are served by The Family’s young women’s group. And, at The Family’s frequent prayer gatherings, they get powerful jolts of spiritual refreshment, tailored to the already powerful.

Humanists often say that religion shouldn’t play a role in politics, but that doesn’t mean it does anyway. So when the time comes, how will Hillary explain her relationship with “The Family” to the millions of church-state separation supporters in America?

Obama: Rhetoric v. Reality

The rhetoric is beautiful; the reality is ugly.

Reality is that Obama's tied just as tightly and securely to the interests that were--and still are--utterly indifferent to poor Ashley's plight as any of the others posing and posturing for that little chinchilla (stet) of putative legitimacy that we bestow with our 'votes'...He wouldn't be where he is if he weren't at LEAST 'palatable' to the oiligarchs, pollutocrats, and the rest of the moneyed elites for whose convenience and profit (alone) the USofA is operated and maintained.

He hasn't yet said much about what he's gonna do, but here's list of things I'm morally certain he NOT gonna do:

• He's NOT gonna end the ICORP in Iraq anytime soon.
• He's NOT gonna restore the 1st Amendment Constitutional barrier between church & State (black churches have been HUGE beneficiaries of Bushevik largesse here), or restore the mortally injured 4th Amendment prohibitions against warrant-less search & seizure.
• He's NOT gonna revoke all those Bushian signing statements or rescind all those authoritarian Executive Orders.
• He's NOT gonna support REAL 'universal' health care.
• He's NOT gonna reduce the military budgets; he's NOT gonna close any USer bases overseas...
• He's NOT gonna put a solar collector on every roof in America.
• He's NOT gonna give the necessary Fed support to REAL alternative energy solutions (ethanol is NOT a Real alternative energy source, but Con-Agra & ADM LURV it).
• He's NOT gonna stop building the border fences, or tear down those already up.
• He's NOT gonna re-regulate the FIRE zone of the economy (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate).
• He's NOT gonna cap carbon emissions.
• And he's NOT gonna raise the cap on income taxable for Social Security (indeed, he seems willing to compromise with the Pukes on reducing benefits.)

Not, mebbe, cuz he doesn't want to, mebbe...but mainly cuz to do so would alienate the vast majority of his LARGEST CONTRIBUTORS (Finance & Agri-Bidness)...and that just ain't gonna happen.

I got $100. I wanna buy 50 shares of Bear-Stearns

I mean, why not? Why can't somebody like me get a piece of this action? I've got a mortage, actrually a couple of 'em. My money is just as worthless as that of some Wall Street bank.

"Quim" Pro Quo: Eliot Spitzer's ($2000/hr) Professional "Companion."

And that's before you even open the Mini-Bar...
She looks all of 19, doesn't she? Hardly the image of a "libertine" woman. Nice top-hamper (to adopt the prevailing nautical imagery), though, nest paw?

Howzat "Abstinence Only" Thing Working Out?

Just fine, if you're a herpes, chlamydia, papilloma or trichomoniasis virus. In fact, it could hardly be going better: more than a QUARTER of teen-age girls (and more than half of all Black teen-age girls) are infected with STDs!
Me?
I call that an astonishing success: Human papillomavirus, or HPV, affected 18% of the girls surveyed, chlamydia 4%, trichomoniasis 2.5%, and herpes simplex virus 2%.

(I am SOOOOOOOO glad I'm too old for teen-age girls.)

Caught In Bed With A Dead Girl Or A Live Boy

Those, former LA governor (and ex-con) Edwin Edwards once said, were the only conditions under which he would lose the support of his constituency.

Eliot Spitzer appears to have been caught in flagrante delecto in neither of these glaring faults. He's just the latest in the long list of powerful pols who cannot control their poles, no matter their effects on the polls. ("I mean, what's the point of being THE alpha male if I cannot fuck anything that moves, if I wanna?")?

I have visited prostitutes on only three occasions: once (the first time) in Dusseldorf's AltenStadt, the second with a woman who presented herself in a window in a rickety old building on an ancient lane in the Red Light District of Amsterdam. And once I mistakenly thought I had "picked up" a hot chick in a bar in Santa Fe, who went with me willingly enough but, when we had left the bar, demanded cash for further services. (I bridled; she gestured over her shoulder at a shadowy gent who seemed to have materialized from nowhere. She said they'd get lost for $50. I think I got away cheaply.)

So I cannot speak from much personal experience about the reasons why men pursue such liaisons. But when I was in the service, such talk was common-place among the married NCOs, and all seemed to avail themselves of such services when the circumstances permitted. It seemed to me at the time that they sought out prostitutes to give relief to urges their wives were either unable or unwilling to submit.

So, upon hearing first about Spitzer's peccadillos, my first thought was: "I wonder what it was that Momma wouldn't do?"

And by this I mean no affront or criticism of 'Momma.' People all have their limits, and living with anyone else for any time in any kind of a humane way means knowing and respecting those limits. Maybe--possibly?, even, given who they "are," probably--Momma had given Eliot leave to seek his surcease commercially.

But, permission or not, that still meant the exchange of cash, the old "pro" for the equally old "quim." And a need--still, because the residual idiocy of puritanism?--the need for secrecy. And that kinda pussy ain't cheap. (He couldn't take her out; it HAD to be for in-call service. Locally, the top of the local craig's list prices is about $350/hr. He paid $4,500. Okay, all night...but still, at most, given his schedule on official bidness, that's not much more than 4 hours...
And that's if he's the Viagra Stallion.

So, ya gotta ask what he was paying for...okay, you don't GOTTA ask. But you wanna ask (and you don't really wanna know) what he was paying for.

And that's where 'they' got him. He was moving money around. That's the irony.

Probably Spitzer's wife agreed (if she did) to the arrangement because going to prostitutes eliminated the possibility of there happening any encumbering 'relationship' troubles that might ensue if Eliot used the aphrodisiac (a la Harry, the K) of his "power" to lure willing (or compliant) accomplices. She must have known it would occur one way or the other. Perhaps she chose the lesser of two evils.

Expect to see this dramatized on the Law & Order franchise within weeks.

It's the Fucking OIL, Stupid!

Why do the US and western European 'democracies' support the 'independence' of Kosovo?
Part One of Three (Support TheRealNews)




There are only two man-made structures on Earth visible from space. One of them is the Great Wall in China.

The other is Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, which sits squarely astride the oil pipeline feeding southeastern Europe and avoiding Russia.

Real-Politik, babies, fuukin Real-Politik!!!

Here's parts 2 and 3:

What the Fuck? Student Suspended From Public School for Blasphemy?!?!?!

From The Humanist comes this bit of religious excretia. Go read.
If I were Campbell's parents, I would sue the motherfucking school, the motherfucking principal, and the motherfucking school board back to the motherfucking stone age. Bankrupt the superstitious, feeble-minded fuckers. They love their fucking bible? Go all fucking Biblical on the goddam stupid shitheels: Burn down the fucking building, slaughter the inhabitants down to their fucking animals, and pour salt on the fucking ground.

(PS: This proves conclusively that Ayn Rand is only fit reading for post-adolescent boys.)