If It Wuz Up To Me, This Might be

pretty much how I think fascism might work:
Bush seeks immunity for companies in spy case
Verizon, AT&T face privacy suits for helping White House eavesdrop

Updated: 2:35 p.m. MT Aug 31, 2007

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration wants the power to grant legal immunity to telecommunications companies that are slapped with privacy suits for cooperating with the White House’s controversial warrantless eavesdropping program.

The authority would effectively shut down dozens of lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies accused of helping set up the program.

The vaguely worded proposal would shield any person who allegedly provided information, infrastructure or “any other form of assistance” to the intelligence agencies after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. It covers any classified communications activity intended to protect the country from terrorism.

Any questions?

Neo-Colonialism: The Busheviki Plan

Here's the Busheviki strategy for the Middle East:
As much as possible, stir up sectarian competitions and conflicts among the indigenes.
Enable as much as possible violent strife among them; arm and encourage all parties.
Keep USer Troops in the Region, and use them in civil conflicts to keep the level of bloodshed high and provide stimuli for violent outbursts and conflicts.
Then, when the sectarian and civil conflicts have exhausted ALL the parties, reduced their military forces to impotence, and shattered the governing structures, return with neo-colonialist tools to take over and exploit the resources until they run out.
Wilkommen nach Real-Politik!

Another Anniversary: WEB DuBois

W.E.B. DuBois, the black American sociologist, scholar, author, pan-Africanist, communist, and one of the founders of the NAACP, died in Accra, the capital of Ghana, on August 27, 1963, where he had expatriated. He had been charged and tried in the U.S. for being a "foreign principle" in 1951 because he chaired the The Peace Information Center. It was dedicated to banning nuclear weapons but Secretary of State Dean Acheson designated it a Communist front. He was 95.
"Children learn more from what you are than what you teach. —WEB Dubois, 1897
Meanwhile, on August 28, 1963, only a day after DuBois' passing, Martin Luther King delivered the speech for which he is best remembered: "I have a dream." You can read the speech here or you can watch a vid here.

If Obama's NOT On The Dim Ticket, Will Black Americans Stay Home Election Day?

I think so.
I wouldn't blame 'em much, either.
So much hype surrounding his campaign!
If he doesn't take the nomination (he's NOT my choice), the disappointment and feelings of disenfranchisement may well drive Black Americans to abandon not only the Dems, but the whole process.
They're already pretty well estranged, one thing or another. It wouldn't take much, I shouldn't think, to completely turn'em off.
Whaddayathink?

Is Larry Craig's Name Being "Dragged Through The Mud?"

Digby sez several months ago Craig was picked-up soliciting sex in a men's room in an airport in Northstar Crossing, MN. He pled guilty.

Bus Plunge

The McCain campaign bus was driving through the countryside one day, on the campaign trail. The bus driver, caught up in the beautiful scenery, loses control and crashes into the ditch.

A farmer living nearby hears the horrible crash and rushes out to discover the wreckage. Finding McCain and his minions in the ditch, he buries them.

The next day, the police come to the farm to question the man. "So you buried all those Republicans?" asked the police officer. "Were they all dead?"

The farmer answered, "Waahl, SOME of 'em said they weren't. But you know how them GOP fuckers lie."
(h/t to Mike Kitts)

Even If A Dem Is President, The "State-of-War" Will Not End...EVER

Norman Solomon sez:
The warfare state didn't suddenly arrive in 2001, and it won't disappear when the current lunatic in the Oval Office moves on.

The USA's military spending is now close to $2 billion a day. This fall, the country will begin its seventh year of continuous war, with no end in sight. On the horizon is the very real threat of a massive air assault on Iran. And few in Congress seem willing or able to articulate a rejection of the warfare state[...]

[...]One day in 1969, a biologist named George Wald, who had won a Nobel Prize, visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- the biggest military contractor in academia -- and gave a speech. "Our government has become preoccupied with death," he said, "with the business of killing and being killed."

That preoccupation has fluctuated, but in essence it has persisted. While speaking of a far-off war and a nuclear arsenal certain to remain in place after the war's end, Wald pointed out: "We are under repeated pressure to accept things that are presented to us as settled -- decisions that have been made."

Today, in similar ways, our government is preoccupied and we are pressurized. The grisly commerce of killing -- whether through carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan or through the deadly shredding of social safety-nets at home -- thrives on aggressive war and on the perverse realpolitik of "national security" that brandishes the Pentagon's weaponry against the world. At least tacitly, we accept so much that threatens to destroy anything and everything.

War is the ONLY product of the Military/Industrial/Congressional complex, and the M/I/C complex is the ONLY form of Government.

Can't We Find Somebody To Give This Stupid Motherfucker A Blowjob?

So then we can impeach this feculent, reeking, drooling, blithering, lying, shit-whistling son-of-a-bitch!

"Iraq No Longer Exists!"

Amy Goodman for Democracy Now! interviews journalist Nir Rosen on how the US invasion of Iraq has led to ethnic cleansing, a worsening refugee crisis and destabilization of the Middle East.

I am more and more of the opinion that the actual policy of the US regime and the rest of the "West" for the future of the Middle East was and is to stir up as much discord and division as possible, and then watch--well, stir the pot with military intervention--while the various religious factions destroy one another and drag the entire region into wholesale turmoil.
Whereupon, when the factions have sufficiently weakened one another, the USer/Western coalition returns to re-colonialize the remnants and appropriate the resoureces without having to share with the indigenes...
Fuukin' BRILLIANT!

Didja ever notice, when the CorpoRats "manage" something,

some part of what it is they are "managing" dies?"

• "Managing" wildlife--wolves, bears, deer, whatever--means killing them.
• "Managing" health care means preventing people from getting it.
• "Managing" forests means cutting trees.
• "Managing" water means polluting it...

Please, lord, spare us the "managers"!

Will Durst: "I Am SO Sick Of..."

This was up on Open Left. Enjoy!

According to the Shit-For-Brains, Gutless, Chickenshit, Piss-Ant, Soi Disant Chimp-In-Chief

USer troops should STILL be fighting in VietNam.
That's right!
That's what the feculent, posturing, simpering, scampering, foot-stamping little coward told the VFW (or was it the Murkin Leejun) yesterday: Vietnam might be a 'democracy' today if the USofA'd had the intestinal fortitude to keep on killing our kids and theirs for the last 35 years. The gutless,little deserter in effect accuses USers of not fighting well enough, or hard enough, or long enough.
You think I jest? Je?!? Mais, oui, c'est posible! (What I really want to do is rip off his empty fucking head and shit down his throat. As a vet of the war he deserted, I believe I'm entitled.)
But Froomkin jests not.

Until Further Notice, This Surfer Is Officially (O-fish-illy?) "The Planet's Luckiest Man!"

Yup!
There were TWO of 'em...

An Historical Primer: Juan Cole Tells It Like It Really Is

You wanna know who, in the long run, is responsible for the current clusterfuck in the Middle East? Look to the Right.

Yup. The mother-fucking, senile, drooling, fuck-witted Gipper (and his minions, including just about every single member of the PNAC).

Cole lays out, in words and pictures that even your Christianist/dominionist/Jeebo-fascist asshole brother-in-law ought to be able to understand.

Swear to fucking christ, if for no other reason then complete incompetence, John Hinckley (scion of a family with close ties to the Bush Crime Family) should be imprisoned for life. I mean, he couldn't be trusted to drive, could he? He'd be on the Interstate on a fucking moped.

Department of Stranger Than...: Dwarf's Dick, Stuck in Vac, Sticks

EDINBURGH (AFP) - A dwarf performer at the Edinburgh fringe festival had to be rushed to hospital after his penis got stuck to a vacuum cleaner during an act that went horribly awry.

Daniel Blackner, or "Captain Dan the Demon Dwarf", was due to perform at the Circus of Horrors at the festival known for its oddball, offbeat performances.

The main part of his act saw him appear on stage with a vacuum cleaner attached to his member through a special attachment.

The attachment broke before the performance and Blackner tried to fix it using extra-strong glue, but unfortunately only let it dry for 20 seconds instead of the 20 minutes required.

He then joined it directly to his organ. The end result? A solid attachment, laughter, mortification and ... hospitalisation.

"It was the most embarrassing moment of my life when I got wheeled into a packed AE with a vacuum attached to me," Blackner said.

"I just wished the ground could swallow me up. Luckily, they saw me quickly so the embarrassment was short-lived."

Ya just can't make up stuff like this.

George Lakoff: "THERE IS NO CENTER!"

Like the mythical 'mean', the so-called center exists only in the misapplication of an abstraction onto an untidy reality.
There Is No Political Center, There Are No Centrists
By George Lakoff, AlterNet. Posted August 20, 2007.

"Centrism" is the creation of an inaccurate self-serving metaphor which marginalizes the progressive cause, and it is time to bury it."

There is no left to right linear spectrum in the American political life. There are two systems of values and modes of thought -- call them progressive and conservative (or nurturant and strict, as I have). There are total progressives, who use a progressive mode of thought on all issues. And total conservatives. And there are lots of folks who are what I've called "biconceptuals": progressive on certain issue areas and conservative on others. But they don't form a linear scale. They are all over the place: progressive on domestic policy, conservative on foreign policy; conservative on economic policy, progressive on foreign policy and social issues; conservative on religion, but progressive on social issues and foreign policy; and on and on. No linear scale. No single set of values defining a "center." Indeed many of such folks are not moderate in their views; they can be quite passionate about both their progressive and conservative views.

Barack Obama has it right: Get rid of the very idea of the right and the left and the center. American ideas are fundamentally progressive ideas -- the ideas this country was founded on and that carry forth that spirit. Progressives care about people and the earth, and act with responsibility and strength on that care.

The progressive view of government is simple. Progressive government has two aspects: protection and empowerment. Protection is far more than the military, police, and fire departments. It includes consumer protection, worker protection, environmental protection, public health, food and drug safety; social security, and other safety nets. It also includes protection from the government itself, and hence a balance of powers, openness, fundamental rights, and so on.

And so on.
To read more, follow the link.

"You Can't Be 'ANTI-GOVERNMENT,' and BE the fucking 'Government'!"

The senescent, syphilitic rantings of Raygun--"Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem"--notwithstanding.

This is both an ontological and an axiological proposition.

Discuss!
H/t, Thom Hartmann!

This'll Be On The Test

Is this the same dog in all the photos?

Does the Chimp Call MSHA's Dick Stickler "Sticky"?

This is a guy whose record is so tainted with conflicts of interest and ties to the industry he was appointed to regulate that his nomination couldn't even get through even a GOPuke Congress.

So the Chimp-in-Chief made him a recess appointee.

"Sicky" is the MSHA what "Brownie" was to FEMA....with fewer casualties.



Great Job, Sticky!!!!

"Owning a Business" is not a "Right."

It is a privilege granted to individuals by the culture and society which sustains both the 'bidness' and the social order. Therefore, 'the market' is not the sole,or even the most relevant source of the limitations upon the act of 'doing business,' even though everything possible has been done to sell that pack of lies...

If a business owner does not conduct her or his business in an ethical manner; If they cheat or lie or misrepresent either their products or their 'bidness' practices; If she or he does not pay a living wage to her or his workers with adequate benefits; If he or she does not do EVERYTHING possible to ensure the safety of her or his employees and prevent loss of life or injury, no matter how dangerous the profession; THEN the People, through their representatives in Government, have the right to demand that the business-owner either remedy their breaches of the 'business/social contract,' or fucking CLOSE!