Just realized that this fine establishment has been on the air for three years.
For some inexplicable reason, this site is averaging 491 hits a day. That's without me posting for 2 weeks.
I'm obviously obselete.
February 2006 Archives
Just keeping an open mind. . .
BARON VLADIMIR HARKISSINGER: Bush, Bush... I place you in charge of Irakkis. It's yours to squeeze, as I promised. I want you to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze.
Give me OIL! Drive them into utter submission. You must not show the slightest pity or mercy... as only you can... Never stop!
Go.... Show no mercy!
BUSH: Yes, my lord Baron.
Bush leaves just as McCain steps out of the shower. The Baron turns to him lovingly.
BARON (to McCain ): And when we've crushed these people enough I'll send in you McCain ... they'll cheer you as a rescuer... lovely McCain ... really a lovely boy.
(suddenly he smiles and screams)
WHERE'S MY DOCTOR?
Via
I'm going down to Cowtown
The cow's a friend to me
Lives beneath the ocean and that's where I will be
Beneath the waves, the waves
And that's where I will be
I'm gonna see the cow beneath the seaThe yellow Roosevelt Avenue leaf overturned
The ardor of arboreality is an adventure we have spurned, we've spurned
A new leaf overturned
It's a new leaf overturnedAnd so I'm going down to Cowtown
The cow's a friend to me
Lives beneath the ocean and that's where I will be
Beneath the waves, the waves
And that's where I will be
I'm gonna see the cow beneath the seaWe yearn to swim for home, but our only home is bone
How sleepless is the egg knowing that which throws the stone
Foresees the bone, the bone
Our only home is bone
Our only home is boneAnd so I'm going down to Cowtown
The cow's a friend to me
Lives beneath the ocean and that's where I will be
Beneath the waves, the waves
And that's where I will be
I'm gonna see the cow beneath the seaYes I'm going down to Cowtown
The cow's a friend to me
Lives beneath the ocean and that's where I will be
Beneath the waves, the waves
And that's where I will be
I'm gonna see the cow beneath the sea
Yes I'm gonna see (I'm gonna see)
The cow (the cow)
Beneath the sea
Sorry. Hadn't seen anyone use that title yet - guess we don't have a lot of Aerosmith fans out there...
Still, it's going to be pretty sweet to see the well deserved derision that will be heaped upon Cheney. The late night shows are going to cash in on this comedy gold for weeks.
This is going to really piss off the cultists.
So, I guess it's been a while since we've had any serious displays of linguistic parsing that would put Clinton to shame. Seems to me that it's about time we had a serious slime fest on that organization everyone loves to hate.
UN inquiry demands immediate closure of Guantanamo
A United Nations inquiry has called for the immediate closure of America's Guantanamo Bay detention centre and the prosecution of officers and politicians "up to the highest level" who are accused of torturing detainees.
The UN Human Rights Commission report, due to be published this week, concludes that Washington should put the 520 detainees on trial or release them.
It calls for the United States to halt all "practices amounting to torture", including the force-feeding of inmates who go on hunger strike.
The report wants the Bush administration to ensure that all allegations of torture are investigated by US criminal courts, and that "all perpetrators up to the highest level of military and political command are brought to justice".
It does not specify who it means by "political command" but logically this would include President George W Bush.
That last line will make all the wingers go absolutely ballistic.
Look for calls to hang Kofi Anan by the end of the week.
Oh wait a minute. That's already a daily occurence. Look for calls to bomb the UN by the end of the week. Oh wait a minute...
Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post up questioning whether or not Bush followers have a political ideology. As they say, read the whole thing (and for extra irony, savor the comment stream of gedaliya). It's one of the best bit of writing I've seen which lays it all out in detail without resorting to personal attacks - stunning.
And needless to say, I agree with the conclusion: Today's conservatives are an authoritarian cult. They aren't a political movement. They - as many have pointed out - certainly are not even conservative. They are authoritarians who worship the personality of Bush. They are a cult.
This does pose a rather interesting problem. Personality cults are rather dangerous things. Authoritarian personality cults, doubly so. Needless to say, when those authoritarian personality cults control all three branches of government, one should be down right worried about the future.
Perhaps the saddest thing about all this is the way that the opposition - be they democrats, conservatives with a soul (yes, they do exist), so called libertarians and whatever independents and centrist there are left - try to engage this cult in discussions based on reason. Now, whatever a cult may be, it is not based on reason. You cannot argue with the member of cult. You can't discuss or argue with them. They are in the thrall of the cult and there's not much else you can do about it.
As far as I can tell, everyone is just acting like these jokers are amenable to debate, reason and all the processes that separate humans from - say - our cousins flinging shit in cages. Even cuter are those who think that reason is ruling the roost in the Bush administration and that the National Review crowd's influence on actual policy making is - as one Gregory Djerejian put it - de minimis. No, I won't go into the long litany of complete and utter boondoggles that make this statement deliciously surreal, but suffice it to say that Gregory is living in the same fantasy world that Daniel Drezner is living in (or perhaps, used to be living in - lately I think he's just living in Spiteville).
Sure, there's probably a few members of this cult that you can pick off with a good argument. Some precious few who will look at the facts and say What The Fuck... But the entire history of cults clearly shows that you're fighting a fool's game.
So, by all means, continue to demand civility. Continue to strive for commong ground. Have as your goal bipartisanship.
I'm convinced this strategy is going to work. Just look at how well it worked in the past. The results speak for themselves.
Attorney General Gonzales in testimony:
GONZALES: Senator, I have to believe all of us -- we take an oath of office and if we honestly believe that a crime is being committed that we would do something about it.
DURBIN: How would they?
I've been on the Intelligence Committee. And I can tell you that when you're briefed with classified material -- I sat in briefings not from here, just a few feet away and listened to what I thought was very meager evidence about weapons of mass destruction before the invasion of Iraq.
Based on that, I voted against it. But I couldn't walk outside that room until it became public much later and say this administration was at war within when it came to this issue.
GONZALES: I think we're letting members of Congress off the hook easily by saying that, if they get briefed into a secret program and they believe it's against the law, that they can't do anything about it.
GONZALES: I think you have an obligation, quite frankly, when you take that oath of office, if you believe that conduct is fact unlawful, I think you can do something about it.
Emphasis mine
Of course, what Gonzales really meant was that, while you may have an obligation to do something about it, don't expect the executive branch to sit idly by with a sympathetic ear.
Inquiry Into Wiretapping Article Widens
Federal agents have interviewed officials at several of the country's law enforcement and national security agencies in a rapidly expanding criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding a New York Times article published in December that disclosed the existence of a highly classified domestic eavesdropping program, according to government officials.
The investigation, which appears to cover the case from 2004, when the newspaper began reporting the story, is being closely coordinated with criminal prosecutors at the Justice Department, the officials said. People who have been interviewed and others in the government who have been briefed on the interviews said the investigation seemed to lay the groundwork for a grand jury inquiry that could lead to criminal charges.
Wow. Anyone else find it simply hilarious that Big Brother is a product of the staunch, anti-government, radical conservatives?
I'm not suprised, though. I always knew y'all were just a bunch of authoritarians who wanted to be on top and couldn't stand having someone else get in your way.
The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.
The system - parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development - is already credited with helping to foil some plots. It is the federal government's latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens' privacy.
...
A major part of ADVISE involves data-mining - or "dataveillance," as some call it. It means sifting through data to look for patterns. If a supermarket finds that customers who buy cider also tend to buy fresh-baked bread, it might group the two together. To prevent fraud, credit-card issuers use data-mining to look for patterns of suspicious activity.
What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information - from financial records to CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records. The system would then store it as "entities" - linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events, according to a report summarizing a 2004 DHS conference in Alexandria, Va. The storage requirements alone are huge - enough to retain information about 1 quadrillion entities, the report estimated. If each entity were a penny, they would collectively form a cube a half-mile high - roughly double the height of the Empire State Building.
....
Some computer scientists support the concepts behind ADVISE."This sort of technology does protect against a real threat," says Jeffrey Ullman, professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University. "If a computer suspects me of being a terrorist, but just says maybe an analyst should look at it ... well, that's no big deal. This is the type of thing we need to be willing to do, to give up a certain amount of privacy."
Yes. For the children.
Anyways, hope you are wearing clean underwear.
Andrew Sabl has a really good post responding to Mark Kleiman's paranoia on Iraq.
Myself, I'm thinking it is Groundhog Day all over again. It's going to be a great summer.
But just to add a bit here, I must say that I also find it quite bizarre that we - the United States - seems to be the one who must protect poor little Israel. I mean, the country (Israel, that is) has about 100-200 nukes, cruise missiles, submarines with cruise missile launch capability and bombers and medium range missiles capable of hitting Iran.
So you have to wonder what in the world the US is worrying about with respect to Israel and Iran. Andrew comes up with, I think, a pretty good answer to that question.
I can't help thinking that behind all of this is an unwillingness to face what “bombing” is. It’s deliberate, mass killing: not “murder” if in self-defense, but not remotely all right for any other reason. I’m neither a pacifist nor a cosmopolitan (nor a dour moralist, though I admit I sometimes blog like one). I supported the Afghanistan war, I was on the fence on the Iraq war when I though WMDs existed, and I’m willing to support Americans’ killing other people’s children if absolutely necessary to protect our own. But casual talk of “4000 sorties” to safeguard “strategic” goals or some unspecified form of “stability” makes me ill—and evokes my highly unprofessional adjectives. The U.S., blessed with no war on our continental soil since 1865, and still obsessed with Pearl Harbor at that, has the luxury of forgetting what happens when the bombs fall. Think about a four-year-old with no arms left. And remember what it means to be the object of “preventive” war rather than the party free to think of it as grand strategy.
Over at Mark Klienman's "Reality Based" community, Andrew Sabl wags his finger again at the collective left. It appears that paying attention to the NSA story is the political loser. What we SHOULD be blogging about is the budget which is about to be signed by Bush which will cut services across the board and a whole bunch of other nasty things.
The average consumer (and producer) of the blogosphere can safely be predicted to care much more about the first story than the second. One story potentially affects people with time on their hands and a penchant for political dissent. The other affects the kind of person who will finally have to give up his own apartment and become an inmate in a nursing home, or who will now have to choose between treating her diabetes and buying enough peanut butter for her toddler's lunch.
First, let me thank Andrew for the incredibly condescending tone in his post. That's really the way to get your friends fired up about a cause they should be paying attention too.
Second, let me ask Andrew what the fuck he's been blogging about. Let's just roll the tape, shall we? (BTW, Andrew, if your listening, it'd be nice if you had a way to see all the posts by a particular author - something that a lot of group blogs don't seem to think about)
Jan 15 Moral reform movements led by ministers: RIP.
Jan 18 No Irish blood in this Gray Lady
Jan 20 Yes, the NSA wiretaps are illegal. Now forget that and talk Medicare.
Jan 23 Framing the Wiretaps: Might we Actually Win?
Jan 24 "Dartmouth Review" vs. "Federalist Society" Conservatives Continued
Jan 24 The T-word, the L-word — and our old friend Pat Roberts
Jan 26 Sabl's Law of U.S. Political Rhetoric
Jan 27 Memo to POTUS: Some Thoughts Concerning the College Curriculum
Jan 27 Latest wiretap poll: The Frame's Afoot.
Now, of course, anyone can blog about whatever they want. But if you're actually going to start down the path of condescension about what others are focusing on, then I think one should first look at what one's self is blogging. See, the way I read Andrew, he hasn't blogged one whit about Medicare or the budget disaster. Most of his blogmates haven't either (no I didn't do a content analysis, just what I saw doing the above analysis). In fact, the single biggest topic for Andrew is (drum roll, please) the NSA wire taps. Either talking about it, or wagging his finger at the rest of the blogosphere for talking about it.
I don't know. If I was a tad more snarky, I'd probably suggest that he blog about the subjects he's disparaging others for ignoring, rather than using the rather large soap box of Mark Klienman's blog (and believe me, it is a large soap box, Andrew) to tell others what they should be doing. And quite frankly, I think he will be far more effective if he just blogs the heck out of what he wants others to talk about rather than wagging his finger at them.
And another thing. For me, there's a strategic issue here. I personally don't care if the NSA is a "losing" issue. I was told the exact same thing about Iraq back in 2002 - i.e. that it was a "losing" issue for the democrats and we should be focusing on "better", more "winnable" things. Glad to see how that all worked out, eh Andrew? Seems to me that if we had focused on that and stood up with a bit of calcium in the spinal region we might be 500 billion richer and maybe we wouldn't have had a Medicare disaster because this administration figured out that we just couldn't be steam rolled.
I'm sure that Andrew is a stand up guy and lord knows that someone who's a UCLA prof and a Political Theorist knows a shit load more about politics than I do. But the point is, the NSA scandal is a BIG DEAL. Sorry if it doesn't penetrate to the masses. It's serious business. The man literally thinks he can ignore the law, congress and the constitution.
That's called a "constitutional crisis" where I come from.
And I know the budget is a big deal, but quite frankly we lost, we were going to lose and it's something that is fixable (in theory).
This deal with Bush and the imperial presidency might spell the end of our democracy. If he gets away with this, then budget fights are simply not going to matter at all.
Pardon me for thinking that it's a wee bit more important at the moment.
And one more thing that I brought up above but want to emphasize: IRAQ. The Dems ignored Iraq an got trounced in 2002. They ignored Iraq and got trounced in 2004. Quite frankly, I'm of the opinion that if we follow Andrew's advice we'll be trounced again in 2008 for the same reasons.
Myself, I think we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Just do a Google blog search for Medicare and Medicaide sometime, Andrew. You'll see that it's still a much talked about topic - as well as the budget fiasco.
People aren't ignoring it.
But from your posts so far, you seem to be :)
