I know how he feels. I have trouble distinguishing one asshole from another.

AmericaBlog, via War Room:

Trent Lott told reporters today that George Bush and GOP Senators barely mentioned Iraq when they met this morning and that they don’t obsess over the war.

When asked if the war was discussed, Lott told reporters that “You're the only ones who obsess on that. We don't and the real people out in the real world don't for the most part."

On the sectarian violence in Iraq, Lott said: “Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.”

Guns don't kill people. People kill people.

People named Duane with criminal records and assault rifle collections are an especially safe bet.

He then proposed legislation to increase discretionary spending on baby-daddy regulation

Senator George Allen’s campaign has just issued a press release stating that because he is, after all, African-American, he claims the right to use the “n-word” in a manner consistent with its usage by other typical African-Americans.

When asked whether this move was an orchestrated attempt by his campaign to court the African-American vote in what has been until now a tight and contentious race, Senator Allen responded “Nigga, please.”

On Hoosier Pond

Those of y’all that know me personally know that I have a crazy crafty/homey/garden-y streak a mile wide. My online friends - who only know me as a mean, controlling bitch - might be surprised to know that in my real life I am very Martha Stewart-y.

On second thought, maybe not so surprising.

But I just want to say for the record, that I have never berated an assistant for failing to provide me with the correct vintage Merlot.

At any rate, after much preparation and hard work and on my part and on Spooney’s, my backyard pond has been completed and has cycled (pond talk!) and is now a safe place for the fishies to live.

Here’s some fun facts: there are over two tons of big rocks, about 500 lbs. of pebbles, and about 200 lbs. of gravel in there. All brought from the driveway to the backyard using our trusty wheelbarrow. Until the wheel broke, that is. And then they were dragged to the backyard in our trusty wheelbarrow-shaped sled.

The waterfall took about a whole day to get right on its own, because we had to move the rocks into about a gazillion different positions before we found a configuration that allowed the water to cascade beautifully down the stones, as opposed to shooting straight out and drenching the person standing right in front of it. Which was me, by the way.

The pond holds about 1500 gallons of water, I figure. I had a book to tell me how to figure that. I’ve forgotten exactly how it said to figure that, but that’s okay, because as you get older you learn how to instantly recognize information you will never need again and it just goes right out of your brain with no trouble at all.

We have minnows to eat the mosquito larvae, and we have some comet goldfish. Comet goldfish are very hardy, can grow to a length of up to 6", and are also known as “feeder goldfish.” That is, fish you buy to feed to other, larger or meaner fish. So think of the break that was for the guys we brought home. You’re welcome, fishies!

No, we do not have koi. Stop asking me that. There are other fish in the sea, you know, besides koi. Fish snobs.

The pond has already attracted many dragonflies and damselflies, and I have a new bird visitor as well: a yellow warbler that is very fond of drinking from the waterfall. He’s also very fond of pooping on the waterfall, but he’s so chirpy and yellow and cute it’s hard to stay mad at him.

The plantings are a little sparse right now, but they will of course grow and fill in. All the plants are either succulents, or are otherwise drought-tolerant. See how good I am? I’m “water-wise,” as the LA Department of Water and Power is fond of saying.

The pond lights run off a solar panel. Are you impressed? You should be.

The pond pump is electric, and the wiring had to be run through conduit and buried in the ground and under a sidewalk. Who did all that, you ask? A licensed electrician? Nope. Spooney and I did it. Again, we had a book.

You know what’s fun? To feed the fish. They recognize me already, and they all get very excited when they see me because they know some tasty fish flakes will soon be dropping onto the pond’s surface. They can come up and get them, or wait for them to fall to the bottom, whichever they prefer. I don’t care. I let fish be fish.

Tonight, right as the sun is setting, I’m going to be sitting beside my pond with Spooney, relaxing with an après-rat race cocktail. It’s fun. It may sound boring, but for some reason it’s not.

Wasted

Second Lieutenant Emily J.T. Perez was a graduate of West Point, and the first miniority female graduate of that academy to become a command sargeant.

She is now also the first female graduate of West Point to die in Iraq.

Perez, who died when her Humvee ran over an IED, was first in her high school class, and was described by one mentor thusly: "I clearly remember thinking that she would definitely be the first female president of this country."

And now she won't.

Carnegie would approve

Andrew Carnegie, one of this country's most famous self-made men, believed in giving away his money, and he had a lot of money to give away. He believed that it was his ticket into heaven.

Of course, he didn't want the U.S. government taking his money and distributing it to the poor through social programs. That's what charities were for, and he wrote The Gospel of Wealth to make damn sure everyone knew it.

He would have fit in pretty well with the crowd at the Clinton Global Initiative 2006, or as Robert Reich has described it, Bill Clinton's "second annual tycoon-fest."

If none of you have ever checked out Reich's blog (way at the bottom of my blog links, where a practitioner of the dismal science belongs), you should:

I remember a day when government collected billions of dollars from tycoons like these, as well as from ordinary taxpayers, and when our democratic process (in its own halting way) decided what the billions would be devoted to. In 1960, the moguls of America paid a marginal tax of 90 percent on their incomes (an effective rate, after all deductions and credits, of over 50 percent). In 1960, over two-thirds of Americans trusted government to do the right thing all or most of the time, according to survey research.

Now, the moguls pay an effective rate of maybe 10 percent of their incomes – none at all if they have clever enough accountants and lawyers who park it in tax havens. And they're richer than ever before in history. Today's release of Forbes Magazine's annual list of the richest 400 Americans is made up solely of billionaires -- for the first time.

And what about government? Now, according to surveys, two-thirds of Americans don’t trust government to do anything right.

So nowadays, a few hundred of the moguls devote some of their billions to doing good things, and we applaud their generosity.

Maybe I’m overly sentimental, but I preferred it the old way.

I know a worse one

BushCo excels at the irrelevant defense.

Responding to the recently leaked intelligence assessment that reportedly concludes that our activities in Iraq has increased the ranks of those determined to attack the U.S., the president said, "We weren't in Iraq when we got attacked on September the 11th. We weren't in Iraq and thousands of fighters were trained in terror camps inside [Afghanistan]. We weren't in Iraq when they first attacked the World Trade Center in 1993."

All those things are true. Well, we WERE in Iraq in 1991, when terrorists were no doubt already being trained in Afghanistan, but let's just for the sake of argument say that he speaks the truth. An irrelevent truth, but the truth.

See, because no is disputing that Al-Qaida existed before we invaded Iraq. It's absolutely not on the table for discussion.

What IS on the table, is whether the ranks, the number of members of Al-Qaida have increased as a result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And Bush of course avoids addressing that question.

The administration spin on this appears to be that the report was leaked in order to "to create confusion in the minds of the American people" prior to the November mid-term elections. Bush elaborates in a typically cringe-inducing manner that "It will stop all the speculation, all the politics about somebody saying something about Iraq -- you know, somebody trying to confuse the American people about the nature of this enemy."

You know, I'm sure there's something really Freudian about how Bush, when speaking off the cuff, often goes on about how enemies are trying to confuse the American people. But is it because he himself is confused, or because BushCo itself attempts to confuse Americans about the facts in order to further their agenda? I guess both.

Bush has promised to declassify part of the leaked intelligence report in order to demonstate that its conclusions are not what they have been described to be. I think we can safely assume that any parts of that report that reflect badly on BushCo will remain classified, eh?

Expressing regret that he will have to declassify the report in order to un-confuse Americans, Bush stated "I think it's a bad habit for our government to declassify every time there is a leak."

A bad habit.

Bad stuff 'bout the Rummy

Retired Major General John R.S. Batiste, former commander of the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, and a senior military assistant to former Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, testified yesterday in front of a Democrat "oversight hearing" (read: the Republicans won't allow an oversight hearing) and had some smack to talk about one of the principle architects of this disaster of a war we are fighting in Iraq:

[Batiste] charged that Rumsfeld and others in the Bush administration "did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war in Iraq."

He told the committee, "If we had seriously laid out and considered the full range of requirements for the war in Iraq, we would likely have taken a different course of action that would have maintained a clear focus on our main effort in Afghanistan, not fueled Islamic fundamentalism across the globe, and not created more enemies than there were insurgents."

Joining his call for Rumsfeld to resign were retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, who was responsible for training Iraq's military and police in 2003 and 2004, and retired Marine Col. Thomas X. Hammes, who served in Iraq in 2004 and helped establish bases for the reconstituted Iraqi armed forces...

...Batiste charged in his testimony that Rumsfeld "is not a competent wartime leader" and surrounded himself with "compliant" subordinates.

"Secretary Rumsfeld ignored 12 years of U.S. Central Command deliberate planning and strategy, dismissed honest dissent, and browbeat subordinates to build 'his plan,' which did not address the hard work to crush the insurgency, secure a post-Saddam Iraq, build the peace and set Iraq up for self-reliance," Batiste said.

In addition, Rumsfeld "refused to acknowledge and even ignored the potential for the insurgency," the retired general said. "At one point, he threatened to fire the next person who talked about the need for a post-war plan," Batiste added.

"Secretary Rumsfeld's dismal strategic decisions resulted in the unnecessary deaths of American servicemen and women, our allies, and the good people of Iraq," Batiste said. "He was responsible for America and her allies going to war with the wrong plan and a strategy that did not address the realities of fighting an insurgency."

Turns out, "macaca" is a nice word for what you are

Another former classmate of Allen's, a famous one, is jumping on the you-did-so-use-the-n-word bandwagon. Are they finding safety in numbers, or is it a campaign-fueled clusterfuck?

"We do have a government that thinks Afghanistan is only one seventh as important as Iraq. And you ask ME about terror and Al Qaida?"

If you haven't seen Bill Clinton get all medieval on Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, you can do so here, but hurry up, because Fox News is forcing You Tube to remove the content.

Validation!

Project Runway's impeccable arbiter of taste and fashion, Tim Gunn, says "I hate crocs. May they please go away."

Unfortunately, it looks like the trend is NOT on the wane, as retailers have, of course, discovered that you can make money by selling girls and yes, even grown women, plastic and rhinestone charms to affix in those goddamn inexplicable holes in their shoes.

What an attractive look!

You know, there's only one shoe I know of that is more attractive than a pair of Crocs.

It is, of course, Hobbit Feet:

They're so COMFORTABLE!

Yeah, but whose side is Allah on?

20% of Americans believe that God is on our side.

If this is so, maybe we can get God to be on someone else's side for a while. Because I don't want to say that God is a jinx, but...

CTrib:

One out of five Americans believe in a God who favors the United States in worldly affairs. Among those believers, Republicans are four times as numerous as Democrats.

No surprise there. If you’re a god-fearing Republican, you got to believe God favors the United States - what the fuck else have you got to hang onto? Your president sure as hell sucks.

Nineteen percent of the 1,721 people surveyed said they either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, "God favors the United States in worldly affairs."

The same percentage agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, “God likes white people more better.”

Paul Froese, an assistant professor who teaches the sociology of religion at Baylor, a Baptist institution in Waco, Texas, helped devise the survey questions. He said the results show, "The idea of God, the belief in God, can be in a political sense exploited for nationalist purposes, at least for that fifth of the country."

He then went on to say “Of course, the Bush campaign figured that out 6 years ago.”

Froese saw a connection between the findings on God and Uncle Sam and other results in the survey involving Americans' sense of God's "personality." Respondents were given 16 words--including absolute, fatherly, forgiving, friendly, loving, punishing, wrathful--and asked to rate how each word described God.

Is "criminally negligent" a choice?

Researchers found the respondents effectively fell in one of four groups. Thirty-one percent believed in an "authoritarian" God who is active in daily life and largely concerned with punishing humans;

This is the god who is testing you by sending your son to Iraq. This is also the god you thank if you score a touchdown or win a Grammy.

23 percent believed in a "benevolent" God who is less interested in punishment;

This is the god who helped my mom quit smoking.

16 percent believed in a "critical" God who doesn't interfere with daily life
but keeps score for an afterlife;

This is the god who will banish to hell everyone who’s ever tossed their Taco Bell wrappers onto my lawn, blocked my curb on garbage day, or cut me off on the 405

and 25 percent believed in a "distant" God who set the laws of nature in motion but is no longer involved in events of this world.

This is the god of love and relationships. You can pray to him all you want, but it will do no good.

He will never call you back.


(thanks to Daddy-O for the link)

Dear President Chavez,

I read about your speech at the U.N. yesterday, and I applaud you for your bravery and candor. Way to stand up to the "world dictator." Bravo.

Your country’s got oil, and so our relationship to you is not unlike some big, important movie star to the little punk on the corner who has his next fix, but still. There were things that you needed to get off your chest and I get that.

If I may make a suggestion, though: the next time you get up in front of a huge room full of the most important people in the whole world, you might want to tone down the crazy just a bit. Just a skooch. I mean, even Qadaffi took off the “kooky” suit when Tom Brokaw showed up with a camera crew. Know what I mean?

Because when you said yesterday how you could still smell the sulphur at the podium where Bush had stood the day before, I thought you were saying that he had farted, like, a really big lingering fart.

Okay, I understand now that your metaphor was about how he was the devil, and that he had the funk of a burning hellish place on him, but it just didn’t translate well. Maybe if I was from your country I would find that image really witty. Hysterical, even. But instead all I can think about is why Venezuelans would believe that the devil smells like hard-boiled eggs.

And while that remark at the end of your speech - "I have a meeting with the axis of evil somewhere around here, so I have to go." IS actually pretty funny, I just want to warn you that our president and a lot of our spy-type people are not really all that bright, and they just might not get the joke, okay? They might really think you and the axis guys are having a meeting later at Carnegie’s Deli.

Now that I think about it, maybe you should have said you were meeting at Carnegie’s Deli, because then most people (although still not the president) would have known that it was, clearly, a joke.

On the plus side, kudos to you for pointing out that because of the Security Council, the U.N. is pretty much powerless to do anything unless the USA says it’s okay. I live in the USA, and I can recognize how stupid and bad that is. And I think that yes, it might be a good idea to move the U.N. to another country for a while, first of all, because those U.N. diplomats NEVER pay their parking tickets, and secondly, it would benefit the U.N. to get out from under our thumb and, frankly, find their balls again.

However, I don’t think the U.N. is going to jump on your invitation to move to Venezuela. I mean, I’m sure it’s lovely, but they do have the whole world to choose from, and my guess is that they would want to go for a country that’s a little less coup-ish. Sorry.

Speaking of coups, I know you’re still steamed about that little CIA-backed deal a couple of years ago. And believe me, we, the people of the USA, are SO embarrassed about that. The CIA so did NOT tell us that they were going to do that, okay? Because if they had, we would have told them that they are just jerks and bullies who are talking out of their ass about half the time and to quit saying that they are with us, because they aren’t.

Anyway, like I said, I know you are steamed, but please don’t refer to Pat Robertson as a terrorist, and imply that we are tolerating terrorism because we don’t arrest him. Yes, Pat Robertson did call for your assassination. But nobody listens to Pat Robertson. Well, okay, some people do, but they are what we would not-so-politely refer to as “the blind, the halt, and the lame.”

The more polite term for them would be “the Republican constituency.”

Well, I should get back to work, and of course you have a nuclear energy program to get off the ground. Say hey to the Venezuleans for us. Oh, and if you dug that Noam Chomsky book, I have a copy of “Manufacturing Consent” that I could lend you. It’s a little dinged up from me slamming it to the ground and weeping over it a few hundred times, but it’s still in pretty good shape.

Let me know.

xoxoxo
Vikkitikkitavi


P.S. I know you are friends with that Ahmadinejad guy. Would you ask him for me if it would hurt him to put on a tie every once in a while? It’s the U.N., for pete’s sake, not a freakin’ barbeque.

P.P.S. I meant a non-pork barbeque, of course.

But I think "Oksana Baiul" is Russian for "maribou scrunchie"

You can take the girl out of the Ukraine...

But you apparently cannot take the Ukraine out of the girl.



(thanks to GFY for the pic)

Move over, Larry David

There's a new self-loathing Jew in town!

Senator George "Macaca" Allen, who would have lost his senatorial race already if the other candidate weren't sort of vile himself, got all riled up when a reporter asked about his Jewish lineage.

Understandable for a man with a confederate flag and noose fetish.

But he wants us all to know that his mother's Jew blood didn't really, ah, "take": "I still had a ham sandwich for lunch. And my mother made great pork chops."

See? No Jewiness here. Now move along, everybody.

Thinking outside the sandbox

Sam Harris, whose brilliant book, The End of Faith, I highly recommend, has written an editorial for the LA Times that condemns “head-in-the-sand” liberals for being soft on terrorism (Be sure to also check out True Ancestor’s post on this editorial). LA Times:

Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.

His assertion that liberals believe what he says they do seems to be rooted in the reactions he got from liberals to his book, which spends a great deal of time discussing the dangers of the Muslim faith.

Let’s not go into how he arrived at his conclusions about liberals, however flawed I think they may be.

As a liberal, I will say that I find fundamentalists of many faiths to be dangerous, and I find Islamic fundamentalists to be particularly scary. But, those people that are religious and who are tolerant of other cultures and religions, are tolerant precisely because they ignore many of the tenets of their faiths (“kill unbelievers” comes to mind), and I think that is a paradox about the positive side of religion or religious people that is generally ignored, at least in the U.S.

But Islamic fundamentalists have existed since the time of Mohammed, so what makes them so dangerous now, particularly? What motivates a moderate Muslim to become a jihadi?

That is the question that I think liberals focus on, and the question that Harris fails to address in his article.

The jihadis have a variety of motivations, I’m sure, but we cannot ignore the fact that one of them is US foreign policy. Certainly they use our ignorance and bullying in the Middle East to bolster their numbers and assist in conversions to their point of view.

Can that really be in question, Mr. Harris?

But let’s look at a concrete example of support for jihadis on the decline.

Holy shit, you say, where in the hell is that happening? And can I move my liberal ass on over there?

It’s happening in Indonesia:

AMID last week’s September 11 anniversary soul-searching about the tenacity of al-Qaeda and the dire state of the Middle East, one theatre of the war on terror was forgotten: the only one where the terrorists are in retreat.

Indonesia gets little attention with Baghdad and Afghanistan in flames, yet it is perhaps the only nation which has come close to beating its own jihadis. It has done so with a radically different strategy to the one pursued by the US...

...The Indonesians, facing criticism from the US and Australia that they had allowed terrorism to fester, ignored much of the unsolicited Western advice to crack down hard. Instead, the sympathisers and hangers-on were allowed to rant and rave in the streets of Jakarta – while the danger men were methodically tracked down by security forces. Around 30 key JI militants have been arrested and tried and three Bali bombers are on death row.

Instead of detainees disappearing into detention centres, the police put one of the key bombers, Amrozi bin Nurhasyim, on TV where he laughed and boasted. Sceptical Indonesians could see the suspects had not been framed or coerced, and much of JI’s support melted away.

JI sympathisers began helping police, who also had success with suspects they befriended in prison. Instead of torture , detainees were treated humanely. Detectives even prayed with them.

The approach worked. Police were able to penetrate the tight clan-based JI networks and root out more terrorists.

Hm. It also seems that the PKS, the Islamic political party in Indonesia, is on the decline.

The trend line shows an unmistakable and steady decline for the PKS, running from a January, 2005 high of 10.1% to a dismal 2.7% by year's end, the second-lowest rating for any major political party. The quantitative results are eye-opening, particularly considering the still prevalent impression among Jakarta's political pundits that the PKS is actually growing in numbers.

Why? Because they stopped focusing on solving the rampant, entrenched, corruption of the Indonesian government, and started pushing an agenda rooted in sharia law. And the people of Indonesia, including, apparently, moderate Muslims, didn’t care for it.

Sooooo, we in the U.S. might want to take an itty-bitty look at what’s going on in Indonesia, and…I dunno, maybe think about what most Muslims really want.

But what do I know? I’m just a head-in-the-sand liberal.




(Many thanks to Harry Shearer’s Le Show for the tip on the Glasgow piece.)

If you want it

Due to the release of the documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon, I have been exposed to the above image many times in recent weeks.

And I am going to admit to you that every time I see it, my eyes well up with tears and my throat hurts.

Because it seems like we've learned nothing in the past 35 years. Sure, I was a kid, but I remember Richard Nixon. I remember what it was like the first time our government became our worst enemy. And now, we've let another awful, greedy, lying pig take over our country and change us. And fill us with fear. And divide us over words like "patriot" and "freedom."

Like we aren't all patriots. Like we all don't want to be free to live in our own fashion.

Our young men and women are dying for no reason. No reason. And despite the fact that all of their lies about why we needed them to die have been proven to be lies, they tell us that if they had it to do over, they wouldn't change a thing.

That's how arrogant they are. That's how craven they are. That's how entrenched they are in their own sense of entitlement, that they can spend our lives as if they were nothing.

They would do it all again. And not for any bullshit about freedom or safety. If you have any doubt about why we are in Iraq, you read this article about who we have brought into that country to work on reconstruction, and what their priorities have been, and you tell me, YOU TELL ME why we're there. We are building a certain kind of government in Iraq, with certain kinds of businesses entrenched, and you tell me that isn't why we went in in the first place.

Blood for oil. It may be an oversimplification, but if you think about it, it's not much of one.

"There are times where I'm glad I'm alive, and there are times where I wish it would've killed me."

Forget that giant yellow ribbon magnet, if you really want to support the troops, go see the new documentary The Ground Truth. It's a movie that takes you inside the experience of being a soldier, and, in the words of one of those interviewed, "honors the veterans by really listening to what they have to say."

One of the producers is a friend of mine, and neither one of us would steer ya wrong. You can see a clip here if you don't believe us though.

And you thought your boss was an asshole

Halliburton subsidiary KBR has been submitting some of its employees in Iraq for the civilian equivalent of the Purple Heart, the U.S. Defense of Freedom medal.

Aw, that's nice.

Except that in the medical records release paperwork, you'll find this:

. . . I agree that in consideration for the application for a Defense of Freedom Medal on my behalf that. . . I hereby release, aquit and discharge KBR, all KBR employees, the military, and any of their representatives. . . with respect to and from any and all claims and any and all causes of action, of any kind or character, whether now known or unknown, I may have against any of them which exist as of the date of this authorization. . . . This release also applies to any claims brought by any person or agency or class action under which I may have a right or benefit.

Yeah, you'll get your medal for being wounded in Iraq...if you promise not to sue us for sending you down that road we knew to be controlled by insurgents!

Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be Jesus freaks

Of all the things that are accused of being child abuse, surely this must qualify.

Christian music sales are up 300% in recent years, clear proof of impaired mental processes among the young.