buzz twang

He just gave a promotion to the guy in charge of our $9 trillion dollar debt. You know what? I really think if you walked into a cabinet meeting and started hurling your feces at the wall, Bush would name a state after you.

– Jon Stewart on Bush’s appointment of Josh Bolten as Chief of Staff. (via)

Skippy has the final word on the Ben Domenech train wreck. Yours truly prefers to glance peripherally at such displays of tropistic arrogance and watch the thought slackers explain away and spin the mistakes and nonsense as heroic followed immediately by a main course of ad homenem attacks on the evil librul messengers.

Of course, the truth is much simpler: Any web site that uses the term “leadership team” so earnestly is surely part of the evil plan to suck our brains out and take over the planet.

…due to being selected for jury duty. It’s interesting… when we get that official looking (and bathed in fire alarm red to alert us to its officalness) notice, our hearts sink. “How do I get out of this?”

And, I’ve realized something: It’s not the actual time spent away from work or whatever it is we do with our day that we hate, it’s not the endless days of listening to facts facts facts and testomony and cross and all of that.

What makes us want to get out of jury duty is the chairs we are forced to sit in for hours on end. No citizen should be subject to torture for doing his or her civic duty.

And, so it goes…

There are few people who simply command attention when they perform. Nina Simone was such a person. My world just stops when I hear her sing…

For a while

Lost in day to day,
Turned another way
With a laugh, a kind hello
And some small talk with friends I know
I forget that I’m not over you for a while.

A wave, an easy grin,
A smile to put them in,
Got other lives to listen to
And some music that I have to do
I forget that I’m not over you for a while.

Days go by with no empty feeling,
Until I touch my hair and touch my skin
And remember you’re gone.

People say to me, “hey Nina do you need some company?
When you have some time to spend,
Drop around-you need your friends.”
They forget that I’m not over you for a while,
They forget that I’m not over you for a while.

Interesting propaganda film, especially considering where we are now. Not much has changed. Actually, since 9/11, such attitudes have gotten worse. Except now the enemy is anyone who doesn’t support the right-wing agenda. Most especially Liberals.

Always remember, those who would wage war on their fellow Americans, calling them unpatriotic, are seeking neither democracy nor liberty. The urge to solidify power via dictatorial ways was a problem sixty years ago, and it is still a problem today.

This is for Mike and Schmuel. A spoof of Immigrant Song by Led Zep. Funny.

Followed the “cartoon” controversy quietly. A few things worth noting…

The entire “movement” was most definitely created and supported by right-wing Islamic radical elements. This article from Truthdig spells it all out nicely.

…when you take a closer look at the social and political contexts of these collective expressions of rage, certain patterns emerge that suggest a more manufactured phenomenon.

Syria is a perfect example, and the one that I know best, having spent the past year living and studying there. This is a country where absolutely nothing happens in public without the express authorization of the government. That’s what makes life in Syria both incredibly safe—it has one of the lowest crime rates in the Middle East and almost no domestic terrorism problems—and incredibly oppressive. Any time there’s a “demonstration” or a “rally,” or even a picnic involving more than one person, the government bureaucracy has to sign off on it.

So how was a gang of youths able to congregate on one of the premier avenues of the capital, destroy the Danish and Norwegian embassies and trash several other Western-owned buildings in the course of a long day? Damascus is a remarkably well-policed city, with government security drones (Mukhabarat) stationed on nearly every street corner, automatic rifles slung across their shoulders. These guards especially cluster around foreign embassies and the fashionable Abu Roumaneh district, where most of the destruction occurred; yet no clashes between protesters and guards have been reported.

We are left with two possible explanations: either all of Damascus’ top-priority guard posts were abandoned at the same time—all of the Mukhabarat stepped out for a daylong cigarette break—or the guards were complicit in the demonstrations-turned-riots. In light of the Asad regime’s proven readiness to defy the international community in the most blunt fashion, one could further presume that Syria’s security agents were not only complicit in this violence but actually helped coordinate it, focus it and contain it from behind the scenes to achieve some higher policy goal. Apparently the U.S. State Department has come to the same conclusion.

What is so interesting about this entire issue is that it really shines a light upon the fact that the GWOT is a culture war between right-wing elements – Christians and Muslims. It’s a right-wing war. Wingers fighting wingers.

Note how many on the right are literally trying to guilt the media into showing of the cartoons, knowing full well that doing so will only further flame the fire of anger and hatred. They cloak it, of course, in the “free speeach” argument. Smoke and mirrors. IN the end, it is the reason most outlets have not reprinted the cartoons, and why most broadcasters have avoided them as well.

To right-wingers like Michelle Malkin, it’s all about stoking the hate. The fact that the newly rechristened “Long War” is at it’s core right-wing Christian extremeists from the West fighting right-wing Muslim extremists from Middle East can not be over emphasized.

Related to this earlier post, Juan Cole presents some very interesting points regarding the Iranian situation in Fishing for a Pretext in Iran, which I wasn’t aware of… This story gets more and more interesting and frightening day by day.

Avedon Carol at The Sideshow makes an interesting point:

Yeah, I’ve always wondered myself about whatever happened to those tons of explosives that disappeared because, “Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”

And, it reminded me that the investigation as to who mailed lethal doses of anthrax to two Democratic Congressional leaders, a handful of media persons including Tom Brokaw, attacks it should be remembered that killed five people, has never yielded a suspect. So, whoever is responsible is likely still out there.

Lovely. Explosives. Anthrax. Out. There. Somewhere. These are the thoughts that cross my mind pretty much every time I board the subway here in NYC.

Scotland is looking rather nice right about now…

The most interesting investigation of this matter I’ve found, in my bookmarks, is the BBC Newsnight transcription which implies that the CIA may have been involved in the attacks.

… with no sense of irony:

The oh-so-compassionate Left is snickering at the possibility that Floyd Allen may have been responsible for the crimes with which Claude Allen has now been charged. [...]

I don’t see why this is funny. If it turns out that Claude Allen, a father of three who reportedly has bailed out his troubled twin brother before, tried to protect Floyd Allen and ruined his career out of familial love, that is an extraordinary thing.

Tell me again why this is funny.

Because you can’t write stuff this bizarre. It comes off like an Ed Wood movie.

And, you know what else is funny? Watching wingnuts screech, whine and generally get bent out of shape when people poke a stick at stuff you don’t think is funny.

Of course, the bitter irony here is red hot, since the twin story was broke by an Evil Liberal in the first place. So, it’s easy to see how the humor here is lost on the average wingnut. It’s so hard to laugh when you are grinding your teeth in anger.

Now that’s funny!

From Think Progress:

[The original] ending was altered in the 1955 animated version, which removed the humans, leaving only the nasty pigs. … The C.I.A., it seems, was worried that the public might be too influenced by Orwell’s pox-on-both-their-houses critique of the capitalist humans and Communist pigs. So after his death in 1950, agents were dispatched (by none other than E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame) to buy the film rights to “Animal Farm” from his widow to make its message more overtly anti-Communist.

Some other notable films in the CIA’s library:

Brainwashing
Spying for Uncle Sam, Part I
Why Man Creates
How Free Should the Press Be?
CBS Reports: UFO: Friend, Foe or Fancy?
Mickey Mouse Cartoon-Squatter’s Rights
I Am a Soldier
Holograms — The First True 3-D Picture
Man and the Sea
Unidentified Flying Objects
Eye in the Sky
It Works, and That’s the Key
Operation Underground Network
He is a Mad Man
Rise of Labor Unions/Employee/Management
Hovercraft
Our Election Day Illusion/The Best Majority
Kidnap Executive Style

Interesting to say the least. It reminds me of a little noticed incident from the mid ninties.

Fox TV aired Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and altered the ending. Heavily influenced by Orwell’s 1984, Brazil concludes with a false ending.

The final scendario: The hero is being tortured by his former best friend, but a rescue is mounted, and our hero dramticially escapes, with the girl, to a happy ending, to live out his days in a house surrounded by a white picket fence. Alas, we soon realize that the escape and the house and the happy ending are all a figment of our hero’s mind as he sits dying in the torture chair, spiritually and physically destroyed, but for his dreams.

Fox TV actually cut this final scene out of the film, editing the movie to end on the white picket fence and house. Protests at the time met with a reply from Fox that the film was edited because of “time constraints”, but of course, everyone understands that edits can be made to preserve the true ending of a film.

And, so it goes…

Right-wing propagandist Ralph Peters offers swill and the lemmings drink it down like sweet sweet Kool-Aid.

Back in Iraq goes over “The Big Lie”, and says from Baghdad: “No civil war here, though. Nope. Just a slaughter.”