Hey, chirren, don't forget that today is Buy Nothing Day. Sit back,
relax, watch a game, play some cards, read a book, whatever. Just buy
no useless consumer crap that you don't need and won't care about
three days from now. You'll feel great and your sleep will be
untroubled tonight.
I used to engineer & produce commercials for a living, and the
work entailed the use of many talented voice-over people. They are a
brilliant, generally super-intelligent, extremely cynical and
black-humored species. Fun to be around, fun to work with.
So what happens if you get the five most in-demand national
V.O. talents into one car together?
Much respect to Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism (the
largest Jewish organization in America), who had this to say to the
Radical Christian Clerics:
We are particularly offended by the suggestion that the opposite of
the Religious Right is the voice of atheism. We are appalled when
"people of faith" is used in such a way that it excludes us, as well
as most Jews, Catholics, and Muslims. What could be more bigoted than
to claim that you have a monopoly on God and that anyone who disagrees
with you is not a person of faith?
So we ask our neighbors on the Religious Right to take note: We are
religious Jews, gathered in Houston to study, pray, and commit
ourselves to God. And yes, we are generally liberal in our politics.
But our liberalism flows directly from our religious commitments.
And we worry that you don't understand what this means, or what it
means for anyone to be a liberal religious believer.
What it means is this: that we bring a measure of humility to our
religious belief. We study religious texts day and night, but we have
no direct lines to heaven and we aren't always sure that we know God's
will.
It means believing that religion involves concern for the poor and the
needy, and giving a fair shake to all. When people talk about God and
yet ignore justice, it just feels downright wrong to us. When they
cloak themselves in religion and forget mercy, it strikes us as
blasphemy.
It means that "family values" require providing health care to every
child and that God cares about the 12 million children without health
insurance. It means valuing a child with diabetes over a frozen
embryo in a fertility clinic, and seeing the teaching of science as a
primary social good.
And it means reserving the right for each person to prayerfully make
decisions for herself about when she dies.
It also means believing in legal protection for gay couples. We
understand those who believe that the Bible opposes gay marriage, even
though we read that text in a very different way. But we cannot
understand why any two people who make a lifelong commitment to each
other should be denied legal guarantees that protect them and their
children and benefit the broader society. We cannot forget that when
Hitler came to power in 1933, one of the first things that he did was
ban gay organizations. And today, we cannot feel anything but rage
when we hear about gay men and women, some on the front lines, being
hounded out of our armed services. Yes, we can disagree about gay
marriage. But there is no excuse for hateful rhetoric that fuels the
hellfires of anti-gay bigotry.
The pendulum swings slowly sometimes, but it swings just the
same. Sane people are finding their voices again. The sun is setting
on this particular historic episode of "conservative" insanity.
Yes, there will be more episodes of "conservative" primacy in the
future. Human stupidity and greed are the only truly non-exhaustible
resources that we have. But we're beginning to chase the cockroaches
back into the darkness where they belong. Many will end up in jail,
many others without a reputation and a voice. It will be a delight to
watch this process unfold.
I, for one, am hopeful that we may be seeing the dawning of a new
period of tolerance, and balance, and compassion and responsibility.
Just discovered Perrspectives, and I
recommend it highly. I'm especially impressed by their "Resource
Center." Go poke around. You can learn an enormous amount of
information about the issues of our times.
Finally. A coherent, concise and ultimately devastating
interrogatory from an unimpeachable source. This is not race baiting;
not religious chest-beating; not hatred. And it is long overdue.
What a moron. The pResident comes out with "tough words" on
Veterans Day. He sounded like a bleating, lost goat on the eve of the
first cold front out in the hill country. The speech was filled with
so many half-truths and outright lies that my bullshit meter pegged in
the first sentence and went dead in the second paragraph. Should've
had the foresight to recalibrate the effen thing. Damned near had an
aneurysm.
Sigh. Tell you what. Do some research and go read it. I can't waste
my time with this coloring book crap right now. But let's just comment
upon the money quote, that "more than 100 Democrats in the House and
the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support
removing Saddam Hussein from power."
No, Shrub, you insufferable, lying, incompetent horses ass of a
fool. They did not have access to the "same intelligence." They had
access to your cherry-picked, forged intelligence. And they voted,
after you paraded every neocon sycophant down to the junior
undersecretary of the interior out to say that "war was the absolute
last resort," to give you authority to use military action to destroy
Saddam Hussein's WMD stockpiles, as a part of a world-wide,
broad-based and UN-sponsored coalition, as a LAST RESORT, if it
was determined by UN weapons inspectors that Iraq harbored weapons of
mass destruction. And you and your cabal of oil-soaked power-crazed
capitalist neocon sandbox playmates went to war before the UN report
was filed. A report that clearly and definitively stated that there
were no WMD's.
There is nothing left to do with this idiot but point and
laugh. His political engine no longer works using Iraqi blood as fuel,
and there ain't any other fuel available. What a stupid, evil,
incompetent little man.
Republicans Voted Against Veterans' Health Care FIVE TIMES This Year,
Despite Warnings of Budget Shortfall.
Before the Department of Veterans Affairs announced a $1 billion
budget shortfall earlier this year, Senate Republicans voted twice
against $1.98 billion for veterans' health care, while also opposing a
proposal to increase veterans' health care funding by $2.8
billion.
And last month, Republicans said "no" to keeping veterans'
health care funding in line with inflation and population
growth. These votes all came despite at least five warnings from
Sen. Patty Murray that the proposed federal funding for veterans'
programs would not be enough to cover costs. [Vote #89, 4/12/05; Vote
#90, 4/12/05; Vote #55, 3/16/05; Vote #251, 10/5/05; CQ Today,
10/5/05; U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs Press Release,
6/23/05; Office of Sen. Patty Murray; Tacoma News Tribune, 6/29/05]
Look for a lot of Republican photo-ops with veterans on the
evening news tonight. That's what Republicans like about veterans.
President George W. Bush and the current administration have now
borrowed more money from foreign governments and banks than the
previous 42 U.S. presidents combined.
Throughout the first 224 years (1776-2000) of our nation's history, 42
U.S. presidents borrowed a combined $1.01 trillion from foreign
governments and financial institutions according to the U.S. Treasury
Department. In the past four years alone (2001-2005), the Bush
Administration has borrowed a staggering $1.05 trillion.
How can so many otherwise intelligent people be so utterly stupid
for so long? George Bush is, quite literally, destroying our
nation. How could anyone have supported him in the first place?
I am a person who has a sense that we are a part of a larger whole;
i.e. not an atheist. I am a person who does not subscribe to
the belief that we are physical beings who occasionally have a
spiritual experience; on the contrary, I believe that we are spiritual
beings who occasionally choose to have a physical experience.
And I am a person who believes that organized religion, with its
dogmas, myths, fear-monging, judgments and hatred, is one of the primary
reasons that we as a species may be well on our way to extinction.
But. I also don't proselytize my viewpoint, and I defend your right to
have yours, as long as it does not interfere with mine or anyone
else's. May the deity of your choice bless you abundantly. I wish you Peace.
With this in mind, I invite you to listen to Julia Sweeney's
beautiful and funny and moving account of her loss of faith, broadcast on This American Life. I don't share
her conclusions; mine are different. But this is one of those once in a
lifetime, profoundly human documents that just sparkle with the best
of who and what we are.
Quicktime stream of her segment available; click the icon:
Or download a full program torrent here.
(Julia's segment begins at 30:15.)
Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, has
told acquaintances over the past year that he suspects that the
election was stolen, but that he didn't challenge the official results
because he lacked hard proof and anticipated a firestorm of criticism
if he pressed the point.
Can we not find one strong person, capable of speaking the truth,
to represent the people of this country? Anyone? ANYONE??
I am no fan of the New York Times; I think that they've taken the
gold standard of journalism and turned it into an incompetent rag more
akin to "The Forbes/National Inquirer Lite" in the last five years or
so. But it does remain an influential paper, still riding the vestigial
coat tails of its previous greatness. So when they release an op-ed
that opens like this,
I tend to take notice:
After President Bush's disastrous visit to Latin America, it's
unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three
years to run. An administration with no agenda and no competence would
be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the
world simply can't afford an American government this bad for that
long.
Was just reading my daily dose of the always interesting Marshall
Wittman blog; today is a good read, but here's my take.
They may be right. But my gut tells me that the Republican party won't
be able to get a dogcatcher elected for at least a couple of election
cycles after this has played out. We're not even to the seventh inning
stretch of this scandal series. Hell, we're in the third
inning. Slate's Weisberg makes some interesting points, but I think
that he's being a bit over-optimistic.
To my mind, there's another calculus at work here: Rove doesn't have
the toolset for this situation. He is an expert at demolition, not a
general contractor. Combined with the nascent attention of the
American People to his techniques -- the lies, the smears, the
Orwellian double-speak, the staged photo-ops, the crab-walks, the bait
& switches, the cherry-picking, the absurd sloganeering and
triumphalism -- well, this is going to be a very rough ride. Bush
doesn't look "manly" talking to troops/old folks/cameras these days;
he looks like the silly and small and incompetent little trust fund
frat rat that he is. They don't like those kind of people in Peoria.
If McCain wants to be the reformer-in-chief, he'd be well advised to
quit the Republican party, asap. The alternative for him would seem to
be -- to my eye, anyway -- the political equivalent of chief engineer
on the Titanic. Sure, he can get the nomination -- it's his turn, for
real -- but nomination for what? Historical laughingstock? The new
Alf Landon? The party's *current* negatives are almost as bad as
POTUS, and they will not be getting any good news, at all, for quite a
long time. Maybe they'll be able to push through a resolution saying
that "rainbows are pretty" between now and the election next
year. Maybe.
Rove's Seventh Circle of Hell has arrived: an engaged alert
electorate, increasingly on to him, exactly when his horse goes
lame. And the party that has been so obsequious to his every outrage
for five years, dutifully mouthing every talking point, is effectively
welded to POTUS now. Hell, we can run a successful opposition campaign
based solely on "Meet the Press" video clips at this point. And that,
sadly, includes McCain's. Rove is what we in the geekery business call
a "single point of failure", e.g. the one place that can take the
whole operation off line. And as far as I can tell, there's never been
a plan "b." Additionally, and happily, Reid and the Dems are actually
growing some testicles, right on time. Strange, but welcome nonetheless.
Napoleon Bonaparte had some good advice that Rove somehow managed
to miss: "You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will
teach him all your art of war."
It's becoming a marvelous time to be an intelligent, proudly
progressive, fiscally conservative and socially moderate liberal. But
we have more than a few of those already available, and the line forms
to the rear.
Tell you what. The Republicans can have the dogcatcher positions; I
wouldn't want to be totally unreasonable. To paraphrase and extend my
wise friend Mary: "Vote for Democratic politicians, Libertarian judges,
and Republican tax assessors."
Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, who sparked controversy by asserting that
programs carried by public broadcasters have a liberal bias, resigned
yesterday from the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting a
day after the agency's inspector general delivered a report apparently
critical of his leadership.
Tomlinson, a staunch conservative who was CPB's chairman until
September, brought unprecedented attention to his agency by publicly
criticizing the alleged political favoritism of news programs,
primarily those carried by the Public Broadcasting Service. CPB wields
great influence over public radio and TV stations through its
distribution of about $400 million in federal funding each year.
I know that this isn't on everyone's radar screen, but it's
exceedingly good news. And there's no political power available to
shoehorn another ideological hack to fill the position. You can take NPR off of
the endangered species list for now.
Something that I don't see anyone saying: this is going to be very
hard to for Bush/Rove to pull out of. The American people sometimes are slow to
comprehend, but when they do, they stay. They now see the dirty
tricks, the stupid photo ops, the Orwellian doublespeak (e.g.,. "Clear
Skies Initiative", "Healthy Forests Initiative") and the genuine
ineptitude of Clown In Chief. Rove has no toolbox to deal with this;
he only knows how to destroy. All of his tactics are beginning to
produce negative results, and I for one am watching gleefully.
A bunch of criminals. Nothing more. And they are destroying the
Washington establishment and the Republican party, right on time, as
predicted.
The
Carpetbagger pretty much flicks this particular piece of lint off
of our shoulders...
I don't want to belabor yesterday's closed session controversy, but
there's one part of the Republicans' response that warrants follow-up.
As GOP senators rushed to microphones yesterday, most of them purple
with rage, the buzz word was "unprecedented." Harry Reid was closing
the Senate without having notified Republicans in advance, which as
they explained it, is not the norm.
Republicans condemned the Democrats' maneuver, which marked the
first time in more than 25 years that one party had insisted on a
closed session without consulting the other party.
True? As far as I can tell, yes. Relevant? I can't see how. As Reid
told reporters, "I'm sorry [Frist is] disappointed in my following
Senate procedures. It was our way of getting to the bottom of
something that was long overdue."
If I understand the point Republicans were trying to make, Reid did
something unusual by calling for a closed session without telling his
friends on the other side of the aisle first. As they tell it, this
undermines trust, strains inter-party relations, and ignores certain
traditions that Congress is supposed to respect.
It's more than a little amusing to hear congressional Republicans
worrying about such niceties. Which party likes to hold open
five-minute votes indefinitely until the get the results they want?
Which party prevents the minority from offering amendments to
legislation? Which party forbids the minority from participating in
conference committees? Which party shuts down committee hearings went
they start to become politically inconvenient? Which party decided
that the Senate leader of one party could campaign against the Senate
leader of the other party for the first time in American political
history?
Republicans want to lecture Dems about decorum and polite floor
tactics? Are they kidding?
